Kharavela of Kalinga
The earlier Satavahana empire had a formidable rival in the kingdom of Kalinga, which had thrown off the yoke of Magadha some time after the death of Asoka and risen to greatness under Kharavela, a prince of remarkable vigour and ambition. Kharavela defied or rescued Satakarni, probably the first of that name, and humbled the pride of Magadha, then under a prince who has been identified with Brihaspatimitra. Brihaspati is, in the opinion of some scholars, the same as
Pushyamitra, but the theory lacks plausibility. The Kalinga king is also credited with having pushed his southern conquests beyond the Godavari. His career was meteoric, and after his death his empire vanished as quickly as it had risen.
The Tamil Country
The far south of India beyond the Venkata Hills, known as the Tamil or Dravida country, was parceled out among many States of which three were important, namely, Chola, Pandya and Kerala. The Cholas occupied the present Tanjore and Trichinopoly districts with some adjoining areas, and showed great military activity in the second century BC. A Chola prince, Elara, conquered Ceylon, and many anecdotes have been preserved which testify to his strong sense of justice. The Pandyas excelled in trade and learning. They occupied the districts of Madura, and Tinnevelly with portions of South Travancore. A Pandya king sent an embassy to the Roman emperor, Augustus, in the first century BC. To the north and west of the Pandyas lay the Kerala country embracing Malabar, Cochin and North Travancore.
Renewed Incursions of the Greeks
The political disintegration of India after the Great Mauryas invited invasions from without, and we have already referred to renewed warlike activities on the part of the Greeks of Syria and Bactria. The Syrian empire, once so powerful under Seleukos, was now seriously weakened by the secession of Parthia and Bactria which were torn from the Seleukidan dominions by satraps who revolted and asserted their independence. And it was from these rebellious provinces that fresh invaders swooped down upon the smiling plains of the Punjab.
At first Bactria showed the greatest activity. Demetrios, son of Euthydemos, king of Bactria, reduced to submission a considerable portion of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Sind, and founded or embellished bactria mapcities in the conquered territories which bore his own name and possibly that of his father. But a rival appeared in Eukratides, who made himself master of the Indian borderland, leaving to his antagonist the precarious tenure of some provinces in the interior. A later king, Menander, who apparently belonged to the house of Demetrios, reigned gloriously at Sakala (Euthymedia or Euthydemia), identified with modern Sialkot in the Punjab. His dominions may have included the Bajaur territory in the North-West where an inscription dated in the fifth year of his reign has been discovered. He is credited with having pushed his arms beyond the river Beas. Another king, Antialkidas, ruled at Taxila (near Rawalpindi) in Gandhara and sent an embassy to the court of Vidisa. Some of these later Greek princes and members of their court succumbed to the influence of their environment and became adherents of Buddhism or of Vaishnavism. Greek political power in parts of Afghanistan and the Indus valley was soon threatened by the Parthians led by Mithradates I, a contemporary of Eukratides who ruled in the second century BC). In the first century AD all vestige of Greek rule seems to have disappeared from the Punjab as well as the borderland. The last known Greek king was Hermaios, who soon made way for the founders of the Parthian and Kushan monarchies to the south of the Hindukush.
The Sakas and Parthians
The foreign conquerors who supplanted the Greeks in north-west India belong to three main groups, namely, Saka, Pahlava or Parthian, and Yue-chi or Kushan. The Sakas were displaced from their home in Central Asia by the Yue-chi and were forced to migrate south. We are told by Chinese annalists that the Saka king went south and ruled in Ki-pin, which about this time probably corresponded to the territory drained by some of the northern tributaries of the Kabul river. They are found settled in southern Afghanistan in the time of Isidore of Charax, probably about the beginning of the Christian era, and the territory they occupied came to be known as Sakasthana, modern Sistan. Gradually they extended their sway to the Indus valley and Western India, which came to be styled Scythia by Greek mariners and geographers in the first and second centuries AD. In the first century after Christ part of this territory had already fallen into the hands of the Parthians. Inscriptions and coins disclose the names of many Scytho-Parthian kings and provincial governors. One of the earliest among these rulers was Maues, Moa or Moga, who was acknowledged as their suzerain by the governors of Chuksha near Taxila. Maues seems to have been followed by Azes I, Azilises and Azes II, after whom the sovereignty of the Indian borderland passed into the hands of Gondophernes, a Parthian. Some scholars attribute to Azes I the foundation of that reckoning commencing 58 BC which afterwards came to be known as the Vikrama Samvat, but the matter cannot be regarded as certain. Indian tradition ascribes to it an indigenous origin. It was handed down by the Malava tribe, and in the post-Gupta period came to be associated with the great Vikramaditya, the destroyer of the Sakas.
With one of the kings named Azes was associated a ruler named Spalirises who seems to have reigned in Southern Afghanistan and to have been a successor of King Vonones. The identity of this Vonones with any king of the imperial line of Arsakes must remain a baffling problem. The Saka-Pahlava kings Kshatrapa coinruled over an empire that embraced several provinces. The governors of these administrative units were known as satraps,(Kshatrapa) or great satraps (Mahakshatrapa). One of these satrapal families ruled in Kapisa near the junction of the Ghorband and Panjshir rivers in Afghanistan, another near Taxila in the Western Punjab, a third at Mathura in the Jumna valley, a fourth in the upper Deccan and a fifth at Ujjain in Malwa. The satraps of the upper Deccan and part of Western India belonged to the Kshaharata race, probably a branch of the Sakas. They carved out a principality on the ruins of the early Satavahana empire and attained great power under Nahapana. But they were finally overthrown by Gautamiputra Satakarni who restored the fallen fortunes of the Satavahanas family. The satraps of Ujjain traced their descent from the lord (svamin) Chashtana, the Tiastanes of Ptolemy the geographer. Rudradaman, grandson of Chashtana, ruled from about AD 130 to 150, and was one of the greatest Saka rulers of ancient India. He entered into a matrimonial alliance with the Satavahana dynasty, but this did not prevent him from inflicting defeats on his southern neighbour. If his court poet is to be believed his sway extended from the Konkan in the south to Sind and Marwar in the north. The successors of Rudradaman were not so strong as he was. Internal feuds were common. Power gradually fell into the hands of the Abhira chieftains. The death knell of satrapal rule in Malwa and Kathiawar was sounded when a new indigenous empire rose in the Ganges valley in the fourth century AD, and the arms of Samudra Gupta and Chandra Gupta II swept through the tableland of Malwa and involved Saka and Abhira in common ruin.
