Indo-Scythian Kingdom

Arrival

The Śakas were driven south and west out of Central Asia in the movements of peoples that also displaced the Greco-Bactrians. They entered the Indian northwest through the Indus valley and by the end of the second century BCE Maues was striking coins at Taxila, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), with the title great king of kings, a formula borrowed from Iranian usage.

Their coinage continues the Indo-Greek pattern — bilingual, Greek and Kharoṣṭhī — and much of the reconstruction of the dynasty again depends on numismatic sequence rather than on narrative sources.

The Azes era

An era beginning in 58 or 57 BCE is used in inscriptions of the northwest and is associated with Azes. The same starting point is that of the Vikrama era, still in use in India, which tradition attributes to a king Vikramāditya of Ujjayinī who expelled the Śakas. Whether the two are the same reckoning under different names, and what the relation is between the historical Azes and the legendary Vikramāditya, has been argued for more than a century and is not settled.

This kind of problem is characteristic of the period: several eras are in use, their epochs are disputed, and dates in the inscriptions of the northwest can rarely be fixed without first deciding which era is meant.

Rule and succession

Śaka authority was exercised through subordinate satraps, a system inherited from Iranian practice, and it is these satrapal lines that outlast the kings — the Northern Satraps at Mathurā and the Western Satraps in Gujarat and Malwa, the latter surviving into the fourth century CE.

The Indo-Scythian kings were displaced in the Indus country by the Indo-Parthians under Gondophares in the first century CE, and the whole region was subsequently taken by the Kushans.