Kidarites

Successors by adoption

The Kidarites emerged in Bactria in the fourth century as the Sasanian hold on the region weakened. They are named from the king Kidara, whose coins imitate Sasanian and Kushan types, and they explicitly claimed the Kushan inheritance — their coin legends use the Kushan royal titulature, and Chinese sources call them the Little Yuezhi, distinguishing them from the earlier Kushans while acknowledging the continuity.

The claim was political rather than genealogical. Taking over an existing coinage, titulature and administrative apparatus was the ordinary way for an incoming power to make itself legible to the population it now governed.

Extent and end

Kidarite authority extended from Bactria across the Hindu Kush into Gandhāra and at times into the Punjab, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan). Their relations with the Guptas to the southeast are unclear; the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta names a Devaputra-ṣāhi-ṣāhānuṣāhi among the rulers who submitted, a Kushan-style title that may refer to a ruler of this group.

They were displaced in the fifth century by further arrivals from the steppe — the Hephthalites in Bactria and the Alchon Huns in the Indian territories. The sequence of these groups, and the extent to which they were distinct peoples rather than successive ruling houses of the same confederation, is a live problem in the numismatic literature.