The Mitra dynasties

Coins as the record

After the Mauryan collapse, a number of cities of the Doab and Rohilkhand issued their own coinage in the names of local rulers. At Ahicchatrā in the old Pañcāla country, at Kauśāmbī and at Mathurā, series of copper coins carry royal names with the common ending -mitra — Bhūmimitra, Agnimitra, Sūryamitra, Bhānumitra and many others — usually with a deity or an altar on the reverse.

These are the primary evidence, and they are limited evidence. They establish that these rulers existed, roughly where and roughly when, and that they claimed the right of issue. They do not establish dynastic relationships, and the several Mitra groups were probably not a single family; the shared name-ending reflects a naming fashion rather than a lineage.

The political picture

Taken together the Mitra coinages show a Ganga plain of city-based polities, none of them large, in the two centuries around the turn of the era. Alongside them the tribal republics of Rajasthan and the Punjab were issuing their own coins, and the Śuṅgas and Kāṇvas held Magadha. It is a fragmented landscape, and the fragmentation is itself the historical fact.

The Pañcāla series ends when the region passes to the Kushans, and Mathurā's Mitra coinage is displaced by that of the Indo-Scythian Northern Satraps and then by Kushan issues. The absorption of these small states into the northwestern empires is the next stage of the story.