Sātavāhana Empire

The dynasty

The Sātavāhanas emerge in the Deccan in the last centuries BCE, in the space left by the Mauryan withdrawal, with their early seat at Pratiṣṭhāna on the Godāvarī — the old Assaka country. The Purāṇas call them Āndhras and give a long list of kings; their own inscriptions call them Sātavāhanas and use matronymics, so that rulers are named as the son of Gautamī or of Vāsiṣṭhī, an unusual practice that has attracted much comment without being explained.

Their language of record was Prakrit, not Sanskrit, and the Sātavāhana court is credited with the Gāthā Saptaśatī, an anthology of seven hundred short Prakrit love poems in a rural setting, traditionally compiled by King Hāla. It is the earliest substantial body of secular lyric poetry from India.

Gautamīputra and the Śakas

The dynasty's central conflict was with the Western Kṣatrapas, the Śaka satraps of Gujarat and Malwa, and control of the western ports changed hands more than once. The Nasik cave inscription of Gautamī Balaśrī, praising her son Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi, describes him as having destroyed the Śakas, Yavanas and Pahlavas and restored the family's fortunes, and lists a territory reaching from the Konkan across the Deccan.

That success was not permanent. Rudradāman's Junagadh inscription of 150 CE claims to have twice defeated a Sātakarṇi, lord of the Deccan, and to have spared him on account of the closeness of their connection — the two houses were linked by marriage. The two inscriptions, read together, are a rare case of both sides of an ancient Indian rivalry being documented.

Trade and the caves

Sātavāhana territory spanned the Deccan plateau and both coasts, and the period coincides with the height of the Indo-Roman trade. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant's handbook of the first century CE, describes the western ports of Barygaza and Kalliena and the goods moving through them; Roman coin hoards are found across the peninsula.

The wealth of that traffic is visible in the rock-cut monasteries along the Western Ghats — Karle, Bhaja, Nasik, Kanheri — whose donative inscriptions name merchants, guilds, bankers and the royal family as donors. The great caitya hall at Karle, with its ribbed vault cut from living rock in imitation of a wooden building, belongs to this period, as does the earliest work at Amarāvatī on the Krishna, where the Sātavāhanas later moved their centre.

The empire fragmented in the early third century CE into successor states — the Ikṣvākus on the Krishna, the Ābhīras in the north, the Cuṭus in the southwest — and the unity of the Deccan was not restored until the Chalukyas of Bādāmi three centuries later.