Indian History · Chronicle V of XI
Kushans, Satavahanas & the South
Indo-Greeks, the Kushans of the Silk Road, the Deccan and the Roman trade of the Tamil south.
The Successor StatesPolitical
As the Mauryas fall, the Shunga dynasty and rival kingdoms carve up northern India.
The Shungas held the Mauryan heartland around Pataliputra, patronizing Brahminical religion and the arts, including the great Buddhist stupa at Bharhut and the gateways of Sanchi. But their realm was only one of many, as India entered centuries of political division and vigorous regional culture.
The Indo-GreeksCultural
Indo-Greek kings such as Menander rule the north-west, blending Hellenistic and Indian worlds.
Descendants of Alexander's Bactrian Greeks pushed into the Punjab, and the greatest of them, Menander — remembered in India as Milinda — is celebrated in a Buddhist text for his dialogue with a monk. Their coins, bearing Greek and Indian scripts and gods, embody a remarkable fusion of cultures on the frontier of two civilisations.
The DeccanPolitical
The Satavahana dynasty builds a powerful empire across the Deccan, linking north and south.
Rising in the central plateau, the Satavahanas dominated the Deccan for centuries, growing rich on the trade routes between the Gangetic north and the ports of the coasts. Great patrons of religion, they endowed the Buddhist cave-monasteries and stupas — Amaravati chief among them — whose sculpture is a glory of early Indian art.
The Kushan EmpireReligious
Under Kanishka the Kushan empire straddles the Silk Road, and Buddhism flowers and spreads to China.
A people from Central Asia, the Kushans built an empire spanning Afghanistan and northern India, controlling the trade that flowed between Rome, India and China. Their greatest king, Kanishka, was a patron of Buddhism: under him the reformed Mahayana teaching, and the first images of the Buddha, spread north along the Silk Road toward China and East Asia.
Art and FaithCultural
In the workshops of Gandhara and Mathura, artists give the Buddha human form for the first time.
For centuries the Buddha had been shown only by symbols — a wheel, a tree, an empty throne. Now, at the meeting of cultures, sculptors began to portray him as a man: at Gandhara in a Greco-Roman style with flowing robes, at Mathura in a rounder Indian idiom. The image of the meditating Buddha, born here, would spread across half the world.
The Tamil SouthCultural
In the far south, the Tamil kingdoms of the Sangam poets grow rich shipping spices and pearls to Rome.
Beyond the reach of the northern empires, the Chera, Chola and Pandya kingdoms of the Tamil land flourished, celebrated in the exquisite secular poetry of the Sangam. Riding the monsoon winds, ships carried their pepper, pearls and gems to the Roman world in exchange for gold; hoards of Roman coins still surface in the south, testimony to a trade that spanned the ancient seas.
