Page Text
________________
KANISHKA
313
and that time we are still almost in the dark. Only a few hints have survived, and those in Chinese sources, as to how or when the Sakas or Scythians had come into possession of these provinces. These hints enable us to conjecture that immediately after the death of Asoka the provinces to the extreme north-west of the empire of Magadha (those provinces which Seleukos had ceded to Chandragupta) asserted their independence; and that they did this not as a whole, but in small divisions, under the leadership of local magnates, mostly of Greek extraction. In the course of internecine conflicts these smaller states had been gradually amalgamated into one or two, or perhaps three, Greek kingdoms, when, in about 160 B.C., the Sse or Sakas, just then expelled from Sogdiana by the Yueh-ti, appeared upon the scene. After a long-continued series of campaigns, with varying fortune, against the possessors of the country, they forced their way through, in about 120, into India proper. Their route was probbably southward through Sind. But, in any case, in the course of the following years they established outposts, under the rule of officers called Kshatrapas (the Persian word “satraps") at Mathura, Ujjeni, and Giri-nagara, the overlord remaining behind in Seistan, which means simply, “the land of the Sse," or Sakas.
Meanwhile the five tribes of the Yueh-ti, themselves pressed on from behind by other nomad tribes, followed close on the heels of the Sakas, and, in about 120 B.C., became the rulers of Baktria. About a century afterwards, one of the five tribes,
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
| SR No. | 035274 |
| Book Title | Story of Nation Buddhist India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | T W Rhys Davids |
| Publisher | T Fisher Unwin Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1916 |
| Total Pages | 356 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 88 MB |