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AN EARLY HISTORY OF ORISSA
and foreign invasions, and both of these were the natural and inevitable results of the downfall of imperial dynasties. In Central India and in the plains of the Ganges, the supremacy of the later Mauryas and of their successors—the Śungas and the Kāņvas, was disputed by the Andhras of the Deccan and the Mahāmeghavāhanas of Kalinga.
Foreign dynasties were at war--the Parthians and the Scythians supplanting the Greeco-Bactrians in the Punjab and other territories, after a century or inore of hostile relations. The Yuga Purāņa, apparently, refers to the latter incident when it says that the Yavanas “soon withdrew because of a dreadful war among themselves, which broke out in their own country." Evidently, the Indo. Bactrian coins point to a tendency towards the creation of petty principalities which became a marked feature in the final phases of Greek rule in India in the later half of the first Century B. C. • .
Various Indian coins, found at different sites in northern India and ascribed to the few centuries this side or that of the Christian era, reveal the existence of various tribal republics and independent states in India in those days. These communities were mostly military clans or groups of clans, and they were governed sometimes by a king, but more often by tribal oligarchies. Examples of such states are the Yaudheya (Warrior) Confederation in the southern portion of the Punjab and in the northern parts of Rajputana.3 The other people were the Arjunā
1. E. J. Rapson states—"With the conquest by the Sakas of the kingdom held by the last #uccessors of Euthydernos in the eastern Punjab, Yavana rule had already ceased in the north-western region of the subcontinent, which is now known as India, and Hormaeus was the last king of his race to reiga in India in its more extended historical and geogra. phical sense." (CHI, Vol. I, p. 560),
2. CHI, Vol. I, p. 528. 3. JRAS, 1897, p. 87.
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