Indian Antiquary Vol 35

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 51

FEBRUARY, 1906.]
THE SOK AND KANISKA.
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Suān, in which Kaniaka is entitled “the Maharaja of Gughang." No doubt can be entertained that Kaniska was a Kashăn prince. Marquart, who first made the attempt to identify the provinces of the five Jubgu of the Yuë-chi, locates Kusbār in one of the northern valleys adjoining the Kabul river between the Kunar and Pangsir river, i. e., immediately west (not north as Marquart thinks) of the Gandhära of Hüan teang, the borders of which, according to Cunningham, lay in the west, near Jalālābād, at the mouth of the Kunar river, and extended, on the south of the right bank of the Kūbal, as far as the mountains of Kālābagh. Marquart considers the province of the five Jabgu,
Kao-fu in the earlier Han-Annals, to be the most southerly, and seeks P. 95.
it in the immediate neighbourhood of Kābul. The Annals of the Wei Dynasty give the names of the five Jabga provinces (these names have not till now been identified) and mention with them the old Kuei-shuang as the country of K‘ien-tun. The old pronunciation of the first symbol was kan or kyan (Canton, kym, Japan. kan); un can stand as equivalent for a foreign tur or dur; I have no doubt that K‘ien-tun may be read as Kan-tur or Gan-dur and is an older equivalent for Gandhāra. The old Kao-fu (or Ta-mi) the Wei-Annals call Yen-fou-ye, with the capital Kao-fu; they give its position as a short distance from Kushān. I do not know how to identify Yed-fou-ye; the two first symbols serve otherwise to represent the Sanskrit word jambu. Between Kushan and Kao-fu, Fu-ti-sha, the old Hi-tun, seems to have been placed. Kushān, then, here seems to be synonymous with Gandhara; but as regards the name Kao-fu, which, as before mentioned, corresponds etymologically to the modern Käbal, we must bear in mind that, of the nonChinese authors, Ptolemy first knows it (as KaBoupa). The name was undoubtedly introduced either by the Parthian Sakas (An-si) or by the Indo-Scythians (Yuc-chi). The country thus designated in upper Kabal is either actually, as is maintained in the older Han-Annals and the Wei-Annals, one of the five Jabgu provinces, which was then wholly or partially lost, so that the name Tu-mi, which perhaps designated the rest of the province, stepped into its place from Kao-fu, or it was originally an Indo-Parthian province partially conquered by the Yuë-chi, and, as far as possessed by them, received the name Ta-mi in the time of the later Han. In any case we are not justified in declaring the statement of the very reliable earlier Han-Annals, even on the evidence of the later chronicler, without further proof, to be an error. At the time of the later Han, at all events, the name Kao-fu, according to the earlier communicated description, must bave extended from a long time previously over a much greater kingdom reacbing eastwards and southwards : P. 96.
if we cannot, with Marquart, exactly identify this with Gandbāra, yet
the latter must have been entirely or for the most part included in Kao-fu. Here, too, we cannot venture to attach to the same names at all periods the same extent of meaning.
The three originally small Jabgu provinces, Kusbän, Hi-tun (Futisha) and Kao-fu or Ta-mi were situated then as the most southerly offshoots of the Ynë-chi kingdom in the first half of the first century B. C. in the mountainous country north from apper Kabul. Regarding the sovereigns of these states, and their inter-connection, we have no direct information, but we have seen from the descriptions of the chroniclers, how a long-standing feud subsisted between the Sakas of Ki-pin in the east, the Parthian Sakas of An-si in the west, the Jabgu of the Yuë-chi in the north, and the weak Greek rulers in the south, and how the middle tract of Kao-fu was an object of contention, torn now to one side, now to another. The Chinese historians repeatedly mention how the native commercial but gradually refined population helplessly surrendered to the powerful barbarian tribes, whose chiefs could have cared for neither barter nor culture. One must realise these conditions in order to estimate the significance which the advent of Kaniska must have had.
A Kushän prince, by the testimony of his own coins, i, e., the Jabga of Kushān, he is depicted by the Buddhist travellers according to tradition as the king of Gandhära. Fa hien and Sang yün locate, as we have seen, his capital at Peshawar in Gandbāra. Hüan tsang gives him a residence in