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518 POLITICAL HISTORY OF ANCIENT INDIA
and the presence of the living Devaputra probably earned for Mathurā its secondary name of "The city (?) of the
gods."1
The exaltation of royalty in the epoch under review had the sanction of certain writers on kingly duty (Rājadharma) who represented the king as a "mahati devatā," a great divinity, in human shape. But it was probably due in the first instance to the Scythians 2 who acted as carriers of Persian, Chinese and Roman ideas of kingship. The title Rājātirāja, supreme king overpassing other kings, as Rapson points out, is “distinctively Persian." "It has a long history from the Xshāyathiyānām Xshāyathiya of the inscriptions of Darius down to the Shāhān Shāh of the present day.” The Kushān epithet “Devaputra” is apparently of Chinese origin, being the literal translation of the Chinese emperors' title “Son of Heaven” (Tien-tze ; tien tzu). 4 If Lüders is to be believed, one at least of the IndoScythian sovereigns (Kanishka of the Ārā Inscription)
1 For a different suggestion see Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 252. Tarn prefers to translate Ptolemy's phrase as 'daughter of the gods'. But see Lévi, JA. 1915, p. 91.
2 The titles 'Theos' and 'Theotropos' were used by certain Indo-Greek rulers, but their example does not seem to have been widely followed. Gondophernes, it is true, calls himself Devavrata, but not yet Deva or Devaputra. As to theory that the Kushāns had been invested competitively with the title "son of the gods" in opposition to the Hiungnu rather than to the Chinese, it has to be admitted that there is no definite evidence that the title in question originated with the Hiungnu, and was not borrowed in ancient times from the Chinese. Cf. B. C. Law Volume, II. 305 ff. The Kushāns had direct contact with the Chines ine the time of Panchao.
3 Cf. the use of the term 'K'shapayitva in connection with the subversion of the Sunga sovereignty by Simuka. The expressions Kshatrasya Kshatra (Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad, I. 4. 14), Adhirāja, Chakravartin, etc., are, no doubt, known to our ancient literature. But there is no proof of the use of the last two as formal styles of sovereigns till the Post-Mauryan period, while the first is never so used.
4 JRAS 1897, 903 ; 1912, 671, 682. Allan, Coins of the Gupta Dynasties xxvii. Artabanus (I or II) called himself 'son of a God' (Tarn, The Greeks,
