Note.—The monograms in Fig. 3b occur on coins of the following: (1) Eukratides, (2) Apollodotos, (3) Apollodotos, Maues, (4) Azes I, (5) Sotēr Megas, (6) Gondopharnes and Aspavarma.

The Yueh-chi, who drove the Śakas out of Bactria about the year 126 B.C., were destined to create “one of the greatest empires of ancient India.” At some date after A.D. 25, one of the five tribes of which they were composed, the Kushāṇas, became supreme, and under the leadership of the head of that tribe, Kujūla Kadphises, they passed south of the Hindu Kush, and overwhelmed the Pahlavas, then ruling in the Kābul valley. The deposition of Pacores, successor of Gondopharnes to the Pahlava kingdom of Taxila, must have taken place between the years A.D. 45 and A.D. 64, and was effected by Vima Kadphises, the second Kushāṇa king. Henceforward there is less confusion of dynasties. We know the names and the chronological order of these powerful Kushāṇa princes—Kujūla Kadphises, Vima Kadphises, Kanishka, Huvishka, Vāsudeva; the names of the three last are even recorded in several inscriptions. It seems to be now generally accepted that Kanishka was the founder of the so-called Śaka era, and that consequently his reign started in A.D. 78.[24] The chief remaining difficulty is the attribution of certain copper coins bearing the title Kujūla Kadaphes (Kharoshṭhī—Kuyula Kaphasa); this must remain for the present unsettled.

The commoner type of these Kadaphes coins deserves special attention (Pl. IV, 2); for the head on the obverse is directly copied from the coins of one of the earlier Roman Emperors, probably Augustus, and bears evidence to that Roman influence which is so marked in the gold coinage of the Kushāṇas, and which is partly traceable to the intercourse between the Yueh-chi and the Roman Empire before their invasion of India, an intercourse which resulted in Kushāṇa ambassadors being actually sent to the court of Augustus. But the plentiful issues in gold of Vima Kadphises and his two successors, all struck on the same standard as the Roman aureus, are due also to other causes. Exports from India to different provinces of the Roman Empire, carried by sea from the south, and by the overland routes in the north, were paid for in Roman gold; and the aureus had, like the English sovereign in more recent times, at this period acquired that status as a current coin in India, which it already possessed in those parts of Asia more directly under the influence of the imperial power. It was only natural that these Kushāṇa invaders should seek to win acceptance for their new gold currency by placing it on an equality with the popular Roman gold. There was, moreover, at this time a world shortage of silver: not only do we find the Pahlava kings striking didrachms in debased silver, but the silver denarius itself was, during the early empire, being reduced in weight and fineness. This accounts for the disappearance of silver and the important place of gold in the Kushāṇa coinage, and is probably also partly the reason why the Western Satraps struck only small hemidrachms, and these often in inferior silver.

The coins of Kujūla Kadphises are all of copper. Those which he struck in the style of Hermaios have the head of the Greek king on the obverse (Pl. IV, 1), and he used the same type after the name of Hermaios had disappeared from the inscriptions; both these types were current in the Kābul province. Another type, akin to the Śaka coins, has a bull on the obverse and a Bactrian camel on the reverse. In one of his inscriptions, for which like his successor he uses both Greek and Kharoshṭhī, he is styled “The Great King, King of Kings, the Son of Heaven.”

The gold of Vima Kadphises (c. A.D. 45-78) was struck in three denominations, the double stater (Pl. IV, 3), the stater or dināra,[25] as the Kushāṇas called it (= the Roman aureus of 124 grains weight), and the quarter stater. On the obverse of these appears either the king’s head or bust, or the king seated cross-legged on a couch, or, as on a rare stater in the British Museum, sitting in a two-horsed chariot. On the copper coins, which are of three sizes, the king is almost invariably standing, with his right hand placing an offering upon a small altar at his side. The portrait of the king is most realistic, though hardly flattering—a corpulent figure with a long heavy face and a large nose, he appears wearing the long Kushāṇa cloak and tall “Gilgit” boots, on his head a conical hat with streamers. Vima Kadphises must have been a zealous convert to the worship of the Hindu god Śiva, for the god or his emblem, the trident battle-axe, is the invariable device on the reverse of all his coins. The title “Sotēr Megas” on this king’s copper coins indicates a relationship between him and the so-called “nameless king” mentioned in the previous chapter, whose coins bear the same legend.

Kanishka, the real founder of the great Kushāṇa empire, which stretched from Kābul[26] to the banks of the Ganges, may have belonged to another branch of the Yueh-chi—he was not, at any rate, nearly related to Vima Kadphises, whose coins are distinct in many respects from those of Kanishka and his successors. One marked distinction is the use of Greek legends only by these later kings. The Greek is often very debased, and the reason suggested for its employment is that Khotanese, the native tongue of the Kushāṇas, was first reduced to writing in the Greek character. Kanishka also introduced the Iranian title, Shāonānoshāo—“King of Kings”—in place of the Greek form Basileōs Basileōn. On the reverse side of the extensive gold (full and quarter staters only) and copper coinage of Kanishka and Huvishka is portrayed a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses; among them are the Greek gods, Helios, Herakles (Pl. IV, 8), Selene; the Hindu god, Śiva (Oesho on the coins); the Iranian deities, Athro, “Fire,” Oado, the wind god, Ardokhsho and Nāna, and even the great Buddha himself (Pl. IV, 4), who had previously appeared on a copper coin of Kadaphes. The representation of this “mixed multitude” was probably intended to conciliate the religious scruples of the numerous peoples included within the vast territory of the Kushāṇa Empire. A standing figure of the king appears on the obverse of Kanishka’s gold staters, on the small quarter staters is a half (Pl. IV, 5) or quarter length portrait. On Huvishka’s gold the standing figure never appears; the portrait is either half-length or merely the king’s head; on one coin the king is seated cross-legged; on another (exceedingly rare) he is riding an elephant (Pl. VI, 7). Vāsudeva closely imitates Kanishka’s standing figure type on his gold.

Kanishka’s copper coinage is of two types: one has the usual “standing king” obverse (Pl. IV, 6); and on the rarer second type the king is sitting on a throne. Huvishka’s copper is more varied; on the reverse, as on Kanishka’s copper, there is always one of the numerous deities; on the obverse the king is portrayed (1) riding on an elephant, or (2) reclining on a couch, or (3) seated cross-legged, or (4) seated with arms raised.

Kanishka had been a great patron of Buddhism. Vāsudeva was evidently a convert to Hinduism and an ardent devotee of Śiva. On the reverses of his coins the deity is almost invariably Śiva accompanied by his bull (Pl. IV, 9), but there is a rare copper piece on which the word “Vāsu” in Brāhmī occupies the obverse, and the special symbol of Vāsudeva the reverse. About half-a-dozen other symbols, which take the place of the monograms of the Indo-Greeks, appear on the coins of the Kushāṇas.

After the death of Vāsudeva, in A.D. 220, the Kushāṇa power declined, though the descendants of Kanishka held the Kābul valley till A.D. 425. The coins of these kings, principally of two classes, are degenerate copies of the gold coins of Kanishka and Vāsudeva. One continues the standing king type with the Śiva and bull reverse; the second has the standing king obverse, with the deity Ardokhsho, who was by this time identified with the Indian Lakshmī, represented as sitting on a throne and holding a cornucopia on the reverse (Pl. IV, 10). Certain Brāhmī letters, now unintelligible, seem to have distinguished the coins of successive rulers. It was this latter type, current throughout the Panjāb, that the Gupta kings took as the model for their earliest coinage. In A.D. 425 a tribe of the Little Yueh-chi, under a chief named Kidāra, replaced the great Kushāṇa dynasty at Kābul; but they were driven out fifty years later by an inroad of the Ephthalites, or White Huns, and settled in the Chitrāl district and in Kashmīr. There they struck coins in much alloyed gold and also in copper of this same standing king and seated goddess type, and there it survived in a hardly recognizable form in the later coins, until the Muhammadans put an end to the Hindu kingdom in the fourteenth century. Certain kingdoms in the Panjāb also copied the large copper coins of the Kushāṇas: the most striking of these minor coinages is that of the Yaudheyas, whose territory included the modern state of Bahāwalpūr. One type of their coins shows a female standing figure on the obverse, and a soldier with a Brāhmī inscription on the reverse (Pl. IV, 11). The earliest coins of Nepāl current from the fifth to the seventh century also show traces of Kushāṇa influence. These large copper pieces give the names of at least four kings, Mānāṅka, Gunāṅka,[27] Aṅśuvarman and Jishṇugupta. Various devices are used, among them the goddess seated cross-legged. The coins of Aṅśuvarman, of the seventh century, have a cow standing to the left on the obverse and a winged horse with the king’s name on the reverse (Pl. V, 1).