Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/60

 3 o HISTORY OF INDIA ARCHITECTURE. It also appears certain that the power of these Kushan kings spread over the whole of the Panjab, and extended as far at least as Mathura on the Jumna, before the commence- ment of the Christian Era. Apparently the last of them was Vasudeva, who ruled at least till A.D. 42. Soon after him we meet with the name of a king Guduphara or Gondophernes, which appears also in the legend of the Apostle Thomas : an inscription of the 26th year of his reign is dated in the iO3rd of the era, or A.D. 47 1 when his rule must have extended into the north of the Panjab. Next there followed two (if not three) kings named Kadphises, who may have ruled till the end of the century, after which northern India was divided into separate kingdoms and tribal governments till the rise of the Guptas in the 4th century. Before the end of the first century another horde, known to us only from coins and inscriptions in which they call themselves Kshaharatas or Kshatrapas, occupied the whole of the province of Gujarat ; one of the first of them Nahapana, for whom we have dates about A.D. 119 and in 124 extended his power over part of Malwa and the Nasik district. He was overthrown by the Andhra king, Gautamiputra Satakarni, and deprived of the districts south of the Narbada. Soon after, we find another Kshatrapa, named Chashtana, ruling in Malwa, and his successors founded a kingdom of their own. They date their coins and inscriptions from the Saka Era, A.D. 78, and the series extends from about 140 to 388 A.D. It thus happens that this dynasty of Kshatrapas were only finally disposed of by the rise of the Guptas. The whole external history of northern India, from the time of Kanishka to that of Ahmad Shah Durani (1761) is a narrative of a continuous succession of tribes of Skythian origin, pouring across the Upper Indus into India, each more Turanian than the one that preceded it, till the whole culminated in the Mughal conquest of India, in the I5th century, by a people as distinct in blood from the Aryans as any that exist. Of the older races, it seems probable that the Yavanas must be distinguished from the Turanians. They were not Greeks, though their name may be merely a mispronunciation of Ionian. The term seems to have been applied by Indian authors to any foreign race coming from the westward who did not belong to one of the acknowledged kingdoms known to them. The Kambojas seem to have been a people inhabiting the country between Kandahar and Kabul, who, when the tide was setting Grunwedel, ' Buddhist Art in India.' English ed. p, 84.