Product Code Database
Gandhāra (Sanskrit: ; Pali: ) was an ancient Indo-Aryan Monarchy of northwestern South Asia whose existence is attested during the Iron Age. The inhabitants of Gandhāra were called the Gāndhārīs.
The capitals of Gandhāra were Taxila (Pali: ; Ancient Greek: ), and Pushkalavati (; ) or Puṣkarāvatī (Pali: ).
The Gāndhārī king Nagnajit and his son Svarajit are mentioned in another religious text, the Brahmana, according to which they received Brahmanic consecration, but their family's attitude towards ritual is mentioned negatively, with the royal family of Gandhāra during this period following non-Brahmanical religious traditions. According to the Jainism Uttaradhyayana, Nagnajit, or Naggaji, was a prominent king who had adopted Jainism and was comparable to Dvimukha of Pancala, Nimi of Videha, Karakaṇḍu of Kaliṅga, and Bhīma of Vidarbha; Buddhism sources instead claim that he had achieved .
By the later Vedic period, the situation had changed, and the Gāndhārī capital of Taxila had become an important centre of knowledge where the men of went to learn the three Vedas and the eighteen branches of knowledge, with the recording that Brahmin went north to study. According to the and the , the famous Vedic philosopher Uddālaka Āruṇi was among the famous students of Takṣaśila, and the claims that his son Śvetaketu also studied there. In the , Uddālaka Āruṇi himself favourably referred to Gāndhārī education to the Videha king Janaka.
Due to this important position, Buddhist texts listed the Gandhāra kingdom as one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas ("great realms") of Iron Age South Asia.
However, according to the scholar Buddha Prakash, Pukkusāti might have acted as a bulwark against the expansion of the Persians Achaemenid Empire into north-west South Asia. This hypothesis posits that the army which Nearchus claimed Cyrus had lost in Gedrosia had in fact been defeated by Pukkusāti's Gāndhārī kingdom. Therefore, following Prakash's position, the Achaemenids would have been able to conquer Gandhāra only after a period of decline of Gandhāra after the reign of Pukkusāti combined the growth of Achaemenid power under the kings Cambyses II and Darius I. However, the presence of Gandhāra, referred to as in Old Persian, among the list of Achaemenid provinces in Darius's Behistun Inscription confirms that his empire had inherited this region from conquests carried out earlier by Cyrus.
Assuming that Pukkusāti lived during the 6th century BCE, is unknown whether he remained in power after the Achaemenid conquest as a Persian vassal or if he was replaced by a Persian satrap (governor), (1988). 9780521228046, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521228046 although Buddhism sources claim that he renounced his throne and became a monk after becoming a disciple of the Gautama Buddha. The annexation under Cyrus was limited to Gandhāra proper, after which the peoples of the Punjab region previously under Gāndhārī authority took advantage of the new power vacuum to form their own states.
However, there are no historical facts known for certain about Pushkarasarin, and all theories about his reign are speculative. It is debated whether he ruled before or after the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley, and is unknown what kind of relationship he historically had with the Persian Achaemenid rulers. With alternative chronologies which date the Buddha's lifetime (and his contemporary kings) as much as a century later, it is alternatively possible that Pukkusāti in fact lived as much as a century after the Achaemenid conquest. Among scholars who favour the latter chronology, it remains an open question for debate, what kind of relationship Pukkusāti historically had with the Persian Achaemenid rulers. Possible theories are: he "may belong to a period when the Achaemenids had already lost their hold over Indian provinces," or he may have been holding power in eastern parts of Gandhara such as Taxila (speculatively considered by some scholars to be outside the Achaemenid dominions), or may have been serving as a vassal of the Achaemenids but with autonomy to conduct warfare and diplomacy with independent Indian states, similar to the "active and often independent role the western satraps had in Greek politics". Thus it is considered that he may have been an important intermediary for cultural influence between Ancient Persia and India.
|
|
