Rejecting at once as worthless or hopelessly lost all those parts of the history before the third century B.C., the first name we come to is the familiar one of Asoka, but here placed 1394 B.C., or more than 1000 years too early. It was in order to recover what was lost by this first error that Kalhana Pandit was forced to falsify all the dates up to the accession of the Karkota dynasty (A.D. 627), when they were known, even in his day, as certain within ten or twenty years. To effect this, he added ten, twenty, or thirty years here and there, as caprice dictated, till at last, losing patience, he gave one king, Ranaditya, in the 6th century, 300 years, instead of a possible thirty, and so made both ends meet! So history is written in the East!
After Asoka’s, the next name we meet in the lists with which we are familiar is that of Kanishka, and he plays so important a part in the history of Kashmir and Gandhara, that it would be of extreme interest if his date could be fixed with even approximate certainty. The ‘Raja Tarangini’ gives us no help in this matter. Generally, it has been assumed, principally on numismatic evidence, that he reigned either immediately before or immediately after the Christian Era;[735] but between him and Asoka our lists afford only two names. If, therefore, we are to apply to this history the same logic the very learned have attempted to apply to dates of the Nirvana in the ‘Mahawanso,’ we must either bring down Asoka to the first century B.C., or take back Kanishka to the third. As neither process is admissible, nothing remains to be done but to admit that the record is imperfect, and that it is only from external evidence that these dates can be fixed with anything like certainty.
Even admitting that Hushka and Jushka were the father and grandfather of Kanishka, which I am inclined to think may be the case, instead of his brothers, as is usually supposed, it will hardly help us much—four reigns of insignificant princes in 200 years is nearly equally inadmissible, and will not help us to fix Kanishka’s date from Asoka’s.
Recently the question has been very much narrowed by the discovery of a number of dated inscriptions at Muttra and elsewhere, in which the name of Kanishka and his successor Huvishka frequently occur—the latter always following, never preceding, the former name. It is this that makes me believe that the Hushka of the chronicle was the father of Kanishka, and nothing in that case is so probable as that his successor should take his grandfather’s name. It is almost impossible he should take his uncle’s, and as the name of Jushka appears nowhere in the inscriptions, it is natural to assume that he had passed away some time before they were written.
Be this as it may, the following table gives the inscriptions as they were found by General Cunningham:— [736]
| In the Indo-Pali Alphabet. | ||
| Mathura.— | Kanishka. | Maharaja Kanishka. Samvat 9. |
| Huvishka. | Maharaja Devaputra Huvishka. Samvat 39. | |
| Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Huvishka. Samvat 47. | ||
| Maharaja Huvishka. Samvat 48. | ||
| Vasudeva. | Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Vasu (deva). Samvat 44. | |
| Maharaja Vasudeva. Samvat 83. | ||
| Maharaja Rajatiraja, Shahi, Vasudeva. Samvat 87. | ||
| Raja Vasudeva. Samvat 98. | ||
| In the Bactrian-Pali Alphabet. | ||
| Other localities.— | Bahawalpur. | Maharaja Rajadiraja Devaputra Kanishka. |
| Samvat 11, on the 28th of the (Greek) month of Dæsius. | ||
| Manikyala Tope. | Maharaja Kaneshka, Gushana vasa samvardhaka. | |
| “Increaser of the dominion of the Gushans” (Kushans). Samvat 18. | ||
| Wardak Vase. | Maharaja rajatiraja Huveshka. Samvat 51, 15th of Artemisius. | |
In addition to these Bactrian-Pali inscriptions, we have a record of a king called Moga (Moa?), on a copper plate from Taxila, wherein the Satrap Liako Kusuluko (Kozola?) speaks of the 78th year of the “great king, the great Moga,” on the 5th of the month of Panæmus.
In addition to the inscriptions bearing these names, General Cunningham quotes a great number of others, with dates in the same Samvat era, extending from the year 5 to the year 281, but without any kings’ names in them. Their purport, however, and the form of the characters used, he considers sufficient to show that they form a connected series dating from one and the same era, whatever that may be.
Here, therefore, we have an era, which we may safely assume was established by Kanishka, either from the beginning of his reign, or to mark some important event in it, and which was used after his time for two or three centuries at least. The question is, was that the era since known as that of Vicramaditya, dating from 56 B.C., or was it the Saka era of King Salivahana, dating 135 years after that? General Cunningham unhesitatingly adopts the former; and though it is not a subject to dogmatise upon, I am much more inclined to adopt the latter.