Brahmi script
Brahmi, developed in the mid-1st millennium BCE, is the oldest known writing system of Ancient India, with the possible exception of the undeciphered Indus script. Brahmi is an abugida that thrived in the Indian subcontinent and uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols, it evolved into a host of other scripts, called the Brahmic scripts, that continue to be in use today in South and Central Asia. The Brahmi script has been dated to the beginning of the 4th century BCE from sherds inscribed with the script found at Anuradhapura; some of the earliest and best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. The first successful attempts at deciphering Brahmi were made in 1836 by Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen, who used the bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of Indo-Greek kings Agathocles and Pantaleon to identify several Brahmi letters; the script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist and official of the East India Company, with the help of Alexander Cunningham.
The origin of the script is still much debated, with some scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts, while others favor the idea of an indigenous origin or connection to the much older and as-yet undeciphered Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization. Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the "pin-man" script, "stick figure" script, it was known by a variety of other names until the 1880s when Albert Étienne Jean Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie, based on an observation by Gabriel Devéria, associated it with the Brahmi script, the first in a list of scripts mentioned in the Lalitavistara Sūtra. Thence the name was adopted in the influential work of Georg Bühler, albeit in the variant form "Brahma"; the Gupta script of the fifth century is sometimes called "Late Brahmi". The Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, making it one of the world's most influential writing traditions.
One survey found 198 scripts that derive from it. The script was associated with its own Brahmi numerals, which provided the graphic forms for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used through most of the world; the Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as their Chinese translations. For example, the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta lists 64 lipi, with the Brahmi script starting the list; the Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Gautama Buddha, mastered philology and other scripts from the Brahmin Lipikāra and Deva Vidyāiṃha at a school. A shorter list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the texts of Jainism, such as the Pannavana Sutra and the Samavayanga Sutra; these Jaina script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoṣṭhi at number 4 but Javanaliya and others not found in the Buddhist lists. While the contemporary Kharoṣṭhī script is accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward.
Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998, while Falk provided an overview in 1993. Early theories proposed a pictographic-acrophonic origin for the Brahmi script, on the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script; these ideas however have lost credence, as they are "purely imaginative and speculative". Similar ideas have tried to connect the Brahmi script with the Indus script, but they remain unproven, suffer from the fact that the Indus script is as yet undeciphered. An origin in Semitic scripts has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber and Georg Bühler's On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet. Bühler's ideas have been influential, though by the 1895 date of his opus on the subject, he could identify no less than five competing theories of the origin, one positing an indigenous origin and the others deriving it from various Semitic models; the most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was a purely indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India.
Goyal noted that most proponents of the indigenous view are Indian scholars, whereas the theory of Semitic origin is held by "nearly all" Western scholars, Salomon agrees with Goyal that there has been "nationalist bias" and "imperialist bias" on the two respective sides of the debate. In spite of this, the view of indigenous development had been prevalent among British scholars writing prior to Bühler: A passage by Alexander Cunningham, one of the earliest indigenous origin proponents, suggests that, in his time, the indigenous origin was a preference of British scholars in opposition to the "unknown Western" origin preferred by continental scholars. Cunningham in the seminal Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum of 1877 speculated that Brahmi characters were derived from, among other things, a pictographic principle based on the human body, but Bühler noted that by 1891, Cunningham considered the origins of the script uncertain. Most scholars believe that Brahmi was derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, with Aramaic being a leading candidate.
However, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharoṣṭhī, Brahmi. Though Brahmi and the Kharoṣṭhī script share some general features, but the differences between the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts are "much greater than their similarities," and "th
Kanishka
Kanishka I, or Kanishka the Great, an emperor of the Kushan dynasty in the second century, is famous for his military and spiritual achievements. A descendant of Kujula Kadphises - founder of the Kushan empire - Kanishka came to rule an empire in Bactria extending from Turfan in the Tarim Basin to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain; the main capital of his empire was located at Puruṣapura in Gandhara, with another major capital at Kapisa. His conquests and patronage of Buddhism played an important role in the development of the Silk Road, in the transmission of Mahayana Buddhism from Gandhara across the Karakoram range to China. Earlier scholars believed that Kanishka ascended the Kushan throne in 78 CE, that this date was used as the beginning of the Saka calendar era. However, historians no longer regard this date as that of Kanishka's accession. Falk estimates that Kanishka came to the throne in 127 CE. Kanishka was a Kushan of probable Yuezhi ethnicity, his native language is unknown. The Rabatak inscription uses a Greek script, to write a language described as Arya – most a form of Bactrian native to Ariana, an Eastern Iranian language of the Middle Iranian period.
However, this was adopted by the Kushans to facilitate communication with local subjects. It is not certain. If controversial theories connecting the Kushans and/or Yuezhi to the medieval Agni-Kuchi peoples of the Tarim Basin are correct, Kanishka may have spoken a form of Tocharian – a "centum" Indo-European language. Kanishka was the successor of Vima Kadphises, as demonstrated by an impressive genealogy of the Kushan kings, known as the Rabatak inscription; the connection of Kanishka with other Kushan rulers is described in the Rabatak inscription as Kanishka makes the list of the kings who ruled up to his time: Kujula Kadphises as his great-grandfather, Vima Taktu as his grandfather, Vima Kadphises as his father, himself Kanishka: "for King Kujula Kadphises great grandfather, for King Vima Taktu grandfather, for King Vima Kadphises father, *also for himself, King Kanishka". Kanishka's empire was vast, it extended from southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, north of the Amu Darya in the north west to Pakistan and Northern India, as far as Mathura in the south east, his territory included Kashmir, where there was a town Kanishkapur, named after him not far from the Baramula Pass and which still contains the base of a large stupa.
Knowledge of his hold over Central Asia is less well established. The Book of the Later Han, Hou Hanshu, states that general Ban Chao fought battles near Khotan with a Kushan army of 70,000 men led by an otherwise unknown Kushan viceroy named Xie in 90 AD. Though Ban Chao claimed to be victorious, forcing the Kushans to retreat by use of a scorched-earth policy, the region fell to Kushan forces in the early 2nd century; as a result, for a short period the territory of the Kushans extended as far as Kashgar and Yarkand, which were Chinese dependencies in the Tarim Basin, modern Xinjiang. Several coins of Kanishka have been found in the Tarim Basin. Controlling both the land and sea trade routes between South Asia and Rome seems to have been one of Kanishka's chief imperial goals. Kanishka's coins portray images of Indian, Greek and Sumero-Elamite divinities, demonstrating the religious syncretism in his beliefs. Kanishka's coins from the beginning of his reign bear legends in Greek language and script and depict Greek divinities.
Coins bear legends in Bactrian, the Iranian language that the Kushans evidently spoke, Greek divinities were replaced by corresponding Iranian ones. All of Kanishka's coins – ones with a legend in the Bactrian language – were written in a modified Greek script that had one additional glyph to represent /š/, as in the word'Kushan' and'Kanishka'. On his coins, the king is depicted as a bearded man in a long coat and trousers gathered at the ankle, with flames emanating from his shoulders, he wears large rounded boots, is armed with a long sword similar to a scimitar as well as a lance. He is seen to be making a sacrifice on a small altar; the lower half of a lifesize limestone relief of Kanishka attired, with a stiff embroidered surplice beneath his coat and spurs attached to his boots under the light gathered folds of his trousers, survived in the Kabul Museum until it was destroyed by the Taliban. A few coins at the beginning of his reign have a legend in the Greek language and script: ΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΝ ΚΑΝΗϷΚΟΥ, basileus basileon kaneshkou " of Kanishka, king of kings."
Greek deities, with Greek names are represented on these early coins: ΗΛΙΟΣ, ΗΦΑΗΣΤΟΣ, ΣΑΛΗΝΗ, ΑΝΗΜΟΣ The inscriptions in Greek are full of spelling and syntactical errors. Following the transition to the Bactrian language on coins and Indic divinities replace the Greek ones: ΑΡΔΟΧϷΟ ΛΡΟΟΑΣΠΟ ΑΘϷΟ ΦΑΡΡΟ ΜΑΟ ΜΙΘΡΟ, ΜΙΙΡΟ, ΜΙΟΡΟ, ΜΙΥΡΟ ΜΟΖΔΟΟΑΝΟ ΝΑΝΑ, ΝΑΝΑΙΑ, ΝΑΝΑϷΑΟ ΜΑΝΑΟΒΑΓΟ ΟΑΔΟ ΟΡΑΛΑΓΝΟ Only a few Buddhist divinities were used as well: ΒΟΔΔΟ, ϷΑΚΑΜΑΝΟ ΒΟΔΔΟ (sh
Barbaricum
Barbaricum is a geographical name used by historical and archaeological experts to refer to the vast area of barbarian-occupied territory that lay, in Roman times, beyond the frontiers or limes of the Roman Empire in North and South Eastern Europe, the "lands lying beyond Roman administrative control but nonetheless a part of the Roman world." In the Late Antiquity it was the Latin name for those tribal territories not occupied by Rome that lay beyond the Rhine and Danube: Ammianus Marcellinus used it, as did Eutropius. The earliest recorded mention appears to date to the early 3rd century. In the research literature, the terms'Germania' and'Barbaricum' are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not identical either in the chronological or in the geographical sense; the extra-Roman area described as Barbaricum was, from the beginning of the Migration Period, not inhabited by Germanii though they represented the majority of the population until the time of Late Antiquity. In the Migration Period and Huns pushed forward into this area before and Slavic tribes populated the area east of the Albis that the Germanii had abandoned.
It is important to highlight the diverse cultural and economic contacts between Barbaricum and the Empire since the early imperial period. Archaeologically, numerous imported Roman artefacts have been uncovered among the finds in the Barbaricum region; the formation of major Germanic tribal units such as the Alemanni and Franks, from the time of the imperial crisis of the 3rd century was influenced by contact with the Roman world. "barbarians" were able to have careers in the Roman Army. Heinrich Beck: Zur Geschichte der Gleichung "germanisch-deutsch". Berlin, 2004. Hans Jürgen Eggers: Der römische Import im freien Germanien. Atlas Urgesch. 1, Hamburg, 1951. Guy Halsall: Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge, 2007. Gustav Adolf Lehmann: Imperium und Barbaricum. Neue Befunde und Erkenntnisse zu den römisch-germanischen Auseinandersetzungen im nordwestdeutschen Raum – von der augusteischen Okkupationsphase bis zum Germanien-Zug des Maximinus Thrax. Vienna, 2011. Ulla Lund Hansen: Römische Kaiserzeit.
In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Vol. 25, pp. 90ff. Walter Pohl: Die Germanen. 2nd edn. Munich, 2004. Tadeusz Sarnowski: Barbaricum und ein bellum Bosporanum in einer Inschrift aus Preslav. In: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 87, pp. 137–144. Helmuth Schneider: Feindliche Nachbarn. Rom und die Germanen. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20219-4
Nahapana
Nahapana was an important ruler of the Western Kshatrapas, descendant of the Indo-Scythians, in northwestern India. According to one of his coins, he was the son of Bhumaka; the exact period of Nahapana is not certain. A group of his inscriptions are dated to the years 41-46 of an unspecified era. Assuming that this era is the Shaka era, some scholars have assigned his reign to 119-124 CE. Others believe that the years 41-46 are his regnal years, assign his rule to a different period. For example, Krishna Chandra Sagar assigns his reign to 24-70 CE, while R. C. C. Fynes dates it to c. 66-71 CE. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions one Nambanus as the ruler of the area around Barigaza; this person has been identified as Nahapana by modern scholars. The text describes Nambanus as follows: He established the Kshatrapa coinage, in a style derived from Indo-Greek coinage; the obverse of the coins consists within a legend in Greek. The reverse represents an arrow, within Brahmi and Kharoshthi legends.
Nahapana is mentioned as a donator in inscriptions of numerous Buddhist caves in northern India. The Nasik and Karle inscriptions refer to Nahapana's dynastic name but not to his ethnicity, known from other sources. Nahapana had a son-in-law named Ushavadata, whose inscriptions were incised in the Pandavleni Caves near Nasik. Ushavadata had married Dakshamitra, daughter of Nahapana. According to the inscriptions, Ushavadata accomplished various charities and conquests on behalf of his father-in-law, he constructed rest-houses and tanks at Bharukachchha, Dashapura and Shorparaga. He campaigned in the north under the orders of Nahapana to rescue the Uttamabhadras, attacked by the Malayas, he offered it to the Buddhist monks. Overstrikes of Nahapana's coins by the powerful Satavahana king Gautamiputra Satakarni have been found in a hoard at Jogalthambi, Nashik District; this suggests. Earlier scholars such as James Burgess have pointed out that Gautamiputra Satakarni and Nahapana were not contemporaries, since Satakarni mentions that the areas conquered by him were ruled by Ushavadata, rather than Nahapana.
According to Burgess, there might have been an interval of as much as a century between the reigns of these two kings. However, most historians now agree that Gautamiputra and Nahapana were contemporaries, that Gautamiputra defeated Nahapana. M. K. Dhavalikar dates this event to c. 124 CE, which according to him, was the 18th regnal year of Gautamiputra. R. C. C. Fynes dates event to sometime after 71 CE. Nahapana was founder of one of the two major Saka Satrap dynasties in north-western India, the Kshaharatas; the Western Satraps are known for the construction and dedication of numerous Buddhist caves in Central India in the areas of Maharashtra and Gujarat. In particular, the chaitya cave complex of the Karla Caves, the largest in South Asia, was constructed and dedicated in 120 CE by Nahapana, according to several inscriptions in the cave. An important inscription relates to Nahapana in the Great Chaitya at Karla Caves: Success!! By Usabhadata, the son of Dinaka and the son-in-law of the king, the Khaharata, the Kshatrapa Nahapana, who gave three hundred thousand cows, who made gifts of gold and a tirtha on the river Banasa, who gave to the Devas and Bramhanas sixteen villages, who at the pure tirtha Prabhasa gave eight wives to the Brahmanas, who fed annually a hundred thousand Brahmanas- there has been given the village of Karajika for the support of the ascetics living in the caves at Valuraka without any distinction of sect or origin, for all who would keep the varsha.
Parts of the Nasik caves were carved during the time of Nahapana, the Junnar caves have inscriptions of Nahapana, as well as the Manmodi caves. by Durga Prasad, with numerous references to Nahapana. Coins of Nahapana More coins of Nahapana Coins with biography
Shaka era
This is about the historical calendar era. For the "Śaka calendar" of 1957, see Indian national calendar; the Shaka era is a historical calendar era, corresponding to Julian year 78. It is known in Indian languages as Shalivahana Śaka or RTGS: Mahasakkarat "Greater Era"); the origin of the Shaka era is controversial. There are two Shaka era system in scholarly use, one is called Old Shaka Era, whose epoch is uncertain sometime in the 1st millennium BCE because ancient Buddhist and Hindu inscriptions and texts use it, but this is a subject of dispute among scholars; the other is called Saka Era of 78 CE, or Saka Era, a system, common in epigraphic evidence from southern India. A parallel northern India system is the Vikrama Era, used by the Vikrami calendar linked to Vikramaditya; the beginning of the Shaka era is now equated to the ascension of king Chashtana in 78 CE. His inscriptions, dated to the years 11 and 52, have been found at Andhau in Kutch region; these years are interpreted as Shaka years 11 and 52.
A more common view was that the beginning of the Shaka era corresponds to the ascension of Kanishka I in 78 CE. However, the latest research by Henry Falk indicates that Kanishka ascended the throne in 127 CE. Moreover, Kanishka was not a Kushana ruler. Other historical candidates have included rulers such as Vima Kadphises and Nahapana. According to historian Dineshchandra Sircar, the inaccurate notion of "Shalivahana era" appears to be based on the victory of the Satavahana ruler Gautamiputra Satakarni over some Shaka kings. Sircar suggests that the association of the northern king Vikramaditya with Vikrama era might have led the southern scholars to fabricate a similar legend of their own. Another similar account claims that the legendary emperor Vikramaditya defeated the Shakas in 78 CE, the Shaka era marks the day of this conquest; this legend has been mentioned in the writings of Brahmagupta, Al-Biruni, others. However, this is an obvious fabrication. Over time, the word "Shaka" became generic, came to be mean "an era".
The earliest known users of the era are the Shaka rulers of Ujjain. From the reign of Rudrasimha I, they recorded the date of minting of their coins in the Shaka era written on the obverse behind the king's head in Brahmi numerals; the use of the calendar era survived into the Gupta period and became part of Hindu tradition following the decline of Buddhism in India. It was in widespread use by the 6th to 7th centuries, e.g. in the works of Varāhamihira and Brahmagupta, by the 7th century appears in epigraphy in Hindu Southeast Asia. The calendar era remained in use in India and Southeast Asia throughout the medieval period, the main alternative era in traditional Hindu timekeeping being the Vikram Samvat era, it was used by Javanese courts until 1633, when it was replaced by Anno Javanico, a hybrid Javanese-Islamic system. It was adopted as the era of the Indian national calendar in 1957; the Shaka era is the vernal equinox of the year AD 78. The year of the modern Shaka Calendar is tied to the Gregorian date of 22 March every year, except in Gregorian leap years when it starts on 21 March.
Vikram Samvat Indian national calendar
International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanization of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously as if it were in the original Indic script, it is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars. University scholars use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit, Pāḷi and other classical Indian languages. IAST is used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than a century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies.
By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways —see comparison below; the Indian National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST. The IAST letters are listed with their Devanāgarī equivalents and phonetic values in IPA, valid for Sanskrit and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: The highlighted letters are those modified with diacritics: long vowels are marked with an overline, vocalic consonants and retroflexes have an underdot. Unlike ASCII-only romanizations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto, the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalization of proper names; the capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which the convention is to typeset the IT sounds as capital letters.
For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges: the retroflex liquids with the vocalic ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts, as used for languages other than Sanskrit; the most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit is by setting up an alternative keyboard layout. This allows one to hold a modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, alt+a = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux Modern Linux systems allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar. MacOS One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. A revision of this is Shreevatsa R's EasyIAST. Microsoft Windows Windows allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually.
ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a screen-selection entry method. Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program since version NT 4.0 – appearing in the consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane. Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are available. MacOS provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in a font, etc, it can be enabled in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as gucharmap or kcharselect – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can have the opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library.
Only certain fonts support all Latin Unicode characters for the transliteration of Indic scripts according to the ISO 15919 standard. For example, Tahoma supports all the characters needed. Arial and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and also support most Latin Extended Additional characters like ḍ, ḥ, ḷ, ḻ, ṁ, ṅ, ṇ, ṛ, ṣ and ṭ. However, the growing trend amongst academics working in the area of Sanskrit studies is towards using Gentium font which has complete support for all the conjoined diacritics used in the IAST character set. Reddy, Shashir. "Shashir's Notes: Modern Transcription of Sanskrit". Retrieved 2016-12-02. Stone, Anthony. "Transliteration of Indic Scripts: How to use ISO 15919". Archived from the original on 14 April 2016. Retrieved 2 December 2016. CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown Wujastyk, Dominik. "Transliteration of Devanagari". INDOLOGY. Retrieved 2016-12-02. Typing a macron - page from Penn State University about typing with accents International Phonetic Alphabet chart with pronunciation guide A visual chart which shows 1.
Which part of the mouth for each sound 2. The 3 groups where the 12 diacritics appear. - from
Satavahana dynasty
The Satavahanas referred to as the Andhras in the Puranas, were an ancient Indian dynasty based in the Deccan region. Most modern scholars believe that the Satavahana rule began in the first century BCE and lasted until the second century CE, although some assign the beginning of their rule to as early as the 3rd century BCE; the Satavahana kingdom comprised the present-day Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. At different times, their rule extended to parts of modern Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka; the dynasty had different capital cities including Pratishthana and Amaravati. The origin of the dynasty is uncertain, but according to the Puranas, their first king overthrew the Kanva dynasty. In the post-Maurya era, the Satavahanas established peace in the Deccan region, resisted the onslaught of foreign invaders. In particular their struggles with the Saka Western Satraps went on for a long time; the dynasty reached its zenith under the rule of Gautamiputra Satakarni and his successor Vasisthiputra Pulamavi.
The kingdom fragmented into smaller states by the early 3rd century CE. The Satavahanas were early issuers of Indian state coinage struck with images of their rulers, they formed a cultural bridge and played a vital role in trade and the transfer of ideas and culture to and from the Indo-Gangetic Plain to the southern tip of India. They supported Brahmanism as well as Buddhism, patronised Prakrit literature; the date and place of origin of the Satavahanas, as well as the meaning of the dynasty's name, are a matter of debate among the historians. Some of these debates have happened in the context of regionalism, with the present-day Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Telangana being variously claimed as the original homeland of the Satavahanas. According to one theory, the word "Satavahana" is a Prakrit form of the Sanskrit Sapta-Vahana; this would indicate that the Satavahanas claimed association with the legendary solar dynasty, as was common in ancient India. According to Inguva Kartikeya Sarma, the dynasty's name is derived from the words vahana.
Another theory connects their name to the earlier Satiyaputa dynasty. Yet another theory derives their name from the Munda words Sadam and Harpan, implying "son of the performer of a horse sacrifice". Several rulers of the dynasty bear the name or title "Satakarni". Satavahana, Satakarni and Shalivahana appear to be variations of the same word. Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi theorized that the word "Satakarni" is derived from the Munda words sada and kon; the Puranas use the name "Andhra" or "Andhra-Bhritya" for the Satavahanas. The term "Andhra" may refer to territory of the dynasty, it does not appear in the dynasty's own records. Tamil epic Silappatikaram mentions a "Nurruvar Kannar", who helped Chera king Senguttuvan during his Himalaya campaign; the direct translation of the term Nurruvar Kannar is "the hundred Karnas" or "Satakarni", hence the Nurruvar Kannar has been identified with the Satavahana dynasty. The use of the name "Andhra" in the Puranas has led some scholars to believe that the dynasty originated in the eastern Deccan region.
At Kotilingala in Telangana, coins bearing the legend "Rano Siri Chimuka Satavahanasa" were found. Epigraphist and numismastist P. V. P. Sastry identified Chimuka with the dynasty's founder Simuka, because of which Kotilingala came to be known as the only place where coins attributed to Simuka were found. Coins attributed to Simuka's successors Kanha and Satakarni I were discovered at Kotilingla. Based on these discoveries, historians such as D. R. Reddy, S. Reddy and Shankar R. Goyal theorized that Kotlingala was the original home of the Satavahanas. However, the coin samples from Kotlingala are small, it is not certain if these coins were minted there or reached there from somewhere else. Moreover, the identification of Chimuka of Kotilingala with the dynasty's founder Simuka has been contested by several scholars including P. L. Gupta and I. K. Sarma, who identified Chimuka as a ruler. P. V. P. Sastry later changed his view, stated that the two kings were different; as for the Puranas, these texts were compiled much during the Gupta period, it is not certain if the Satavahanas were referred to as Andhras during their time.
Another section of scholars believe. All four extant inscriptions from the early Satavahana period have been found in and around this region; the oldest known Satavahana inscription was found at Cave No.19 of the Pandavleni Caves in Nashik district, was issued during the reign of Kanha. An inscription found at Naneghat was issued by Nayanika, the widow of Satakarni I. A later inscription dated to the reign of Satakarni II has been found at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, located to the north of Maharashtra; the majority of the other Satavahana inscriptions have been found in western Deccan. On the other hand, the epigraphic evidence from eastern Deccan does not mention the Satavahanas before the 4th century CE. At Nevasa, a seal and coins attributed to Kanha have been discovered. Coins attributed to Satakarni I have been discovered at Nashik and Pauni in Maharashtra (besides places in eastern Deccan and present-day Madhya Pra
Sha-sta-na).[3] Kushan Period.
