Indo-Scythians Erotic

The Indo-Scythians were an ancient people, Iranian-speaking nomads of Saka stock who rode south out of Central Asia in the second century BCE and ruled parts of what is now Afghanistan, eastern Iran, Pakistan and northwestern India until their last dynasty fell to the Guptas around 400 CE; no community survives under the name, and their descendants dissolved into the populations of Sistan, Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. What made them a group was the road behind them. The Sakas had ranged the steppe from the Aral Sea to the Ili valley for centuries. When the Yuezhi, themselves fleeing the Xiongnu, crashed into their pastures, the Sakas were shoved through Bactria into the Helmand basin, which still carries their name: Sistan, from Sakastan, land of the Sakas. From there they came down the Indus and through the passes into a Gandhara the Indo-Greek kings had held for a century. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea simply calls the lower Indus Scythia. They did not erase the Greek world they found. They took it over.

Their kings, Maues at Taxila around 85 BCE, then Azes and Azilises, struck coins with Greek on one face and Kharoshthi Prakrit on the other, kept Zeus and Athena on the reverse, and added a signature of their own: the ruler on horseback, spear couched, in trousers and belted tunic. That mounted lord with a steppe silhouette is the Indo-Scythian brand. Satraps ruled for them at Mathura, where Rajuvula's queen paid for a relic stupa recorded on the Mathura lion capital, and at Ujjain and in Kathiawar, where the Western Satraps outlasted everyone. Rudradaman's Junagadh inscription of 150 CE, the first long royal text in polished Sanskrit, boasts of rebuilding a Mauryan dam more than four centuries old. A steppe dynasty ended up as the leading patron of Sanskrit prose.

Religion was elastic. They arrived with the Iranian cults of the steppe, borrowed Greek gods for their coinage, funded Buddhist stupas, and put Lakshmi on an elephant-flanked lotus. Indian lawgivers filed them under the Shakas, foreigners whose kshatriya status had lapsed, which did not stop a Satavahana king from marrying Rudradaman's daughter. The Shaka era of 78 CE, still the epoch of India's official civil calendar, is traditionally tied to Saka rule, though who actually started it is argued. The Indo-Parthians and then the Kushans pushed them out of the north during the first century CE. The Western Satraps held on through the Satavahana wars for three centuries more, until Chandragupta II absorbed Gujarat and Malwa in the 390s. The word Shaka, the name Sistan, the horseman on the coin: that is what remains.