Indian Epigraphy c15.t6.59

c15.t6.59

As regards the founder of the Kṛta-Mālava-Vikrama-saṃvat, we should naturally look for a powerful Scytho-Parthian king who began to rule in 58 B.C. Some scholars have suggested the name of Azes I.⁴ But the probable identification of the era with the older Scytho-Parthian reckoning renders it untenable in view of the fact that Maues, the predecessor of Azes I in the Indian possessions of the Śakas, is known from the Taxila inscription of Patika to have been ruling in the year 78 of the era.⁵ It is interesting to note in this connection that the earliest local Parthian ruler of East Iran, who is known from his coins to have assumed the imperial title ‘Great King of Kings’, was Vonones who must have flourished sometime after the Parthian emperor Mitridates II (123-88 B.C.) as the latter assumed the said title for the first time. Since the name of the month mentioned in the date of the Taxila inscription is Graeco-Parthian, it has been rightly suggested that the era used in that record is of Parthian origin and that it marks the establishment of a new kingdom in East Iran.⁶ It is thus quite probable that the first year of the reign of Vonones, the earliest independent Parthian ruler of East Iran, came to be regarded as the beginning of a new reckoning that was instituted to oust the Imperial Parthian era of 248 B.C. As Vonones seems to have flourished shortly after Mithridates II about the middle of the 1st century B.C., it is not unreasonable to place his accession in 58 B.C. which is the epoch of the earliest extant Indian reckoning of a historical character.¹ The use of the era seems to have been introduced in Sind and the adjoining regions by the Śaka feudatories of Vonones, and the Mālavas, who originally lived in the Punjab within the dominions of these Śakas, carried its use to Rajasthan and the neighbouring areas with their migration to those parts.