The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c8.s11.317

c8.s11.317

the god Brahman, and taken through Angiras, Brihaspati, Samyu, Bharadvaja, Drona, and Asvatthaman, to a certain Pallava, the mythical founder of the line of kings. And the name of this eponymous person is explained as having been taken from the fact that he lay on a couch covered with a heap of sprouts (pallava).¹ It seems likely, however, that, whatever may be the ancestral and racial origin of the kings with whom we have now to deal, their name simply represents, in a Sanskritised form, that of the Pahlavas, Pahnavas, or Palhavas, who are mentioned in the Puranas, and in other records, along with the Sakas and the Yavanas. If so, the original introducers of the name were of foreign descent, and made their way into India from the north-west. As regards the period when this may have occurred, Professor Weber tells us that, "as the name of a people, the word Pahlav became early foreign to the Persians, learned reminiscences excepted: in the Pahlavi texts themselves, for instance, it does not occur. The period when it passed over to the Indians, therefore, would have to be fixed for about the second to the fourth century, A. D.; and we should have to understand by it, not directly the Persians, who are called Parasikas, rather, but specially the Arsacid an Parthians."² And the epigraphic records fully corroborate this view. The Junagadh inscription, and one of the Nasik records, tell us,—according to Dr. Bhandarkar's chronology of the Andhrabhrityas,³—that in A. D. 150 the Palhava Suvisakha, son of Kulaipa, was settled in Kathiawad as a minister of Rudradaman,⁴ and that, about twenty years earlier, Gotamiputra had destroyed the Palhavas with the Sakas and Yavanas,—i. e. had driven them out of his territories more to the east and south.⁵ And the mention, in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta,⁶ of Vishnugopa, king of Kanchi, who cannot well be any but a Pahlava or Pallava king,—i. e. either a descendant of the original intruders, with a Sanskrit name, or a native ruler belonging to a dynasty which had taken, as its name, the nearest Sanskrit approach to the appellation of the foreign race,—indicates pretty clearly that a dynasty of Pahlavas or Pallavas was firmly established on the eastern coast of Southern India by the middle of the fourth century A. D. The Junagadh and Nasik records shew some of the steps by which the Pahlavas, or their name and reputation, could manage to reach so far to the south-east. And, if Dr. Oldhausen's actual derivation of the name Pallava, through