A History of the Mahrattas v1.c7.125

v1.c7.125

¹ He is said by some to have been a Koonbee, or cultivator, and by others to have been the son of a Koomar [Kumbhār], or potter. The legends of the country call him an outar of Mahdeo. His mother, says the same authority, was the virgin daughter of a Bramin, who becoming pregnant by a snake of a sacred kind, was in consequence supposed to be disgraced, and was driven from her father’s threshold; but she was received into the house of a potter, by whom she was protected. [Sālīvāhana (Shalivahan) or Sātavāhana is now known to be the name of a dynasty, not of an individual. The era commencing A.D. 78, which is termed Sālīvāhana-saka in Mahārāshtra, is called Saka-kāla or Saka-nripa-kāla (i.e. the Saka or Scythian era) in inscriptions prior to the eleventh century. The Sālīvāhanas belonged to the early and non-Aryan Āndhra race, whose representative in 256 B.C., was a feudatory of the Mauryan empire (Asoka’s Rock Edict, xiii). In 75 B.C. the Sātavāhanas were independent, and the third ruler of the dynasty, Srī Sātakarni was master of the Deccan and Mālwā. Some little time after his death the sovereignty of the Deccan, as well as of the north Konkan, south Gujarāt, Kāthiāwār and western Mālwā, was seized by the Saka Satrap, or Great Satrap, Nahapāna, who, according to Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar, may have been the viceroy of the Kushan Kings Kadphises I and II. Dr. Smith suggests that the era referred to above dates from the commencement of the reign of Kadphises II. (Ind. Ant., March 1918; O.H.I., p. 128.)