The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c30.78

v1.c30.78

The mountainous fringe of country on the north of the Punjab and the United Provinces was also occupied at this period by independent native Indian states; and the names of some of them have similarly been preserved by the coins, which were no doubt the result of commerce between these peoples of the hills and the lowlanders. In the Gurdāspur District of the Punjab there lived the Udumbaras, who claimed to be descended from Viçvāmitra, the rishi of the third book of the Rigveda¹. His figure appears on the coins of their king, Dharāghosha, whose reign must probably be assigned to the latter half of the first century B.C., since his coinage is evidently imitated from that of the Çaka king Azilises (Pl. V, 14, Dharāghosha; 15, Azilises). Of a somewhat later date, perhaps of the first or second century A.D., are the coins of the Kulūtas, the eastern neighbours of the Udumbaras, in the Kulū valley of the Kāngra District; and to the same period as the coins of the Udumbaras belong the earlier issues of the Kuṇindas who inhabited the country of the Sutlej in the Simla Hill States (Pl. V, 16, Amoghabhūti). These three peoples, the Udumbaras, the Kulūtas, and the Kuṇindas, lived on the border between the regions in which the two ancient alphabets, Brāhmī and Kharoshṭhī, prevailed: they accordingly used both of them in their coin-legends. To a branch of the Kuṇindas (or Kulindas, as they are called in the Purāṇas), whose territories 'extended further east along the southern slopes of the Himalayas as far as Nepal' (Pargiter, *Mārk. Pur.* p. 316), are probably also to be attributed the coins of two kings which have been found in the Almora District (Pl. V, 17, Çivadata)².