The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c7.s2.3

v1.c7.s2.3

According to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar,² the earliest writer on the subject, ‘the Andhrabhṛtya dynasty of the Purāṇas is the same as the Sātavāhana dynasty of the inscriptions’. He explained the term ‘Andhrabhṛtya’ as meaning Andhras *who were once servants* or dependants. They came to power under the leadership of Simuka who uprooted the Śuṅgas and the Kaṇvas in 73 B.C. In his opinion Dhānyakaṭaka (near modern Dharaṇikoṭa in the Guntur District) was their eastern capital. Dr. J. Burgess wrote in 1887 that ‘the Sātavāhanas or Andhras held sway for about four centuries from the second century B.C. till the end of the second or the beginning of the third century A.D. . . . their conquests extended far to the north and to the western coast. . . . Their first capital is said to have been on the Kṛṣṇā at Śrīkākulam about 19 miles west of Masulipatam, and founded according to legend by Sumati, a great emperor; by whom is probably meant Simuka the first of the dynasty. It was afterwards transferred to Dhānyakaṭaka or Dharaṇikoṭa, and thence to other places.’³ According to Dr. V. A. Smith,⁴ the Andhra community in the days of Megasthenes occupied the delta of the Godāvarī and Kṛṣṇā rivers and possessed a military force second only to that of the Mauryas; the capital of the state ‘is believed to have been then Śrīkākulam’, on the lower course of the Kṛṣṇā; in the days of Aśoka, their rājā appears to have been in some measure subordinate to him; and soon after the close of the reign of that great emperor or possibly even before its close, they asserted their independence about 240 or 230 B.C. under a king named Simuka, and within a short period their authority spread as far west as Nāsik. Smith also says that ‘the Āndhra kings all claimed to belong to the Sātavāhana family and many of them assumed the title or bore the name Sātakarṇi’. Prof. E. J. Rapson is of the same opinion as Dr. Smith;¹ he adds, however, that at the time of Puṣyamitra Śuṅga’s incursion into Vidarbha the Andhras had ‘extended across the Deccan from the eastern coast’. Dr. L. D. Barnett states that their earliest capital was Śrī-kākulam,² then Dhānyakaṭaka, and finally in the first century A.D. it was at Pratiṣṭhāna in the centre of their western provinces.