The Satavahana Empire

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The Deccan is the wedge of high old basalt that holds the Indian peninsula apart from the northern plains — a plateau tilted toward the east, cut by the Godavari and the Krishna, walled on the west by the long scarp of the Ghats that drops to the Arabian Sea. To move between the riverine north and the trading coasts of the south, goods and armies and pilgrims had to cross it. The dynasty that first made the crossing into a state was the Satavahana, who rose in the Deccan in the centuries after the Mauryan empire loosened its grip and held the plateau, in one branch or another, for roughly four hundred years. They stood at the hinge of the subcontinent — between the Sanskritic order of the Vedic sacrifice and the Brahmanical social code on one side, and on the other the monsoon ports through which the Deccan grew rich, and the Buddhist monasteries that the wealth of that trade carved into the cliffs. A Satavahana king could in the same reign pour the offerings of a royal horse-sacrifice and endow a cave for renunciate monks who had left the householder’s world entirely. The empire’s whole character lies in that doubleness, held without strain.

The dynasty and its names

The line is known by two names, and the gap between them is the first problem of its history. The Puranas — the great Sanskrit genealogical compendia, set down long after the events — list a dynasty they call the Andhra or Andhra-bhritya, the Andhras or servants of the Andhras, and assign it a span of some four and a half centuries. The dynasty’s own inscriptions and coins, written in Prakrit in the Brahmi script, call its kings Satavahana. The two designations refer to the same house; the Puranic “Andhra” is a later label, fastened on a people of the eastern Deccan, and it should not be read backward into the modern linguistic geography of the region. The Satavahanas were a Deccan power whose center of gravity shifted across their long life from the western plateau toward the Krishna delta in the east, and the term that mattered to them was the one they cut into stone.

Their origins are obscure and contested. Their heartland is most often placed in the western Deccan, around the capital at Pratishthana — modern Paithan, on the Godavari — though some scholars, weighing the density of early coins and inscriptions, have argued for a homeland farther north in Vidarbha or farther east in the Krishna-Godavari country. The founder named in the king-lists is Simuka, placed in the later centuries BCE, in the unsettled period after Mauryan authority withdrew from the south. His brother and successor Kanha (Krishna) is the first Satavahana attested in a contemporary record, his name cut at the cave site of Nasik. From these beginnings the house built a plateau-spanning realm, lost much of it to invaders from the northwest, and won it back in a single dramatic reign.

Two features of Satavahana kingship mark them out at once. The first is the title carried by their greatest rulers — Dakshinapatha-pati, Lord of the Southern Road, the trunk route that ran across the Deccan and gave the whole southern region the name Dakshinapatha. The second is a naming convention found almost nowhere else in early India: the kings styled themselves by their mothers. Gautamiputra means son of the lady Gautami; Vasishthiputra, son of the lady Vasishthi. The custom does not by itself prove that descent or property passed through women, but it set the queen-mother at the visible center of royal identity, and it produced, in the Satavahana record, two of the most commanding female voices to survive from the ancient subcontinent.

The horse-sacrifice and the gift

The earliest sustained statement the dynasty makes about itself is religious, and it is Vedic. In a cave at the head of the Naneghat pass — the Pass of the Coin, a steep stair through the Western Ghats that funneled trade between the coast and the plateau — a long Prakrit inscription of around the first century BCE records the deeds of the royal house in the voice of a queen. She is Naganika (Nayanika), widow of the king Satakarni, and the inscription enumerates the great srauta sacrifices the royal couple performed: a sequence of solemn rites including two ashvamedhas, the horse-sacrifice that only a king claiming paramount sovereignty dared to undertake, a rajasuya royal consecration, and a vajapeya, alongside a long roster of lesser offerings. With each rite the inscription tallies the dakshina, the sacrificial fee paid to the officiating Brahmins: thousands of cattle, horses by the hundred, elephants, villages, draped cloth, and struck coin counted out in karshapanas. The cave at Naneghat held a row of royal portrait-figures, now lost, with their names labeled above — a dynastic gallery overlooking the road they taxed.

The Naneghat record fixes the first pillar of the Satavahana settlement. These were kings who legitimized themselves through the oldest apparatus of Indo-Aryan sovereignty — the horse loosed to wander for a year while the king’s warriors followed and claimed every land it crossed, then brought back for the sacrifice that proclaimed him universal lord. The Vedic priesthood underwrote the throne; the throne, in return, made the priesthood rich. That this most royal of theologies was here proclaimed in a queen’s voice, and inscribed at the choke-point of a trade route rather than at the dynastic capital, is characteristic: the Satavahanas advertised their sacred kingship exactly where the merchants who paid for it would read it.

Gautamiputra and the war for the Deccan

The pivot of the whole history is the reign of Gautamiputra Satakarni, in the late first and early second century CE, and it survives in one of the most remarkable royal documents of ancient India. In a cave at Nasik, his mother, the dowager queen Gautami Balashri, set down a long panegyric — a prashasti — to her dead son, recording a grant of a field to the monks who dwelt there. The inscription is a portrait of the king as the dynasty wished him remembered. He had, it says, destroyed the Shakas, the Yavanas, and the Pahlavas — the Scythian, Greek, and Parthian peoples who had pressed into western India from the northwest. He had restored the glory of the Satavahana house. And it calls him eka-bamhana, the unique or peerless Brahmin, and the one who halted the contamination of the four social orders — a king who presented himself as the guardian of the Brahmanical order even as he reconquered a kingdom.

The enemy behind the inscription’s rhetoric was concrete. Through the later first century CE the western Deccan and the rich coastlands had fallen to the Western Kshatrapas — Saka satraps of northwestern origin, ruling from Ujjain and the Gujarat coast, whose king Nahapana had pushed deep into Satavahana territory and whose son-in-law Ushavadata endowed the very cave-monasteries the Satavahanas had patronized. These Sakas were the southern edge of the long Scythian and Parthian pressure that had reshaped northwestern India; to the north, in the same generations, the Kushan empire was rising over the Indus and the Gangetic plain, so that the Satavahana plateau stood between a Kushan north and a Saka-held coast — the indigenous Deccan power wedged among the great foreign-descended states of the age. Gautamiputra broke them. The proof is in the ground: at Jogalthembi, near Nasik, a hoard of more than thirteen thousand silver coins of Nahapana came to light, a great many of them overstruck — Gautamiputra’s own dies hammered over the Kshatrapa’s image, the conqueror’s emblem stamped onto the conquered’s currency. To restrike an enemy’s coin is to seize the most public instrument of his sovereignty and reissue it as one’s own; the Jogalthembi hoard is the war’s economic record, written in metal.

The reconquest did not hold cleanly. Gautamiputra’s son and successor, Vasishthiputra Pulumavi, presided over the empire at a broad extent, but the Kshatrapas recovered under the great Rudradaman I, whose celebrated rock inscription at Junagadh — the first long royal inscription in Sanskrit rather than Prakrit — boasts that he twice defeated a lord of the Deccan, “Satakarni,” yet spared him because of the closeness of their connection. A marriage alliance bound the two dynasties even as they fought; Vasishthiputra married a daughter of Rudradaman. The frontier between Satavahana and Kshatrapa, plateau and coast, was the seam along which the empire’s western fortunes ran, and it never finally closed in the Satavahanas’ favor.

Coin of the realm

It was in this contest that the Satavahanas became founders of a tradition. They issued some of the earliest royal coinage of indigenous India on a large scale — and Gautamiputra Satakarni was among the first native Indian rulers to place a portrait of the king on his silver. The model came from the very enemies he had beaten: the portrait-coin reached the Deccan from the Western Kshatrapas, who had it in turn from the Indo-Greek kingdoms of the northwest, where the Hellenistic ruler-portrait first entered the subcontinent. The Satavahanas took up the convention and made it serve a plateau empire. Their silver portrait-pieces, struck most often over captured Kshatrapa coins, carried bilingual legends — Prakrit on one face and a southern Dravidian language on the other — a stamp of authority meant to be read across the whole north-south span of the realm.

The bulk of Satavahana money, though, was not silver but the metals of everyday exchange. Thousands of coins in lead, copper, and potin — a base alloy — have come out of the Deccan, carrying not portraits but emblems: the chaitya or arched-hill symbol, the Ujjain mark of four arcs joined at a center, the lion, the elephant, the tree-in-railing. The most evocative bear a two-masted ship under sail, struck under the later kings Vasishthiputra Pulumavi and Yajna Sri Satakarni — a coin that put the source of the dynasty’s wealth onto the dynasty’s money, the maritime trade rendered as an image small enough to hold. Coinage on this scale meant a monetized economy reaching down past the court into the market, the toll-gate, and the guild — sovereignty made portable, divisible, and daily.

The road, the port, and the Roman sea

The wealth that paid for the sacrifices and the monasteries came off the water. By the first century CE the western coast of India was a terminus of the monsoon trade that linked the Mediterranean to the East, and the Satavahana plateau sat astride the routes that fed it. The single most vivid witness is the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek merchant’s handbook of the mid-first century CE, written by an anonymous trader who had himself sailed the run. The Periplus names a powerful inland ruler it calls “Saraganus” — a Greek rendering of Satakarni — and reports that under “Saraganus the elder” the port of Calliena (Kalyana, near modern Mumbai) had been an established mart, until a later ruler it calls Sandanes closed it, so that Greek ships putting in there were taken under guard to Barygaza. It lists the great market-towns of the interior from which goods came down to the coast: Paethana (Pratishthana, the Satavahana capital) and Tagara, sending onyx and cotton cloth and other wares over the long inland roads to the sea.

The traffic ran both ways, and Rome paid in metal. Hoards of Roman gold aurei and silver denarii have surfaced across the Deccan and the southern peninsula — the residue of a balance of trade that drained Mediterranean bullion eastward in exchange for pepper, gems, textiles, and ivory. To the Satavahana treasury this current of foreign coin was a sinew of state. The toll-gates on the Ghat passes, the Periplus’s safe and dangerous harbors, the bilingual silver and the ship-coins, the Roman gold in the ground — all describe one machine: a plateau empire monetizing the passage of goods between the inner subcontinent and the outer sea.

Stone cut for the Buddha

The same merchant wealth, turned to merit, raised the monuments for which the Satavahana age is best remembered. Along the western scarp of the Ghats, where the trade roads climbed from the coast, communities of monks cut their monasteries directly into the basalt — the chaitya hall enclosing a stupa for worship and the vihara of cells for residence, released inward from the living rock. The greatest of them belong to the Satavahana centuries. At Karla stands the largest and most perfectly preserved chaitya hall of early India, its high vaulted nave lined with pillars and lit through a great horseshoe-arched sun-window; a donative inscription names the merchant-banker Bhutapala of Vejayanti as the giver of the hall. At Nasik, Kanheri, Junnar, and a chain of lesser sites the same pattern repeats — and the earliest excavation at Ajanta, centuries before its famous later flowering, belongs to this first cave-cutting age.

The donor inscriptions on these walls are the social record of the patronage, and they overturn any picture of monastic endowment as a thing kings did alone. Beside the gifts of royalty and queens stand the gifts of merchants, bankers, householders, artisans’ and traders’ guilds — and, repeatedly, the gifts of Yavanas, the foreign Greek-descended residents of the western towns, who carved their devotion into the same rock as the Indian faithful. A monastery so endowed was a node in the same network as the port and the toll-gate: it sat on the trade road, it was paid for by the people the road enriched, and it housed a community that returned merit and prestige to the donors whose names it preserved.

Eastward, on the lower Krishna, the patronage took monumental form. At Amaravati — the ancient Dhanyakataka, near the eastern capital the dynasty later favored — rose the Mahachaitya, the “Great Stupa,” one of the supreme monuments of Buddhist Asia. Faced and railed in the soft greenish-white limestone of the Palnad hills, it was enlarged across the Satavahana centuries and after them under their Ikshvaku successors, until its drum, dome, railing, and gateways carried a continuous skin of carved narrative — scenes from the Buddha’s lives and former births, worshipping crowds, the wheel and the empty throne. The Amaravati style is the third of the great early Indian schools of Buddhist sculpture, distinct from the northern centers in its crowded, fluid, swaying compositions, and it carried — down the same sea-lanes that brought the Roman gold — across South India, to Sri Lanka, and into Southeast Asia. In its earliest reliefs the Buddha is shown only by sign — a footprint, an empty seat, the wheel of the teaching — and in its later phases in human form, so that the monument is also a record of the moment Buddhist art learned to picture its founder.

The plural ground

To call the Satavahanas patrons of the Buddha is true but partial, for the religious world they governed held several traditions at once, and the dynasty stood over all of them. The same coins that bear the chaitya and the worship of stupas circulated in a realm whose kings performed the ashvamedha; the cave-cliffs that housed Buddhist monks lay in a country where the Brahmanical order and its Vedic rites organized the high life of the court, where the emerging shape of devotional Hinduism and the renunciant path of the Jains were present in the towns and on the trade roads, and where later coins and inscriptions register the rise of cult toward deities who would become central to the Hindu pantheon. The Satavahana court did not choose among these; it underwrote them, and drew legitimacy from each — the sacrifice that made the king a universal lord, the monastery that made him a giver of merit, the social code that made him guardian of order.

The cultural memory of the dynasty carries the same plurality. To a Satavahana king named Hala the tradition attributes the Gatha Saptasati — the “Seven Hundred Verses,” an anthology of short Prakrit love-poems, earthy and exact, of village and field and the longings of ordinary people. That the throne of the horse-sacrifice and the Great Stupa should also be patron to a courtly anthology of vernacular love-lyric is the Satavahana temper in miniature: high Sanskritic ritual, Buddhist renunciation, and a literature of the common tongue under one roof.

It is into this world that the tradition places the philosopher Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamaka school of the Mahayana and the most consequential thinker of later Buddhism. A persistent strand of Buddhist tradition holds that his Suhrllekha — the “Letter to a Friend,” a verse epistle of counsel on the Buddhist life — was addressed to a reigning Satavahana monarch with whom he stood in friendship, the king variously named in the sources, and his Ratnavali, the “Precious Garland,” likewise read as advice to a Satavahana ruler. Modern scholarship treats the connection as plausible but unfixed; the Letter and the Garland read as documents of a patronage between a philosopher and a Deccan court, and the most discussed reconstruction places Nagarjuna in the orbit of the dynasty in the later second century. The tradition further sets his last years on a hill it calls Sriparvata, on the Krishna near the eastern Buddhist foundations — the same river country, watered by the same trade, where the Great Stupa stood.

The unmaking and the bridge

The Satavahana realm did not end in a single catastrophe. Yajna Sri Satakarni, in the later second century CE, was the last king to hold the empire at something like its old extent — his ship-coins the final image of the maritime power that had carried the dynasty — and after him the central authority frayed. The renewed pressure of the Western Kshatrapas on the west, and the steady gathering of strength by the provincial governors and feudatories the throne had relied upon, pulled the plateau apart. By the third century CE the empire had dissolved into a scatter of successor states: the Ikshvakus of the Krishna valley, who carried on the Buddhist patronage at the eastern foundations; the Abhiras in the western Deccan; the Vakatakas, who would in time hold much of the plateau and patronize the later flowering at Ajanta; and a clutch of lesser houses across the south. The matronymic kings, the bilingual silver, the Lord-of-the-Southern-Road title — all passed into the hands of others.

What the Satavahanas had made, and what made them, was the crossing itself. They were the first power to take the wedge of the Deccan and govern it as a unit, and to do so they had to face two ways at once — north toward the Sanskritic order whose sacrifices crowned their kings, and seaward toward the monsoon trade whose wealth carved their monasteries. They paid the Brahmin his thousands of cattle and they paid the monk his cave; they restruck the Saka’s silver and they pressed the foreigner’s gold; they sent the produce of the inner plateau down the Ghat passes to the Roman sea and brought its bullion back up the same roads to the treasury at Pratishthana. The horse loosed for the sacrifice and the ship under sail on the coin are the two emblems of a single sovereignty — a kingship that held the inner and the outer subcontinent together at the one place where the peninsula could be crossed, and made of that crossing an empire.

Reading the dynasty

The Satavahana past is contested even by the standards of early India: the dynasty the Puranas call the Andhras names itself Satavahana in its own inscriptions, the king-lists disagree on the number and order of rulers, and the absolute chronology still swings by as much as a century. The history is built from three classes of evidence read against one another — the cave and coin inscriptions in Prakrit, the great spread of the coinage, and the outside witness of the Greek and Sanskrit texts. The foundation of the numismatic study is Edward James Rapson’s Catalogue of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, the Western Kṣatrapas, the Traikūṭaka Dynasty, and the “Bodhi” Dynasty (British Museum, 1908), which organized the coin series and the dynastic order on which a century of work has built. The standard synthesis of the records is Vasudev Vishnu Mirashi’s The History and Inscriptions of the Sātavāhanas and the Western Kshatrapas (1981), which set the epigraphic corpus of the dynasty beside that of its great rivals; Dineshchandra Sircar’s Indian Epigraphy (1965) and his studies of the dynasty’s successors remain the scholarly grammar of how these inscriptions are read.

The outside witnesses are themselves landmarks of the field. The trader’s handbook that named “Saraganus” and the inland markets of the Deccan reached English through Wilfred Schoff’s annotated translation of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1912), the version through which the document’s geography of the western ports is most often consulted. The connection of the dynasty to the philosophy of Nagarjuna — the Suhrllekha and the Ratnavali read as counsel to a Satavahana king — is treated in the philosophical literature gathered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where the patronage question is weighed as plausible inference rather than fixed date. More recent archaeology has turned from the kings to the country they ruled: Carla M. Sinopoli’s On the Edge of Empire: Form and Substance in the Satavahana Dynasty (2001) reads the dynasty through settlement, craft, and the reach of its administration rather than through its monuments alone, setting the Satavahana state within the comparative study of early South Asian empire — the inscriptions and coins supplying the names, the landscape supplying the empire they sat within.

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