Apracharājas and Pāratarājas

The Apracharājas

The Apracha line ruled in Bajaur, in the hills north of the Gandhāran plain, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), in the first century BCE and first century CE, as subordinates or neighbours of the larger northwestern powers. They are known almost entirely from inscribed Buddhist reliquaries — small stone or metal caskets recording the enshrinement of relics — which name a sequence of rulers and their kinsfolk as donors.

The Bajaur and Shinkot caskets and their fellows are of unusual value because they are dated and because they show a local dynasty investing systematically in Buddhist foundations. Many surfaced through the antiquities market rather than through excavation, which limits what can be inferred about their original settings.

The Pāratarājas

The Pāratas ruled in eastern Balochistan, ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), around the Loralai district, from perhaps the first to the third century CE. They are known from a series of silver and copper coins bearing Kharoṣṭhī and Brahmi legends, from which a list of some ten kings has been reconstructed.

Neither dynasty has a narrative history, and neither is mentioned in any literary source. They are included here because they are securely attested — coins and dated inscriptions are hard evidence — and because they illustrate what most of the political landscape of the ancient northwest actually looked like: small hill and frontier polities, sometimes tributary and sometimes not, in the spaces between the empires.