The Northern Satraps

At Mathurā

As Indo-Scythian power spread east from the Indus, satraps were installed in the Mathurā country, where they displaced the local Mitra rulers. Their names — Hagāmaṣa, Hagāna, Rājuvula, and Rājuvula's son Śoḍāsa — are Iranian or Central Asian, and their coins adapt the types already current in the region.

Mathurā at this period was among the most important cities in northern India: a junction of trade routes, a centre of Jain and Buddhist monastic settlement, and the seat of a sculptural workshop whose mottled red sandstone was exported across the north.

The lion capital

The Mathurā lion capital, now in the British Museum, is a sandstone capital carved with addorsed lions and covered with a Kharoṣṭhī inscription in several hands. It records the dedication of a stūpa and a monastery for the Sarvāstivādin order by a chief queen of Rājuvula, and names a number of members of the satrapal family.

The document is valuable out of proportion to its size. It fixes the family relationships of the Northern Satraps, shows the use of Kharoṣṭhī — a northwestern script — deep in the Doab, and demonstrates that these foreign rulers were endowing Indian religious institutions within a generation of their arrival.

End

Śoḍāsa's rule is the last well attested, and Mathurā passed to the Kushans in the first century CE, becoming one of their two principal centres alongside Puruṣapura. Under Kushan rule the Mathurā workshops produced the first images of the Buddha in human form in the region, alongside Jain tīrthaṅkaras and Hindu deities from the same hands and the same stone.