THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESadded to it by a Yavanaraja Tushaspha under Ashoka Maurya.^4 This
would indicate that a Yavana king served as a governor under Ashoka
(though his name, Tushaspha, seems to be of Persian rather than Greek
origin). Rudradaman then goes on to tell about the victories he himself
attained over the Shatavahana kings and over the tribe of the Yaudehas
near present Delhi. This particular reference to a Rudradaman’s northern
campaign has been variously interpreted: those who maintain that the
Kanishka era began in AD 78 say that the Kushana empire must have
declined soon after his death; and those who suggest a later date (around
AD 144) for Kanishka’s accession to the throne contend that Rudradaman
could not have conducted this campaign at the time when the Kushanas
were in full control of northern India.
The last great Kushana emperor was Vasudeva whose inscriptions cover
the period from the year 67 to the year 98 of the Kanishka era. He was the
first Kushana ruler with an Indian name, an indication of the progressive
assimilation of the Kushanas whose coins show more and more images of
Hindu gods. There were some more Kushana rulers after Vasudeva, but we
know very little about them. They have left no inscriptions, only coins.
Moreover, the knotty problem of the Kanishka era does not permit us to
correlate foreign reports about India in the age of the Kushanas (such as
the Chinese and the Roman ones) with the reign of clearly identifiable
Kushana rulers.
In Central Asia and Afghanistan the Kushanas seem to have held sway
until the early third century AD. In those regions their rule was only
terminated when Ardashir, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, vanquished
the Parthians about AD 226 and then turned against the Kushanas, too.
Ardashir I and his successor Shahpur I are credited with the conquest of
the whole of Bactria and the rest of the Kushana domain in Central Asia.
Their provincial governors had the title Kushana Shah. In the valley of
Kabul local Kushana princes could still be traced in the fifth century AD.
In northwestern India some Kushana rulers also survived the decline of the
western centre of their empire. The famous Allahabad inscription of the
Gupta emperor, Samudragupta (about AD 335 to 375), reflects a faint
reminiscence of the erstwhile glamour of the Kushanas: among the many
rulers who acknowledged Samudragupta’s power he also lists the
Daivaputras Shahi Shahanushahis, who were obviously the successors of
the great Kanishka.
The splendour of the ‘dark period’The five centuries which passed between the decline of the first great
Indian empire of the Mauryas and the emergence of the great empire of
the Guptas has often been described as a dark period in Indian history
when foreign dynasties fought each other for short-lived and ephemeral