Person · Satavahana king · India
Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi
The Satavahana ruler who broke Nahapana's Kshatrapa power in the western Deccan about 125 CE, restruck his rival's silver coins with his own dies, and is styled in his mother's inscription the destroyer of Shakas, Yavanas and Pahlavas and the one who stopped the mixing of the four varnas.
- Date
- -1–130
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Satavahana
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 19.943, 73.749
Worth knowing
His mother Gautami Balashri's inscription in Cave 3 at Nasik, cut after his death, is the fullest Satavahana record we have and one of the earliest Indian eulogies of a ruler by a woman of his family. The Sanskrit word for his dynasty's own language was Prakrit: they never used Sanskrit in inscription.
About the place
Placed at the Pandavleni caves above Nasik, where the inscriptions of his reign and his mother's eulogy of him are cut. No Satavahana capital site is securely identified with him.
Connections (2)
- Imperial inscription atPandavleni, Nasik
Gautami Balashri's inscription in Cave 3 at Nasik, cut after her son's death, is the fullest Satavahana record in existence: it lists his conquests, calls him the destroyer of Shakas, Yavanas and Pahlavas, claims he stopped the mixing of the four varnas, and records her gift of the cave to the sangha. It is an Indian dynastic eulogy composed by the ruler's mother, which happens nowhere else in the epigraphy of the period, and everything we know of his reign rests on it.
- CampaignJunnar cave groups
Nahapana's Kshatrapa inscriptions are at Junnar and his coins were restruck by Gautamiputra with the original dies still partly legible underneath — which is how the two dynasties' chronologies were locked together. The war was about these passes: whoever held Junnar and the Naneghat controlled the traffic from the Konkan ports to the plateau, and the caves on both sides carry the donations of the winners and losers in turn.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gautamiputra Satakarni”. The Nasik and Naneghat cave inscriptions in Epigraphia Indica and in Senart’s corpus; Himanshu Ray, Monastery and Guild (1986).
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