Person · Alchon Hun king · India
Mihirakula
Also known as Mihirakula, Mihiragula, Mihirakula Hun
The Alchon Hun ruler who succeeded Toramana and whose coins and inscriptions run from Gandhara to the Gangetic plain in the early sixth century. Kashmiri and Chinese Buddhist sources remember him as a persecutor of monasteries; Yashodharman's pillars at Sondani record his defeat.
- Date
- 502–530
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 26.230, 78.169
Worth knowing
A Gwalior inscription of his fifteenth year records a sun temple built by a subordinate, so he was not simply a destroyer of religion in his own documents. The Gandharan monastic landscape does not recover after his generation, and the Buddhist centre of gravity in the north-west moves permanently east.
About the place
Placed at Gwalior, where an inscription of his reign survives. His coins run from Gandhara to the Ganges plain and he had no single capital in India.
Connections (3)
- CampaignEran
Toramana's boar-inscription and Bhanugupta's memorial stone both stand at Eran, which makes it the one site where the Huna and Gupta claims touch. Mihirakula, Toramana's son, carried the war further south and east than his father. Neither dynasty's records admit a defeat, and the archaeology of the site is not decisive either.
- CampaignYaśodharman
The Sondani pillars state that Mihirakula, whom even kings did not approach, was made to bow his head to Yashodharman. It is the only explicit claim of a Huna defeat in an Indian inscription, and it comes from an Aulikara ruler of Dasapura rather than from the Guptas — which is itself the evidence that imperial authority in central India had passed to regional houses.
- CampaignGandhāra
Kalhana's Rajatarangini and the Chinese pilgrims both remember Mihirakula as a destroyer of monasteries, and the Gandharan sites do stop being maintained in his period. How much of that is his campaigns and how much the collapse of the trade and patronage the monasteries lived on is unresolved, but Xuanzang a century later found the region's viharas empty.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mihirakula”. The Gwalior inscription of Mihirakula, in Fleet, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. III; Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī, book I; Xuanzang, Da Tang Xiyu Ji.
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