Chapter 6 - Scythian (Saka) elements in the Later Art of India

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Kashmir, and from eastern India. Kashmir was again linked with western
Tibet and Tibet was linked with Nepal and Bengal. In the last decades of the
first century B.C. there were political changes taking place in the west-
Punjab region around Taxila. The Greeks under the leadership of
Apollodotus II were subsequently able to regain the territories of the Punjab
which they had earlier lost to the Indo-Scythian Maues. However, they were
finally expelled from this region around c. 55 B.C. by another Scythian
prince, Azes I, who dethroned Hippostratus (the last Greek king to reign in
the west Punjab, including Taxila and Pushkalāvatī). A tetradrachm of
Apollodotus II from the Sarai Saleh hoard found on the North-West Frontier,
in the Abbotabad region, with two combined monograms, suggests that
Apollodotus II was the immediate successor of Maues, and both reigned
within a short lapse of time in the same region.¹ Thus, it was Azes I himself
who definitively established the Indo-Scythian dynasty in the region of the
West Punjab. It is noteworthy, that stylistically, the portrait of the king on
the Apollodotus's drachm is similar to the one issued in the west-Punjab
mints. The hoard found in the Malakand region, not far away from the
ancient cities of Pushkalāvatī (near Peshawar) and Taxila is similar to the
Peshawar hoard containing coins of Azes I, Azilises, Azes II and
1 Osmund Bopearachchi, The Arsacid Empire: Sources and Documentation', Das
Partherreich Und Seine Zeugnisse, Stuttgart, 1998, p.396.