Indian History Quiz: Post-Mauryan Period: Kushanas and Satavahanas

The main Kushana capital was Purushapura, the modern Peshawar, which Kanishka I developed as his seat of power. As the empire spread into the Ganga-Yamuna plain, Mathura on the Yamuna became its second capital and the southern headquarters of the family.

Nahapana belonged to the Kshaharata family of the Shakas, the Western Kshatrapas who ruled in western India, and not to the Kushanas at all.

Ashvaghosha was a Buddhist monk and Sanskrit poet at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka I. He wrote the Buddhacharita, a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit verse, and the Saundarananda, and he acted as deputy to Vasumitra at the Fourth Buddhist Council held in Kashmir.

The Gathasaptasati, also written as Gatha Saptasati, is an anthology of seven hundred short verses compiled by the Satavahana king Hala.

The panel showing the submission of the mad elephant Nalagiri, sent by Devadatta to kill the Buddha and calmed by him in the street of Rajagriha, is among the best known carvings of the Amaravati stupa on the lower Krishna in Andhra Pradesh.

Brihadratha was the last ruler of the Mauryan dynasty. About 185 BCE his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Sunga killed him, according to tradition at a review of the army, and took the throne at Pataliputra.

The Junagadh rock inscription of about 150 CE was issued by Rudradaman I, the Shaka ruler of the Western Kshatrapa line.

Milindapanho means the questions of Milinda, and Milinda is the Indian name of the Indo-Greek king Menander, who ruled in the north-west in the second century BCE.

The Nasik cave inscription praising Gautamiputra Satakarni was issued in the name of his mother Gautami Balashri, in the reign of her grandson.

The Fourth Buddhist Council met in Kashmir under the patronage of the Kushana ruler Kanishka I. Vasumitra presided over it and Ashvaghosha acted as his deputy, and its work of collecting commentaries on the canon went with the open division of Buddhism into the Mahayana and Hinayana schools.