State, power and religion in the Indo-Iranian borderlands and North-west India, c. 200 bc–ad 200

Abstract

The Greek tradition of coinage was maintained by the Bactrians, Indo-Greeks, Śakas and Kushanas, ruling successively in the North-west from the second century bc to second century ad. On their coins, apart from the rulers themselves, appear the figures and names of several deities. These were Greek deities in the beginning, to whom Iranian and Indian deities went on being added. The paper traces this process in detail and examines how the rulers first seem to address, through their coins, only an elite Greek or Hellenised aristocracy and then the wider Iranic and Indian populations, through the medium of deities figured on their coins. There was simultaneously the objective of legitimation and glorification of the rulers themselves by the same means. Curiously, Buddhism so important in Gandhara sculpture has only a rare presence on these coins even under the Kushanas.