Satvahana in 218 B.C.

Satvahana — 218 BC · The Rising Power of the Deccan.

The Satavahanas — the rising Andhra power of the Deccan, masters of the high plateau between the Godavari and the Krishna in central-southern India. The classical geographers know them as the Andarae, a nation of thirty walled towns and many villages, fielding foot, horse and war-elephants. As the long arm of the Maurya grows weak in the south, the lords of Pratishthana take up the suzerainty the emperors of Pataliputra can no longer hold, gathering into their hands the inland roads that bind the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and the cotton country of the black-earth Deccan. They are brahmanical kings who pour the offerings of the old Vedic sacrifices, yet they shelter the robe-clad monks and raise the great railed stupas of the Krishna. North of the Tamil kingdoms and south of the imperial heartland, this is a realm still in the making — a Deccan monarchy feeling for the shape of an empire.

On the high black-soil plateau of the Deccan a new power is taking form. For three generations the emperors of the Maurya held the south under their writ, their pillars and edicts set up as far as the Tamil country; but that grip has loosened, and in the river-lands of the Godavari and the Krishna the chiefs of the Andhras no longer wait on Pataliputra’s word. From their seat at Pratishthana they gather the plateau under one house — the dynasty later remembered as the Satavahanas — taking up the overlordship the north can no longer enforce. They hold the inland passes and the trunk roads that carry cotton, iron and ivory between the two seas, and their kings sacrifice to the old gods while their towns fill with the shrines of the new faith. To the far geographers of the west they are no more than a name on the edge of the world: the Andarae, a strong nation of fortified towns and elephant-armies, dimly heard of beyond the Ganges. Here on the ground they are a kingdom in its first ascent.