The Hindu Shahi kingdoms: power, coins and temple evidence

Royal centres and the Indus connection

The Hindu Shahis emerged after the Turk Shahis in the Indo-Iranian borderlands. Arturo Annucci’s numismatic study places their expansion between Kabulistan and Gandhara and examines their political setting alongside the Abbasid and Saffarid powers. His overview is a starting framework for the dynasty; its coin chronology remains under investigation. It should not be turned into a precise founding date shared by every regional site.[1]

Noémie Verdon examines Hund, known in Sanskrit sources as Udabhanda and in Arabic and Persian accounts as Wayhind. Its position on the Indus connected Kabul with the Punjab approaches. She traces how later scholars came to call it a Shahi capital and separates that interpretation from the different wording of earlier accounts. Textual and inscriptional evidence nevertheless connects the town with Lalliya, Bhima and Jayapala, supporting its importance as a political and administrative centre.[2]

Coins across political changes

Annucci describes the characteristic silver coins with a bull on one face and a mounted spearman on the other. Their legends commonly carry a name or title, yet matching these with individual kings in literary lists is difficult. His research reconsiders earlier classifications using a Vienna collection and metal analysis. Later rulers continued related monetary designs, so the survival of a coin type cannot by itself prove the survival of the same dynasty.[1]

Temples and the limits of attribution

Salt Range monuments preserve another part of this history. Adam Hardy identifies a local branch of Nagara architecture extending across areas now in Pakistan’s Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Some temples stand beside forts, placing religious buildings within an important regional route landscape. Architectural connections, rather than surviving royal foundation records, provide much of the evidence for comparing this group.[3]

Hardy cautions that the temples’ patrons and precise cult affiliations cannot generally be recovered from the surviving evidence. He also disputes dates assigned by earlier architectural studies. Verdon’s work, meanwhile, uses Hund inscriptions to establish religious activity there in Jayapala’s time. The two settings must be distinguished: evidence for a named ruler at Hund does not automatically identify the patron of a different Salt Range temple.[2][3]