01Kartikeya on the coins
Named after Kumara, Bhagwan Kartikeya, he struck gold coins showing the god riding his peacock, and on the other side the king feeding a peacock. He also issued horseman, elephant-rider, lion-slayer and rhinoceros-slayer types, and an Ashvamedha series, so he too performed the horse sacrifice. His inscriptions run from Bilsad in 415 CE to the Damodarpur copper plates of north Bengal, which show a working land office, with village headmen, scribes and the district officer approving each sale.
02Nalanda and the silk weavers
Xuanzang, who studied at Nalanda in the 630s, says its first monastery was built by a king Shakraditya; Shakra is Indra, as is Mahendra, and seals found at the site support reading him as Kumaragupta. At Mandsaur a guild of silk weavers who had migrated from Lata in Gujarat built a Sun temple in 436 CE, in his reign under the local king Bandhuvarman, and repaired it in 473; their long Sanskrit inscription by the poet Vatsabhatti still survives. At the end of his reign the Pushyamitra tribe rose and the Hunas pressed the north-west, and his son Skandagupta took the field.
