Kidara

Founder of the Kidarite kingdom · early 5th century CE · Bactria and Gandhara

Kidara — Chinese Jiduolo (寄多羅) — was the founder and namesake of the Kidarite dynasty, the first wave of post-Sassanian steppe rulers to take Bactria and cross the Hindu Kush into Gandhara. The Kidarites are sometimes called “Red Huns” or “Kidarite Huns” in the modern literature, but they are best understood as the immediate political predecessors of the Hephthalites and the Alkhans, sharing material culture and the boar-totem heritage of the wider Altai-Waraz lineage.

From Bactria to Gandhara

The Kidarites are reported in Armenian sources at 367 CE, and Chinese sources record them ruling Bactria by 410 CE. Within a generation Kidara had taken Gandhara and Punjab, and his successors put pressure on the Gupta Emperor Kumaragupta I (reigning 413–455 CE). The pressure was severe enough that Skandagupta commemorates his “victory over the Hunas” on the Bhitari Pillar Inscription c. 455 CE — a victory that, on most readings, is over Kidara’s heirs rather than the later Alkhans. See the Bhitari Pillar post.

Coinage and seals

Kidara’s gold and silver coinage, modelled on late Kushan and Sassanian prototypes, names him in Bactrian and Brahmi: Kidara Kushanshah. The Brahmi seals and bullae of Bhagundi, Sudāsa, and Jihah (Jina) — fifth-to-sixth-century CE — are the best-preserved Kidarite documents from the Gandhara phase, and a key source for Pfisterer and Vondrovec’s typology.

Sources

• Bhitari Pillar Inscription of Skandagupta, c. 455 CE
• Kim, H. J., “White Hunnic Expansion and the Kidarite Dynasty” in The Huns (2016)
• Allchin, Ball & Hammond, The Archaeology of Afghanistan (2019)
• Schörflinger, “Die Kidariten in Taxila” (2013)