KING KANISHKA 227 position strangely open to doubt. Unluckily, no pas- sage in the works of the accurate Chinese historians has yet been discovered which synchronizes hiiri with any definite name or event in the well-ascertained his- tory of the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese books which mention him are all, so far as is yet known, merely works of edification, and not well adapted to serve as mines of historic fact. They are, in truth, translations or echoes of Indian tradition, as are the books of Tibet and Mongolia, and no student needs to be told how baffling are its vagaries. Kanishka and his proximate successors certainly are mentioned in an exceptionally large number of in- scriptions, of which more than a score are dated, and it might be expected that this ample store of epigraphic material would set at rest all doubts and establish beyond dispute the essential outlines of the Kushan chronology. But, unfortunately, the dates are recorded in such a fashion as to be open to most various inter- pretations, and eminent scholars are still to be found who place the accession of Kanishka in 57 B. c., as well as others who date that event in 278 A. D. Many lines of evidence, which are of great collective force when brought together, lead to the conclusion that Kanishka was the contemporary of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and came to the throne about 120 or 125 A. D., directly succeeding Kadphises n. Kanishka unquestionably belonged to the Kushan section of the Yueh-chi nation, as did the Kadphises kings, and there does not seem to be sufficient reason
