Gurjara-Pratihara warrior

GURJARA-PRATIHARA WARRIOR (8th-11th centuries). The Pratiharas were an Early Medieval Hindu dynasty that ruled from 730 to 1036. The Pratiharas originally ruled the Gurjaradesa (the ancient name for the territory between the modern Indian states of Rajasthan and Gujarat), but after their victory in the Tripartite Struggle in 916, against the Pala dynasty of Bengal and the Rashtrakutas of Manyakheta, the Pratiharas eventually conquered most of North India, from the Thar Desert in the west, to the jungles of Bengal in the east, and from the feet of the Himalayas in the north to the Narmada river in the south.

Aside from the struggle against the neighbouring Indian empires, the history of the Pratihara dynasty was marked by the resistance against the expansion of Islam. The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus was the first early Islamic empire that invaded India, resulting in their annexation of Sindh (the territory around the Indus River, modern-day Pakistan). This was the same Umayyad Caliphate that expanded Islam to the Maghreb and conquered Visigothic Hispania, and that in 732 AD was defeated by a Frankish army led by Charles Martel, founder of the Carolingian dynasty and grandfather of the future emperor Charlemagne, at the Battle of Poitiers in western France. The same Umayyad dynasty that would later rule an independent Al-Andalus from their new capital at Córdoba after losing their throne in Damascus and with it, their massive empire that once stretched from the Pyrenees to the doorstep of India. After conquering Sindh, the Umayyad Arab army advanced into modern-day Rajasthan and were halted by the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty under its founder, king Nagabhata I.

After gradually shrinking and weakening, the Gurjara-Pratihara Empire was finally destroyed by the Ghaznavids, a Persian-speaking Muslim dynasty of Turkic origin that ruled much of Iran, Central Asia and northwest India between the 10th and 11th centuries, and the empire broke into several small states under Ghaznavid control.