SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 18 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 14 of 99

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 10 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which of the following kingdoms was divided into subdivisions called Aharas or Rashtras that meant districts?

(a)Satavahana
(b)Kushana
(c)Parthian
(d)Shaka

Answer

Why

Correct — A. The Satavahanas kept the older Mauryan administrative vocabulary. Their kingdom was divided into aharas, also called rashtras, which the question glosses as districts.

Each ahara was placed under an amatya, and Satavahana records carry the office-names amatya and mahamatra that the Mauryas had used before them.

That Deccan kingdom carrying Mauryan office-names is option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Kushana — The Kushanas ruled the north-west and the Ganga plain and governed through satraps titled kshatrapa and mahakshatrapa, not through aharas.
(c)
Parthian — The Parthians (Pahlavas) held pockets of the north-west after the Indo-Greeks and left no district scheme of this kind in the Deccan. Gondophernes is the ruler usually named for them.
(d)
Shaka — The Shakas also used the kshatrapa title, and their Western Kshatrapa line was the Satavahanas' rival — Gautamiputra Satakarni's defeat of Nahapana is the standard episode. The ahara vocabulary belongs with the Satavahana records, which name aharas such as Govardhana.

Concept

The Satavahanas ruled the Deccan after the Mauryas, with Pratishthana (modern Paithan, on the Godavari) as a capital.

Their administration reads as a continuation rather than a break: districts called aharas, officials called amatyas and mahamatras, terms already in use in Ashoka's time.

Below the king sat a graded feudatory order, and the dynasty is also remembered for beginning the practice of granting tax-free villages to Buddhist monks and brahmanas.

The stem's own gloss — that ahara or rashtra meant a district — is the giveaway. SSC is testing a term, not a chronology.

Key facts

The Satavahana kingdom was divided into aharas, also called rashtras, each under an amatya.
Ahara was already the word for a district in Ashoka's time, and the Satavahanas kept it.
The Satavahanas ruled the Deccan, with Pratishthana (Paithan on the Godavari) as a capital.
Gautamiputra Satakarni is their best-known ruler, praised in the Nashik inscription of his mother Gautami Balashri.

Study next

Satavahana land grants and the beginnings of tax-free villages for religious doneesThe kshatrapa system of the Shakas and Kushanas, and how it differed from the aharaThe Nashik and Nanaghat inscriptions as sources for Satavahana history

Common traps

Reading ahara as a Mauryan-only term and rejecting the Satavahanas for that reason.
Pairing the Satavahanas with the north-west, where the Shakas, Kushanas and Parthians actually ruled.

SSC asks post-Mauryan dynasties through one distinctive label each — a title, an office, a capital.

Also asked 10 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q23 (Gautamiputra Satakarni and the Satavahana dynasty) and 26 Sep 2024, 12:30, GA Q5 (Brahmanical sculpture of the Mathura school placed in the Kushana period).

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.