An Era Whose Founder Is Still Argued Over

The Saka era counts its years from 78 CE, and Indian tradition generally attributes its founding to a king remembered as Salivahana, though the historical figure behind the epoch is genuinely disputed rather than settled. Many historians connect the year instead to the accession of the Kushan emperor Kanishka, whose empire's coinage and inscriptions provide much of the era's earliest datable evidence, while others have argued for a link to the Western Kshatrapa dynasty's ruler Chashtana instead, and the atlas records this as an open disagreement among specialists rather than adopting any one attribution as settled fact.

Whatever its founder, the era became one of the major year counts of classical and medieval India, used alongside the older Vikram Samvat and several regional eras in Hindu religious and administrative dating, and it travelled outward from India with the broader transmission of Indian astronomical science, jyotisha, into Southeast Asia, where it became the basis for the traditional calendars of Java and Bali. The calendar built on the Saka era is lunisolar, following the same general Hindu calendrical framework as the Panchanga, with intercalary months inserted to keep its lunar count aligned with the solar year the era itself is reckoned against.