Di-Chalkon - Kujula Kadphises

Kujula Kadphises founded the Kushan Empire by unifying the five Yuezhi tribes of Bactria, and his coinage reflects a ruler still working out what his dynasty would become. These early copper issues borrow heavily from the Indo-Greek and Indo-Parthian visual vocabulary of the region — a deliberate political choice by a conqueror trying to establish legitimacy among populations accustomed to those traditions. The result is a numismatic record of an empire in the act of inventing itself.

Kujula lived, by ancient sources, to over eighty years old — an extraordinary claim, but the sheer span of datable coinage attributed to his reign does nothing to contradict it.