ANDHRA HISTORY

The earliest reference to the term Andhra is the name of a tribe and this is made in the Aitareya Brahamana datable to 800 B.C. Andhras left the northern part of Indian subcontinent near Yamuna river, crossing the Vindhyas and came to present day Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. It also mentions that the Andhras were socially parallel to other tribes like the Pundras, Sabarasand Pulindas. There are references to an Andhra kingdom and a people known as the Andhras in Indian epic poetry (the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas). In the Mahabharata Rukmi ruled the Vidarbha Kingdom, which included the Deccan Plateau, the foothills of the Vindhya Range, present-day Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka and a little-known (now submerged) archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. Rama is said to have lived in the forest around present-day Bhadrachalam during his exile. Although the ancient literature indicates a history dating to several centuries BCE, archaeological evidence exists only from the last two millennia. The fifth-century BCE Kingdom of Pratipalapura, identified with Bhattiprolu in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, maybe the earliest kingdom in South India and inscriptions suggest that King Kubera ruled Bhattiprolu around 230 BCE