page_title: Parikshit
section_title: Historicity
hierarchical_section_title: Parikshit / Historicity
context_page_description: Parikshit was a Kuru king who reigned during the Middle Vedic period. Along with his son and successor Janamejaya, he played a decisive role in the consolidation of the Kuru state, the arrangement of Vedic hymns into collections, and the development of the orthodox srauta ritual, transforming the Kuru realm into the dominant political and cultural center of northern Iron Age India.
  He also appears as a figure in later legends and traditions. According to the Mahabharata and the Puranas, he succeeded his grand uncle Yudhishthira to the throne of Hastinapur.
context_section_description: Michael Witzel dates the Pārikṣita Dynasty of the Kuru Kingdom to the 12th-11th centuries BC. H.C. Raychaudhuri dates Parikshit in ninth century BC. He was succeeded by his son Janamejaya.
  Only one Parikshit is mentioned in Vedic literature; however, post-Vedic literature (Mahabharata and Puranas) seems to indicate the existence of two kings by this name, one who lived before the Kurukshetra War was an ancestor to the Pandavas, and one who lived later and was a descendant. Historian H. C. Raychaudhuri believes that the second Parikshit's description better corresponds to the Vedic king, whereas the information available about the first is scanty and inconsistent, but Raychaudhuri questions whether there were actually two distinct kings. He suggests that the doubling was eventually "invented by genealogists to account for anachronisms" in the later parts of the Mahabharata, as "a bardic duplication of the same original individual regarding whose exact place in the Kuru genealogy no unanimous tradition had survived," and therefore there "is an intrusion into the genealogical texts" of the late, post-Vedic tradition, which also has two of Parikshit's son Janamejaya.
caption: Kuru and other kingdoms of the Vedic period
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