thumb|Figure of a foreigner, found in Sarnath. This is a probable member of the West Asian Pahlava or Saka elite in the Gangetic plains during the Mauryan period.
thumb|Figure of a foreigner, found in Sarnath. This is a probable member of the West Asian Pahlava or Saka elite in the Gangetic plains during the Mauryan period.
The Pahlavas are a people mentioned in ancient Indian texts. According to Patrick Carnegy, a Raj-era ethnographer, the 4th-century BCE Vartika of Katyayana mentions the Sakah-Parthavah, demonstrating an awareness of these Saka-Parthians, probably by way of commerce. Knowledge of the Pahlavas is distilled from the literary references in texts like the Manu Smriti, various Puranas, the Ramayana, the , and the .
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).