Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.VII

       What happened to the city? There are several theories. Its final destruction was probably caused by the catastrophic flood in the area in about 575. But it seems that a huge fire may have already played a major part in its collapse- archaeologists have found ash during excavations. 

      Geologists have speculated that the fire may have been started by an earthquake, because the city is near the edge of a tectonic plate that carriers the Indian subcontinent. But the ashes may have been left by invaders. For more than a century, the Guptas and their neighbors were threatened by a tribe from central Asia – the Hepthalites, or White Huns, who invaded northern India during the reign of Skanda Gupta. A retaliatory attack on the invaders in the early 6^th century brought devastation to Pataliputra when the Huns sacked the city –perhaps they put it to the torch. By the middle of the 6^th century, the Huns controlled most of the Gupta’s territory.

     Their mere presence north of the city would have greatly disrupted the flow of trade on which the empire’s wealth was based. The resulting loss of financial power may have ignited social and political tensions among the empire’s rulers, perhaps leading to fierce internal disputes among the different factions.

    

    After the death of Skanda Gupta, several different lines of succession developed, which suggests that the royal family fell out over who should take power. If so, this magnificent city may have received its death wound in the chaos of a civil war. Pataliputra may, in fact, have died by its own hand, leaving only shattered pottery and a few scorched stones in the dust to mark its passing.

      

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.VI

       The last Mauryan emperor, Brihadratha, proved to be weak and ineffective, and fell from power in 185 BC- a victim of internal unrest. The Shunga dynasty took power, and ruled for about 100 years, adding their own monuments to the growing collection at Sanchi.  The city’s fate over the next 400 years is unclear but in about 320 AD, another family emerged to restore Pataliputra to its former glory – The Guptas- who for a time, ruled most of India’s east coast almost as far south as Madras, as well as the traditional territory of Magadha. It was to be Pataliputra’s last flowering when the Guptas fell, so did the city.

          By the end of the 4^th century, Pataliputra was grand enough to impress a traveler from the sophisticated culture of China. The writer Fa Xian visited the city during the reign of Chandra Gupta II, and was lost in admiration. He wrote:  “the royal palace and the halls in the midst of the city, the wall and the gates with their inlaid sculpture work, seem to be the work of superhuman spirits”. A Buddhist festival took place during Fa Xian’s visit. ‘On that day,’ he relates,’ the monks and laity within the borders all come together. They have singers and skilful musicians; they pay their devotions with flowers and incense… All through the night they keep lamps burning, have skilful music, and present offerings.’      
                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

        But when Xuan Zang, another Chinese traveler, visited the city in 637, he found heaps of rubble where its monasteries, temples, and shrines once stood. ‘Once upon a time,’ he wrote, ‘these buildings could be counted in their hundreds. Now, only two or three of them are still standing. All that is left, to the north of where the palace was and near the Ganges, is a small town consisting of about 1000 houses.’ Sometime between the 5^th and 7^th centuries, Pataliputra had been destroyed

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.V

A series of pavilions scattered through the formal gardens contained the private rooms used by the royal family. The interiors were light and airy, and the rooms were sumptuously furnished with cane and wooden furniture, rich fabric hangings and animal skins. The royal residents could look out over gardens stocked with ornamental trees of every variety. Peacocks and tame gazelles wandered about between flowers fountains, and fish ponds.

 Among the buildings in the gardens was one which did not have much of a view. This was the harem where the royal princesses and concubines lived, ruled by the reigning queens. Outsides its walls, armed women, often dressed as men, stood guard. The princesses and concubines spent much of their time indoors, and most wore very few clothes when inside the harem- often only bracelets on their wrists and ankles and a jewel studded belt. Occasionally they strolled through their own gardens, or accompanied one another on excursions into the city or to the river, escorted by their female guards. On rare occasions, the entire court would parade through the city streets to attend a religious festival, or to watch the animal fights staged for the amusement of the people in arenas outside the city walls.

                                                                   Pataliputra was a city that could afford luxury and extravagance on an almost unimaginable scale. Its wealth depended on trade, and it controlled the Ganges- the main freight route across the north of India. Along the city’s northern walls, the fingers of dozens of wharves stretched into the great river. Boats shuttled between landing places and warehouses, unloading produce. Food was a common freight- the population of Pataliputra was too large to feed itself from the produce of its own lands alone. But cotton, stone, timber, and luxury goods also passed through the docks in enormous quantities. The population of the city grew as people were drawn in by its wealth, and new satellite towns sprang up nearby to house the excess.

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.IV

To cater for the populations spiritual needs, great temples stood beside the public squares. Devotees of all the major religions of India had freedom of worship- Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains.  Even the Greek soldiers were given the same freedom of worship.

The imperial palaces and their outbuildings sprawled across a huge walled compound at the heart of Pataliputra. Armed guards checked the identity of every visitor. Inside the main gate were the royal storehouses, where soldiers and officials collected their pay. Next came the almshouses, where, on fixed days of the year, the king would hand out gifts of food to the sick and the poor. Nearby, horses and elephants bedded down in the royal stables, close to tack rooks full of harnesses, saddles, carriages, glided ceremonial coaches, and fearsome war chariots spread with tiger and lion skins.

On the edge of the palaces were public rooms: echoing halls supported by hundreds of carved and gilded pillars, decorated with silver birds and golden vines. The halls were used for royal audiences and banquets. Traces of one pillared hall survive in the form of 84 heaps of stone, lying in rows. Alongside, in a richly decorated gallery, the city’s painters and sculptors celebrated the achievements of their royal master.

Beyond the halls lay private apartments to which only senior nobles and officials had access. Inside the apartments, a royal arsenal held stores of bows and arrows, lances, swords, daggers, and shields, ready for times of war. The treasury, beside the king’s personal rooks, housed a hoard of precious stones, incense, and bars of gold, silver, and iron, guards patrolled it night and day, and from its contents, a team of jewelers created works of art.

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.III

Alexander was ready to risk an invasion. But his war weary, homesick men refused to go on, and he was obliged to turn back towards the west without giving battle.  After he died in 323 BC, his far flung empire broke apart as his general set themselves up as rival rulers in different provinces.

In India, meanwhile, the Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta, had exploited the power vacuum left by Alexander’s conquests and had seized control of the lands of the North West, up to the Indus. By about 300 BC, the territories beyond the river were controlled by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander’s generals who now ruled an empire stretching from the Indus all the way back to the Mediterranean. Seleucus raise fresh troops in a bid to expand his realms into the Ganges valley, but the war elephants of Magadha trampled bloody paths through his formations, and hordes of infantry overwhelmed the weary remainder. Seleucus’s offensive turned into a humiliating retreat.

The Greeks never again threatened Magadha. But many of the hostages and envoys Seleucus had sent to the court at Pataliputra settled there, including artists, craftsmen, musicians, and soldiers. It was also Seleucus who sent Megasthenes as his ambassador to Pataliputra.

Pataliputra was t its zenith under the Mauryans. Four main gates led through its high toothed battlements on the north, east, west, And south sides. Wide avenues led from the gates to the city centre, their central gutters carrying waste water beyond the city walls.

The city was carved into 16 commercial sectors, each assigned to a different guild of craftsmen. The wealthy and the elite lived in brick mansions along the main avenues, near the palaces. Second rank nobles and merchants lived behind the elite, and so on in bands. The poor lived just inside the city walls, in baked earth hovels. People washed clothes and watered livestock in the canals which crisscrossed the city.

 There were inns, hospitals, and art galleries. Ashoka even provided veterinary centers. As a convert to Buddhism, he respected the sanity of all living things. He is also thought to have ordered the first Buddhist monuments to he built at Sanchi, including the Great Stupa, or shrine-carved with pictures which show how life was lived at Pataliputra.

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.II

According to these authors, Megasthenes described Pataliputra as 80 stadia long and 15 stadia wide – about 15 Km by 2.7 Km.  The whole city, he added, was encircled by a deep moat more than 180 m wide and a huge fortified wall more than 40 Km long, studded with 64 gates and 570 towers. The wall was built of timber erected in a double palisade, with earth packed in between. In the 1870s and 1920s, archaeologists found some of these timbers, preserved by water logging because of the high water table.

Other sources from which scholars have built up a picture of life in Pataliputra include stone carvings on religious monuments at the shrines of Sanchi and Bharhut in Madhya Pradesh state in central India; letters and essays left by Chinese travelers; and native Indian literature – particularly the Arthasastra, probably written by Kautilya, the Machiavellian advisor to first Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta, who reigned from around 321 to 297 BC.

Pataliputra had its origins in a village, pataligrama that existed on the site in the late 6^th century BC. Its strategic location was appreciated in the 5^th century BC by King Ajathashatru of Magadha a ruler notorious for the murder of his father, King Bimbisara- and he built a fort there. His grandson, Udayin , made Pataliputra his capital. Later rulers strengthened Pataliputra’s fortifications.

In 326 BC the troops of Alexander the Great were nibbling at the fringes of the subcontinent, subduing the fragmented kingdoms along the valley of the Indus river n present day Pakistan. Alexander’s spies had told him of the empire of Magadha that lay beyond. They brought figures for its fighting forces that spoke for themselves: 200000 men under arms, 20000 cavalry, 2000 chariots and 3000 war elephants. This was a gigantic force, and only an enormously wealthy and well organized state could have offered it.

                                                                                                  cont.

Pataliputra The Largest Jewel in India’s Crown Part.I

When Alexander the Great’s army erupted out of Greece in the 4^th century BC, the prospects of fighting the mighty forces of Pataliputra stopped in its tracks. Today, little remains of the city’s imperial majesty except a few eyewitness accounts.

Bihar today is one of the developing states in India. It lies 800 Km south east of New Delhi, the Indian capital, and is prone both to catastrophic droughts which turn its plains into choking dust bowls, and to monsoon floods which sweep down the Ganges valley, drowning crops and demolishing villages . Its capital, the town of Patna, famed for its rice, is described by modern Indian writers as the subcontinent’s grubbiest town. Yet it is build on the site of a nonce glittering city- the capital of the kingdom of Magadha, home of the Mauryan and later the Gupta dynasties, which controlled the Ganges valley and much of India from about 320 BC until 550 AD. At its height the capital, Pataliputra, was one of the largest cities in the world.

 The only remains of Pataliputra today are a few postholes, fragments of wood, stone, and pottery, and chipped earthenware statuettes. If archaeology were the only source of information, much of the city’s story would remain obscure, but scholars have used other sources to piece together how it looked.

 The most comprehensive source is a book, Indika, by a Greek author, Megasthenes, who spent many years as an ambassador to the court at Pataliputra. The original text of Indika has also been lost, so the information, by other Greek authors who had read his work, is second hand and sometimes conflicting. Nonetheless, the Greek authors’ information is united in portraying a city of great prosperity.
                                   






                                                       cont.