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Fortified Cities of Ancient India

A Comparative Study

Wimbledon Publishing Company

The Layout of the City*

The oldest literary documents of the Indo-Arians, namely the Vedas, communicate to us the image of a rural way of life. An entirely different way of life is revealed by the oldest texts of the Buddhists and Jainas, as also by the great epics: they occur before a background of an urban culture. Flourishing cities form the centers of mighty states. The life of the city-dwellers is illuminated from all sides, while that of rural settlements and their inhabitants decline into obscure ahistoricity.

Strewn among their tales, sagas and legends are numerous descriptions of cities. Thus, Ayodhya, the residence of the epic hero Rama, is portrayed in the Ramayana in the following manner:

(7) 12 miles long and 3 miles wide is the great and splendid city. It has well-laid-out main streets (8) and is graced with a large and well-laid-out royal highway that is bestrewn with fallen flowers and continuously sprinkled with water. (9) King Dasaratha ... lived in this city — (10) it had gates with door-panels, well-laid-out interior shops, and all sorts of war machines and weapons; in it lived all kinds of craftsmen; (11) crowded with heralds and bards. it was splendid and of unequalled grandeur, with high towers and flags and filled with hundreds of "hundred-killer" weapons; (12) it was a city graced everywhere with throngs of women and dancers, containing parks and mango groves, a vast city girded by sal-trees;

(13) it was a fort with an inaccessible and deep moat, unconquerable by foreigners, and filled with horses and elephants, as well as with cattle, camels and donkeys; (14) it was packed with throngs of vassal kings bringing tributes and graced with traders from diverse regions; (15) it was adorned with palaces decorated with jewels resembling mountains; it was brimming with pavilions and resembled the heavenly city of the King of gods.

The following account of the residence of King Milinda occurs in the Buddhist didactic narrative Milindapañha:

... the city Sagala, which lies in a lovely area graced with rivers and mountains, with groves, parks, woods, lakes and lotus ponds, winsome in the midst of rivers, mountains and forests; built by able men, not pressured by adversaries and enemies who have been subdued; with manifold different towers and tower-gates; with a castle containing excellent gates and gate arches and surrounded by a deep moat and a light plastered fortification wall; with well-laid streets, intersections, crossings and triangular places; with interior shops which are filled with numerous excellent, well-decorated wares; enhanced with hundreds of different alms houses, with hundred thousands of wonderful dwellings that resemble the mountain peeks of the Himalayas; decorated; ... [a description follows of the city dwellers] ...; furnished with different textile shops containing Kasika, Kautumbaraka etc. (cloth); scented by fragrance of the perfume shops with well-decorated splendid manifold flowers; filled with many wonderful gemstones; enlivened by stately merchants with well-decorated shops visible from all sides; filled with coins, silver, gold, copper and pottery; a site of glowing treasures, rich in money, corn, luxury goods and utensils; filled with treasure and storage houses, and with great amounts of food and drink — many kinds of food and drink for munching, eating, licking, drinking and tasting; appearing like Uttarakuru, filled with corn, like Alakamanda, the city of gods.

A stereotypical description of a city in the Jaina canon reads as follows:

... the city (so-and-so), rich, safe, and wealthy; ... (followed by a characterization of the land and its inhabitants) ... ; provided with precious groves, parks, springs, ponds, bathing pools, and wells; with a widely protruding and deeply dug moat, surrounded by an arched fortification wall that is thick and hard to conquer, due to its double-wing gates and discuses, maces, cudgels, barriers and hundred-killers; boasting arched battlements; high looming with its towers, pathways, gates, gate buildings, and gate arches; with a well-built royal street; with firm crossbars and door posts fashioned by enabled masters; contentedly and happily filled with craftsmen who enliven markets and bazaars; adorned with shops of manifold treasures at triangular places, street forks, intersections, and crossways; ... (followed by the description of street life) ...; provided with lightly plastered, exquisite residential houses; a feast for the eyes, uplifting and worth seeing, shapely and perfect in form.

Although these three texts derive from different languages (the first in epic Sanskrit, the second in Pali and the third in Jaina Prakrit), the correspondences are obvious. Notwithstanding the eulogies, the descriptions consist of certain basic ideas: the cities possess well-laid-out streets, intersections, and places with all kinds of shops; they are defended by ramparts and walls with towers and gates, as well as by a deep moat. Lastly, they are surrounded by parks. The nomenclature freezes to fixed phrases, which in all three language areas recur in numerous passages without ever being explained. The narrators' intention was not to make such explanations, but rather to decorate the generally known concepts with especially well-sounding decorative words.

Nevertheless, the fact that already in the pre-Christian era written works on city building existed can be determined from later texts. Discussions regarding urban complexes occur as well in Indian medieval books on architecture, as also in the Kautiliya Arthasastra, a compendium on statecraft allegedly written by the prime minister of the Maurya ruler Candragupta, around 300 BCE in Pataliputra. A comparison of the relevant passages reveals that the Arthasastra can hardly be considered to be the direct source of the medieval architectural handbooks, even if the terminology frequently finds correspondences. Both teaching systems seem to have derived their information independently from each other from the same sources, and fashioned it for their own purposes. Medieval manuals on architecture contain a great deal of information from their own time that is woven with what has been handed down. There are several descriptions of their sections on urban building. These are, however, of little use for a real understanding of the situation one or two thousand years earlier.

For this reason the information from the Arthasastra is even more important. The traditional attribution of the authorship to the minister Kautilya is hardly historical, and the compendium probably arose in the first half of the first millennium AD. Most of its substantial accounts, however, derive from older handbooks. Clearly, the intention of a compendium on statecraft is to present passages from the older handbooks that are tailored to the needs of the state government: only such facts are dealt with that are relevant for the building authority of the state, while individual questions regarding the construction that are important only to architects are omitted. The 4th chapter of the 2nd book, which is devoted to the planning of a city, thus deals with the number of gates, as well as the number and size of the streets, in summary fashion, before moving on to a detailed account on the planning of the royal residence. With regard to the planning and construction of dwellings we learn nothing. Their construction was not regulated by the state, but was rather a private affair. When in the 3rd book (Ch. 8) private buildings enter into the discussion, however, this is cast exclusively in the context of neighborhood law, with proper regard to public safety and hygiene while determining property borders, fireplaces, and drainage pits.

Even with regard to public edifices such as treasuries, storehouses for material and food, arsenals, and prisons, what is discussed is not the construction in general but rather the planning of the necessary security preparations. The limit placed on description within the scope of a handbook on statecraft is the reason why it is difficult to understand many a detail because we do not know their context. This goes especially for the most important contribution to city planning, the chapter regarding the defenses. In our purposes we need not delve into the detailed instructions on the building of towers and gates as they are discussed in Ch. 2. Most important for the overall picture of the city presented in the Arthasastra are the specifications regarding moats, ramparts, and walls (see Ch. 2, Figs. 1-9). The earth excavated from three parallel moats close to each other is used for a rampart behind them rising to a height of 10 m. Atop the compressed earth rampart, on which is planted thorn bushes and poisonous plants, stands a wall 5 to 10 m high and half as wide. It is built of brick or stone, interrupted at regular intervals of 54 m by towers quadratic in section, as well as by city gates. The number of city gates is cited in the following chapter in connection with the laying out of the main streets: three main streets are to run from east to west, and three from south to north. Thus, the city had twelve gates. This information regarding the 12 gates is repeated in medieval architectural manuals, which, however, also describe cities with eight and four gate. In a stereotypical way, the narrative literature characterizes a city as having four gates, one at each cardinal direction.

Were we now to attempt to verify the literary picture of the old Indian city by means of actual excavated remains, we must be aware of the preliminary nature of the results. The archaeology of India is still at an early stage. Even if, fortunately, in recent years numerous stratigraphic investigations have contributed substantially to the dating and periodization of urban cultures, large-scale horizontal excavations that might shed light on city planning and the manner of house building are almost completely lacking. Nonetheless, conclusions regarding the layout can be drawn by means of many old cities that have not yet been excavated. As early as the 19th century, Alexander Cunningham made precise outline drawings of numerous cities. Such topographic images were only possible because the ruin fields of cities even today are marked by the remains of old city ramparts. From deep breaks in the ramparts one can surmise the position of city gates — not always with complete certainty for streams and artificial landscaping can cause such gaps. Certainly ground-plans allow the calculation of circumference and area of the different cities.

With ingenious perspicacity Cunningham identified in the ruins of cities that he investigated most of the sites mentioned in reports by Chinese pilgrims to India. Inscriptions that came to light in later excavations showed that fewer of his identifications had been erroneous than scholars, from time to time, had previously estimated. Today, few large city ruins exist for which the ancient names remain unknown. An overview of the hitherto topographically recorded cities in order of their size reveals the following picture.

The largest of the ruins visible on the surface lies on the left bank of the Yamuna (Jumna) between the two villages Kosam Inam and Kosam Khiraj, 50 km southwest of Allahabad. As early as 1892 Cunningham identified this site as the well-known capital of the Vatsa land, Kausambi, known from literature as the seat of government of the legendary ruler Udayana, a contemporary of the Buddha. Because this identification conflicts with the distance given by the Chinese pilgrim to India, Hiuen-Tsang, this identification has been subsequently contested. Inscriptions found more recently, however, lend strong confirmation to Cunningham's identification. In 1951 behind the southwestern city gate a monastery was cleared. A seal inscription demonstrated that it was the Ghositarama cloister, one of the best known monasteries in the Buddhist literature.

Ghosaka, the banker of king Udayana, is believed to have founded it. Hiuen-Tsiang described the monastery as lying in the southeastern part of the city, which accords with the archaeological findings. Since 1949, under the aegis of Allahabad University, Kausambi has being excavated systematically. The most important results of these excavations were the layout of the ramparts and the defenses of the southeastern city gate, and the clearing of syenaciti in front of this gate. The ground plan (Fig. 1) shows a nearly square cityscape bordered by an earthen rampart. Excavations have shown that this rampart was nearly 13 m in height and was encased with 154 layers of brick. Although a wall atop the rampart is yet to be proven, at the foot a moat exists with an enormous width of 145 m that directed the river around the city. The rampart encloses a city area of 2.29 km. Gaps in the rampart point to the existence of six city gates, two on either side on the landside, of which the southeastern one has been excavated. The building of the complex falls in the first half of the 1st century BCE. For a more exact dating one must be a bit patient. It is, however, clear that Kausambi is one of the oldest Indo-Aryan cities. Its size is a sign of the city's importance as a key center of traffic on the trade route between Panjab, through Pataliputra, to the harbor Tamralipti on the Gulf of Bengal.

On the western bank of an old riverbed of the Yamuna lie the ruins of Sugh (Fig. 2) that Cunningham identified with the royal city Srughna mentioned in the Mahabharata and in the report of the pilgrim Hiuen-Tsiang. Its area comprises 1.97 km. On the northern and western sides, which are not bordered by a river bank, Cunningham found depressions in the earth resulting from the city moat. In 1962 excavations took place here. From the fact that the city is not mentioned in the old Buddhist texts one may conclude that it does not belong to the group of the oldest Indo-Aryan cities.

Rajagrha (present-day Rajgir), the old capital of Magadha, has become famous as the site for endless Buddhist and Jaina tales. Different from the other ancient Indian capitals, Rajagrha was not located in the plane on a riverbank, but rather in a valley surrounded by mountains (Fig. 3). On these mountain crests large sections of a wall of unworked stone is still preserved. At strategically important points, watch towers complement it. The city itself was fortified by means of a rampart of earth strengthened by a core of quarried stone. This rampart encloses an irregularly formed city area of 1.87 km. The remains of the northern city gate is preserved; through it the road led to the (New) Rajagrha at a distance of 1.2 km. New Rajagrha lies outside of the valley and comprises less than 1/7 of the surface of the old city (0.25 km). A trench or moat and a rampart over 7 m high, upon which a 3.35 m wide brick wall was built, enclose the city in the form of an irregular square. Tradition has it that the new city was founded as early as the time of the Buddha. In reality, however, its origin may be from a much later period, while more recent research in (old) Rajagrha confirms that this city belonged to the oldest period of Indo Aryan settlements.

Vidisa, the capital of the Dasarna people, became famous as the residence of Agnimitra in one of Kalidasa's dramas. This city is first mentioned in an inscription of Asoka in the 3rd century BCE. It lies along an important traffic artery, the rout from the Panjab, through Ujjayini, to the harbor Bharukaccha (Broach). With regard to the area, the ruins of this city are only a little smaller than those of Kausambi. They lie at the confluence of the present-day river Bes with the Vetravati (today: Betva), not far from famous Buddhist site of Sanci. In 1874 Cunningham recorded the remains of a city rampart preserved to a height of 10 m and a moat that connected the two rivers along the western city border. By means of this moat "the capital city named Vidisa was surrounded by the Vetravati" as we learn from a later text. According to Cunningham's drawing the city had a circumference of 5.4 km and a surface area of 1.72 km. Roughly rectangular in plan, no one can be certain to what extent the river erosion obscured the old city borders (Fig. 4).

Ahicchatra (in inscriptions Adhicchatra), the capital of the northern Pañcala famous in the Mahabharata epic, lies in the Bareli district, U.P., ½ km northeast of the village of Ramnagar. The rampart encloses a city area of 1.52 km, in the form of a rather irregular triangle (Fig. 5). During the Islamic period the defensive complex was rebuilt, and thus we cannot tell much about the size and position of the old city gates. Excavations have shown that the city was founded in a time prior to 300 BCE.

Aside from Rajagrha, the most important site of the Buddha's activities was Sravasti, the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, located on the bank of the Aciravati. Right in front of the city gates, the Jetavana monastery is the scene of events in innumerable Buddhist texts. In 1862 Cunningham identified the ruins of Ma-heth, which were located along an old course of the Rapti, with Sravasti and the neighboring Saheth with the Jetavana monastery. These identifications, which were partially subject to doubt, were confirmed a few years ago by newly found inscriptions. While excavation at Saheth brought to light an extensive monastery, that of a ruin in Maheth illustrated a typical fortified city (Fig. 6). An earthen rampart, preserved to a height of 19 m, bears a 2.75 m wall at its crest and encloses a city area of 1.45 km. In all, the rampart evidences 28 depressions, which the locals designate as "gates". But only some of the breaks are really gates. One, the Nausahra gate, was cleared in 1907. Recent archaeological investigations revealed a settlement site that predated the erection of the rampart.

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Excerpted from Fortified Cities of Ancient India by Dieter Schlingloff. Copyright © 2013 Dieter Schlingloff. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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