Journey
Capitals of Magadha and the middle Ganges
The first Indian empires were assembled from this stretch of the Ganges plain, and the capital moved as the technology of power changed: from a hill-ringed fort to a river port, from a republic's assembly hall to a walled imperial city. Each move is legible in what survives. Rajgir's hill walls, Pataliputra's timber palisade and Vaishali's assembly mound are all excavated.
Stops (6)
- Rājagriha / Rajgir · Rājagriha — the fortified valley
Magadha's first capital, ringed by five hills with a cyclopean wall along the ridges, and the place where the first Buddhist council met after the Buddha's death. Bimbisāra and Ajātaśatru ruled from here. It is a defensive site, chosen for the hills rather than for trade, which is what the earliest Indian state needed.
- Pātaliputra · Pātaliputra — the river port that replaced it
Ajātaśatru moved the centre to the Ganges–Son confluence, and Megasthenes describes a city nine miles long behind a wooden palisade with five hundred and seventy towers. Sections of that palisade have been excavated. The shift from a hill fort to a river port is what made Mauryan logistics possible.
- Vaishālī · Vaishālī — the republic Magadha swallowed
The Licchavi confederacy, governed by an assembly, which Ajātaśatru took by sowing dissension among its members over some years. The Buddha praised its method of deciding by meeting, and the sangha's own procedure borrowed from it. Its fall is the end of the republican experiment in the Ganges plain.
- Kauśāmbī · Kaushāmbī — the Vatsa capital
Vatsa's capital on the Yamuna with one of the largest earthen ramparts in the plain, and one of the sixteen mahājanapadas that Magadha absorbed. The Ashokan pillar raised here was later carried to Allahabad Fort and inscribed by Samudragupta and then Jahangir.
- Ujjain / Avantikā · Ujjain — the western capital
Avanti's capital and then a Mauryan viceroyalty where Ashoka served before becoming emperor. It sat on the meridian Indian astronomy used and on the trade road from the Ganges plain to the western ports, which made it the empire's second city rather than a provincial one.
- Vidisha · Vidisha — the junction town
Where the Betwa and Bes meet on the road south from the Ganges plain, with the Heliodorus pillar outside it and Sanchi ten kilometres away. Ashoka was viceroy at Ujjain and married a Vidisha merchant's daughter; the Sanchi stupa's gateways were paid for by this town's guilds.