Place · Panchala capital · India
Ahichhatra
The early historic Panchala kingdom capital at Ahichhatra in Bareilly district, Uttar Pradesh — a 72-hectare urban site excavated by K.N. Dikshit and A. Ghosh in 1940-44 and the Allahabad University team from 1963. The site documents continuous occupation from the Painted Grey Ware period (c.1000 BCE) through the Mahajanapada, Mauryan, Shunga, Kushan and Gupta periods. The city was the capital of North Panchala in the Mahabharata and the capital of the Panchala kingdom through the second urbanisation (c.600 BCE-200 CE). The 1948 Terracotta Figurine Hoard — thousands of fired clay figurines of Mother Goddess, mithuna couples, animals and ascetics — is one of the largest Shunga-period terracotta collections in India. The 'Ahichhatra Ganga and Yamuna' pair of Shunga-period terracotta river-goddess figures are iconic.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Tradition
- South Asian archaeology
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.540, 79.350
Connections (1)
- In the same set asAtranjikhera
Atranjikhera has the type sequence — Ochre Coloured Pottery, Black and Red Ware, Painted Grey Ware, Northern Black Polished Ware, and the region's earliest iron — and Ahichhatra has the same pottery under a named epic capital with a five-kilometre rampart. Between them they turn a ceramic sequence into a political geography, which is how the second urbanisation is dated at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ahichchhatra”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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