Place · early historic city · India
Kaushambi
Also known as Kauśāmbī, Kausambi, Kosam, Vatsa, Ghositarama
The Vatsa capital on the Yamuna, one of the largest fortified cities of the second urbanisation, with a rampart circuit of some six kilometres, an Ashokan pillar and the Ghositarama monastery the Buddha is said to have stayed in. It was still a working city when the Hunas reached the Ganges plain, and not afterwards.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Maurya / Magadha
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The city and inscriptions are established; the older altar and rampart readings remain disputed.
- Location
- 25.345, 81.389
Worth knowing
G.R. Sharma's excavations claimed a sacrificial altar and a defensive rampart far older than the city's accepted dates, and both readings are disputed. The Ashokan pillar here was moved to Allahabad fort, so the edict and the city are now sixty kilometres apart.
Connections (4)
- Site adjacencyNaimisharanya
Naimisharanya, the forest where the Puranas are said to have been recited to the assembled sages, lies in the old Vatsa country whose capital was Kaushambi on the Yamuna. The pairing is characteristic: an early historic city with one of the largest earthen ramparts in the Ganges plain, and a few kilometres away a forest that the textual tradition makes the place where its own literature was composed.
- Traveller routeXuanzang
Xuanzang visited Kaushambi on the Yamuna and recorded its monasteries and stupas, including the vihara he was told held a sandalwood image of the Buddha carved in his lifetime. His notes on the city are part of how it was identified on the ground in the nineteenth century, and Kaushambi's enormous earthen rampart — among the largest in the Ganges plain — confirms the scale of the place he described.
- AnalogueEran
Kausambi was one of the great walled cities of the Ganges-Yamuna doab and stops functioning as one in the sixth century; Eran records a battle in roughly the same decades. The two together are the shape of the evidence for this period: a battle inscription with no clear outcome, and a city that simply ceases, with no text explaining why.
- Legend set atBhasa
Bhasa's best-known plays, Pratijna-Yaugandharayana and its sequel Svapnavasavadatta, are built on the legends of Udayana, king of Kaushambi, probably a contemporary of the Buddha. In the Svapnavasavadatta a usurper takes Kaushambi and Udayana is pushed to a border camp at Lavanaka, from which his minister Yaugandharayana engineers a marriage with Padmavati, sister of the Magadha king, to win the kingdom back. The setting is legendary, not documentary.
On these journeys
- Capitals of Magadha and the middle Ganges
- The Hunnic wars & the end of the Guptas
- Pre-Harappan, Chalcolithic & early historic horizons
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kaushambi”. G.R. Sharma, The Excavations at Kauśāmbī (1960); Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. I, on the Kausambi pillar edict.
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