Place · Satavahana trade pass · India
Nāneghāṭ
The 2nd-century BCE Satavahana trade pass cut through the Western Ghats connecting Junnar on the Deccan plateau to the Konkan coast at the Kalyan port. The pass holds a 150-foot gallery with a long Prakrit Brahmi inscription of around 50 BCE by the Satavahana queen Naganika (widow of Satakarni I) listing the sacrifices (yajnas) she sponsored and the fees paid to the officiating Brahmins — effectively a royal price list in stone. The inscription names the gods, the specific sacrifices (ashvamedha, rajasuya, and twelve others), the horses, cattle and gold given, and the villages granted. It is among the earliest Brahmi inscriptions in the Deccan and one of the oldest records of royal patronage of Vedic yajna performed by a ruling queen.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Patron dynasty
- Satavahana
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.290, 73.670
Worth knowing
The pass was cut through rock to make a trade road, and beside it is a Satavahana inscription listing sacrifices performed and the fees paid for each. It is a royal price list carved on a mountain, which is not a genre with many other examples.
Connections (3)
- Imperial inscription atPandavleni, Nasik
The Nasik caves and the Naneghat pass carry inscriptions of the same royal house a hundred kilometres apart, and together they show how a Deccan dynasty actually worked: Naneghat lists sacrifices performed and the fees paid for them, a royal price list at the head of a trade pass, and Nasik records the donations of merchants and of the queen Gautami Balashri, along with the wars between Satavahanas and Kshatrapas over the same routes.
- Route adjacencyJunnar cave groups
Junnar's two hundred excavations cluster around the Nāneghāt pass, which carries the road from the Konkan ports up to the Deccan plateau. The pass itself holds a Sātavāhana inscription listing sacrificial fees — a toll gate and a monastery economy in the same defile. The Nāneghāt inscription of Nāganikā is also one of the earliest records in India to name a queen as the author of a royal text rather than as its subject.
- Trade routePaithan (Paithani)
Naneghat was cut to carry goods from the Konkan harbours up to Junnar and on to Paithan, the Satavahana capital at the southern end of the Dakshinapatha. The rock-cut jar at the pass head collected the toll. Every Ghat pass on this coast has a monastery or an inscription at its head for the same reason: the traffic paid for both, and the state took its share at the top of the climb.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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