Place · ancient city · Pakistan
Sagala / Sialkot
The ancient city of Sagala in Punjab, Pakistan — the capital of the Indo-Greek kingdom of Menander I ('Milinda', c.165-130 BCE) and the setting of the Milindapanha ('Questions of Milinda') dialogue in which the Buddhist monk Nagasena converted Menander to Buddhism. The Milindapanha is one of the most important works of early Pali Buddhist philosophy and the only major Buddhist text with a Hellenistic Greek interlocutor. Sagala has long been identified with modern Sialkot in Pakistani Punjab, 125 kilometres north of Lahore — though the identification is debated by some scholars. Alexander the Great conquered Sagala in 326 BCE. The city appears in the Mahabharata as the capital of the Madra kingdom. Modern Sialkot is Pakistan's major sports-goods manufacturing centre.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Tradition
- Milindapañha tradition; ancient Punjab
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.490, 74.540
Connections (4)
- Milindapanha knowledge linkNālandā mahāvihāra
Sagala, generally identified with Sialkot, is the setting of the Milindapanha, in which the Indo-Greek king Menander questions the monk Nagasena about the self, continuity and rebirth — a genuine philosophical dialogue between a Greek ruler and a Buddhist teacher, whatever its historicity as a conversation. Nalanda five hundred years later was the institution where that kind of argument was conducted professionally. This is a link in the history of a discipline rather than a route anyone travelled.
- Route adjacencyTakshashilā / Taxila
Taxila and Sagala are both on the Uttarapatha between the Indus and the Beas, and both are places where Greek and Indian thought are recorded meeting: an Aramaic Ashokan edict and Hellenistic silverwork at one, the Milindapanha's debate between an Indo-Greek king and a Buddhist monk at the other. The road is why the encounter is located there.
- BirthplaceMuhammad Iqbāl
Iqbāl was born at Sialkot in 1877 into a family of Kashmiri converts, and took his first education there before Lahore, Cambridge, Munich and Lincoln's Inn. The town is the same Sāgala that was Menander's capital seventeen centuries earlier and the Sangala Alexander stormed before that, and Iqbāl's Persian work is steeped in exactly the Central Asian and Iranian world those layers came from. He wrote about Kashmir, which his family had left, as a homeland he had never lived in.
- Imperial administration ofMenander I (Milinda)
Menander ruled from Sāgala, the Sialkot of today, from about 165 to 130 BCE, over a realm reaching from the Kabul valley across the Punjab — the largest the Indo-Greeks held. His silver and bronze coinage is the most abundant of any of those kings and stayed in circulation for centuries, which is why his issues turn up as far east as the Ganga plain and were still being imitated long after the dynasty ended. The city had already been stormed by Alexander as Sangala a century and a half before he made it his capital.
On these journeys
- Uttarāpatha — the Great Northern Road
- Overland corridors
- The epigraphic record
- Guru Nanak's first udasi — east
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sagala”. Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in India Prior to Steam Locomotion.
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