Place · early urban archaeological site · Bangladesh
Wari-Bateshwar
The early urban Chalcolithic-Iron Age settlement at Wari-Bateshwar in Narsingdi district, Bangladesh, 70 kilometres from Dhaka — the oldest known urban settlement in Bangladesh and one of the earliest in the Bengal delta. Archaeological excavations since 1933 (and large-scale Bangladesh Jahangirnagar University excavations from 2000 under Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti and Sufi Mustafizur Rahman) have documented a brick-walled fortified city of 10 hectares, pot-shards with Brahmi inscriptions, imported Roman beads and Mesopotamian coins, dating from c.400 BCE to 200 CE. The site may be the Sounagoura of Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography — the eastern trade port of Bengal. The Wari-Bateshwar dates push Bengal's urban chronology back from the Mauryan to the pre-Mauryan period.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Tradition
- Bangladesh archaeology
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.680, 90.570
Connections (2)
- Early urban BengalMahāsthāngarh
Wari-Bateshwar in the delta interior and Mahasthangarh on the Karatoya are the earliest urban sites in Bengal — fortified towns with punch-marked coins, semi-precious stone beads and evidence of long-distance trade in the pre-Mauryan and Mauryan centuries. Mahasthangarh has a Brahmi inscription of the Mauryan period about famine relief grain, which makes it the eastern anchor of the Ashokan administrative map.
- Early historic deltaChandraketugarh
Chandraketugarh near the Bengal coast and Wari-Bateshwar in the delta interior are among the earliest urban and trading sites of the lower Ganga, and Chandraketugarh's terracottas — crowded, detailed, showing ships, ornaments and hairstyles in extraordinary specificity — are the finest of their kind in India. The site is still mostly unexcavated and has been comprehensively looted, so most of what is known comes from objects without a findspot.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Wari-Bateshwar ruins”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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