Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.38

c8.38

The ramparts, over 30 feet high and armed at regular intervals by bastions, were built of mud revetted externally with a battered facing of baked bricks which, as excavated, presents an imposing frontage. They were built before the introduction of N.B.P. Ware, but overlapped the arrival of this fabric, and a central date in the 6th century B.C. provisionally meets the evidence. The facing of baked brick closely recalls that of the Harappā citadel (p. 97), but whether across the many intervening centuries a significant structural tradition had been preserved is more than doubtful; the idea of a sloping brick revetment is scarcely so highly specialized that independent invention is excluded. After the original construction of the Kaushāmbi walls, rectangular towers of baked brick were imposed upon the bastions, and the defences were renewed more than once. Within them, courtyard houses of the later centuries B.C. and possibly later still have been uncovered, together with the site of a large enclosed Buddhist monastery which has been identified with the Ghositārāma described by the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang, who came this way in the 7th century A.D. The monastery marked the site where the Buddha preached, and the excavator ascribes the first construction of the main stūpa or relic-shrine to the century of the Buddha's death. The general wealth of the city, in the midst of its fertile landscape and beside its great river-highway, is sufficiently indicated by the vast quantity of material, including many hundreds of terracotta figurines, which has been found here by the present excavators and by less orthodox predecessors.