Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c8.56

c8.56

In Bengal, too, on both sides of the present national frontier, intermittent excavation carried out on obviously important sites, notably Maināmati near Comilla,71 Mahāsthān in the Bogra district,72 and Tamluk (Ptolemy's Tamalites) at the head of the Hooghly estuary,73 has begun to present a similar picture. At Tamluk trial excavations have revealed a scanty assortment of 'neolithic celts and an ill-fired pottery' at the lowest level (compare Jaugaḍā, above), followed by a Gangetic culture (with cast copper coins) ascribed to the 3rd–2nd centuries B.C., and succeeded in turn by a deposit containing much Rouletted Ware of the 1st century A.D. Whether these occupations were continuous is not stated, but it would appear that here, as on the other sites mentioned, substantive settlement began in or about the 3rd century B.C., that is, in the Mauryan period. Incidentally, Mahāsthān has produced an interesting inscription on a limestone slab, recording the earliest known Bengal famine and the measures taken by the local authority to meet it by the issue of paddy from reserve stocks, which were to be replenished when opportunity offered. Both alphabet and language resemble those of Ashoka’s pillar edicts of about 250 B.C. (p. 174). Future exploration may show that civilization came late to the dense monsoon-ridden jungles of eastern India, and that these, like the Assam and Orissa hills down to modern times, had previously been the camping ground of small disarticulate societies in an essentially Neolithic condition.