The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c30.59

v1.c30.59

Acting on Mr Jayaswal’s illuminating suggestion (p. 521), we may perhaps venture to trace the feudatory kings of this dynasty to Kauçāmbī, 80 miles N.E. of Bhārhut, and to Ahicchatra, 250 miles N.W. of Kauçāmbī. The question of the site of Kauçāmbī has been much debated, chiefly because of the impossibility of reconciling Cunningham’s identification (Kosam on the Jumna in the Allahābād District of the United Provinces) with the descriptions of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims. But in all this controversy it seems to have been forgotten that such descriptions may either have been incorrect originally or may have been misinterpreted subsequently. The tangible facts seem undoubtedly to support the identification of Kosam with Kauçāmbī. It must have been a city of great military strength. ‘The remains at Kosam include those of a vast fortress with earthern ramparts and bastions, four miles in circuit, with an average height of 30 to 35 feet above the general level of the country’ (*Imp. Gaz.* xv, p. 407). It was also an important commercial centre, as is indicated by the extraordinary variety of the coins found there; and at a later date the name of the place was unquestionably Kauçāmbī, as is proved by at least two inscriptions which have been actually discovered on the site¹. At a distance of two or three miles to the north-west of Kosam stands the sacred hill of Pabhosā (Prabhāsa), the solitary rock in this region of the doab between the Jumna and the Ganges; and on its scarp, in a position wellnigh inaccessible, there is a hermit’s cave ‘cut into the vertical face of a precipice 50 feet high’ (*J.A.S.B.* LVI, p. 31). In the seventh century a.d. it was believed to be the abode of a venomous dragon which was subdued by the Buddha, who left his shadow in the cave. Hiuen Tsiang, who tells the story, adds that the shadow was no longer visible in his day; but the most recent editor of the inscriptions, which are engraved inside and outside the cave, informs us that the country folk still believe in the dragon². One of these inscriptions (no. 904) records—if Mr Jayaswal’s reading is correct—that the cave was excavated in the tenth year of the reign of Odraka, the fifth of the Çuṅga kings. The donor was Āshāḍhasena, the maternal uncle of Bahasatimitra, who was presumably the feudatory king then ruling at Kauçāmbī and whose coins (Pl. V, 2) are found at Kosam. Bahasatimitra was thus, it seems, contemporary with Odraka, whose reign, according to the Purāṇas, began 61 years after the accession of the first Çuṅga king, i.e. c. 123 B.C.; and this date is in agreement with the period to which numismatists have, from entirely different considerations, assigned the coins of Bahasatimitra. The coinage of the kings of Kauçāmbī seems to begin in the third century B.C. and to extend over a period of about three hundred years¹.