Tribes in Ancient India c54.38

c54.38

Samaṭaṭa, as we have already said, was included in the larger divisions of Vaṅga. Some scholars are of opinion that it was distinct from Vaṅga, which lay between the Meghna on the east, the sea on the south, and the old Buḍigaṅgā course of the Ganges on the north. The western boundary of Vaṅga appears always to have been indefinite (vide Bhaṭṭasāli, Sculptures in the Dacca Museum, pp. 4-6).¹ Samaṭaṭa is mentioned for the first time in the Allahabad Pillar Inscription ² of Samudragupta as one of the most important among the north-east Indian frontier kingdoms which submitted to the mighty Gupta emperor. It is also mentioned in the Karmavibhāga of the Bṛhatsaṃhitā (Chap. XIV) as an eastern country, and was visited by the Chinese travellers, Hsüan Tsang, I-tsing and Seng-chi. Hsüan Tsang describes it as ‘the country of which the rivers have flat and level banks of equal height on both sides’. According to him, it was much to the south of Kāmrūpa and east of Tāmralipta; it was low, moist and on the sea side. Samaṭaṭa thus seems to have been identical with the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra and must have comprised, according to epigraphic evidence, the modern districts of Tipperah, Noakhali, Sylhet (J.A.S.B., 1915, pp. 17, 18), and probably portions of Barisal. That it included Tipperah is proved also by Nos. 19 and 59 of the Cambridge MSS., Add., 1643, and Foucher, Iconographie Bouddhique, Vol. I; also Bhaṭṭasāli, op. cit., pp. 12-13.