Tribes in Ancient India c8.23

c8.23

One of the earliest cities of Pañcāla was Parivakṛā or Paricakrā, where King Kraivya Pañcāla performed his horse sacrifice.³ Another city, Kāmpila, appears to have been mentioned in the *Yajurveda Saṃhitā*, where ‘the epithet Kāmpila-vāsinī is applied to a woman, perhaps the *mahiṣī* or chief wife of the king, whose duty it was to sleep beside the slaughtered animal of the horse sacrifice (Aśvamedha). The exact interpretation of the passage is very uncertain, but both Weber and Zimmer agree in regarding Kāmpila as the name of the town known as Kāmpilya in the later literature, and the capital of Pañcāla in Madhyadeśa’.⁴ The *Viṣṇupurāṇa* (Chap. II) and the *Bhāgavatapurāṇa* (Chap. 22) say that Kāmpilya, son of King Haryaśva, was celebrated as Pañcāla. Among the hundred sons of Nipa of the Ajamīḍa dynasty, Samara is mentioned as the king of Kāmpilya.⁵ We have seen that Kāmpilya became the capital of King Drupada when he was invested with the sovereignty of the southern Pañcāla country. In the *Ādikāṇḍa* of the *Rāmāyaṇa* (Sarga 33) we are told that King Brahmadatta used to live in the city of Kāmpilya. Cunningham identifies Kāmpilya with Kampil, on the old Ganges between Budaon and Farokhabad.¹ According to N. L. Dey,² it was situated at a distance of 28 miles north-east of Fatgarh in the Farokhabad district. It was the scene of the *svayamvara* of Drupada’s daughter, Kṛṣṇā or Draupadī, who became the wife of the five sons of Pāṇḍu. Drupada’s palace is pointed out as the most easterly of the isolated mounds on the bank of the Bur-Gaṅgā.³