The Mauryan Polity c6.s1.t4.25

c6.s1.t4.25

"That fire was the medium of this final catastrophe, all evidences indicate infallibly. The thick carpet of black ash and charcoal which lay like a pall over the whole site below the bottoms of the Gupta walls, is proof of this fact obvious enough for any child to read, and it is equally obvious that these ashes cannot be due to any burning of the Gupta structures. Otherwise how could they lie so uniformly underneath the lowest foundations of these buildings? If, however, they cannot be of Gupta date, or rather if they cannot appertain to the Gupta stratum, they must, by the simple law of alternative, appertain to the only other level of occupation traceable at this site, namely the Mauryan stratum."¹