Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c5.t4.82

c5.t4.82

We find numerous references to roads,¹ but it is not clear what sort of roads they were. Prof. Rhys Davids says, "There were no made roads, and no bridges. The carts struggled along, slowly, through the forests, along the tracks from village to village kept open by the peasants. The pace never exceeded two miles an hour, smaller streams were crossed by gullies leading down to fords, the larger ones by cart ferries."² Probably, things were not quite so primitive. Mention of "highways" and "royal roads" (*mahāmagga*: *rājamagga*) as distinguished from "bye-lanes" and "bye-road" (*upa-patha*)³ might suggest the existence of well-constructed roads. Still however the conditions do not appear to have been satisfactory. Roads were not smooth.⁴ They lay through forests and deserts and beset with many dangers : dangers from draught, famine, wild beasts, robbers, demons, poisonous trees and so on.⁵ The travellers, often, experienced want of water,⁶ though wells were dug by the road-side.⁷ The journey of a caravan through desert or forest country is indeed a typical feature of our stories. The *Apaṇnaka*⁸ and *Vaṇṇupatha*⁹ *Jātakas* throw a flood of light on the difficult way in which trade was carried on by these caravans. We are told of five kinds of wildernesses (*kantāras*); those infested with robbers, those in which wild beasts abounded, those others visited by drought, demons and famine. These were in reality, probably,¹⁰ the five successive portions of the route over the deserts of Rājaputānā.