Mahasthangarh

The city

Mahasthangarh stands on the west bank of the old Karatoya in the Bogra district of Bangladesh, in ancient India. Its citadel is a rough rectangle of about 1.5 by 1.4 kilometres, raised on an artificial mound above the floodplain and enclosed by a brick rampart rebuilt many times. Mounds, tanks and temple sites extend for several kilometres beyond it.

The place is identified with Pundranagara, capital of Pundravardhana, one of the territorial divisions of eastern India named in inscriptions and in Sanskrit literature.

The Mahasthan inscription

A limestone slab found at the site carries six lines of Brahmi in Prakrit and is among the earliest inscriptions from the region. It records an order to relieve distress — the issue of grain and coin from a storehouse to a people called the Samvangiyas — and names the place Pudanagala.

The script has generally been read as Mauryan, which would put the record in the third century BCE and make Pundranagara a provincial centre of the Maurya empire. A later date has been argued on palaeographic grounds. The question is not settled, and the inscription is the main evidence either way.

Occupation

The site was occupied continuously from the early historic period into the medieval centuries, through Maurya, Gupta, Pala and Sena authority and into the sultanate. Its position on the Karatoya, then a major river, accounts for the persistence.

Excavation began in 1928-29 under the Archaeological Survey of India and resumed as a Bangladesh-France joint project from 1993, which established the stratigraphic sequence on which the dating now rests.