A second wave of cities
After the decline of the Indus cities in the early second millennium BCE, there were no comparable cities in South Asia for about a thousand years. From around the sixth century BCE towns grew again, this time mainly in the Ganges valley. Historians call this the second urbanisation. Its archaeological marker is a fine, glossy pottery called Northern Black Polished Ware, found over a large area of northern India.
The cities
Excavations at Kaushambi, Rajghat (old Varanasi), Ujjain, Rajgir, Shravasti, Champa and other sites have revealed massive ramparts of earth and brick, sometimes with moats, enclosing settlements of considerable size. The dating of the earliest fortifications is debated: some excavators placed them as early as the eighth century BCE, others in the sixth or fifth. Within the walls were houses of mud and later of fired brick, drains, wells and craft workshops for iron, copper, beads and pottery.
Kingdoms and assemblies
The Buddhist and Jain texts describe a north India of sixteen great territories, the mahajanapadas, among them Magadha, Kosala, Vatsa, Avanti, Kashi and the Vajji confederacy. Some were monarchies; others, such as the Vajjis and the Shakyas, were governed by assemblies of clan chiefs. Over the sixth to fourth centuries the kingdoms fought each other, and Magadha, under the Haryanka, Shishunaga and Nanda dynasties, absorbed its rivals and laid the foundation for the Mauryan empire.
Money, trade and writing
The period saw the first Indian coins, the punch-marked coins of silver and copper stamped with symbols, and the growth of long-distance trade along the river and the routes that later became the Uttarapatha and Dakshinapatha. Guilds of merchants and craftsmen appear in the texts. Whether writing was used before the Mauryan period is debated; the earliest securely dated inscriptions in Brahmi are Ashoka's, though finds at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka have been claimed to carry earlier Brahmi.
New ideas
The cities were the setting for new religious and philosophical movements. The Buddha, Mahavira, the Ajivika teacher Gosala and others taught in the towns and in the groves outside them, supported by kings, merchants and householders. Their ideas about rebirth, karma and renunciation, and their challenge to Vedic sacrifice, have been linked by historians to the social changes of urban life, though how directly is debated. Some scholars, notably Johannes Bronkhorst, have argued that Greater Magadha, the eastern Ganges region, had a distinct culture of its own from which these ideas came.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Sharma, R. S. India's Ancient Past. Oxford University Press, 2005
- Bronkhorst, Johannes. Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India. Brill, 2007
See also
- Magadha — Magadha was an ancient kingdom of the eastern Gangetic plain, centered on present-day Bihar, that grew from one of the sixteen mahajanapadas into the political core of the Nanda, Maurya, and Gupta empires.
- Janapadas after the Kurus — The Janapadas were the polities of Iron Age North India that succeeded the Vedic-era Kuru kingdom, sixteen of which, the Mahajanapadas, dominated the subcontinent before Magadha absorbed them into the first pan-Indian empire.
- Vajji confederacy — The Vajji confederacy was a league of clans in north Bihar governed by an assembly at Vaiśālī rather than by a king, and the best-documented of the gaṇa-saṅgha polities of early India.
- Rajagriha — Rajagriha, modern Rajgir in Bihar, was the first capital of the kingdom of Magadha, a hill-girt city of the kings Bimbisara and Ajatashatru where the Buddha and Mahavira both taught, and where the first Buddhist council was held.
- Vaishali — Vaishali was the capital of the Vajji confederacy and its leading clan, the Licchavis, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, a city associated with the Buddha's last journey and the second Buddhist council, and by Jain tradition the region of Mahavira's birth.
- Pataliputra — Pataliputra was the capital of the Magadha kingdom and later of the Mauryan and, intermittently, Gupta empires, located at the confluence of the Ganga, Son, and Gandak rivers on the site of modern Patna, Bihar.
- Gautama Buddha — Gautama Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama, was a Shakya prince of ancient India whose renunciation and enlightenment, traditionally dated to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, became the founding event of Buddhism.
- Mahavira — Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and last tirthankara of the present cycle in Jain tradition, an older contemporary of the Buddha whose teaching gave Jainism its historical form.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.