Unearthing the Early Historic Cities of Ancient India

When most people picture an ancient Indian city, they think of Harappa or Mohenjo-daro. But those belonged to the first wave of urban life, which faded by around 1900 BCE. Cities returned to the subcontinent only centuries later, during what scholars call the second urbanisation, beginning around the sixth century BCE in the Gangetic plains. The settlements of this period – places like Pataliputra, Kaushambi, Taxila and Sisupalgarh – make up the Early Historic cities. Studying them is a detective story that pulls together three very different kinds of evidence: ancient books, the spade of the archaeologist, and patient comparison across regions. Each tells us something the others cannot.

Early Historic cities in texts 🔗

Written sources give us the earliest “blueprints” and “snapshots” of these cities. It helps to separate them into two types. Some texts are normative, meaning they describe how a city ought to be built. Others are narrative, meaning they tell stories set inside real or imagined cities. Reading both together lets us recover the values and aspirations attached to urban life, even when the physical city has vanished.

The Arthaśāstra and the ideal fortified city 🔗

Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra, usually dated to a period spanning roughly the fourth century BCE to the third century CE, is the classic normative source. It treats the city less as a marketplace and more as an instrument of the state. The text places enormous value on the durga or fortified capital, ranking the fort among the most important elements of the kingdom – in some passages even above the treasury and the army. A detailed reading of the Arthaśāstra’s planning sections shows that it specifies the spatial organisation of the city-state in surprising detail, from the placement of gates and roads to the zoning of different communities. It even prescribes standard units of measurement, such as the danda and rajju, for laying out urban blocks. The big scholarly question is whether this was only a “plan-image” in the author’s mind or an actual guide that builders followed on the ground.

Silappadikāram and the southern port city 🔗

For a vivid, lived-in portrait we turn south to the Tamil epic Silappadikāram, composed by Ilango Adigal. Its fifth book describes the great port of Puhar (Poompuhar) on the north bank of the Kaveri in remarkable detail. The city, according to the epic and other Sangam poetry, was split into two distinct districts: Maruvurpakkam near the sea, crowded with warehouses and the homes of foreign traders, and Pattinappakkam further inland, where the wealthier residents and royal quarters lay. Between them ran gardens where a market operated, known by one name in the daytime and another at night. This is narrative writing, but it preserves a memory of bustling maritime trade, multi-storeyed mansions and cosmopolitan crowds.

Sanskrit kavyas and the epics 🔗

Sanskrit literature adds further layers. The epics describe Ayodhya in the Rāmāyaṇa and the cities of the Mahābhārata as places of dazzling wealth and order, while later kavyas and works such as those of Bāṇabhaṭṭa describe royal encampments and capitals. A useful caution here: these descriptions are idealised. A poet praising a king’s capital was not writing a survey report. Yet such texts still tell us what a “great city” was supposed to look like – fortified walls, broad streets, palaces, temples and thriving bazaars – and that shared image is itself historical evidence.

Role of archaeology in understanding urbanism 🔗

Texts give us ideals and stories. Archaeology gives us the ground truth – the actual walls, drains, roads and rubbish that people left behind. Excavations at three sites in particular have transformed how we understand Early Historic urbanism.

Sisupalgarh: a planned fortress city 🔗

Near Bhubaneswar in Odisha lies Sisupalgarh, one of the largest and best-preserved Early Historic fortifications in the subcontinent, often identified with the ancient Kalinga capital. It was first dug by B. B. Lal in 1948 and then investigated again by R. K. Mohanty and Monica L. Smith between 2005 and 2009. The excavations revealed a roughly square walled city enclosing over a square kilometre, with eight formal gateways placed two to a side and a regular grid of internal roads confirmed by geophysical survey. The defences were not there from the start; a massive clay rampart was raised in a later phase and then reinforced with brick. Near the centre stood monumental stone pillars and stone-lined water reservoirs. Estimates suggest the city may have housed more than 25,000 people at its peak. Sisupalgarh shows that sophisticated, deliberate urban planning extended well beyond the Ganga valley into eastern India.

Sirkap: a city of cultural fusion 🔗

At Taxila, in the northwest of the subcontinent, the site of Sirkap tells a different story. It was laid out by the Indo-Greek ruler Demetrius around 180 BCE and excavated by Sir John Marshall between 1913 and 1930, with later work by Mortimer Wheeler and Amalananda Ghosh. The city was built on a “Hippodamian” grid plan typical of Greek towns, with a long main street and smaller lanes branching off at intervals. Yet the buildings along it blend Greek, Persian and Indian features, including shrines of different faiths. Sirkap is a physical record of how Early Historic India absorbed foreign influences and reworked them into something local.

Bhita: an ordinary town laid bare 🔗

Not every city was a royal capital. The site of Bhita, near Prayagraj (Allahabad), matters precisely because it was a fairly ordinary town. Marshall’s excavation of Bhita in 1909-10 marked one of the first serious efforts to dig out an entire ancient Indian town rather than a single monument. The dig exposed dense housing blocks lined along streets, with some houses containing many rooms arranged around an open central courtyard. This let researchers study domestic life, lane systems and the texture of everyday urban space – the very things that grand texts tend to ignore. Together, Sisupalgarh, Sirkap and Bhita give us city walls, public spaces and private homes, turning the literary ideal into measurable reality.

Regional patterns and variations 🔗

One of the biggest lessons of recent scholarship is that there was no single template for the Early Historic city. Different regions followed different paths. The historian and archaeologist Frank Raymond Allchin, working with collaborators such as George Erdosy and Robin Coningham, set out this idea in his influential study The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States. The book argues that cities and states developed across South Asia between roughly 800 BCE and 250 CE, alongside the rise and spread of Buddhism and Hinduism.

Allchin’s regional trajectories 🔗

Rather than treating “Indian urbanism” as one uniform process, Allchin’s framework distinguishes several regional trajectories of urban growth – commonly summarised as around six broad regions. These range from the heartland city-states of the middle Ganga valley around the time of the Buddha, to the cities of the northwest such as those in the Taxila region, to urban centres beyond the Ganga in peninsular and eastern India, and onward to the rise of cities in Sri Lanka. Each region had its own timing, its own triggers and its own political setting. A survey of South Asian urban archaeology shows how scholars built on this work to compare settlement hierarchies and the formation of states across these different zones. The northwest, for instance, absorbed Achaemenid and Greek influences, while the Tamil south developed its port cities through maritime trade – two very different routes to the same broad outcome of urban life.

Why more excavation is still needed 🔗

The honest conclusion is that our picture remains incomplete. Many famous cities are known mainly from their upper, later levels, because excavators often stopped before reaching the earliest occupation. At Taxila, for example, Marshall concentrated on the layers closest to the surface, leaving the deepest origins of urban life there poorly understood. Large sites have been only partly dug, and several regions of the subcontinent have barely been investigated at all. This is why fresh, scientifically planned excavations – using modern dating, geophysical survey and careful stratigraphy – continue to reshape the story. Each new season of digging can confirm a textual claim, overturn an old assumption, or reveal a regional pattern nobody expected.

What do you think? If the texts describe an idealised city while the soil reveals a messier reality, which source should we trust more when the two disagree – and why? And given how unevenly the subcontinent has been excavated, how confident can we really be that we have found the “typical” Early Historic city at all?

References

1. https://architexturez.net/doc/10-1080/00369227808736393
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poombuhar
3. https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/111140/1/Unit-24.pdf
4. https://www.carc.ox.ac.uk/XDB/DMS/%7B1D20459F-3991-4402-81B7-F30B2DA04B35%7D.pdf
5. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-royal-asiatic-society/article/abs/vi-archaeological-exploration-in-india-190910/D778CF04F89299CEB562718B775B0E12
6. https://www.amazon.in/Archaeology-Early-Historic-South-Asia/dp/0521376955
7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-006-9002-7
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/44407/1/Unit-14.pdf