Identification and origins of Pāṭaliputra

Note: this text is extracted from Book III, chapter 17.

“there is a city called Pāṭaliputra, the ornament of the earth, filled with various beautiful jewels, the colours of which are so disposed as to form a perfect scale of colour”

This great city [named Pāṭaliputra] (the modern Patna) was built about 482 B.C., and became the capital of Aśoka, the first emperor of India (274-236 B.C.). It was known at this time as Pātaliputta, which the Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, corrupted to Palibothra. As the great Buddhist centre, Aśoka enriched the city with magnificent temples and works of art of every kind. Its foundation is ascribed by Buddhists to Kālāsoka, although nothing definite can be said on this point.

The most curious fact connected with Pāṭaliputra is that from the seventh to eighteenth centuries a.d. its site seems to have been entirely lost, and many fantastic tales arose about its early history. One of these crept into the pages of Somadeva, as we have already seen (Vol. I, p. 18 et seq.).

In 1878 the Government Archaeological Survey of India reported that Pāṭaliputra must have stood near the modern Patna, but have been long since swept away by the Ganges. This theory, however, was disproved in 1893 by the discovery of extensive ruins at Patna by Waddell and Spooner. The meaning of Pāṭaliputra is still uncertain. It is said to signify the “city of flowers,” but this is the meaning of Kusumapura, another name for Pāṭaliputra. (See the story of Harasvāmin in Book V, Chapter XXIVj and the twenty-second vampire story in Chapter XCVI of the Ocean of Story.) Waddell considers it to mean simply the “son of Pāṭali,” from the old seaport at the mouth of the Indus. See D. B. Spooner, “The Zoroastrian Period of Indian History,” Joum. Roy. As. Soc., 1915, p. 63 et seq.) L. A. Waddell, Discovery of the Lost Site of Pāṭaliputra, 1892; and Report on the Excavations of Pāṭaliputra (Patna), 1903.— n.m.p.