Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/43

 INTRODUCTION.

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town whose ruins have been discovered in the neigh-" bourhood of Allahabad. It was impossible that the transcribers of long lists of names, every one of which was absolutely strange to them, should avoid constant errors, and the mistakes seem frequent with the letter I. The almost certain reading Tanganoi has a variant, Ganganoi, and the position on the map and similarity of the names perhaps justify us in reading Baraita Baraila, and recognizing in it the present town of E,ae Bareli, which is built on remains of an unknown antiquity, and is almost certainly not named after the Edja Bal, who was defeated and slain by Nasir^ud-din in 1246 A.D. The same considerations would lead us to read Sapolas Sapotas, a natural and obvious Greek translation of Sawattha, as the ancient city of Sravasti was called in the Prakrit, which was contemporaneous with the Antonines. The remaining towns, Heorta and Rappha, there are no means of identifying. The great interest in this record lies in the fact that the two people whom it shows to have been dominant in Central Hindustan were neither of them of Hindu origin, one being aboriJhusi, a

Scythian of the third nothing certain can be a good probability that a large Hindu kingdom flourished on the southern bank of the Ganges, and that the descendants of its ruling family may be still found near their old ginal, the other said,

but there



is

seat of empire.

The epoch of Ptolemy saw the culminating glory and the the great kingdom of Srdvasti, which had for eight centuries at least maintained a leading position among the states

final ruin of

Vikramdditya, the last of its kings whose crowned the achievements of his race by defeating Meghavahana, the powerful king of Kashmir, and That so celerestoring the fanes and holy places of Ajodhya. brated a shrine, distant less than fifty miles in a straight line from the capital, should have been allowed to fall so completely into decay is a matter for surprise, and we are driven to suppose either that the Gogra formed the southern limit to an area of of Northern India.

name we

possess,

civilization stretching along the foot of the mountains, or that legend has exaggerated the desolation of the place and the merits of its restorer. have seen that Ptolemy represented the Scythians as coterminous with the trans-Gogra kingdom along its southern frontier, and it was to them that the power of Vikram^ditya himself, or of one of his immediate successors, finally succumbed. The legends of Ajodhya, whose antiquity marks the unbroken

We

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