A History of India, Third Edition

THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRES

kilns. Kausambi had the most impressive fortification, its city walls are
about 4 miles long and at some places 30 feet high. The archaeologist
G.R.Sharma, who excavated Kausambi in the 1950s, thought that these
walls resembled those of the Indus cities. There were also public buildings
like assembly halls in these early Gangetic cities, and after the rise of
Buddhism they also contained monasteries and stupas. City planning with
regard to the network of streets seems to have started again only in the
fourth century BC.
An important indicator of the growth of an urban economy are the
punch-marked coins which have been found in those Gangetic cities. There
were also standardised weights which provide evidence for a highly
developed trade in the fifth century BC. Was there perhaps some cultural
continuity right from the time of the Indus civilisation down to this new
Gangetic civilisation? This question cannot yet be answered, but it is
interesting to note that the weight of 95 per cent of the 1,150 silver coins
found at Taxila is very similar to the standardised stone weights of the
Indus civilisation.
There was a great demand in this period of the Gangetic civilisation for
a new type of ceramic referred to as ‘Northern Black Polished Ware’. The
centre of production of this was in the Gangetic plains. Just as the earlier
Painted Grey Ware was identified with the period of Late Vedic settlement
in Panjab and Doab, this new type of ceramic shows the spread of the
Gangetic civilisation and its influence on other parts of India opened up by
the many new trade routes. Northern Black Polished Ware made its first
appearance around 500 BC and could be traced in all the mahajanapadas
mentioned above; it even showed up in distant Kalinga (see Map 3). In
1981 a city was discovered and partly excavated in western Orissa, which
was about 1 mile long and 500 yards wide, surrounded by a solid brick
wall. At this site Northern Black Polished Ware was also discovered.
Another important indicator for a well-developed urban culture, a
script, has not yet been found in those Gangetic cities. Ashoka’s
inscriptions of the third century BC still remain the earliest evidence for an
Indian script. But since the two scripts Brahmi and Karoshthi were already
fully developed, scholars believe that they may have originated in the fifth
century BC. Script in India developed probably for the first time under
Persian influence. The Persians held sway in the Northwest of the Indian
subcontinent at that time and Karoshthi, which was written from right to
left, was based on the Aramaic script which was the official script of the
Persian empire.

The rise of Buddhism

This new Gangetic civilisation found its spiritual expression in a reform
movement which was a reaction to the Brahmin-Kshatriya alliance of the