Indian History Quiz: Mahajanapadas and the Rise of Magadha

It is a text of the Sutta Pitaka of the Buddhist canon and it names the sixteen great states of the age of the Buddha, from Magadha and Kosala in the east to Gandhara and Kamboja in the north-west.

Of the sixteen mahajanapadas only Assaka lay in the Deccan, on the banks of the Godavari, with its capital at Potana, also written Potali.

Avanti covered the Malwa region and had two capitals: Ujjain in its northern half and Mahishmati on the Narmada in its southern half.

Bimbisara was the first great ruler of the Haryanka line of Magadha, traditionally dated from about 544 BCE, with his capital at Girivraja, also called Rajgriha.

The First Buddhist Council met at Rajgriha soon after the death of the Buddha, with Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty as its patron and Mahakassapa presiding, and it settled the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as recited by Upali and Ananda.

The Vajji confederacy had its centre at Vaishali in north Bihar and was the best known gana-sangha, a state governed not by a single king but by an assembly of the heads of ruling families.

He founded the Nanda dynasty and the Puranas describe him as a ruler of humble birth who destroyed all the Kshatriya houses, calling him Ekarat, the sole sovereign.

Buddhist and Jain traditions credit him with two engines used in the long war against the Vajji confederacy: the rathamusala, a chariot fitted with a swinging mace that cut down men as it was driven through them, and the mahashilakantaka, a catapult that hurled heavy stones.

Shravasti was the capital of Kosala in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and Ayodhya and Saketa were its other important towns. Its king Prasenajit was a contemporary of the Buddha, who spent many rainy seasons at the Jetavana monastery in Shravasti, which is why the town appears so often in Buddhist literature.

He was the last of the Nanda kings of Magadha and ruled when Alexander invaded the Punjab; Greek writers describe the vast army of the Gangaridai and Prasii that waited beyond the Beas.