The verdant and fertile lands that are now Bangladesh, owe a great deal to nature, and to mankind’s harnessing of its natural forces and phenomena for their own benefit.
Rich in heritage and diversity of cultures, the natural result of human activity, those natural forces and phenomena owe everything to three of the greatest of Asian rivers, the Meghna, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra.
Along these great rivers developed, no one is yet sure how early in human history, but certainly many millennia ago, some of the world’s earliest trading; and to the great delta where the rivers met the sea, came traders, more than, at the latest, two millennia ago, from Sumatra, Java, China, Tibet, North India, Arabia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, all in their great days of historic development. From the thriving centre of trade, and even earlier, peoples travelled across the world.
For all that, it is not hard to find the documentary, circumstantial and empirical evidence, and, increasingly, but slowly, the archaeological evidence, as well.
The archaeological evidence is emerging, above all perhaps, at the site at Wari Bateshwar in Narshingdi where, “tens of thousands” of beads of semi precious stones have been harvested, together with some of the world’s earliest known coinage, dating back beyond the middle of the last millennium BCE; including silver, punch marked coins, at least two thousand five hundred years old.
Bronze Age dwellings, mysterious brick constructed sites, paved roads, mud, 5.3km ramparts still higher than a man, wide moat, tools of manufacture and trade mark this as a large, and important early site of international trade lying on the banks of the Old Brahmaputra, probably the earliest of the ancient trade routes to China, known as, “Silk Roads.”
This may well be the site of the city, called by Roman and Greek writers, the city of Ganges. If it is not, then other sites lie, as yet unexplored, within the five main branches of the great delta.
The Greco–Roman cartographer of the second century BCE, Ptolemy, marks on his mid second century map of the lands of the Ganges, the five main branches of the delta, so called, of course, like that at the mouth of Nile and Amazon, amongst many others around the world, because the triangular shape resembles the Greek letter D, Delta.
Kambyson, Mega, Kamberikhon, Pseudostomon, and Antibole were the given names, as identified by inhabitants to the mariners who were Ptolemy’s informants, which may, of course, mean that those names never actually existed; but the map also clearly marks the Kingdom of Gangaridai as lying within the delta.
But it is the Greek and Roman writers who offer us the greatest insight into this enigmatic kingdom that was certainly the focus of international trade from early times, and laid the foundation for the rich heritage that, today, is Bangladesh’s alone.
India of course, feeling neglected by its lack of possession of this wellspring of the geopolitical structure of today’s sub continent, is making strenuous efforts to claim a significant presence within their territory, a little like their manipulation of Wikipedia’s entry about Sundarban, in which the reader would be hard pressed to find that over 80% of that great, natural phenomenon lies in Bangladesh! Its management of the entry on Gangaridai attempts to make Gangaridai synonymous with Bengal, and argues that the kingdom reached down to Orissa.
However, historic references make it fairly clear that the kingdom of Gangaridai lay to the east of the Ganges, although it would appear that, in resisting the advance of the army of Alexander the Great, it may well have allied with the Prasii, based on Patna, presumably the Maghada kingdom, or its successor, the Mauryan empire.
Indeed, until the archaeology of the region progresses, of which so comparatively little has so far been undertaken, especially in Bangladesh, we may expect that the true history of the historic kingdom will be subjected to at least as much “smoke and mirrors” by India, as in so many other areas of neighbourly lack of mutual interest and cooperation.
The first literary reference is, in fact, almost contemporary with the advance of Alexander, by the Greek traveller and historian, Megasthenes, who appears, for some years, to have lived in Patna towards the end of the fourth century BCE.
In his work, Indica, he wrote, “Now this river (Ganges) which at its source is 30 stadia broad, flows from north to south, and empties its waters into the ocean that forms the boundary of the Gangaridai, a nation that possesses a vast force of the largest sized elephants. Owing to this, their country has never been conquered by any foreign king: for all other nations dread the overwhelming strength and number of these animals (thus Alexander the Macedonian, after conquering all Asia, did not make war on the Gangaridai, as he did all others; for when he arrived with all his troops at the river Ganges, he abandoned as hopeless an invasion of the Gangaridai and India when he learned that they possessed four thousand elephants well trained and equipped for war).”
This, nearly contemporary commentary, almost certainly based on information culled from those who had faced the prospect of Alexander’s army, in noting the size of the force that opposed that army, underlines that, even in Alexander’s fourth century BCE times, about two and a half thousand years ago, Gangaridai was already a formidable, and unconquered territory. And well might one wonder, why would anyone have been tempted to invade these lands that, as far as they knew, lay at the edge of the world? The wealth of trade, already well established, seems a very reasonable explanation.
Megasthenes goes on to note, “The least breadth of the Ganges is eight miles, and its greatest 20. Its depth where it is shallowest is fully a hundred feet.”
Interestingly, the next literary reference to Gangaridai is legendary. In the third century BCE, the Greek writer, Apollonius of Rhodes, in his rewriting the eighth century BCE Homeric legend of Jason and the Argonauts, the story of the Golden Fleece, included a character called Datis, “a chieftain, leader of the Gangaridai, who was in the army of Perses the third, who fought against Aeetes in the Colchian Civil War. Colchis was situated in modern Georgia on the east coast of the Black Sea. Aeetes was the King of Colchia, against whom Jason and the Argonauts undertook their legendary expedition to find the Golden Fleece.”
Two hundred years or so after Magesthenes, there was still an enormous interest, in both Greece and Rome, in the exploits of Alexander, and of those who finally overcame his apparently irresistible advance across the known world, in Gangaridai.
Writing in the first century BCE, the historian, Diodorus Siculus, no doubt borrowing from Magesthenes, but probably also relying on information gleaned from merchants and traders, wrote that, in addition to the 4,000 elephants, the king of the Gangaridai, who he names as Xandrammes, “had an army of 20,000 horse, 200,000 infantry, and 2,000 chariots.”
Siculus wrote, further, of Gangaridai. “Among the southern countries the first under the Kaukasos (Caucasian mountain range) is India, a kingdom remarkable for its vast extent and the largeness of its population, for it is inhabited by very many nations, among which the greatest of all is that of the Gangaridai, against whom Alexander did not undertake an expedition, being deterred by the multitudes of their elephants. This region is separated from other India by the greatest river in those parts.”
Siculus, it seems, was sure of that separation of Gangaridai from the rest of India by the Ganges; and equally certain that, in those ancient times, Gangaridai was the largest, and the most powerful, among the nations of India. As one of the earliest historians and geographers in the Roman age, when we already know that trade was flowing freely from those parts, to Rome, his impression must be allowed to account for something.
It is interesting too, to compare the circumstantial evidence of the report, in the late second century BCE, of the Han Dynasty emissary of China, reporting on trade into Bactria, “the inhabitants ride elephants when they go into battle. The kingdom is situated by a great river.” Elephants, it appears, were a Gangaridai trademark!
At about the same time as Siculus was writing, Virgil, the great Roman poet, wrote in his famed Georgics, “On the doors I will represent in gold and ivory the battle of the Gangaridai and the arms of our victorious Quirinius.” (Georgics lll, 27). It appears that the armies of Gangaridai were, at that time, employed as mercenaries in the Roman Army, since the piece celebrates a victory by Quirinius in Galatia in Asia Minor.
By the beginning of what now by international accord, with respect especially to Muslims, we call the Common Era, known in the past as Anno Domini, the “Years of our Lord,” a reference to Jesus Christ, Strabo, the famous Roman geographer and historian, made his own reference to the trading centre at the delta of the Ganges. In his seminal work, Geographia, published about year one of the Common Era, in what may well be the first documented piece of the academic snobbery that, even today, bedevils relations with “people of commerce,” writes, “concerning those merchants who sail from Egypt, even to the Ganges, they are but private citizens, and know nothing of the history of the places they visit.”
Strabo, it seems, was certain that trade of his time involved the Ganges. But so too was the anonymous writer of the mid first century CE work, “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” a merchant’s guide to trade in the Southern Oceans.
Subsequent Roman writers, such as Plutarch, Pliny, Quintus Curius Rufus, and Dionysius Periegetes, all write of Gangaridai. And Ptolemy’s map, marking so clearly the location of this, to them, famous kingdom and people, leave no doubt that, thus far, this wellspring of the nation of Bangladesh requires, yet considerable investigation, deep into the archaeology of the deltaic lands, and those around.
Thus, the Kingdom of Gangaridai was the wellspring from which flowed international trade and connections. Eventually the wealth, and stability it engendered, attracted, beyond mere trading partners, invaders.
The Khilji, fleeing the Mongol depredations in their Afghan homeland; the Mughals, seeking the wealth to build their own empire; the Europeans, amongst whom it was the British who scooped the pool; and finally Pakistan, reliant on Bangladesh for the wealth to develop its weaponry, military establishment, and its architectural aspirations.
Gangaridai, the wellspring of Bangladesh; the wellspring, in fact, of much of modern South Asia!
Tim Steel is a communications, marketing and tourism consultant.
