Pataliputra

Palíbothra is the Greek name of Pataliputra, carried west by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador resident at Candragupta’s court around 300 BCE, whose lost Indica survives in the quotations of Strabo and Arrian. Megasthenes described the city concretely: a parallelogram along the river some eighty stadia by fifteen, palisaded in wood with five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates, the greatest city in India. Strabo spells the name Palíbothra; Arrian’s excerpts give Palímbothra with a nasal, and both shapes render a Middle Indo-Aryan pronunciation of the name rather than the Sanskrit, its -putra heard as -bothra.

The form is the family’s best evidence that Greek ears recorded the spoken vernacular, not the court language: the aspirate wandered, the vowels blurred, but the giveaway voiced b for p and the cluster’s collapse mark a name learned in conversation. For all its distortion the transcription anchored India in Western geography for centuries; Ptolemy still plots the city by it, and when eighteenth-century Europeans sought the lost capital of the Mauryas, it was Megasthenes’ Palibothra, matched at last to Patna, that guided the search.

Pāṭaliputta is the Pali form of the city’s name, the Middle Indo-Aryan continuation of Sanskrit Pāṭaliputra with the cluster tr assimilated to tt. Its great attestation is a founding scene: in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta the Buddha, on his last journey, passes through the village of Pāṭaligāma as Magadha’s ministers Sunīdha and Vassakāra wall it against the Vajjis, and declares that so far as noble people travel and traders gather, this will be the chief city, Pāṭaliputta, though it will face ruin from fire, water, and discord. The canon thus names the metropolis before it exists, in the same breath as the village it replaced.

No other entry on this page catches a city at the moment of its naming. The Sanskrit form belongs to a capital already famous, the Greek to one at its imperial height, the Chinese to its old age among ruins; the Pali form belongs to a construction site, and its prophecy frame is the closest thing the family has to a birth certificate. The tradition Aśoka patronized remembered, or composed, the founding of his own capital in the mouth of the Buddha, and the vernacular doubling of putta is exactly how the emperor’s own subjects would have said it.

Pāṭaliputra is the Sanskrit name of the Mauryan and Gupta capital, a compound of pāṭali, the trumpet-flower tree, and putra, “son”: the city as child of the tree, a name the tradition explained with more than one legend and no certainty. It is the standard form across Sanskrit literature, in the grammarian Patañjali (second century BCE), whose Mahābhāṣya reaches for the city as a ready example the way a modern grammar reaches for London, in the political drama Mudrārākṣasa, whose plot turns on Candragupta’s seizure of the city, and in the Purāṇic king-lists.

The Sanskrit form is the family’s reference point but not its oldest attestation; the Pali canon’s Pāṭaligāma narrative and Megasthenes’ Greek transcription both precede Patañjali. What the Sanskrit register adds is permanence: while the spoken forms drifted and the Greek report faded, the literary name held its shape for a thousand years of texts composed long after the city had declined. When the name finally wore down to Patna in the modern vernacular, it was the Sanskrit spelling that preserved, letter by letter, what the city had been called at its height.

Palibothra is the Latin form of the city’s name, taken over unchanged from the Greek of Megasthenes’ tradition. Pliny the Elder, cataloguing the peoples of the Ganges in the Natural History, names the Prasii as the greatest of them and Palibothra as their capital, so eminent, he adds, that some writers call the whole people Palibothri; he repeats the itinerary measurements the Greek ambassadors had recorded and locates the city at the great river-junction. The name appears in Latin only as geography, never from contact: no Roman is known to have seen the city.

The entry belongs to the standard Greek-to-Latin channel that carried eastern names into Rome’s world-picture, but with the transmission run at maximum length: a Prakrit street-name, heard by a Seleucid Greek, quoted by a geographer, excerpted by a Roman encyclopedist, each step further from the Ganges. Pliny wrote four centuries after Megasthenes, and his Palibothra is a city of the reign of Candragupta frozen in amber, still walled in wood and counting its towers long after the real city had passed to other dynasties. The Latin name preserves not the city but the embassy’s memory of it.

Bāliánfú yì, “the town of Bāliánfú,” is the Chinese name of Pataliputra as recorded by the monk Faxian, who reached Magadha around 405 CE on his overland pilgrimage from Chang’an to the Buddhist holy land. The first three characters transcribe a Middle Indo-Aryan pronunciation of the city’s name, the syllables chosen for sound rather than sense; the fourth, yì, is the plain Chinese word for a town. Faxian found the city still impressive and the palace attributed to Aśoka standing, walls and gates carved, he wrote, as no human hands could have made; he stayed three years, copying texts and learning Sanskrit.

The transcription is this family’s easternmost member, and it reverses the geometry of every other exonym on the page: the Greek and Latin names came from ambassadors of empires to India’s west looking in, while the Chinese name came from a pilgrim for whom India was the West, the source-country of scripture. Where Megasthenes measured walls and towers, Faxian counted monasteries. The same city, transcribed at opposite ends of the ancient world’s road network, entered Greek as a marvel of size and Chinese as a station of holiness.