The Rise of Magadha
By about 500 BC one kingdom in the Ganges plain had absorbed most of its neighbours, and every north Indian empire for the next thousand years was built on it. Magadha's advantages were physical before they were political. It had iron ore in the southern hills, elephants in the forests, the Ganges and the Son for transport, and the most productive rice land in northern India. Bimbisara, ruling from the hill fortress of Rajagriha, used all four and added marriage alliances with Kosala and Vaishali. His son Ajatashatru dispensed with the alliances. He took Kosala, and then spent years dividing the Vajji confederacy - a league of republics north of the Ganges - before destroying it, which the Jain accounts credit to siege engines and a chariot with rotating blades. He moved the centre of gravity to a fort at Pataliputra where the Son meets the Ganges, a position that controlled the river traffic of the entire eastern plain and remained the capital of northern India for eight hundred years. The same generation and the same region produced the Buddha and Mahavira. Both taught in Magadha, both appear in traditions that name Bimbisara and Ajatashatru as patrons or antagonists, and the first Buddhist council met at Rajagriha after the Buddha's death. That the two great heterodox movements arose exactly where urbanisation and state formation were fastest is one of the standing arguments in Indian history. Four dynasties ruled Magadha in turn, each displacing the last by force. The Nandas made it the largest power in India and were remembered as low-born and extortionate, which is the reason later texts give for their fall to Chandragupta Maurya around 322.
- Year: 544 BCE
- Category: Political
