Magadha

The kingdom in the Ganges plain that swallowed the others and became the base of every north Indian empire that followed. Magadha had iron, elephants, river transport and the most productive rice land in northern India, and its kings used all four to absorb their neighbours across three centuries. It is also where two religions began. The Buddha and Mahavira both taught in Magadha in the fifth century BC, under kings named in their traditions - Bimbisara and Ajatashatru - and the first Buddhist council met at Rajagriha after the Buddha's death. The rise of heterodox movements in exactly the region undergoing the fastest urbanisation and state formation is one of the standing arguments in Indian history. Under the Nandas in the fourth century the kingdom was the largest power in India and probably the wealthiest, with a standing army whose reported size - tens of thousands of cavalry, thousands of elephants - is given by Greek sources as the reason Alexander's men refused to march east of the Beas in 326. The Nandas were remembered as low-born and extortionate, and their tax collection is the reason later texts give for their fall. Four houses ruled it in turn - Haryanka, Shishunaga, Nanda and then Maurya - and each took power by displacing the last, usually violently. Ajatashatru moved the centre of gravity from the hill fortress of Rajagriha to a fort at Pataliputra where the Son joins the Ganges, which controlled the river traffic of the whole eastern plain and remained the capital of northern India for eight hundred years. The same reign is credited with siege engines and a war chariot with rotating blades in the Jain accounts of the war against the Vajji confederacy, a republic Magadha took apart by dividing it first. Around 322 Chandragupta Maurya, advised by Chanakya, overthrew Dhana Nanda and took Pataliputra, and Magadha became the Mauryan empire. The state did not change so much as expand: the same capital, the same revenue system and the same army carried Ashoka to the edges of the subcontinent a generation later.

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