very verge of the high cliff overlooking the river. This is specially noticeable as having its base encircled with a coil of serpents, which would seem to corroborate the connection of the local name with the word ahi, 'a snake'. The principal residents of the town are Nágar Bráhmans by descent, though—since the time of Aurangzeh—Muhammadans by religion, who believe that their ancestors were the priests employed by Janamejaya to conduct his sacrifice, and that in return for their services they had a grant of the township and the surrounding villages. Immediately after this event it is said that the Pandavas transferred their seat of local government from Ahár to Baran, and it may be that they then first attached the prefix ahi to the name of the town—so making it Ahibaran—in order to commemorate the circumstances of the migration. This would imply that the town was already in existence; and it might with much plausibility be identified with the Varanávata,[1] mentioned in the 143rd chapter of the first Book of the Mahábhárat.
All this, however, is conjectural and refers to a period so remote, nearly 1400 years before Christ, that no tangible record of it could be expected to survive to the present day. To come down to somewhat later times: the Bactrian dynasty, which flourished in the centuries immediately preceding our era, and the Gupta dynasty that succeeded it, have both left traces behind them. In the rains, copper and gold coins with Greek and Páli inscriptions, used so frequently to be washed down in the debris from the high ground of the old town, at a particular point, now called 'the Manihárs' or bangle-makers' quarter,' that after any heavy storm people made it a regular business to search for them. To prevent further cutting away, the slope was built up with masonry in 1876; but even since then two copper coins of Su-Hermæus, styled Basileus Soter, a gold coin of Chandra Gupta II, and another of an intermediate dynasty, have been picked up, which I presented to the coin cabinet of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
It may thus be concluded that the town of Baran at the commencement of the Christian era was a place of some wealth and importance;
- ↑ General Cunningham proposes to identify with the Varanávata of the Mahábhárata a village, now called Barnáwa, in the Merath district. It has not yet been explored, and it is therefore uncertain whether it is really an ancient site or not.
