the Ganges before the change of the course of the Son, all or almost all traces of the ancient city must long since have been swept away by the Ganges.
In strong but in direct corroboration of my supposition, that Pâṭaliputra had been cut away by the Ganges, even so early as Bakhtiâr Khilji’s invasions of Bengal, I need only point to the entire silence of the Muhammadan historians regarding it and its immense fort, public buildings, &c. Bakhtiâr Khilji could not possibly have left the great fort of Pâṭaliputra in his rear while advancing on Bihâr, and he certainly did not besiege or take it. What then had become of it? No mention occurs of any fort, great or small, at or near Patna till Shir Shah’s period, when he is recorded to have erected the fort of Patna at a small village of that name; and this detailed account (noticed below) does not even allude to a fort or the ruins of one as existing at the village of Patna.
The portions of the old city likely to have escaped would have been the southern outskirts. Modern Patna consequently does not stand on the site of old Pâṭaliputra, but very close to it, the old city having occupied what is now the bed of the Ganges, and perhaps part of the great island between Patna and Hajipur on the opposite side of the river.
I shall subsecquently examine and detail the traces of the ancient Pâṭaliputra that still exist, but before doing so I proceed to show that by Erranoboas the Greeks meant the Gandak.
First as to the word itself. Erranoboas has hitherto been considered to represent the Sanskrit Hiranyavaha or Hiranyabâha, while the Gandak has been supposed to have been rendered in Greek into Condochates.
That Hiranyabâha was a name of the Son depends solely on the authority of Amara Kosha, as far as I am aware, and General Cunningham derives the name from the broad yellow sands, and imagines some connection between the names Hiranyabâha, Sona, or golden, and the broad yellow sands; but I have already shown that the name Sona refers to the red colour of the waters of the Son, and has nothing to do with gold, whereas Hiranyabâha clearly means gold-bearing. The two names consequently have nothing in common, nor do I remember ever hearing of the Son as in any way connected with gold; but the Gandak river, in Sanskrit “the great Gandaki,” appears connected in some way with gold,—see Beal’s Catena of Buddhist Scr., page 137, where the Gandak is called the golden
