The Layout of the City*

The oldest literary documents of the Indo-Arians, namely the Vedas, communicate to us the image of a rural way of life. An entirely different way of life is revealed by the oldest texts of the Buddhists and Jainas, as also by the great epics: they occur before a background of an urban culture. Flourishing cities form the centers of mighty states. The life of the city-dwellers is illuminated from all sides, while that of rural settlements and their inhabitants decline into obscure ahistoricity.

Strewn among their tales, sagas and legends are numerous descriptions of cities. Thus, Ayodhya, the residence of the epic hero Rama, is portrayed in the Ramayana in the following manner:

(7) 12 miles long and 3 miles wide is the great and splendid city. It has well-laid-out main streets (8) and is graced with a large and well-laid-out royal highway that is bestrewn with fallen flowers and continuously sprinkled with water. (9) King Dasaratha ... lived in this city — (10) it had gates with door-panels, well-laid-out interior shops, and all sorts of war machines and weapons; in it lived all kinds of craftsmen; (11) crowded with heralds and bards. it was splendid and of unequalled grandeur, with high towers and flags and filled with hundreds of "hundred-killer" weapons; (12) it was a city graced everywhere with throngs of women and dancers, containing parks and mango groves, a vast city girded by sal-trees;

(13) it was a fort with an inaccessible and deep moat, unconquerable by foreigners, and filled with horses and elephants, as well as with cattle, camels and donkeys; (14) it was packed with throngs of vassal kings bringing tributes and graced with traders from diverse regions; (15) it was adorned with palaces decorated with jewels resembling mountains; it was brimming with pavilions and resembled the heavenly city of the King of gods.

The following account of the residence of King Milinda occurs in the Buddhist didactic narrative Milindapañha:

... the city Sagala, which lies in a lovely area graced with rivers and mountains, with groves, parks, woods, lakes and lotus ponds, winsome in the midst of rivers, mountains and forests; built by able men, not pressured by adversaries and enemies who have been subdued; with manifold different towers and tower-gates; with a castle containing excellent gates and gate arches and surrounded by a deep moat and a light plastered fortification wall; with well-laid streets, intersections, crossings and triangular places; with interior shops which are filled with numerous excellent, well-decorated wares; enhanced with hundreds of different alms houses, with hundred thousands of wonderful dwellings that resemble the mountain peeks of the Himalayas; decorated; ... [a description follows of the city dwellers] ...; furnished with different textile shops containing Kasika, Kautumbaraka etc. (cloth); scented by fragrance of the perfume shops with well-decorated splendid manifold flowers; filled with many wonderful gemstones; enlivened by stately merchants with well-decorated shops visible from all sides; filled with coins, silver, gold, copper and pottery; a site of glowing treasures, rich in money, corn, luxury goods and utensils; filled with treasure and storage houses, and with great amounts of food and drink — many kinds of food and drink for munching, eating, licking, drinking and tasting; appearing like Uttarakuru, filled with corn, like Alakamanda, the city of gods.

A stereotypical description of a city in the Jaina canon reads as follows:

... the city (so-and-so), rich, safe, and wealthy; ... (followed by a characterization of the land and its inhabitants) ... ; provided with precious groves, parks, springs, ponds, bathing pools, and wells; with a widely protruding and deeply dug moat, surrounded by an arched fortification wall that is thick and hard to conquer, due to its double-wing gates and discuses, maces, cudgels, barriers and hundred-killers; boasting arched battlements; high looming with its towers, pathways, gates, gate buildings, and gate arches; with a well-built royal street; with firm crossbars and door posts fashioned by enabled masters; contentedly and happily filled with craftsmen who enliven markets and bazaars; adorned with shops of manifold treasures at triangular places, street forks, intersections, and crossways; ... (followed by the description of street life) ...; provided with lightly plastered, exquisite residential houses; a feast for the eyes, uplifting and worth seeing, shapely and perfect in form.

Although these three texts derive from different languages (the first in epic Sanskrit, the second in Pali and the third in Jaina Prakrit), the correspondences are obvious. Notwithstanding the eulogies, the descriptions consist of certain basic ideas: the cities possess well-laid-out streets, intersections, and places with all kinds of shops; they are defended by ramparts and walls with towers and gates, as well as by a deep moat. Lastly, they are surrounded by parks. The nomenclature freezes to fixed phrases, which in all three language areas recur in numerous passages without ever being explained. The narrators' intention was not to make such explanations, but rather to decorate the generally known concepts with especially well-sounding decorative words.

Nevertheless, the fact that already in the pre-Christian era written works on city building existed can be determined from later texts. Discussions regarding urban complexes occur as well in Indian medieval books on architecture, as also in the Kautiliya Arthasastra, a compendium on statecraft allegedly written by the prime minister of the Maurya ruler Candragupta, around 300 BCE in Pataliputra. A comparison of the relevant passages reveals that the Arthasastra can hardly be considered to be the direct source of the medieval architectural handbooks, even if the terminology frequently finds correspondences. Both teaching systems seem to have derived their information independently from each other from the same sources, and fashioned it for their own purposes. Medieval manuals on architecture contain a great deal of information from their own time that is woven with what has been handed down. There are several descriptions of their sections on urban building. These are, however, of little use for a real understanding of the situation one or two thousand years earlier.

For this reason the information from the Arthasastra is even more important. The traditional attribution of the authorship to the minister Kautilya is hardly historical, and the compendium probably arose in the first half of the first millennium AD. Most of its substantial accounts, however, derive from older handbooks. Clearly, the intention of a compendium on statecraft is to present passages from the older handbooks that are tailored to the needs of the state government: only such facts are dealt with that are relevant for the building authority of the state, while individual questions regarding the construction that are important only to architects are omitted. The 4th chapter of the 2nd book, which...