SITUATION OF TAKSHAŚILĀ (TAXILA) ON THREE GREAT TRADE-ROUTES

The city of Takshaśilā or Taxila, as it has more familiarly been known to Europeans ever since Alexander the Great's invasion of India, was situated at the head of the Sind Sāgar Doāb between the Indus and Jhelum rivers and in the shadow of the Murree hills where they die down into the western plain. To be more precise, it was a little over 20 miles north-west of the modern city of Rāwalpindi and close beside the railway junction of Taxila, where the main line of the North-Western Railway is joined by a branch line from Havelian in the Hāripur valley. Here also, in ancient days, was the meeting-place of three great trade-routes: one, from Hindustān and Eastern India, which was to become the ‘royal highway’ described by Megasthenes as running from Pāṭaliputra to the north-west of the Maurya empire; the second from Western Asia through Bactria, Kāpiśī and Pushkalāvatī and so across the Indus at Ohind to Taxila; and the third from Kashmīr and Central Asia by way of the Srīnagar valley and Bāramula to Mānsehra and so down the Hāripur valley. These three trade-routes, which carried the bulk of the traffic passing by land between India and Central and Western Asia, played an all-important part in the history of Taxila, for it was mainly to them that the city owed its initial existence as well as its subsequent prosperity and greatness; and it was due to their diversion or decline, when trade contacts with foreign countries were interrupted, that Taxila sank eventually into insignificance.

SIGNIFICANCE OF TRADE-ROUTES FOR EARLY HISTORY OF TAXILA

This matter of trade-routes has an intimate bearing on the question of the date of Taxila's foundation. In the prehistoric days of the Indus civilisation, before roads and vehicular traffic had been developed, the urban population of the Panjāb was almost wholly dependent for its transport and communication on the navigable rivers, which flow generally in a direction from north-east to south-west, and it was only on the banks of those rivers that human settlements of any considerable size could be sustained.