Uttarapatha

1 · POSITION

Uttarapatha, the northern road, was the great trade route of northern India, running across the northwest and the Indo-Gangetic plain to the port of Tamralipti on the Bay of Bengal. The register holds it as a road rather than an itinerary: hospitality grew wherever long-distance movement concentrated on it — at river crossings, market towns, monasteries and capitals. [1, 2]

2 · A NAMED ROAD

Panini’s grammar is the first text to name it. The Arthashastra calls its northern part the Haimavatapatha; its southern sector ran from Lahore by Delhi, Hastinapur, Varanasi, Allahabad and Pataliputra to Rajgir. Its traders had their own presiding deity, the yaksha Manibhadra, whose great statues survive from the Mauryan and Sunga periods. [1]

3 · THE MAURYAN HIGHWAY

Chandragupta Maurya built a highway along it in the third century BC, in eight stages from Purushapura and Taxila to Pataliputra and Tamralipta, some 2,600 kilometres, and kept an army of officials to maintain it. Megasthenes, the Seleucid envoy, travelled down it to the Mauryan court. Milestones, guest houses and wells were provided for traders and other travellers. [1, 3]

4 · WHAT IT BECAME

The road’s line survives as the Grand Trunk Road, which the register holds under its own code: Ashoka’s rest houses, Sher Shah’s sarais and the Mughal kos minars were all built on Uttarapatha’s course. [3]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The route’s origins are placed in the Harappan world by one source; the claim is not tested here. The 2,600-kilometre length belongs to the Mauryan highway, not to the older road. Guest houses on it are attested in general terms, not by a named surviving building. [1–3]