The basin of the Indus River and its tributaries has a long history of being at the centre stage of many civilisations. From the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, right down to modern times, hundreds of cities, towns and settlements have undergone centuries of expansion, followed by sudden regress and, in this process, left their mark on the region’s identity.

However, within this list of historic cities lies a mysterious city that has, for all intents and purposes, completely vanished from the face of the earth — a city that fell out of record as a seemingly never-ending saga of invasions gripped the land, a city whose last mention is present in a 1,400-year-old account of a wandering Buddhist monk. The City of the Lion: Simhapura.

THE KUSHANS, THE HUNS AND THE TURKS

The millennium lasting from the start of the 1st century CE to the end of the 10th century CE was one riddled with changes of cataclysmic nature for the Indus Valley. On multiple occasions, pre-existing social orders were disrupted, new empires made their mark, various religions competed for ascendancy, and languages and peoples of all sorts appeared at the forefront of the region.

The very first in this saga of migrating groups to cross the waters of the mighty Indus in this new millennium were the Kushans. The Kushans were one branch of a massive tribal confederation known as the Yuezhi

who, upon being ousted from Western China, had wandered towards Bactria in today’s Northern Afghanistan and used it as a base from which to overtake the Indus Valley.

Over the course of the next three centuries, the Kushans strung up a massive empire, stretching from the Oxus River in Central Asia down to the Ganges in South Asia, and they supplanted this empire with a massive network of roads and trade routes connecting far-off regions with one another. As well connected as it was internally, externally it was connected with China, Central Asia and beyond, through the Silk Road, and to the Roman Empire through sea routes running from Roman Egypt to Sindh.

Once a thriving city during the Kushan Empire and a place of great religious significance for Buddhists, Simhapura suddenly vanished from the map. Archaeological efforts over the past two centuries have tried to rediscover the whereabouts of this lost city in Pakistan and the secrets that it holds

This new era of connectivity and prosperity for the next three centuries resulted in the rise of new art forms, fresh cultural norms and altogether new religious trends, with Buddhism taking the forefront in the region. The Kushans’ refined diplomatic ties with other vast empires and tolerance for change welcomed missionaries, artists, pilgrims, philosophers, architects, traders, and scholars of all sorts that entered their realm.

This influx of people led to various new settlements appearing on the map of their territories, as new cities were made and older cities were expanded. Much of the urban sprawl associated with this era was concentrated in the heartland of Gandhara (from Nangarhar to Taxila) and its neighbouring regions in Punjab, Kashmir and Kabul.

Cities like Peshawar grew exponentially, monasteries and stupas of all kinds started popping up between Swat and Northern Punjab, and newer cities and settlements were erected from Nangarhar till Taxila. It is argued that, under the umbrella of Kushan prosperity, the mysterious city of Simhapura flourished too. This was the golden age of the Pax Kushana.

This golden age of the Kushans eventually saw its end in the middle of the 4th century, when the Sassanian Empire of Persia defeated the Kushans, annexed much of their territory and reduced them to mere vassals. This event was followed by the western borders of the Indus valley being overrun by vast hordes of horsemen with terrifyingly large oblong heads due to cranial manipulation: the Huns.

The conquest of the Huns left the region perpetually crippled, with many a city and settlement in their path plundered and its people put to the sword. An innumerable number of Buddhist monasteries, stupas and devotional complexes fell into a desolate state, either due to a planned campaign or as a natural consequence of the turbulent invasion.

Buddhism, though still persisting, became the victim of the policies of some Hun rulers. The rule of the Huns finally met its end due to the combined efforts of the Sassanians of Persia and the Turks — the new tribal confederation now emerging from beyond Central Asia — who together put an end to Hun rule and subsequently annexed their territories.

It was during this era of confusion following the decay and disarray left in the wake of continuous military expeditions, when only a few remnants of the once glorious days of the Kushans remained, that the last visitor to Simhapura and the protagonist of our story emerges: a traveller by the name of Xuanzang.

A VISITOR FROM CHINA

Xuanzang was a young man from Eastern China who had joined the ranks of a Buddhist monastic order and ordained himself a monk at the age of 20. As his proficiency as a monk grew, he slowly started to carry with him a great worry about the nature of Buddhist texts present in China and the partial or manipulated knowledge being dispensed on account of improper translations of these texts.

Xuanzang eventually sought to travel to South Asia himself, the region from where many Buddhist texts and treatises were emanating, to collect as many treatises as he could to bring back to China.

Xuanzang’s travelogue, later known as The Great Tang Records of the Western Countries, became one of the most accurate and detailed accounts of Central and South Asia in the 7th century. He started his journey around 629 CE, beginning from western China and travelling deep through the many cities, kingdoms and trade routes of modern Xinjiang into Central Asia. There, after exploring the sites of Buddhist significance between Balkh and Jalalabad, he finally crossed the Khyber Pass and entered today’s Pakistan.

Xuanzang left extensive commentaries on various parts of the region of Gandhara, stretching from Nangarhar in the west to Taxila in the east — a region that occupied the position of utmost significance amongst many Buddhists. This was because it had served as an important vehicle for the transport of Buddhism from South Asia into Central Asia and China, with Gandharan monks going as far as being the first to travel to the Korean peninsula and introducing its people and rulers to Buddhism.

In his south-eastward trek, Xuanzang first came to Peshawar. Here, he started by chalking out an image of the desolation of the once-great capital of the Kushans, where now most towns and villages stood deserted.

He wrote at length about the destroyed Kanishka stupa of Peshawar, which was once amongst the tallest structures of the world, and the ruined great monastery of the city. But alongside the tales of desolation, he also spoke of how, what’s now called the ‘city of flowers’, had a wonderful variety of flowers and fauna even back then. This region, which now produces the best jaggery in the country, was, even then, filled with people fond of extracting sugarcane juice in order to make ‘solid sugar.’

Passing by Charsadda, Swabi and Mardan, Xuanzang then reached Swat, where he lamented how there exist 1,400 monasteries on each side of the Swat River which once housed nearly 18,000 monks but were now in a desolate state, with very few monks left in the valley. From there, he descended upon the plains of Punjab and the ever-illustrious city of Taxila.

Xuanzang penned only a few lines about the climate and people of Taxila in his writings, but he dedicated many pages to what he saw during his wandering in the regions around the city, as he explored many of the great stupas and monasteries around Taxila, and the great tales associated with them. It was here, in the wanderings around Taxila, that he came upon a city called Simhapura.

SIMHAPURA

On May 31, 631 CE, Xuanzang departed from the city of Taxila and, according to his own estimates, trekked nearly 140 miles southwards before finally coming upon a kingdom in the Salt Range, known as Simhapura.

This kingdom, which was subject to the rulers of Kashmir, was estimated to be nearly 1,000 miles in circumference, with its western borders lying upon the Indus River. Within these borders lay the capital city, also known as Simhapura, which he described as being 14 li (a li is a Chinese unit of distance) in circuit, which equates to nearly three miles in circumference.

This measurement, if correct, would make the city larger in size than the ancient city of Taxila which, at the time of Xuanzang, largely consisted of the Sirsukh settlement established by the Kushan kings and which happened to be a mile shorter in circumference.

Xuanzang once again left his work devoid of details regarding the interior of this vast city, but he spoke at length about the natural outlook of the region and important sites in the vicinity of the city. He mentioned the city’s advantage at being constructed in the midst of tall cliffs and crags that imparted to it a natural defence against invading armies — an advantage greatly exploited later on by the free tribes of the Salt Range, who used these natural defences to oppose imperial rule as late as the time of the Delhi Sultans.

He mentioned the climate being cold and the land, as a consequence, not belonging to a stock that could be highly cultivable. Yet still, the region was high in produce. The people of Simhapura he regarded as being fierce. They greatly valued the quality of courage and respected the courageous.

Xuanzang’s account then naturally diverts towards the existence of a once-magnificent stupa south of the city, which was established by Ashoka the Great himself and was further connected to a monastery. But both the mention of the damage to the stupa’s intricate decorations and of the monastery being largely abandoned point towards the trend of Buddhism’s decline in the region.

He then wrote of another of Ashoka’s wonderful stupas and a monastery existing south of the city. This stupa, made of stone, was 200 feet in height and was in close proximity to a collection of 10 interconnected ponds, with lotus flowers floating on their surface and tree foliages drooping towards them and which, according to Xuanzang, housed various kinds of fish and dragons — the dragons being a reference to the mythical Naga creatures that feature heavily in Buddhist literature.

ALONG COME THE EUROPEANS

In 643 CE, Xuanzang returned to China and, in the subsequent years, through imperial patronage, he was able to publish the accounts of his travels. This collection of his travels, The Great Tang Records of the Western Countries, became one of the most popular and well-read texts in China at the time, and it later went on to inspire some of the greatest epics of Chinese literature.

But unbeknownst to the Chinese at the time, over a millennium after being written, this text that contained a collection of Xuanzang’s keen eye for detail, impressive recollections of distances travelled and precise directions, would become a handbook for colonial archaeologists and their hunt for unearthing the history of the regions falling under their dominions.

As early as the 1830s, Ranjit Singh’s Italian mercenary general, Jean Baptiste Ventura (a former Napoleonic soldier), was partaking in crude excavations across significant historical sites in the Sikh Empire. But his excavations only yielded a small collection of ancient coins. Much more significant than the scanty discoveries of his excavations was how his excavations and later writings on his findings were able to inspire like-minded officers serving in neighbouring British India — in particular, a Scotsman named Alexander Cunningham.

An engineer and soldier of the East India Company (EIC), with a keen interest in the antiquity of lands now subservient to his employer, Cunningham had taken his leave from the service after an illustrious career and now dedicated the remainder of his days, taking great inspiration from Ventura, to carrying out excavations in British India, in order to uncover the unknown parts of its history.

In 1861, a department to overlook excavations and archaeology, the Archaeological Survey of India, was established, with Cunningham at its head. Even though the relevance of this body waxed and waned with time, the resources, manpower and authority given to Cunningham through it led to a significant amount of discoveries of archaeological sites across British India, and allowed for him to release extensive commentaries on his findings.

Discussing the antiquity of Punjab in his book The Ancient Geography of India, Cunningham mentioned that if one were to trek beyond a hundred miles south from Taxila, following Xuanzang’s directions, one would inadvertently arrive at the village of Sangohi in Jhelum. Sangohi, despite its name bearing a tinge of resemblance to Simhapura, could not be the city Xuanzang was talking about here, since Sangohi was located in a plain region and wasn’t surrounded by cliffs.

However, the further existence of a set of ponds and important religious structures took Cunningham’s eyes elsewhere. “The vicinity of ten pools of limpid water,” wrote Cunningham, “with surrounding temples and sculptures points towards the holy tanks of Ketaksh or Ketas, which are still visited by crowds of pilgrims from all parts of India.”

Cunningham believed that, even though Xuanzang’s estimated distance from Taxila to the city far exceeded the location of Ketas (modern day Katas Raj), the region was still a perfect contender for the title of Simhapura, on account of how only this region in the small tract of land south of Taxila could both satisfy the cold climate of Simhapura as well as have a set of ponds or water tanks nearby.

Even though Cunningham was never able to conduct proper excavations in Katas Raj to verify his claims, later scholars also went on to argue that the peculiar lack of detail given to the proposed distance, and the absence of details of the interior of the city, could mean that Xuanzang perhaps himself never visited the city but rather relied on information of the city procured by a native in Taxila.

Cunningham’s research still managed to delimit the possible existence of the city in a triangular tract of land in the Chakwal district of Punjab, between the three sites of Dulmial, Murti and Katas.

NEW DISCOVERIES

The 20th century was marked by colossal archaeological breakthroughs regarding the Indus Valley. Archaeologists discovered networks of extensive cities and proposed the existence of a massive Bronze Age civilisation that once flourished in the region.

They discovered and catalogued nearly all the major stupas, temples, settlements and sites in the illustrious Buddhist heartland of Gandhara in Punjab and the erstwhile North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), thoroughly excavated an entire ancient Greek settlement in Taxila.

In the 1970s, with the construction of the Karakoram Highway, archaeologists discovered the ancient highway that once carried people across Central and South Asia. They also discovered more than 30,000 petroglyphs near Chilas.

In all the laborious pursuits behind these massive breakthroughs, many of which took help from Xuanzang’s work, not much thought was given to the stories of Simhapura, a city now relegated more to myth than reality. Yet, in 2018, nearly 150 years after Cunningham’s initial report in his book of the city having existed somewhere in the Salt Range of Punjab, a group of Pakistani archaeologists began a survey in the Salt Range, to scour the area for any clues that could point them in the direction of the city.

They deduced three contenders in the Salt Range, owing to the presence of certain elements mentioned by Xuanzang, as having a potential connection to the lost city. These were Katas Raj, Murti and a set of unexplored mounds called Sheranwali Sarkaar.

Since ancient times, the story of a saddened Shiva’s teardrop falling on this piece of land in the Potohar and forming a pond had attracted Hindus towards the site of Katas Raj, which boasts of a large complex of Hindu temples built around the pond, but hidden amongst the splendour of the temples. The site also displays the remains of a square base of a Buddhist stupa that, inadvertently, according to the Pakistani archaeologists, was one of the two stupas mentioned by Xuanzang to be at the south of the city.

Sitting nearby, the other site of Murti also contains the remains of a Hindu temple as well as a Buddhist stupa and, though any standing body of water there is now used for sewage purposes, there were a set of clear water pools there for till at least the 1930s.

Once done with assessments and research in the former two places, the archaeologists finally came to the very last spot: the shrine known as Sheranwali Sarkaar. Present in the form of a newly built shrine, the site exists in the shadows of two large mounds that are home to a collection of graves from an unknown period.

The name of the shrine references a lion [sher], much like the ‘simha’ in Simhapura. Some locals still refer to the place as ‘Sangi’, which archaeologists debate could either be a reference to sangi as in stone, or sangha for a Buddhist monastery, or simply a word for a companion.

However, far beyond the similarities of nomenclature and linguistics, the most compelling links the site could possibly have with Simhapura are established due to two discoveries. Firstly, the mounds characteristically exhibit a look reminiscent of the early stupas of the region that were circular in shape with a dome-like appearance, and were, for the most part, present in and around large settlements and cities. The second link, according to these archaeologists, is that this site of Sheranwali Sarkaar was north of Katas Raj — where Xuanzang’s first stupa is believed to be — and northwest of Murti — the site of Xuanzang’s second stupa — and therefore could be the most likely location of Simhapura. These coordinates would also almost completely align with the directions that our Chinese friend had left behind 1,400 years ago.

Unfortunately, little work has occurred since the publication of the findings of these archaeologists, though through no fault of their own, as excavations of this scale haven’t been seen in Pakistan for decades. To unearth an entire city requires greatly skilled manpower and extensive planning.

In this grand saga spanning 1,400 years, where people of every epoch have revealed more and more about this lost city, our generation has also made its contribution in helping us inch closer to discovering Simhapura. However, whether we get to see Simhapura unearthed in our lifetime, only time will tell.

The writer’s areas of interest are Pakistan’s lesser-known history and folklore. He is a Chitrali based in Peshawar.
X: MHuzaifaNizam

Header image: illustration by Sarah Durrani

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 29th, 2024