Ancient India's sixteen great states, and the one that swallowed the rest
Around the time of the Buddha, northern India was a patchwork of sixteen great kingdoms and republics, spread across a belt running from Gandhara near the Indus to Anga far to the east. Buddhist and Jain texts cannot agree on which sixteen they were. What is clear is how the story ended: one of them, Magadha, absorbed its rivals.
The Mahājanapadas flourished from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, during what historians call the second urbanisation, when India built its first large cities since the Indus Valley civilisation. It was also the age of the śramaṇa movements, Buddhism and Jainism among them, which challenged Vedic orthodoxy. Archaeologists link the period partly to a pottery style known as Northern Black Polished Ware. Most states were monarchies, but two were probably aristocratic republics called gaṇasaṅghas.
The word janapada means roughly the foothold of a people, recalling the time when a tribe, or jana, took land and settled; in Pāṇini's grammar it simply means country. The lists vary. The Anguttara Nikaya names sixteen; the Digha Nikaya gives only twelve, leaving out Gandhara and Avanti among others; one later Buddhist text slots in Kalinga and swaps in the Yona. A Jain sutra offers a different sixteen, focused on the middle and east, and scholars judge it a later and less reliable list.
Each state had its own character. Anga was a trading power whose merchants sailed to distant Suvarnabhumi. Avanti, split by the Narmada river and centred on Ujjaini, was a major Buddhist centre. Gandhara, watered by the Indus, had its later capital at Taksashila, whose university drew students from far away and is credited with producing Pāṇini and Kautilya. The Kambojas, straddling the Hindu Kush, had both Iranian and Indian affinities and a republican tradition noted in the Mahabharata and Kautilya's Arthashastra.
In the struggle for dominance during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, Magadha pulled ahead. Its king Bimbisara annexed Anga, his only conquest, and a later Magadhan ruler defeated Avanti's king Nandivardhana. Around 345 BCE the Nandas seized the Magadhan throne, and the Puranas bitterly accuse Mahapadma Nanda of wiping out the old warrior aristocracy.
Source: Mahajanapadas
