The Indian kingdom that helped persuade Alexander's army to turn back
When Alexander's troops reached Punjab after nearly a decade of marching, they heard of a kingdom to the east whose army was said to be five times the size of their own. Exhausted and homesick, they mutinied. Most historians identify that feared realm with the Nanda Empire, centred on Pataliputra near modern Patna.
The Nandas ruled Magadha and the Gangetic plains in 4th-century BCE northeastern India, building on the Haryanka and Shaishunaga dynasties before them. They ran a more centralised administration, and ancient writers credit them with enormous wealth, probably thanks to a new currency and tax system. Greek authors knew their realm as the land of the Gangaridae and Prasii, the latter probably from a Sanskrit word for easterners, with its capital at Palibothra, generally accepted as Pataliputra. Their territory seems to have run from Punjab to Odisha, probably taking in Avanti in central India.
Origins were a sore point. Greek, Roman and Jain writers all describe the founder as a barber's son. The Roman historian Curtius, relaying what King Porus told Alexander, adds that the barber won the queen's favour, killed the king and seized power as a supposed guardian. The Puranas instead make the founder, Mahapadma, a son of a Shaishunaga king by a Shudra mother, while Buddhist texts call the family of unknown lineage and cast the founder as a frontiersman who led a band of robbers. Because two independent traditions agree on the barber story, historians treat it as the more reliable account.
Almost nothing about their chronology is settled. All three Indian traditions count nine Nanda kings but disagree on names. The Matsya Purana gives the first king alone 88 years, some Vayu Purana manuscripts give the whole dynasty 40, and the scholar Taranatha offers 29. Modern estimates range from c. 344 to 322 BCE, based on a Sri Lankan tradition of 22 years, to a Jain reckoning stretching from 467 BCE to 312 BCE. One astronomical theory puts the first king's accession in 424 BCE.
Ancient texts also portray the Nandas as unpopular, blaming their humble birth, heavy taxes and misconduct. The last king, Dhana Nanda, was overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya, whose Maurya Empire went on to dominate the Ganges valley. The Nandas' likely hold on Avanti helped make Chandragupta's conquest of Gujarat possible.
Source: Nanda Empire
