272 F. S. Growse — Bulandsliahr Antiquities. [No. 4, 



the time of Aurangzeb — Muhammadans by religion, who believe that their 

 ancestors were the priests employed by Janamejaya to conduct his sacrifice, 

 and that in return for their services they had a grant of the township and 

 the surrounding villages. Immediately after this event it is said that the 

 Pandavas transferred their seat of local government from Ahar to Baran, 

 and it may be that they then first attached the prefix alii to the name of 

 the town — so making it Ahibaran — in order to commemorate the circum- 

 stances of the migration. This would imply that the town was already in 

 existence ; and it might with much plausibility be identified with the Varan- 

 avata,* mentioned in the 143rd chapter of the first Book of the Maha- 

 bharat. 



All this, however, is conjectural and refers to a period so remote, nearly 

 1400 years before Christ, that no tangible record of it could be expected 

 to survive to the present day. To come down to somewhat later times .- 

 the Baetrian dynasty, which flourished in the centuries immediately pre- 

 ceding our era, and the Gupta dynasty that succeeded it, have both left 

 traces behind them in their coins ;f the second also in a copper -plate in- 

 scription that will be mentioned further on. When the Tomars of Kanauj 

 extended their sovereignty over all Upper India, it may be that the 

 legendary Parmal ruled under them at Baran ; but at the time of 

 Mahmud's invasion, in 1017, when Kanauj was still the capital, and Delhi 

 in all probability had not yet been re-built, Baran was certainly the seat 

 of a Dor Raja, by name Hardatt, who — as stated in the Tarikh-i-Yamini — 

 averted its threatened destruction by professing to be a convert to Islam. 

 His dominion extended at least as far as Merath and Kol, for at each of 

 those places he had a fort, for which he paid a large ransom in money and 

 elephants. Indeed from traditions extant at other localities it would seem 

 that the Dor Raja of Baran was the head of all that clan, which for about 

 two centuries supplied rulers for the whole of the territory included in the 

 present districts of Merath, Aligarh, and Bulandshahr, with parts of Murada- 

 bad, Mathura and Eta. When Kol was finally reduced by the Muham- 

 madans in the reign of Nasir-uddin Mahmud (1246-1265 A. D.), it was 

 under a Dor Raja, and the tower, which was wantonly destroyed by the 

 local authorities in 1860, is generally supposed to have been erected in 1274 

 A. D. on the site of the principal temple of the old city. Among the 



* General Cunningham, however, proposes to identify with the Varanavata of the 

 Mahabharat a village now called Barnawa, in the Merath district. It has not yet heen 

 explored and it is therefore uncertain whether it is really an ancient site or not. 



t [Two copper coins of Su-Hermaeus (Kadphises), one gold coin of Chandra 

 Gupta II, and one gold coin of a dynasty intermediate between the Guptas and the Indo- 

 scythians, presented by Mr. Growse, and now in the Society's Cabinet, were found on 

 the hill side, mentioned on p. 271. See Proceedings, A. S. B. for June, 1878. Ed.] 



