272 F. S. Growse—Bulandshahr 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 ahi to the name of 
the town—so making it Ahibaran—in order to commemorate the cirecum- 
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 148rd 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 Bactrian 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;+ 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 
Mahmid’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 Térikh-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 Murdda- 
bad, Mathura and Eta. When Kol was finally reduced by the Muham- 
madans in the reign of Nasir-uddin Mahmiid (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 Barndwa, in the Merath district. It has not yet been 
explored and it is therefore uncertain whether it is really an ancient site or not. 
¢ [Two copper coins of Su-Hermacus (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, Ep.] 
