Kalinga Ancient Trade Routes

Jaugada

Strongly Supported Archaeology

Jaugada is a ruined fort in south Odisha with Ashoka's orders carved on a big granite rock. Old pots, tiles and coins lie all over the ground inside its earth wall.

Jaugada is a ruined fort in south Odisha. It stands on the bank of the Rushikulya river. Inside it, a huge slab of granite carries thirteen of Ashoka’s edicts. They were cut about 250 BCE [The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09), 1908, p.72].

Old pots, tiles and coins lie scattered inside the fort’s earth wall. Archaeologists found a full iron-using culture here. They also found beads of agate, carnelian, crystal and quartz, plus old punch-marked coins [Patra, n.d., p.109].

One writer links the edicts here to the port of Palur, another old trading port down the coast. This suggests Jaugada was part of the same network of towns [Patra, n.d., p.113].

For scholars

No modern edition of the edicts has been checked for this entry yet. A 1925 scholarly edition still needs to confirm the exact wording. The dig behind these finds happened in 1956-57. That report was not read directly here. This entry relies on a later summary of it instead [Patra, n.d., p.109].

Facts

Site type
fortified early historic settlement with Ashokan rock edicts
Coordinates
19.52°, 84.83°
[The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09), 1908]
  1. *The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09)*. 1908. public domain
Modern name
Jaugada, Ganjam district, Odisha
Excavated by
Archaeological Survey of India (Indian Archaeology: A Review 1956-57, cited in OHRJ XLVII(2) n. 14; report not consulted)

Key finds

  • Ashokan rock edicts

    Thirteen edicts of Ashoka cut into a granite outcrop inside the fort - the only Ashokan edicts in the old Madras Presidency, and the southern twin of the Dhauli set.

    [The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09), 1908, vol. XIV, p. 72]; [District Gazetteers (Cuttack, Puri, Ganjam, Balasore), British-era editions, n.d., O'Malley, Puri (1908), p. 28]
    1. *The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09)*. 1908. public domain , vol. XIV, p. 72
    2. *District Gazetteers (Cuttack, Puri, Ganjam, Balasore), British-era editions*. n.d. public domain , O'Malley, Puri (1908), p. 28

  • Copper coins of the first century CE

    Coins found inside the fort wall show the city was still lived in and trading centuries after Ashoka.

    [The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09), 1908, vol. XIV, p. 73]
    1. *The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09)*. 1908. public domain , vol. XIV, p. 73

  • Punch-marked and Puri-Kushana coins

    Two coin families that circulated widely in eastern India, tying the site to inland and coastal exchange.

    [Patra, n.d., p. 109]
    1. Sushanta Kumar Patra, Benudhar Patra. *Archaeology and the Maritime History of Ancient Orissa*. in Orissa Historical Research Journal XLVII. n.d. , p. 109

  • Knobbed vessels and semi-precious stone beads

    Beads of agate, carnelian, crystal and quartz, and knobbed pottery of the kind traded across the Bay of Bengal.

    [Patra, n.d., p. 109]
    1. Sushanta Kumar Patra, Benudhar Patra. *Archaeology and the Maritime History of Ancient Orissa*. in Orissa Historical Research Journal XLVII. n.d. , p. 109
Scholar notes

No critical edition of the edicts was consulted: Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum I (1925) still needs to be cited for the text, so ashoka-separate-edicts is deliberately not listed among the source_refs. The Imperial Gazetteer's latitude is hard to read in the archive.org scan; 19 deg 31' is adopted because OHRJ p. 109 prints the same minutes (its '10 deg 31' N' is an obvious misprint for 19 deg 31'). The excavation behind OHRJ's account is IAR 1956-57, which was not read.

  1. *The Imperial Gazetteer of India, new edition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907-09)*. 1908. public domain , vol. XIV, pp. 72-73, 'Jaugada' ('Ruined fort in Ganjam District, Madras, situated in 19 deg 31' N. and 84 deg 50' E., about 18 miles west of Ganjam town, on the north bank of the Rushikulya ... a huge granite mass, on which are inscribed thirteen edicts of the Buddhist emperor Asoka (about 250 B.C.).')
  2. Sushanta Kumar Patra, Benudhar Patra. *Archaeology and the Maritime History of Ancient Orissa*. in Orissa Historical Research Journal XLVII. n.d. , p. 109 ('At Jaugada ... the excavation has revealed a full-fledged iron-using culture' with plain and painted pottery, knobbed vessels, iron implements and beads of shell, bone, agate, crystal, carnelian and quartz; punch-marked and Puri-Kushana coins; an earthen rampart. Linked by the authors to Palur.)
  3. *District Gazetteers (Cuttack, Puri, Ganjam, Balasore), British-era editions*. n.d. public domain , O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers: Puri (1908), pp. 28-29 (Ashoka inscribed at Dhauli rock-edicts I-X and XIII, and 'Besides these general edicts, he also inscribed two edicts, known as the Kalinga edicts, in which he laid down principles for the administration of the newly conquered province'; the Jaugada version is treated alongside the Dhauli one.)