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60 INDIA AS DESCRIBED IN EARLY TEXTS
(ii, 30.25) it may be taken to have formed then the upper or northern division of the district of Midnapore, while Vajjabhūmi with Tāmalitti (Tamaralipta, modern Tamluk on the western bank of the Rupnarayan), the lower or southern division. Tāmalitti (also spelt as Tāmalitthi), which seems to have stood formerly at the mouth of the Ganges, was a great sea-port town of the time. It is said that Asoka reached it from Pāțaliputta by crossing the Ganges and then traversing the Viñjhātavi.1 Sumbha mentioned in the early Pali texts with Setaka, Sedaka or Desaka asits important town would seem to have been a locality other than onc corresponding to Subbha or Suhma. Hiuen Tsang speaks of a Svetapura, obviously the same name as the Pali Setaka, which lay within the Vajji territory, 80 or 90 li south from the neighbourhood of Vesāli.2
As for Pundra or Pundravardhana (identified with the modern district and town of Bogra), it lay, according to the Divyāvadāna, to the east of the Pundakakşa (Pundrakakşa) hill, and according to Hiuen Tsang, about 100 li east from the northern end of Kajargala across the Ganges, say, from the isolated hill at Sakrigalli. A Brāhmi inscription on a circular stone seal of the Maurya Age, found at Mahāsthāngarh near the town of Bogra, mentions Punara as a
1 Law, Geography, p. 68. * Beal, op. cit., i, p. 75.