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city. When or under what circumstances the capital was removed from Girinagar, where Parñadatta, the Gupta governor evidently had his head-quarters, it is difficult to say. It has been suggested that the capital was removed as the bursting of the Sudarśana lake was a standing menace to its safety, as shown by two previous records thereto; one in 150 A.D. and the other in 455 A.D. But this is not sufficiently convincing.
After asserting his independence, Bhațārka seems to have transferred his capital from Girinagar to Valabhi. This is confirmed by the epigraphical records, which suggest that Girinagar had lost its importance. We get references of the Brāhmaṇas who migrated from Girinagar and settled down at various places round about Valabhi. One of such examples from the Valabhi grants is found in the Aộastu Plates (EI, XXII, p. 114) where the donee had migrated from Girinagar and resided at Sraddhikā. According to the Bombay Gazetteer (I, Pt. I, p. 96) "its (Valabhi's) choice as a capital was probably due to its being a harbour on the Bhavnagar creek. The place was not so much inland as it is now. Since the days of Valabhi kings the silt which thickly covers the ruins, has also filled and choked the channel which once united it with the Bhavnagar creek when Ghālā was probably a fair-sized river,”
An unusually large number of records ( copper-plates) of this family have come to light which enable us to reconstruct the geneology and chronology of the kings with a fair degree of certainty; but these records contain little else of historical value.
The final overthrow of the Imperial Gupta dynasty between A.D. 550 and 570, fully explains the absence of all references to its suzerainty in Valabhi records since the time of Guhasena. It is probably for this reason that in later records of the family, since the time of Sīlāditya I ( 606 A.D.), the conventional geneology of the royal family as given in the land-grants begins with Guhasena, descended from Bhațārka, the names of all the intervening rulers being omitted altogether.-(R. C. Majumdar, The Classical Age, pp. 60-63).
Towards the close of the sixth century A.D., Valabhi had become the most powerful kingdom in Western India. Hiuen Tsang pays high compliments to king Sīlāditya of Mo-la-po, i.e. of Western Malwa as “a monarch of great administrative ability and of rare kindness and compassion." At the time of the Chinese pilgrim's visit in 640 A.D., Dhruvasena II, the nephew of Silāditya, was the king of Valabhi.
It was during the reign of Dhruvasena II, Bālāditya, who was the son-in-law of Harsavardhana of Kanauj that Hiuen Tsang visited India. The Valabhi king was a sincere believer in Buddhism, and he attended the religious assembly convoked by Sri Harşavardhana at Prayāga and probably also at Kanauj, early in 643 A.D. During the greater part of the reign of Harşavardhana, Valabhi was a powerful and independent kingdom and exercised supremacy over Northern Gujarat and a part of Malwa.
Valabhipura was a city of power, wealth and culture. It had a large library of sacred books. Sthiramati and Gunamati, two Buddhist monks, had composed their
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