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AN EARLY HISTORY OF ORISSA
(iii) "He brings into the capital the canal excavated by king Nanda 300 years before", as has been proposed by K. P. Jayaswal and R. D. Banerji.1
Now, according to K. P. Jayaswal, the year in this passage may be taken as referring to the Nanda era mentioned by Al-Biruni in Tahqiq-i-Hind. Pargiter places accession of the first Nanda ruler approximately in B. C. 402, calculating back from the accession of Chandragupta Maurya in B. C. 322, by adding $0 years as the duration of the reign period of the nine Nanda kings. According to this estimate the canal excavated by the Nanda king in Kalinga would be in (402-103) 299 B. C. But then it would be too late to ascribe the public work to Mahāpadma Nanda because he was ousted in about 322 B.C. from the throne. Even if we take the puranic account of one hundred years as the duration of the Nanda kings (i. e. 88 years for Mahāpadma and 12 years for his sons) then we reach (322 + 100-103) 319 B. C. as the year of excavation of the acqueduct which too is absure. R. D. Banerji believes that the canal may have been excavated by the first king of the Nanda house 103 years before the fifth year of Kharavela's reign, viz., 108 years before his accession. Agreeing with K. P. Jayaswal, he takes the era to be counted from 458 B. C. Hence the canal was
1. JBORS, III, 1917, pp. 425 f.
2. There is hardly any unanimity among our authorities-Pauranic, Buddhist and Jaina, regarding the reign period of Ugrasena Mahāpadma Nanda and also the total duration of the rule of his house. The Matsya Purana assigns 88 years (ashasiti) to the reign of the first Nanda, but some Mss. of the Vayu Purana, which is the oldest work of this class and is referred to by Bana in the seventh century A. D., the first Nanda ruled for 28 years (ashṭāvim sati). According to Taranatha, Nanda reigned for 29 years (Ind. Ant., 1875, p. 362). But the Buddhist chronicles of Ceylon inform us that the Nandas ruled only for 22 years, whereas the Jaina traditions put the reign period to 155 years.
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