Bihar during the Mahabharata period
For the purpose of elucidating the difficulties of Indian chronology the empire of
All the Purana are supposed to have been recited soon after the war of the Mahabharat and the iron age or “Kaliyug” to have commenced at that period. Those poems consequently only relate to events supposed to have happened in the former or third age excepting in the chapters delivered as prophetic in which the history of the dynasties which followed are brought down to different periods in different Purana.
The names of the princes in each dynasty their number and the length of time during which the dynasty subsisted are usually recorded but from the inaccuracy of transcribers in all probability these data can rarely be forced into coincidence. The reign of Chandragupta, king of
After the extinction of the lunar race on the throne of Magadha, two dynasties, one of five and another of ten princes, are then supposed to have reigned during 498 years, until the accession of Mahanandi, whose posterity, about 100 years later, were dethroned, in the revolution which terminated in the elevation of Chandragupta, or Sandrocottus, about 3 1 5 years B.C.
Such, it appears that Indians had of their own chronology. The posterity of Sandrocottus only filled the throne about 100 years; his descendant Vrihadratha was dethroned by the commander of his forces, whose posterity reigned above a century. It must then have been in the century preceding the Christian era, which the last of that race was dethroned by his minister Vasudeva, who transmitted the crown to his descendants. The Andhrajatiya is the last dynasty recorded. On the death of Puliman, which, as fixed by the historians of