Tirabhukti and the early-medieval regional order

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regional order From Videha to Tirabhukti: a change of scale Tīrabhukti, later Tirhut, became a durable administrative and regional name for north Bihar, but it should not be treated as a timeless replacement for Videha or Mithila. The terms belong to different archives and scales. Videha is prominent in Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist, Jain, and epic traditions; Tīrabhukti becomes especially visible in Gupta and early-medieval administrative records; Mithila grows in importance as a literary, scholastic, and regional name whose later reach cannot simply be projected backward. The safest history therefore asks when each name is actually attested, what kind of source uses it, and whether the source is naming a province, a city-centred administrative unit, a cultural region, or a remembered homeland. A later equivalence between Tirhut and Mithila is historically real without proving that every early-medieval document used the two words as exact synonyms (Sircar 1971; Salomon 1998; Thakur 1988). The Basarh seals and the first firm administrative archive The excavations at Basarh, identified with ancient Vaiśālī, recovered a remarkable group of clay seals and sealings that makes Gupta-period Tīrabhukti unusually visible. The material includes the seal of Mahādevī Dhruvasvāminī, wife of Chandragupta II and mother of Govindagupta, along with official sealings connected with the establishment of the yuvarāja or crown prince. Read together, these finds show that Vaiśālī was not only a place of ancient republican and Buddhist memory; in the Gupta period it also functioned as a centre of provincial administration. Sealings are not narrative chronicles. Their strength lies in naming offices, establishments, persons, and institutional relationships in a securely archaeological 206 urban context (Bloch 1906; Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. III, revised ed. 1981). Vaiśālī as headquarters: strong inference, bounded claim The Basarh record has often been summarized by saying that Vaiśālī was the capital of Tīrabhukti. That is a reasonable description of the administrative concentration revealed by the seals, but the word capital can imply more than the evidence establishes. What the sealings directly support is the presence of provincial and crown-prince establishments at the site, including offices whose jurisdiction related to Tīrabhukti. They do not provide a surveyed p