Few city names in India carry as much weight as Ayodhya. In modern times it has become inseparable from a long and painful religious-political dispute. But the city’s history reaches back far beyond those later centuries, into the deep past of the Gangetic plains. This article looks only at that earlier story — Ayodhya before the medieval era — drawing on archaeology, inscriptions and the accounts of ancient travellers. It deliberately stops before the medieval and modern controversies, which lie outside its scope.

What emerges is a portrait of a very old city that was, for much of its early history, sacred to several traditions at once.

Saketa: the city’s older name

One of the first things to understand is that, in the earliest non-legendary records, the city was known not as Ayodhya but as Saketa. The name “Ayodhya” appears in the great Sanskrit epics — the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — as the capital of the legendary Ikshvaku kings of Kosala, including Rama. But the earliest datable, non-religious Sanskrit texts, such as the grammarian Panini’s work and Patanjali’s commentary on it, refer to the city as Saketa. So do the earliest Buddhist Pali texts and Jain Prakrit texts, which describe Saketa as an important city of the Kosala mahajanapada.

Scholars generally agree that Saketa and the present-day Ayodhya are the same place, identified through topographical clues in these ancient texts. From the Gupta period onward, the two names came to be used for the same city, and the older name Saketa gradually gave way to Ayodhya.

A great city of Kosala

In the first millennium BCE, Saketa was a significant urban centre in the kingdom of Kosala, one of the major states of the northern plains. Archaeology supports a long, continuous occupation: excavations at the site have revealed layers belonging to the Northern Black Polished Ware culture (broadly the first millennium BCE), followed by remains from the Shunga, Kushan and Gupta periods — terracotta figurines, pottery, beads, and structural remains in brick. The Greek geographer Ptolemy even mentions the city, under a Greek rendering of the name Saketa, in his geographical writings.

The city’s strategic position along trade routes and on the Sarayu (Ghaghara) River helped make it prosperous, and it features repeatedly in early literature as a place of wealth and importance.

A shared sacred city

Perhaps the most striking feature of early Ayodhya/Saketa is how many traditions held it sacred at once. The early Buddhist and Jain texts record that both the Buddha and Mahavira are said to have visited and stayed in the city. Buddhist sources describe the Buddha residing there and delivering discourses, and the city remained an important Buddhist centre for many centuries.

For Jains, the city’s significance is even more foundational: Jain tradition holds Ayodhya to be the birthplace of several tirthankaras (the spiritual teachers of Jainism), including the very first, Rishabhanatha. And in the Hindu tradition, the city is revered above all as the setting of the Ramayana and the capital of Rama — and it is counted among the seven most sacred cities of Hinduism.

This layering of sanctity across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions is not a contradiction but a reflection of how ancient Indian sacred geography often worked: important places accumulated meaning across multiple faiths over the centuries.

What the Chinese pilgrims saw

Some of the most concrete early descriptions of the city come, once again, from the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims who travelled across India. Faxian, in the early fifth century CE, recorded Buddhist monasteries in the area — a sign that it was an active Buddhist centre in his day. The tradition also associates the city with a stupa said to have been founded by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, pointing to a Buddhist presence stretching back to the Mauryan age.

Two centuries after Faxian, Xuanzang visited in the seventh century and described monasteries and stupas as well. By his time the city was known as Ayodhya, and his account, together with inscriptions, helps trace how its religious character evolved across the centuries.

The Gupta city and the rise of the Rama tradition

A significant development came during the Gupta period. An inscription from the reign of Kumaragupta I, dated to the fifth century CE, names Ayodhya as the capital of the Kosala province and records religious donations to Brahmins there. According to some sources, a Gupta ruler moved his royal court to Ayodhya, and the city enjoyed renewed prominence in this era. It was during the Gupta age that the ancient city of Saketa came to be firmly identified with the legendary Ayodhya of the Ramayana.

Historians who have studied the development of the Rama tradition, such as Hans Bakker, have traced how reverence for Rama and the growth of Ayodhya as a major Rama pilgrimage centre developed and intensified over the following centuries. The city’s sacred associations, in other words, were not static; they grew, shifted and deepened across a very long span of time, as religious traditions themselves evolved.

A note on what comes later

The medieval and modern history of Ayodhya — including the construction of later religious buildings, the long dispute that followed, and its eventual legal and political resolution — is a vast, sensitive and heavily contested subject in its own right. It is also a subject where reasonable people, and serious scholars, disagree, and where claims must be weighed with great care. This article has deliberately confined itself to the earlier story, before those medieval centuries, where the archaeological and textual record allows a clearer view.

Why the early history matters

Seen through the lens of its deep past, Ayodhya emerges as one of the truly ancient cities of the Gangetic plains — a Kosala capital known to grammarians and Greek geographers, a place woven into the foundational stories of three of India’s great religious traditions, and a centre that drew pilgrims and travellers from across Asia. That early, layered, multi-faith history is a remarkable inheritance in its own right, and it deserves to be remembered alongside the more recent chapters with which the city’s name is now so often associated.

Sources

  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ayodhya” (britannica.com)
  • Archaeological Survey of India excavation summaries and the work of B. B. Lal on “Archaeology of the Ramayana Sites”
  • Hans Bakker, Ayodhya (scholarly study of the city’s religious history), as summarised in academic literature
  • Accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang, as preserved in translations and surveys
  • Karamdanda (Karmdand) inscription of Kumaragupta I, as discussed in epigraphic studies