The Mauryan Pillared Hall at Kumhrar in Patna Stood on Eighty Polished Sandstone Columns, Was Located on 7 February 1913, and the ASI Began Uncovering Its Pillars Again on 1 December 2024

The Mauryan pillared hall at Kumhrar, in eastern Patna, had eighty polished sandstone columns, each a single piece of stone, set in rows 15 feet apart. D. B. Spooner of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) located it on 7 February 1913, one month after his dig began, and on 1 December 2024 the ASI’s Director General started uncovering some of its buried pillars again.

The old excavation reports spell the place Kumrahar and the 2024 news reports spell it Kumhrar. Both mean the same ruins, which lie inside the ancient capital Pataliputra.

How broken stone gave up a hall

The archaeologist Disha Ahluwalia writes that L. A. Waddell conducted the first excavation in Patna, between 1892 and 1899. Spooner’s report says Waddell inferred from the polished stone fragments at Kumrahar that the spot held the column of Ashoka which the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang called the “Nili” column.

Spooner’s first report, printed in the ASI’s annual report for 1912 to 1913, says that idea fell apart quickly. The polished fragments could not all have come from one pillar. His team found three piles of stone pieces in a straight line, 15 feet apart from centre to centre, and trial pits dug at the same distance in every direction found more piles. That settled that a large pillared hall had stood there.

The report puts the discovery on 7 February, a month after the work began, and Live History India’s account of the dig gives the same date. Ratan Tata of Bombay agreed to finance the Pataliputra excavation. John Marshall, the Survey’s Director General, wrote in the same volume that it was the first time a private individual had offered to bear the cost of one of the great city excavations.

By the end of that first season Spooner had mapped eight rows of ten columns, all 15 feet apart. He called the hall one of exceptional size and said he could not yet fix its full extent.

Stone shafts on a bed of clay and timber

Spooner described the columns as polished monoliths about 3 feet 6 inches across at the base, made of Chunar sandstone, with no capitals and no pedestals. He thought they were not less than 20 feet tall. The 1951 to 1955 excavators later measured how the shaft narrows from base to top and worked out a height nearer 32 feet.

The roof was timber. Spooner found that logs of sal wood rested directly on the stone, held down by metal bolts that went about a foot into the top of each column, which he took to be copper. The beams were joined with iron nails six to eight inches or more in length, and the plinth and floor were wood. He put the floor some 17 feet below the modern surface.

Digging 38 years later, Altekar and Mishra explained how the pillars stood. Each sat in a foundation trench about five feet square and roughly five to six feet deep. At the bottom lay a bed of blue clay, then a wooden base about four and a half feet square, made of beams, then the column. About nine feet of each shaft was below the plinth, and that buried part was polished as carefully as the part in view. The report offers no firm reason, and suggests the stones may have been dressed before the plan of the hall was final.

Seventy-two, then eighty, then four more

The K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute in Patna ran five seasons at Kumrahar from 1951 to 1955. A. S. Altekar was its honorary director and Vijayakanta Mishra the field director, and their report appeared in 1959.

Spooner’s plan had marked the sites of 72 columns. The Jayaswal Institute team found the places of eight more, completing the seventh and eighth rows to ten each, and concluded the hall had eighty pillars in all. Four more stood at the entrance, probably in a porch. Trenches to the west and south turned up no further pillars.

Most of the stones were gone by the time of the digs. Spooner had thought the missing pillars sank into the ground. Altekar and Mishra answered that the pits were uneven in plan, not round, and that the foundation clay under them was undisturbed. In their reading, this was the work of later stone robbers who pulled out the stumps from below ground.

A layer of ash about a foot thick covered the hall area. The report takes it as the remains of the burnt wooden floor and roof and dates the fire early in the Sunga period, within a span of about 150 BCE to 100 CE. Chips of the polished stone lay in Sunga-period layers across the site, and the authors suggest the Yavana invasion mentioned in the Gargi Samhita as the likely cause. That view replaced an older one that put the burning after the Gupta age.

A Persian model or an Indian first attempt

Spooner saw a likeness between his plan and the hall of a hundred columns at Persepolis and wrote that it pointed to a probable connection. He later argued for a Zoroastrian phase in Indian history, in a paper of 1915, a theory that Ahluwalia says was never firmly supported.

A second reading came in 1959. In the authors’ view, the evidence then available suggested the hall was probably the earliest large stone-pillared building raised by Indian builders, who had little experience of such structures. Ashoka’s monolithic pillars were set six to seven feet into the ground, and the builders of the hall may have felt a roof needed deeper footings.

Whose hall, and for what

The ASI’s 2024 statement calls the building the Asokan Sabhgar, Ashoka’s assembly hall. Altekar and Mishra wrote that it was probably built under Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the dynasty.

Its purpose is less certain still. Sujeet Nayan, the ASI’s Patna Circle Superintending Archaeologist, said at the December 2024 start of work that the hall is believed to have been used by Ashoka for the Third Buddhist Council in the 3rd century BCE. The 1959 report records the tradition differently: it places the council at the Asokarama monastery in Pataliputra. Trenches near the hall found Buddhist monasteries going back to the Sunga period, but none from the Mauryan age. The team had expected administrative buildings and found none.

The report also rejects the idea that this hall was the palace seen by the Chinese pilgrim Fa Hien. He described a palace with several halls and carved, inlaid work, while Kumrahar has one hall, destroyed long before his visit. Ashoka’s own record is in Ashoka the Great.

South of the hall, Spooner found seven long platforms of 30-foot sal logs, 20 feet and more below the modern surface. He left their purpose undetermined and dismissed the popular idea that they were landing stages for pleasure barges. Altekar and Mishra found a canal south of the hall that was dug in the Mauryan period. From it they conjectured a broad wooden staircase for distinguished visitors arriving by boat, and a waterway along which the pillars could have been floated in from the Chunar quarries. Both ideas are their conjecture, not a finding.

The city around it

Pataliputra’s defences are described in Greek text and have been traced in several digs. Strabo’s Geography, in H. L. Jones’s translation, describes Palibothra as 80 stadia long and 15 wide, in the shape of a parallelogram, with a wooden wall pierced for arrows and a trench in front that served for defence and for the city’s sewage. Our Chandragupta Maurya article covers that text and the part Megasthenes plays in it.

On the ground, the 1959 report lists timber remains of the palisade at Lohanipur, Bulandibagh, Bahadurpur, Kumrahar and other places in Patna. A dig at Bulandibagh in 1926 and 1927 uncovered a section about 230 feet long, with two rows of uprights 14 feet 6 inches apart. It also sets the city’s moat beside the rules for forts in the Arthashastra. Apart from two trenches, the area dug was occupied continuously from the Mauryan period to about 600 CE.

Buried in 2004, opened again in 2024

Groundwater seepage began to waterlog the ruins in the late 1990s, according to the ASI’s account as reported by PTI. The ASI covered the site with soil and sand in 2004 to stop further decay.

In October 2023 Bijoy Kumar Choudhary, executive director of the Bihar Heritage Development Society, said the hall lay about 20 feet underground and that the ASI should re-excavate it. O. P. Jaiswal, a former professor of ancient history and archaeology at Patna University who had seen the structure before it was buried, asked for immediate restoration. In the same week the National Monuments Authority released draft heritage bye-laws for the site, which it lists as the supposed site of the Palace of Asoka.

On Sunday 1 December 2024, Yadubir Singh Rawat, the ASI’s Director General, began uncovering some of the buried pillars, with Sujeet Nayan present. The ASI statement said the aim was to examine the present status of the pillars, and that all 80 could be uncovered after detailed scientific analysis, including a measurement of the water table with scientists of the Central Ground Water Board. Nayan said only a few pillars would be exposed at first, and that after a detailed analysis of their condition they may be opened to the public. In his words, it was a historic moment, as the unravelling of the pillars began “after 20 years.”

As of 29 October 2026, tuput has found no published report of the water-table readings, of how many pillars have been exposed, or of a decision to open all eighty.