Patna through the ages—Etymology of Place-Names

Patna through the ages, old and new, with its ups, the good, and downs, the bad, periods, is a subject of absorbing interest. It underwent, in course of time, a series of varied and unpredicatively shifting circumstances, having once had the position and name of Patali, a small village or a resting place, villa, sarai, as an appanage of Magadha to which the fifth and the sixth Rulers of Shishunag Dynasty had extended the frontiers of their kingdom of Gribaraja or Rajgriha, and not long after presenting the dazzling spectacle of a mighty Metropolis of an all-Indian Empire of the Mauryas, who called it Pataliputra, the Palibothra of the Greeks. No less attractive and interesting, and well-worth knowing about the modern capital of the State of Bihar, inaugurated in 1912, under the auspices of the Britishers, who had to leave our country for good in 1947, is a systematic study of terms and terminology of place-names, the nomenclature or set of names, definite and distinctive. The specific use, since olden times, of particular divisions or quarters of a city stretching for hundreds of miles along the southern bank of the Ganges, but very much limited, restricted and circumscribed between the Ganges and the Jalla regions.