Seven walls, twenty-one moats, one buried city
In 1097 a commander named Nanyadeva, probably of South Indian origin, set up his own kingdom in Mithila and made Simraungadh its capital. An inscribed stone pillar dates his reign to the Saka year 1019, that is 1097 CE. His dynasty, the Karnatas, ruled Tirhut for more than two centuries, calling themselves lords of Mithila, and under them the first known work of Maithili prose, the Varna Ratnakara, was written. Simraungadh became the centre of Mithila's politics and learning.
The city was built for defence and for floods. A rectangular enclosure of earthen ramparts and ditches stretched about 7.5 km north to south. When the Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin passed in 1236 on his way home from Nalanda, he described seven tall walls, eleven large gates and 21 ditches filled with water and lined with trees. The ramparts and ditches also helped protect the city from the river floods that regularly swept the plain.
The end came with Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq's invasion of Tirhut in the 1320s. The last Karnata king, Harisimhadeva, fled north into the hills of Nepal, and his descendants married into the royal line of Bhaktapur. The city declined. Later visitors, an Italian missionary in 1740 and British officers in 1801 and the 1830s, found only ruins within a maze of walls. Much of the old city still lies unexcavated beneath the fields, divided by the modern border.
