# Wari-Bateshwar Declines and Is Abandoned (c. 100 BCE)

URL: https://allhistories.com/bangladesh/timeline/-100-wari-bateshwar-declines-and-is-abandoned
Location: Wari-Bateshwar, Belabo, Narsingdi
Themes: Rivers, Abandonment

Around 100 BCE the town at Wari-Bateshwar was abandoned after centuries of occupation. Wikipedia reports that this may have followed flooding caused by a shift in a river channel, though the cause is presented as possible rather than proved. No later urban layer of comparable scale has been described at the site. Bengal's rivers are notoriously unstable. The Brahmaputra and its distributaries have repeatedly moved, and a port that depended on a navigable channel could be stranded or drowned. The flood explanation remains a hypothesis, and other causes such as shifting trade routes or political change cannot be excluded. The site then lay under soil and rice fields until local finds in the 1930s and organised excavation from 2000. A brick Buddhist structure, dated to roughly 1,400 years ago, found in 2010, shows the area was reoccupied for religious use centuries later, and local memory of an older fortress survives in the name Asam Raja's Fort. At this point in the timeline (c. 100 BCE), the delta had no single ruler named in the sources: local kings and tribal polities held it during the Shunga, Kushan and post-Kushan centuries (184 BCE – 335 CE).

## Why it matters
Shows how shifting rivers could erase a trading town, a recurring theme in the history of the delta.

Ruler at the Time: [Post-Mauryan Bengal (Shunga and Kushan era, no single ruler)](https://allhistories.com/bangladesh/rulers/post-mauryan-bengal-shunga-and-kushan-era-no-single-ruler)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Wari-Bateshwar ruins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wari-Bateshwar_ruins)
- [Wikipedia — Ganges Delta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges_Delta)