Traditionally seven cities have been associated with the region of Delhi.  The earliest, Indraprastha, is part of a literary description in the Sanskrit epic ''Mahabharata'' (composed c. 400 BCE to 200 CE but describing an earlier time) which situates a city on a knoll on the banks of the river Yamuna.  According to art historian Catherine B. Asher, the topographical description of the ''Mahabharata'' matches the area of Purana Qila, a fourteenth-century CE fort of the Delhi sultanate, but the analogy does not go much further. Whereas the ''Mahabharata'' speaks of a beautifully decorated city with surrounding fortification, the excavations have yielded "uneven findings of painted gray pottery characteristic of the eleventh century BCE; no signs of a built environment, much less fortifications, have been revealed."