Looked it up and it says that “-nagara” means city in Sanskrit.

While that is true, I am looking beyond that and I am asking myself why does a word composed of words that mean “serpent” and “source of light” gain a meaning of “city”.

I look at the names of our cities and I see nouns named after other nouns, i.e. places named after people and things.

So then I ask myself what types of people would we be prone to name places after? Washington? Saint Louis? Phoenix? Columbus? Melbourne? Lafayette? Austin? Augusta? Lincoln? Sydney? Madison? Darwin? Bismarck? Alexandria? Adelaide? New York? Kyiv? Numerous places named after Saints?

We name places after people and often times those people were well known because they were spiritually advanced. It makes sense to me that “cities” aka nagaras would be named after spiritually advanced people who were born there, lived there, or died there.