Maurya Empire

Five hundred elephants

Drafted from Megasthenes, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (1877)formation

The Mauryan empire begins with the only thing in ancient Indian history that can be dated from both ends: a treaty between an Indian king and one of Alexander's generals, in which the Indian side paid in elephants.

The bargain

Seleucus Nicator, having taken the eastern half of Alexander's empire, campaigned into the Punjab around 305 BC against Chandragupta Maurya, who had taken Magadha in the disorder after the Macedonian withdrawal.

Nobody records a battle. What is recorded is the settlement: Seleucus ceded the satrapies of Arachosia, Gedrosia and Paropamisadae — roughly southern Afghanistan and Baluchistan — and received five hundred war elephants.

He used them four years later at Ipsus, where they were decisive in the battle that broke Antigonus and settled the shape of the Hellenistic world.

So the largest single transfer of territory in the early Hellenistic period was paid for in animals, and the animals went on to determine who ruled Anatolia. It is the clearest evidence anywhere of how the two worlds valued each other's assets: Seleucus wanted the elephants more than the provinces, and Chandragupta agreed.

The ambassador

The other term of the settlement was an embassy, and Megasthenes was sent to Pataliputra and stayed for years.

Not one word of what he wrote survives directly. Everything known of it comes from later Greek and Latin authors quoting him — Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus, Pliny — which means every sentence has passed through somebody with different interests. They preserved the administration and they also preserved the ants that dig gold and the men with no mouths who live on smells, in the same register, because a marvel and a customs regulation were equally reportable.

Read with that allowance, he is the only outsider who saw the Mauryan state working.

The city

His measurements of Pataliputra are the most checkable thing in the fragments, and excavation has broadly borne them out.

The city stood where the Ganges met another great river, eighty stadia long and fifteen broad — something like fifteen kilometres by three — laid out as a parallelogram. It was girded with a wooden wall pierced with loopholes for archers, crowned with five hundred and seventy towers, and had sixty-four gates. A ditch ran round it, six plethra wide and thirty cubits deep, serving for defence and for the city's sewage.

Timber palisades on that scale sound implausible until you dig them up, which is what happened at Kumrahar and Bulandi Bagh in the twentieth century: massive sal-wood beams, set as a double palisade, exactly where he said.

A wooden city fifteen kilometres long, with five hundred and seventy towers, in the fourth century BC. That is the capital of the state Ashoka inherited, and it is the reason the Greeks who saw it went home describing the Prasii as the most distinguished people in India.

Figs and raisin wine

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)expansion

Chandragupta died in 297 BC and handed the throne to his son Bindusara, who ruled for twenty-five years and left behind, so far as anyone has found, not a single inscription or monument bearing his own name. Between the conqueror who founded the empire and the son who covered it in edicts, the middle reign is close to a blank.

A letter to a Greek king

What survives of Bindusara is almost entirely anecdotal, and the best of it is a piece of court correspondence too small to have been invented for effect. The Greek epithet by which Greek writers knew him, Amitrochates, transcribes a Sanskrit title, Amitraghata — "Slayer of Foes" — and under that name he kept up the same diplomatic relationship his father had opened with the Seleucid kings, receiving an ambassador at his own court exactly as Chandragupta had received Megasthenes.

Bindusara wrote to Antiochus I Soter asking for a shipment of figs and raisin wine — nothing, he said, being sweeter than figs — and added, as an afterthought that outlived the fruit by twenty-two centuries, that he would also like Antiochus to buy him a sophist and send him along with the rest. Antiochus's reply survives too: he was glad to send the figs and the wine, but regretted that Greek custom did not permit the sale of a philosopher.

What the silence probably covers

Bindusara's own dominions are known only backward, from what his son Ashoka is independently attested to have ruled. Ashoka's empire reached south as far as the latitude of Madras, short only of the deep south and of the coastal kingdom of Kalinga, which he took by force in a campaign of his own. Chandragupta's twenty-four years look, on the balance of probability, too crowded already with the conquest of Magadha, the expulsion of the Macedonian garrisons, the war with Seleucus and the annexation of Ariana to have left much room for a separate campaign into the Deccan as well. What that leaves, by elimination rather than by any direct record, is Bindusara: a reign with no edict of its own, in which the empire most likely grew to nearly the full southern extent his son would inherit and then stop growing at.

A shadow between two well-lit reigns

Bindusara's twenty-five years pass, in what survives of them, without a single named battle, a single surviving decree, or a single building anyone has since dug up and attributed to him. What is left is a courtesy visit from a Greek ambassador, a request for fruit and wine and a philosopher, and a kingdom that was, by the time it reached his son, most of the way to the edges Ashoka would spend his own reign explaining rather than conquering.

The machine

Drafted from Megasthenes, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (1877)expansion

What Megasthenes describes at Pataliputra is not a court with a countryside attached. It is an administrative apparatus, and the parts of his account that his Greek readers found least interesting are the ones that matter.

The boards

City government, he says, was run by thirty men in six committees of five.

One looked after the crafts. One after foreigners — assigning them lodgings, watching them, escorting them, sending their property home if they died and burying them. One registered births and deaths, for taxation and so that the information should not be lost. One supervised trade and commerce, and weights and measures. One inspected manufactured goods and enforced the separation of new goods from old. One collected the tax of a tenth on sales.

A committee for the registration of births and deaths, in the fourth century BC, whose stated purpose includes making sure the record is not lost. There is nothing comparable anywhere in the Greek world he came from.

The army was administered the same way: another thirty men in six committees, one each for the infantry, the cavalry, the chariots, the elephants, the navy and the commissariat — a department for bullock carts, porters, grooms, and the men who beat drums and led horses.

The roads

He records a royal road running from the north-western frontier to Pataliputra, with pillars set up every ten stadia to show the distances and the turnings.

Milestones, on a trunk road, across an empire — the same infrastructure the Achaemenids had built and the Romans would, arrived at independently or borrowed from a Persian model the Mauryas inherited through the north-west, which had been Achaemenid territory a generation before Chandragupta took it.

The tax

The land tax was a quarter of the produce, and the land belonged to the crown. The cultivator paid rent to the king and a tax on top of it, and the fragments say a good deal about the officers who measured the land and inspected the irrigation sluices to see that everybody got a fair share of the water.

That is a state reaching down to the level of the individual watercourse. It is also the fiscal basis of everything else: the elephants, the roads, the wooden walls, the thirty officials in the city and the thirty in the army camp.

The seven classes

The one part of the account that is famously wrong is the description of Indian society as seven hereditary classes: philosophers, farmers, herdsmen, artisans, soldiers, inspectors and councillors.

There are four varnas, not seven, and the categories he lists mix occupation with function. What he seems to have done is describe the administrative categories the state used — the groups it taxed and conscripted differently — and take them for the society's own divisions.

That mistake is itself evidence. A Greek observer at Pataliputra encountered a government that classified its subjects thoroughly enough that he took the classification for the thing itself.

The thirteenth

Drafted from Ashoka, Inscriptions of Asoka (1925)peak

The Thirteenth Rock Edict is the most famous inscription in Indian history and the most commonly misquoted, because the passage everyone knows is followed by one that nobody quotes.

What it says about Kalinga

When king Devanampriya Priyadarsin had been anointed eight years, the country of the Kalingas was conquered by him. One hundred and fifty thousand in number were the men who were deported thence, one hundred thousand in number were those who were slain there, and many times as many those who died.

Then: This is the repentance of Devanampriya on account of his conquest of the country of the Kalingas. He finds it painful and deplorable that when an unconquered country is being conquered, slaughter, death and deportation take place there.

Notice what is being counted and by whom. This is a king publishing his own casualty figures — including the deportations, which is the part a conqueror would ordinarily leave out — and describing the whole operation as a source of remorse, in an inscription cut on rock faces across his own empire.

What is deplored, exactly

The edict is more specific than the summaries make it. What Ashoka says he minds is not death in the abstract.

He minds that the Brahmins, ascetics, sects and householders living there — among whom are practised obedience to elders and to parents, courtesy to friends and relatives, and proper treatment of slaves and servants — suffer injury or the slaughter or deportation of the people they love. And that even those not directly harmed suffer through the misfortune of friends and relatives they are attached to. This is shared by all men.

It is an argument from social bonds rather than from sanctity of life, and it is addressed to a very wide audience: there is no place where men are not indeed attached to some sect.

The sentence nobody quotes

Two clauses later:

And even the inhabitants of the forests which are included in the dominions of Devanampriya, even those he pacifies and converts. And they are told of the power to punish them which Devanampriya possesses in spite of his repentance, in order that they may be ashamed of their crimes and may not be killed.

The forest peoples are to be reminded that the king can still kill them.

That is not a later interpolation or a sceptical historian's gloss. It is in the edict, four sentences after the remorse, in the same voice: in spite of his repentance. Ashoka is telling one population that he is sorry and another that he retains the capacity and they should bear it in mind.

How to read it

The pacifist Ashoka and the cynical Ashoka are both readings of a text that contains the material for each, and the edict is more interesting than either.

He did not give Kalinga back. He kept the army. He went on governing an empire that had been assembled by force and was held by the threat of it, and he warned the frontier populations accordingly.

He also, in the same document, published his own atrocity figures, argued that suffering is shared by all men regardless of their sect, and declared that this conquest is considered the principal one by Devanampriya, viz. the conquest by morality.

Both halves are the policy. A ruler who has decided that further conquest is not worth what it costs, and who wants that decision understood as a principle rather than as exhaustion, still has to hold what he already took — and this edict is what it looks like when somebody tries to say all of that at once, on a rock, in the third century BC.

What the edicts were for

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)peak

The renunciation is not the whole of what Ashoka had cut into rock, and the rest of it is a governing programme.

Dhamma as the edicts define it is not Buddhism. It is a civic ethic: obedience to parents and elders, liberality to Brahmins and ascetics, proper treatment of slaves and servants, restraint in spending, care for animals, and — repeatedly — respect for the beliefs of others. The Twelfth Rock Edict says that whoever honours his own sect and disparages another's from devotion to his own does his own sect the greatest possible harm, and that concord is best.

That is an argument aimed at a specific problem. Ashoka governed a subcontinent of Brahmins, Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas and forest peoples, in several languages, through officials he could not supervise. What a state in that position needs is not a religion but a shared minimum, and the edicts are an attempt to legislate one.

The machinery is there too. He created a class of officers called dhamma-mahamatras to tour and enforce it. He instructed officials to hear petitions at any hour. He ordered wells dug, trees planted and rest-houses built along the roads, and medical provision for men and animals — the Second Rock Edict claims it for his own dominions and for those of the Greek kings beyond them.

He also sent missions outward, to Sri Lanka and to the Hellenistic kingdoms, and named the kings: Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander. It is the earliest attested attempt anywhere to propagate a religion by diplomacy, and it is the reason Buddhism became something other than a north Indian school.

Reading a king who explains himself

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)aside?What aside means

Ashoka's edicts are cut into rock faces and polished sandstone pillars from Kandahar to Karnataka, and they were unreadable for two thousand years. Brahmi had been forgotten; James Prinsep deciphered it in 1837, and a king known only from Buddhist legend became the best-documented ruler of ancient India.

What the edicts contain is unusual for any period. They use the first person. They give a policy — dhamma, glossed as consideration for others, restraint in spending, care for animals, respect for all religious communities — and they instruct officials to tour and enforce it. They record the Kalinga campaign and say plainly that the king felt remorse. The Kandahar edicts are in Greek and Aramaic, addressed to populations left behind by Alexander and the Achaemenids, the two powers that had held that country before him.

The historiography has swung about what to make of them. A nationalist reading made Ashoka a pacifist unifier; a sceptical reading points out that he did not give Kalinga back, kept the army, and that dhamma served an empire needing a common ethic across a hugely diverse population. Thapar's position, followed here, treats the edicts as a genuine and unusual political programme that was also useful.

The Mauryan wheel is on the Indian flag and the Sarnath capital is the national emblem — which is a twentieth-century republic taking a third-century-BC king for its constitutional ancestor, and is a different thing from a successor dynasty claiming his authority.

The commander-in-chief

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)end

Around 185 BC the last Mauryan emperor was killed by his own army commander at a review of the troops, and the empire that had held most of the subcontinent for a hundred and forty years stopped existing.

The killing

Brihadratha was reviewing the army. Pushyamitra Shunga, his senapati — commander-in-chief — killed him there, in front of it, and took the throne.

That is the whole account. No siege, no invasion, no succession war among princes: the man who commanded the army used it, in the one setting where the emperor was surrounded by soldiers who answered to somebody else.

It is the most ordinary way for an empire to end and the least explicable without knowing what had happened to it in the fifty years before, because a functioning Mauryan state does not put itself in that position.

What had already gone

The empire had been shedding provinces since Ashoka's death in about 232 BC. Kalinga went. The Deccan went. The north-west was lost to the Greeks of Bactria, who came back over the mountains in the 180s and reached deep into the Punjab. Bengal appears to have gone its own way.

The reasons argued over are the ones argued over for every large ancient empire, and there is no consensus. A succession of short reigns after Ashoka. An administrative apparatus expensive enough that the revenue could not sustain it once the campaigning stopped. Provincial governors who had always been sent out from the centre and who, in a weak reign, stopped being recalled.

There is also a specifically Mauryan argument, and it belongs to whoever finds it convincing: that Ashoka's programme itself had a cost. A state that renounces further conquest keeps the standing army and loses the plunder that helped justify it, and a dhamma-mahamatra touring the provinces to enforce a civic ethic is another salary on the same revenue.

That case has been made and it is thin, because empires with no such programme came apart on the same timetable.

Ashoka's reputation, first version

The Shungas were Brahmins, and the later Buddhist tradition says Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists, destroyed monasteries and put a price on the head of every monk.

The tradition is Buddhist and late, the number of destroyed monasteries grows with the retelling, and the archaeological record does not show a rupture — the stupa at Sanchi was substantially enlarged during the Shunga period, and the famous gateways are Shunga work.

So the best-attested statement about the fall of the Mauryas after the event itself is a piece of religious polemic which the buildings contradict. That is worth knowing before reading anything about what the dynasty meant, because almost everything written about Ashoka for the next two thousand years came through the same tradition.

What was actually lost

Not the idea of an Indian empire, which was attempted again by the Guptas five hundred years later and by others afterwards.

What was lost was the apparatus, and it did not come back in that form. The Mauryan state had governed directly through appointed officials over an enormous area — the committees Megasthenes describes, the land measurement, the registers, the trunk roads with distance markers. What replaced it, and what Indian empires largely ran on afterwards, was a looser arrangement of subordinate kings paying tribute and keeping their own governments.

The Guptas at their height held less ground than Ashoka and held most of what they did hold through other people's dynasties, and they were the most successful thing anybody built in the interval.

The king who had to be found again

Drafted from Ashoka, Inscriptions of Asoka (1925)afterlife

Ashoka's edicts stood in the open air for two thousand years, on roads people used, and nobody could read them. When they were finally deciphered, the king they revealed did not match the king anybody had been expecting.

The script that was lost

Brahmi went out of use in its early form and the knowledge of it went with it. By the medieval period the inscriptions were simply marks: Firuz Shah Tughluq moved two of the pillars to Delhi in the fourteenth century because they were magnificent objects, had the writing examined, and was told nobody could read it. Jahangir added his own inscription to the Allahabad pillar in the seventeenth, alongside a text he could not decipher.

James Prinsep, assay master of the Calcutta mint, worked it out in 1837, partly from the short donative inscriptions at Sanchi where the repeated formula dānam, gift, gave him a purchase on the letters.

What emerged was a king who called himself Devanampriya Priyadarsin — Beloved of the Gods — and who was not obviously anybody. The identification with the Ashoka of Buddhist legend came from the Sri Lankan chronicles, and was confirmed when an inscription turned up using the name outright.

Two Ashokas, and neither is the edicts

The Ashoka the tradition had preserved was a Buddhist saint: Ashoka the Fierce in his youth, who killed ninety-nine brothers and built a torture chamber, then converted, built eighty-four thousand stupas in a single day with the help of spirits, and gave the whole earth to the order.

Faxian, walking through Pataliputra around 405, was shown the ruins of a palace he was told Ashoka had built by employing spirits to pile up the stones and carve the walls — no human hands of this world could accomplish this.

The edicts are a different man. He is preoccupied with administration, with whether his officials are doing what they are told, with getting the message into the local languages, and with religious concord as a public order problem. He never mentions the Four Noble Truths. He does not use the word Buddhism.

So the two records that survive are a legend that made him a saint and an archive that shows him governing, and they were reunited by an English metallurgist working from mason's marks on a stupa railing.

What was done with him afterwards

The rediscovered Ashoka arrived exactly when he was needed.

Indian nationalism in the twentieth century had a use for an indigenous emperor who had unified the subcontinent, renounced violence, guaranteed religious tolerance and left the evidence in his own words. He was, on that reading, the answer to the claim that India had never been a nation and had always needed governing from outside.

In 1947 the Sarnath lion capital became the state emblem of the Republic of India and the wheel from the same pillar went on the flag.

That is a modern government adopting a third-century-BC king as its constitutional ancestor, on the strength of documents that had been unreadable until a hundred and ten years earlier — and it works, because the documents are genuine and say what they are quoted as saying.

The part usually left out of the flag is the clause about the forest peoples being reminded that the king can still kill them. Ashoka put both on the same rock, and the state that took his wheel took the half that suited it, which is what states do with ancestors.