Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Edicts of Ashoka are a collection of more than thirty inscriptions carved on pillars, boulders, and cave walls, attributed to Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire, who ruled from 268 BCE to 232 BCE. They are the earliest datable written texts from India, dispersed across modern India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The edicts were written in three languages: Ashokan Prakrit (the dominant tongue), Greek, and Aramaic. Four scripts were used: Brahmi for central and eastern Prakrit inscriptions, Kharoshthi for the northwest, and the Greek and Aramaic scripts in the northwestern frontier regions of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
James Prinsep, an archaeologist and philologist employed by the East India Company, deciphered the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts. In March 1838, he published a translation of a large number of rock edicts, producing what scholar Richard Salomon called a "virtually perfect" rendering of the full Brahmi alphabet. Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen had made the first successful attempts in 1836 using bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of Indo-Greek king Agathocles.
Major Rock Edict No.13 names five Hellenistic rulers: Antiochus II Theos of the Seleucid Empire, Ptolemy II Philadelphos of Egypt, Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia, Magas of Cyrene, and Alexander II of Epirus. Ashoka claims that dharmic missions extended to each of their territories.
The Rummindei Edict, found in Lumbini in modern Nepal, records Ashoka's visit in the 21st year of his reign and identifies Lumbini as the birthplace of the Buddha. It also contains the earliest known use of the epithet Sakyamuni (Sage of the Shakyas) to describe the historical Buddha, and states that Ashoka made the village of Lumbini free of taxes.
The Edicts of Ashoka contain some of the earliest examples of the Brahmi numerals that are ancestral to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The numeral 6, for instance, appears in Minor Rock Edict No.1 in the phrase recording that Ashoka had been on tour for 256 days. The system in the edicts is not yet positional; a mature positional system and the zero were developed much later, around the 6th century CE.