Edicts of Ashoka

• 1. Introduction

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  The Edicts of Ashoka are the oldest datable written texts from India, carved into pillars, boulders, and cave walls across what is now India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. An emperor named Ashoka, who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 268 BCE to 232 BCE, ordered them inscribed in stone so that his words could not be altered, copied inaccurately, or lost. That decision has consequences we still feel today: we have these texts exactly as they were originally cut. Earlier Indian writings, including the Vedic texts, existed only as oral traditions for centuries, leaving no fixed record. What did Ashoka want to say so badly that he chiseled it into rock? What kind of ruler reaches from his capital in Bihar to the Mediterranean world and to the Hellenistic kings of Egypt and Macedonia to spread a message of non-violence and tolerance? And who, exactly, was writing in fluent Greek philosophical prose in the frontier city of Kandahar?

• 2. The Man Behind the Stone

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  Ashoka refers to himself in his inscriptions as "Beloved of the Gods" in the Prakrit form Devanampiya. For centuries after the edicts were discovered, scholars did not know whose reign these words described. The connection was only confirmed in 1915, when C. Beadon, a British gold-mining engineer, found an inscription at Maski in what was then Madras Presidency (present-day Raichur district, Karnataka) that used the name Ashoka alongside his full title. A second confirmation came from a minor rock edict at the village of Gujarra in Gwalior State, where the full title Devanampiya Piyadasi Asokaraja appeared together. Before these discoveries, the name James Prinsep had already cracked the scripts themselves. Prinsep was an archaeologist, philologist, and official of the East India Company who, in a series of results published in March 1838, produced what scholar Richard Salomon called a "virtually perfect" rendering of the full Brahmi alphabet. Prinsep initially assumed the king named in the edicts was a Sri Lankan ruler; it was George Turnour's communication of Pali texts from Sri Lanka that allowed him to connect the title with Ashoka. The Kharoshthi script, written right to left, had also gone unread for over a thousand years. Prinsep deciphered it in parallel with Norwegian scholar Christian Lassen, who had already identified several Brahmi letters in 1836 using bilingual Greek-Brahmi coins of the Indo-Greek king Agathocles. One contemporary observer described the result as removing "the thick crust of oblivion which for many centuries had concealed the character and the language of the earliest epigraphs." The two Indian scripts had both become extinct around the 5th century CE, making this a double recovery: the scripts and the king.

• 3. Structure of the Edicts

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  The first known edict, the Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription, was written in Greek and Aramaic in the 10th year of Ashoka's reign, that is, around 260 BCE, at the border of his empire with the Hellenistic world. It came before the Indian-language inscriptions, which began in the 11th year of his reign. The full corpus divides into four categories defined by size and material: Minor Rock Edicts, Minor Pillar Edicts, Major Rock Edicts, and Major Pillar Edicts. Minor inscriptions generally precede the larger ones, and rock inscriptions appear to have started before pillar inscriptions. The Minor Rock Edicts are explicitly religious: they name the Buddha, mention previous Buddhas, and discuss Buddhist scripture. The Major Rock Edicts and Major Pillar Edicts take a different direction entirely, never naming the Buddha or Buddhist teachings, but instead addressing order, behavior, non-violence, and the administration of the state. The Major Rock Edicts include fourteen separate edicts numbered first through fourteenth, plus two additional ones found in Odisha. The seven Major Pillar Edicts were inscribed at the very end of Ashoka's reign, in the 26th and 27th years, that is from 237 to 236 BCE. The last of them, Edict No.7, is explicitly testamental in nature, summing up the accomplishments of Ashoka's life. Among the Minor Pillar Edicts, the Rummindei and Nigali Sagar inscriptions record Ashoka's visits and Buddhist dedications in what is now Nepal, and were inscribed on pillars erected in the 19th and 20th year of his reign.

• 4. Dharma Across Four Scripts

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  Three languages and four scripts carried Ashoka's message. Ashokan Prakrit was the dominant tongue, written in Brahmi in central and eastern India and in Kharoshthi in the northwest, the region of modern Pakistan. Greek and Aramaic served the edges of the empire where Hellenistic and former Achaemenid populations lived. The Prakrit of the inscriptions shows local variation across the subcontinent, running from early Gandhari in the northwest to Old Ardhamagadhi in the east. Ashoka called his inscriptions Dhaṃma Lipi, meaning "Inscriptions of the Dharma," using a word that the Greek translators rendered as eusebeia, meaning piety, and the Aramaic version rendered as qsyt, meaning truth. None of the Greek versions mention the teachings of the Buddha at all. Historian Romila Thapar notes that Ashoka's dhamma amounts to a general ethic of non-violence, tolerance of all sects, obedience to parents, respect for religious teachers of all traditions, and generosity toward friends and servants. It was designed, in her reading, to act as a focus of loyalty across the diverse strands of the empire. The Kandahar Greek Edict of Ashoka, written in Greek only, probably originally contained all fourteen Major Rock Edicts. The Greek used there is, in the source's words, of a very high level and displays philosophical refinement, suggesting a highly cultured Greek community in Kandahar at that time. By contrast, in the newly conquered southern territories of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Ashoka used only northern Prakrit and Brahmi, not the local Dravidian languages, a choice the source describes as a form of authoritarianism toward the south.

• 5. A State Built on Welfare

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  Major Rock Edict No.2 names the Cholas, the Pandyas, the Satiyaputra, the Keralaputra, Tamraparni, and the Greek king Antiochus as recipients of Ashoka's welfare program. Within and beyond his borders, two kinds of medical treatment were established: one for people and one for animals. Wherever beneficial herbs did not exist, they were imported and planted. Mango groves were planted along roads for shade. Wells were dug at intervals of eight kos, with steps built down to the water. The edicts record that Ashoka appointed officers he called mahamatras of morality when he had been anointed thirteen years; their jurisdiction covered Greeks, Kambojas, and Gandharas, as well as servants, masters, Brahmanas, the destitute, and the aged. In the kitchen of King Devanampriya Priyadarsin, many hundreds of thousands of animals had once been killed daily for curry. By the time a relevant edict was carved, only three were killed daily: two peacocks and one deer. The edict declares that even those three shall not be killed in future. Major Pillar Edict No.5 lists the animals Ashoka declared inviolable in his 26th year of reign: parrots, ruddy geese, wild geese, bats, queen ants, terrapins, tortoises, porcupines, squirrels, iguanas, the rhinoceros, white doves, domestic doves, and all quadrupeds neither useful nor edible. She-goats, ewes, and sows with young or in milk were also protected. The source notes a 100 panas fine for poaching deer in imperial hunting preserves, which shows that rule-breakers existed; the legal restrictions conflicted with practices freely exercised by common people in hunting, felling, fishing, and forest burning.

• 6. Reach Toward the Mediterranean

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  Major Rock Edict No.13 names five Hellenistic rulers as recipients of Ashoka's dharmic mission: 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. The edict claims that the conquest by the Dharma extended 600 yojanas from Ashoka's center, a distance the source estimates as greater than 2,000 km, roughly the distance between central India and Greece. Whether these emissaries were actually received is unclear in Hellenistic records. Historian Louis Robert argued that the Greek-language edicts from Kandahar suggest that the emissaries Ashoka sent were likely Greek subjects and citizens of Kandahar, fluent in both Indian thought and the political language of the Hellenic world. Scholars have noted parallels between Buddhism and the Cyrenaicism and Epicureanism of the same period, all pursuing a state of ataraxia or equanimity. Hegesias of Cyrene, whose ideas recall Buddhist teachings on suffering, lived in the city of Cyrene governed by Magas, the same Magas named in Ashoka's edict. Semitologist Andre Dupont-Sommer argued that the monastic communities of the Essenes of Palestine and the Therapeutae of Alexandria may have been shaped by the model of Buddhist monasticism following Ashoka's missions, and traced a line from those communities to the emergence of Christianity. These are contested claims; the source notes that colonial-era scholars such as Rhys Davids attributed Ashoka's claims of dharmic conquest to vanity, and doubted that Greeks could have been influenced by Indian thought.

• 7. Numerals, Scripts, and Legacies

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  The Edicts of Ashoka contain some of the earliest known examples of what became the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The number 6 appears in Minor Rock Edict No.1 when Ashoka states he has been on tour for 256 days. The Brahmi numerals in the edicts do not yet use a positional system; the zero and a mature positional arrangement were invented much later, around the 6th century CE. The system is further documented in the Nanaghat inscriptions from the 1st century BCE and then in the Nasik Caves inscriptions from the 2nd century CE. The influence on Indian epigraphy runs in an unexpected direction. Sanskrit inscriptions appear later than Prakrit inscriptions, even though Prakrit is considered a descendant of Sanskrit. Linguist Louis Renou called this "the great linguistical paradox of India." The early Sanskrit inscriptions that do survive from the 1st century BCE include the Ayodhya and Hathiba-Ghosu-Ghandi inscriptions. The Brahmi script of the edicts remained in popular use through the Kushan period and stayed readable into the 4th century CE during the Gupta period. After that, script evolution rendered the edicts unreadable. This means that Ashoka's words were visible and comprehensible to people in India for a period of nearly 700 years. When the Chinese traveller Fa Hian visited in around 400 CE, he described an inscription on one of Ashoka's pillars in Ni-li city, recording that Ashoka had presented the whole of Jambudvipa to the priests and redeemed it again with money, and that he had done so three times.