Maurya Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Maurya Empire rose from the plains of Magadha around 320 BCE, and within a generation it had become the largest political entity the Indian subcontinent had ever seen. At its height under Ashoka, its roads stretched from the mountains of Afghanistan to the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Its armies numbered, according to the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 8,000 chariots, and 9,000 war elephants. And yet the written records from this age are partial, contested, and filtered through centuries of retelling. The primary sources are fragments of Megasthenes' lost history preserved in Roman texts, and Ashoka's own stone edicts scattered across the subcontinent. What drove a young man named Chandragupta to build something so vast? What turned a conquering emperor into a man who would inscribe the words "our king killed very few animals" into rock? And how does a structure of that scale collapse in just over a century?

• 2. Chandragupta's Rise

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  Plutarch records that Chandragupta, as a young man, saw Alexander the Great. That encounter, whatever its nature, preceded one of the most consequential careers in South Asian history. After Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE, his empire fractured into rival kingdoms led by his generals, and the resulting instability in the Punjab gave Chandragupta his opening.

  The Roman historian Justin, writing in the second century CE, describes Chandragupta as the man who led the revolt against Alexander's former governors. Justin also notes, however, that after winning liberation for the people, Chandragupta "had transformed liberation in servitude after victory" by establishing an oppressive regime of his own. Scholars read Justin's description of the force Chandragupta assembled variously as "mercenary soldiers", "hunters", or "robbers". One reading identifies that force with the people of the Punjab, whom Rhys Davids called "kingless people", and from whom Chandragupta recruited the core of his army.

  When Alexander's former general Seleucus I Nicator moved east to defend his territories, he was defeated and retreated into the mountains of Afghanistan. Around 302 BCE, the two men concluded a dynastic marriage alliance. Seleucus transferred to Chandragupta the easternmost satrapies of his empire, including Gandhara, Parapamisadae, and the eastern parts of Gedrosia, and possibly Arachosia and Aria as far as Herat. In return, Chandragupta sent Seleucus 500 war elephants, which played a decisive role in Seleucus's victory over western Hellenistic rivals at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE.

  As a gesture of the alliance's warmth, Chandragupta also sent Seleucus various aphrodisiacs. The exchange of presents is recorded in classical sources, with one account noting that Chandragupta sent "contrivances of wondrous efficacy" designed "to act like charms in producing a wonderful degree of affection."

• 3. The Capital and Its Network

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  Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital on the site of what is now Patna, was described by Megasthenes as surrounded by a wooden wall pierced by 64 gates and 570 towers. The Greek writer Aelian called the Indian palaces superior in splendour to Persia's Susa or Ecbatana, and excavations at modern Kumhrar have uncovered the remains of a great pillared hall supported on 80 columns, each several meters high. The palace was chiefly built of timber and stood in a park studded with fish ponds and ornamental trees.

  The empire was not a uniformly governed block of territory. Scholar Monica Smith notes that ancient states are better understood as networks of centres of power than as continuous territories. The Mauryan network had three distinct spheres: the metropolitan core in Magadha, the former Janapadas and Mahajanapadas under closer imperial supervision, and a periphery of lineage-based societies that were relatively free of central control. Ashoka's inscriptions, as Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund observe, reveal this structure directly: the major rock edicts appear only in frontier provinces, not in the imperial centre, and are entirely absent from large parts of what is now Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.

  Roads held the network together. The most prominent was the Uttarapath, a chiefly winter-time road connecting eastern Afghanistan to Pataliputra. Its seasonal timing was deliberate: the water levels in the rivers crossing its path dropped in winter, making them fordable. Other roads linked the Gangetic basin to the Arabian Sea coast in the west and to the precious metal-rich mines in the south.

  The economic life sustained by these roads was unusually dynamic. Under the Mauryan system no private ownership of land existed; all land belonged to the emperor, who in turn supplied labourers with seeds, tools, animals, and stored food for crises. The economy has been described by scholars as a form of state socialism and even as the world's first welfare state. Yet private commercial entities also flourished, existing purely for commerce and predating the empire itself.

• 4. Bindusara, the Middle Emperor

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  Chandragupta's son Bindusara ascended the throne around 297 BCE, inheriting an empire that already covered northern, central, and eastern India, along with parts of Afghanistan and Baluchistan. He was roughly 22 years old at the time, according to historian Upinder Singh. He pushed the empire further south into what is now Karnataka, bringing sixteen additional states under Mauryan control and coming close to unifying the entire Indian peninsula.

  The kingdoms he chose not to conquer are as revealing as those he did. Bindusara left the Tamil kingdoms of the Cholas under King Ilamcetcenni, the Pandyas, and the Cheras intact, describing them as friendly. The only kingdom in India outside his control was Kalinga, on the Bay of Bengal coast. That omission would define his son's reign.

  Bindusara maintained his own diplomatic correspondence with the Hellenistic world. A famous exchange preserved by Athenaeus records Bindusara writing to the Seleucid king Antiochus I, asking for sweet wine, dried figs, and a sophist. Antiochus replied that the wine and figs would be sent, but that "it is not lawful for a sophist to be sold in Greece." Bindusara's guru, Pingalavatsa, was a Brahmin of the Ajivika religion, and his wife, Empress Subhadrangi, came from Champa, the present Bhagalpur district, also of the Ajivika faith. During his reign, citizens of Taxila revolted twice: the first revolt was caused by the maladministration of his eldest son Susima; the second was never suppressed in his lifetime and was only crushed by Ashoka after Bindusara died, around 273 BCE by Singh's estimate.

• 5. Ashoka and the Kalinga Turning Point

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  Before he became known for his edicts on piety, Ashoka was, by the sources' own account, a brilliant and aggressive commander. As a young prince he crushed revolts in Ujjain and Taxila. As emperor, he re-asserted Mauryan dominance in southern and western India. His conquest of Kalinga in 261 BCE changed the direction of his reign entirely.

  The warfare was ferocious. An estimated 100,000 soldiers and civilians were killed, including over 10,000 Imperial Mauryan soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of people were adversely affected by the destruction. When Ashoka witnessed the devastation personally, he embraced Buddhism and renounced expansion and violence. He banned hunting and violent sports, abolished slave trade, and undertook a massive programme of public works including wells, trees, and hospitals along roads.

  His edicts record his missionary ambition in geographic detail. One edict names the Greek rulers who received his Buddhist proselytism: Amtiyoko (Antiochus II Theos), Tulamaya (Ptolemy II), Amtikini (Antigonos II), Maka (Magas), and Alikasudaro (Alexander II of Epirus). The edicts also locate those rulers at "600 yojanas away," a measurement the source notes corresponds to the distance between the centre of India and Greece at roughly 4,000 miles. A full edict written in both Greek and Aramaic was discovered in Kandahar, described as being in excellent classical Greek, using the word Eusebeia, meaning "Piety", as the translation for the Prakrit word Dharma.

  Ashoka sent a mission led by his son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitta to Sri Lanka, where the king Tissa adopted Buddhism as the state religion. Ashoka is believed to have built as many as 84,000 stupas across India, including those at Sanchi and the Mahabodhi Temple. He helped convene the Third Buddhist Council near his capital, and commissioned the publication of Buddhist literature across the empire. Some of the emissaries he dispatched were themselves Greeks: the Pali sources name Dharmaraksita as a leading Greek Buddhist monk active in proselytism.

• 6. The Peacock, the Pillar, the Flag

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  The name "Maurya" does not appear in any of Ashoka's own edicts, nor in the contemporary Greek accounts of Megasthenes. Its earliest attestations come from later sources: the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman, dating to around 150 CE, the Puranas from the fourth century CE or earlier, Buddhist texts linking Chandragupta to the "Moriya" clan of the Shakyas, and Jain texts identifying his father as a superintendent of peacocks.

  The Buddhist tradition explains the name through geography: the dynasty's ancestors settled in a region where peacocks were abundant, becoming known as the "Moriyas", meaning "belonging to the place of peacocks." A second Buddhist account says they built a city called Moriya-nagara, named because its bricks were the colour of peacocks' necks. Archaeological evidence supports the dynastic connection: peacock figures appear on the Ashoka pillar at Nandangarh and in sculptures on the Great Stupa at Sanchi. Modern scholars conclude the peacock was likely the dynasty's emblem.

  The Mauryan visual legacy did not stop in antiquity. In July 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, then interim prime minister of India, proposed to the Constituent Assembly that the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath become the State Emblem of India, and that the 24-pointed Buddhist Wheel of Dharma on its drum-shaped abacus become the central feature of India's national flag. The proposal was accepted in December 1947. The stone capital carved in the third century BCE now anchors the symbols of the world's most populous democracy.

• 7. Collapse and Aftermath

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  Ashoka was followed for fifty years by a succession of weaker emperors. His son Mahinda had become a Buddhist monk. Another son, Kunala, was blinded and therefore ineligible for the throne. Tivala, son of Ashoka's wife Karuvaki, died before Ashoka himself. Dasharatha Maurya, Ashoka's grandson, succeeded him and lost significant territories, some of which were later reconquered by Samprati, the son of Kunala.

  In 180 BCE, the last Mauryan emperor, Brihadratha, was killed by his own general Pushyamitra Shunga during a military parade, with no heir to prevent the collapse. The Shunga Empire rose in its place. Scholars have advanced several reasons for the empire's decline: the succession of weak rulers, partition of the empire, growing regional independence, a top-heavy administration with authority concentrated in too few hands, the sheer scale of the empire, and eventual invasion by the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.

  The fall of the Mauryas left the Khyber Pass unguarded. The Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius conquered southern Afghanistan and parts of northwestern India around 180 BCE, forming the Indo-Greek Kingdom. One of the Indo-Greek kings, Menander, became a famous figure of Buddhism and established a new capital at Sagala, the modern city of Sialkot. The Indo-Greeks retained holdings in the subcontinent until around 70 BCE, when Indo-Scythian tribes brought about their demise.

  Historian Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri argued that Ashoka's pacifism undermined the military strength of the empire. Romila Thapar has countered that the extent of his pacifism has been "grossly exaggerated." What both views share is the recognition that the empire Chandragupta built was extraordinary enough that scholars still argue about why it ended.