The Maurya Empire of India

In the 300s BC, northern India was divided among many kingdoms. The richest was Magadha, on the Ganges, ruled by the Nanda dynasty from Pataliputra, today’s Patna.

In 326 BC, Alexander’s army reached the Indus and turned back. Into the power vacuum it left stepped a young man named Chandragupta.

Around 322 BC, Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda king and took Pataliputra. He then seized the Punjab from Alexander’s successors.

Tradition says his adviser was Chanakya, also called Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra, a manual on statecraft, spies and taxes.

Most scholars think the Arthashastra was compiled or expanded later, but it shows how Indian rulers thought about running a state.

Alexander’s general Seleucus tried to reclaim the Indus lands. Instead, around 303 BC, he made peace with Chandragupta.

The Mauryas gained Arachosia and Gandhara, in today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. Seleucus received 500 war elephants, and the two families made a marriage alliance.

A Greek ambassador, Megasthenes, lived at Pataliputra and described a vast walled city and an enormous army, though his numbers may be exaggerated.

Chandragupta’s son Bindusara extended Maurya rule into the Deccan plateau of central India.

By the end of his reign, only Kalinga on the east coast, and the Tamil lands of the far south, stood outside the empire.

Bindusara’s son Ashoka was crowned around 268 BC. In about his eighth year, he invaded Kalinga, in today’s Odisha.

In his own words, carved later in stone, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed, and many more died.

Ashoka declared that he felt deep remorse. He said that from then on, the only true conquest was conquest by dhamma: moral law.

Ashoka had his messages carved on rocks and tall polished pillars across the empire, in local languages and scripts, even Greek and Aramaic near Kandahar.

They urged honesty, kindness to animals, respect for all religious groups, and announced wells, rest houses and medical care for people and animals.

At its height the empire covered most of the subcontinent, by estimates between 3.4 and 5 million square kilometres.

According to Buddhist chronicles, Ashoka supported a great council of monks, and sent missions to neighbouring lands.

His son Mahinda is said to have brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan chronicles also say monks named Sona and Uttara went to a “Golden Land”, Suvarnabhumi.

Thailand and Myanmar both claim that land. Historians note that no Southeast Asian record mentions the story before the second millennium AD, so it remains a tradition.

After Ashoka died around 232 BC, the empire was divided among weaker successors, and distant provinces broke away.

In 185 BC, according to later accounts, the general Pushyamitra Shunga killed the last Maurya king during a military review, and founded his own dynasty.

Some later writers blamed Ashoka’s pacifism. Most historians point instead to an over-centralised state that was hard to hold together.

Over the centuries, the Brahmi script of the edicts became unreadable, and Ashoka survived mostly in Buddhist legend.

In 1837, James Prinsep, a British official in Calcutta, deciphered Brahmi, and Ashoka’s own words could be read again.

When India became a republic, it chose the lion capital from Ashoka’s pillar at Sarnath as its national emblem, and his wheel of dhamma for its flag.

The Maurya Empire lasted about 140 years. But it was the first to unite most of South Asia, and its ideas outlived it.

Ashoka’s support helped Buddhism grow from a regional faith into a religion of Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and, later, East Asia.

Next: China, where in 221 BC the Qin dynasty unified the warring states.