Maurya Empire

Foundation

Candragupta Maurya took Pāṭaliputra from the Nandas around 322 BCE, in the vacuum left in the northwest by the withdrawal of Alexander's garrisons. The tradition assigns the strategy to his brahmin adviser Cāṇakya, also called Kauṭilya, though the details of that partnership come from much later texts and cannot be treated as documentary.

Within two decades the new state had absorbed the Punjab and pushed into Afghanistan. Around 305 BCE Seleucus Nicator, holding the eastern part of Alexander's inheritance, was checked and came to terms: the satrapies of Arachosia, Gedrosia and Paropamisadae passed to Candragupta in exchange for five hundred war elephants, sealed with a marriage arrangement. Seleucus sent Megasthenes as ambassador to Pāṭaliputra, and the fragments of his account are the earliest sustained foreign description of an Indian state.

The Jain tradition holds that Candragupta abdicated, followed the teacher Bhadrabāhu south to Śravaṇabeḷagoḷa in Karnataka, and died there by the ritual fast. The story is not attested in early sources and is contested; the Karnataka site nonetheless preserves it as a living local memory.

Aśoka

Bindusāra succeeded his father and was in turn succeeded, after a disputed accession, by Aśoka around 268 BCE. Eight years into the reign came the conquest of Kalinga, and with it the change on which the whole later reputation rests. The thirteenth rock edict states the casualties — a hundred and fifty thousand deported, a hundred thousand killed, many times that number dead of other causes — and declares the king's remorse, and that he now considers conquest by dhamma the only true conquest.

The edicts, cut on rock faces and on polished sandstone pillars from Kandahar in ancient India’s north-west (modern-day Afghanistan) to Karnataka, are the empire's principal documentary remains and the earliest readable writing in India since the Indus script. They are written in local Prakrits in Brahmi, in Kharoṣṭhī in the northwest, and in Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar. Their subject is conduct: obedience to parents, generosity to renunciants and brahmins, restraint in killing animals, tolerance between sects, the appointment of officers of dhamma, and the provision of wells, roadside trees and medical care for people and animals.

How far Aśoka's dhamma is a Buddhist programme is a genuine question. He states his support for the saṅgha explicitly in some inscriptions and made a pilgrimage to the Buddha's birthplace at Lumbinī, where his pillar still stands; but the edicts addressed to the general population commend an ethic that no sect would reject and repeatedly enjoin respect for all of them.

The state

The Arthaśāstra, a manual of statecraft traditionally ascribed to Cāṇakya, describes an administration of extraordinary reach: a graded bureaucracy, state control of mines and forests, systematic espionage, and a treasury as the foundation of everything else. Its date is disputed — the surviving text is now generally placed centuries after the Mauryas, incorporating older material — so it should be read as an ideal of governance available to the tradition rather than as a description of Mauryan practice.

What the edicts themselves show is a state governing through provincial capitals at Taxila (in modern-day Pakistan), Ujjayinī, Tosalī and Suvarṇagiri, with princes as viceroys; officers on tours of inspection every few years; and a real concern that instructions be read aloud at fixed intervals so that they were actually known. Megasthenes describes Pāṭaliputra as a great wooden-walled city on the Ganga, and excavation at Patna has recovered timber palisades consistent with the account.

Decline

Aśoka died around 232 BCE and the empire did not survive him by long. The succession appears to have been divided, the Purāṇic and Buddhist king-lists disagree, and the northwest was lost to Bactrian Greek advances within a few decades. In about 185 BCE the last Mauryan king, Bṛhadratha, was killed at a military review by his own commander-in-chief Puṣyamitra Śuṅga.

Explanations for the collapse have followed the fashions of historiography — an over-extended bureaucracy, a fiscal crisis, Aśoka's pacifism weakening the army, a brahmin reaction against royal patronage of the heterodox sects. None is well supported by evidence, and the plainest observation is that an empire assembled in two generations by conquest fragmented when the centre weakened.

The afterlife was longer than the empire. Aśoka's lion capital from Sarnath is the emblem of the Republic of India, the wheel from its abacus is at the centre of the national flag, and the rediscovery of the edicts in the nineteenth century — after James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837 — restored to Indian history a king who had survived until then mainly in Buddhist legend.