Maurya Empire

The Maurya Empire was a geographically extensive Iron Age historical power in South Asia with its power base in Magadha. Founded by Chandragupta Maurya around c. 320 BCE, it existed in loose-knit fashion until 185 BCE. The primary sources for the written records of the Mauryan times are partial records of the lost history of Megasthenes in Roman texts of several centuries later; the Edicts of Ashoka, which were first read in the modern era by James Prinsep after he had deciphered the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts in 1838; and the ''Arthashastra'', a work first discovered in the early 20th century, and previously attributed to Chanakya, but now thought to be composed by multiple authors in the first centuries of the common era. Archaeologically, the period of Mauryan rule in South Asia falls into the era of Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW).

Through military conquests and diplomatic treaties, Chandragupta Maurya defeated the Nanda dynasty and extended his suzerainty as far westward as Afghanistan below the Hindu Kush and as far south as the northern Deccan; however, beyond the core Magadha area, the prevailing levels of technology and infrastructure limited how deeply his rule could penetrate society. During the rule of Chandragupta's grandson, Ashoka (ca. 268–232 BCE), the empire briefly controlled the major urban hubs and arteries of the subcontinent excepting the deep south. The Mauryan capital (what is today Patna) was located in Magadha; the other core regions were Taxila in the northwest; Ujjain in the Malwa Plateau; Kalinga on the Bay of Bengal coast; and the precious metal-rich lower Deccan plateau. Outside the core regions, the empire's geographical extent was dependent on the loyalty of military commanders who controlled the armed cities scattered within it.

The Mauryan economy was helped by the earlier rise of Buddhism and Jainism—creeds that promoted nonviolence, proscribed ostentation, or superfluous sacrifices and rituals, and reduced the costs of economic transactions; by coinage that increased economic accommodation in the region; and by the use of writing, which might have boosted more intricate business dealings. Despite profitable settled agriculture in the fertile eastern Gangetic plain, these factors helped maritime and river-borne trade, which were essential for acquiring goods for consumption as well as metals of high economic value. To promote movement and trade, the Maurya dynasty built roads, most prominently a chiefly winter-time road—the Uttarapath—which connected eastern Afghanistan to their capital Pataliputra during the time of year when the water levels in the intersecting rivers were low and they could be easily forded. Other roads connected the Ganges basin to Arabian Sea coast in the west, and precious metal-rich mines in the south.

The population of South Asia during the Mauryan period has been estimated to be between 15 and 30 million. The empire's period of dominion was marked by exceptional creativity in art, architecture, inscriptions and produced texts, but also by the consolidation of caste in the Gangetic plain, and the declining rights of women in the mainstream Indo-Aryan speaking regions of India. After the Kalinga War in which Ashoka's troops visited much violence on the region, he embraced Buddhism and promoted its tenets in edicts scattered around South Asia, most commonly in clusters along the well-traveled road networks. He sponsored Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka, northwest India, and Central Asia, which played a salient role in Buddhism becoming a world religion, and himself a figure of world history. As Ashoka's edicts forbade both the killing of wild animals and the destruction of forests, he is seen by some modern environmental historians as an early embodiment of that ethos. In July 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the interim prime minister of India, proposed in the Constituent Assembly of India that Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath be the State Emblem of India, and the 24-pointed Buddhist Wheel of Dharma on the capital's drum-shaped abacus the central feature of India's national flag. The proposal was accepted in December 1947. Provided by Wikipedia