Maurya and Shunga Art c5.6

c5.6

Whether the evolution of such a political outlook was the outcome of natural historical process or was directly or indirectly conditioned by India’s contact with the contemporary West-Asiatic world, is difficult to say. In any case the chronological and historical background is significant and is worth consideration. Already in pre-historic times, the Indus Valley civilisation formed a part of the civilisation that extended to ancient Sumer; much later, the civilisation represented by the Ṛigveda was but a cognate of that represented by the Avestā. There is no reason to assume that this intimate relation of India with Iran and the ancient Asiatic West lapsed at any time during the centuries that followed. Indeed, from about 800 B. C. almost continuous contact of Aryanised India with Iran can be traced back to or inferred from various sources, literary and archaeological. In the sixth century B. C. part of Northern India went under the political domination of Iran, and gradually the Indus came to form the eastern boundary of the wide Iranian empire of Darius; indeed this part of India came to be politically organised into the 20th satrapy of that empire.¹⁵ Darius describes himself in his inscriptions as ‘Kshayathiyanam Kshayathiya’, the king of kings, the great king;¹⁶ he was in reality a ‘sārvabhauma’ monarch of the old Indian conception, an ‘ekarāt’ like Mahāpadmananda. Indeed the Achaemenid dynasty was the first to evolve and give reality to the idea of imperial suzerainty which a century later was partially achieved by the Nandas, but fully by the Mauryas.¹⁷ Certainly no contemporary borrowing can at once be postulated, but it is likely that both India and Iran participated in a common historic process.