Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.118

c14.118

The Dark Ages of India in the second half of the first millennium B.C. are suddenly illuminated, round about 300 B.C., by light from the West. Megasthenes, a Greek at the court of the first of the great sovereigns of the Mauryan dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya, wrote an objective account of the civilization in which he found himself, which has survived in fragments. He presents a picture of a regime which had established control over a large part of Northern India at least: fully literate, urban, highly organized, and ruling from an impressive citadel within a great walled town at Pataliputra on the Ganges. The state is held together by a powerful army, with a war office divided into six departments, dealing respectively with cavalry, infantry, light mobile armour (chariots), heavy armour (elephants), quartermaster's stores and maintenance of war engines, and finally liaison with the naval forces. No less elaborately organized is the civil service, which has a ministry of agriculture and public works controlling road construction, irrigation canals, mines, forests, land taxes, and big-game hunting. The city council, subdivided like the war office into six departments, deals with industry, weights and measures, registration of births and deaths, control of state shops, collection of sales tax, and the supervision of the affairs of foreign visitors. The king, who succeeds by patrilineal right, leads the army, which includes infantry equipped with 6-foot bows and others with slashing swords; there are some Buddhists, but essentially the picture is one of a Hindu society.