Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.119

c14.119

There is surely something very familiar in this startling picture of an authoritarian regime, with its power over so large a tract of India: the control of manufactures, and of weights and measures; the elaborate city civilization, with its centralized government - the picture we can reconstruct from the evidence of the Harappā civilization is, after all, not so dissimilar. The Mauryan empire may be the result of indigenous evolution of the Aryan tradition, from the humble beginnings in the log cabins of the West to this sophisticated bureaucratic state a thousand years later, but can we ignore altogether the other, more ancient, urban tradition of India which the Aryans found? Chandragupta Maurya was not a foreigner, no invader such as Harṣa or Babur, coming in from the north-west to impose his will on the Indian people, but a product of a long tradition within India itself; he must have based his rule on long-established custom, in which was blended the ancient civic tradition of Harappā, with its bureaucracy and mercantile organization, and the more barbarous but invigorating Aryan warrior-caste which could make the state strong against its enemies and implant something to offset the fatal tendency to stagnation and decay that had been Harappā’s downfall.