Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10: Chapter IX. Ashoka
Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10
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Chapter IX. Ashoka
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THIS BOOK IS NOT A HISTORY, but in its last chapter the impersonal *disjecta* of prehistory may fittingly be assembled for a moment in the likeness of a man. Ashoka came to the throne about 268 B.C. and died about 232. Spiritually and materially his reign marks the first coherent expression of the Indian mind, and, for centuries after the political fabric of his empire had crumbled, his work was implicit in the thought and art of the subcontinent. It is not dead today.
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It is just possible that Ashoka had Seleukid blood in his veins; at least his reputed vice-royalty of Taxila in the Punjab during the reign of his father would have introduced him to the living memory of Alexander the Great, and, as king, he himself tells us of his proselytizing relations with the Western powers. But, though on one notable occasion he used Greek and Aramaic as his vehicle, it is as an Indian that he speaks to us through the graven rocks and pillars that bore his message to his people, from Afghanistan and the North-west Frontier to Mysore: his message of Moderation and Gentleness and Tolerance and Piety; his exhortation to forgo silliness and superstition and to regard the sacredness of life. And then, 'Let small and great exert themselves', he proclaims sharply from the granite slopes of that Brahmagiri which, with its ancient town-site and its megaliths, has recurred more than once in this survey. The alternation of a meekness which sometimes partakes of sentimentality with a recurrent and redeeming toughness is a dual character that has reappeared down to modern times amongst the greater Indian leaders.
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Here we are not concerned with the details, true or supposititious, of Ashoka's life and administration. The writings of Vincent Smith and F. W. Thomas are accessible¹⁰⁸ and, in spite of needed modifications and additions,¹⁰⁸ wear well with time. It will suffice to recall that Ashoka's grandfather, Chandragupta, who in 326 B.C. had met Alexander the Great in the Punjab, usurped the throne of Magadha beside the Ganges in Bihār within the next two or three years, and so established the Maurya dynasty at the head of the most powerful and wealthy kingdom in northern India. About the same time he attacked and destroyed the garrisons left by Alexander in the Indus basin; and the attempt by Seleukos, one of the four heirs to Alexander's empire, to recover the lost ground in the latter years of the century ended in victory for Chandragupta and a patched-up peace. The peace-terms may possibly have included a marriage between the victor and a daughter of Seleukos.
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The Mauryan kingdom, from its Gangetic homeland, now reached out to the Hindu Kush in the west and to Bengal in the east. Its southerly limit at the death of Chandragupta in 398 B.C. is less certain; but his successor Bindusāra, surnamed Amitraghāta or 'slayer of enemies', extended it into the Peninsula, and when Ashoka came to the throne the southern end of his empire lay across northern Mysore. Nor was this vast amalgam a merely nominal holding. It was integrated by a highly organized civil service, and the king himself was tireless in its supervision, touring the land and, in his own words, 'beholding the country and the people'. In archaeological thinking, the scene was set for a wide pervasion of dominant cultural ideas and standards over an almost infinite diversity of local traditions.
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And that, as I see it, is what we find. I have already suggested (p. 24) the likelihood that at the end of the 6th century B.C., when Achaemenid Persia acquired its Indian province, Persia supplied India, not merely with administrators, but also with new materials and ideas: above all, with the use of iron, which now appears in India for the first time, and the idea of a currency, which was minted at Taxila in native guise but on Persian standards, and emerged in the Ganges basin in or shortly after the 5th century B.C. Persia moreover lent India the Aramaic alphabet which, with Aramaic speech, had been the official medium of communication throughout the Achaemenid empire. In India this script was modified to suit the local Prākṛit language and, as Kharoshṭhī, was used by Ashoka for his inscriptions in the north-west. Even as far south as Brahmagiri, the Ashokan scribe has added a word in this alien Kharoshṭhī, though elsewhere in metropolitan India the Brāhmī script was unchallenged.
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But the Persian contribution to India did not end with iron and currency and Kharoshṭhī. These were the symbols of that new security which advancing imperial rule imposed along the highways, and of a new burgeoning of inter-regional trade. Local capitals which were also caravan-cities sprang up beside the main routes: probably Begram north of Kabul; certainly, as recent work has shown, Chārsada (Pushkalāvati or ‘Lotus City’) on the Peshāwar plain; and far-famed Taxila in the Punjab. These derelict and dusty sites are memorials to the *pax Persica* of the latter half of the 6th century B.C. And two centuries later, when Alexander the Great brought his travel-stained troops to the Indus, he came as the successor to the Great King of Persia, whose empire he had grasped. He came to claim the Achaemenid province of India; albeit that his curiosity ever marched ahead of him, and his horizon was a mirage. But in the long view what mattered to India was less the arrival of Alexander than the destruction of the Persian power. Under the Achaemenid emperors, the arts and crafts—particularly but not only those of architecture—had achieved resplendent distinction. With the burning of Persepolis in 330 B.C., two centuries of royal patronage came to an abrupt end. The accumulated artistry of Persia was out of work.
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The successor-empire, to which Alexander and his heir Seleukos pointed the way, was that of Chandragupta and his Mauryas. Here was the greatest empire that India had ever produced, greater even than that of the Indus valley two thousand years previously. Here was the patronage of a dynasty with, as yet, no confirmed artistic tradition of its own in any way comparable with its wealth and its ambition. Here was a new home for the accomplished artists and craftsmen of Persia. And hither they came.
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It is not an exaggeration to say that this Indo-Persian phase marks the beginning of masonry architecture in India. There had of course been stone and brick buildings far back in the 3rd millennium, but little to which, so far as we know, the proud term 'architecture' can fairly be applied. Subsequently to the 3rd millennium, the earliest stone structures in India to which an approximate date can be attached are the remnants of the great defences of Old Rājgir in Bihār. These defences, twenty-five miles in length, enclose the site of the city which was associated in the 6th century B.C. with the Buddha and Mahāvīra during the first formative period of the Buddhist and Jaina faiths.* The work consists of a massive wall, dry-built of large unshapen stones, with square bastions at frequent intervals. These rugged structures, too, can scarcely claim the name of architecture. Nor can those of the early Taxila in the Punjab, visited though it was by Alexander in 326 B.C. There, on what is now the Bhīr Mound, the local king received his Greek visitor and showed him the sights. They were humble enough; the excavator of Taxila, Sir John Marshall, himself admits that at this time the town had 'no architecture worthy of the name'.110 With rare exceptions, its buildings were a rambling conglomeration of ill-aligned and ill-built walls of plastered rubble, resembling rather the slum of a poverty-stricken suburb than the central lay-out of a capital city. Almost the only architectural ‘feature’, if such it may be called, is the occasional use of untidy stone pedestals designed to carry wooden roof-posts. The general culture of the city was of the same inferior order: only at the end of the 4th century, at or shortly after the arrival of Alexander, do considerable hoards of sophisticated jewellery, including three superb gems of Achaemenian workmanship,¹¹¹ enliven the monotony of the scene. It is likely enough that these hoards were either Persian loot brought to Taxila by Alexander’s following, or were otherwise a sequel to the devastation of the Persian empire and the dispersal of Achaemenian craftsmanship.
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∗ Limited excavation within this huge site has shown, at one point, N.B.P. Ware at the lowest level, and at another point a preceding layer containing 'a medium to coarse red ware mixed with a few fine black sherds'. There is at present no indication of any very long occupation prior to 500 B.C. See *I.A.* 1953-54, 9, and 1954-55, 16.
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Indeed, in ‘Aryan’ India the term ‘architecture’ can first be applied unreservedly to the famous sandstone columns, once more than thirty in number, which Ashoka set up as memorials after his conversion to Buddhism, and on some of which he subsequently carved his pious injunctions to his subjects. It has long been recognized that these columns, without precedent in Indian architectural forms, represent in partibus the craftsmanship of Persia. Actually, the name ‘Persepolitan’ which is commonly given to them by writers on Indian architecture is not altogether happy, since the innumerable columns of Persepolis are invariably fluted, whereas those of Ashoka are unfluted,¹¹² as indeed was the normal Persian custom. But if for ‘Persepolitan’ we substitute ‘Persian’ or, better still, ‘Achaemenid’, there can be no dispute. The Chunār sandstone from which Ashoka’s columns are wrought is superbly carved and is finished with a lustrous polish of a kind which in India is characteristic of no other age. This is a Persian accomplishment; the masonry of the palaces of Darius and Xerxes ‘goes to the extreme of highly polished stones, looking, when well preserved, like mirrors of black marble’.¹¹³ Equally Persian are the famous lions which crowned the Ashokan column at Sārnāth, near Banaras, and have been assumed as the Republican badge of India. The setting-up of memorial or religious pillars (of wood) was indeed an Indian, not a Persian, habit,¹¹⁴ but the Ashokan form and craftsmanship are a completely alien rendering of this tradition. And, once established in India by the great Buddhist emperor, the Achaemenid column, with its bell-shaped lotus capital and with or without its animal impost, entered into the fabric of Indian architecture and was reproduced, in modified forms, by architects or rock-carvers, Buddhist and other, for several centuries after Ashoka.
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The mention of rock-carvers recalls another debt of Ashoka's to Persian prototypes. From the 7th century B.C., if not earlier, tombs in the likeness of pillared halls had been cut into the cliffs of Media and Persia. In India, the first of a long and distinguished series of rock-cut 'structures' were carved in the time of Ashoka out of the hard gneiss of the Barābar hills, nineteen miles north of Gayā in southern Bihār.¹¹⁵ It is significant that they reproduce wooden buildings: a round hut with a thatched roof, an oblong hall or shrine with a vaulted 'wooden' roof, a monumental doorway imitating bamboo and timber. In other words, the more grandiose Persian idea is adapted to the Indian idiom. At the same time the Persian tradition of polished stonework is faithfully and laboriously followed; the hard granite surface of the interiors of these humble cells has been burnished until it resembles glass or metal. And incidentally the Barābar caves were dedicated by Ashoka to the use of the Ājīvika ascetics, who were rivals to Buddhists and Jainas alike, though with a bias to the latter. The dedication is a tribute to the reality of the tolerance which the Buddhist emperor preached.
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Lastly, there can be no doubt that, in carving his precepts upon rocks, Ashoka was once more adapting a Persian precedent. The Bisutūn or Behistūn rock-inscription of Darius I dates from c. 518 B.C.; there is in India no precursor to the rock-edicts cut at the bidding of Ashoka in and after 257 B.C. True that, save for an occasional formula, nothing could be more unlike the commemorative and administrative records of the proud Persian despots than the gentle exhortations of the Buddhist emperor. But yet again, as so often, we are confronted with the transmutation of a manifestly inherited idea.
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In one way and another, then, the Mauryan was heir to the Great King. There is, however, an archaeological time-gap in the process of transmission. Persepolis was burned in 330 B.C., and the earliest relevant works of Ashoka shortly ante-date the middle of the 3rd century. What in the interim had happened to the homeless Persian craftsmen? I am inclined to think that Megasthenes and Pāṭaliputra, between them, come to the rescue.
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Megasthenes was sent by Seleukos as ambassador to the court of Chandragupta at Pāṭaliputra, adjoining Patna on the Ganges, about 302 B.C. He compiled a valuable account of the Mauryan court and administration, and extracts from it are preserved by later classical writers. The Indian towns, he says, ‘which are down beside the rivers or the sea are made of wood; for towns built of brick would never hold out’ against rain and flood. ‘But the towns which are built on elevated places out of reach, these are made of brick and clay.’ Pāṭaliputra he describes as situated at the junction of the Son and Ganges, and as being more than 9 miles long and 1¾ miles wide; in other words, it was stretched out along the bank of the Ganges in a fashion similar to that of the modern Patna. The city was surrounded by a wooden palisade with loopholes for archers, and outside the palisade was a wide and deep ditch, which served both as a defence and as a drain. Along the palisade were 570 towers and 64 gates. In the royal palace, as we are told by Aelian, following Megasthenes, there was much that was ‘calculated to excite admiration, and with which neither Susa, with all its costly splendour, nor Ecbatana, with all its magnificence, can vie. In the parks tame peacocks are kept, and pheasants which have been domesticated; and cultivated plants . . . and shady groves and pastures planted with trees, and tree-branches which the art of the woodman has deftly interwoven. . . . There are also tanks of great beauty in which they keep fish of enormous size but quite tame.' The whole description is significantly reminiscent of a Persian paradise.
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Of the splendour that was Pāṭaliputra little is known today in material form, but that little is precisely what we have been led to expect.¹¹⁸ As long ago as 1896 a summary excavation brought to light a column-capital of a familiar Achaemenid pattern. It has the stepped impost, side-volutes and central palmettes of its Persian prototypes, and its design if not its execution is attributable to an early phase of the transplanted Achaemenid craftsmanship. Two stone legs of a throne of Persian type were also found. Subsequently, in 1912, a more ambitious but still very incomplete excavation seems to have uncovered some part of a large pillared hall, represented by an unframed cluster of some eighty monolithic columns showing the Persian polish. In front of them is a row of massive timber rafts, presumably designed to carry a platform or monumental staircase over the unstable subsoil. Inadequate though the evidence be, it is tolerably clear that we have here a Persian *diwan* or *apadana* or audience-hall, and that we are confronted once more with a deliberate 'Persianization' that bespeaks the presence of imported ideas and imported master-masons.
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The general credibility of Megasthenes is supported by a further discovery: that of a part of the wooden fortification which he describes. In 1926-7 digging disclosed a double line of upright timbers, 15 feet high, 14½ feet between the parallel lines, and bonded together by a 'floor' and a 'roof' of cross-timbers. The strange structure was interrupted by a transverse timber drain, but appeared to the excavator to 'extend almost indefinitely'. Whether it was a passage within an earthen rampart or whether, as is more likely, it was filled with earth and formed its core or revetment, was not ascertained but could be determined, no doubt, by trained observation. Unless the timber breakwaters of Ujjain be included (above, p. 144), this type of fortification is at present without analogy in India, though it fits in happily with the remarks of Megasthenes about the use of timber on riverine sites.
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The excavation of these various constructions was clumsy and produced no associated evidence as to date. A little recent digging¹¹⁷ on this difficult and often water-logged site has recognized five periods, ranging from that of the N.B.P. Ware (c. 5th century B.C. or later) to the Islamic 17th century. The earliest stratum lay on the natural surface and, with the N.B.P. sherds, yielded 'a good number' of polished sandstone pieces, including one large slab showing the typical Mauryan or Persian polish and bearing a palmette and bead-and-reel pattern of appropriate type. Somewhere under the vast site lies doubtless an earlier nucleus, if we may believe that the foundation of Pāṭaliputra as a Magadha border-fortress occurred in the time of the Buddha, about 494 B.C.¹¹⁸ No site in India would better repay sustained and large-scale excavation.
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As is wholly natural, therefore, it is at the Mauryan capital, Pāṭaliputra, that we may expect to discover the two missing generations of Achaemenid craftsmen. By the time of Ashoka their transference from the dead Persian empire to the living and expanding Indian empire had become something more than an accident of history. The displaced masters had already begun to train Indian pupils in their Achaemenid skills, and a certain non-Persian element in some of the Ashokan carvings—a trend towards softness and reduced precision, as in the bull from Ashoka's column at Rāmpūrwā in Bihār, and even in the lively animals round the pedestal of that most Persian creation of Ashoka's bestiary, the lions of Sārnāth—anticipates the Indianization which was to become more apparent in the succeeding Śuṅga period. Indeed, the whole episode of which this forms a part, taking place as it did on the historic stage, is an instructive finale to Indian prehistory. We are present at the passage of ideas, forms and techniques from one great region of Asia to another, from one religious and ethical and physical environment to another, not as blue-prints but as intelligent stimuli. Stated otherwise, the process is not altogether unlike that of biological evolution: history suddenly presented India with a whole complex of notions and variations from which she selected those best adapted for survival and development in her particular intellectual climate. The Mauryan empire of India was the sequel to the Achaemenid empire of Persia, not its reflection.
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And in greater or lesser degree this is the recurrent implication of Indian prehistory. It may be that the industries of the Old Stone Age of the subcontinent should be approached on these lines, with Africa directly or indirectly as a major though not exclusive source. More certainly, the derivation of the Indus Civilization from Mesopotamia may be understood in this fashion; and the Gangetic Bronze or Copper Age, in which the individuality of the northern plains first asserted itself, demonstrates the extent to which borrowed ideas and materials could be transmuted by the genius of a borrower supported by a prolific environment and drawn by imaginative ambition. So too in the succeeding Iron Age we observe this recipient India of the plains adopting the new metal with an avidity that amounted, nevertheless, to a technical rather than a social revolution; and then spreading it southwards to the more isolated and archaic populations of the central plateau, and southwards again—if I am right, as a parcel of Mauryan encroachment—into the Peninsula. And behind this interplay of material and geographical opportunity lies the Mind of India which, for all the recklessness inherent in so immense a generalization, may be said to show a surprising uniformity of response amidst an infinite diversity of background. For on the one hand Indian prehistory—it is not my function to extend this assertion into history—displays, like the Indian landscape, wide expanses of uniformity: a monotonous and interminable Palaeolithic, a diffuse Microlithic, centuries of Indus Civilization, centuries of Ganges Civilization, leagues of Megaliths. But on the other hand, again like the Indian landscape, this monotony is broken by sudden changes and heights; ever and anon India leaps from its sleep and grasps new ideas, new opportunity, with quick and prehensile intelligence. Let me say again that a prehistorian is writing.
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¹ See T. H. Holditch, *The Gates of India* (London, 1910); Aurel Stein, ‘The Indo-Iranian Borderlands’, Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1934, *Journ. of the Roy. Anthropological Inst. of Gt. Britain and Ireland*, LXIV (1934); and generally, J. F. Richards, ‘Geographic Factors in Indian Archaeology’, *Indian Antiquary*, LXII (1933), 235-243—the best sketch of the historical geography of India yet published. Also, O. H. K. Spate, *India and Pakistan: a General Regional Geography* (London, 1954).
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² Wheeler, ‘Roman Contact with India, Pakistan and Afghanistan’, in *Aspects of Archaeology, Essays presented to O. G. S. Crawford*, ed. by W. F. Grimes (London, 1951).
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³ For these and some other geochronological methods see F. E. Zeuner, *Dating the Past* (4th ed., London, 1958), and L. S. Palmer, *Man’s Journey through Time* (London, 1957).
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⁴ See pp. 106, 142, and Walter A. Fairservis, *Excavations in the Quetta Valley, West Pakistan* (American Mus. of Nat. Hist., 1956), p. 356. Recently the University of Pennsylvania has been very co-operative in this matter, and C14 dates are slowly accumulating.
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⁵ W. F. Libby, *Radiocarbon Dating* (Univ. of Chicago, 1952), and a large literature.
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⁶ *A.I.* no. 1 (1946), 58-9; nos. 10-11 (1955), 32-3, and 138-41.
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⁷ *A.I.* no. 1 (1946), 55-8; nos. 10-11 (1955), 50-2, and 143-6. N.B.P. ware has been mistaken for Greek black gloss, but, as Miss M. Bimson of the British Museum laboratory points out, there are several differences. Thus, a razor blade will run smoothly across the Greek black, whereas it will cut into the Indian black. If very small fragments are held near a magnet, Greek black is attracted to the magnet, whereas Indian black is relatively non-magnetic. Greek black, when refired, is consistently stable at temperatures of c. 1000° C., whereas Indian black shows considerable variation in its resistance to such temperatures.
Linked texts (5)
- Ἰνδική — Λούκιος Φλάουιος Ἀρριανός, Ancient Greek
- Sārnāth
- Pāṭaliputra
- Bhir Mound
- Rajgiri