Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.19

c10.19

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.