Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.2

c10.2

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.