Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.5

c10.5

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.