Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.40

c9.40

It remains to ask, Where did they or their culture come from? Their iron-industry at least is no insoluble problem. Its impressive quantity and quality owe much to the accident of preservation in protective tombs. The scrappy remains of iron-work from the 'megalithic' levels of the Brahmagiri town would never, unsupported, have suggested the extent of the industry. *Per contra*, had megalithic tombs been built beside the Gangetic cities of the Iron Age, there can be no doubt that their display would have been correspondingly striking. There is in fact no more difficulty in deriving the early ironwork of south India in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. from Gangetic sources in the 5th and 4th centuries—and ultimately from Persian sources at the end of the 6th century (p. 24)—than in deriving the ironwork and N.B.P. Ware of the towns of the upper Deccan from the same northern region. The distinctive ceramic fashion of the *doāb*, as is not unnatural, was gradually left behind in the Deccan, but the use of the splendid and abundant new metal quickly penetrated southwards into the Peninsula. At the risk of complicating the matter with a gratuitous historical intrusion, I here add the suggestion that the southward extension of the Mauryan Empire into the Peninsula at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C., probably in the time of Ashoka's father, Bindusāra,¹⁰² provides an apposite context. The sharp and sudden difference at Brahmagiri between the magnificently equipped megalith-builders and their relatively primitive stone-using predecessors is exactly consonant with a tremendous historical event of the kind.¹⁰³ On this view, the three copies of Ashoka's Minor Rock-edict at Brahmagiri were appropriately addressed to the southernmost colonists of his father's empire, and not, as I had previously conjectured, to their bucolic precursors.