Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s20.8

c11.s20.8

Several attempts have been made along different lines to arrive at a date for the *Arthaśāstra* later than the Mauryan epoch. Jolly has compared the *Arthaśāstra* with the *Dharmaśāstras* ; while he has succeeded in discovering many close parallels, it cannot be said that any clear conclusion can be drawn from them about the relative age of KA. Jolly has himself changed his mind ; in 1913¹ he was ready to concede that the text of Yājñavalkya as we know it did not exist when KA was written ; he said that while many neologisms are common between KA and the youngest smṛtis, there is little clue to decide which of them is earlier ; he was struck by many differences between KA and the smṛtis (torture, ordeals, divorce etc.) and accounted for them by assuming that they were due to deep-lying differences in standpoint known from the beginning between a code of custom and a text-book of politics. Finally he said that the kernel of KA belonged to about 300 B.C. and much of its contents was seen to be genuine by numerous early citations as shown by Zachariae, Hillebrandt, Hertel and Jacobi. The resemblances with the later smṛtis puzzled him and he left it an open question if the smṛtis revised the old law in the light of the KA or later ideas entered into KA and fused themselves inseparably with the text. Ten years later, in 1923 Jolly wrote : ‘One cannot help arriving at the conclusion that Kauṭilya must have been acquainted with the whole body of Dharmaśāstra literature much as we now have it, from the earliest Dharmaśāstras down to the most recent metrical smṛtis and smṛti fragments’. Even the great authority of Jolly cannot gain assent for so extravagant a conclusion in preference to the hesitant tone that marked his expressions a decade earlier, especially when we find him adding as an afterthought : ‘It is true that some facts seem to point the other way, so that Yājñavalkya instead of Kauṭilya would have to be regarded as the borrower, either directly or indirectly through the medium of a common source.’