Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s38.1

c11.s38.1

An impenetrable obscurity settles on the Mauryan empire after the reign of Aśoka. The only certainty is that the great empire founded by Chandragupta and extended and maintained in all its splendour by his son and grandson, did not long survive in its itegrity. Tivara, the only son of Aśoka named in his inscriptions, is not heard of again, and must be presumed to have predeceased his father. The Purāṇas, the Avadānas, and the Jaina accounts have different tales to tell, and later writers like Kalhaṇa of Kashmir and Tāranāth of Tibet give their own versions of what happened. There is no means of reconciling these divergent accounts except to assume that the empire was in some manner divided among the surviving sons of Aśoka, and that each of our sources preserves the story of that part of the empire with which it was concerned. A continuous history of the Mauryan empire after Aśoka is, in the present state of knowledge, out of the question ; all we can do is to reproduce the lists of monarchs with the periods of their rule found in the authorities, and note what we know of them.¹