Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s38.32

c11.s38.32

The second and thirteenth Rock-Edicts of Aśoka mention the Southern kingdoms and Ceylon; the list in the second edict is fuller and comprises the names of Cōḍa, Pāṇḍya, Satiyaputa, Keralaputa and Tāmbapaṇṇi. All these lands lay outside the empire of Aśoka, but he was on such friendly terms with them that he could arrange for the medical treatment of men and animals in all these lands, and for the importation and planting of useful medicinal herbs and roots wherever they were needed; he also sent missionaries for the preaching of the Dhamma among the people of these countries—thus evincing his interest in the physical and mental well-being of his neighbouring states. Now the merest mention of such facts raises the presumption of a certain level of culture and progress in the arts of life. The Tamils and the Sinhalese had a settled polity and lived in well-ordered states, and some decades before the date of the Aśoka inscriptions, Megasthenes had heard somewhat of the trade of the Sinhalese and of the polity of the Pāṇḍyan kingdom¹. He knows that Ceylon is an island more productive than India of gold and large pearls; a good part of the island was forest inhabited by wild beasts, a large breed of elephants among them. His quaint account of the Pāṇḍyan kingdom seems to be an idealised mixture of fact and fable. He says that Heracles had a daughter Pandaea to whom he assigned the southernmost portion of India; the people in this country comprised 365 villages which brought by turns their tribute to the royal treasury every day of the year; what is called tribute here seems to have been the supply of the provisions needed for a day for the royal household; in the *Silappadikāram*, a work of six or seven centuries later than the time of Megasthenes, we hear of households of shepherds in the capital city of Madura supplying ghee by turns to the palace².