Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.2

c12.s12.2

For the linguistic situation in India during the Nanda and Mauryan periods, we have literary evidence only for the Nanda period, and both literary and epigraphical for the Mauryan period. The Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas and Upanishads, the dates of which cannot be satisfactorily determined, cover at least 600 years, from 800 B.C. to 200 B.C.; and the Buddhist and Jaina canonical literatures also, in their substance, refer to the period immediately before the Nandas; and conditions during the Nanda age not being very different from those obtaining a few centuries earlier, the evidence from the Brāhmaṇas and other works mentioned above can be regarded as equally applicable to it. The Brahmanical Sūtras, Yāska, Pāṇini, Kātyāyana, Patañjali, Kauṭilya, Vātsyāyana, probably Bharata, and above all, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa—all these belong either wholly or partly (as in the case of the two epics) to the Nanda and Mauryan periods. On the epigraphic side, we have to take note of the earliest Brāhmī inscriptions which are few and very small, and Brāhmī legends on the early coins and seals, some of which may be pre-Maurya; and the inscriptions of Aśoka and his successors. Post-Maurya inscriptions for a couple of centuries after the extinction of the Maurya dynasty also have some value for these periods.