Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s15.21

Language: English

c12.s15.21.1

After the withdrawal of the Macedonian army of Alexander and the establishment of an alliance of Chandragupta Maurya with Seleucus, the Mauryas came into very intimate friendly relations with the Seleucid Greek houses, and this relation continued from generation to generation. Besides contracting a matrimonial alliance Chandragupta repeatedly received Megasthenes as an ambassador from Seleucus, is reported to have sent Seleucus some strange Indian drugs presumably through his own envoy, and is further said to have been used to offer sacrifices in Hellenic manner to Alexander's altars on the Hyphases. The ceremonial at the court of this king described by classical writers also reveals Achaemenian influence¹. His son Bindusāra had also in his court a Greek envoy, Deimachus of Plataea, sent by Antiochus I, son of Seleucus. Bindusāra also, like his father seems to have been a Hellenophil; he wrote back to Antiochus requesting him to buy and send on to him sweet wine, dried figs and a Greek sophist. From Antiochus came the reply: ‘We shall send you dried figs and sweet wine, but it is not lawful in Greece to sell a sophist.’ Diodorus speaks of a Greek author Iamboulus by name who found his way to the king of Palibothra, and this king of Palibothra, presumably Bindusāra or at least one of the first three Maurya monarchs, ‘had a great love for the Grecians.’ Aśoka’s friendly relations with the Yavanas or the Greek states of Western Asia and Egypt are well-known;

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the world that he claims to have conquered by his policy of Dhammavijaya was preeminently this Hellenistic world; he arranged for the medical treatment of men and cattle, among others, in the dominions of Antiochus Theos and his neighbours; and it is not unlikely that his description of himself as devānampiya Pijadasi is an echo of the deification of kings current among Alexander’s successors in Hellenistic Orient. Both Megasthenes and Kauṭilya refer to a State department run and maintained specifically for the purpose of looking after foreigners² who evidently were quite numerous not only in the capital city of Pāṭaliputra but in other provincial capitals and trade centres. There can hardly be any doubt that these foreigners were mostly colonial Greeks and a very large majority of them were merchants and businessmen. Indeed in the third century B.C. a caravan highway ran from Taxila via Kandahar, Persepolis and Susa to Seleuceia on the Tigris, while another old main road ran via Kandahar, Herat, Hecatompylos, Ecbatana and Seleuceia and was joined by the Taxila-Kabul-Bactria route³. Taxila, it is well known, was the seat of an important Maurya province, and from here a great highway ran direct to connect Pāṭaliputra with the Hellenic east. Besides, there was also a coastal sea-borne trade route to Seleuceia along the Persian Gulf and up the Tigris, and to Egypt following the coastline.

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It is this trade route that explains the Aramaic inscription referred to above and datable in the fourth century B. C. It was along this route also that foreigners including envoys, Greek traders, travellers, artists and craftsmen must have flocked to Mauryan India in such numbers as to oblige the State to maintain a department to look after their comfort and well-being. This intimate contact indeed explains such finds as the fragmentary handle of a terracotta vase showing Alexander's head in lion's skin and recovered from Taxila¹, or random finds from Sārnāth, Basarh and the Patna region of terracotta pieces of distinctive Hellenistic appearance or with definite Hellenistic motifs and design². That they belong probably to a later date does not minimise the importance of the very intimate relations the Maurya court maintained with the Hellenic east; rather they point out that even after the decline and downfall of the Mauryas parts of India continued to remain in touch with the Hellenistic world. Within a century after the death of Aśoka a Greek army penetrated as far east as Mādhyamika near Chitor and Sāketa near Ayodhyā.