Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s15.5

c12.s15.5

But a slow and steady widening of the tribal and primitive outlook was being effected in the political sphere. Already in the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* we hear of such sacrifices as the *Rājasūya* and the *Aindramahābhiṣeka*, of *sārvabhauma* kings, of paramount rule and of all-encompassing sovereignty. The same political conception of *rājā sārvabhauma* is repeated in *Baudhāyana Śrauta*- sūtra, and that of rāja chakkavatti in early Buddhist and Jaina texts¹. In reality however the normal political condition of northern India till the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. was not that of an empire of any considerable extent under a sārvabhauma monarch but it was that of separate small and independent states and kingdoms each under a king or tribal leader. It was only towards the third quarter of the fourth century B.C. that the ideal was partially achieved in the person of Mahāpadmananda who has been referred to in the Purāṇas as sarvarājocchettā, sarvakṣatrāntakaṇpaḥ and ekarāṭ, the supreme monarch, and one of his sons, the last of the dynasty, as the powerful monarch of the Prasioi and the Gangaridai, in the accounts of classical writers.