Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c8.10

c8.10

A brief study of the Mauryan polity, based mainly on the *Arthaśāstra*, follows (Chap. V); this sums up the state of government and administrative organisation as it was in the reigns of the first two emperors and provides the background necessary for the proper appraisal of the innovations of Aśoka in the administrative system, to which references occur in the inscriptions of that ruler. The present writer is inclined to accept the *Arthaśāstra* as a valid picture of conditions that prevailed in the Mauryan empire and has attempted to explain the basis for this view in an excursus on the *Arthaśāstra* at the end of the chapter.