A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c9.9

c9.9

Thus it is evident that starting somewhere about 1000 B.C. the movement of the Aryans into the South proceeded more or less steadily and peacefully, and had reached its completion some time before the establishment of the Mauryan empire which included in its fold all India except the extreme South. The fact that the edicts of Aśoka were engraved in places as far south as Mysore and Kurnool shows that there must have been present in these places people to whom the Brāhmi script and the Prākrit idiom were nothing strange; also that Aśoka had political and diplomatic relations with the southern countries that lay outside his empire.