The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c18.78

c18.78

The inscription of the Satrap Rudradāman, engraved soon after the year A. D. 150 on the famous rock at Girnār in Kāthiāwār, on which Asoka, four centuries earlier, had recorded a version of his immortal edicts, bears direct testimony to the care bestowed by the central government upon the question of irrigation, even in the most remote provinces. Although Girnār is situated close to the Arabian Sea, at a distance of at least 1,000 miles from the Maurya capital, the needs of the local farmers did not escape the imperial notice. Pushyagupta, the Vaisya, who was Chandragupta’s governor of the western provinces, saw that by damming up a small stream a reservoir of great value for irrigation could be provided. He accordingly formed a lake called Sudarsana, ‘the Beautiful’, between the citadel on the east side of the hill and the ‘inscription rock’ farther to the east, but failed to complete the necessary supplemental channels. These were constructed in the reign of Chandragupta’s grandson Asoka, under the superintendence of his representative, Rāja Tushāspha, who was then viceroy. These beneficent works constructed under the patronage of the Maurya emperors endured for four hundred years, but in the year A. D. 150 a storm of exceptional violence destroyed the embankment, and with it the lake.