India, c. 2600 BC – AD 130

The Indus cities, the renouncer traditions, the Mauryan empire, and four centuries of contact with the Greek and Roman west.

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India

THE INDUS CITIES THE VEDIC AGE THE SIXTEEN STATES THE MAURYAS AFTER THE MAURYAS 2400 BC 2000 BC 1600 BC 1200 BC 800 BC 400 BC AD 1 THE CITIES THE RENOUNCERS THE EMPIRES CONTACT WITH THE WEST c. 2600 BC — THE INDUS CITIES. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro at their mature phase — grid-planned streets, standardised fired brick, covered drains and a public bath, contemporary with the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The script is undeciphered, so a literate urban civilisation of a million people leaves no readable word.1 c. 2300 BC — Meluhha in the Akkadian records. Mesopotamian texts name a trading partner, Meluhha, generally identified with the Indus. Indus seals have been excavated at Ur and Susa. Contemporary evidence of trade between the two oldest urban systems.2 c. 1900 BC — The Indus cities decline. Abandoned over some centuries; the causes are disputed and include river shift and monsoon change. No destruction layer of conquest has been found.3 c. 1500 BC — The Rigveda composed. Oral Sanskrit hymns, later written. The oldest surviving text of any Indo-European language, transmitted by memory for a millennium before it was set down.4 c. 563 BC — Siddhartha born at Kapilavastu. A prince of the Shakya republic, son of Shuddhodhana, on the present India–Nepal border. The tradition holds the Shakyas to be Suryavamsha, of the Solar Dynasty — the line of Ikshvaku that also produced Rama. Set out in Two Wheels.6 c. 540 BC — Mahavira and the Jains. A contemporary of the Buddha, and of the same Kshatriya class. Two renouncer traditions from the warrior caste, in the same generation, in the same region.7 c. 534 BC — THE RENUNCIATION. He leaves the kingdom, his wife and his son Rahula. A Kshatriya of the senior royal line abandons the throne, and the tradition makes the renunciation the point: the wheel of dharma is taken up in place of the wheel of empire.8 c. 483 BC — The Buddha dies at Kushinagar. The relics are divided among eight claimants and stupas raised over them — the beginning of the reliquary practice Ashoka later takes up at scale.10 c. 250 BC — The Third Buddhist Council, and the missions. Held at Pataliputra under Ashoka by the Theravada account. Missions are sent out afterwards — to Sri Lanka under his son Mahinda, and westward to the Greek kings of Edict 13. The emperor spends the empire’s reach on the renouncer’s teaching.22 c. 600 BC — The sixteen Mahajanapadas. Northern India organised into sixteen great states, republics and kingdoms both. Magadha rises among them, and it is Magadha the Mauryas inherit.5 c. 322 BC — Chandragupta founds the Maurya empire. In the vacuum left by Alexander's withdrawal. Within twenty years it holds the whole north Indian plain and the passes into Afghanistan.13 c. 300 BC — The Arthashastra. The treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, Chandragupta’s minister. Its dating is disputed and the surviving text is later, but it is the fullest ancient Indian account of how a state was to be run.17 c. 268 BC — Ashoka accedes. Grandson of Chandragupta. His empire holds nearly the whole subcontinent, and his edicts are the earliest deciphered Indian inscriptions.19 c. 261 BC — KALINGA, AND THE TURN. The Thirteenth Rock Edict records the conquest of Kalinga and the king’s own remorse for it in his own words — a hundred thousand killed, many times that number dead of other causes. He turns to dhamma. No other ancient monarch records regret for a victory in a public inscription.20 c. 250 BC — The pillar edicts and the lion capital. Ashoka’s edicts cut on polished sandstone pillars across the empire. The lion capital from Sarnath is the state emblem of India today.24 c. 185 BC — The Mauryas end. The last Maurya is killed by his commander Pushyamitra Shunga. The empire lasts about 137 years; the teaching it exported outlasts it by more than two thousand.25 c. 518 BC — Darius takes the Indus. The Persian empire annexes the Indus valley. Herodotus states it was the most heavily taxed satrapy of all, and Darius’s own inscriptions list Hidush among his lands.9 326 BC — Alexander turns back at the Hyphasis. His army refuses to go further east. The Macedonian frontier stops at the Punjab, and the satrapies he leaves behind become the ground the Mauryas take.11 326 BC — The Hydaspes: Alexander and Porus. Alexander defeats Porus in the Punjab, then restores him to his own kingdom as satrap. It is the last of his great battles.12 c. 303 BC — SELEUCUS TRADES LAND FOR ELEPHANTS. Seleucus campaigns east, cannot hold, and settles. He cedes Arachosia, Gedrosia, Aria and the Paropamisadae to Chandragupta and receives five hundred war elephants. A marriage agreement is part of the terms.14 c. 302 BC — Megasthenes at Pataliputra. Seleucus sends him as ambassador to the Mauryan court. His Indica is the first substantial Greek description of India. It is lost and survives only in quotation by Strabo, Arrian and Diodorus.15 301 BC — The elephants decide Ipsus. Chandragupta's five hundred elephants are used at Ipsus, where Antigonus is killed and his kingdom divided. Ptolemy takes Coele-Syria from that settlement and Seleucus disputes it — the grievance behind six Syrian Wars, and behind Judaea changing hands in 200.16 c. 273 BC — Bindusara writes to Antiochus. He asks the Seleucid king for sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist. Antiochus sends the wine and figs and replies that Greek law forbids the sale of philosophers. Athenaeus preserves the exchange.18 c. 258 BC — The Kandahar bilingual edict. Ashoka's edict cut in Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar, in Alexander's own foundation. Greek was still the administrative language of the region a century after he passed through.21 c. 250 BC — ASHOKA NAMES THE HELLENISTIC KINGS. The Thirteenth Rock Edict records missions sent to five named Greek kings, Ptolemy II Philadelphus among them, with Antiochus II, Antigonus Gonatas, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander. Contemporary Indian inscription naming the king who built the Library.23 c. 155 BC — Menander, the Greek king of India. The Indo-Greek kingdom at its height. His coins are found across the north-west, and the Pali Milindapanha records him in dialogue with a Buddhist monk. A Greek king remembered in Buddhist scripture.26 c. 120 BC — Hippalus and the monsoon. A Greek navigator is credited with working out the monsoon crossing, which allows a direct run from the Red Sea to India rather than a coastal creep. The volume of the trade multiplies from this point.27 c. 110 BC — THE HELIODORUS PILLAR. A Greek ambassador from Taxila sets up a pillar at Besnagar to Vasudeva, in Sanskrit, calling himself a Bhagavata — a devotee of Vishnu. Contemporary stone evidence of a Greek adopting Indian religion, and the earliest surviving epigraphic reference to Vasudeva worship.28 22 BC — An Indian embassy reaches Augustus. Sent by a king Strabo calls Pandion or Porus, with gifts and a letter in Greek. One of the party, an ascetic named Zarmanochegas, burned himself alive at Athens; Strabo and Dio both record it and give his tomb inscription.29 c. AD 1 — Tamil at Berenike. Excavation at the Red Sea port of Berenike — built by Ptolemy II for elephants — has recovered Indian peppercorns, teak, and potsherds inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi. Indian writing, in an Egyptian harbour.30 c. AD 50 — The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Greek merchant's handbook to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, naming ports, goods and sailing seasons. Roman coin hoards in south India confirm the volume. The route runs through the ports the Ptolemies built for elephants.31 c. AD 60 — Arikamedu, a Roman post in Tamil country. Excavation on the Coromandel coast has produced Arretine ware, amphorae and Roman glass. Roman coin hoards across south India are counted in tens of thousands.32 c. AD 77 — Pliny counts the cost. He complains that India, China and Arabia drain a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire, and that India alone takes fifty-five million — Natural History 12.84. A Roman writer treating the trade deficit as a scandal.33 c. AD 127 — Kanishka and the Kushans. The Kushan empire spans Bactria to the Ganges. Gandharan sculpture gives the Buddha a human form for the first time, in a Greek idiom — drapery, proportion and features from Hellenistic art, on an Indian subject.34 c. AD 150 — The Muziris papyrus. A commercial contract in Greek, found in Egypt, for a cargo shipped from Muziris on the Malabar coast. It values one shipload at some seven million sesterces. The single best document of the India trade.35 c. AD 200 — Clement of Alexandria names the Buddha. In the Stromata he records Indian philosophers who follow the precepts of Boutta, whom they honour as a god. The Buddha named in a Christian text, at Alexandria.36
  1. 1c. 2600 BCTHE INDUS CITIES
  2. 2c. 2300 BCMeluhha in the Akkadian records
  3. 3c. 1900 BCThe Indus cities decline
  4. 4c. 1500 BCThe Rigveda composed
  5. 5c. 600 BCThe sixteen Mahajanapadas
  6. 6c. 563 BCSiddhartha born at Kapilavastu
  7. 7c. 540 BCMahavira and the Jains
  8. 8c. 534 BCTHE RENUNCIATION
  9. 9c. 518 BCDarius takes the Indus
  10. 10c. 483 BCThe Buddha dies at Kushinagar
  11. 11326 BCAlexander turns back at the Hyphasis
  12. 12326 BCThe Hydaspes: Alexander and Porus
  13. 13c. 322 BCChandragupta founds the Maurya empire
  14. 14c. 303 BCSELEUCUS TRADES LAND FOR ELEPHANTS
  15. 15c. 302 BCMegasthenes at Pataliputra
  16. 16301 BCThe elephants decide Ipsus
  17. 17c. 300 BCThe Arthashastra
  18. 18c. 273 BCBindusara writes to Antiochus
  19. 19c. 268 BCAshoka accedes
  20. 20c. 261 BCKALINGA, AND THE TURN
  21. 21c. 258 BCThe Kandahar bilingual edict
  22. 22c. 250 BCThe Third Buddhist Council, and the missions
  23. 23c. 250 BCASHOKA NAMES THE HELLENISTIC KINGS
  24. 24c. 250 BCThe pillar edicts and the lion capital
  25. 25c. 185 BCThe Mauryas end
  26. 26c. 155 BCMenander, the Greek king of India
  27. 27c. 120 BCHippalus and the monsoon
  28. 28c. 110 BCTHE HELIODORUS PILLAR
  29. 2922 BCAn Indian embassy reaches Augustus
  30. 30c. AD 1Tamil at Berenike
  31. 31c. AD 50The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
  32. 32c. AD 60Arikamedu, a Roman post in Tamil country
  33. 33c. AD 77Pliny counts the cost
  34. 34c. AD 127Kanishka and the Kushans
  35. 35c. AD 150The Muziris papyrus
  36. 36c. AD 200Clement of Alexandria names the Buddha

What this page carries. Four lanes. The cities — the Indus civilisation, urban and literate and unread, because its script is undeciphered. The renouncers — the Buddha and Mahavira, both Kshatriya, both in the same generation, both leaving the throne. The empires — the sixteen states, Magadha, and the Mauryas. Contact with the west — Persia, Alexander, the Seleucid treaty, the Indo-Greek kingdoms and the Roman sea trade.

The contact runs both ways and is materially attested. Darius lists Hidush among his lands; Seleucus trades four satrapies for five hundred elephants and those elephants decide Ipsus; Ashoka names five Greek kings in a rock edict, Ptolemy II among them; a Greek ambassador sets up a pillar to Vishnu in Sanskrit; and Gandharan sculpture gives the Buddha a human form in a Greek idiom. The Ptolemaic side is on The Ptolemies.

The Register

How the grading reads. one amber dot: a single channel carries it. two green: two independent sources cross. three green: a contemporary inscription, coin or other object. Thirty-six entries.

№DateLaneEventAtt.
1c. 2600 BCTHE CITIES THE INDUS CITIES. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro at their mature phase — grid-planned streets, standardised fired brick, covered drains and a public bath, contemporary with the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The script is undeciphered, so a literate urban civilisation of a million people leaves no readable word.
2c. 2300 BCTHE CITIES Meluhha in the Akkadian records. Mesopotamian texts name a trading partner, Meluhha, generally identified with the Indus. Indus seals have been excavated at Ur and Susa. Contemporary evidence of trade between the two oldest urban systems.
3c. 1900 BCTHE CITIES The Indus cities decline. Abandoned over some centuries; the causes are disputed and include river shift and monsoon change. No destruction layer of conquest has been found.
4c. 1500 BCRENOUNCERS The Rigveda composed. Oral Sanskrit hymns, later written. The oldest surviving text of any Indo-European language, transmitted by memory for a millennium before it was set down.
5c. 600 BCEMPIRES The sixteen Mahajanapadas. Northern India organised into sixteen great states, republics and kingdoms both. Magadha rises among them, and it is Magadha the Mauryas inherit.
6c. 563 BCRENOUNCERS Siddhartha born at Kapilavastu. A prince of the Shakya republic, son of Shuddhodhana, on the present India–Nepal border. The tradition holds the Shakyas to be Suryavamsha, of the Solar Dynasty — the line of Ikshvaku that also produced Rama. Set out in Two Wheels.
7c. 540 BCRENOUNCERS Mahavira and the Jains. A contemporary of the Buddha, and of the same Kshatriya class. Two renouncer traditions from the warrior caste, in the same generation, in the same region.
8c. 534 BCRENOUNCERS THE RENUNCIATION. He leaves the kingdom, his wife and his son Rahula. A Kshatriya of the senior royal line abandons the throne, and the tradition makes the renunciation the point: the wheel of dharma is taken up in place of the wheel of empire.
9c. 518 BCCONTACT Darius takes the Indus. The Persian empire annexes the Indus valley. Herodotus states it was the most heavily taxed satrapy of all, and Darius’s own inscriptions list Hidush among his lands.
10c. 483 BCRENOUNCERS The Buddha dies at Kushinagar. The relics are divided among eight claimants and stupas raised over them — the beginning of the reliquary practice Ashoka later takes up at scale.
11326 BCCONTACT Alexander turns back at the Hyphasis. His army refuses to go further east. The Macedonian frontier stops at the Punjab, and the satrapies he leaves behind become the ground the Mauryas take.
12326 BCCONTACT The Hydaspes: Alexander and Porus. Alexander defeats Porus in the Punjab, then restores him to his own kingdom as satrap. It is the last of his great battles.
13c. 322 BCEMPIRES Chandragupta founds the Maurya empire. In the vacuum left by Alexander's withdrawal. Within twenty years it holds the whole north Indian plain and the passes into Afghanistan.
14c. 303 BCCONTACT SELEUCUS TRADES LAND FOR ELEPHANTS. Seleucus campaigns east, cannot hold, and settles. He cedes Arachosia, Gedrosia, Aria and the Paropamisadae to Chandragupta and receives five hundred war elephants. A marriage agreement is part of the terms.
15c. 302 BCCONTACT Megasthenes at Pataliputra. Seleucus sends him as ambassador to the Mauryan court. His Indica is the first substantial Greek description of India. It is lost and survives only in quotation by Strabo, Arrian and Diodorus.
16301 BCCONTACT The elephants decide Ipsus. Chandragupta's five hundred elephants are used at Ipsus, where Antigonus is killed and his kingdom divided. Ptolemy takes Coele-Syria from that settlement and Seleucus disputes it — the grievance behind six Syrian Wars, and behind Judaea changing hands in 200.
17c. 300 BCEMPIRES The Arthashastra. The treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, Chandragupta’s minister. Its dating is disputed and the surviving text is later, but it is the fullest ancient Indian account of how a state was to be run.
18c. 273 BCCONTACT Bindusara writes to Antiochus. He asks the Seleucid king for sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist. Antiochus sends the wine and figs and replies that Greek law forbids the sale of philosophers. Athenaeus preserves the exchange.
19c. 268 BCEMPIRES Ashoka accedes. Grandson of Chandragupta. His empire holds nearly the whole subcontinent, and his edicts are the earliest deciphered Indian inscriptions.
20c. 261 BCEMPIRES KALINGA, AND THE TURN. The Thirteenth Rock Edict records the conquest of Kalinga and the king’s own remorse for it in his own words — a hundred thousand killed, many times that number dead of other causes. He turns to dhamma. No other ancient monarch records regret for a victory in a public inscription.
21c. 258 BCCONTACT The Kandahar bilingual edict. Ashoka's edict cut in Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar, in Alexander's own foundation. Greek was still the administrative language of the region a century after he passed through.
22c. 250 BCRENOUNCERS The Third Buddhist Council, and the missions. Held at Pataliputra under Ashoka by the Theravada account. Missions are sent out afterwards — to Sri Lanka under his son Mahinda, and westward to the Greek kings of Edict 13. The emperor spends the empire’s reach on the renouncer’s teaching.
23c. 250 BCCONTACT ASHOKA NAMES THE HELLENISTIC KINGS. The Thirteenth Rock Edict records missions sent to five named Greek kings, Ptolemy II Philadelphus among them, with Antiochus II, Antigonus Gonatas, Magas of Cyrene and Alexander. Contemporary Indian inscription naming the king who built the Library.
24c. 250 BCEMPIRES The pillar edicts and the lion capital. Ashoka’s edicts cut on polished sandstone pillars across the empire. The lion capital from Sarnath is the state emblem of India today.
25c. 185 BCEMPIRES The Mauryas end. The last Maurya is killed by his commander Pushyamitra Shunga. The empire lasts about 137 years; the teaching it exported outlasts it by more than two thousand.
26c. 155 BCCONTACT Menander, the Greek king of India. The Indo-Greek kingdom at its height. His coins are found across the north-west, and the Pali Milindapanha records him in dialogue with a Buddhist monk. A Greek king remembered in Buddhist scripture.
27c. 120 BCCONTACT Hippalus and the monsoon. A Greek navigator is credited with working out the monsoon crossing, which allows a direct run from the Red Sea to India rather than a coastal creep. The volume of the trade multiplies from this point.
28c. 110 BCCONTACT THE HELIODORUS PILLAR. A Greek ambassador from Taxila sets up a pillar at Besnagar to Vasudeva, in Sanskrit, calling himself a Bhagavata — a devotee of Vishnu. Contemporary stone evidence of a Greek adopting Indian religion, and the earliest surviving epigraphic reference to Vasudeva worship.
2922 BCCONTACT An Indian embassy reaches Augustus. Sent by a king Strabo calls Pandion or Porus, with gifts and a letter in Greek. One of the party, an ascetic named Zarmanochegas, burned himself alive at Athens; Strabo and Dio both record it and give his tomb inscription.
30c. AD 1CONTACT Tamil at Berenike. Excavation at the Red Sea port of Berenike — built by Ptolemy II for elephants — has recovered Indian peppercorns, teak, and potsherds inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi. Indian writing, in an Egyptian harbour.
31c. AD 50CONTACT The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Greek merchant's handbook to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, naming ports, goods and sailing seasons. Roman coin hoards in south India confirm the volume. The route runs through the ports the Ptolemies built for elephants.
32c. AD 60CONTACT Arikamedu, a Roman post in Tamil country. Excavation on the Coromandel coast has produced Arretine ware, amphorae and Roman glass. Roman coin hoards across south India are counted in tens of thousands.
33c. AD 77CONTACT Pliny counts the cost. He complains that India, China and Arabia drain a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire, and that India alone takes fifty-five million — Natural History 12.84. A Roman writer treating the trade deficit as a scandal.
34c. AD 127CONTACT Kanishka and the Kushans. The Kushan empire spans Bactria to the Ganges. Gandharan sculpture gives the Buddha a human form for the first time, in a Greek idiom — drapery, proportion and features from Hellenistic art, on an Indian subject.
35c. AD 150CONTACT The Muziris papyrus. A commercial contract in Greek, found in Egypt, for a cargo shipped from Muziris on the Malabar coast. It values one shipload at some seven million sesterces. The single best document of the India trade.
36c. AD 200CONTACT Clement of Alexandria names the Buddha. In the Stromata he records Indian philosophers who follow the precepts of Boutta, whom they honour as a god. The Buddha named in a Christian text, at Alexandria.