Maurya Empire Founded
Around 321 BCE, Chandragupta Maurya seized the throne of Magadha in northeastern India and founded the Maurya Empire, which would grow into the first state to bring most of the Indian subcontinent under a single government. The date is traditional and approximate; scholars place his rise somewhere in the 320s BCE. The empire lasted until about 185 BCE and left a lasting mark on Indian political thought, administration, and religious history.
The background was a landscape of rival kingdoms and republics. By the fourth century BCE, Magadha, centered on the Ganges plain and its capital Pataliputra, had become the most powerful of them under the Nanda dynasty, which commanded a large army and substantial revenues. In the northwest, meanwhile, Alexander the Great's campaigns had reached the Indus region around 326 BCE. When Alexander withdrew and then died in 323 BCE, he left a patchwork of local rulers and garrisons with weak central control.
Chandragupta's origins are poorly documented, and sources disagree about his background. Later Indian traditions, including Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical texts, link him with the scholar-advisor Chanakya, also called Kautilya, who is credited with helping engineer the downfall of the Nandas. The historical role of Chanakya is debated, as are the details of the story. What seems reasonably clear is that Chandragupta overthrew the Nanda ruler, took Pataliputra, and then expanded westward and across central India, absorbing territory the Greeks had left unsettled.
His most notable confrontation came around 305 BCE with Seleucus I Nicator, who had inherited much of Alexander's eastern territory and tried to reclaim it. The two reached a settlement under which Seleucus gave up lands in the northwest, in return for a gift of war elephants, and the two powers established diplomatic relations. The Greek envoy Megasthenes later lived at the Mauryan court, and his lost account survives only in fragments quoted by other writers.
The empire reached its greatest extent under Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka, who ruled in the third century BCE. After a bloody campaign in Kalinga, Ashoka is traditionally said to have embraced Buddhism and promoted a policy of moral conduct, which he recorded on rock and pillar inscriptions across his domain. These edicts are among the earliest deciphered written sources in India. The Maurya state relied on a large bureaucracy, a standing army, and an extensive network of roads, though the treatise Arthashastra, long attributed to Kautilya, probably took its final form later.
After Ashoka, the empire weakened and fragmented, ending when the last ruler was overthrown by his general Pushyamitra Shunga. Yet the Maurya model of continental rule, and Ashoka's imagery, continued to inspire later states, including modern India, which adopted his lion capital as its national emblem.