Class 7 Social Science Chapter 5: The Rise of Empires

Bigger is not the answer

Ask what an empire is and the first answer is usually that it is a very large kingdom. That is not quite it.

The difference is not size but shape, and the shape is what makes an empire both powerful and unstable.

Where the word comes from

Empire comes from imperium, a Latin word meaning supreme power.

That is a clue worth keeping. The word does not describe a measurement. It describes a relationship, in which one authority stands over others.

What an empire is made of

An empire is a set of smaller kingdoms and territories gathered under one strong ruler, or a group of them. Very often that power was taken by waging war on the smaller kingdoms first.

So an empire is assembled out of states that already existed.

The part people miss

Here is the structural point. Each of the smaller territories kept its own ruler.

They were not wiped off the map and replaced by officials. Their kings stayed, and became tributaries of the emperor, who directed the whole territory from one capital.

What a tributary is

A tributary is any ruler, or any state, that has given in to an emperor and pays him tribute.

Tribute might be money, or gold and other precious metals, or grain, livestock, elephants, or anything of worth the kingdom turned out. It was handed over as a sign of submission, of loyalty, or of respect. Another word for a tributary is a vassal, and we also say such kingdoms accepted the emperor overlordship.

The bargain underneath

Now the arrangement makes sense. Tribute and loyalty bought something back: an emperor would usually leave regional kings and chiefs to go on running their own districts.

That is a bargain, not a conquest in the simple sense. Both sides get something, which is why it lasts, and both sides can recalculate, which is why it breaks.

Where the capital sits

The emperor ruled from a capital, and a capital was not chosen at random. It was as a rule a place that was already the hub of wealth and of government already.

A place that is already rich and already organised is cheaper to rule from than one that is neither.

Three words for the man at the top

Ancient Sanskrit texts are blunt about the relationship, and their words for an emperor say so plainly.

Samraj means the lord of all, or supreme ruler. Adhiraja means overlord. Rajadhiraja means king of kings. Not one of them describes a large country; all three describe standing above other rulers.

The six things an empire does

An empire has to do certain work, or it stops being one. The six features divide neatly into three pairs.

Pair one: holding the territory

An empire maintains an army, which keeps the tributary states under control, expands the empire, and protects it from attack from outside.

And it keeps up the lines of movement: highways, river and sea routes, and the works that serve them, used for administration, for trade and for the welfare of the people.

Pair two: running the territory

An empire builds an administration and keeps it running, its officers handling the provinces, gathering the taxes and holding order.

And it makes laws, issues currencies, sets weights and measures, and regulates trade. A single set of weights across a thousand miles of road is itself an act of government.

Pair three: making it worth holding

An empire decides who may reach its resources, from the mines to the forest and farm yield to the labour itself.

And it encourages art, literature, religions, schools of thought and centres of learning. That last one is easy to read as decoration. It is not; it is how a collection of conquered states becomes somewhere people want to be.

Why a king would want the trouble

Running an empire is hard work, so why do it? Three reasons are commonly given.

There is the ambition to rule the entire world, which is really about controlling great territories and being remembered by posterity, the generations still to come. There is the wish to get hold of wide country and what lies in it, and so build strength in money and in arms. And there is a plain desire for great wealth, for the ruler and for the empire.

One more problem to solve

An empire covers a vast area, and a vast area holds many different peoples, with different languages, customs and cultures.

Getting them to live together in some harmony is a problem no army solves. That is part of why the sixth feature, the encouragement of learning and belief, is on the list at all.

Empires come and go

Indian history is full of empires. The pattern repeats: each one grew, spread wide, held for a time, weakened and was gone.

The most recent state of that kind over this Subcontinent was gone under a hundred years ago. So this is not a story about a remote past that has nothing to do with now.

Why start at the far end

We begin with the earliest ones instead, and there is a reason for that.

Studying how empires worked in the distant past shows how deeply they shaped India development at every level: political, economic, social and cultural. Start at the beginning and the pattern is easier to see.

Scenario:

Two visitors compare the lands they have come from. The first describes a single territory with one king, one army and one city, where every official answers to that king directly. The second describes something larger. In her land, she says, a dozen kings still sit in their own capitals and govern their own districts. But each of them sends gold and grain and trained elephants every year to one ruler in a distant city, and none of them would make war without his leave. A third listener says the second land is simply a bigger version of the first.

Analysis:

One kingdom, one empire, and a listener who has measured the wrong thing.

Activity:

Find out which modern countries were part of an empire a century ago, and whether their rulers then were local or sent from abroad.

Title:

Audit an empire against the six features

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Most people can fill the army box at once and the learning box last, which is roughly the reverse of how much each one decides whether an empire holds together.

All three Sanskrit words for an emperor describe standing above other kings, not ruling a big country.

The most recent state of that kind over this Subcontinent was gone under a hundred years ago.

A single set of weights and measures stretching across a thousand miles of road is itself an act of government.

Imperium is supreme power, not a large map.

Hold it, run it, make it worth holding: two features each.

Conquest is a bill first

Taking an army into far country is nothing like as simple as it sounds, and the reason is money.

The troops want feeding and clothing, arming and wages. Elephants and horses have to be looked after. Roads have to be built, or ships. All of that happens before anybody wins anything.

So what does an empire really need?

Three things, and none of them is courage. Considerable economic power. Control over the workforce. Access to resources.

An empire that cannot pay cannot campaign, whatever its ambitions.

The key to the whole business

Follow that through and you reach the point of this topic. Economic activity, and above all the making and the selling, is among the things that hold an empire up at all.

It is also the key to something a good ruler is supposed to care about: the welfare of the people and the quality of their lives.

Why trade routes matter so much

That is why establishing and controlling trade routes, across the empire and beyond it, mattered so much to a ruler.

The logic is simple. Better routes mean goods traded in greater quantity and greater variety. Busier trade leaves the makers better paid, and the ruler collecting more. Everyone in the chain gains, including the treasury.

What was actually traded

We are not guessing here. Both literature and archaeological excavation give plenty of evidence.

The main items included cloth and spice, farm yield, costly goods such as gems and craftwork, and animals of several kinds.

And how far it went

This brisk trade was not confined to India.

A great many Indian goods travelled to distant countries, going by land or by sea. The routes inside the empire were one end of something much longer.

Traders were not alone

It is easy to picture an ancient trader as a single man with a cart, doing his own business and trusting nobody.

Mostly that is wrong. Traders worked out the advantages of joining forces, and what they created were guilds, known as shrenis.

What a guild was

A guild was a powerful association. Its members might be traders, or craftsmen, or moneylenders, or agriculturists.

As far as the evidence shows, a guild had a head, and that head was usually elected. Below him were executive officers, who were expected to have all kinds of ethical qualities.

The first remarkable thing

Two things in particular make the guilds worth studying. The first is what they did to competition.

Members finished as partners instead of rivals. They had worked out that pooling what they had, and what they knew of buyers, of what was wanted against what was offered, of the hands available, left everybody better off than secrecy did.

The second remarkable thing

The second is autonomy. Guilds settled their own working rules, which the king was to leave alone.

An ancient text puts it directly: cultivators, traders, herdsmen, moneylenders and artisans have the authority to lay down rules for their own classes. Five groups, each governing itself.

Why a king agreed to that

It is worth asking why a powerful ruler would accept this.

The honest answer is that he had no reason not to. If trade flourished under the guild own rules, the king got his taxes and his prosperity without having to run anything. Interference would have cost him effort and gained him nothing.

How long they lasted

Guilds reached across much of India and lasted hundreds of years.

Even after they stopped existing formally, their spirit went on shaping Indian trade and business, in some ways to this day.

What they prove

The guilds are an excellent example of something broader: how far Indian society could arrange itself without being arranged.

They are not the only example. The old village body, with its many committees and panels, is another. In both cases, people organised themselves without being organised from above.

The rule a wise ruler followed

So there is a principle buried in this topic, and it is a principle about government rather than about trade.

A wise ruler left people to arrange their own affairs, and kept his hands off while the local bodies did their work properly. Knowing when not to act is part of ruling well.

Putting it together

An empire needs money before it needs anything else. Money comes from production and trade. Trade needs routes, and routes need building and protecting.

And the trade itself was run, in large part, by associations that governed themselves. An empire sat on top of an economy it did not invent and could not fully control.

Scenario:

A newly crowned king is advised to take direct charge of the cloth trade in his richest city. His minister says the traders there have their own association, with a head they elected themselves and officers who settle disputes. And that it already fixes the rules for weight, for credit and for apprentices. The king replies that supreme power must mean power over everything. And that he will appoint his own officials to write those rules instead. He adds that he cannot see why traders would share anything with one another in the first place, since each wants the same customers.

Analysis:

A ruler with real authority, about to spend it on something he would gain nothing from.

Activity:

Find out whether any trade or craft near you has its own association, and who makes its rules.

Title:

Cost out a campaign

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Most of the costs are daily and continue whether or not anyone is fighting, and almost every source of money traces back to trade. That is why a ruler who wants to conquer has to care about markets first.

An ancient text grants cultivators, traders, herdsmen, moneylenders and artisans the authority to lay down rules for their own classes.

Guild members shared information about markets and about supply and demand, having worked out that secrecy left everyone poorer.

The spirit of the guilds went on influencing Indian trade and business long after the guilds themselves stopped existing.

An army is a bill before it is a weapon.

Guilds: share what you know, write your own rules.

A century of upheaval

Between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE, north India changed profoundly.

We have already met the sixteen mahajanapadas, the great kingdoms of the north and the centre, each with a council of its own. One of them was about to become something else.

Magadha steps forward

Magadha held what is now south Bihar and some ground beside it. It grew to matter more than its neighbours, and made the ground ready for many kingdoms to run together into this land first empire.

Powerful early kings had a great deal to do with it. Ajatashatru in particular was crucial in making Magadha a dominant centre of power.

Two famous contemporaries

Ajatashatru reign is easy to place in memory, because two of the most famous religious figures in the world lived during it.

Siddhartha Gautama, whom the world came to call the Buddha, and Vardhamanan, whom it calls Mahavira, were both alive in his time.

Why Magadha and not another

This is the part worth dwelling on, because it is not luck. Magadha sat in the resource-rich Ganga plains.

It had fertile land. It had abundant forests, which meant timber, and which meant elephants. Both of those are military assets as much as economic ones.

Iron, again

Iron ore and other minerals came from the nearby hilly regions, and they proved crucial to the kingdom expansion.

Iron ploughs turned the land better, so agricultural produce increased. Iron weapons were lighter and sharper, so the army became more capable. One metal, two advantages.

What a surplus buys

A surplus of food grains does something that is easy to overlook. It frees people from growing food.

Those freed people went into arts and crafts, and what they made was wanted both inside the empire and outside its borders. A full granary is the beginning of an export trade.

Two rivers

Magadha also had the Ganga and the Son.

Rivers are roads that need no building, and these could be used for transport. Flourishing trade boosted the income of the state, and that income is a direct part of why Magadha rose.

The Nandas

Around the fifth century BCE, Mahapadma Nanda came to the front in Magadha and began the Nanda line.

He drew a great many lesser kingdoms together, and pushed his realm out over parts of the east and the north. With the economy flourishing he started striking coins, which declares financial strength quite as much as it serves convenience. Greek accounts tell us the Nandas kept a large army.

How the Nandas lost it

The last Nanda emperor was Dhana Nanda, and the accounts agree on an awkward combination. He was very rich, and he was highly unpopular.

He ground his own people down and used them up. Being hated is what let the Nanda realm be taken and swallowed by one of the biggest empires this land has seen.

A grammarian in the same years

Panini lived around the fifth century BCE, in the time of the Nandas.

He composed the Ashtadhyayi, which sets out how Sanskrit grammar works, across 3,996 brief sutras. A sutra is a concise, carefully made phrase that holds an idea in a form easy to remember and pass on.

Meanwhile, in the northwest

While all this went on in the east, the northwest was a different world. It held smaller kingdoms strung along an ancient route that ran towards the Mediterranean.

One of them, the Greek accounts say, was the Pauravas, and their king was Porus.

Alexander, first phase

Between 334 and 331 BCE, Alexander marched on the Persian Empire, a young and formidable Greek king out of Macedonia. His reason was revenge for earlier Persian invasions of Greece.

There is a detail here worth noticing: during those earlier invasions, some Indian troops out of the Persian-held northwest had fought on the Persian side. He conquered the Persian Empire, Greek culture spread, and his empire came to cover three continents.

Alexander, in India

Between 327 and 325 BCE he pushed further east, wanting to stand at the world far edge, and carried the war into India.

He defeated Porus in Punjab. But he was fought hard by local tribes and rulers, and put whole city populations to the sword. Greek writers note that in some of the fighting the women stood in the line beside the men. Alexander himself was seriously wounded.

Why he turned back

His soldiers were tired and homesick. The heart went out of them and they would go no further inland, towards the Ganga.

So Alexander drew back into Persia with part of his force, going by the southern coastal route and through the harsh desert of Iran, which cost his troops heavily in thirst, hunger and disease. The retreat was more destructive than the battles.

And how it ended

Between 324 and 323 BCE, back in Persia, he faced rebellions and political turmoil.

He fell ill and died at Babylon, aged thirty-two. His enormous realm was shortly carved up among his generals and his satraps, each making a kingdom of his own. Though only officials, such men held significant power and freedom. A satrap was a governor of a province of the Persian or Greek empires, left behind by the overlord to manage far-off territory.

Porus, and an answer

With the fighting done, Alexander put it to Porus how he would like to be dealt with.

Porus answered: like a King. Alexander left him at the head of his own kingdom, as a satrap.

The naked philosophers

Word also reached Alexander of certain Indian sages whom the Greeks named Gymnosophists, the naked philosophers, most likely for how little they had on. They were famous for wisdom.

He challenged them with riddles and threatened death for wrong answers. They answered calmly and intelligently, he was impressed, and he spared them all. Asked whether life or death is the stronger, a sage answered life, since it lasts and death does not. Asked what makes a man most loved, the sage said it is to hold the greatest power and still frighten nobody. Historians treat such a conversation as two great currents of thought touching, the Greek and the Indian.

Scenario:

Two neighbouring kingdoms of the sixth century BCE are compared. The first has brave soldiers and an ambitious king, but thin soil, no forest within reach, no hills nearby and no navigable river. The second has deep fertile soil, wide forests, hills a few days away and two rivers running through it. A student predicts that the first will prevail, because its king wants it more. He adds that the forests of the second kingdom are of no military use, and that a river is merely scenery.

Analysis:

A prediction built on ambition, about to be tested against geography.

Activity:

Find out which modern Indian cities sit on navigable rivers, and whether that still affects how goods reach them.

Title:

Build the case for Magadha

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Almost every advantage feeds both the army and the trade, which is the point: an empire needs the two together, and geography here supplied both from the same sources.

Troops raised in the Persian-held northwest of India had fought against the Greeks during the earlier Persian invasions of Greece.

Greek writers note that in some of the Indian fighting the women stood in the line beside the men.

Panini set out how Sanskrit grammar works, across 3,996 brief sutras.

Magadha won on land, timber, iron and two rivers.

Alexander won the battle, lost the army, died at 32.

A new dynasty, a few years later

About 321 BCE, with Alexander and his army only a few years gone from India, a fresh line and a fresh state came up.

This was the Maurya Empire, which Chandragupta Maurya founded. It quickly absorbed the territories of the Nanda empire and then went on expanding beyond them.

He did not do it alone

Most accounts have it that Chandragupta did this with a capable adviser at his shoulder, Kautilya by name.

Kautilya brought what he knew of politics, of governing and of money, and built with it a state that still counts among the greatest this land has had. An empire, in other words, was designed and not merely won.

Who Kautilya was

According to Buddhist texts he is also called Chanakya, or Vishnugupta, and he was a teacher at the world-renowned university of Takshashila, which is modern Taxila.

So the architect of the empire came out of a classroom.

How his story starts

The story opens at the court of Dhana Nanda, by then, as we saw, a thoroughly hated man.

Kautilya saw it and told Dhana Nanda to mend his conduct or else see his state fall apart. Dhana Nanda was angered, insulted him, and threw him out of the court. Kautilya then vowed to end what he called the evil Nanda rule.

Chandragupta rises

The tales of where Chandragupta Maurya came from and what he did are many, and they do not agree. Their common theme does not.

He threw the Nandas down and took Magadha, setting up his rule with Pataliputra for a capital.

Why it worked

Recall what Magadha was already holding: the gifts of its situation, an economy that worked, and a trade in full flow.

Combine those with the advice of a master strategist and the expansion makes sense. He was not building from nothing; he inherited a working machine and had someone who understood machines.

Westward, against the Greeks

Chandragupta then defeated the Greek satraps whom Alexander had left behind in the northwest, and brought that region into his empire.

The result was a state running from the plains of the north down to the Deccan tableland.

And then made peace with them

Here is a detail easy to miss, and it says something about how he ruled. Having beaten the Greeks he kept up dealings with them all the same.

He even had a Greek historian and envoy, Megasthenes, to stay at his court. Megasthenes wrote about his travels in India in a book called Indika, the first such written account. It is unfortunately lost, except for passages quoted by later Greek scholars.

The Arthashastra

Kautilya saw clearly how a kingdom, a rajya, ought to be set up, run and made secure.

He set it out in his famous work the Arthashastra, which translated means the science of governance and economics. In it he listed directives across many areas: defence, economics, administration, justice, urban planning, agriculture and the welfare of the people.

The seven limbs

His most important political concept is the saptanga, the seven parts that together constitute a kingdom. They fall into three natural groups.

Group one: who rules

First the king himself, the swami.

Then his body of councillors, ministers and senior officers, the amatya. Note that the theory does not put the king alone at the top; the advisers are a limb of the state in their own right.

Group two: what he rules

The land of the state, together with the people living on it, is the janapada, the very word we met earlier for a clan territory.

The fortified towns and cities are the durga. So the state is land and people, plus the places that hold them.

Group three: what he rules with

The treasury, which is to say what the kingdom is worth, is the kosha.

The forces of defence and of law and order are the danda. And the allies are the mitra, which is the limb most often forgotten, because it says a state is partly made of its friendships.

What the seven are for

According to Kautilya, the saptanga together must produce a kingdom that is settled, well guarded and thriving.

And it is held two ways rather than one, by war in its season and by friendships made for peace in another. A state with no allies has only one of those tools.

Law, order and corruption

He pressed the case for order in society, and that in its turn called for an administration with real weight.

He laid down a body of law against corruption too, and fixed penalties for anything done to the hurt of the public. Corruption was treated as a crime against the public, not a private failing.

Where power actually comes from

Kautilya makes a claim about the source of a king strength that is worth reading twice.

A ruler grows stronger, he argues, by seeing to how well his people live, since it is the countryside that generates every kind of economic activity and therefore every kind of strength. He adds that a ruler should single out for favour those country people who do work others gain by. Raising an embankment, bridging a road, making a village pleasanter, helping to guard one.

The sentence that holds it together

His central idea about governing is put without hedging.

A ruler is happy, he writes, only in so far as those he rules are happy, and he does well only in so far as they do well. What suits the king is not the test; what suits his people is. However much power a king holds, their interests are to be served before his own.

Scenario:

A young king has just taken a large territory by force and asks three advisers what to do next. The first says he should spend everything on the army, since nothing else holds a state together. The second says he should keep the treasury full and the forts strong. And that allies are a weakness because they must be humoured. The third says the king should begin by asking what the villages need, and should reward anyone who builds an embankment or a bridge. The king replies that the third adviser has confused ruling with charity, since a king business is power.

Analysis:

Three answers to one question, two of them incomplete and one of them mistaken for kindness.

Activity:

Find out what your local government spends most on, and whether any of it matches what Kautilya told a king to favour.

Title:

Audit a state against the saptanga

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Every limb has a modern counterpart except perhaps the forts, and the allies turn out to be as prominent now as then, which is why Kautilya counted friendships as part of the state itself.

The architect of the Maurya empire was a university teacher: Kautilya taught at Takshashila, which is modern Taxila.

Megasthenes book Indika was the first written account of India by a foreign visitor, and it is lost except for quoted passages.

Among the seven limbs of a state, Kautilya counts the allies, so a state is partly made of its friendships.

Saptanga: who rules, what he rules, what he rules with.

Arthashastra: the science of governance and economics.

A grandson, and a change of mind

Ashoka ruled from 268 to 232 BCE. He was Chandragupta grandson, and he is credited with major achievements in administration and in religion.

At the start of his reign he was decidedly ambitious. He had inherited a vast empire and he enlarged it further.

How far it reached

By the end it covered almost the whole Indian subcontinent, leaving out only the southernmost region.

It took in what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan, and parts of what is now Afghanistan.

Kalinga

Then one encounter is said to have changed the direction of his life. According to one of his own edicts he marched on Kalinga, which is modern-day Odisha, and waged a ferocious war there.

What he saw of the dying and the wreckage on that field decided him to put violence aside. Thereafter he followed, so far as he could, the way of peace and of doing no harm that the Buddha had taught.

The detail worth noticing

He wrote this down himself, in his edicts, and he did not have to.

He was free to leave the Kalinga war out, and hand later ages an unclouded picture of a peaceable and kindly king. He chose instead to record the destructive war he had caused.

Spreading the message

Having taken up what the Buddha taught, Ashoka sent out envoys to carry it as widely as they could go. An emissary is somebody sent on a special mission, often a diplomatic one.

They went to Sri Lanka, to Thailand, to Central Asia and beyond.

The great communicator

Historians have sometimes called him a great communicator, and the reason is his edicts: official declarations issued by a ruler.

He had them engraved on rocks and on pillars in many parts of his empire. They carried his messages to the people and urged them to follow dharma.

Language and script

The edicts were mostly cut in Prakrit, the tongue ordinary people spoke over much of India, and set down in the Brahmi script. Every regional script of India descends from Brahmi.

That distinction matters. The language is the thing we say aloud; the script is the set of marks we put it down in. The same language can be written in more than one script.

What he called himself

In his edicts Ashoka used the name Devanampiya Piyadasi.

The first of the two stands for one the gods hold dear. The second means one who regards others with kindness. The wording of the edicts leaves no doubt that he meant to be taken for a kindly ruler who felt for his people.

What he claimed to do

Some southern kingdoms lay outside his empire and he still supported their wellbeing.

He said he put treatment within reach of people and of animals, and not only inside his own frontiers. He forbade the hunting of animals and any cruelty to them, and had them treated when they needed it, which puts him early among those who tried to protect the natural world. He said he had set shelters and water sources at measured distances down the chief highways, and had trees planted for fruit and for shade. He also claimed to encourage all sects to accept and study each other best teachings.

And the caution that goes with it

We need not take all of Ashoka claims literally, and the chapter says so.

These are a ruler describing himself in his own inscriptions. What is clear is that he minded how his people fared, much as Kautilya had said a ruler should, and took real trouble to reach them.

What happened next

The Maurya state ran on for fifty years after Ashoka was gone.

His successors could not hold it together. Lesser kingdoms pulled away one by one into independence, and about 185 BCE this land entered a new stage of its story.

Life in the cities

A city such as Pataliputra was a crowded seat of government and of trade, with palaces, public halls and streets laid out to a plan.

Taxes gathered to a good system, and a lively trade, kept the treasury full and fed the growth of the state. Officials, merchants and artisans were the key figures of city life.

What the archives show

The Sohagaura copper plate inscription, from the fourth or third century BCE, is one of India earliest known administrative records.

It was found at Sohgaura in Uttar Pradesh, written in Prakrit using Brahmi, and is believed to date from Chandragupta Maurya reign. It records the setting up of a granary to store grain against famine, which is a state thinking about food security.

Farming, and why famines were rare

Megasthenes account tells us a substantial part of the population worked in agriculture, and that farming was an important source of revenue.

Two crops were sown in a year, because rain fell in both summer and winter. That meant famines were rare and people had ample food, and the granaries were kept well stocked for emergencies. Remarkably, fighting close at hand did not touch them: the farmers were shielded from it and the work of the fields went on.

How people lived

Smiths and potters, carpenters and jewellers and other craftworkers lived in the cities, which were laid out to a plan and even carried signs in the streets.

Messages travelled by courier from place to place. The houses were timber, and some stood two floors high. Vessels of water stood at regular intervals along the streets in case of fire. Later accounts describe cotton clothing: a lower garment reaching below the knee and partway to the ankle, and an upper garment thrown over the shoulders. Some went in leather shoes, patterned and thick in the sole, to gain a little height.

The lions at Sarnath

The Sarnath pillar capital is a fine example of Mauryan art. A capital here means the top portion of a pillar, and Ashoka had this one erected at Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first teaching.

Four lions stand on it, symbolising royal power. Round the band beneath them run four strong beasts, a bull, a horse, an elephant and a further lion, and with them the dharmachakra, the wheel of dharma, standing for what the Buddha taught. This capital was chosen as India national emblem, with the motto satyameva jayate, truth alone triumphs, taken from the Mundaka Upanishad, and the dharmachakra sits at the centre of the national flag.

Why empires come apart

Historians still debate why the great empires declined, and several causes recur.

Regions are tempted to become independent. If an emperor needs extra resources for long campaigns, or a drought strikes, local rulers face rising demands for tribute and resentment follows. If a powerful emperor is succeeded by one thought weak, local kings may simply stop paying. The bigger a state becomes the harder it is to keep whole, and the distant parts go first. Economic crises from drought or flood shake it too.

The paradox

So an empire is something of a paradox, and both halves are true.

On one hand it can make one polity out of many, as the Mauryan empire did across nearly all the Subcontinent, and can cut down or end the fighting between small kingdoms. A well-run empire might be richer than a set of quarrelling neighbours. Set against that, an empire has nearly always been made by fighting, and kept in being by force and by holding people down. That is what makes them fragile at the core and unstable over time.

Scenario:

A gallery label in a new museum reads as follows. Ashoka of the Mauryas was a wholly peaceful king from the very day he took the throne. He wrote his edicts in the Brahmi language, carefully leaving out any mention of war so that later generations would admire him. Everything he claimed in those edicts can be taken as straightforward fact, since he carved it in stone himself. His empire fell apart immediately on his death because an empire held together only by force can never last.

Analysis:

Four statements about one reign, each of them wrong in a different way.

Activity:

Find a photograph of an Ashokan pillar edict and see whether you can identify any Brahmi letters in it.

Title:

Weigh the paradox of empire

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Force appears in both columns, because the same army that ends the wars between small kingdoms is what holds the tributaries down. That is exactly why the chapter calls an empire fragile at its core.

Ashoka could have left the Kalinga war out of his edicts entirely, and chose to record it instead.

Vessels of water stood at regular intervals along Mauryan streets in case of fire.

Every regional script of India descends from Brahmi.

Language is spoken, script is written.

Empires bring peace by force: that is the paradox.