The Maurya Empire

By the sixth century BCE, the Indian subcontinent was a patchwork of competing kingdoms and republics. Sixteen major states, the Mahajanapadas, jostled for territory across the Gangetic plain. Magadha, Kosala, Avanti, Vatsa — names that fill the Buddhist and Jain texts of the period. They warred, they traded, they absorbed one another. But no single power had managed to stitch this vast, linguistically diverse, geographically fractured landmass into anything resembling a unified state.

The Nanda dynasty, ruling from Magadha in the eastern Gangetic plain, came closest. At their peak the Nandas commanded what ancient sources describe as an army of 200,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, 2,000 war chariots, and 3,000 war elephants. These numbers are probably inflated, but the scale was real enough to terrify Alexander the Great's Macedonian soldiers when they heard reports of it in 326 BCE. The Nandas were powerful. They were also, by most accounts, deeply unpopular — low-born usurpers, ruthless tax collectors, despised by the Brahmin priestly class.

The details of The founder of the Maurya Empire (r. c. 321–298 BCE). After overthrowing the Nanda dynasty with the help of his advisor Chanakya, he unified most of the Indian subcontinent for the first time, establishing an empire that stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal. He later abdicated and, according to Jain tradition, starved himself to death as an act of religious devotion.'s early life are tangled in legend and contradiction. Greek sources say he met Alexander himself. Jain and Buddhist traditions give conflicting accounts of his origins: some say he was from the Moriya clan of the Kshatriya warrior caste, others that he was raised among peacock tamers (the word maurya may derive from mayura, peacock). What the sources agree on is this: he was young, he was driven, and he had a teacher who saw in him the instrument of a grand political project.