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Mauryan king Asoka, whose empire encompassed most of the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century bc, was renowned for his promotion of Buddhism and for his humane and tolerant rule. This article by Indian professor Romila Thapar discusses what scholars have learned about the history of the ancient Mauryan empire through the multilingual inscriptions left across India by Asoka and his government.
By Romila Thapar
The earliest deciphered contemporary inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent are the edicts issued by the Mauryan Emperor Asoka and inscribed on rock surfaces and pillars. These date from the 3rd century bc. The earlier script of the third millennium bc—the Harappa script associated with the Indus civilization—is generally believed to be pictographic and found on seals, amulets, and occasionally as graffiti on pots. But these pictographs have yet to be deciphered and in the absence of a decipherment the edicts of Asoka are historically the earliest scripts available for study.
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The inscriptions mark the transition from orality to literacy although the date when this happened remains uncertain. The scripts used for engraving the edicts are all phonetic and therefore mark a departure from the earlier pictographic script. Some scholars maintain that a script was invented by the Mauryas in order to facilitate administration, enabling faster communication with distant places and frontier zones. But the invention of scripts is more often associated with trading communities. The invention must have preceded the reign of Asoka since he uses it extensively and presumably there were people who could read the edicts, although he does insist that his officers read them out to his subjects. The inscriptions are generally located in places likely to attract people.
The inscriptions of Asoka use three different languages and four scripts. The most important and the largest in number are composed in Prakrit but Asoka also had a few inscribed in Greek and Aramaic. The scripts used for the Prakrit inscriptions were Brahmi and Kharoshthi, and for the others, Greek and Aramaic. The Greek and Aramaic inscriptions are all close together near Kābul and Kandahār in Afghanistan. The script and language were in use prior to the reign of Asoka with Greek and Aramaic speakers settled in this region. The province of Gandhara (present day Peshāwar and its vicinity), was part of the Iranian Achaemenid empire in the 6th century BC and therefore would have used Aramaic. It was included in the Mauryan empire in the 4th century and adjoining territories in Afghanistan were ceded by the Hellenistic kingdom of Seleucus Nicator—the successor of Alexander in Iran—to the Mauryan King Chandragupta at the conclusion of a campaign. Hence the presence of Greek-speaking people. One Asokan inscription is bilingual in Greek and Aramaic and suggests that bilingualism in these languages was common in these parts.
The importance of the Greek and Aramaic inscriptions, apart from their locations, also lies in their providing translations of some of the significant terms used in the Prakrit inscriptions, the readings of which have been controversial. For example, the Prakrit term dhamma is the same as the Sanskrit dharma and has no exact equivalent in English. It has been variously rendered as piety, virtue, sacred duty, or even as the dhamma taught by the Buddha. It is translated as eusebeia in the Greek inscriptions, suggesting the more general use since there is no reference to the Buddha in the Greek and Aramaic versions.
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The more important inscriptions, much larger in number and inscribed in various parts of the subcontinent, were composed in Prakrit and engraved in two different scripts—Brahmi and Kharoshthi. Inscriptions in Kharoshthi are all clustered in the north-west, again suggestive of being read locally. Kharoshthi derives from Aramaic and is written from right to left. The letters, although conforming to the Prakrit alphabet, recall many Aramaic forms. Initially limited to the vicinity of Peshāwar, Kharoshthi in the post-Mauryan period traveled further afield and especially into central Asia. The use of Greek and Aramaic declines by the time of the Christian era.
The script with the maximum usage and historical potential was Brahmi, which was to become the standard script of the subcontinent in post-Mauryan times, although undergoing the usual evolution of a widely used script. It was written from left to right, consisted of carefully formed letters, and was relatively easy to read. There has been a continuing debate as to its origin. Some support a source which permitted admixtures of letters from the Greek, or the Phoenician or Semitic scripts, and others argue for an independent process of inventing letters in India. The resemblances of some letters to neighboring scripts cannot be denied and probably it was an efficient working out as well as borrowing of forms, appropriate and accessible to those needing a script.
The extensive use of Prakrit in the subcontinent did not rigidly follow the original composition. The edicts were issued by the king from the capital or the royal camp but were adapted to some forms of local usage when actually engraved. The language and the script had a pliancy that could reflect, to a small degree, variations influenced by local linguistic inflections. Certain sounds were interchanged such as “l” or “r,” occasional spelling mistakes occurred as also slippages in either fitting a word into a space or inadvertently leaving out a letter, and there were minor variations in words or the use of a term more familiar locally. Inscriptions were composed by rulers and by officials at the court, but the actual engraving was done by professional engravers, who were of low rank and whose literacy may have been barely adequate. A group of Asokan inscriptions from Karnātaka in southern India, carry the briefest of statements at the end of the royal edict, naming the engraver as Capada. Interestingly, this little statement is in Kharoshthi whereas the rest of the edict is in Brahmi. It is unclear whether the engraver was brought from the northwest or whether he was demonstrating his knowledge of more than one script.
The edicts inscribed on rock surfaces in Karnātaka were many, for it was a gold-bearing area that appears to have been worked by the Mauryan state. Curiously this was a Dravidian-speaking area with no prior script, yet the edicts are all composed in Prakrit—at this time a north Indian Indo-Aryan language—and engraved in Brahmi. The officers were expected to read out the edicts and translate them to the local population. No attempt was made to render the edicts into the local language as was done in the north-west with Greek and Aramaic, perhaps because there was no local script. In the political assessment of the region it was probably less important than the north-west, being an area of clans and chiefdoms rather than states and kingdoms. The intention may have been to make literacy a statement of power in an oral society and this perhaps is how the inscriptions were also viewed. This is also suggested by the earliest use of a script for engraving inscriptions in Tamil—the most widely used Dravidian language in south India. The script used was an adaptation from the Mauryan Brahmi script and current in the 2nd century BC.
The edicts inscribed on rock surfaces are addressed to various categories of people—a few to Buddhist monks in various monasteries, some addressed specifically to the officers of the state, and the majority addressed to the people at large. Those of the first category are concerned with matters relating to Buddhist practice and monastic procedures. The remaining two categories concern the welfare of the subjects, both through what Asoka perceived as better administration but more through a deliberate cultivation of an ethic of social responsibility. The latter was deeply influenced by Buddhist ethics but was not merely a call to his subjects to follow the teachings of the Buddha. Although personally a Buddhist, Asoka was well aware of his role as a statesman ruling a multicultural empire.
The various categories of rock engraved edicts were issued in the earlier part of his reign. Towards the latter part, a special collection of edicts was inscribed on pillars. Addressed to his subjects, he recapitulated his contribution to their welfare and further advised them on ethical behavior. These pillar edicts, as they have been called, were engraved with finesse and care on specially cut, polished sandstone pillars and located in various parts of the Ganges valley. These make a dramatic contrast to the more rough-hewn rock surfaces of the earlier inscriptions and show a distinct improvement in the handling of the script.
The tone of the Asokan edicts is conversational and could have been an attempt to link the oral tradition to literacy, and “speak” to the subjects. This was again an unusual perception of the use of a script by a king who was attempting to establish an unusual relationship with his subjects.
About the author: Romila Thapar is emeritus professor of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, and is the author of Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas and other books.
Appears in
Philology; Indo-Iranian Languages; Indian Languages; India; Ashoka; Mauryan Empire
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