Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (10 page)

Only fragments of Megasthenes’
India
survive but the writings of both men provided valuable source material for Arrian, Diodorus, Pliny the Elder and Strabo. The ambassadors observed Indian society at first hand, and what they noted down remained the best account of India available to Western Europe for more than fifteen hundred years. Like all good diplomats they gathered intelligence, taking careful note of the administration and how it worked, the strength and running of its army, the class structure of the country, its economy and natural resources. They also observed how the capital city of Palimbothra was defended, where it was located and how far it was from their own frontier.

According to Strabo, Megasthenes placed the city of Palimbothra at the junction of the River Ganges and another great river, the Erranoboas, ‘the Ganges being the largest of rivers, and the Erranoboas being perhaps the third largest … At the
meeting of this river [Ganges] and the other is situated Palibothra, a city eighty stadia in length and fifteen in breadth.’ Arrian enlarges on the details of Sandrokoptos’s capital: ‘The largest city in India, named Palimbothra, is in the land of the Prasians, where is the confluence of the river Erannoboas and the Ganges … Megasthenes says that on one side where it is longest this city extends ten miles in length, and that its breadth is one and three-quarters miles; that the city has been surrounded with a ditch in breadth 600 feet, and in depth 45 feet; and that its wall has 570 towers and 64 gates.’
¹⁷

By 281
BCE
Seleukos the Victor had outlived all his rival successors to become, at seventy-seven years of age, the last of the Macedonian generals who had fought alongside Alexander. In that year he set out to take possession of Macedonia and Thrace for his son and heir Antiochos, only to be outwitted and murdered by one of the sons of his now deceased friend-turned-adversary Ptolemy of Egypt. The Successor Wars then gave way to the Syrian Wars, waged between the Seleucid Empire and the Ptolemaic Kingdom. With the death of Seleukos’s grandson Antiochos II in 246
BCE
the Seleucid Empire began to fall apart. His successor Seleukos II was defeated by Ptolemy III and his authority contested by his younger brother. This allowed Diodotos Soter, satrap of Bactria, to break away to become the independent ruler of Bactria.

Diodotos Soter and his successors prospered. By about 240
BCE
the Graeco-Bactrians had annexed a hefty slice of Indian territory east of the Indus. Meanwhile, Parthia to the north had also broken away and under the Parthian chief Arsaces had formed an alliance with the Bactrians that prevented Seleukos II from reclaiming his great-grandfather’s eastern territories. With the rise of the Parthians the overland
links established by Alexander between the Mediterranean world and India were all but severed.

Here was the sum of the information available to Sir William Jones from the Greek side. To achieve that much desired point of synchronicity he had now to link this to something in the new material emerging from his researches into the Sanskrit record. He knew that the war between Seleukos and Sandrokoptos must have taken place in or very soon after 305
BCE
, the year in which the former declared himself ruler of Alexander’s Persian empire. ‘If we can fix on an Indian prince, contemporary with Seleucus’,
¹⁸
he declared, they would have that common fixed point in history.

The shoreline at Patna, drawn from the terrace of the Patna Customs House, looking upstream towards Bankipore. A pen-and-ink drawing by the EICo’s Opium Agent, Sir Charles D’Oyly, dated 24 October 1824. (APAC, British Library)

One of the many authorities consulted by Sir William Jones before he set sail for India was the geographer, map-maker and pioneer oceanographer Major James Rennell, known today as the ‘father of Indian geography’. Rennell had been forced to retire in 1776 when in his early thirties after being attacked and badly injured by a group of Hindu fanatics while surveying on the Bhutan frontier. Most of his thirteen years in India had been spent mapping the EICo’s newly acquired territories in Bengal, in the course of which Rennel had built up a unique understanding of its terrain and the forces that had shaped it. When Jones had last seen him in his house just off Portland Place in London he had been in the process of completing what would be the first accurate map of India. Now in 1787, just as Jones began his search for the missing link between India and ancient Greece, he received a letter from Rennell concerning the identity and location of ancient Palimbothra. This was the city about which Megasthenes and his successors had written in such detail, placing it 425 miles downstream from the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna, 638 miles upstream from the mouth of the Ganges, and, quite specifically, at a confluence ‘where the Ganges and the Erranoboas unite’.

Jones and his pandits had searched in vain in their Sanskrit texts for any mention of a city named Palimbothra or the river Erranoboas. What they had found, however, were frequent references to the great city of Pataliputra, for centuries the capital city of Magadha.
¹⁹
Then came Rennell’s letter, containing his account of how while surveying in and about the modern town of Patna more than a decade earlier, he had learned from the local townspeople that an ancient city named ‘Patelpoot-her’ had once stood there but had long ago been washed away.

Rennell’s subsequent surveys had then revealed that the
EICo’s new civil and military lines of Bankipore, which were then in the course of being built alongside the Ganges just upstream of the ‘native’ city of Patna, were being laid out over an old river bed (a disastrous bit of civic planning that continues to bedevil modern Patna every year when the monsoon rains begin). This former river bed, he realised, must have been the original course of the River Soane (today written Sone), which now entered the Ganges twenty-two miles further upstream. What Rennell had also discovered was that this original course of the River Soane had at one time split just before joining the Ganges, so as to create a long oval-shaped island, the length and breadth of which were large enough to contain the rectangular walls of the city of Palimbothra as described by Megasthenes, as well as providing the city’s wide moat. Furthermore, the proportions of the mileages given by Megasthenes fitted, placing the ancient city roughly where the modern town of Patna now stood. Was it possible, Rennel wanted to know, that Patna, Pataliputra and Palimbothra were all one and the same?
²⁰

Yet Rennel’s theory failed on one count – why the Greeks had named the river that flowed into the Ganges at Palimbothra the Erranoboas. The explanation came to Sir William Jones from a quite serendipitous reading of a hitherto unread Sanskrit text. In it the River Soane was described as
Hiranyabahu
, or ‘golden armed’. This, he realised, had been ‘Greekified’ by Megasthenes into
Erranoboas
, or ‘the river with a lovely murmur’. Here was literary proof that the rivers Soane and Erranboas were one and the same, and that modern Patna was indeed the site of the Greeks’ Palimbothra and ancient India’s Pataliputra.

This first discovery led on directly to a second, also found in
two hitherto unread Sanskrit texts. One took the form of a ‘very long chain of instructive and agreeable stories’ written in verse by a poet named Somadeva. It told the story of ‘the famed revolution at Pataliputra by the murder of King Nanda, with his eight sons, and the usurpation of Chandragupta’.
²¹
The other text was a verse drama entitled
The Coronation of Chandra
and it dealt with precisely the same subject, the Chandra of the title being ‘the abbreviated name of that able and adventurous usurper Chandragupta’. This was in fact the first half of a much longer verse drama entitled
Mudrarakshasa
, or ‘The Minister’s Signet Ring’, written by a fifth-century playwright named Vishakhadatta.

The Minister’s Signet Ring
told the story of two rival ministers, Rakshasa and Chanakya, both serving King Nanda, ruler of Magadha. King Nanda has become a tyrant in his old age, leading Chanakya to accede to the plans of the ambitious prince Chandragupta to usurp the king. Nanda learns of the plot and sends Chandragupta into exile, together with his eight friends. Chandragupta finds sanctuary with the lord of the Himalayas, Parvateswar, who has allies among the Yavans (Greeks), Sacas (Scythians), Cambojans (Gandharans) and Ciratas (Kashmiris). Parvateswar provides Chandragupta and his friends with money and troops in return for half the empire of King Nanda. They advance on King Nanda’s capital of Pataliputra, which falls after a brief battle. Chandragupta kills all his half-brothers and he and Parvateswar divide up Nanda’s kingdom between them. Parvateswar is then poisoned by Nanda’s daughter and is succeeded by his son Malayaketu, who with the advice of Nanda’s former minister Rakshasa attacks Chandragupta at Pataliputra. However, Chandragupta fortifies the city with his Greek allies, while Chanakya uses his guile to
bring Rakshasa over to Chandragupta’s camp. Malayaketu’s coalition collapses and Chandragupta goes on to reign over Magadha ‘for many years, with justice and equity, and adored by his subjects’.

This was a play about Brahmans putting things right, written by a Brahman for Brahmans. But from Jones’s point of view the real value of
The Minister’s Signet Ring
was that it was based on a real historical event: the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty by Chandragupta Maurya. He already knew the bare bones of the story from his readings of the
Puranas
, but what the play added was detail; in particular, the fact that the exiled prince Chandragupta had overthrown Nanda after forming an alliance with a king from the mountains and a number of peoples from India’s North-West frontier. That was precisely what Sandrokoptos had done. Patently, the Greek Sandrokoptos was the Indian king Chandragupta.

The final confirmation – the clincher – came with the later recognition that the two names Sisikottos and Sandrokoptos were both Greek versions of the same name: Chandragupta. The meaning of Chandragupta was plain to every Sanskrit scholar, being derived from two words:
chandra
, ‘moon’; and
gupta
, ‘protected’. Sisikottos, less obviously, was a Greek rendering
of Sashigupta
, which also meant ‘moon-protected’,
sashi
being an alternative Sanskrit word for ‘moon’. The young Indian exile and mercenary Sashigupta had simply evolved with age into the older monarch Chandragupta.

Obvious as these connections seem today, it had taken a happy combination of chance and scholarship on the part of Sir William Jones to make the all-important breakthrough. ‘I cannot help mentioning a discovery which accident threw in my way,’ he announced in a now-famous speech marking the
Asiatic Society’s tenth anniversary, delivered in Calcutta on 28 February 1793. He first announced the resolution of the Palibothra-Pataliputra-Patna puzzle, then went on to describe how this had led on to an even greater discovery: ‘Chandragupta, who, from a military adventurer, became the sovereign of Upper Hindustan … was none other than that very Sandrocottus who concluded a treaty with Seleucus Nicator.’
²²

With this breakthrough ancient Indian history secured its first positive dating from which to develop its own internal dateline and a contemporaneous chronology. Alexander the Great had died in Babylon in 323
BCE
. By the time Seleukos the Victor had begun his Indian campaign in 305
BCE
, Chandragupta Maurya was already firmly established as a great king of northern India. He must therefore have won the Nanda throne after the death of Alexander in 323
BCE
and before Alexander’s satraps Eudemos and Peithon had been forced to withdraw from the conquered Indian territories in 317
BCE
. Jones plumped for the latter date.

According to the Puranic ‘Table of the Kings of Magadha, Emperors of India’ as published in
Asiatick Researches,
²³
Chandragupta had reigned for twenty-four years. Assuming the length of reigns given in the
Puranas
to be correct, it followed that Chandragupta had ruled from about 317 to 293
BCE
. His son Bindusara had ruled for twenty-five years, giving him a period of rule from about 292 to 268
BCE
. Bindusara had been followed by his son Ashoka, who had ruled for thirty-six or thirty-seven years, so about 267–230
BCE
. The Mauryan dynasty had lasted for a total of 137 years, so approximately 317–180
BCE
.

In the two centuries and two decades since these datings were first arrived at, little has changed to question their general validity.