Pushyamitra Shunga's Coup
Pushyamitra Shunga killed the last Mauryan emperor at a military review around 185 BC and founded a dynasty that ruled the Ganges plain for a century. He was the Mauryan commander-in-chief, a Brahmin by birth, and by the standard account he assassinated Brihadratha in front of the army while it was drawn up for inspection. The empire he took over was already a fraction of what Ashoka had ruled fifty years earlier. The Mauryan state had depended on an enormous bureaucracy and standing army financed by land revenue, and its later kings had lost the north-west to the Greco-Bactrians and the south to local dynasties. Pushyamitra fought off a Greco-Bactrian invasion under Menander or Demetrius that reached the Ganges valley, and campaigned against Kalinga and the Satavahanas. He is presented in Buddhist sources — the Divyavadana and the Sri Lankan chronicles — as a persecutor who destroyed monasteries, killed monks and put a price on the head of every Buddhist. He performed the ashvamedha, the Vedic horse sacrifice, which Ashoka's dynasty had abandoned, and the revival of Brahmanical ritual is the fact those accounts are built on. Modern scholarship treats the persecution as largely polemical. The Buddhist stupa at Bharhut and the railings at Sanchi were built or enlarged under the Shungas, which is difficult to reconcile with systematic destruction. Patanjali, the grammarian, worked at his court. The dynasty ended in 73 BC when its last king was killed by his own minister. The Mauryan model of a centralised subcontinental state was not attempted again for over 1,700 years.
- Year: 185 BCE
- Category: Political
