Maurya Empire

The first state to govern nearly all of India, and the only ancient empire whose ruler publicly repented of his own conquest. Chandragupta Maurya took Magadha around 322 BCE in the vacuum left by Alexander's withdrawal, and pushed the Greeks back out of the northwest, receiving territory from Seleucus in exchange for five hundred war elephants. The Arthashastra, attributed to his adviser Kautilya, is a manual of statecraft as unsentimental as anything Machiavelli wrote, eighteen centuries earlier. His grandson Ashoka conquered Kalinga around 261 BCE and then had the slaughter and his own remorse carved into rock edicts across the subcontinent - the only case in the ancient world of a victorious emperor publishing his regret and changing policy because of it. Those edicts, in Prakrit, Greek and Aramaic depending on the region, promoted dhamma, religious tolerance, medical care for people and animals, and rest houses on the roads. Buddhist missions went to Sri Lanka and beyond. The empire held a professional army, a spy network and a capital at Pataliputra with wooden walls. It fragmented within fifty years of Ashoka's death. His lion capital is India's state emblem. The empire ran from about 322 to 185 BCE and covered most of the subcontinent. Pataliputra is now Patna in Bihar. Megasthenes, a Seleucid ambassador, left an account of the court that survives in fragments. Ashoka's pillars are polished sandstone monoliths weighing up to fifty tonnes, moved hundreds of kilometres. The Ashoka Chakra appears on India's flag, taken directly from his pillar capital.

• Existed: 322 BCE – 185 BCE
• Type: Entity
• Government: Centralised absolute monarchy with elaborately theorised bureaucratic administration (Arthashastra model)
• Capital: Pataliputra (modern Patna, Bihar)