Shunga Empire

The dynasty that replaced the Mauryas by killing the last of them on parade. Pushyamitra Shunga was the Mauryan commander-in-chief, and around 185 BC he assassinated the emperor Brihadratha at a review of his own army and took the throne. The empire he inherited had already shrunk; what he held was the Ganges plain and central India rather than the subcontinent. His reign is contested in a way that matters. Buddhist sources written centuries later describe him persecuting the sangha, destroying monasteries and putting a price on the heads of monks; the archaeology shows the great stupa at Sanchi being enlarged and given its carved stone railings and gateways under Shunga rule, which is difficult to reconcile with a campaign of destruction. What is clearer is a revival of Brahmanical practice - Pushyamitra is recorded as performing the horse sacrifice, an assertion of universal kingship the Mauryas had abandoned. The period is the beginning of classical Indian art in stone. The railings at Bharhut and Sanchi carry the earliest large narrative relief sculpture in India, and Sanskrit returned as a language of inscription after two centuries in which the Mauryas had used the local vernaculars. The Shungas fought the Indo-Greek kingdoms of the northwest through most of their existence. Menander, ruling from the Punjab, raided as far as Pataliputra itself and is remembered in a Buddhist text as the king who questioned a monk about the nature of the self - one of the few places where a Greek ruler of India speaks in an Indian source. The grammarian Patanjali wrote in this period and refers to a Greek army besieging a city in the Ganges plain in the past tense, which is one of the few contemporary datable references in early Indian literature. The dynasty lost ground steadily and the last Shunga king was killed by his own minister around 73 BC, which is the same way the dynasty had begun. North India then had no single power for three hundred years, until the Guptas built one from the same Magadhan base.

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