The Mauryan Golden Age

The Mauryan Golden Age refers to the height of the Mauryan Empire in the Indian subcontinent, generally centered on the reigns of Chandragupta Maurya, who founded the empire around 322 BCE, and his grandson Ashoka, who ruled from about 268 to 232 BCE. Under Chandragupta and his successors the Mauryan state unified most of the Indian subcontinent under a single centralized administration for the first time, supported by an extensive bureaucracy and road network described in the surviving statecraft treatise the Arthashastra. Ashoka's reign marked the period's cultural peak: after a famously bloody conquest of Kalinga, he adopted Buddhism and renounced further military expansion, issuing a series of edicts carved on pillars and rock faces across the empire promoting nonviolence, religious tolerance and moral governance, among the earliest surviving public inscriptions of their kind anywhere in the world. The empire declined and fragmented within about fifty years of Ashoka's death.