Founding of the Maurya Empire

The Maurya Empire was founded around 322 BCE when Chandragupta Maurya, with the guidance of his advisor Chanakya, overthrew the Nanda dynasty that had ruled the kingdom of Magadha in northeastern India, establishing a new dynasty from a base of power in the Ganges valley. Chandragupta rapidly expanded his territory westward, and following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, he took advantage of the resulting instability among Alexander's successor states to seize the Indus valley region and, after a war against the Greek Seleucid king Seleucus I Nicator around 305 BCE, secured a peace treaty that ceded substantial additional territory in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Mauryan state. Chandragupta's Maurya Empire became the first major power to politically unify most of the Indian subcontinent, and under his grandson Ashoka, who ruled from around 268 to 232 BCE, the empire reached its greatest extent and became closely associated with the imperial spread of Buddhism across South and Central Asia.