The Mahajanapadas and the Mauryan Empire

Ashoka's Major Rock Edict XIII is the single most quoted passage in early Indian history: it describes the Kalinga war in his own words, gives the casualty count, roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people deported and one hundred thousand killed, and records his remorse, his conclusion that conquest by dhamma is the only true conquest. A question built around this chapter can trap a candidate by assuming this edict sits at Kalinga itself. It does not. At Dhauli and Jaugada, the two Major Rock Edict sites actually located in Kalinga (present-day Odisha), edicts XI, XII and XIII are missing, replaced by two separate, locally-addressed edicts instructing the mahamattas of Tosali and Samapa on judicial conduct and on how to treat unconquered frontier peoples. The one place you would most expect to find Ashoka's confession of the Kalinga war is the one place it was deliberately left out. Getting this chapter right means holding this kind of specific, checkable detail, not just the broad story of "Ashoka renounced violence after Kalinga", which is true as far as it goes but is not what UPSC actually tests.

This site's Ancient India essentials: Harappa to the Guptas note covers this period in passing, a region-river table for the sixteen mahajanapadas and a note on Mauryan district officers. This note goes much deeper: Magadha's rise, the Nanda-to-Maurya transition, the Mauryan administrative machine including its own spy network, Ashoka's rock, minor rock and pillar edicts, his dhamma policy, the 1837 decipherment, the Arthashastra's rules on slavery, and why the empire declined.

The Mahajanapadas: sixteen states, two forms of rule

A janapada is, literally, the land where a jana, a people, clan or tribe, "sets its foot" and settles; a mahajanapada is simply a "great" janapada, a larger, consolidated territorial state. Early Buddhist and Jaina texts name sixteen such states as the major powers of the sixth century BCE, and while the lists vary slightly between texts, names such as Vajji, Magadha, Koshala, Kuru, Panchala, Gandhara and Avanti recur consistently enough to mark them as the most important. Each mahajanapada had a capital city, usually fortified: Rajgir (ancient Rajagaha, "house of the king") for Magadha, Ujjain for Avanti, Shravasti for Koshala, Vaishali for the Vajji confederacy, Taxila for Gandhara. Maintaining fortified capitals, standing armies and bureaucracies took real resources, which the Brahmanas' Dharmasutra literature of this period addressed directly, laying down that kings (ideally Kshatriyas) should collect taxes and tribute from cultivators, traders and artisans, and treating raids on neighbouring states as a legitimate way to acquire wealth.

Monarchies and gana-sanghas

Most mahajanapadas were straightforward monarchies. A significant minority, however, including the Vajji confederacy centred on the Lichchhavis of Vaishali, were ganas or sanghas, oligarchies in which power was shared among a number of men, collectively called rajas, rather than concentrated in one king. Both the Buddha and Mahavira belonged to such gana-sangha communities, and in the Vajji case the rajas seem to have controlled resources such as land collectively rather than individually. Two of the older, once-prominent mahajanapadas, Kuru and Panchala in western Uttar Pradesh, had by this period faded from the political importance they held in the later Vedic age, overtaken by newer, more aggressively expansionist states further east.

Magadha's early rivals: Avanti and Koshala

Magadha's most serious early rival was Avanti, whose king Chanda Pradyota Mahasena fought Magadha before the two made peace (Avanti's king later even sent for Magadha's royal physician, Jivaka, when he fell ill). Koshala, ruled by Prasenajit, was tied to Magadha by marriage: Bimbisara's first wife was Prasenajit's sister, bringing a Kashi village as dowry. None of this diplomacy stopped Magadha from eventually absorbing both rivals.

Why Magadha, specifically, won

Between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, Magadha (roughly present-day Bihar) pulled ahead of every other mahajanapada, and both the NCERT textbook and the ancient sources it draws on offer real, checkable reasons rather than vague ones. Magadha sat on especially productive agricultural land; it had ready access to iron mines in present-day Jharkhand, giving its armies better tools and weapons than rivals could easily match; its forests supplied elephants, a key component of any ancient Indian army; and the Ganga and its tributaries gave it cheap, convenient communication and transport, a real advantage over landlocked rivals. But early Buddhist and Jaina writers, closer to the events, credited the outcome just as much to the individuals in charge: ruthlessly ambitious kings, chiefly Bimbisara, Ajatasatru and Mahapadma Nanda, and the ministers who implemented their policies.

The dynastic sequence: Haryanka to Nanda

Bimbisara, who belonged to the Haryanka dynasty, built Magadha's position through both conquest and calculated marriage alliances (he took three wives, from Koshala, from the Lichchhavis of Vaishali, and from the Madra clan of the Punjab) and by annexing Anga, placing it under his son Ajatasatru as viceroy at its capital, Champa. Ajatasatru succeeded him by killing him, then fought a long war against a Koshala-Kashi coalition and, separately, spent sixteen years destroying the Vajji confederacy and its capital Vaishali, ending its independence for good. Udayin, who came next, founded a new fort at the confluence of the Ganga and Son rivers, the site that became Pataliputra. The Haryankas were succeeded by the Sisunaga dynasty, whose greatest achievement was finally breaking the power of Avanti, ending a century-old rivalry and folding Avanti permanently into the Magadhan sphere. The Sisunagas in turn gave way to the Nandas: Mahapadma Nanda, who claimed the title ekarat ("sole sovereign"), conquered Kalinga and built an army so large, by tradition 200,000 infantry, 60,000 cavalry and 6,000 war elephants, that Alexander's forces, having reached the Punjab around 326 BCE, chose not to advance further east against it. By the fourth century BCE, Magadha's capital had shifted from the hill-fortress of Rajagriha to Pataliputra (present-day Patna), commanding the Ganga's trade and communication routes.

The Nanda-to-Mauryan transition

Dhana Nanda's fall, and Chanakya's part in it

The last Nanda king, weak and unpopular compared to Mahapadma Nanda's formidable reign, is named in Buddhist and Jaina tradition as Dhana Nanda (also Dhanananda). That same tradition, later given literary form in Vishakhadatta's Sanskrit drama Mudrarakshasa, holds that Dhana Nanda insulted the Brahmana Chanakya (also Kautilya or Vishnugupta) at a public assembly, and that Chanakya, humiliated, vowed to bring the dynasty down and found in Chandragupta, a young man he had mentored and educated at Taxila, the instrument to do it. The personal story survives only in sources written well after the event, but the outcome is not in doubt: with Chanakya's guidance, Chandragupta raised an army, defeated the Nandas, and took the Magadhan throne.

Alexander's invasion and Chandragupta's path to the throne

The Nanda collapse happened against the backdrop of Alexander the Great's own campaign in the subcontinent. Alexander reached the Punjab in 326 BCE, where his exhausted troops, at the Hyphasis (Beas) river, refused to march further east into the territory the Nandas' huge standing army defended, forcing his retreat. He died at Babylon in 323 BCE, and his Greek governors in the Indian northwest soon withdrew. Chandragupta, who had already taken the Magadhan throne around the time of Alexander's own presence in India, moved into the vacuum Alexander's death created and won the Punjab by around 322 BCE. Bringing Magadha and the Punjab under one ruler by 321 BCE is the point historians mark as the Mauryan Empire's true founding.

The war with Seleucus and the treaty of 303 BCE

Seleucus I Nicator, the Greek general who inherited Alexander's Asian territories, advanced into the Indian northwest around 305 BCE. Chandragupta defeated him, and the peace concluded by around 303 BCE saw Chandragupta receive eastern Afghanistan, Baluchistan and the territory west of the Indus in exchange for 500 elephants, along with, by tradition, a marriage alliance between the two courts. Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to Chandragupta's court, and Megasthenes' own account, surviving only in fragments quoted by later Greek and Roman writers, is one of the two main sources for Mauryan administration. By the time his grandson Ashoka conquered Kalinga, the empire stretched from Afghanistan and Baluchistan in the northwest across most of the subcontinent, leaving out only the far south and parts of the northeast; Chandragupta's own son Bindusara had already pushed Mauryan control well into the Deccan.

Mauryan administration: the machine behind the Arthashastra

Central administration and Pataliputra's own committees

Historians reconstruct Mauryan administration mainly from two sources: the surviving fragments of Megasthenes, and the Arthashastra, parts of which plausibly preserve genuine Mauryan-era material despite being compiled some centuries later. Both agree the emperor held concentrated power, advised by a council, but with the final decision his own. Pataliputra's own city administration, per Megasthenes, ran through six committees of five members each, covering sanitation, care of foreigners, registration of births and deaths, and weights and measures, and the same structure, thirty officers in six committees, managed the army's six wings.

Provincial administration: five centres and a three-tier hierarchy

The empire had five major political centres named directly in Ashokan inscriptions: the capital Pataliputra, and the provincial centres of Taxila and Ujjayini (both on major trade routes), Tosali (Kalinga's provincial capital) and Suvarnagiri ("golden mountain", likely chosen to tap Karnataka's gold mines), each governed by royal princes. Below this sat officers named in the edicts. Ashoka's Rock Edict III instructs that "everywhere in my empire, the yuktas with the rajukas and the pradesikas shall go on tour every five years", pairing three roles: pradesikas as district heads, rajukas as justice officers with reward-punish authority, and yuktas as subordinate, clerical officers handling accounts. Dhamma mahamattas were a distinct, later creation (from the thirteenth year of Ashoka's reign) solely for propagating dhamma. Megasthenes separately describes officials who "superintend the rivers, measure the land, inspect the sluices" and oversee woodcutters, carpenters and miners, a state reaching deep into everyday economic life.

The espionage system: testing the king's own officials

The Arthashastra devotes an early chapter of its first book to what it calls "the institution of spies", and its purpose is not chiefly foreign intelligence but internal oversight: testing, in the text's own words, "the purity of character" of the king's own ministers and officers. It lists specific disguises a spy could operate under: a kapatika chattra, a fraudulent wandering disciple skilled at reading others' intentions; an udasthita, a recluse who takes up farming or trade as cover; a grihapatika, a settled cultivator running his own network of informants; a vaidehaka, a merchant whose trading contacts double as sources; and a tapasa, an ascetic who claims supernatural powers to draw out confidences from highborn citizens. Read alongside Megasthenes' officials monitoring rivers, land measurement and craft production, the picture is of a state that actively checked, through disguised agents answering to the centre, whether its own administrators were honest.

Revenue, monopolies, and the cost of empire

That reach shows directly in Mauryan revenue policy. The state held direct monopolies over mining, the sale of liquor and certain manufacturing; it brought new land under cultivation using hired cultivators and labourers, taking a striking one-quarter to one-sixth of the produce as land revenue, with peasants using state-built irrigation paying an additional charge, and facing compulsory higher production quotas in emergencies. Tolls were levied at town gates on goods brought in for sale. This funded an enormous state apparatus, a huge standing army (Greek accounts, treated by some historians as exaggerated, put it at 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry and 9,000 elephants) plus a large, salaried bureaucracy and its own internal spy network. A state this expensive to run is exactly the vulnerability the decline section below returns to.

Ashoka's edicts: major, minor, and pillar

The fourteen Major Rock Edicts and their eight sites

Ashoka, Chandragupta's grandson, reigned roughly from 268 to 231 BCE (some reckonings place his formal coronation four years after his actual accession, giving c. 272/268 to 231 BCE; Encyclopaedia Britannica's own range, c. 265 to 238 BCE, is a reminder that Mauryan chronology carries a genuine few years of scholarly uncertainty whichever source is used), and was arguably the most famous ruler of early India. He was also the first Indian ruler to inscribe his own messages, to subjects directly and not just officials, on rock surfaces and polished pillars across the empire.

The Kalinga war, traditionally dated to around 261 BCE, eight years after his coronation by his own edict's reckoning (Rock Edict XIII's casualty figures and its "conquest by dhamma" conclusion are set out above), was the pivot of his reign. The same edict claims his dhamma had reached rulers beyond his own borders, naming Hellenistic Greek kings, Antiochos of the Seleucid kingdom, and Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas and Alexander, though how far this reflects real diplomatic contact rather than rhetorical reach is genuinely uncertain. What is not in doubt is that Ashoka retained Kalinga after conquering it; the war did not turn him into a pacifist who abandoned his army or territorial gains. Rock Edict XII sets out religious tolerance as a doctrine in its own right, condemning anyone who glorifies their own sect by disparaging another's.

Most inscriptions were written in Prakrit using the Brahmi script; those in the northwest of the subcontinent used the Kharosthi script instead, and in Afghanistan, at the empire's western edge, edicts were inscribed in Aramaic and Greek, the scripts of that region's own administrative and settler populations. The fourteen Major Rock Edicts appear, in full or in part, at eight known sites: Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra in present-day Pakistan, Kalsi in Uttarakhand (the only North Indian site carrying the complete set of fourteen), Girnar in Gujarat, Sopara in Maharashtra, Yerragudi in Andhra Pradesh, and Dhauli and Jaugada in Odisha, the two Kalinga sites where, as noted above, edicts XI to XIII are replaced by two locally-addressed Separate Kalinga Edicts rather than reproduced.

The Minor Rock Edicts: where Ashoka names himself

Every Major Rock Edict refers to its author only by titles, Devanampiya ("beloved of the gods") and Piyadasi ("of gracious mien"), never by his personal name. That changed only with an 1915 discovery: a Minor Rock Edict at Maski, in present-day Raichur district, Karnataka, reading "Devanampriyasa Asokasa", pairing the title directly with the name Asoka for the first known time in the inscriptions themselves, letting historians confirm that the Piyadasi of the edicts and the Asoka of later Buddhist legend were one king. The Minor Rock Edicts as a group belong to the earlier part of the reign and are more personal in tone: at Bairat in Rajasthan, the Bhabru edict has Ashoka declare his own devotion to the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, and name seven specific texts he recommends monks, nuns and lay followers study, a direct link between an emperor's own inscription and a specific set of early Buddhist scripture.

The Pillar Edicts: welfare, animal protection, and the Schism Edict

The Pillar Edicts, inscribed on tall, separately quarried sandstone columns rather than on natural rock faces, belong mostly to the later part of Ashoka's reign and read calmer and more settled than the Major Rock Edicts. The seven Major Pillar Edicts survive at pillars now at Delhi (moved from Topra, Haryana, and separately from Meerut), at Kausambi (moved to Allahabad), and at Rampurva, Lauriya Araraj and Lauriya Nandangarh, all in Bihar's Champaran district. One lists, by name, birds and animals exempted from slaughter, among them parrots, geese, tortoises, porcupines and squirrels, alongside a ban on killing pregnant or nursing females of several species; another recaps Ashoka's welfare measures directly, wells dug and trees planted along roads for people and animals, alongside rest houses. A further, distinct set, the Schism Edicts, on pillars at Sarnath, Sanchi and Allahabad, warn any monk or nun who tries to divide the sangha that they will be expelled, internal Buddhist discipline rather than a message to the wider public. Two pillars in the Nepal terai, at Rummindei and Nigliva, are personal rather than administrative: the Rummindei pillar marks Ashoka's visit to Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace, recording that he reduced the village's tax burden in commemoration.

James Prinsep and the 1837 decipherment

For centuries after the Mauryas, nobody could read these inscriptions; the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts had fallen out of use and out of memory. That changed in the 1830s, when James Prinsep, an officer in the mint of the East India Company, deciphered both scripts, completing the work on Brahmi in 1837. Prinsep found that most inscriptions named a king called Piyadassi, "pleasant to behold", and, as the Maski find would later confirm directly, a handful also named him Asoka, the ruler already known from Buddhist texts as one of early India's most significant figures. This single act of decipherment turned Ashoka from a name in later religious literature into a historical figure whose own words could finally be read, and gave nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars, working across inscriptions and texts in many languages, the tool they needed to reconstruct the broad outline of early Indian political history within a few decades.

Ashoka's dhamma: a policy, not just a personal conversion

Dhamma, as the edicts themselves define it, was a broad, largely non-sectarian code for social conduct rather than a doctrine tied to any one sect: honesty, truthfulness, compassion, generosity to Brahmanas and those who had renounced worldly life, kindness towards slaves and servants, respect for elders, and non-injury to living beings, alongside "little sin and many good deeds". Ashoka frames it throughout as something he practises and preaches, not a creed he asks others to convert to, of a piece with the toleration Rock Edict XII sets out.

Propagating dhamma had its own dedicated machinery and its own dedicated public ritual. The dhamma mahamattas, created in the thirteenth year of Ashoka's reign, were tasked specifically with fostering dhamma work, aiding the outlying regions and neighbouring peoples, and attending to women's particular concerns, distinct from the ordinary revenue and justice administration described above. Rock Edict VIII records that ten years after his coronation Ashoka replaced the traditional royal pleasure tour, built around hunting, with a dhamma yatra: visiting Sambodhi, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment, giving gifts to Brahmanas, ascetics and the aged, and instructing rural people directly, describing this as itself "a kind of revenue". The same commitment shows in concrete public works: hospitals for people and animals, medicinal plants imported where not locally available, wells dug and trees planted along roads, and rest houses for travellers. By the tradition in the Sri Lankan chronicle Mahavamsa, compiled centuries after the events it describes, Ashoka's own son Mahinda and daughter Sanghamitra were sent as missionaries to Sri Lanka, useful corroborating tradition rather than a contemporary Mauryan record.

The Arthashastra on slavery and social status

The Arthashastra devotes a specific chapter of its third book, traditionally titled Dasa-kalpa ("rules concerning slaves"), to the legal status of dasas, and its rules are considerably more structured, and more clearly tied to varna status, than a generic idea of "ancient Indian slavery" would suggest. The text's core rule is direct: "never shall an Arya be subjected to slavery." Members of the Arya varnas were, in principle, exempt from enslavement altogether.

This exemption was not absolute. Kinsmen could mortgage an Arya's labour, or that of a dependent, to cover genuine family distress, fines or court judgements, but the text requires that person be redeemed as soon as possible, particularly if young and able to work. Permanent bondage for an Arya arose only in specific circumstances: voluntarily enslaving oneself and then running away, running away twice after being mortgaged by someone else, or attempting to flee to a foreign country. Where bondage did apply, the Arthashastra grants the dasa real, enforceable protections: he could keep both his own outside earnings and any inherited property; a master could not assign him degrading work such as carrying the dead or clearing filth, nor abuse him, without forfeiting the price paid for him; and the sexual violation of a female slave by her master or his household freed her immediately. Paying back the value for which one had been enslaved restored full "Aryahood", free status, at any point.

The rule for Mlechchhas, people outside the Arya fold, was starkly different: the text states plainly that it was "no crime" for Mlechchhas to sell or mortgage the lives of their own children. Together, these provisions show Mauryan-era dasa status was not one uniform institution equivalent to chattel slavery; it was closer to a regulated, redeemable debt bondage for Aryas, hedged with real legal protections, alongside a far harsher, unregulated regime for non-Aryas. A statement flattening this into "slavery in Mauryan India worked the same way for everyone" is exactly the trap this named angle is built to test.

The decline of the Mauryan empire: three explanations, one ending

A fractured succession and an expensive centre

Encyclopaedia Britannica's own summary is a useful, checkable starting point: after Ashoka's death the empire shrank through invasions, defections by southern princes, and quarrels over succession among heirs who matched neither Chandragupta's nor Ashoka's administrative ability. That weakness landed on a state built to depend on an unusually capable emperor at its centre: a huge standing army, a large salaried bureaucracy and an internal spy network answering directly to the throne, all funded by land revenue running to a quarter or more of produce, is an expensive machine to keep running once the person at its apex stops being equal to it.

Romila Thapar's overcentralisation thesis

Historian Romila Thapar's influential account, in her study Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, argues the empire's structure was itself the problem: a centralised administration reaching in principle from emperor to village demanded rulers of real ability to function at all, and once weaker successors held the throne, the centre lost its grip over a periphery it had never genuinely absorbed rather than merely administered. A revolt at Taxila that the Ashokavadana says Bindusara sent the young Ashoka to suppress, with locals blaming corrupt officials rather than the crown, is often read as early evidence of exactly this centre-periphery strain, though the episode survives only in a much later Buddhist legend, unconfirmed by any contemporary Mauryan source.

The Brahmanical-reaction thesis, and why most historians reject it

A separate thesis, associated with historian H.C. Raychaudhuri, argues Ashoka's dhamma provoked a Brahmanical backlash: his edicts curbed animal sacrifice, a source of Brahmana income and status, and the dynasties that rose on the empire's ruins, the Shungas and Kanvas, were themselves Brahmana houses that revived the Vedic sacrifice the Mauryas had discouraged. The thesis remains widely taught, but most historians, Thapar prominent among them, reject it as historically unsound: it reads a later dynasty's religious practice backward as proof of an organised, empire-toppling resentment, when the better-attested causes sit in administration and succession, not sectarian revenge.

How it actually ended: Pushyamitra Shunga and Brihadratha

Whatever combination of causes historians favour, the empire's actual end is well attested and specific. Brihadratha, the last Mauryan king, was killed in 185 BCE by his own Brahmana commander-in-chief, Pushyamitra Shunga, who then founded the Shunga dynasty. The Sanskrit writer Banabhatta's Harshacharita, composed centuries later but drawing on an older tradition, describes Pushyamitra staging a review of the full Mauryan army before Brihadratha, ostensibly to display its strength, and using the occasion to kill his own king. A dynasty founded on a centralised administration and an unusually capable line of early rulers ended not in foreign conquest but in an assassination by the man commanding its own army, a fitting illustration of Thapar's argument that the structure had come to depend entirely on the person at its centre.

Quick revision points

• Mahajanapada: a "great janapada", sixteen named in early Buddhist and Jaina texts; most were monarchies, but the Vajji confederacy (Lichchhavis, capital Vaishali) was a gana-sangha, an oligarchy of rajas sharing power collectively. The Buddha and Mahavira both belonged to such ganas.
• Magadha's rise (6th to 4th century BCE): fertile land, iron ore (Jharkhand), forest elephants, and the Ganga as a cheap transport route, combined with the individual ambitions of kings.
• Dynastic sequence: Haryanka (Bimbisara, then Ajatasatru who killed him and destroyed Vaishali after a 16-year war, then Udayin who founded the fort at Pataliputra) → Sisunaga (broke Avanti's power) → Nanda (Mahapadma Nanda, "ekarat", huge army deterred Alexander; the last king, weak and unpopular, is named in tradition as Dhana Nanda) → overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya, with Chanakya (Kautilya)'s help, c. 321 BCE.
• Alexander reached the Punjab (326 BCE), his troops mutinied at the Hyphasis, and he died at Babylon in 323 BCE; Chandragupta won the Punjab by c. 322 BCE. Seleucus I Nicator's invasion (305 BCE) was defeated; the treaty (c. 303 BCE) traded 500 elephants for eastern Afghanistan, Baluchistan and trans-Indus territory, and sent Megasthenes to Chandragupta's court.
• Mauryan officer levels (per Rock Edict III): pradesikas = heads of districts; rajukas = judicial/reward-punish authority; yuktas = subordinate, clerical officers. Dhamma mahamattas were a separate, later creation solely for propagating dhamma. The Arthashastra's spy system (kapatika chattra, udasthita, grihapatika, vaidehaka, tapasa, and others) primarily tested the loyalty of the king's own officials, not just foreign threats.
• Five major political centres named in Ashokan inscriptions: capital Pataliputra, plus provincial centres Taxila, Ujjayini, Tosali and Suvarnagiri.
• Kalinga war, c. 261 BCE (eight years after Ashoka's coronation): Rock Edict XIII records roughly 150,000 deported, 100,000 killed. Trap: edicts XI-XIII are absent at Kalinga itself (Dhauli, Jaugada), replaced there by two Separate Kalinga Edicts.
• Eight Major Rock Edict sites: Shahbazgarhi, Mansehra (Pakistan), Kalsi (Uttarakhand, only site with all 14), Girnar (Gujarat), Sopara (Maharashtra), Yerragudi (Andhra Pradesh), Dhauli, Jaugada (Odisha). Scripts: Prakrit/Brahmi most common, Kharosthi in the northwest, Aramaic and Greek in Afghanistan. James Prinsep deciphered Brahmi in 1837.
• Minor Rock Edicts (earlier, personal): Maski (Karnataka, 1915) is the only edict naming Ashoka by name alongside his title; Bhabru (Bairat) has him declare devotion to Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha and name seven recommended texts.
• Pillar Edicts (later, calmer): seven Major Pillar Edicts at Delhi (from Topra and Meerut), Allahabad (from Kausambi), Rampurva, Lauriya Araraj and Lauriya Nandangarh; one lists protected animals, another recaps welfare works (wells, trees, rest houses); separate Schism Edicts (Sarnath, Sanchi, Allahabad) warn against splitting the sangha; the Rummindei pillar marks Ashoka's visit to the Buddha's birthplace, Lumbini, with a tax cut for the village.
• Dhamma: a non-sectarian code (honesty, compassion, tolerance, non-injury), propagated by dhamma mahamattas (from Ashoka's 13th regnal year) and dhamma yatras (from his 10th year, replacing hunting tours); by tradition (the Mahavamsa), his children Mahinda and Sanghamitra were sent as missionaries to Sri Lanka.
• Arthashastra on slavery: "never shall an Arya be subjected to slavery." Bondage for Aryas was conditional and redeemable, with real legal protections; for Mlechchhas, selling one's own children into slavery was explicitly "no crime", a sharply harsher rule.
• Decline: no single agreed cause. Britannica's plain account cites weak successors, invasions and southern defections; Romila Thapar blames overcentralisation outrunning weaker rulers' ability to hold it together; the Brahmanical-reaction thesis (Ashoka's dhamma hurting Brahmana ritual income) is widely taught but rejected by most historians including Thapar. The empire actually ended in 185 BCE, when Pushyamitra Shunga killed the last Mauryan king, Brihadratha, and founded the Shunga dynasty.

Hold the dates, the dynastic order, and which fact belongs to which source, Megasthenes, the Arthashastra, or the edicts themselves, and which edict type, major rock, minor rock, or pillar, carries which piece of content, and this chapter's statement-based traps, misplacing an edict, flattening an officer hierarchy, assuming slavery worked one way across the whole population, or reducing the decline to one single cause, stop working on you.