Stone, Script, and Sovereignty: The Asokan Edicts and the Communication of Imperial Authority in Mauryan India, c. 268 to 232 BCE

Abstract

The inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka are the earliest substantial body of royal texts in South Asia and the only contemporary evidence for the workings of the first subcontinental empire. This article examines them not primarily as sources for Aśoka's biography or religious convictions, the questions that have dominated their study since James Prinsep's decipherment in 1837, but as instruments through which a thinly administered empire attempted to communicate authority across a vast and heterogeneous territory. Drawing on the epigraphic corpus as edited by Hultzsch and re-examined by Falk, on the administrative analysis of Fussman and Thapar, and on the recent reinterpretations of Olivelle and Lahiri, the article argues that the edicts constituted a deliberate technology of rule. Their placement along routes and at frontiers, their adaptation to local languages and scripts, and their construction of dhamma as a political idiom accessible to subjects of every persuasion reveal an emperor who governed by the projection of a royal voice rather than by the dense bureaucratic apparatus imagined in the Arthaśāstra. The article concludes that the strengths and the limits of this strategy help to explain both the extraordinary reach of Aśoka's empire and the rapidity of its dissolution after his death.