Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor (34 page)

Under its veneer of moss the Kalsi Rock Edict was in excellent condition. ‘I find the Khalsi text to be in a more perfect state than any of them’, wrote Cunningham in his report, ‘and more specifically in that part which contains the names of the five Greek kings – Antiochus, Ptolemy, Antigonus, Magas, and Alexander.’ Now at last the issue of who precisely these names referred to could finally be cleared up, allowing a more accurate dating for Ashoka’s inauguration as king to be arrived at.

It had already been established that: firstly, Antigonos was not Antigonos I but his grandson Antigonos II, who had established the Antigonid dynasty in Macedonia in 319
BCE
and had died at the age of eighty in 239
BCE
; secondly, Antiochos was not Antiochos Soter but his less successful son Antiochos II, who succeeded his father in 262
BCE
and was thereafter preoccupied in warring with Ptolemy II of Egypt; and thirdly, that Ptolemy was this same Ptolemy II, who had become king of Ptolemaic Egypt in 283
BCE.
Antiochos II and Ptolemy II had concluded a peace treaty in about 250
BCE,
and both had died in the same year of 246
BCE.

Of the two last Greek kings now clearly identified on the Kalsi Rock Edict – Magas and Alexander – the first had to be the half-brother of Ptolemy II, who had broken away in about 277
BCE
to found Cyrene (approximating to modern Libya), which remained independent of Egypt until Magas’s death in about 255
BCE.
Finally, the last of the five named rulers could only be Alexander II, who had succeeded his father King Pyrrhas of Epirus (approximating to modern Albania) in 272
BCE
and gone on to drive Antigonos II out of Macedonia, which he had then ruled over until it was reclaimed by Antigonos’s son Demetrius II.

These five kings provided the following ruling spans:

Antigonos II 319–239
BCE

Antiochos II 262–246
BCE

Ptolemy II 283–246
BCE

Magas 277–
c
.255
BCE

Alexander II 272–
c
.254
BCE

Taken together, these five sets of dates showed that the Girnar, Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi Rock Edicts must have been ordered between 262
BCE
– when Antiochos II came to the throne – and 255
BCE
, the death of Magas.

In RE 12 Ashoka had listed his nearest neighbour to the west, Antiochos II, but – surprisingly – made no mention of the Macedonian satraps Diodotos and Andragoras, who had broken away in or just after the year 255
BCE
to rule Bactria and Parthia as independent kings. This strengthened the case that the Rock Edicts must have been inscribed before that date, and since RE 3 stated unambiguously that ‘Twelve years after my coronation this has been ordered’, it followed that Ashoka had been anointed king of Magadha twelve years before 262–255
BCE
, so somewhere between 274–267
BCE
. Cunningham plumped for the latter date.

At the start of the Cold Weather months of 1865–6 General Cunningham made his second visit to the northern Punjab. He had hitherto assumed the celebrated Manikyala Tope, dug into by Court, Masson and others, to be the site of the ancient city of Taxila. But after matching the accounts of Alexander’s invasion with the details provided of Faxian and Xuanzang, he was able to place Taxila behind the long, curling spur of the Margalla Ridge, which extends southwards into the plains
from the mountains of Hazara. Until recently this was a favourite picnic spot for the diplomats and their families at nearby Islamabad. Today it is off-limits, but if you stand on that ridge and look to the west you can see how advantageously the city of Taxila was placed. Besides being protected on three sides by mountains, it controls the Margalla Pass, where the Great Highway (and the more recent railway line) cuts through Margalla Ridge.

At Taxila Cunningham identified three areas of occupation, each enclosed within clearly defined city walls. The best preserved was Sirsuk, neatly laid out like a Roman town with a street grid, temples on raised platforms, massive cut-stone walls and city gates. However, the oldest and largest of the three cities was Bir, to the east of which stood the largest of a number of stupa mounds, referred to by the local inhabitants as the
Chir,
or ‘Split’, Tope, because of the way it had been torn open by the French general Claude Auguste Court back in the days when he was employed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Over the next fifteen years Taxila continued to draw Cunningham like a magnet, for he was fully aware of its importance in India’s early history. He made his last visit in the Cold Weather season of 1878–9, when he was sixty-five – very old for British India where fifty was the usual age for retirement. By then he had developed more sophisticated excavation techniques that took account of lesser objects such as potsherds, fragments of terracotta or even bits of plaster. However, it was the coinage of Taxila that chiefly preoccupied him. The whole area was littered with rectangular copper punch-marked coins, many bearing only a single die stamp, leading him to conclude that this was the earliest form of the Indian punch-marked coin, most probably minted in Taxila and pre-dating the arrival of
the Greeks. His discovery of a hoard of punch-marked coins mixed with Greek-type coinage that included coins of the Graeco-Bactrian rulers Pantaleon and Agathocles – probably the sons of Demetrius, who succeeded Euthydemous in about 200
BCE
– showed that despite their close contact with Alexander’s successors in Gandhara, the Mauryans had kept to their own style of coinage, displaying only punch-marked symbols most probably related to regions or local mints.

If Cunningham hoped to find evidence of Ashoka or his grandfather Chandragupta at Taxila, his expectations were never fulfilled. That was left to a later Director-General, John Marshall, who would spend more than fifteen years excavating at Taxila and so love the place that he would build himself a delightful cottage there. This missing link between Ashoka and the city where he spent some years as his father’s viceroy would come in the form of an inscription written in Aramaic, inked and then overcut on to a stone slab, of which only part had survived as a sliver of rock lodged into the wall. It came from Taxila’s Sirkap site, where it had been used for building material for the new Greek-styled city established by the Graeco-Bactrian king Demetrius in about 200
BCE
.

Half of each line is missing but its references to no killing of living beings, respect for Brahmans and monks, obedience to parents and elders and the performance of good works appear to have affinities with the sentiments expressed in RE 3 and RE 11 as inscribed on the edict rocks at nearby Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra – the latter being the fifth Rock Edict to be identified, discovered in the mid-1880s. Near the bottom of the stone sliver the name of Priyadasi has survived, along with a reference to the sons of Priyadasi.

*

As Cunningham made his way back to the Gangetic plains towards the end of his tour of 1864–5 he had every reason to feel despondent. In four winter seasons he had identified and surveyed more than 160 ancient sites in northern India, more than justifying the faith shown in him by Lord Canning. But the first Viceroy’s successor, Lord Lawrence, had come looking for budget cuts and Cunningham returned to Calcutta knowing that his archaeological department had been axed.

Four lean years as a military pensioner in England followed, which Alexander Cunningham put to good use by writing
The Ancient Geography of India: the Buddhist Period.
Then in January 1869 Lord Mayo arrived in Calcutta to replace Lord Lawrence, the political weathercock turned once more and in 1871 the general returned to India as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) – and as a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire.

Sir Alexander Cunningham’s new instructions were to ‘superintend a complete search over the whole country and a systematic record and description of all architectural and other remains that are remarkable alike for their antiquity or their beauty, or their historic interest’. These were brave words but in fact Cunningham’s new remit did not extend to the Madras and Bombay Presidencies. He was, however, provided with sufficient funds to pay for two assistants: an Armenian engineer from the Bengal Public Works Department named Joseph Beglar; and an Englishman, Archibald Carllyle, who had come out to India to tutor the sons of a minor raja and had stayed on to work as a museum curator.

It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to the archaeological work undertaken by Cunningham, Beglar, Carllyle and their subordinate staff through the 1870s and
into the 1880s. Only a fraction concerns the further disinterring of Ashoka and his times – a process that resumed in the early months of 1871 with Cunningham’s discovery of a box on a shelf at the Asiatic Society of Bengal’s premises in Calcutta bearing the label ‘Rupnath, in Parganah [District] Salimabad’.

The shrine of Rupnath lies at the very heart of the Indian subcontinent. The temple itself is a simple structure that stands in an attractively wooded glade beside one of three small pools linked by a series of waterfalls descending from the Kaimur hill range. It is well off the beaten track, some thirty-five miles north of Jabalpur and fifteen miles due west of Sleemanabad, which was called Salimabad before the arrival of Colonel James ‘Thugee’ Sleeman, the suppressor of the murderous thugee cult endemic in this part of India in the 1830s.

Pilgrims come to Rupnath to worship the lingam in the shrine, which has a long association with the Nath order of ascetics. These Naths follow many different paths but all share an antipathy towards caste barriers and honour Matyendranath as their founder, a ninth-century yogi said to have invented Hatha yoga as a spiritual exercise. Despite claiming Lord Shiva as their first master, these Naths stand outside the Brahmanical tradition, representing in their lineage the last phase of Buddhism in India, when tantric ritual entered the Mahayana Buddhist mainstream as a means of attaining spiritual perfection.

Nath shrines are generally found in remote mountain regions and isolated forests, as at Rupnath. Today the waters that feed the three pools have been dammed, so that a lake extends out into the plain below the lowest of them, but in
other respects Rupnath has changed very little since the day in the mid-nineteenth century when the servant of a Colonel Ellis came to this spot, probably to attend the annual
mela,
or religious fair, held here on
Shivaratri,
the ‘night of Shiva’, celebrated in late February–early March. This unnamed servant came away from Rupnath with an eye-copy of an inscription engraved on a rock beside the pool, which he gave to his employer, who passed it on to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta – where it was placed in a box and shelved.

It was this box that Sir Alexander came upon in 1871 while rummaging through the Society’s shelves. He at once instructed his new senior assistant Joseph Beglar to make a search of the district of Salimabad, between Gaya and Monghyr in Bihar. Beglar duly searched but found nothing. However, the general was not one to let matters rest. He made enquiries and learned of the second Salimabad, now renamed Sleemanabad. Beglar made a new search and soon reported back that he had found both Rupnath and the inscription.

Cunningham immediately set out to see for himself. ‘Here a small stream breaks over the crest of the Kaimur range’, he afterwards reported, ‘and, after three low falls, forms a deep secluded pool at the foot of the scarp. Each of these pools is considered holy, the uppermost being named after Rama, the next after Lakshmana, and the lowest after Sita. The spot, however, is best known by the name of Rupnath, from a linga of Siva which is placed at a narrow cleft of the rocks.’ The inscription was carved in five lines on a flat boulder beside the lowest lake, its upper surface ‘worn quite smooth by people sitting upon it for hundreds of years at the annual fairs’.

Sir Alexander Cunningham’s engraving of the Rupnath rock at the foot of the Kaimur Falls, together with his depictions of three other Ashokan sites. (Reproduced in
Inscriptions of A
oka,
1877)