Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor

by Charles R. Allen

  From the Great Tope Cunningham and Maisey moved on to open another twenty-seven stupas, ten of them on Sanchi hill and the remainder at four Buddhist sites in the surrounding hills. Every excavation led to the discovery of relic boxes containing one or more soapstone reliquaries, each holding ashes and bone fragments, and each inscribed in Brahmi with the name of the Buddhist saint or saints whose remains it contained, in some cases with added background information – such as, for example, ‘Relics of the emancipated Kasyapa Gotra the missionary to the whole Hemawanta [Himalayas]’. To the amazement of the excavators, many of these names matched those of early Buddhist elders and missionaries as given in the Great Dynastic Chronicle. In what Cunningham had designated ‘No. 2 Tope’ at Sanchi were found five reliquaries, which together held the remains of ‘no less than ten men of the Buddhist Church, during the reign of Ashoka. One of them [Moggaliputta Tissa] conducted the proceedings of the Third Synod, in 241 B.C., and two were deputed to the Hemawanta country as missionaries, after the meeting of the Synod. From this we may conclude that the date of the Tope cannot be earlier than about 220 B.C., by which time the last of Ashoka’s contemporaries would have passed away.’

  The relics from ‘No. 3 Tope’ at Sanchi proved to be equally revealing. They were found to contain the ashes of two even more famous early Buddhists: Sariputra and Mogalana, two of Sakyamuni Buddha’s earliest converts and among the closest of his disciples. Further remains of these same two elders were buried in other stupas, showing that the practice of spreading relics had been widespread at the time of Ashoka. ‘These discoveries’, wrote Cunningham with absolute justification, ‘appear to me to be of the greatest importance for the early illustration of the early history of India, for they authenticate in the fullest manner the narrative of the most interesting portions of Ashoka’s reign.’13 More specifically, they corroborated the claims made in Ceylon’s Great Dynastic Chronicle.

  Cunningham concluded that Sanchi and the Bhilsa region (today Vidisha) made up the place identified in the Great Dynastic Chronicle as Chetiyagiri, the ‘stupa hill’, where Ashoka’s first wife Devi had come from and where his first two children, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, grew up. That same Devi had either founded or patronised a monastery there and, even though the Great Tope’s colonnade and gateways were the work of Ashoka’s successors, this site was of particular interest to Ashoka as the starting point of the great missionary programme he had initiated as part of his drive to spread the Dharma throughout Jambudwipa and beyond.

  Needless to say, Cunningham’s first report on Sanchi was immediately challenged by Professor Horace Wilson, still occupying the Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford and still refusing to accept that the author of the Rock and Pillar Edicts was Ashoka. Cunningham responded by writing The Bhilsa Topes, copiously illustrated with Maisey’s maps and drawings, which became the model for all subsequent archaeological reports published in British India. He demolished Wilson’s arguments point by point, making no secret of his contempt for Wilson’s reliance on ‘mendacious’ Brahmanical testaments. Here, by contrast, was hard archaeological evidence that provided ‘the most complete and convincing proof of the authenticity of the history of Asoka, as related in the Mahawanso’. The publication of The Bhilsa Topes in 1853 effectively silenced Wilson, finally putting an end to the arguments over the identity of Piyadasi and the significance of Ashoka as the champion and propagator of Buddhism in the third century BCE.

  Dr Wilson had dominated the Orientalist scene since the 1820s, but not always to its advantage. With his death in 1860 a millstone fell from the neck of Indian studies, even if Wilson’s influence continued to linger at Oxford, where the scholar best qualified to succeed him to the Boden Chair, Wilson’s young German rival Max Müller, was notoriously passed over in favour of Wilson’s former student Monier Williams.

  Cunningham believed his discoveries at Sanchi and the Bhilsa region to be equal in importance to those recently made in Mesopotamia by Henry Layard, whose impressive folio volume of Illustrations of the Monuments of Nineveh had appeared a few years earlier. But outside India few academics shared his enthusiasm and the British public showed no interest whatsoever. They could respond to the romance of Ancient Egypt, thanks to the army of savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone by Jean François Champollion in 1822 and the rich plunder from its tombs and pyramids that now filled their museums. They could even identify with Nineveh, Nimrod and Babylon through the Old Testament and the Holy Land. But India was something else. John Company now reigned supreme, imposing British values over a land formerly ‘cursed from one end to the other by the vice, the ignorance, the oppression, the despotism, the barbarous and cruel customs that have been the growth of ages under every description of Asiatic misrule’.14 As far as the British public was concerned India had little to offer and never had, a land of picturesque mosques and tumbledown Muslim tombs as portrayed in the prints of the Daniells. Small wonder that a hitherto unheard-of emperor in a far distant past excited little interest. A century and a half later, the situation remains pretty much the same.

  12

  Sir Alexander in Excelsis

  One of the pillars of the East Gateway of the Bharhut stupa, with adjoining rail and coping, photographed by Joseph Beglar in 1874. (Cunningham, The Stupa of Bharhut, 1879)

  The uprising known to the British as the Indian Mutiny convulsed the subcontinent from the summer of 1857 through almost to the end of 1858. It ended East India Company rule and led to Crown rule, with a Viceroy governing India in the name of the Queen. Four years later Alexander Cunningham retired from military service with a colonel’s pension. A group photograph taken at the time of his departure shows him looking every bit his forty-six years.

  Alexander Cunningham (centre) at the time of his retirement from the Indian Army, with other Royal Engineer officers in October 1862. (Royal Engineers Museum, Chatham)

  However, before his departure Cunningham had taken care to make his case with Lord Canning, the first viceroy, and within a matter of months he was back – but as a major-general and archaeological surveyor to the Government of India ‘in Behar and elsewhere’, together with an equally vague brief to ‘make an accurate description of such remains as most deserve notice’. It was the role he had been born to fill.

  No financial provision had been made other than Cunningham’s official salary of 450 rupees a month and a field allowance of 350 rupees a month. But it was a start and it allowed Cunningham to devote himself full-time to the recovery of ancient India’s historical geography, criss-crossing northern India in a series of field-trips during the winter months and then writing up the results over the summer. The fruit of these surveys eventually amounted to twenty-three volumes of Archaeological Survey Reports, which to this day make breathtaking reading, as much for their scope as their findings.

  The first Cold Weather survey was concentrated on Bihar and the province then known as the North-Western Provinces and Oude (subsequently United Provinces and today the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh). Stanislas Julien’s two-volume translation of the travels of Xuanzang, Memoires sur les Contrées Occidental, had appeared in 1857–8, which meant that Cunningham was now able to conduct his field surveys with copies of both Faxian’s and Xuanzang’s travels in his knapsack. It enabled him to track down virtually every place visited by the Chinese pilgrims, including such ancient cities as Sravasti, Kosambi and Ayodhya. At Kosambi, west of Allahabad on a bend of the Yamuna River, Cunningham found an Ashokan pillar that Xuanzang had failed to mention, lacking a capital, badly damaged by a recent fire and carrying no Brahmi inscription, but still standing. At Ayodhya, where Xuanzang had seen several ruined monasteries including one ‘with an Asoka tope to mark a place at which the Buddha had preached to the devas’,1 Cunningham could find only the bell of an Ashokan capital, inverted to serve as the base of a lingam in the Shaivite temple of Nageshvarnatha.2

  He did better south of t
he River Ganges, identifying the extensive ruins first reported on by Francis Buchanan south of the fort of Bihar as the site of the famous monastic university of Nalanda. At Bodhgaya he began clearing the mass of ruins surrounding the great temple and its Bodhi tree to better expose the stone railing that Markham Kittoe had unearthed during his visit to the site back in 1847. He found more of the posts decorated with medallions that Kittoe had drawn, a number of which had been recycled to serve as roof supports for a building beside the main temple now occupied by Hindu devotees.

  From the style of the decorations and the accompanying Brahmi inscriptions recording the names of the donors, Cunningham concluded that the railings could not be of much later date than Ashokan.3 However, he was wrong, as a second round of excavations conducted in 1875 revealed when the remains of a simpler and earlier set of railings was uncovered. Together, they confirmed the essential accuracy of Xuanzang’s account, which was that the original Ashokan railings had been destroyed by the anti-Buddhist regicide Pushyamitra and that the second set of railings that had replaced them had themselves been destroyed by King Sasanka of Bengal.

  The Bodhi tree was itself a major cause for concern. In 1812 Francis Buchanan had found the tree in full vigour but when Cunningham saw it half a century later it was ‘very much decayed’, its branches ‘barkless and rotten’.4 By the time of Cunningham’s third visit to Bodhgaya in 1876 the tree had gone completely, having been brought down in a storm and removed. During the course of his fourth visit, in the Cold Weather of 1880–1, it occurred to him that some of the tree’s roots might have survived. A dig into the sandy soil just west of the Diamond Throne disinterred two large pieces of ‘an Old Pipal Tree’. Conscious that the sacred continuity of the Bodhi tree was now at risk, he took a cutting from the nearest pipal tree and planted it beside the now restored Diamond Throne. It took root and is now venerated by Buddhist pilgrims as the authentic descendant of the original Bodhi tree of Sakyamuni Buddha’s time.

  In 1864 Cunningham returned to the scene of his first success: Sankisa, the site of the Buddha’s descent from heaven. He now had Xuanzang’s account and the extra information it provided, including the detail of an Ashokan stone pillar of a ‘lustrous violet colour and very hard, with a crouching lion on the top’.5 The modern village of Samkassa was perched on a large rectangular mound known locally as the qila or ‘fort’. About three-quarters of a mile south of the fort was a smaller mound, made up of solid brickwork crowned by a modern Hindu temple dedicated to Bisari Devi, described to Cunningham as a goddess of great power. As he made his way across the open ground towards the temple he almost fell over a large boulder-like object. When cleared of the surrounding undergrowth it revealed itself as a capital of an ancient pillar, bearing the figure of an elephant.6

  Carved in lustrous pale sandstone and standing four feet high, the elephant was incomplete, having lost its trunk, tusks, ears and tail. Even so, Cunningham thought the sculpture ‘by far the best representation of that animal that I have seen in any Indian sculpture. The veins of the legs are carefully chiselled, and the toes are well and faithfully represented.’ It stood on a round abacus and bell similar in style to that recovered by Cunningham at Sanchi, although here decorated with stylised leaves rather than ducks.

  The Ashokan elephant capital found by Alexander Cunningham in a field outside Samkassa village in 1864, as photographed on site by his assistant Joseph Beglar in the 1870s. The original print is damaged. (APAC, British Library)

  The pillar upon which the elephant had originally stood could not be found. However, Cunningham had no hesitation in declaring this to be another of Emperor Ashoka’s works and he speculated that the reason why Xuanzang had reported seeing a lion capital at Sankisa and not an elephant could have been because the trunk had already broken off when the Chinese pilgrim saw it and ‘the elephant thus disfigured was mistaken for the lion’.

  In this same winter season Cunningham returned to Kosambi to look for further remains of the pillar located a year before. He uncovered a short and much mutilated edict almost identical to the Schism Edict found at Sanchi, confirmation that Ashoka had indeed sent out a directive to a number of Buddhist monasteries ordering the Sangha to toe the line.

  But not every discovery came from directions supplied by the Chinese pilgrims. Following information provided by a Mr Forrest, Cunningham travelled due north from Delhi as far as the village of Kalsi, just west of the hill-station of Mussoorie at a point where the Jumna River debouched on to the plains. From here Cunningham was directed to a low ridge above the river, upon which rested a large elephantine boulder of distinctive white quartz covered in moss. Three sides had been smoothed and polished and on two of these were neatly set out the fourteen Rock Edicts of Ashoka, all virtually identical in lettering and contents to the Girnar Rock Edict. An added bonus came with the discovery that the northern shoulder of the rock bore the figure of a bull-elephant with large tusks and a curled trunk, neatly cut. Between the elephant’s fore and rear legs were four Brahmi characters spelling out the word gajatame.

  After much puzzling Cunningham had to admit that he had no idea as to what this could mean, other than it might refer to the name of the rock, which like the other three edict rocks so far discovered had clearly been selected because of its elephant-like appearance. The best theory today is that gajatame means something like ‘best of elephants’ – possibly Ashoka’s personal memorial to a favourite elephant but more probably a reference to the elephant as a symbol of the Buddha.7 The Kalsi elephant was the third such image to be discovered in close proximity to an Ashokan monument, the first being the elephant carved out of the solid rock at Dhauli and the second the elephant capital at Sankisa. All have been cut or carved with remarkable realism.

  The Kalsi elephant together with RE 13 and part of RE 14, as drawn and published by Alexander Cunningham in his Inscriptions of Aoka, 1877.

  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.