Founding
In the power vacuum after Alexander’s incursion into the northwest, Chandragupta Maurya — by tradition a young man of modest origin, coached by the Brahmin strategist Kautilya (Chanakya) — overthrew the Nanda kings of Magadha around 321 BC and built the first empire spanning most of the subcontinent, from Afghanistan (won from Alexander’s successor Seleucus in exchange for 500 war elephants) to the Deccan. The Greek envoy Megasthenes described the capital, Pataliputra, as a walled river metropolis with hundreds of towers; the Arthashastra, the statecraft treatise attributed to Kautilya, prescribes the machinery — taxation, espionage, regulation — of a startlingly administered state. Jain tradition holds that Chandragupta ended his days as an ascetic, fasting to death in Karnataka.
Ashoka and Kalinga
His grandson Ashoka (r. c. 268-232 BC) began as a conventionally ruthless expander. The hinge of his reign — and of Indian moral history — was the conquest of Kalinga (coastal Odisha) around 261 BC. In his own words, carved on rock for all to read, the war’s hundred thousand killed and multitudes deported filled him with remorse, and he turned from conquest by arms to conquest by dhamma — an ethic of non-violence, tolerance among sects, care for subjects, prisoners, and animals — published in dozens of rock and pillar edicts across the subcontinent in local languages and scripts. It is the closest thing antiquity offers to a ruler publicly repenting his own victory.
Ashoka patronised Buddhism generously — councils, stupas, and missions credited with carrying the faith to Sri Lanka and beyond — which is why Buddhist tradition across Asia remembers him as the model righteous emperor.
Decline and long shadow
The empire outlived Ashoka by half a century, contracting under weaker successors until the last Maurya was assassinated by his own general around 185 BC. Its afterlife has been extraordinary: when the modern Republic of India sought symbols, it reached past every intervening empire to Ashoka — his lion capital from Sarnath is the state emblem, and the Ashoka Chakra wheel spins at the centre of the national flag.