The Mauryan Empire
Chandragupta unifies almost all of the Indian subcontinent.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 137 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Chandragupta Maurya seizes Magadha around 322 BCE and expands to control most of the subcontinent, defeating Seleucus and receiving 500 war elephants in the settlement. His minister Kautilya is credited with the Arthashastra, a manual of statecraft as unsentimental as anything Machiavelli wrote, covering taxation, espionage, famine policy and when to break a treaty. The empire runs a large bureaucracy and a standing army of several hundred thousand.