Journey
Ashokan pillars & minor edicts
Polished sandstone shafts up to fifteen metres and fifty tonnes, quarried at Chunar near Banāras and moved hundreds of kilometres, with animal capitals on top. Minor edicts were cut on rock instead. Two of the pillars were hauled to new cities by later rulers who could not read them and wanted them anyway.
Stops (13)
- Lumbinī · Lumbinī — the pillar that fixed a birthplace
Cut in 249 BCE and saying the king came in person, made offerings because the Buddha was born here, and reduced the village's tax to an eighth. Found again in 1896, it settled where Lumbinī was — the one case where an Ashokan pillar resolves a modern archaeological argument outright.
- Nigālī Sāgar pillar · Nigālī Sāgar — a stupa already ancient
A broken shaft recording that Ashoka enlarged the stupa of Konākamana, a Buddha of a previous age, to twice its size — and did so in his fourteenth year, before visiting Lumbinī. It is evidence that a cult of previous Buddhas was established and had monuments before his reign.
- Lauriyā Nandangarh pillar · Lauriyā Nandangarh — standing where it was raised
Ten metres of polished sandstone with a lion capital, still on its original spot in Champaran, which almost none of the others are. The polish — the Mauryan mirror finish nobody has satisfactorily explained — survives on it better than anywhere else.
- Rāmpurvā pillars · Rāmpurvā — the lion and the bull
Two pillars found in Champaran swamp, one with a lion capital and one with a bull. The bull capital is now at Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi. They stood on the road from Pātaliputra to Lumbinī, which is what the pillar series mostly marks: a route, not a set of sites.
- Sārnāth · Sārnāth — the capital that became a state emblem
Four lions back to back over a wheel and four animals, carved from a single block. India adopted it in 1950 and the wheel beneath it went on the flag, so a third-century-BCE Buddhist monument is the Republic's signature on every passport and coin.
- Sānchī · Sānchī — the stupa and the pillar
Begun under Ashoka and enlarged for a thousand years, with a pillar beside it carrying the schism edict — a warning that monks or nuns who split the order will be put in white clothes and expelled. Administration and devotion cut on the same site.
- Fīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar · Delhi–Topra — hauled to a new capital in the 1350s
Firuz Shah Tughlaq had this pillar moved from Topra to Delhi on a forty-two-wheeled carriage and boats down the Yamuna, and re-erected on his palace roof. Nobody could read Brahmi; his chronicler records the failed attempts. It was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837.
- Kaushāmbī pillar (now Allahabad Fort) · Kaushāmbī — moved to Allahabad Fort
Raised at Kausāmbī, moved to the fort at the Prayāg confluence, and then inscribed twice more: by Samudragupta with the Allahabad prashasti listing his conquests, and by Jahangir with his accession. Three empires writing on one column, the later two over the first.
- Maski · Maski — the edict that named him
A minor rock edict in Raichur and the first found to say Devānampiya Asoka outright rather than just Beloved of the Gods. Until 1915 the edicts and the Ashoka of the chronicles were not certainly the same person; this inscription joined them.
- Bairāt (Virāṭnagar) · Bairāt — the reading list
The Bhabru edict, found here, names seven Buddhist texts by title and recommends them to monks and laity — the earliest evidence anywhere for which parts of the canon existed and were valued in the third century BCE. The stupa on the hill is among India's oldest.
- Rūpnāth · Rūpnāth — the minor edict on the scarp
On the Kaimur escarpment near the Narmada–Ganga watershed roads, carrying the minor rock edict in which Ashoka describes his own two and a half years as a lay follower and the year since he drew close to the sangha. It is the most personal thing he says anywhere.
- Gujarrā · Gujarrā — the king by name again
A minor edict in the Bundelkhand uplands and one of the few besides Maski to give the personal name. The minor edicts cluster in the south and centre, away from the great rocks at the frontiers, which suggests a different campaign of publication.
- Brahmagiri · Brahmagiri — the edict and the stratigraphy
A minor rock edict beside a megalithic site in Karnataka that Mortimer Wheeler excavated in 1947 to build the stratigraphic sequence tying neolithic, megalithic and early historic south India together. The Ashokan text gives that sequence its one fixed date.