Journey
Ashoka's major rock edicts
Fourteen texts cut on rock at the edges of the Mauryan empire between about 257 and 256 BCE, in Brahmi, Kharosthi, Greek and Aramaic depending on who was meant to read them. They are the earliest deciphered writing in India after the Indus script, and the first time an Indian ruler speaks in the first person.
Stops (10)
- Kālsī · Kālsī — the northern rock
On the Yamuna where it leaves the hills, the northernmost of the major rock edicts. The fourteen texts are cut on a quartz boulder with an elephant carved beside them and the word gajatame, the best elephant, incised above — the Buddha's conception image used as a signature on a public notice.
- Shāhbāzgarhī · Shāhbāzgarhī — the same words in Kharosthi
In the Peshawar valley, where the fourteen edicts are cut in Kharosthi, the right-to-left script of the north-west, rather than in Brahmi. The empire published one text in whatever script its readers used, which makes these rocks the best evidence we have for where literacy actually reached.
- Mānsehra · Mānsehra — on the road to Kashmir
Kharosthi edicts on three boulders in Hazara, on the route north toward Kashmir and the Karakoram. Placing them here rather than in a city means they were cut for travellers: the edicts are sited on roads and frontiers, not in capitals.
- Kandahar (Old Kandahar edict) · Kandahar — Ashoka in Greek and Aramaic
At the empire's western edge, a bilingual inscription in Greek and Aramaic for a population left over from Alexander's settlements and the Achaemenid administration. The Greek renders dhamma as eusebeia, piety — a Mauryan king's ethical programme translated into the vocabulary of Hellenistic philosophy.
- Girnār rock inscriptions (Junāgaḍh) · Girnār — three empires on one rock
The Junāgadh boulder carries Ashoka's fourteen edicts, Rudradāman's Sanskrit prashasti of about 150 CE, and a Gupta inscription of Skandagupta — three dynasties and seven centuries writing on the same stone, each about the same reservoir. It is the single most informative rock in India.
- Dhauli · Dhauli — the Kalinga edict
Above the Daya river outside Bhubaneswar, where the two separate Kalinga edicts replace the usual thirteenth — the one that describes the war's hundred and fifty thousand deported and hundred thousand killed. The victors' own account of remorse is suppressed in the conquered province and replaced with instructions on governing it.
- Jaugaḍa · Jaugada — the other Kalinga rock
The southern of the two Kalinga sites, inside an earthen fort on the Rishikulya. It carries the same substituted edicts as Dhauli. That both Kalinga rocks omit the remorse passage and both add administrative instruction is the clearest evidence in the corpus that Ashoka edited for audience.
- Yerraguḍi · Yerragudi — both kinds at once
In Kurnool district, the only site carrying both the major rock edicts and the minor ones, which makes it the hinge for dating the series. The Brahmi here is written boustrophedon in places — alternate lines running in opposite directions, as a ploughing ox turns.
- Sopara · Sopārā — the edict at the port
Fragments of the eighth and ninth edicts found at the great western port, which put the series on the Arabian Sea coast as well as on the land frontiers. Sopārā traded to the Red Sea; publishing there meant publishing to people who would carry the text away by ship.
- Sannati, Kalburgi · Sannati — the portrait of the king
A Sātavāhana Buddhist site in Kalburgi where a slab reused as a temple platform turned out to carry Ashokan edicts, including a version of the fourteenth. It also holds a relief inscribed Rāya Asoko — the only known contemporary portrait of him.