Place · relocated Ashokan pillar · India
Kaushāmbī pillar (now Allahabad Fort)
The Ashokan pillar raised at Kaushambi in the 3rd century BCE and later moved by Firoz Shah Tughlaq to Allahabad Fort in 1583 at Akbar's foundation of the city. The pillar carries three overlaid inscription layers: Ashoka's dharma pillar edicts of 243 BCE, Samudragupta's 4th-century Prayag prashasti (one of the greatest Indian epigraphic documents, listing his conquests in 33 lines of poetry by his court poet Harishena), and Jahangir's 17th-century personal record. The composite inscription is a condensed epigraphic autobiography of three Indian empires on one stone shaft. The pillar now stands inside Allahabad Fort, closed to public viewing since 2001.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Tradition
- Ashokan edicts (Brahmi, Kharosthi, Greek, Aramaic)
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.430, 81.875
Connections (4)
- Monument relocationPrayāga / Prayagraj/ Allahabad
The pillar was raised at Kaushambi, moved to the fort at the Prayag confluence, and then written on again — by Samudragupta, whose Allahabad prashasti is the principal record of his conquests, and by Jahangir, who added his accession. Three empires eight hundred years apart used one stone, each assuming its own words would be the last. It stands at one of the greatest tirthas of the plain, which is presumably why each of them chose it.
- Ashokan stone from ChunarChunar
The Kaushambi pillar, later moved to Allahabad Fort and inscribed again by Samudragupta and Jahangir, is Chunar stone like the rest. The quarry is the hidden infrastructure behind the whole pillar programme: a single sandstone source, a river for moving forty-tonne shafts, and a workforce capable of the high polish that has kept these surfaces bright for two thousand three hundred years.
- Succession in timePātaliputra
Samudragupta had his conquests cut onto Ashoka's Kausāmbī pillar in the fourth century, directly over an emperor who had written about renouncing conquest. The Guptas took the Mauryan heartland and its monuments and used them to say the opposite thing. Jahangir then added his own accession inscription to the same column in the seventeenth century, so three empires wrote on one pillar, the later two over the first.
- Trade routePratishthana / Paithan
Kauśāmbī on the Yamuna was the grand junction of the Uttarāpatha with the Dakshiṇāpatha; Pratishṭhāna on the Godavari was the southern terminus. The two were connected by the Dakshiṇāpatha, which climbed from Kaushambi through Vidisha and Ujjain, crossed the Narmadā at Mahishmati, and descended into the Satavahana Deccan.
On these journeys
- Ashokan pillars & minor edicts
- Uttarāpatha — the Great Northern Road
- Dakshiṇāpatha — the Great Southern Road
Sources
Major and Minor Pillar Edicts — Kausambi/Allahabad
Open Kaushāmbī pillar (now Allahabad Fort) in the repository →