Place · Ashokan inscription · Pakistan
Shāhbāzgarhī
The Mauryan rock edict site in Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, 15 kilometres east of the Takht-i-Bahi monastery, carrying fourteen of Ashoka's major rock edicts carved in Kharosthi script around 258 BCE. The Kharosthi version — the same text as the Girnar rock edicts in Rajasthan — adapts Ashoka's dharma address to the Gandharan audience in the right-to-left Aramaic-descended script of the Indo-Iranian borderland. Shahbazgarhi is one of only two Kharosthi rock edict sites (with Mansehra), the rest of the empire inscribing in Brahmi. The edicts were discovered by French general Court in 1836.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Tradition
- Ashokan edicts (Brahmi, Kharosthi, Greek, Aramaic)
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.220, 72.160
Connections (2)
- Imperial inscription atPātaliputra
Shahbazgarhi in the Gandharan northwest carries the fourteen edicts in Kharosthi, the right-to-left script derived from Aramaic that was used across the northwest for centuries. The text is the same as at Girnar; the alphabet is not. The empire wrote to each region in the script that region could read, which is the clearest single piece of evidence for how a Mauryan administration actually handled a multilingual territory.
- Shared sacred geographyTakshashilā / Taxila
Shāhbāzgarhī's Kharosthi edicts and Taxila's Aramaic one are both in the north-west, and both use scripts that came into India from Achaemenid Iran. The region Alexander passed through is where Mauryan publishing had to be multilingual, and Gandhāra's later Buddhist art follows the same mixed inheritance. Kharosthi runs right to left and derives from Aramaic; Brahmi runs left to right, and the two scripts divide Ashoka's empire along the line Achaemenid administration had reached.
On these journeys
Sources
Major Rock Edicts — Shahbazgarhi
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