Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Ashoka
Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor | Charles Allen
1 post | 1 read
India's lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived, and the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found and in the process India's ancient history was itself recovered. In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as much about Britain's entanglement with India as it as about India's distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
Vansa
post image
Pickpick

For nearly 2000 years,nobody was reading a poewrful Emperor's painstakingly carved edicts about seeing the error of his violent expansionist ways,converting to BUddhism and wanting to rule through peaceful means.In the mid 19th Century,a bunch of soldiers,chemists,lawyers,administrators,out of sheer curiosity,spent years deciphering them,and his voice was heard again,and still it.THis is that story.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7578833355