The World

The Mauryans and the Qin

SELEUKOS IN INDIA: THE RISE OF CHANDRAGUPTA

Thanks to his general Seleukos, Ptolemy seized not only Libya but also Cyprus, Judaea (the Graeco-Roman name for Judah), Coele-Syria and much of the Aegean. As a thank-you, in 312 BC Ptolemy lent Seleukos a tiny corps of 800 infantry and 200 cavalry with which he managed to reconquer not just Babylon, where he had been a popular governor, but then, in an astonishing performance of almost Alexandrian proportions, the rest of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Foxy, pointy-faced and fearless, Seleukos had the gift of winning over different nationalities to work with his Macedonians. In the last year of Alexander’s life he had joined the king’s inner circle, present at the final drinking parties before his death, and unlike henchmen of longer standing he had not at first requested a satrapy. Alone among the Companions, he had stayed with his Bactrian wife Atama, a decision that was to pay off when he retook the east. But the biggest threat to Alexander’s heir was his own blood: in 310, Alexander IV and Roxane were murdered, followed soon afterwards by Hercules. Finally Ptolemy decided to marry Alexander’s sister Cleopatra, but she too was murdered before the ceremony could take place. After 300 years of rule by one family, the House of Alexander had vanished.

In 306, Ptolemy and Seleukos declared themselves to be kings, founding two Alexandrian dynasties that would rule for centuries, setting new lows for depravity down to their last great ruler, Cleopatra. Egypt was Ptolemy’s heartland; while he created a Greek-speaking bureaucracy there, fortified by a Macedonian army, he backed the Egyptian priests and embellished their temples. In return, they hailed him as pharaoh.^* Towards the end of the reign, he settled himself and Alexander the mummy in his expanded Alexandria.^*

In 287, now in his eighties, Ptolemy chose a younger son, the twenty-two-year-old Ptolemy, intellectual and thoughtful, to succeed him instead of his elder son, Thunderbolt, then aged thirty-two. It was a sensible decision: Thunderbolt was a psychopathic wrecking-ball. When Ptolemy died in 283, the only one of Alexander’s successors to die in his bed, he was smoothly succeeded by Ptolemy II, while Thunderbolt escaped to seek his fortune elsewhere.

After a murderous rampage around the Mediterranean, Thunderbolt fled to Seleukos and invited him to seize the west. Seleukos, now seventy-five and the last of the successors, was up for the challenge. His eldest son Antiochos, who accompanied him on his campaigns, was half-Persian, which helped as they established a Greek empire from Syria to Pakistan, earning Seleukos the epithet Nicator – Victor. Like Alexander, the Victor was an avid founder of cities, building two capitals – an eastern one, Seleucia (near Baghdad), and a western one, Antioch (Antakya, Türkiye). When, as part of an alliance, he took a new young wife, Stratonice, his son Antiochos fell ill. Consulting his doctor, the old king discovered that the boy was in love with her. Seleukos fixed his own succession and his son’s sickness by giving the boy both the crown and the girl, announcing their marriage and then crowning them king and queen of Asia, progenitors of the Seleucid dynasty.

Before he returned to the west, Seleukos had marched into the Punjab, where he discovered his limits. In 305, he clashed with a new dynasty there led by an Indian king who may have met Alexander.

Twenty years earlier, Chandragupta Maurya, who may have advised Alexander on Indian affairs, led a rebellion against the unpopular Nanda kings of Pataliputra (Patna). Chandragupta may have been an illegitimate relative of the Nandas, hidden by his mother and brought up far from court. It was said that a courtier, Chanakya,^* invited the boy to his philosophical school at Takshashila (Taxila). Little is known about Chandragupta, but he may have served King Dhana Nanda until he became jealous of the young general and ordered his killing. Chandragupta finally took Pataliputra and, when the Macedonian rule in Punjab collapsed, he expanded there too.

In 305, Seleukos arrived to retake these Indian provinces but, after failing to defeat Chandragupta, he met the Indian monarch on the Indus and ceded territories, agreed a marriage alliance and exchanged ambassadors. Ambassador Megasthenes wrote a (mostly vanished) book Indica, describing the heavily guarded monarch, his orderly empire and his capital Pataliputra, one of the world’s biggest cities. Chandragupta sent Seleukos a useful gift for an ageing warlord: Indian aphrodisiacs. Even more useful, he gave Seleukos the equivalent of a twentieth-century panzer division – 500 war elephants, which he would use to conquer the west.

ASHOKA – WHEEL -TURNING KING

Seleukos, now aged seventy-five, accompanied by his twenty-two-year-old son Antiochos and his corps of Indian elephants and Scythian chariots, marched all the way from Pakistan to the Aegean, defeating all contenders. In 281 BC, they crossed the Hellespont but, as Seleukos – the last of Alexander’s Companions and, with Ptolemy, the most gifted – stopped to admire an ancient shrine, the psychopathic Thunderbolt, who had invited him into Greece, stabbed the old Victor. Then, seizing control of the army, he marched into Macedon and claimed the throne. It was an astonishing turn of events, but it did not last. Thunderbolt was himself killed in battle, the end of the wars of Alexander’s successors. Seleukos’ family kept Syria, Iraq and Iran; the Ptolemies ruled Egypt, Israel and Lebanon.

The great Ptolemy’s daughter Arsinoe was left high and dry in Greece: twice married to warring kings, twice widowed, she wanted her share of power and headed to Alexandria to join her brother Ptolemy II. Arsinoe framed his wife for planning to kill the pharaoh, had her killed and then married Ptolemy II. The incest pleased the Egyptians but disgusted the Greeks. ‘You’re pushing your cock into an unholy hole,’ wrote a lampoonist named Sotades. Ptolemy had Sotades sealed in a lead coffin and dropped into the Nile. Ptolemy II called himself and his wife Philadelphoi – Sibling-lovers, a divine pharaonic couple.

Philadelphos did everything with extravagance – what the Greeks called tryphe^* – making his father’s library the greatest collection in the world and inviting all peoples to settle in Alexandria, which was soon home to a million people, Greek, Egyptian and Jewish. When he commissioned Greek-speaking Jews to translate their Torah into Greek, he made the Bible available to non-Jews, a move which later had world-changing consequences.

In 275, Arsinoe and Philadelphos held a sacred festival combined with military parade and trade fair to celebrate their power: 80,000 troops marched through Alexandria with floats and statues of Zeus, Alexander and the Sibling-lovers themselves, elephants, leopards, giraffes and rhinoceroses, and delegations of Nubians and Indians in national dress. The Nubians advertised Ptolemy’s trade with Arkamani, qore (ruler) of Kush, who operating from his capital at Meroe, where he built many pyramids that still stand, sold war elephants to Philadelphos. As for the Indians, the festival’s theme was Dionysios returning from India – and Philadelphos had founded new Red Sea ports on the Egyptian and Arabian coasts to trade with the emperor of India, Ashoka, who boasted of his Greek links, naming Philadelphos in his inscriptions.

Born around the time that his grandfather Chandragupta was giving Seleukos those elephants, Ashoka was just one of the possible heirs of an expanding empire. Around 297, Chandragupta abdicated from the throne to devote himself to Jain ascetism, handing over to his son Bindusara, who maintained his father’s friendly relations with the Seleucids, asking Antiochos to send figs, wine and a Greek philosopher. Bindusara appointed Ashoka as governor in the north-west at Taxila and Ujjain, where he fell in love with a merchant’s daughter, Devi – Vidisha-Mahadevi – whom Buddhists later claimed was related to Buddha.

In 272 BC, as Bindusara lay dying, Ashoka, reported by one tradition as unattractive and suffering from a fainting condition, possibly epilepsy, fought and killed his brothers. Calling himself Beloved of the Gods (Deva¯nampiya) and the Kindly (Piyadasi), Ashoka expanded down the east coast, vital for Mauryan links to eastern Asia: ‘King Piyadasi conquered Kalinga, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed and many times that number perished,’ and ‘Kalinga was annexed.’ Leading an army of 700 elephants, 1,000 cavalry and 80,000 infantry and protected by a bodyguard that included female archers, he may have conquered lands from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and south to Deccan – probably the largest raj until the British. When he had the luxury of security, he did what he thought was right, encouraged by his Buddhist lover Devi. ‘Now that Kalinga was annexed, the Beloved of the Gods felt remorse,’ he declared in one of the thirty-three remarkable inscriptions he raised around his empire.^* The killing ‘is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods and weighs heavily on this mind’, and he even mentioned the suffering of slaves.

Rebranding himself as chakravartin, wheel-turning monarch, and dharmaraja, he ‘very earnestly practised dharma, desired dharma and taught dharma’, which was the universal law of righteousness, one of the essential teachings of Buddha. He preached tolerance and peace – ‘the essential advancement of all sects … One should honour each sect by the other.’ According to Buddhist sources, he opened up seven of the original eight stupas that contained the Buddha’s relics, and built 84,000 stupas – clearly an exaggeration – to redistribute the relics. He also oversaw the Third Buddhist Council and sent missionaries, led by his son Mahendra and daughter Sanghamitra, to spread the teachings south to Sri Lanka, but also westwards to five Greek kings – just as a Greek satrap, Diodotos I, seized parts of Afghanistan and Tajikistan to found his own Hellenic-Bactrian kingdom.

Ashoka’s Buddhism had to be enforced by special officers, dharma-mahamattas: ‘This dharma edict is engraved so it may long endure … as long as my sons and grandson live …’ Buddhist sources claim his beliefs were resisted by Brahmins among his own family. Meanwhile to the east a conqueror was uniting China for the first time.

HEART OF TIGER AND WOLF: ENTER THE QIN

In 247 BC, the militaristic kingdom of Qin – pronounced Chin – was disastrously inherited by a thirteen-year-old boy, Ying Zheng, who was humiliatingly dominated by his mother, said to be addicted to her prodigiously well-endowed lover. From this ill-starred beginning, this homicidal, brilliant and half-mad visionary would create China.

Ying was the scion of a family who had started in the 860s as horse breeders for the Zhou kings. For centuries, the family had governed a small remote north-western fiefdom that was on the edge of civilization, regarded by the Zhou as barbarians. At a time when ideas of morality later known as ‘Confucian’ were embraced by a small number of followers, the Qin forged their kingdom into a brutal and efficient force that thrived in the Warring States period – that is, during the perpetual wars over several centuries between the seven or so contending kingdoms who ruled what would become China. A century earlier, the Qin had appointed a minister, Shang Yang, who enforced a system that placed the clan above the individual, dividing people into units of families which were responsible for the actions of all its members collectively: ‘Whoever didn’t denounce a culprit would be cut in two; whoever denounced a culprit would receive the same reward as he who decapitated an enemy.’ Before his own execution, Shang started the aggressive expansion of Qin.

Now after a succession of feckless dukes, Ying found himself ruler. His father Zhuangxiang had not expected to rule but, while held as a hostage abroad, he met a merchant, Lu Buwei, who had a beautiful concubine, Lady Zhao. The prince fell in love with her and Lu presented her to him as a present. When Zhuangxiang became king, he appointed Lu as his chancellor, while Lady Zhao gave birth to the boy Ying Zheng, whose enemies would naturally claim that the merchant rather than the king was his real father.

In 246, the king died, and the thirteen-year-old Ying bided his time as he was guided by Lu and his mother, who became lovers again. Thinking better of this, Lu distracted the queen mother by introducing her to ‘a man named Lao Ai who had an unusually large penis’. To make sure she heard about his equipment, Lu had Lao dance to sensual music and supposedly ‘stick his penis through the centre of a wheel … so as to excite her interest’. This artful presentation worked. The queen was hooked. Lao Ai, now promoted to marquess, secretly had two sons with her, convinced he could outwit the young king and enthrone one of these babies. Women in east Asian kingdoms were often politically active – and the denunciation of female potentates for their sexual voracity would be a way of denigrating their rule throughout history. On the other hand, private and political lives were intertwined in personal monarchies; spatial and emotional closeness to the ruler was essential to win the trust of vigilant rulers; and women were neither more nor less likely to be influenced by sex or friendship than their male equivalents. Whatever the proportions of his penis, Lao was no match for the young king’s ‘heart of tiger and wolf’. Ying Zheng was terrifying, with a ‘waspish nose, eyes like slits, a chickenish chest and a voice like a jackal’, according to a visitor, and ‘he’s merciless’ … but he could also be charming, lavishing ‘clothes, food, drink’ on his visitors.

In 239, the king, at the age of twenty, advised by the Councillor, a minister named Li Si, provoked Lao Ai to seize power. Ying defeated Lao’s army, slaughtered his entire clan and had him torn into pieces by five horses, then exiled his mother. A master of human manipulation, the king could be kind – or predatory. ‘When in difficulties he humbles himself; when successful he swallows men up without a scruple,’ wrote a visitor. ‘Should he succeed in conquering the world, we will all be his captives.’

In swift campaigns, devised with the Councillor, Ying Zheng conquered three of the contending kingdoms. In 227, the king of Yan sent two assassins who were to present a map and the head of a traitor to Ying and then kill him. Receiving them in an audience hall (recently discovered by archaeologists) at his capital Xianyang (near modern Xi’an), Ying so terrified the assassins that they dropped the head. One of the hitmen drew a dagger and slashed at Ying, who drew his sword and staged a fighting retreat, managing to cripple both his would-be assassins. Ying soon conquered Yan and the rest of the kingdoms, taking the last one, Qi, in 221, uniting China for the first time – at a cost of around a million lives: ‘Insignificant as I am, I have raised troops to punish rebellious princes and thanks to the sacred power of our ancestors all six kings have been chastised so at last the empire is pacified.’

Now thirty-eight, the king declared himself Shi Huang-di – the First August Thearch, a sacred and cosmological title, emperor of China – boasting that ‘he was the first to achieve a single great peace’. The First Emperor had invented China as a political entity, ruling through forty commanderies, collecting all weapons which were melted down and cast into colossal statues set up in the palace, and adding that new throne hall at Xianyang and a huge pleasure park, the Supreme Forest, containing more palaces. He built the 500-mile Straight Road highway, just one of 4,200 miles of roads, along with a network of canals. The fighting was not over in the north, where a nomadic federation based in Mongolia, the Xiongnu, raided the empire: Ying Zheng started the Great Wall to expand into the grasslands that were crucial to the Xiongnu’s seasonal migrations. Sections of his roads and the Wall survive.

The only obstacle to his ruling forever was the mortality he shared with all people: determined to achieve immortality, he consulted magicians, who advised pursuing immortality through pilgrimages to sacred mountains or over the sea to find the Island of Immortals: fleets were dispatched to look for it.

The First Emperor’s movements were secret, a sensible policy in the wake of two more assassination attempts. When he realized that the Councillor always knew where he was, he had his entire retinue executed. And when his magicians started to call him ‘violent, cruel, power-greedy’ he launched a campaign of terror, executing 460 scribes. Father of scores of children, the First Emperor favoured his eldest son Fusu as heir, but the boy criticized him too, and was sent to serve at the frontier.

Many must have witnessed the emperor as he travelled and inspected his projects: one day, a minor official from Henan, named Liu Bang, born a peasant, escorted some prisoners to work on the emperor’s building projects and was lucky enough to see him in person. Strangely though no one would have believed it at that moment, the future belonged to this young provincial.

Ying Zheng forced 700,000 enslaved labourers to build a colossal tomb at Mount Li, thirty miles east of the capital, a four-sided pyramid within a man-made mountain 400 feet high, which displayed the strange grandeur of its creator – the emperor’s unique and sacred cosmic role. His tomb exceeded anything built anywhere else except the Great Pyramid. It was one of the paramount building projects in world history.^*

There was certainly contact between Qin China and northern India. It was probably Ashoka and his courtiers who first used the name Qin not just for a dynasty but for that vast country, China. The Chinese themselves called it The Central Country. Yet, as Qin united China, Ashoka was losing India.

Ashoka’s decline is mired in legends, some Buddhist, some Hindu, but he may have fallen in love with one of his wife’s maids, Tishyaraksha, a singer-dancer, who turned against Buddhism and flirted dangerously with his favourite son Kunala. In the ensuing showdown, both the latter were blinded. Young wives and aged kings do not go well together. As another son, Samprati, took control, the ailing Ashoka found himself powerless.^* Indian and probably Chinese goods were starting to reach the Red Sea ports of the Ptolemies, who sold them into the Mediterranean. In 236, the marriage of Ptolemy III Euergetes took place amid a murderous–incestuous imbroglio peculiar to the Ptolemy family.

* Ptolemy’s Egyptian adviser, the priest Manetho, was the great historian who divided the Egyptian pharaohs into the dynasties that we still use today.

* It was Ptolemy who planned his own royal district around the Soma – Tomb of Alexander – adding the 400-foot Pharos lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world; the Museion, sanctuary of the Muses (the first museum), an academy for Aristotelian study including the Library for which all the works of the world were to be translated into Greek. He welcomed intellectuals from all over the Greek world.

* Chandragupta was guided by the semi-mythic Chanakya. It was long believed that Chanakya wrote at least some of the Arthashastra (Science of Politics), a guide to staying in power: ‘You can lose a war as easily as you win. War is unpredictable. Avoid war.’ Chanakya understood the essence of politics, ‘The root of right governance is victorious inner restraint,’ and used the ancient Indian image of the wheel to describe the rajamandala, the circle of kingdoms, the tributaries around a powerful empire. The Arthashastra identifies Kautilya as its author; this was presumed to be another name for Chanakya, but it is now believed that Chanakya was not the author.

* Philadelphos supposedly kept nine paramours, of whom the star was a badass chariot-racing Greek beauty Belistiche, who – despite rules against female participation – somehow won the Olympics and moved to Alexandria as Philadelphos’ lover: they had a son together. This pleasure-loving daredevil sportswoman was so celebrated that when she died Philadelphos had her deified and buried in the temple of Sarapis.

* There is very little known about Ashoka except through his inscriptions – clearly inspired by those of the Persian Great Kings – on which these claims are based. Probably they are exaggerated. This account also uses the obscure and contradictory myths of Ashoka from the point of view of Sri Lankan and Indian Buddhist and Brahmanical sources.

* The emperor’s concept was to create an afterlife version of his empire. Beneath vaulted roofs depicting the heavens and stars flowed bronze-lined rivers of mercury, symbolizing the Yangtze and Yellow, while 7,500 terracotta soldiers guarded the entrances to the tomb, reinforced by crossbow boobytraps. The statues were unlike any previous Chinese statues, realistic in their physique and faces. Some had moustaches, some had hairbuns, some paunches; many had different eyes; all were fully fitted out with armour and weaponry. Most were built from a limited number of modular parts, but the generals were probably sculpted from life. These were probably inspired by smaller figures found in Warring States tombs, but it is just possible they were influenced by Greek sculpture, brought eastwards by Seleukos and his fellow Greeks. The first century BC historian Sima Qian is the source for the outrageous tales of Ying’s madness and cruelties but they may in fact be indirect descriptions of his master, Han emperor Wu.

* Ashoka’s death led to a vicious fight for the succession not just between different princes but between Brahmins, Buddhists, Jains and Ajivikas that was temporarily won by in 232 by a grandson, son of Kunala, Dasaratha Maurya, but ultimately his favoured son Samprati, a Jain not a Buddhist, seized the crown. The empire started to break up.