Empires, inscriptions, and pilgrim itineraries

Research record

itineraries Empire as a claim with uneven reach The appearance of the Mauryas, Guptas, and later supra- regional powers changes the scale at which the history of Mithila, Vajji, Anga, and the Nepal-facing corridor must be written. Empire did not erase local institutions or turn every settlement into an equally administered unit. Royal inscriptions, coins, pillars, seals, roads, tax relations, ritual patronage, and military claims each register different degrees of incorporation. A proclamation at a pillar is strong evidence that a ruler chose that place for public communication; it is not proof that every village nearby experienced identical administration. The historical problem is therefore to map imperial acts and networks without filling the spaces between them with an assumed uniform state (Thapar 2012; Lahiri 2015). Mauryan north Bihar: monument and text must be separated North Bihar preserves an unusually important group of monolithic pillars associated with Ashoka. Yet the pillars do not all carry the same evidence. Lauriya-Areraj and Lauriya- Nandangarh bear the first six Major Pillar Edicts, and at Rampurva one of the two known pillars is inscribed while its companion is uninscribed. The lion-capital pillar at Kolhua/Vaishali is conventionally accepted as Ashokan but carries no Ashokan inscription. This distinction matters. An inscribed pillar combines monument, royal language, script, and place; an uninscribed pillar establishes monumental intervention but requires other evidence for its purpose and date. A chapter on empire must never silently transfer an edict from one pillar to another (Hultzsch 1925; Falk 2006; Archaeological Survey of India, Patna Circle). 162 Stone, quarry, transport, and state capacity The polished sandstone pillars are also evidence for technologies and labour systems. Quarrying a large monolith, shaping and polishing it, transporting it over long distances, preparing a foundation, raising the shaft, and fitting a capital required skilled stoneworkers, transport crews, supervisors, and substantial logistical coordination. Those operations demonstrate state-supported capacity even when the surviving pillar is uninscribed. They do not tell us whether labour was paid, corvee, hereditary, or organized through contractors in any one locality. Material scale establishes a problem of mobilization; social relations of production r

Section index

1. Empire as a claim with uneven reach
2. Mauryan north Bihar: monument and text must be separated
3. Stone, quarry, transport, and state capacity
4. The first six Pillar Edicts in the Champaran corridor
5. Dhamma was not a simple synonym for Buddhism
6. Officers, justice, and the language of government
7. Punishment, mercy, and royal paternalism
8. Animals, medicine, and welfare claims
9. Lauriya-Areraj: an inscription at a lived place
10. Lauriya-Nandangarh: edict, capital, and neighbouring archaeology
11. Rampurva: a pair that demonstrates evidentiary difference
12. Kolhua/Vaishali: Ashokan presence without an edict
13. A pillar corridor: useful hypothesis, not a demonstrated road map
14. Pillar routes and the Nepal-facing frontier
15. Imperial communication and literacy
16. Scripts, languages, and the geography of authority
17. From Mauryan to post-Mauryan landscapes
18. Gupta political re-scaling
19. Chandragupta I, Kumaradevi, and Licchavi dynastic capital
20. Coins are political media, not marriage certificates
21. Samudragupta and the Allahabad prasasti
22. Nepal in Samudragupta’s frontier world
23. An inscription can be a palimpsest of empires
24. Vaishali under later imperial horizons
25. Figure 2 revisited: Kolhua as a multi-period sacred landscape
26. Pilgrims are authors, not transparent measuring instruments
27. Faxian: travel for Vinaya and sacred geography
28. Faxian and Vaishali: memory between city and relic landscape
29. Xuanzang: a seventh-century archive of ruins and communities
30. Ruins are historically specific evidence
31. Several hundred monasteries: count, convention, and translation
32. Relational geography: sequence before coordinate
33. Xuanzang’s Vaishali and religious plurality
34. A pillar seen centuries later is evidence twice over
35. Pilgrimage creates and preserves route knowledge
36. From Pataliputra to the north: continuity without a single road
37. Inscriptions and itineraries have opposite silences
38. Epigraphic absence is not political absence
39. Monument relocation and the danger of present position
40. Colonial archaeology and the recovery of Buddhist geography
41. Translation history is part of the evidence chain
42. Empires, sacred routes, and the India-Nepal frame
43. Evidentiary conclusions
44. Chapter-specific bibliography

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Empires, inscriptions, and pilgrim itineraries.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/political-10/