Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 96

The political borders within today’s India and Pakistan shifted a few times over the centuries between 300 BC and 400 AD, a time that gave rise to both the Indian subcontinent’s first united empire — the Mauryan — and India’s golden age under the Gupta Dynasty.

In 322 BC, a nobleman named Chandragupta Maurya (sometimes spelled Candra Gupta Maurya) overturned Alexander the Great’s Indian conquest by leading a successful revolt against governors in the Punjab (modern Pakistan and northwest India). He also seized Magadha, the main state in northeast India, and formed the biggest Indian political force yet, the Mauryan Empire. Seleucus, the general who became Persia’s king after Alexander died, invaded from the west in 305 BC, but Chandragupta defeated him and won a treaty from him setting an Indian border along the Hindu Kush Mountains. The Hindu Kush, an extension of the Himalayan range, is the barrier that Alexander crossed when he invaded India.

Chandragupta’s son and grandson enlarged the empire, especially to the south, but war sickened the grandson, Asoka. After early victories, he became a devout Buddhist, devoted to peace. Instead of troops, he sent missionaries to win over Burma and Sri Lanka.

After Asoka died in 238 BC, his successors proved less able to hold the large territory together, and the Mauryan Empire declined. An ambitious rival from the Sunga family assassinated the last Mauryan king, Birhadratha, in 185 BC, and seized power. The resultant Sunga Dynasty couldn’t prevent the subcontinent from breaking into a number of independent kingdoms and republics — something like what would soon happen during the medieval period in Europe.

Another leader, another Chandragupta, united India again about 600 years after the Mauryans did. The new power grew into the Gupta Empire, achieving great wealth through widespread trade and intelligent government, and bringing about the greatest cultural flowering ever to rock India.

Known as Chandragupta I, this conqueror started in the kingdom of Magadha in 320 AD, bringing surrounding kingdoms under his influence by force and persuasion. He revived many of Asoka’s principles of humane government. Much as the Romans did, he put local leaders to work for him instead of killing or imprisoning them; he propped up regional authorities and made them dependent on his administration. This model for governing India government worked for a long time. It served the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 16th century and even the British in the 19th century.

Chandragupta had able successors, including his son Samudragupta, who spread the Gupta territory to the north and east. Grandson Chandragupta II, a great patron of the arts, ruled from 376–415 AD, spending tax money to promote architecture, painting, and poetry. The Gupta era gave India glorious temples, palaces, sculpture, music, dance, and poetry.

The Guptas weren’t without enemies. Huns from Mongolia and northern China battered the northern frontier of India in the fifth century. In the 480s AD, after the last Gupta king died, Huns took over the north. (For more about the Huns and what they were doing to Europe around the same time, turn to Chapter 6.)