Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 78

The dedicatory inscriptions in the Barabar hills record the gift of the caves by Ashoka, and of the nearby Nagarjuni caves by his grandson Dasharatha, to the Ajivikas, an ascetic sect founded by Makkhali Gosala that taught a strict doctrine of destiny.

Buddhist tradition places the Third Council at Pataliputra in Ashoka's reign under the presidency of Moggaliputta Tissa, who is credited with settling disputes in the order and with the compilation of the Kathavatthu, a work of the Abhidhamma Pitaka.

The Junagadh rock inscription of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman, the earliest long inscription in polished Sanskrit, records that the embankment of the Sudarshana lake in Saurashtra was originally built by Pushyagupta, a governor of Chandragupta Maurya, and that conduits were added by Tushaspha in Ashoka's reign; it then describes the…

He was the last of the Mauryas and was killed about 185 BCE by his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Sunga, who then founded the Sunga dynasty with its capital at Pataliputra.

Almost all of Ashoka's inscriptions call him only Devanampiya Piyadasi, the beloved of the gods, of amiable appearance.

In the Arthashastra the Samaharta is the officer in charge of assessing and collecting the revenue of the realm from land, mines, forests, trade routes and city dues, and of keeping the accounts of income and expenditure on which the state ran.

The Sarnath capital has four lions standing back to back on an abacus that carries an elephant, a bull, a horse and a lion separated by wheels, the whole resting on an inverted lotus.

Prinsep, an official of the mint at Calcutta and secretary of the Asiatic Society, worked out the values of the Brahmi letters in 1837 and so made Ashoka's edicts readable.

It is the longest of the fourteen major rock edicts and the only source in Ashoka's own words for the war on Kalinga, the number of people killed, deported and dead of other causes, and the remorse that turned him from conquest by arms to conquest by Dhamma.

After the treaty of about 305 BCE between Chandragupta Maurya and Seleucus Nicator, the Greek ruler sent Megasthenes to Pataliputra as his ambassador.

He was the last of the Nanda kings of Magadha and ruled when Alexander invaded the Punjab; Greek writers describe the vast army of the Gangaridai and Prasii that waited beyond the Beas.

Shravasti was the capital of Kosala in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and Ayodhya and Saketa were its other important towns. Its king Prasenajit was a contemporary of the Buddha, who spent many rainy seasons at the Jetavana monastery in Shravasti, which is why the town appears so often in Buddhist literature.

Buddhist and Jain traditions credit him with two engines used in the long war against the Vajji confederacy: the rathamusala, a chariot fitted with a swinging mace that cut down men as it was driven through them, and the mahashilakantaka, a catapult that hurled heavy stones.

He founded the Nanda dynasty and the Puranas describe him as a ruler of humble birth who destroyed all the Kshatriya houses, calling him Ekarat, the sole sovereign.

The Vajji confederacy had its centre at Vaishali in north Bihar and was the best known gana-sangha, a state governed not by a single king but by an assembly of the heads of ruling families.

The First Buddhist Council met at Rajgriha soon after the death of the Buddha, with Ajatashatru of the Haryanka dynasty as its patron and Mahakassapa presiding, and it settled the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as recited by Upali and Ananda.

Bimbisara was the first great ruler of the Haryanka line of Magadha, traditionally dated from about 544 BCE, with his capital at Girivraja, also called Rajgriha.

Avanti covered the Malwa region and had two capitals: Ujjain in its northern half and Mahishmati on the Narmada in its southern half.

Of the sixteen mahajanapadas only Assaka lay in the Deccan, on the banks of the Godavari, with its capital at Potana, also written Potali.

It is a text of the Sutta Pitaka of the Buddhist canon and it names the sixteen great states of the age of the Buddha, from Magadha and Kosala in the east to Gandhara and Kamboja in the north-west.