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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Discuss critically the relative importance of the different sources for the history of the Mauryan period.

  • UPSC 1986
  • Mauryan Empire

The historiography of the Mauryan Empire rests on an unusually rich but uneven cluster of sources — a normative treatise on statecraft, a foreigner's ethnographic account, an emperor's own inscriptions, later dynastic king-lists, and the mute testimony of coins and excavated sites. None of these is a neutral window onto Mauryan reality: each was produced…

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What the full answer covers

  • The Arthashastra: A Blueprint, Not a Photograph
  • Megasthenes' Indica: A Foreigner's Restricted Lens
  • Ashokan Inscriptions: The Most Reliable, If Also the Most Curated
  • Puranic, Buddhist, and Jaina Traditions: Useful for the Margins
  • Archaeological and Numismatic Evidence: Independent but Thin
  • Weighing the Sources Together

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