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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Examine sources of information for Mauryan dynasty. Throw light on historical significance of Ashoka’s inscriptions.

  • UPSC 1999
  • Mauryan Empire

Reconstructing the Mauryan dynasty draws on a deliberately mixed archive — a normative treatise on kingship, a foreign envoy's ethnography, a dynasty's own epigraphic record, later devotional chronicles, and the silent testimony of coins and excavated strata. Each was shaped by a different purpose and therefore requires a different degree of trust.

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What the full answer covers

  • Surveying the Sources
  • The Historical Significance of Ashoka's Inscriptions

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