Knowra Megasthenes Megasthenes Megasthenes was a Greek envoy to the Mauryan court and author of the Indica, an account of India under Chandragupta Maurya. His work survives only through quotations and summaries by later writers.
Maurya Empire : An ancient Indian empire founded by Chandragupta Maurya around 322 BCE and expanded by his successors. Megasthenes’s account is a major, though fragmentary, source on this empire.
Indica (Megasthenes) : A lost Greek work describing India, known through fragments and quotations preserved by later authors. This is the work through which Megasthenes’s observations are chiefly known.
Arthashastra : An ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, administration, economics, and political strategy, traditionally associated with Kautilya. It offers an Indian political text to compare with Greek descriptions of Mauryan rule.
Ancient Greek ethnography : Greek descriptions of foreign peoples, customs, and places, often combining observation with inherited stories. Megasthenes’s claims about Indian society belong to this tradition and require source criticism.
Chandragupta Maurya : The founder of the Maurya Empire, who ruled much of the Indian subcontinent in the late fourth and early third centuries BCE. Megasthenes served as an envoy at Chandragupta’s court.
Strabo : A Greek geographer and historian whose work Geography describes places and peoples across the ancient world. Strabo preserved passages from the Indica while criticizing some of its claims.
Ashoka : A Mauryan emperor who ruled in the third century BCE and whose inscriptions survive across South Asia. His inscriptions provide contemporary evidence from a later phase of the empire Megasthenes described.
Caste system in India : A system of social classification and hierarchy in South Asia, shaped by varied practices and historical change. Megasthenes’s account of Indian social divisions is often compared with later evidence on caste.
Seleucid Empire : A Hellenistic empire founded by Seleucus I Nicator after the death of Alexander the Great. Megasthenes represented the Seleucid ruler in diplomacy with the Mauryan court.
Arrian : A Greek historian of the Roman era whose surviving works include accounts of Alexander’s campaigns and India. Arrian quoted Megasthenes in his account of India.
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