Research Notes: Ancient India by the Numbers
1From about 2600 to 1900 BCE, the cities of the Indus Valley civilization stood along the Indus River and nearby rivers, in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. No palace or royal tomb has been clearly identified in these cities, and their writing still cannot be read, so archaeologists do not know who ran them.
2In many Indus cities, some of them hundreds of kilometers apart, archaeologists have found small cube-shaped weights cut from a hard stone called chert. The weights come in the same set of sizes from city to city (Table 1). Indus farmers were among the first people anywhere to grow cotton and weave it into cloth, and Indus traders carried goods such as carnelian beads and timber as far as Mesopotamia.
3About 1,600 years after the large Indus cities emptied, Chandragupta Maurya founded the Maurya Empire in about 321 BCE. His grandson Ashoka ruled from about 268 to 232 BCE. In about 261 BCE, Ashoka's army conquered Kalinga, a kingdom on the east coast. In a message carved on rock, Ashoka himself gave figures for the people of Kalinga who were carried away or killed (Graph 1). He wrote that the killing and suffering filled him with deep sorrow and regret. After the war he followed Buddhist teachings and spread a code of conduct he called dhamma: respect for parents and teachers, kindness to servants and animals, and tolerance of all religious groups.
4Ashoka had his messages carved on rocks and polished stone pillars across an empire that stretched from what is now Afghanistan deep into southern India. Greek-speaking settlers had lived in the far northwest since the time of Alexander the Great, and many traders there used the Aramaic alphabet (Table 2).
5Indian scholars also gathered knowledge about the body and about numbers. A medical book linked to a surgeon named Sushruta, put together over several centuries, explains how to clean wounds, set broken bones and rebuild a damaged nose with skin from the cheek, and it lists more than 100 surgical tools. Later, during the Gupta period (about 320 to 550 CE), Indian mathematicians wrote numbers with a place-value system of nine digits, and a symbol for zero came into use after that.