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How Did a Mauryan Emperor Use Morality to Govern an Empire? - Ashoka's Edicts and the Politics of Remorse | Sleepy Facts About History
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Most people know a simple story about the emperor Ashoka: he was a cruel conqueror who felt remorse after a bloody war, converted to Buddhism, and became a peaceful ruler. But the historical Ashoka left his own words carved into stone across the Indian subcontinent, and those inscriptions tell a much more complicated story. This episode examines the Mauryan Empire's rock edicts to understand how Ashoka actually governed and what his moral language was designed to achieve.
The inscriptions…
The skinny
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