ABSTRACT
Ashoka’s reign of more than three decades is the first fairly welldocumented period of Indian history. Ashoka left us a series of great inscriptions (major rock edicts, minor rock edicts, pillar edicts) which are among the most important records of India’s past. Ever since they were discovered and deciphered by the British scholar James Prinsep in the 1830s, several generations of Indologists and historians have studied these inscriptions with great care. The independent Republic of India selected Ashoka’s lion pillar as the emblem of the state.
