ABSTRACT
With the fall of the Mauryan Empire came the loss of a pan-Indian authority exercised from Pataliputra in Magadha. There now arose a number of competing power centres in different regions of India. The imperial monarchy was replaced by regional monarchies, and a centralised bureaucracy by regional bureaucracies. Many regional monarchs had Central Asian origins, but they too in time conformed to the notions of kingship that had been maturing since late Vedic times and which reached their apogee in the Mauryan period. One of the reasons why historians find the post-Mauryan era so absorbing is the huge scale of available evidence for research. The domestic literary evidence can be drawn from the royal inscriptions, the shastras, the secular literature, Buddhist religious and secular texts, and the fascinating Tamil anthologies from the south. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court of Chandragupta Maurya, refers to pearl fishing in the southern waters controlled by a ruling group called the Pandyas.
