For five thousand years the subcontinent has been building things that outlast the people who ordered them: cities with covered drains, pillars that carry a king's apology, a grammar tight enough to run like a machine. Some of it we can read. Some of it, like the signboard at Dholavira, is still waiting.
Every tile in a Ancient India game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Cities and Empires
nine stories
1The city that put its plumbing underground
On the tile: Street Drainsc. 2600 BC
Almost every house at Mohenjo-daro had a private bathing area with a drain carrying the dirty water out to a larger drain and on into a sewage line. Many of those bathing floors were watertight, keeping moisture out of the rooms nearby. Wastewater also ran down vertical pipes inside the walls to chutes that opened onto the street. The street drains were typically baked brick, with special shaped bricks at the corners, sealed with mud mortar and mostly covered over, so the system ran hidden beneath the feet of anyone walking by.
Dholavira stands on the arid island of Khadir in Gujarat, where water arrives in bursts and then vanishes. Two seasonal streams were the main supply. Its builders answered in stone: a series of reservoirs east and south of the citadel, a drainage system threaded through the town, and fortifications built up in layers. UNESCO describes the waterworks as the ingenuity of people struggling to survive and thrive in a harsh environment, which is a fair summary of the whole place.
West of the walled city at Dholavira lies a large cemetery, and most of what is buried there is not a person. The great majority of the burials are memorial in nature: cenotaphs, monuments raised for the dead that hold no dead. Six distinct types have been recorded. Whatever the people of Dholavira believed happened after a life ended, they thought it worth building a permanent marker for someone who was not underneath it.
Lothal is the only port town known from the Indus civilization, and along its eastern side runs a walled basin 217 meters long and 26 meters wide. An inlet sits at one end and an outlet at the other, which would have held the water level steady. Stone anchors, marine shells and seals possibly from the Persian Gulf were found nearby. Boats are thought to have ridden in on the high tide from the Gulf of Khambat and tied up at the wharf.
Southeast of the settlement at Kalibangan, excavators uncovered a field with its furrows still legible: one set closely spaced running east to west, another set widely spaced running north to south. No plow, plowshare or coulter survived. The grid is the evidence. Farmers in the surrounding district have worked the same way in modern times, putting one crop in the close rows and another in the wide ones, the spacing chosen to suit how big each plant grows.
Taxila is not one city but several, stacked along the Indus across centuries: the Neolithic mound at Saraikala, the ramparts of Sirkap from the second century BC, and the city of Sirsukh from the first century AD. Persia, Greece and Central Asia each shaped it in turn, and the layers are still visible on the ground. Through all of that changing influence it held one steady role, as an important Buddhist center of learning.
The Guptas inherited a country that had been unsettled since the Mauryas fell, and gave it something rarer than conquest: about two and a half centuries of prosperity, later called a Golden Age. Sanskrit became a common language of learning again, and Kalidasa wrote his plays. Gupta kings put up inns and rest houses for monks and pilgrims. The dynasty had begun generations earlier with Srigupta, a regional ruler whose kingdom was little more than Magadha.
Ashoka ruled most of the subcontinent and left instructions carved across it in stone. Then the arithmetic turned cruel. Within fifty years of his death the empire his family had built was gone. Sand swallowed the toppled columns, overgrowth took the stupas, and nobody kept up the Brahmi letters, so in time nobody could read a word of them. The greatest of the Mauryan kings survived as a bare name in the Puranas, India's old compendia of kings, heroes and gods.
9A deserter stumbled onto the first Indus city found
On the tile: Charles Masson1829
James Lewis served in the artillery of the East India Company Army until 1827, when he deserted with another soldier. To stay ahead of the authorities he changed his name to Charles Masson and spent years traveling India, collecting old coins and digging at ruins as leads took him. In 1829 he came upon Harappa. It was the first indication anyone had that such a civilization had ever existed in India, and he guessed it was Alexander the Great's.
The same small cubes of stone turn up across the Indus settlements, and their sizes were anything but arbitrary. They climbed by doubling, in the ratio one to two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two. The smallest in the series is 0.856 grams; the most common is about 13.7 grams. Above that the system switched to decimal steps, with the largest weight a hundred times the common one. They may have served trade and tax collection alike.
Thousands of Indus inscriptions survive from some sixty excavation sites, on seals, pottery, bronze tools, bangles, bone and shell. The obstacle is length. The average inscription runs five signs and the longest known runs twenty-six. No bilingual text has turned up to compare against, and the language behind the signs is still unidentified. With so little repetition to work from, the usual techniques of decipherment have nothing to grip.
The Bakhshali manuscript is written on birch bark and carries hundreds of zeroes, every one of them a plain dot. Radiocarbon dating commissioned by Oxford's Bodleian Libraries in 2017 put its earliest leaves as far back as the third or fourth century, which would make this the oldest recorded zero symbol; a group of historians of Indian mathematics published a response disputing that reading. The dot is the ancestor either way. It later grew a hollow center.
In 628, at Bhillamala in what is now Bhinmal, Brahmagupta finished a work in twenty-five chapters that set out arithmetic in commercial language. Positives were fortunes, negatives were debts, and a debt subtracted from zero is a fortune. Add zero to a number and the number is unchanged; multiply by zero and everything collapses to zero. Then he pushed on to division by zero and claimed that zero divided by zero is zero, which is the one place he was certainly wrong.
Aryabhata gave his rule for the circle as instructions rather than a formula: add four to one hundred, multiply by eight, then add sixty-two thousand, and the result is approximately the circumference of a circle twenty thousand across. Work it through and the ratio he is handing you is 62832 over 20000, which is 3.1416. The true value to eight places is 3.14159265. He was right to four decimal places, and he said approximately.
Aryabhata held that the sky does not turn. The apparent rotation of the heavens, he wrote, is caused by the Earth turning on its axis. He also said the Moon and planets shine by reflected sunlight, and he explained eclipses of the Sun and Moon correctly. Later commentators could not bring themselves to follow him on the spinning Earth. Most of them simply changed the text, editing the verses to rescue him from what they took for foolish errors.
Around the year 500, Aryabhata drew up tables of half chords and called the quantity jya. Arab mathematicians took over the sound and wrote jiba, a word that means nothing in Arabic. Later Arab writers read it as jaib, which does mean something: a fold. When Europeans translated those works into Latin they translated the fold, giving sinus, and from sinus came our sine. The word in every trigonometry book is a chain of misreadings that starts in India.
Panini compressed Sanskrit into about four thousand rules in the Ashtadhyayi, a system so tightly built that scholars call it a language machine. Its weak point was what to do when two rules apply to the same word at once. Panini left a metarule to settle it, and for roughly 2,500 years readers interpreted that metarule in a way that produced wrong forms. In 2022 Rishi Rajpopat, a doctoral student at Cambridge, published a reading that makes the machine run.
The Sushruta Samhita, compiled in India around 600 BC, is one of the world's earliest works on medicine and surgery: the causes of more than 1,100 diseases, hundreds of medicinal plants, instructions for scores of operations, three kinds of skin graft. Its nose repair measures the gap with a leaf, then lifts a patch of living skin from the cheek and turns it onto the face. The forehead version surgeons use today came later; how much later, nobody knows.
The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is a sunken tank roughly twelve meters by seven, with wide staircases leading down at either end. At the foot of the stairs a small brick-edged ledge runs the full width of the pool, so anyone coming down could move along it without stepping into the water. The side walls were finely fitted brick, and then the builders went further: a thick layer of bitumen, natural tar, laid along the sides to stop water seeping through the walls and up into the structure above.
Just outside the north entrance to the citadel at Dholavira lies one of the longest Indus inscriptions known: ten symbols, each about 37 centimeters high, mounted on a wooden board roughly three meters long. The letters were cut from white gypsum and set in like mosaic tiles, one of them repeated four times. At some point the sign toppled face down in the dirt. The wood rotted away and left the gypsum lying where it fell. Nobody can read it.
The capital that once crowned Ashoka's pillar at Sarnath carries four lions standing back to back, and a wheel once rested on their shared backs. The abacus below them is carved with a bull, a lion, an elephant and a horse, each separated by a wheel of its own. A much later manuscript labels the four lions as if they roar the message to the four corners of the world. The capital now stands in the Sarnath Museum.
Buddhist texts say the Buddha traveled to Sarnath in the sixth century BC after his enlightenment, met his first disciples there and delivered his first sermon. Pilgrims have been coming for more than 2,500 years, and successive rulers, patrons and monastic communities built the place up into a center of Buddhist learning. In July 2026 the ancient Buddhist site of Sarnath was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, India's forty-fifth.
Sanchi began as a hemispherical brick structure raised in the third century BC, contemporary with Ashoka's pillar on the same hill. The Shungas increased its scale and faced it with a veneer of dressed stone, adding walkways, stairs and ornate railings. The Satavahanas decorated the gateways in the first century AD. The Guptas added four shrines at the entrances in the fifth. UNESCO calls Sanchi the oldest Buddhist sanctuary in existence, which is partly a story about never starting over.
Four gateways stand at the entrances to the Great Stupa, each one two square pillars carrying three curved crossbeams. They are stone, but the shapes are carpentry. The railings and gateways preserve forms first built in timber and around earlier burial mounds, copied across into a material meant to last. Every surface is packed with carving: tales of the Buddha's earlier lives, scenes from his life, and the Buddha himself, present only as a symbol.
Ashoka built the first temple at Bodh Gaya in the third century BC, at the place associated with the Buddha's enlightenment. What stands today is later: a temple fifty meters high from the fifth or sixth century, one of the earliest Buddhist temples built entirely of brick still standing in India. Beside it grows a Bodhi tree held to descend directly from the original, and a polished sandstone platform known as the Vajrasana.
On 28 April 1819 a Madras Presidency officer named John Smith was hunting a tiger in tangled undergrowth in what is now Maharashtra when he found the entrance to a cave. It turned out to be one of about thirty, cut into the cliff and painted inside. Smith marked the occasion by scratching his name and the date on a pillar. In 2016 his great-great-grandson visited the caves and apologized for it.
The caves at Ajanta were not cut in one campaign. The first were excavated under the Satavahana dynasty, between roughly the second and first centuries BC. Then the cliff went quiet for about four hundred years. Work resumed in the fifth and sixth centuries AD under the Basim branch of the Vakataka dynasty and their feudatories, and it is from that second burst that the richly decorated caves come.
Eight years after his coronation, Ashoka conquered the kingdom of Kalinga. Then he did something unusual for a conqueror: he published his regret. The thirteenth of his major rock edicts records the toll, a hundred and fifty thousand deported, a hundred thousand killed and many more dead of other causes, and states that he felt deep remorse for the conquest. The best conquest, the edict goes on, is conquest by dhamma.
Ashoka's edicts are mostly not boasts about battles. One records that he had banyan trees planted along the roads to give shade to animals and men, mango groves set out, wells dug at intervals, rest houses built and watering places made. Another says he provided two types of medical treatment, for humans and for animals, and had medicinal herbs, roots and fruits imported and grown in any place where they did not already occur.
By the nineteenth century the edicts cut across India could not be read at all: the script had been forgotten, and so had the king. James Prinsep worked through an inscription in that unknown script at the Sanchi stupa and found a ruler who called himself Devanampiya Piyadassi, Beloved of the Gods, and who appeared nowhere else. George Turnour, reading a chronicle from Sri Lanka, supplied the answer: Piyadassi was Ashoka. Prinsep published in 1837, and the lost emperor had his name back.
Chandragupta Maurya used marriage alliances, diplomacy and war to build an empire across most of the subcontinent, then abdicated in favor of his son Bindusara. What happened after that comes down through Jain writing rather than through records kept at the time: he is said to have turned ascetic, taken up Jainism and gone south. The inscriptions that link him to the Jain saint Bhadrabahu were cut centuries later, which is why historians pass the ending along as tradition.
The Greek writer Athenaeus passes on a story he had from Hegesander. An Indian king the Greeks called Amitrochates, the Mauryan emperor Bindusara, wrote to Antiochus asking him to buy and send some sweet wine, some dried figs, and a sophist. Antiochus answered him, in Athenaeus's telling: “The dried figs and the sweet wine we will send you; but it is not lawful for a sophist to be sold in Greece.” Two out of three.
The Arthashastra, a treatise on running a state credited to Chandragupta Maurya's adviser Kautilya, was known for centuries only through later writers quoting it. The text itself was considered lost. In 1905 the Sanskrit scholar Rudrapatna Shamasastry came across a copy. He published the Sanskrit in 1909 and an English translation in 1915, which brought it to a worldwide audience. It is now set beside Machiavelli's The Prince, which appeared in 1532, more than eighteen centuries after Kautilya.
Samudragupta spent his reign enlarging the Gupta empire, carrying it from the Himalayas in the north to the southern kingdoms. Accounts of him describe a muscular warrior who was also a poet and a musician, which could pass for flattery until the coins turn up. On one of his own gold issues the emperor sits playing a vina, an Indian stringed instrument that resembles a lyre. The legend on the coin reads Maharajadhiraja Shri Samudragupta. The conqueror had himself struck in gold with an instrument in his lap.
At Kandahar, in present-day Afghanistan, Ashoka had an edict cut into rock in two languages at once: Greek and Aramaic. A separate Greek inscription from the same place carries versions of two of his rock edicts, including an account of the conquest of Kalinga. The empire reached country where Greek was the working language, and the emperor wanted to be read there. The bilingual inscription was preserved at the Kabul Museum and has since disappeared.
Part of the settlement between Chandragupta Maurya and Seleucus I Nicator was an agreement to appoint a Greek ambassador, and the man sent was Megasthenes. He traveled to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra and wrote an account of the country called the Indica. A Greek world that knew India mainly through Alexander's campaign now had a report from somebody who had been to an Indian capital himself.