30 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: Did Emperor Ashoka really exist?
Very interesting! I thought the Brahmi alphabet being derived from the Aramaic one was more or less settled except for some holdout nationalist arguments about it. With respect to Zoroastrian influence, I would think the Kushan Empire would potentially be a more likely source of that (since there's a lot of material showing syncretisms of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Hellenic religion, Near Eastern religion, and Vedic Religion/Proto-Hinduism around then).
The general question occured to me because one of the more popular ideas in the comparative study of empires is looking at the way empires tend to lead to powerful polities emerging in their peripheries influenced by the imperial economy and ideology, which sometimes go on to dominate or conquer the empire (Barbarian kingdoms and Western Rome, Arabs and Sasanians, China and the northern frontier...). Macedonia, itself once an Achaemenid vassal state, is the obvious example of this, but it does seem to me like something similar is going on with the emergence of powerful Indian polities and with the rise of steppe empires as well.
There's nothing here!