Ashoka Had His Edicts Cut in Greek and Aramaic at Kandahar and Named Five Hellenistic Kings in Rock Edict 13, Addressing the Greek World in Its Own Language and Its Own Word for Piety

Ashoka addressed Greek readers in Greek. Two of his inscriptions found at Kandahar in southern Afghanistan are in that language, one of them cut beside an Aramaic text, and Rock Edict 13 names five Greek kings as rulers beyond his borders.

Two stones at Alexandria in Arachosia

Kandahar is the site that Livius.org identifies with Alexandria in Arachosia, which Alexander the Great founded in the last weeks of winter in 329 BCE. The first Ashokan stone came to light there in April 1958. J. Filliozat, writing in the Archaeological Survey of India’s journal Epigraphia Indica, says Abdul Bay Ashna, headmaster of a school in Kandahar, found it at Shar-i-Kuna and reported it through the Afghan authorities to the French Archaeological Delegation and the Kabul Museum. A few days later U. Scerrato of the museum and J. M. Casal of the delegation each took rubbings. The Greek text was well cut and in good condition, Filliozat writes, and its second line begins with Piodasses, the Greek spelling of Piyadasi, the name Ashoka’s edicts give their king.

Louis Robert announced the find to the Academie des Inscriptions in Paris on 20 June 1958. The Italian edition that year carried the title Un editto bilingue greco-aramaico di Asoka: la prima iscrizione greca scoperta in Afghanistan, which calls it the first Greek inscription discovered in Afghanistan. Francesco Maniscalco, whose 2018 paper surveys both stones, gives April 1957 for the find; the 1958 editors’ own notices are specific about April 1958 and the June announcement, and this article follows them.

A second stone followed in 1963. K. R. Norman reports that it carries a Greek version of part of Rock Edicts 12 and 13, and Daniel Schlumberger published it in 1964. According to the Persee record of that paper it was found at the same place as the first. Maniscalco describes the bilingual’s Greek as cut inside a trapezoidal outline on a large limestone block beside the road through ancient Kandahar, citing Margherita Guarducci. He adds that the block, once on show in the Kabul museum, had been missing for several years when he wrote.

What the Greek says

The bilingual’s Greek, in Maniscalco’s English, says the king “indicated piety to men” and, from that moment, “more pious rendered men, and every thing prospers on all the earth.” D. C. Sircar’s version in Epigraphia Indica, translated from the French edition, has it that after ten years “he has rendered the people more pious.” The text goes on to say the king abstains from living beings and so do others, that the king’s hunters and fishermen have stopped hunting, and that people are respectful to father, mother and elders.

The word carrying the load is eusebeia, Greek for piety, which stands where the Prakrit edicts have dhamma, the moral order Ashoka taught. The Aramaic half uses a different word, which Maniscalco renders “truth,” and he notes that the two versions were not copied from one another. The longer 1963 Greek text adds enkrateia, temperance, and pairs eleos and oiktos, compassion and regret, in the passage that follows the conquest of Kalinga. “From that moment compassion and remorse filled him and he suffered deeply,” Maniscalco translates. The Kalinga figures are given there in Greek counting units of ten thousand, and tuput’s piece on the edicts sets them against the Prakrit versions.

The same stone turns Rock Edict 12, on respect between sects, into advice a Greek reader would know: “it is well to respect one another and learn from one another reciprocally,” in Maniscalco’s translation. Maniscalco argues that the Greek writer had the Indian text in hand and stretched Greek to carry Indian ideas, which accounts for rare words found nowhere else. Sircar reads the two versions at Kandahar as independent free translations of an edict probably drafted in Prakrit at the Record Office in Pataliputra and sent to the viceroy and the mahamatras, Ashoka’s officers, at Alexandria in Arachosia for the local Greek and Kamboja subjects. He notes that only the Aramaic recalls Rock Edict 1 on the royal kitchen, and only the Greek names the king’s hunters.

Aramaic had been the writing of the Achaemenid Persian administration, and Maniscalco counts five Ashokan inscriptions in Aramaic in Afghan territory, among them one from Pol-i Darunta in Laghman.

The damaged first line

The Greek line breaks off right after “ten years.” Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli and Robert restored a word for “completed” in 1958, and Carlo Gallavotti later proposed a word for sacred investiture. In 1995 Pugliese Carratelli read “overcome by compassion,” which, as Maniscalco summarises it, would date the stone to ten years after Kalinga, about 250 BCE, and not to the tenth year of the reign. Maniscalco prefers “invested with purifications” and keeps the reading tied to the reign. Livius.org dates both Kandahar edicts to 258 BCE.

Who ruled Kandahar

Strabo, in H. L. Jones’s translation, says Alexander took lands along the Indus from the Arians and settled them, and “Seleucus Nicator gave them to Sandrocottus” on terms of intermarriage and five hundred elephants. tuput’s piece on Chandragupta Maurya covers the four ancient accounts of that exchange. Whether the lands included Kandahar is still argued.

Sircar reads the Shar-i-Kuna stone as proof that Afghanistan, “apparently the home of the Yavanas and Kambojas,” lay inside Ashoka’s empire, and a footnote adds that Ashoka could not have issued such an edict to the subjects of a foreign ruler. Maniscalco lists Schlumberger, Gerard Fussman and Paul Bernard among those who hold that Arachosia was Mauryan from the pact of about 305 to 303 BCE until Demetrius of Bactria. He dissents. Strabo, he says, limits the cession to lands bordering the Indus, and Greek was a fitting language for a message of moral outreach even in a city ruled from elsewhere. Either way the choice of Greek and Aramaic matches the languages of the Persian administration and the Greek governments that followed it.

Five kings named in Rock Edict 13

Rock Edict 13 reaches the Greek world in a single sentence. In E. Hultzsch’s translation of the Kalsi copy, the conquest by morality “has been won repeatedly” among Ashoka’s borderers, as far as “six hundred yojanas” (a yojana is an Indian measure of distance) away, where the Yona king Antiyoga rules, and beyond him four more kings: Tulamaya, Antekina, Maka and Alikyashudala.

Hultzsch identifies them as Antiochus II Theos of Syria, Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, Antigonus Gonatas of Macedonia and Magas of Cyrene. The fifth is the one open question. The name is lost on the Girnar rock, and the two Kharoshthi copies, at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra, read Alikasudara. Norris suggested Alexander of Epirus in 1846, and Hultzsch records that Beloch preferred Alexander of Corinth. The reign dates also differ between the two scholars we read. Hultzsch puts the end of Alexander of Epirus at about 255 BCE, and Maniscalco gives 240 or 239. On Hultzsch’s 1925 reckoning the edict falls between 272 and 255 BCE if the Epirote is meant, and between 252 and 250 if the Corinthian is.

Antiochus appears in Rock Edict 2 as well. In Hultzsch’s translation, two kinds of medical treatment, for men and for cattle, were set up everywhere in Ashoka’s dominions and among his borderers, including the Yona king Antiyaka and his neighbours, with herbs, roots and fruits imported and planted where they were missing. Rock Edict 5 appoints the dhamma mahamatras, officers of morality, thirteen years after Ashoka’s anointing, to work among the Yonas, Kambojas and Gandharas, and Rock Edict 13 separately says that in every country there are Brahmanas and Sramanas except among the Yonas. For the art that grew up where these peoples lived, see tuput’s piece on Gandhara and Mathura.

What the Greek writers record

The Greek sources Hultzsch gathers show the courts talking to each other in the reign before Ashoka’s. Athenaeus, citing Hegesander, has Amitrochates, the Greek form of Bindusara’s surname Amitraghata, write to Antiochus to buy sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist, and Antiochus answer, in Hultzsch’s translation, that “it is not lawful in Greece to sell a sophist.” Hultzsch infers that Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus at Chandragupta’s court, was succeeded by Deimachus, ambassador of Antiochus I, and adds that Pliny records Ptolemy II sending Dionysius to an Indian king who may have been Bindusara or Ashoka.

None of the sources we opened records an Ashokan envoy preaching dhamma in Egypt, Syria or Macedon. The statement in Edict 13 that people followed dhamma even where his envoys had not gone is the king’s own claim, and the edict is the only evidence for its reach in the Greek lands that we found. The Kandahar stones are separate evidence: they put the teaching into Greek, with a Greek reader’s word for piety. Filliozat records that the bilingual was published in full in Rome in Italian and in the Journal Asiatique in French, both in 1958, and Maniscalco reported in 2018 that the stone itself had been missing for several years.