Kalinga War: A Visual History

The Kalinga War (about 262-261 BC) was the Mauryan emperor Ashoka's conquest of Kalinga, the kingdom of the Odisha coast that had broken free after the Nanda period. Ashoka's own Thirteenth Rock Edict says 150,000 were deported, 100,000 killed and many times more died, and that the slaughter filled him with remorse; he turned to dhamma, the moral law inspired by Buddhism, gave up further conquest and sent missionaries across Asia. The battle was fought, tradition says, on the banks of the Daya river at Dhauli near Bhubaneswar, where an edict rock and elephant sculpture stand. It is the last war of the Mauryan expansion and one of the few in history whose victor recorded regret in stone.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

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Casualties of Kalinga according to the Thirteenth Rock Edict

Timeline of the Kalinga War

1. 268 BC
   Ashoka becomes emperor
2. 262 BC
   Invasion of Kalinga
3. 261 BC
   Kalinga conquered
4. 257 BC
   Rock edicts issuedIncluding the Kalinga edict.
5. 250 BC
   Buddhist missions dispatched
6. 232 BC
   Ashoka dies

Kalinga and the Mauryas

Kalinga, rich from rice, elephants and maritime trade to Southeast Asia, had been part of the Nanda realm and slipped from Mauryan control; it lay between Magadha and the empire's southern lands and its independence was an affront. Ashoka, who had won the throne in a bloody succession struggle around 268 BC, invaded in his eighth year with a large army; Kalinga's forces, reputedly 60,000 infantry, 1,000 cavalry and 700 elephants, resisted fiercely.

The slaughter and the edict

The Thirteenth Rock Edict, carved at sites like Shahbazgarhi and Kalsi (but pointedly omitted at Dhauli in Kalinga itself), states that the conquest caused the death of 100,000, the deportation of 150,000 and the suffering of the innocent, and that the Beloved of the Gods felt profound sorrow; conquest by dhamma, he declares, is the true conquest. Tradition says the Daya river ran red and that Ashoka, viewing the field, was converted; historians think his Buddhism predated the war but the edict marks the turn.

After the war

Kalinga was governed from Tosali by a viceroy under instructions in the separate Dhauli and Jaugada edicts to treat its people justly. Ashoka renounced military conquest, banned animal sacrifice, sent Buddhist missions to Sri Lanka, the Hellenistic kings and Southeast Asia, and had his edicts inscribed across the subcontinent. Kalinga rose again under Kharavela in the first century BC after the Mauryas fell; the Dhauli hill today has a Japanese-built peace pagoda.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Maurya Empire (322 BC to 185 BC)
• Eastern Maurya kingdom (232 BC to 185 BC)
• Magadha (600 BC to 320 BC)
• Satavahana dynasty (100 BC to 225)
• Seleucid Empire (312 BC to 63 BC)
• Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (256 BC to 125 BC)

8 surprising things about the Kalinga War

1. The Kalinga War is one of the only wars in history whose victor left an inscription expressing remorse.
2. Ashoka's edict about Kalinga was carved all over India but not in Kalinga itself, where instead he addressed the local officials on good governance.
3. The Dhauli rock bears the front half of an elephant, carved from the living stone, the oldest sculpture in Odisha.
4. Ashoka's title in the edicts is Devanampiya Piyadasi, 'Beloved of the Gods, He Who Looks on with Affection'; his name Ashoka appears only in a few.
5. H. G. Wells wrote that among the tens of thousands of monarchs in history, Ashoka's name 'shines almost alone, a star'.
6. The lion capital of Ashoka's Sarnath pillar is India's national emblem and his wheel is on its flag.
7. Kalinga's later king Kharavela recorded his own conquests in the Hathigumpha inscription a century and a half later.
8. The Buddhist tradition made Ashoka 'Chandashoka' (cruel Ashoka) before Kalinga and 'Dharmashoka' after.

Sources

• Ashoka Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Kalinga War Wikipedia
• Ashoka the Great World History Encyclopedia
• Romila Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961) Oxford University Press

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