Question

describe indica with the significance of mauryan empire​

Answer 1

Answer:

Northwest Expansion

By 320 BCE, the empire had fully occupied Northwestern India. Chandragupta Maurya would become the first emperor to unify India into one state, creating one of the world's largest empires in its time, and the largest ever in the Indian subcontinent

Answer 2

Answer:

Megasthenes' Indica can be reconstructed using the portions preserved by later writers as direct quotations or paraphrase. The parts that belonged to the original text can be identified from the later works based on similar content, vocabulary and phrasing, even when the content has not been explicitly attributed to Megasthenes. Felix Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker contains 36 pages of content traced to Megasthenes.

E. A. Schwanbeck traced several fragments to Megasthenes, and based on his collection, John Watson McCrindle published a reconstructed version of Indica in 1887. However, this reconstruction is not universally accepted. Schwanbeck and McCrindle attributed several fragments in the writings of the 1st century BCE writer Diodorus to Megasthenes. However, Diodorus does not mention Megasthenes even once, unlike Strabo, who explicitly mentions Megasthenes as one of his sources. There are several differences between the accounts of Megasthenes and Diodorus: for example, Diodorus describes India as 28,000 stadia long from east to west; Megasthenes gives this number as 16,000. Diodorus states that Indus may be the world's largest river after Nile; Megasthenes (as quoted by Arrian) states that Ganges is much larger than Nile. Historian R. C. Majumdar points out that the Fragments I and II attributed to Megasthenes in McCrindle's edition cannot originate from the same source, because Fragment I describes Nile as larger than Indus, while Fragment II describes Indus as longer than Nile and Danube combined.