The Imperial Guptas
B.G. Gokhale describes how, in India, at the beginning of the fourth century A.D., a line of rulers arose from obscurity to inaugurate a Golden Age.
Inside the Fort at Allahabad stands a monolithic sandstone column 35 feet round. On it are carved two inscriptions; no two epigraphs in the history of India are so dissimilar in content, nor in the spirit of the personalities that ordered them inscribed. One belongs to the middle of the third century B.C. and is that of the Maurya Emperor Asoka, known the world over as the great Buddhist and pacifist ruler of Indian antiquity.
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