Why History Forgot About This Extraordinary Emperor

The ground shakes as thousands of marine elephant-widers thundered towards the coastal kingdom of Kalinga. It's 261 BCE. Emperor Ashoka already rules most of India and now moves on to crush Kalinga and seize their ports. The Kalingans stand ready to defend their home with swords, javelins and war elephants of their own. But they're outnumbered and don't realise how badly until it's too late. A trumpeting avalanche rolls towards them. Blades on tasks cut through bodies, while the rest are crushed under foot. Those who survive run for the Dyer River, but on the far bank, Marion cavalry is already closing in. Penic spreads and soldiers jump into the water only to be met by arrows raining down from Marion arches. The water turns red as the slaughter continues, leaving 100,000 dead and even more forcibly deported. Families are erased and villages destroyed. Yet this devastation doesn't fuel more war. Instead of violence, a different kind of power rises, built on knowledge and reason, spreading outwards in ripples that still reaches today. Monasteries and merchants. When the Kalinga war ends, the Marion's control nearly all the land between the Himalayas and the ocean, home to roughly a third of the world's population at the time. The successful conquest of Emperor Ashoka pushes his rule to the eastern coast, but the triumph comes at a cost. Confronted with the scale of the suffering he caused, Ashoka is overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow. For months, he's desperate to repent until he encounters Buddhism. At the time, it's still a small movement carried along roads by begging monks who speak of non-violence and tolerance as a release from suffering. Ashoka converts and becomes a patron, spreading belief without enforcing it. Pillars are carved with his edicts on kindness, religious tolerance and social welfare. They read like ancient good life quotes. To do good is difficult. One who does good first does something hard to do. Ashoka practices what he preaches. He upgrades imperial roads, plants shade trees and builds wells for travelers and cattle. These roads double as trade routes, linking inland markets to ports bound for Southeast Asia. Caravans carry vast amounts of Indian riches like Ebony, Sandalwood, Cotton and Pepper. Buddhism also starts taking off and monks crowdsour support to cut caves and to cliffs for simple monasteries. They offer shelter to travelers and position themselves as guardians of the trade. This resonates with a rising merchant class which donates generously, gaining both protection and spiritual merit. The Buddhist monasteries grow bigger, now not just spiritual centres but engines of wealth. Monks manage land and run mines and mills. They lend money to farmers who invest in trading voyages. Basically monasteries become the first banks of South Asia. It's a perfect system, faith funding trade, trade carrying faith. The Marian Empire collapses a century after Ashoka but the monasteries endure and merchants keep moving. They turn westwards where a new superpower is stretching its limbs with a growing demand for Indian goods. We'll take a quick break from ancient trade systems and focus on today's business. Thanks to our partner Adoo for sponsoring this episode. Adoo is an all-in-one management software that helps you run your business every day. What was enabled by personal interactions back then is only possible through professional solutions in today's global economy. Adoo offers these through more than 45 apps like accounting, inventory, CRM and many more or centralized on one single platform. You can, for example, create and send your invoices in seconds. You just select your customer, add your products and quantities, define the billing terms and you can already send it all via email. 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For half the year, the monsoon blows towards the Arabian Sea and for the other half, it flips direction. This predictable rhythm lets Indian sailors ride the wind straight across the ocean and glide safely home months later. They build enormous and tough ships that can easily carry 1,000 people or a few hundred tons of cargo. In Rome, Indian goods sell for up to 100 times their original price. If you're lucky, the profit from a single voyage can buy 2,000 acres of the best Egyptian farmland or pay 10,000 Roman soldiers for a year. In this trade, the successful merchant doesn't just get rich, they can rival the wealth of senators. Above all, the Indians bring pepper. It pours into the markets and rewires Roman taste itself. Nearly 80% of their recipes now demand it. Even soldiers freezing at Hadrian's Wall order pepper to make their Russians edible. Words like pepper, ginger and sugar travel with the spice, moving from Sanskrit into Latin and almost every European language. But the biggest ships aren't loaded with spice, their animal transports, vast floating stables, carrying elephants, tigers, leopards, even occasional rhinoceros. All kept alive through an almost two-month journey for Rome's gladiator games. Indian imports into Egypt search past 1.3 billion a year in today's dollars and Roman tax collectors skim off over a quarter of that flow. Enough to finance a third of the empire's budget. Older accounts emphasize the overland silk road from China, but when historians re-examined maritime trade, the volumes of goods travelling along these routes told a different story. Goods do travel overland from China, but the silk road is slow, costly and hard to control. Most Chinese goods reach Roman market through Indian sea trade networks. All this makes India Rome's largest trading partner. For more than 300 years, the system works until the Roman Empire starts to weaken. Commerce slows, fleets shrink and ports full silent one by one. Indian merchants redirect their massive ships towards Southeast Asia's rising kingdoms. And with them, travel ideas that will reshape how humans understand the universe itself. Ground zero. Trade fuels prosperity across the subcontinent. By the fourth century, most of it is ruled by the Gupta Empire. Wealth flows into art and science, fueling a boom in centres of learning. Among them rises Nalanda, the elite MIT of ancient India. 10,000 monks live and study there, crowned by a vast nine-story library known as the Sea of Jules. India begins to build one of the richest mathematical traditions on earth. Scholars start writing nine numerical symbols in a radically new way. A digit's position now defines its value. Around 628, the mathematician Brahmagopter takes on a revolutionary idea. He defines zero, lays out its rules and gives it real power. Suddenly, any number, no matter how big, can be expressed with just ten symbols. They call the new number, Shunya, the void. It draws directly from the Buddhist idea that emptiness is not absence, but something meaningful. By the seventh century, Buddhism is still tightly linked to scholars and new ideas, but has begun to fade from everyday life. The Gupta Empire backs Hinduism instead, which celebrates warrior kingship at a time of northern honey invasions that leave many Buddhist monasteries in ruins. So, Buddhist communities pack their manuscripts and flee, drawn by new patrons for Indian monastic knowledge. In China, Indian monks and scholars help the first and only female emperor Wu Zetien to rise to power. Monastery's flourish throughout the empire and Indian culture comes into fashion. For more than a decade, Buddhism even becomes a state religion. South of China, across the Bay of Bengal, Buddhism is absorbed into the local culture. Stone temples rise, while religious texts and literature take shape after Sanskrit models. Across Southeast Asia, local traditions are blended with Indian culture, creating a vast and powerful endosphere of influence. But the final expansion of Indian ideas turns west. From the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, Arab and Persian merchants expanded the Indian Ocean. routes, linking South Asia and the Middle East by sea. Over the next century, these networks converge in Baghdad, the heart of the Abbasid caliphate, and what travels there is not faith or culture, but something more practical. The Journey of Numbers In the eighth century, a young Islamic world stands between Europe and India. From Baghdad, a family of administrators called the Barmakids helps run the caliphate. Their bloodline runs from Buddhist scholars who once led Central Asia's greatest monastery, and that legacy doesn't vanish, even embedded in a different culture. They establish the House of Wisdom, designed rival India's Nalanda. By commissioning translations and gathering manuscripts, the Barmakids fill libraries with Indian texts. First, paper mills follow, enabling mass manuscript production. Over the next two centuries, Arab scholars translate copy and carry Indian knowledge west towards the far edge of the Arab world. When the manuscripts reach Spain, Europe is deep in the Middle Ages. The next centuries see Europe shaped by growing kingdoms, population growth, and a hunger for knowledge. But merchants still struggle through trade with clunky abacuses, and every multiplication is a slow motion disaster with Roman numerals. Until now, Indian maths lives mostly in monasteries and early universities, but doesn't reach the streets. But change is on the way. In 1225, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, arrives in Pisa. He's part ruler, part nerd, part shaman. He speaks five languages, debates, maths, and philosophy with Arab scholars and thinkers of every kind. Muslim bodyguards in turbans flank him, followed by a procession of exotic animals and wagons stacked with manuscripts. To summon Europe, his open mind is deeply unsettling. He's here to meet Fibonacci, the mathematician who's just written the book of calculation on the nine Indian numerals and the strange new symbol, the Arabs call Zefa. Frederick encourages him to expand the book, transforming abstract knowledge into practical tools for merchants. It's an instant bestseller. It shows how to convert currencies, calculate profit and interest, but mostly replace the abacus with pencil and paper. Indian numerals spread across Europe, adopted by bankers, funding explorers, and voyages. But as Indian mathematics spreads west, its homeland falls apart. Turkic armies sweep through northern India. The lander is destroyed, and its great library burned to ash. Old trade routes collapse, scholars scatter, and waves of Persian migrations reshape the north. A court, Sanskrit fades, now replaced by Persian. By the 13th century, the language that carried a thousand years of knowledge begins to slowly disappear from centers of power. When a Portuguese ship reaches India in 1498, history closes a cruel loop. India had given Europe the mathematical tools that the west now weaponizes. Navigation uses them to open new seeruts, allowing the Portuguese to violently attack the spice trade. Finance takes over, enabling wealthy London merchants to run the East India Company and turn India into a balance sheet. Other European powers follow, and India is gripped tightly within their claws for nearly five centuries. Universal language. At its peak in the late 7th century, the Indian sphere of influence shaped nearly half of humanity. Carried by faith and trade, it embraced curiosity and tolerance. By improving everyday life, Indian culture spread by being both useful and beautiful, enriching every society it touched. The legacy is still visible. Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population, carries India in its name. Thai kings are still crowned in Sanskrit ceremonies. China now has the largest Buddhist population on earth, and the Buddhist temple Ankhawat in Cambodia remains the largest temple ever built. But the most enduring legacy is simpler. Away of counting and calculating, the closest thing humanity has to a universal language. The soft power of Indian knowledge never disappeared. It still helps us to measure, understand, and reshape reality itself. [MUSIC]