WI: Chandragupta Maurya conquered the Macedonian Empire?

What if Chandragupta Maurya reunited the Diadochi states, first taking down the Seleucids and then making his way into Egypt and Macedonia?

Would he then style himself as a Greek monarch, Persian monarch, or try to impose a Sanskrit ruling class over the former Achaemenid Empire?
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
What if Chandragupta Maurya reunited the Diadochi states, first taking down the Seleucids and then making his way into Egypt and Macedonia?

Would he then style himself as a Greek monarch, Persian monarch, or try to impose a Sanskrit ruling class over the former Achaemenid Empire?
How does he March his men and elephants across hostile terrain and conquer the Middle East? Exactly? No Indian king or emperor has ever achieved this. I don't see how it's possible.
 
How does he March his men and elephants across hostile terrain and conquer the Middle East? Exactly? No Indian king or emperor has ever achieved this. I don't see how it's possible.
How would it be any harder for Chandragupta Maurya to march from the Indus to Macedonia, than it was for Alexander the Great to march from Macedonia to the Indus?
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
How would it be any harder for Chandragupta Maurya to march from the Indus to Macedonia, than it was for Alexander the Great to march from Macedonia to the Indus?
Geography? Internal Indian politics? The fact that um Indian soldiers were just conscripts recruited from their farms at sword point and not disciplined enthusiastic hoplites. The fact that it would be ya know like Hannibal in the alps marching Indian elephants through Afghanistan and Mesopotamia.
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
Oh and the fact that Maurya doesn't have the charisma that will make men follow him that far. Alexander is the kind of guy that inspire you to march into Hell and back.
 
Geography? Internal Indian politics? The fact that um Indian soldiers were just conscripts recruited from their farms at sword point and not disciplined enthusiastic hoplites. The fact that it would be ya know like Hannibal in the alps marching Indian elephants through Afghanistan and Mesopotamia.
Chandragupta defeated Seleucus in battle, annexing Hindu Kush, Bactria, and Baluchistan, so his army was clearly capable. He could also start hiring Greek mercenaries into his army if he needed to do so.

Persian empires and the Seleucids used elephants all the time.
 
To top off the insanity of a reverse Alexander scenario and why it's not possible for Maurya, the fact is he probably wasn't interested in expanding into foreign lands. Conquering the Indus was easier considering the local hostility to the Greeks, which made him, an Indian warlord and a local, seem like a liberator (which he probably was, in a sense).
 

Yun-shuno

Banned
Chandragupta defeated Seleucus in battle, annexing Hindu Kush, Bactria, and Baluchistan, so his army was clearly capable. He could also start hiring Greek mercenaries into his army if he needed to do so.

Persian empires and the Seleucids used elephants all the time.
To um what exactly secure a defensible border? Against the Seleucids-the biggest joke of a Greek kingdom to have existed like ever.
 
To top off the insanity of a reverse Alexander scenario and why it's not possible for Maurya, the fact is he probably wasn't interested in expanding into foreign lands. Conquering the Indus was easier considering the local hostility to the Greeks, which made him, an Indian warlord and a local, seem like a liberator (which he probably was, in a sense).
There was no concept of India yet, and no Indian empire had conquered Bactria until Chandragupta.

Bactria and Baluchistan, which followed Zoroastrianism and spoke Iranian languages rather than the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit, would have been just as alien as Persia, yet Chandragupta still conquered those areas.

I don't see why conquering an empire is any crazier than trying to conquer a subcontinent.
 

longsword14

Banned
Why would he bother marching all the way? For glory? It is just silly to do all that when there is no pressing need to do so. He is the most powerful man in the Indian subcontinent : his northern borders have been secured and he has the northern plains under his control. With his control over major population centers and sources of income, marching into harsh and poor lands has no sense behind it.
 
For this to become a reality you would have to fundementally change Chandragupta as a person. His primary goal was the reclamation of the Nanda throne he had a claim to. The second was to expel Alexander and subsequently the Seleucids from all lands in the sub-continent till Gandhara or Arachosia as the Greeks knew it. The actual unification of India came later down the line when his mentor, the great political scholar Chanakya directed him and molded him by making that his primary goal. If you want him to go across and invade lands past Afghanistan you need to not only change the mindset of Chandragupta, but also Chanakya.

And that is where it gets extremely improbable. What gains does it gain the Mauryan Empire? You have to conquer past sparsely populated hill regions where the local tribesmen will constantly hinder you till you reach the Zagros, upon where you'll need to do battle with the Macedonian phalanxes, now not as hardy or well trained as before, yes, but with the amount of local Persian recruits perhaps even more numerous. In fact the only advantage I think Chandragupta has is his elephants which can be turned to go amok and his excellent longbowmen. All in all this will not only cause massive butterflies, but will also REQUIRE massive butterflies.

Oh and the fact that Maurya doesn't have the charisma that will make men follow him that far. Alexander is the kind of guy that inspire you to march into Hell and back.

Um. No. Chandragupta was an amazingly inspiring person and if the supposed valorous figure he showed off wasn't enough his mentor was like the Aristotle of the east, perhaps even more politically minded. If Chandragupta hadn't the political and personal charisma he wouldn't have inspired his armies to be able to conquer ALL of India, a feat akin to uniting perhaps the entire Mediterranean or maybe even all of Europe. He even got the three southern states to swear fealty to him alongside Sri Lanka.

To put into perspective how great a task that is, the only people aside from him who achieved it was when the British colonised India and even then they had to do so in piecemeal strategies. No lesser man can achieve such a thing. I'm not saying Alexander didn't have a personality. I'm saying Chandragupta had one which could probably rival it. It's just that due to poor documentation and great universities and libraries such as Nalanda and Taxila being destroyed there are very sparse records of it.
 
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Yes. I agree with Shahrasayr on all points. What Chandragupta accomplished was something that no one before him or AFTER him had accomplished. He created the first historical empire in India. True, his son Bindusara carried on his work of unification of the subcontinent. It was his grandson, Ashoka, who left th the task unfinished after his victory over Kalinga, due to his conversion to Buddhism. He left the southern tip of the subcontinent with the four kingdoms of Chola, Pandya, Chera and Satyaputra undisturbed, outside the Mouryan Empire. Still it was the largest among the empires that rose in India like the Gupta, the Pala, the Chola or the Mughal. The Mouryan Empire covered an area of about 5 million sq.kms against 3.3 million sq.kms of the present Republic.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
If they understood the Monsoon then heading along the coast would be relatively trivial - you can supply an army by sea, basically.
 
Still it was the largest among the empires that rose in India
I am going to say that with modern scholarship in mind it is a disingenuous argument to claim that the Mauryas had a larger state than the current Republic and probably the Mughals.[1] According to recent research the Mauryan state was a 'spider,' a very decentralized state - the Mughals most likely held effective control over more land, at least briefly during Aurangzeb, and the current Republic definitely does.
The geography of Mauryan empire resembled a spider with a small dense body and long spindly legs.The highest echelons of imperial society lived in the inner circle composed of the ruler, his immediate family, other relatives, and close allies, who formed a dynastic core. Outside the core, Mauryan empire ran along stringy routes dotted with armed cities. (from India and South Asia: A Short History)
In other words, Magadha, the Gangetic imperial core or the 'head of the spider,' was most likely quite centralized and fairly uniformly administered. Central authority in territories surrounding this core was significant, but not as strong as in Magadha itself. Outside the northern heartland, imperial control was limited, with imperial control very possibly present only in major roads and resource-producing areas like the gold mines of Karnataka. To quote "The First Millennium B.C. in Northern India" by Romila Thapar that I've been drawing on,
Excavations carried out so far at sites close to the location of Asokan inscriptions, do not provide significant evidence of a Mauryan presence. Asokan inscriptions tend to cluster in Karnataka. The archaeological sites are largely those of megalithic burials and settlements, suggesting that there was a pre-existing pattern of habitation and exchange into which the Mauryas may have intruded [...] Mauryan control seems to have been greater in those areas where they were tapping resources, as, for example, gold, and hence the cluster of inscriptions. Possibly, other resources were obtained through local agencies, such as the people inhabiting the megalithic sites, and their way of life remained substantially unchanged by the Mauryan presence.​
Archaeologically there's no real 'Mauryan ceramic phase,' for example.

To sum up things by quoting "Imperial Landscapes of South Asia" by Carla M. Sinopoli,
While the Mauryans may have had effective territorial control in their northern heartland, imperial territories in Peninsular India were restricted to areas near important mineral resources and trade routes, suggesting discontinuous territories and limited presence in many areas of the peninsula. Other than the inscriptions and some rare artifacts, areas distant from the imperial core contain relatively little direct evidence of the Mauryan presence, and no evidence of the form that presence may have taken.
That is, I am partial to the following map of the Mauryan empire (taken from Sinopoli, "Imperial Landscapes") than those on Wikipedia:
tesXipy.png

[1] Who did not, by the way, rise in India as you state; Babur was born and crowned in Andijan and reigned as ruler of Kabul much longer than as ruler of Hindustan, and in a broader sense the Mughals were Timurids.
 
I have to think that the rest of India would prove far more appealing a target than Persia. For Alexander, the most valuable parts of the Persian Empire were also the closest: Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. For anyone invading from the east, they're the furthest away.
 
Mauryan administration might not have reached into all interior corners of the empire due to various reasons. Many parts of the subcontinent was covered by thick forests impenetrable for humans at that time. There were also forest lands inhabited by tribals untamed by civilization. But this situation must have changed only by many centuries of slow deforestation and human settlements. Even today there are large tracts of dense forests in the Amazon basin still to be explored by humans. But those lands are all supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the Federal Republic of Brazil. It also may be mentioned that many of the villages in India were autonomous, controlled by elected councils, mostly undisturbed by royal or imperial interference. Such villages existed under many of the later kingdoms and empires like the Guptas and the Cholas. Those villages were not molested by the rise and fall of the empires. Their autonomy was respected by most of the rulers.
 
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