sourced story
321 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesDebated

Chandragupta Maurya Founds the Maurya Empire

With his mentor Chanakya's guidance, a young rebel topples the Nanda dynasty and builds the subcontinent's first pan-Indian empire

On the timeline · around 321 BCE · The Maurya EmpireThe Mahajanapadas and the New ReligionsThe Maurya EmpireChandragupta Maurya Founds the Maurya Empire425 BCE400 BCE375 BCE350 BCE325 BCE300 BCE275 BCE

Quick facts

Founded
321 BCE
Founder
Chandragupta Maurya (Sandrakottos to the Greeks)
Mentor and minister
Chanakya (Kautilya)
Defeated dynasty
Nanda dynasty, under Dhana Nanda

What happened

Chandragupta Maurya, known to the Greeks as Sandrakottos, founded the Maurya Empire around 321 BCE after defeating Dhana Nanda, the king of Magadha, in a series of battles. He was guided by Chanakya, also called Kautilya or Vishnugupta, a teacher at the university city of Takshashila who became his mentor and later his chief minister. Together they built a centralized administrative state whose structure, taxation, espionage, and military organization, is described in the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft traditionally attributed to Kautilya, though modern scholarship increasingly treats it as a text compiled or expanded by multiple authors in the centuries after the Mauryan period rather than a direct Mauryan-era document. Chandragupta went on to expand the empire further, later ceding some northwestern territory to the Seleucid ruler Seleucus I in exchange for elephants and a marriage alliance, and the Maurya state he built became the first to unify the great majority of the Indian subcontinent under one rule.

Why it matters

The Maurya Empire set the template for centralized statehood in India that later empires, including the Guptas centuries later, would draw on. Its scale and administrative sophistication, whatever the Arthashastra's precise textual history, mark the first time most of the subcontinent operated under a single political authority.

How we know

Chandragupta's reign and his defeat of the Nanda dynasty are recorded in later Indian sources such as the Puranas and in the accounts of Greek visitors like Megasthenes, whose lost work survives in quotations by later classical authors; the Arthashastra's authorship and date remain a live scholarly question rather than a settled fact.

Sources

See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.

Part of a timelineAncient India29 events · From the granaries of Mehrgarh to the astronomers of the Gupta court, the long record of the Indian subcontinent's first cities, philosophies, and empiresView all →