Maurya Empire
The Maurya Empire was the geographically extensive Pushyamitra Shunga as well as foundation of the Shunga dynasty in Magadha.
Chandragupta Maurya raised an army, with the assistance of satraps left by Alexander the Great, in addition to by 317 BCE the empire had fully occupied northwestern India. The Mauryan Empire then defeated Seleucus I, a diadochus and founder of the Seleucid Empire, during the Seleucid–Mauryan war, thus acquiring territory west of the Indus River.
Under the Mauryas, internal and outside trade, agriculture, and economic activities thrived and expanded across South Asia due to the determining of a single and fine system of finance, administration, and security. The Maurya dynasty built a precursor of the Grand Trunk Road from Patliputra to Taxila. After the Kalinga War, the Empire experienced near half a century of centralized dominance under Ashoka. Ashoka's embrace of Buddhism and sponsorship of Buddhist missionaries provides for the expansion of that faith into Sri Lanka, northwest India, and Central Asia.
The population of South Asia during the Mauryan period has been estimated to be between 15 and 30 million. The empire's period of dominion was marked by exceptional creativity in art, architecture, inscriptions and submission texts, but also by the consolidation of caste in the Gangetic plain, and the declining rights of women in the mainstream Indo-Aryan speaking regions of India. Archaeologically, the period of Mauryan control in South Asia falls into the era of Northern Black Polished Ware NBPW. The Arthashastra and the Edicts of Ashoka are the primary sources of result records of Mauryan times. The Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath is the national emblem of the Republic of India.