King Aśoka has always been a subject of abiding scholarly interest as well as popular imagination. One can say that he is a perennial favourite of publishers and authors. Herman Tieken’s The Aśoka Inscriptions: Analysing a Corpus is a significant addition to the available massive corpus of serious writings on the Emperor who preferred to call himself a King (rājā). The inscriptions engraved at the order of King Aśoka in the third century BCE inaugurated the long history of Indian epigraphy.
August 2023, volume 47, No 8