Ashoka

Allen, Charles:
Ashoka : the search of India's lost emperor / Charles Allen. - London : Little, Brown, 2012. - XIX, 460 S. : Ill.
ISBN 978-1-408-70196-6 (Hardcover)
£ 25,00
ISBN 978-0-349-12238-0 (Paperback)
£ 12,99 [laut Amazon (UK) noch nicht veröffentlicht]
DDC: 934.045092

Beschreibung
India’s lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history. In his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived, and the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found and in the process India’s ancient history was itself recovered.
   In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as much about Britain’s entanglement with India as it as about India’s distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Preface: The King Without Sorrow
1. The Breaking of Idols
2. The Golden Column of Firoz Shah
3. Objects of Enquiry
4. Enter Alexander
5. Furious Orientalists
6. The Long Shadow of Horace Hayman Wilson
7. Prinsep's Ghat
8. Thus Spake King Piyadasi
9. Brian Hodgson's Gift
10. Records of the Western Regions
11. Alexander Cunningham the Great
12. Sir Alexander in Excelsis
13. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum
14. India after Cunningham
15. Ashoka in the Twentieth Century
16. The Rise and Fall of Ashokadharma
Acknowledgements
Appendix: The Rock and Pillar Edicts
Notes
Index

Autor

Charles Allen (*1940) is the author of a number of bestselling books about Indian and the colonial experience elsewhere. A traveller, historian and master storyteller he is one of the great chroniclers of India. [Verlagsinformation]. Wikipedia [en].

Quellen: Little, Brown Book Group; WorldCat; Amazon (UK)