The Mighty Gupta Empire of India

This episode is brought to you by Masterworks. Stick around to the end to find out how you can build wealth by investing in art today. By the 4th century AD, the great empires of India survived mostly in old traditions, in monuments of waning luster, spread across a land that had widely fractured into petty kingdoms. The rather modest dominion of one dynasty had begun to expand under its king Chandragupta, and after his reign, the throne was assumed by his son, an emperor who would proudly bear his battle scars, the great Samudragupta. At his behest, the forges burned day and night. Horses were mounted, war elephants arrayed. In ages past, when Alexander had marched east to conquer the world, it was the prospect of facing the vast armies of India that ultimately induced his weary troops to make him turn back. Then came the Mauryan Empire, which conquered wide and stood for over a century before its demise. Now half a millennium later, this region would yield before a new power. Samudragupta rallied his troops and rode against the surrounding regions. Enemies were run through with spears and felled by arrows as he annihilated nine kings of the Ganges River Basin and brought their fertile lands under his domain. Bordering regions likely submitted ahead of his army to become tributary states. The forces of this Gupta Empire moved swiftly. While fielding traditional divisions of elephants and light infantry, their power rested on heavy cavalry. Fierce nomads to the northwest had shown India the merit of mounted archery. Indeed, those roaming armies began to overrun regions of South Asia formerly under Greek control, where the world of Aristotle had long blended with that of the Buddha, and a Greco-Buddhist culture still remained, in which Brahmi's script framed the faces of Roman rulers, and the Buddha and his followers emerged in detailed Hellenistic rendering. Although Samudragupta was a great admirer of the arts, his immediate ambitions lay not in the west but south along the eastern coast lined with trade ports. And so the emperor and his army fought and trekked through forests on a quest that no doubt seemed guided by the hand of Vishnu, a Hindu deity considered by many, including the Gupta dynasty, to be the benevolent supreme being over the universe. The Gupta warriors scattered the armies before them, trailing over the bloodied fields of battle to reach the coastal kingdoms. Temples, farms, and homes were likely left unharmed, for though Samudragupta defeated 12 kings on this campaign, he restored them all to their thrones on the condition that they submit and become tributaries of the empire. While in some sense an administrative practicality, the mercy shown by Samudragupta earned him praise as an invincible yet noble conqueror. Distant rulers sent him offerings and daughters in marriage, and his overlordship stretched from the southeastern shores to the hallowed foothills of the Himalayas. Samudragupta then undertook the ancient Ashvamedha ritual, in which a horse was released to wander the empire for a year accompanied by a party of the king's warriors. Any ruler could contest the king's authority by ambushing the men and capturing the horse. The party returned safely, and the horse was ritually sacrificed. And thus Samudragupta was hailed as the undisputed king over all the land he claimed. The ascendants of the Gupta dynasty would survive him. His son Chandragupta II took up the banner of conquest, crushed his enemies, and extended the empire to the western coast, where merchants from distant places came to trade. The links between civilizations of the east and west were long-standing. Indeed, an Indian artifact had been buried by ash in Pompeii centuries before, and the sight of Roman coins was not uncommon in India. Philosophies and musings passed between the far-flung peoples as goods came via Roman Egypt, including gold, silver, and Italian wine, exchanged for Indian ivory, spices, fine silks, iron, and steel. Indian craftsmen were famed in the ancient world for their high-quality metalworking. Now, across the lofty cities of the Gupta empire, industry flourished. The guilds of merchants, artisans, and weavers were granted influence in local administration. Magnificent monuments of worship towered overhead, and great thinkers emerged in the universities and centers of learning. Here, the innovative use of zero as a placeholder within the decimal place-value system enabled increasingly complex calculations. Later in India, that circular symbol would represent the world's first true zero used as a number, a concept central to understanding negative numbers and conducting advanced mathematics. The trigonometric functions sine and cosine are traced to the Gupta period as well, in part due to the great Aryabhata, who also calculated pi to the fourth decimal place and correctly observed that stars only appeared to move due to the rotation of the earth. He described this relativity of motion. Just as a man in a boat moving forward sees the stationary objects on the shore as moving backward, just so are the stationary stars seen by the people on earth as moving exactly towards the west. The Gupta empire seemed to afford its people stability, safety. Skanda Gupta drove out an invasion of nomads in the mid-fifth century, but it seemed these enemies were growing more daring in their incursions upon imperial territory. Much of the land had been cultivated when Indian kings gifted tracts of conquered regions to the priestly Brahmin class, often deposing tribal leaders. In this era, the four varnas or social classes, as described centuries before in Hindu scriptures, began to lose their malleability, crystallizing into professional and hereditary realities. Although general prosperity had improved the status of the low shudra peasants, a Chinese traveler named Faxian noted the extreme ostracization of those considered unworthy of placement in the varna system altogether, a growing untouchable lot forced to live outside of town. Faxian faced no persecution himself. He had come to India as a pilgrim. This was the land where the Buddha had lived and taught many centuries before. Stupa shrines dotted the country and mantras echoed from caves where monks dwelt in elaborate monasteries. Although devout Hindus themselves, the Gupta emperors remained widely tolerant of Jainism and Buddhism. Yet Buddhist monks would later write of the atrocity with which their order was slain and temples burned around the year 520 by riders from the north. The Alkan Huns, these nomadic masters of horse archery, moved south, led by a man who was darkly remembered centuries later. The northern region brought forth another god of death. People knew of his approach by noticing the vultures, crows, and other birds flying ahead, eager to feed on those who were being slain within his army's reach. He was called Mihirakula. A diadem adorned his bulging skull, artificially elongated in the tradition of Hunnic rulers. His father, the great Toramana, had conquered far into India before him, but he had been defeated and ousted by regional powers. Mihirakula now came to lead the return of the Huns. The path was cleared, for the Gupta Empire had receded to the east, weathered by prior invasions and possible natural disaster. The Huns leveled cities and massacred people in their conquest, but they were no simple horde of ravagers. The conquerors were keen to establish themselves as legitimate overlords. In old Gupta towns, coins were issued in the image of Mihirakula, a Hun king who now worshipped a Hindu deity, not Vishnu, but the god of destruction, Shiva. The Huns had not wandered into the mere destitute remains of the Gupta Empire. Rather, the autonomy the Guptas had long extended to their subject states now empowered former feudatories and successors to function without the empire. And so it was an alliance of regional kings, including King Yashodharman of the central Indian Alikara dynasty, who emerged to face Mihirakula. The Huns buried them in arrows, but the Indian troops pushed forward to the furious bellow of war elephants in the clatter of armor and blades. The will of the invaders was broken as they fell in the chaos. The Huns were hacked and trampled across the valley, and it was written, King Mihirakula had never been forced to Shiva, but Yashodharman bent that monarch's head painfully down into deference. The Huns were driven out, exiled to the north, but the victory of non-Gupta kings signaled the shift in power. Here was the soft twilight of the Gupta Empire, gone before the end of the 6th century. And yet the achievements of those within the empire and extended cultural sphere outlived the might of its armies. Gupta period advancements in mathematics and astronomy would later reach the Islamic world and then Europe, contributing to further scientific innovation. And in India, there remained temples and ruins of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist tradition, some lost for centuries to the wilderness. Sacred monuments sat in lonely halls like shadowed visions from the golden age. The Age of the Gupta Empire. 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