Ashoka's Two Separate Edicts at Dhauli and Jaugada Tell the Judicial Officers of Kalinga to Judge Without Anger or Haste, Promise Inspectors Every Five Years and Declare That All Men Are His Children

Ashoka’s fourteen major rock edicts appear as a set at several sites, but at Dhauli, south of Bhubaneswar, and at Jaugada, in Ganjam district, the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth are missing. Two edicts written for the province of Kalinga alone stand in their place, addressed to the officers of two towns, Tosali and Samapa. The first contains the sentence that E. Hultzsch, who edited all of Ashoka’s inscriptions in 1925, translates as “All men are my children.”

In that first edict the king tells the city’s judicial officers which faults ruin a judge’s work, and how often an inspector will come to check on them. In the second he speaks to the unconquered peoples on the province’s borders and tells his officers what to promise them. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) dates the edicts to the reign of Ashoka, 272 to 236 BCE, and its heritage record for Dhauli calls them a charter for the people and an instruction for the royal officers, the Mahamatras.

A polished rock above the Daya

Lieutenant Markham Kittoe found the Dhauli inscription in 1837, according to both Hultzsch and D. R. Bhandarkar. It is cut on the northern face of a hillock called Aswathama, on the left bank of the Daya river. The ASI’s record gives the engraved surface as 4.57 m by 3.04 m, which matches the 15 feet by 10 feet that Hultzsch quotes from Kittoe’s account of a rock “hewn and polished” to take the text.

Three columns fill the surface. According to the ASI and the Orissa Review, the left column carries the first separate edict. The middle one holds the standard edicts 1 to 6, and the right one edicts 7 to 10 and 14, with the second separate edict below them inside a frame of straight lines. Hultzsch adds a point about the order of work: the second edict was cut straight after edict 14, and the first was added afterwards on the left. The numbering follows James Prinsep, who published a reading from Kittoe’s lithograph in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1838. Alexander Cunningham argued for swapping the numbers, and Hultzsch kept Prinsep’s because a change would now confuse readers.

Above the inscription is a terrace, and on it the forepart of an elephant, about four feet high, cut from the solid rock. The ASI record calls it the earliest sculptural piece of Odisha. Bhandarkar noted grooves around it which suggest it was once covered by a wooden canopy. The Orissa Review quotes Romila Thapar’s view that local craftsmen probably carved it, and that it was meant to draw the eye to the text beside it.

The sources differ on the animal’s label. The ASI record names it Gajatme. Hultzsch prints a short label for “the white one” under the Dhauli figure and, following Bühler, takes it as a reference to an elephant standing for the Buddha. He ties the word gajatame, “the best elephant”, to the Kalsi rock in the Dehra Dun district instead. The ASI has put a glass window and a concrete roof over the rock at Dhauli.

What the first edict asks of a judge

The first separate edict is addressed, in Hultzsch’s translation, to the Mahamatras at Tosali, “the judicial officers of the city”. Mahamatra was the title of a senior official, and Hultzsch notes that at Tosali and Samapa they held judicial powers. The king opens by saying that instructing them is his main means of carrying out what he thinks right. They are occupied with many thousands of men, he says, with the object of gaining those men’s affection.

Then comes the sentence about children. Hultzsch renders it as a wish that all men should have “complete welfare and happiness in this world and in the other world”, the same wish the king holds for his own children. S. Dhammika’s English rendering says the same.

The next lines deal with a specific failing. A single person is imprisoned or harshly treated, and by chance an order cancels his imprisonment while many others go on suffering. The officers must try to deal with all of them impartially, the king says, and he names what stops them: envy, anger, cruelty, hurry, want of practice, laziness and fatigue. Hultzsch’s translation calls “the absence of anger and the avoidance of hurry” the root of all this. An officer worn out by the work “will not rise” in Hultzsch’s rendering, which Dhammika reads as not being promoted, and the officer ought to keep moving.

An inspection system follows. The king says he will send out a Mahamatra every five years, a man who is neither harsh nor fierce but gentle in his actions, to see whether the judges are acting on the instruction. From Ujjayini the prince who governs there will send one at intervals of no more than three years, and the same is to be done from Taxila. The edict was to be heard on the days of the Tishya constellation, and by a single listener on other occasions in between. The Jaugada copy of the first edict is addressed to the officers at Samapa and is damaged at the inspection clauses, which the Dhauli copy gives more fully.

What the second edict tells the border peoples

The second edict is addressed at Dhauli to the prince and the Mahamatras at Tosali, and at Jaugada to the Mahamatras at Samapa. Vincent Smith, writing in 1920, supposed that the prince at Tosali was one of Ashoka’s sons. He described the Jaugada text of the separate edicts as in substantially perfect condition and the Dhauli text as much mutilated, so the Jaugada copy supplies wording that Dhauli has lost.

The edict begins with an imagined question. The unconquered peoples on the border, the king says, might ask what he wants from them. His answer, in Hultzsch’s translation of the Jaugada text, is that they should not be afraid of him but have confidence in him, that they should receive happiness and not misery, and that “the king will forgive them what can be forgiven”. He also hopes they will practise dhamma, which Hultzsch renders as morality.

The officers are told to carry this out and to make the border peoples believe that the king is “like a father” to them. The edict was to be heard every four months, on the Tishya day. Hultzsch notes that the borderers here were outside the territory Ashoka controlled, and that the Mahamatras at Tosali and Samapa also had charge of dealing with them.

Jaugada, the fort town on the Rushikulya

Jaugada lies on the northern bank of the Rushikulya river, near Pandia village. The inscription calls its own rock the Khepingala mountain, in Hultzsch’s reading, and Walter Elliot took copies of the text in 1850. It is cut on three tablets on the vertical face of the rock, with the two separate edicts on the third. They are set apart in a frame, the upper one marked with a swastika symbol at its top corners and the lower with the letter m, as Hultzsch records.

The ASI’s Eastern Circle dug at Jaugada in 1956 and 1957 under Debala Mitra. The Indian Archaeology review says five cuttings were made across the site, together with a trench 117 feet long through the earthen rampart. The rampart rose about 25 feet in places, and the fortified area was roughly square. The finds included beads of shell, bone, carnelian, agate and crystal that the report calls remarkable for their workmanship, black-and-red pottery, a knobbed vessel type also found at Sisupalgarh, and eleven Puri-Kushan coins, a type Patra says turns up at other places in Odisha too.

Patra, writing in the Orissa Review, passes on F. R. Allchin’s ranking of early Indian cities by size. It puts Jaugada, at 61 to 120 hectares, in the fourth of six grades, alongside Ujjain, Pratisthana and Anuradhapura. He gives its occupation tentatively as the third century BCE to the sixth or seventh century CE.

Why edicts 11 to 13 are not there

Hultzsch’s translation of the Kalsi text of edict 13 says the Kalinga country was conquered when the king had been anointed eight years. It gives 150,000 deported, 100,000 slain, and many times as many dead. The ASI and the Orissa Review give the conventional date of the war as about 261 BCE. Rock Edict 13 and its Greek counterpart at Kandahar and Ashoka’s change of course after the war have their own articles.

Why the Kalinga rocks leave out edicts 11, 12 and 13 is an inference, and the sources give more than one explanation. Patra reports one from the Puri district gazetteer. Edict 14 says the set was written in forms “sometimes of medium length, sometimes expanded”, and also in a shorter form, because not everything suits every place. Edict 11 defines dhamma, edict 12 deals with tolerance, and edict 13 describes the war, so some of them may have seemed inapplicable to a conquered province. Patra also offers a second reading, that Ashoka did not want to wound the people of Kalinga further by cutting the war edict there. Smith and Bhandarkar describe the two separate edicts simply as the ones that replace the three, drafted for the needs of the newly annexed province.

Why the same edicts also stand at Jaugada, far from Dhauli, is a second question. Patra cites B. M. Barua’s view that the Jaugada rock was close to Samapa, the headquarters of the province’s southern division, and notes that scholars disagree about whether Samapa and Jaugada are two places or one. The site of Tosali is also open. Smith and Bhandarkar place it at or near Dhauli, and Thapar, as the Orissa Review quotes her, agrees. Patra writes that since B. B. Lal’s excavation at Sisupalgarh, near Bhubaneswar, many scholars have located Tosali there, and he finds it more likely that Dhauli was an extension of the capital than the capital itself. His article describes Dhauli as the site of the war, but the text of edict 13 that Hultzsch translates names no battlefield.

What stands today

The ASI’s heritage record lists Dhauli as a protected monument and says the edicts and the elephant are in a good state of preservation. Beside the rock, a Shanti Stupa, or peace pagoda, was built by the Japan Buddha Sangha with the Government of Orissa in 1971 and 1972, according to Patra. Patra and the Odisha Tourism site both describe Jaugada as an ASI-protected monument, and Odisha Tourism calls it the second place in the state with an Ashokan major rock edict. In 2006 Patra wrote that the land around Dhauli still awaited excavation, and in 2007 he called for more digging at Jaugada, with better roads and visitor facilities.