# Chandragupta takes Magadha
**चंद्रगुप्त ने मगध जीता**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/chandragupta-magadha/
- Chapter: [The Mauryan Empire](https://indianepics.online/chapter/maurya.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 321 BCE (± 5 years)
- Where: Pataliputra (Patna), Bihar (25.61, 85.14)
- Tags: political

## Summary

Chandragupta Maurya overthrows the Nanda king and rules from Pataliputra; later tradition credits his minister Chanakya with the plan.

चंद्रगुप्त मौर्य ने नंद राजा को हटाकर पाटलिपुत्र से शासन किया; बाद की परंपरा इसका श्रेय उनके मंत्री चाणक्य को देती है।

## Account

The date is conventional. Greek writers, who call him Sandrokottos, put his rise in the years after Alexander; Buddhist and Jain texts agree on the generation, not the year, and whether he took Magadha or the Punjab first is still argued. Chanakya, the scheming minister of the play Mudrarakshasa, comes from Indian sources written centuries later, not from the Greeks.

Megasthenes, Seleucus's envoy to the Mauryan court, describes Pataliputra as a timber-walled city where the Son met the Ganges. It stayed the capital for the whole dynasty.

## Sources

- Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961)
- Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus 15.4 (Sandracottus takes power in India after Alexander)
- Megasthenes, Indica (fragments in Arrian and Strabo) (Palimbothra at the meeting of the Ganges and the Erannoboas (Son))

## Image

Sarnath capital. Chrisi1964, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASarnath_capital.jpg

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