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D.D. KOSAMBII
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by name. The existence of free cities mentioned by Megasthenes appears to be supported by some Mauryan punch-marked coins that bear the emperor's personal mark, with homo-signs or some group-mark in place of the usual symbols of sovereignty. It must be remembered that such cities would have a tribal origin, and a guild structure. The other fact to be kept in mind is that both the Arthaśāstra and what remains of Megasthenes are concerned with the major features, not with every single minor form of production ; India is a country of long formal survivals even after substance and basis are obselete. The essential is that the city, free or not, is an administrative center, no longer a center of tribal assembly and warfare. There is no class structure between the primary producer and the coercive mechanism (the State); the mechanism of violence is controlled by the center, namely the king and his bureaucracy.
This system must have reached full bloom with the Nandas (about 400 B.C.), whose proverbial wealth and prosperity are attested by the great variety and accurate minting of their silver punch-marked coins. Its main effect was upon the Gangetic and Indus valleys, and the regions about a few cities elsewhere, the rest Asoka's empire being undeveloped, with great variety of survivals. The inevitable expansion carried with it the seeds of decay. In the absence of slavery, with the sūdra deported from the cities, and tight control of manufactured goods and its prices from raw material to the finished article, civic production would certainly not suffice for the whole countryside from Afghanistan to Bengal and the Himalayas to Mysore. Nevertheless, more land is steadily being brought under cultivation by means of the tools made in the cities. The immense distances and poor transport would also make central administration most cumbrous, accounting progressively more complicated, official peculations increasingly harder (A 2.7-9) to check. Certainly, the Mauryan silver coinage as a whole, particularly after Candragupta, shows far greater proportion of copper with much rougher weight adjustment than before-symptoms of tremendously increased demand for currency, logical corollary of the opening up of the whole peninsula for the first time. The minute reverse marks of the pre-Mauryan coinage also disappear, to be replaced by a single issue-mark, presumably at the mint, which again confirms rigid state control, to the exclusion of former important merchant guilds. A natural step would be that the artizan, or at least his technique, first moved to the countryside, thus bringing about the full development of self-sufficient rural units. The state machinery would have to be dispersed in consequence. Increasing the number of stipendiary superintendents would be impossible, which means the necessity of creating new classes of owners, new intermediate relations of production between state and producer. That is, the ksatriya has also to move to the countryside with small forces scattered over village territory. The brahmin is as important in making the people submissive; he has already a foothold as priest and medicine-man, with tax
