Name: Why History Forgot About This Extraordinary Emperor
Uploaded: 2026-03-13T21:40:17.000Z
Duration: 14 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The ground shakes as thousands of Maori and elephant riders thunder towards the coastal kingdom of Kalinga.

Emperor Ashoka already rules most of India and now moves on to crush Kalinga and seize their ports.

The Kalingans stand ready to defend their home with swords, javelins and war elephants of their own.

But they're outnumbered and don't realize how badly until it's too late.

A trumpeting avalanche rolls towards them.

Blades on tusks cut through bodies while the rest are crushed underfoot.

Those who survive run for the Dyer River.

But on the far bank, Marian cavalry is already closing in.

Panic spreads and soldiers jump into the water, only to be met by arrows raining down from Marian archers.

The water turns red as the slaughter continues, leaving 100,000 dead and and even more forcibly deported.

Families are erased and villages destroyed.

Yet this devastation doesn't fuel more war.

Instead of violence, a different kind of power rises, built on knowledge and reason, spreading outwards in ripples that still reach us today.

When the Kalinga war ends, the Mauryans control nearly all the land between the Himalayas and the ocean, home to roughly a third of the world's population.

The time the successful conquest of Emperor Ashoka pushes his rule to the eastern coast.

Confronted with the scale of the suffering he caused, Ashoka is overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow.

For months, he's desperate to repent until he encounters Buddhism.

At the time, it's still a small movement, carried along roads by begging monks, who speak of non violence and tolerance as a release from suffering.

Ashoka converts and becomes a patron, spreading belief without enforcing it.

Pillars are carved with his edicts on kindness, religious tolerance and social welfare.

One who does good first does something hard to do.

He upgrades imperial roads, plants shade trees and builds wells for travelers and cattle.

These roads double as trade routes, linking inland markets to ports bound for Southeast Asia.

Caravans carry vast amounts of Indian riches like ebony, sandalwood, cotton and pepper.

Buddhism also starts taking off and monks crowdsource support to cut caves into cliffs for simple monasteries.

They offer shelter to travelers and position themselves as guardians of the trade.

This resonates with a rising merchant class with which donates generously, gaining both protection and spiritual merit.

The Buddhist monasteries grow bigger now not just spiritual centers, but engines of wealth.

Monks manage land and run mines and mills.

They lend money to farmers who invest in trading voyages.

Basically, monasteries become the first Banks of South Asia.

Faith funding trade, trade carrying faith.

The Mauryan empire collapses a century after Ashoka, but the monasteries endure and merchants keep moving.

They turn westwards, where a new superpower is stretching its limbs with a growing demand for Indian goods.

We'll take a quick break from ancient trade systems and focus on today's business.

Thanks to our partner Adoo for sponsoring this episode.

Adoo is an all in one management software that helps you run your business every day.

What was enabled by personal interactions back then is only possible through professional solutions in today's global economy, and

Adoo offers these through more than 45 apps like accounting, inventory, CRM and many more, all centralized on one single platform.

You can, for example, create and send your invoices in seconds.

You just select your customer, pay, add your products and quantities, define the billing terms, and

Plus, with the built in chatter, you keep a clear overview of your emails, notes and activities all in one place.

And tracking your payments with clear statuses and deadlines is just as simple.

You can try out all these features for free because your first ADO app is free forever, with unlimited support and hosting included.

When you're ready to scale up, Adoo adapts to your needs and you can simply add applications.

You get access to all applications from $24.90 a month.

The golden age of trade 6,000 km west, Roman dominance has been rising through marching legions and territorial takeover.

In 30 BCE, having conquered Cleopatra's Egypt, the empire grips the Red Sea ports.

This opens a direct corridor to the Indian world and ship traffic increases.

It helps that the Indian peninsula sits inside a massive wind machine.

For half the year, the monsoon blows towards the Arabian Sea, and

This predictable rhythm lets Indian sailors ride the wind straight across the ocean and glide safely home.

Months later, they build enormous and tough ships that can easily carry 1,000 people or a few hundred tons of cargo.

In Rome, Indian goods sell for up to 100 times their original price.

If you're lucky, the profit from a single voyage can buy 2,000 acres of the best Egyptian farmland or pay 10,000 Roman soldiers for a year.

In this trade, a successful merchant doesn't just get rich, they can rival the wealth of senators.

It pours into the markets and rewires Roman taste itself.

Nearly 80% of their recipes now demand it.

Even soldiers freezing at Hadrian's Wall order pepper to make their rations edible.

Words like pepper, ginger and sugar travel with the spice, moving from Sanskrit into Latin and almost every European language.

But the biggest ships aren't loaded with spice, but their animal transports.

Vast floating stables carrying elephants, tigers, leopards, even occasional rhinoceros.

All kept alive through an almost two month journey for Rome's gladiator games.

Indian imports into Egypt surge past 1.3 billion a year in today's dollars.

And Roman tax collectors skim off over a quarter of that flow, enough to finance a third of the empire's budget.

Older accounts emphasized the overland Silk Road from China.

But when historians re examined maritime trade, the volumes of goods traveling along these routes told a different story.

Goods do travel over land from China, but the Silk Road is slow, costly and hard to control.

Most Chinese goods reach Roman markets through Indian sea trade networks.

All this makes India Rome's largest trading partner for more than 300 years.

The system works until the Roman Empire starts to weaken.

Commerce slows, fleets shrink and ports fall silent.

One by one, Indian merchants redirect their massive ships towards Southeast Asia's rising kingdoms.

And with them, travel ideas that will reshape how humans understand the universe itself.

Ground zero Trade fuels prosperity across the subcontinent.

By the 4th century, most of it is ruled by the Gupta Empire.

Wealth flows into art and science, fueling a boom in centers of learning.

Among them rises Nalanda, the elite MIT of ancient India.

Crowned by a vast nine story library known as the Sea of Jewels.

India begins to build one of the richest mathematical traditions on earth.

Scholars start writing nine numerical symbols in a radically new way.

A digit's position now defines its value.

Around 628, the mathematician Brahmagupta takes on a revolutionary idea.

He defines zero, lays out its rules and gives it real power.

Suddenly, any number, no matter how big, can be expressed with just 10 symbols.

They call the new number Shunya the void.