The tradition of . great kings and emperors goes back to the Vedas. The RigVeda tells of Sudaas who had achieved his overlordship of Rigvedic India by his victory at the Battle of Ten Kings (Daasha-raajna)…representing about forty different RigVedic peoples.



The conception of paramount power and imperial sovereignty was so well established even in these early days that it expressed itself in appropriate technical terms, such as Adhiraja, Rajadhiraja, or Samraat, liberally used in the Vedic texts….Chandragupta [Maurya]…is the first Indian king who established his rule over an extended India, an India greater than even British India. The boundaries of this Greater India lay far beyond the frontiers of modern India along the borders of Persia. Chandragupta is again the first of the Rulers of India to be able by his conquests to join up the valleys of the Indus and the land of the five rivers with the eastern valleys of the Ganges and the Jumna in one Empire that stretched from Aria (Herat) to Pataliputra. And he is also the first Indian King who followed up this political unification of Northern India by extending his conquests beyond the barriers of the Vindhyas…to bring both North and South under the umbrella of one paramount sovereign…Chandragupta was able to rid the country of all traces of Greek occupation by 323 BC….To crown all, Chandragupta as the founder of the imperial Maurya dynasty, gives to India for the first time a continuous history as well as a unified history, a history affecting India as a whole…[vi] [Emphasis added]