The Introduction and Chapters 1–3 of Thomas R. Trautmann, Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth — the three goals of life, the science of kingship, kingdoms and republics, and the inventory of goods. Read from
RAW/books/Arthashastra-The Science of Wealth.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 2 — Chapters 4–6 · What Runs Through All of It · thread map: The Ledger's Blind Spot.
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which merged six chapters into one account.
Whose worldview this is. The subject here is the world of the Arthashastra itself — a hypothetical Indian kingdom of roughly the first or second century CE — reported through Trautmann and, in the Introduction, through Gurcharan Das. Where a claim is theirs rather than the text's, it is marked.
This report has a second job. The
Counsel From Elsewheresections of every other report in this folder draw their Kautilyan advisor from these pages, so the counsel elsewhere can be checked against them.
Source ingest: Thomas R. Trautmann, Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth
The book opens on a line from the Arthashastra that sets the terms for everything after it. In the happiness of his subjects lies the king's happiness, in their welfare his welfare. He shall not consider as good only that which pleases him but treat as beneficial to him whatever pleases his subjects.1 That is not a moral appeal. It is an argument from interest, put to a man who is being taught how to get rich.
How people should relate — and the whole book turns on one word. The king's tax is called his bhaga, his share, and normally it is one-sixth, shad-bhagin. That proportion carries across the produce of land and across other economic transactions too.2 A share is not a rent and not a levy on somebody else's property. It means the king is one shareholder among several in the same crop, and that he and the farmer are in the same partnership.
The consequence follows immediately and it is a limit. A man who owns a thing can sell it; a man who holds a share cannot sell the land it comes off. The focus falls on possession rather than on ownership, and the ruler is told to leave the possession alone. The Naradasmriti puts it in one sentence: a householder's house and his field are considered as the two fundamentals of his existence. Therefore let not the king upset either of them.3
What is real. Four kinds of land, and only one of them is the king's. There is the king's own land, the lands of private individuals, common land around every village for everyone's enjoyment, and unoccupied forest.4 The king may grant vacant land to subjects willing to clear it, till it and pay tax on it, and take it back if they fail to develop it — which is the power that got mistaken, later, for ownership of everything.
How you know, and where the mistake came from. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court, was the first to say Indian kings owned the whole land of the country.5 He also reported gold-digging ants the size of foxes. The later error was a translation error: the dharma texts call the king pati or swami of the kingdom, and those words mean protector and master, not owner. Indian commentators are blunt about it. Shabaraswami, on the Purva Mimasa, sets out what a king's power actually is and where it stops:
The monarch has not property on the earth... His kingly power is for government of the realm and extirpation of wrongs; and for that purpose he receives taxes from husbandmen and levies fines from offenders. But the right of property is not... vested in him.6
Later jurists say the same. Nilakantha, in the sixteenth century, puts proprietary right in villages and lands with their respective landlords and limits the king's right to collecting tax from them. Madhava is blunter still: the land is not the king's wealth, it is the common wealth of all living beings to enjoy the fruit of their labour.
What a person is, when that person is the king. Somebody with four and a half hours' sleep. The night and the day are each divided into eight parts by the sundial, and the schedule is packed from end to end with the business of the day.7 The text then makes one concession, and it is a real one: he may divide the day and night differently, in conformity with his capacity.
What is worth having. Self-control, listed as a set of specific abstentions. He should avoid another's wife and another's property, practise non-violence towards all living things, and stay away from harmful company. He should especially avoid four vices that destroy self-control — gambling, drinking, womanising and hunting.8 On the positive side he should study different fields of knowledge, keep the company of wise men, be honest, and be resolute rather than dilatory and fickle.
How you make people do things. Two instruments and a warning. A leader can move people through fear and punishment, danda, or through reward and trust, dana. The text mostly leans toward punishment and discusses retributive justice at length — but it insists that punishment be proportionate to the wrong and be seen as deserved and just by the public, or the ruler loses the respect of his people.9 Two further instruments follow, and they are less respectable: dividing people, bheda, and using deceit and illusion, maya.
The shape of time, and what is worth having in the largest sense. The three goals of a life are ranked, and the ranking is a scheduling instruction as much as a moral one. Dharma — the right thing, in private and in public — comes first; artha, material well-being, second; kama, desire, third.10 Dharma is what stops the desires from running loose, and no amount of regulation catches everybody, so what the system finally rests on is self-restraint in each person and trust between them.
What makes things happen, in a market. Trust, backed by a stick. Disputes get settled by a panel of three judges called dharmasthas, upholders of dharma, and the framework of law is what lets exchanges work at all — a peaceful way to settle a quarrel and a way to punish bad behaviour.11 But there are limits to restraint and trust, which is why the ruler is also told about danda, the rod of the state, for the people who fail dharma.
Read: lines 143–295.
What is worth having, ranked, with different tempos attached. Three legitimate goals: love, wealth, and religion-and-morality. Each has its own science, and artha being wealth, arthashastra is the science of wealth. But the Panchatantra, a book for the education of princes, attaches a speed to each: pursue wealth and love as if you were immortal, patiently and persistently — and pursue religion as if Death himself had seized you by the hair.12
The thing you are told to hurry over is the one ranked first. The two you may take your time on are the two you will spend your life doing. That is a working schedule rather than a contradiction, and it assumes a reader who intends to do all three.
What is real — and wealth is not money. Artha means wealth in all its forms, and the list is wider than a modern one. The Kamasutra defines it as the acquisition and increase of things as intangible as learning, as personal as friends, and as concrete as land, gold, cattle, grain, household goods and furnishings.13 It also says where to learn about it: from a treatise of royal administration called The Duties of Overseers, and from merchants and others conversant in economics.
How the definition is built, in three steps. The text does it in two compact lines:
The source of the livelihood (vritti) of men is wealth (artha), in other words, the earth inhabited by human beings. The science which is the means of the acquisition and protection of the earth is Arthashastra. (15.1.1–2)14
Livelihood, then the inhabited earth that produces it, then the taking and holding of that earth. Wealth arrives at kingship in three moves, and the reason is taxation: what makes a king the highest form of wealth is his power to tax the productive people living on ground he possesses.
What a person is, when that person is a king. A farmer, a miner, a manufacturer, and the referee. He taxes farmers and farms his own land. He acquires and cares for cattle, horses and elephants, works mines, extracts forest products, manufactures weapons for the army, and makes cloth on a large scale for the royal household and for sale in the market.15 Unlike a private entrepreneur he is also the keeper of law and order, taxing and regulating everybody else's undertakings — so he competes with some of his subjects and partners with others while judging the disputes of both.
How people should relate — economics and politics are not two things. These days they are demarcated as separate domains, and in the concept of artha they were one. The science of wealth is the science of politics, and vice versa; artha is rajya, and Arthashastra is its science.16 Trautmann's warning follows from that and is worth keeping: pull the economic parts out and drop the rest, and you have not been faithful to the logic of the text.
How you know — and what a successful book does to its ancestors. Books in ancient India were copied one by one onto palm leaf, and a book survived only by being recopied in an unbroken chain as older manuscripts wore out. An outstanding book therefore killed the books it surpassed, because nobody copied those any more.17 The Arthashastra names several earlier authorities — Bharadvaja, Vishalaksha, Pishuna, Kaunapadanta, Vatavyadhi — and several named schools, and not one of those earlier works survives. It says so itself in its opening line: this single Arthashastra has been prepared mostly by bringing together as many Arthashastras as have been composed by ancient teachers.
What makes things happen at the level of the record. Survival by recopying, and then the same mechanism running in reverse. The Arthashastra was not surpassed by any later arthashastra, so it kept being copied. But the Laws of Manu took its two new topics — the duties of the king, and the eighteen headings of the law of transactions — from the arthashastra tradition and treated kingship more religiously and less practically.18 Manu's success may have eclipsed the readership for the more detailed and practical book. The evidence is a count: seven manuscripts of the Arthashastra, against thousands upon thousands of Manu.
What is real, in the moral register, and it is the flattest thing in the book. Liquor, butcher shops, courtesans and gambling are considered quite the norm of kingship and dealt with in a matter-of-fact manner, without moralizing.19 The king takes a share of the animals brought to the slaughterhouse and organises the traffic in liquor so as to make it a durable and respectable source of income. He participates in some of these trades himself, taxes them, and keeps them from wrecking social order by regulating them. The stigma that other texts attach to the southern country is not in evidence either — the southern trade route is rated superior because it carries better goods.
The shape of time, and who this book was written for. A brahmin working for a real kingdom, not as royal chaplain but as minister or adviser on practical, secular matters of administration, diplomacy and war.20 The prince is one intended audience — arthashastra is recited to him daily as part of his education — and the other is the class of brahmin ministers who wrote such books and the sons and students who would hold office after them. The stream of texts existed to perpetuate a class and its special knowledge as a preparation for office.
How you know when it was written, and the answer is disputed. The text never mentions Chandragupta, the Mauryan Empire, or Pataliputra, and the kingdom it presupposes is of modest size rather than an empire.21 Against a Mauryan date sit the goods: China silk, whose name could not exist before 221 BCE; red coral from Alexandria; the pearls of south India; and Parasamudra for Sri Lanka, a name Greek sailors pick up in the first century. Kangle, whose knowledge of the text was unsurpassed, favoured a Mauryan date; Goyal concluded the evidence proves it post-Mauryan. What both sides agree on is that the tradition behind it is older than either.
And one doctrine that is certainly old. Four means the king may use when dealing with another state: conciliation, gifts, sowing dissension, and force.22 Kautilya found that already in the texts before him.
Read: lines 312–518.
How people should relate, and there are exactly two ways. The kingdom, rajya, and the republic, sangha. A whole book of the Arthashastra is given to republics, and the assessment of them is put from the king's side:
The gain of a republic is the best among gains of an army and an ally. For, republics being closely knit are unassailable for their enemies. He should win over those of them who are friendly with conciliation and gifts, and those hostile through dissention and force. (11.1.1–3)23
What a republic is made of. Political power spread broadly across a warrior class whose members debate and decide public affairs in assembly. Because decision-making is shared, solidarity is strong, and each member takes responsibility for the well-being of the whole. That has a direct payoff in fighting spirit — and its tendency is defensive rather than offensive.
The text distinguishes two kinds. The Kambojas, Surashtras, Kshatriyas, Shrenis and others live by agriculture and warfare. The Licchivikas, Vrijikas, Mallakas, Madrakas, Kukuras, Kurus, Panchalas and others live by the title of raja.24 The first are peasant-warriors. The second are a warrior class who call themselves rajas, with servants and slaves to work the land — so a republic is not the absence of kingship but the plural of it, and a kingdom is what you get when several rulers are concentrated into one family line.
What a kingdom buys with that concentration, and what it pays. It buys a complex division of labour, a much greater capacity to mobilise money, larger armies, magnificent palaces, and an unlimited urge to conquer, absorb and tax. What it pays is a list of standing costs no republic carries: guarding the king's person, the strain on family relations, the danger of army takeover, the peculation of officials, and the upkeep of the spy establishment.25
What is real — the world is full of poison, and the birds know first. The concern for the king's body reaches down into ornithology:
The parrot, the starling or the fork-tailed shrike shrieks when there is fear of snakes or poison. In the proximity of poison, the heron becomes frantic, the pheasant becomes faint, the intoxicated cuckoo dies, the eyes of the chakora bird become discoloured. (1.20.7–8)26
A palace is a place where a cuckoo dying is information. The birds are not there for their song and they are not pets. They are instruments, and each species reports in its own way — one shrieks, one goes frantic, one goes faint, one changes colour in the eye.
Where a king is most in danger, stated as a list of dead men. He should visit the queen only after old women have cleared her, and then the precedents are given:
For, concealing himself in the queen's chamber, Bhadrasena was killed by his brother, and Karusha was killed by his son, concealed in his mother's bed. The king of Kashi was killed by the queen, mixing fried grain with poison under the guise of honey; Vairantya was killed by the queen with an anklet smeared with poison; the king of the Sauviras with a poison-smeared girdle-jewel; Jalutha with a poison-smeared mirror; Viduratha was killed by the queen who concealed a weapon in the braid of her hair. (1.20.14–16)27
What a person is, when that person is your son. A fresh object that absorbs whatever it is smeared with. Earlier authorities had proposed silent punishment, confinement, exile to a frontier fortress, lodging with the mother's kin, or letting the prince indulge in vulgar pleasure so he does not turn on his father. Kautilya rejects every one of them and reverses the last completely, prescribing religious ritual and education in practical affairs by experts.28
And the sharpest thing in the chapter is an argument against testing him. The Ambhiyas advised planting a secret agent to tempt the prince with hunting, gambling, wine and women and say attack your father and seize the kingdom, with a second agent to dissuade him. Kautilya's answer:
This awakening of one not awake is highly dangerous, says Kautilya. A fresh object absorbs whatever it is smeared with. Similarly the prince, immature in intellect, understands as the teaching of the shastra whatever he is told. Therefore, he should instruct him in what conduces to dharma and artha, and not what is harmful. (1.17.28–30)28
A loyalty test creates the disloyalty it was looking for. The king's officials do get tested — by religion, gain, lust and fear — and the tests are known to carry risk. For the prince the risk is total, because the idea being tested for is one he does not yet have.
What makes things happen, and it is the hardest thing in the kingdom to see. Money leaving. The text has three images for it, in a row:
It is not possible not to taste honey or poison placed on the tongue; just so, it is not possible for one dealing with the money of the king not to taste the money, if only a little. We cannot know when a fish swimming in water is drinking water; just so, we cannot know when officers appointed for carrying out works are appropriating money. It is possible to know the path of birds flying in the sky, but not the ways of officers moving with their intentions concealed. (2.10.32–34)29
Forty different kinds of embezzlement are then listed, most of them falsification of accounts.30 Written record-keeping was necessary for a complex kingdom to run at all. It is also one more surface on which a theft can be hidden. The book asks for accurate written records everywhere and never claims they solve the problem.
How you know what is happening in your own country. Officials tell a king what he wants to hear, so he needs a second channel. The answer is a large establishment of spies working under disguise — student, wandering monk or nun, farmer, trader, religious hermit, poisoner, fighter — on the payroll to gather information.31 They do not only gather it. They also work up favourable feeling toward the ruler among the people and carry out the king's silent punishments.
How power is prevented from concentrating in the one place it must not. By splitting it. The kingdom exists because power is concentrated in one man, and a large army under a single command is therefore the standing threat — there is a tradition that the last Mauryan emperor was killed by his general while reviewing the troops.32 So the force assigned to a fort is to have several commanders. The concentration of royal power is protected by dividing military power.
What is worth having when everything is lost. A hole in the ground on the border of the country. He should cause a permanent treasure to be buried by persons condemned to death, as a provision against calamity. (2.5.4)33 What happens to the condemned men is not said, because it does not need to be said. They are killed, and the value of the treasure is that it is secret.
The shape of time — the day, and it is relentless. Eight parts to the day and eight to the night, each about an hour and a half. Military measures and accounts; the affairs of city and country; bath, meal, study; receiving revenue and assigning tasks; ministers and the reports of spies; recreation or consultations; reviewing elephants, horses, chariots and soldiers; military plans with the commander. Then the night: secret agents; bath, meal, study; three parts asleep; awake to study the shastra and preview the day; council and dispatch of agents; blessings from priests and gurus, and the physician, chief cook and astrologer.34 Then a circumambulation round a cow with calf and a bull, and into the assembly hall.
And the ideal that schedule serves. A rajarshi, a king who is a sage — casting out lust, anger, greed, pride, arrogance and foolhardiness, and leading a life of self-control in the midst of luxury.35 Not a life of pleasure and ease. Constant labour, and asceticism inside unparalleled wealth.
Read: lines 519–720.
What is worth having, laid out as four storehouses. The granary, which holds foodstuff rather than only grain; the store of kupya, raw materials; the armoury; and the treasury.36 There is also a storehouse for goods, a room for merchandise and medicine, pens for cattle and stables for horses and elephants — and, oddly, the director of stores also builds the prison, perhaps because he knows how to construct a secure building, or because prisoners have to be fed out of the granary.
What the granary is for, and it is two things. Supplying the palace and the army, and one other. From his granary the king should set apart one half for the people in the countryside in times of distress, and use the other half. And he should replace old stock with new. (2.15.22–23)37 Half the national store, held permanently against a famine that has not arrived. Nothing is issued to the public in ordinary times, so this is not a welfare system — it is insurance, and the size of the reserve is the measure of how uncertain the food supply was.
What a person is, expressed as a quantity of rice. The milling ratio decides the eater. From five dronas of paddy: twelve adhakas of low-grade husked rice feeds a young elephant, eleven a mature elephant, ten riding elephants, nine war elephants, eight soldiers, seven chiefs, six queens and princes, five the king.38 Broken grains go to slaves, workers, cook's helpers, and lesser animals — ducks, geese, goats, sheep, cattle.
One scale runs from the king down through the livestock without a break in it. The rations for people work the same way: an upper-caste male gets a set measure of rice, curry, salt and butter; for lower castes the curry and the fat are cut; for women it is a quarter less; for children a half. Quality tracks status and quantity tracks body size, and both are read off the same table.
What is real, in the storehouse of raw materials. Twenty-one hardwoods, eight reeds, five creepers, seven fibre plants, two rope fibres, three leaves, three flowers, four categories of medicinal plant, and sixteen poisons — plus the poisonous snakes and insects that make up the group of poisons.39 Then the body parts:
Skin, bones, bile, tendons, eyes, teeth, horns, hooves and tails of the lizard, seraka, leopard, bear, dolphin, lion, tiger, elephant, buffalo, chamara, srimara, rhinoceros, bison and gavaya, and also of other species of deer, beasts, birds and wild animals. (2.17.13)39
The chapter on the armoury follows immediately, which is the first sign of what the list is for. Coats of mail are made of metal rings or plates, of fabric, and of combinations of skin, hooves and horns of dolphin, rhinoceros, dhenuka, elephant and bull. Hilts are made of rhino or buffalo horn, or elephant tusk.
How people should relate, and it is a ladder made of pearls. The treasury's gems begin with pearls, described at greater length than anything else in the inventory. Five varieties of pearl string, then the necklaces made of multiple strings — starting at the top with the Indracchanda of 1,008 strings, then 504, sixty-four, fifty-four, thirty-two, twenty-seven, twenty-four, twenty, ten, and finally the single string.40 Whether a necklace of 1,008 strings ever existed is beside the point. It is the largest imaginable object, and it is the ruler against which every lesser necklace is measured.
What makes things happen in the luxury trade. Distance and rarity. Red coral is not found in Indian waters at all and comes from Alakanda, which is Alexandria in Roman Egypt.41 Pliny reports the two halves of the same circuit: coral gems are prized by Indian men as much as large Indian pearls by Roman women, and coral had become so scarce in Gaul, where it once decorated swords and shields, that it was rarely seen in its native place. Indian seers considered coral a powerful amulet against danger, so it was beautiful and protective at once, and it is still one of the nine gems today.
What is real by omission, and it is at your feet. Pottery gets one short line in the whole book: vessels are made of split-bamboo cane and of clay.42 Not because pots were rare. Because they were so common and cheap they were taken for granted — the same pottery that lies in uncountable broken pieces on the surface of every long-settled site in India, and that archaeologists use to date everything.
Textiles, equally necessary, get treated at length in two places: as luxury goods in the treasury, and as the spinning and weaving operations the king's officials run. The difference is not usefulness. It is whether a thing can be made costly and fine enough to mark somebody out.
What a horse is, and it is a diplomatic instrument. India has no wild horses, so every horse in every age is imported and expensive, and effectively monopolised by the king and the warrior class. The overseer's register makes the point:
The Superintendent of Horses is responsible for registering the total number of horses, received as gifts, acquired by purchase, obtained in war, bred in the stables, received in return for help, stipulated in a treaty or temporarily borrowed, according to their pedigree, age, colour, marks, class and source. (2.30.1)43
Only one of those seven modes of acquisition is a market. The grades of horse are named by where they come from — the best from Kamboja, Sindhu, Aratta and Vanayu, the middling from Bahika, Papeya, Sauvira and Titala, and the rest are inferior.
And what an elephant is. The thing battles are won with. Victory in battle for a king depends principally on elephants. For elephants, possessing very big-sized bodies and being capable of life-destroying activities, pound the troops, battle-arrays, fortresses and camps of enemies. (2.2.13–14)44
Elephants are native, so they are caught wild as adults rather than bred, for a purely economic reason: they eat prodigiously and are not useful until twenty. The grades are named by region as horses are, and here all the regions are Indian — best from Kalinga and Anga, worst from the Punjab, where they no longer exist.
How people should relate between states, priced in animals. Seleucus ceded most of what is now Afghanistan and the Indus valley to Chandragupta and received five hundred elephants in return.45 That is a king-to-king transaction and not a market exchange. From then on the Mauryans were a source of elephants for the Seleucids, and the Greek word for an Indian came to mean elephant-driver.
The shape of time, and it is a very long stability. From the Arthashastra until steam-powered manufacture and transport — nearly two thousand years — the broad outline of India's luxury trade with the rest of the world stayed the same.46 Rome paid for Indian pearls with amber, copper, lead, coral and coined money, and Pliny put the minimum outflow at a hundred million sesterces, so dearly do we pay for our women and our luxuries. The result is large hoards of Roman gold and silver still being dug out of south India and Sri Lanka.
What the whole inventory is, once you stand back from it. A king's list, not a country's. It leaves out kitchen knives, iron plough points and clay water pots, and concentrates on articles of high value needed for war, for diplomacy, and for displaying the king's primacy.47 A merchant's inventory of the same century, if one had survived, would look completely different. This is not a neutral record. It is a picture with a purpose.
Read: lines 721–989.
Everything above is sourced to the chapters named. Everything below is built rather than found, and is not measured by assessgate.sh.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, and six named authorities argued for it. How to handle a prince who might turn on you. Bharadvaja said punish him silently. Vishalaksha said confine him to one place. The Parasharas said send him to a frontier fortress; Pishuna, to a distant prince's fortress; Kaunapadanta, to his mother's kin. Vatavyadhi said let him drown in vulgar pleasure so he never becomes hostile.28
Kautilya calls the last one a living death and a danger to the family, and rejects all six. Every one of the rejected options is a form of removal — get the prince away, or get him incapable. His replacement is the only option on the list that assumes the prince will one day be competent and in the room: ritual, and education in practical affairs by experts, with friendly agents keeping the king informed.
The reasoning behind the rejection is the transferable part. A fresh object absorbs whatever it is smeared with. A test that proposes disloyalty is not a neutral measurement, because the proposal is itself the instruction. Against a seasoned official the test measures something real. Against a man who has not yet had the thought, it plants it.
[SPECULATIVE]Protect a single point of failure by splitting the thing that could break it. The kingdom's whole advantage is concentrated command, and its whole exposure is a general with a concentrated army — so the garrison of a fort gets several commanders. Applies when the asset you cannot decentralise is the decision-making, and the asset you can is the means of enforcement. Fails in a real emergency, which is exactly when several commanders is the wrong number, and is why the arrangement has to be paid for in slower response every day it is not needed. Decision type: power consolidation.
Bury the fallback where its existence is the only thing protecting it. The permanent treasure on the border is dug by men who are executed afterwards, and its value is stated as its secrecy. Applies when a reserve must survive the total loss of the institution that holds it, so that no register, no guard and no successor can be relied on. Fails completely on the first generation that does not know where it is — which is the same property that makes it safe, and the reason the folklore about Dhanananda's lost treasure in the Ganga is what it is. Decision type: strategic retreat.
[SPECULATIVE]An inventory tells you who wrote it. Read the storehouse lists and the shape of the state falls out of them: pearls at enormous length, pottery in one clause, no kitchen knives at all, and a milling table that runs from war elephants down to the king without a break. Applies when you want the priorities of an institution rather than its stated aims — what gets counted, and at what resolution, is harder to falsify than a mission statement. Fails as a picture of the economy, which is Trautmann's own point: the absence of pots means the author did not care about pots, not that there were few. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
[SPECULATIVE]A Nahua advisor on the tribute in elephants. In the Mexica arrangement, a conquered town could be taxed in sacrifice victims — which forced its chief either to make constant war on his neighbours or send his own people's children to the stone. See What the Nahuas Took For Granted, Chapters 1–4. The tribute was designed to be self-perpetuating: paying it required the payer to keep fighting.
From that seat, the Seleucid arrangement looks unusually cheap for the payer and unusually expensive for the receiver. Chandragupta gives up five hundred elephants and gets Afghanistan and the Indus valley. Elephants are native, caught wild as adults, and cost him twenty years of nothing to acquire; the territory is farmland with taxpayers on it, and it produces every year. A Nahua reading would say the Greeks bought a consumable with an appreciating asset — and that the Mauryans, unlike the Mexica, took the payment in a form that left the other party able to come back and buy more.
Where the two systems converge is on the point neither states: both prefer to be paid in something the payer has to keep producing. The Mexica took children and got a permanent war. The Mauryans took land and got a permanent tax base. The difference is which one compounds.