322 BC

Chandragupta Maurya

Chandragupta takes Magadha from the Nandas

A chronicle written centuries later compresses the transfer of power into a single brutal sentence: Chanakya had the ninth Nanda killed, then anointed Chandragupta king.

The overthrow, as later texts tell it

In the late fourth century BCE — by convention 322 BCE — the last Nanda ruler lost Magadha and Chandragupta became its king, founding the Maurya dynasty in a kingdom whose royal centre is conventionally identified with Pataliputra.

The Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicle Mahavamsa says the Brahman Canakka — Chanakya — had the ninth Nanda, Dhanananda, killed and then anointed Candagutta as king.

Beyond that one attributed sentence, the surviving evidence does not establish the detailed course of the Nanda overthrow.

322, 321, or somewhere in a wider range

322 BCE is conventional rather than independently fixed. The accession is variously dated to 324, 322/321, 320/319, or later still.

No contemporary narrative of the overthrow survives at all. The Mahavamsa, Jain legends, Justin's Latin epitome and the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa are all much later and disagree on chronology, ancestry and sequence.

Even the order of events is open: whether Chandragupta took Magadha before or after campaigning against Macedonian power in the northwest is not established.

Durdhara and the unnamed Nanda princess

The listed marriage claim does not survive scrutiny. Durdhara is named in Hemachandra's twelfth-century Jain text as Bindusara's mother; a separate tradition mentions an unnamed Nanda daughter, and nothing securely identifies the two as the same woman or makes her Dhana Nanda's sister.

Chanakya's own role rests on those later literary traditions rather than on any contemporary record, and his identification with Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra, has long been debated.

Justin's later account surrounds Chandragupta's rise with a lion and a self-presenting elephant.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~-322.

What the sources leave uncertain

The accession is variously dated to 324, 322/321, 320/319 or later; 322 BCE is conventional rather than independently fixed.
No contemporary narrative of the overthrow survives. The Mahavamsa, Jain legends, Justin’s epitome and the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa are much later and differ in chronology, ancestry and sequence.
The identification of Chanakya with Kautilya and the connection of the Arthashastra to Chandragupta’s minister have long been debated.
The title’s marriage claim is not established: a twelfth-century Jain text separately mentions an unnamed Nanda daughter and a queen called Durdhara, but does not securely identify them as the same person or call her Dhana Nanda’s sister.