Almost every ancient ruler reaches us through other people. Ashoka is the rare exception, because he had his own proclamations cut into rock faces and onto polished sandstone pillars, and enough of them survive to fill a book. They run from Kandahar in modern Afghanistan to Karnataka in the south, in Brahmi and Kharosthi script, in Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, and in Greek and Aramaic where he was addressing populations who read them.
They were unreadable for most of two thousand years. James Prinsep, working in Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837 and found a king who never gives a personal name in the great majority of the inscriptions, calling himself only Devanampiya Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods, He Who Looks On With Affection. The identification with the Ashoka of Buddhist tradition rested for decades on Sri Lankan chronicles until a minor rock edict discovered at Maski in 1915 used the two together, and further copies at Gujarra and Nittur confirmed it.
The result is a text that behaves like no other ancient royal record. It is addressed to subjects rather than to gods or posterity, it repeats itself deliberately so the message survives copying, and it instructs officials to have it read aloud on fixed days. The pillar at Lumbini records that the king came in person, worshipped, and cut the village's tax rate, which is at once a religious act, an administrative order and a receipt.