Introduction
Brihadratha Maurya was the last ruler of the Maurya dynasty, whose assassination by his own military commander brought roughly a century and a half of Maurya rule to an end.
Family
- No further family relationships recorded in this tree.
The Dynasty's End
Brihadratha was assassinated by Pushyamitra Shunga, his own commander-in-chief, who then founded the succeeding Shunga dynasty in Magadha — an abrupt and violent transition that later Buddhist sources sometimes frame, with likely partisan exaggeration, as motivated partly by Pushyamitra's hostility toward the Mauryas' continued association with Buddhism, though the episode's precise causes remain debated among historians working from limited and not entirely disinterested surviving sources.
This article records the Maurya Empire (c. 4th-2nd century BCE) as historical genealogy reconstructed from Ashoka's own rock and pillar edicts, Greek and Latin accounts of contact with the Mauryas, and later Buddhist, Jain and Puranic traditions composed well after the events they describe; where these traditions genuinely disagree, that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into invented certainty.