Introduction
Pushyamitra Shunga was commander-in-chief of the last Maurya emperor, Brihadratha, whom he assassinated in order to seize power and found the succeeding Shunga dynasty.
Family
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Founder of a New Dynasty
Pushyamitra's coup ended nearly a century and a half of Maurya rule and established the Shunga dynasty, which would go on to rule much of the former Maurya heartland in northern India for roughly the next century. His reign is also associated by some later Buddhist sources with hostility toward Buddhist institutions, in a sharp reversal from the strong imperial patronage Buddhism had enjoyed under Ashoka, though the extent and nature of any actual persecution remains a matter of historical debate given the partisan character of the sources describing it.
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.