Ashoka
c. 304 BC – 232 BC · 72 years · Pataliputra · Asia
United almost all of India but, shocked by the Kalinga war, embraced Buddhism and spread it across Asia.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 3rd century BC
Portrait: Photo Dharma from Sadao, Thailand · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Contemporaries around the world
Europe
- Archimedes — mathematician, physicist and engineer, 17 years younger
- Pytheas — Greek navigator and geographer, 46 years older
Africa
- Hannibal — Carthaginian general, 57 years younger
- Eratosthenes — scholar, head of the Library of Alexandria, 28 years younger
- Euclid — ancient Greek mathematician, 21 years older
- Arsinoe II — queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, 12 years older
- Ptolemy I Soter — founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, 63 years older
Asia
- Qin Shi Huang — first emperor of China, 45 years younger
- Liu Bang (Emperor Gaozu of Han) — founder of the Han dynasty, 48 years younger
- Mencius — Chinese Confucian philosopher, 68 years older
- Qu Yuan — Chinese poet and minister, 36 years older
- Zhuangzi — Chinese Taoist philosopher, 65 years older
The world in their lifetime
- c. 300 BC Maya script — aged 4, Americas
- c. 285 BC Library of Alexandria — aged 19, Africa
- c. 261 BC Kalinga War — aged 43, Asia