Indian · -375–-283
Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, is traditionally identified as the Brahmin adviser who helped Chandragupta Maurya overthrow the Nanda dynasty around 321 BCE and found the empire that would run most of the Indian subcontinent. The Arthashastra, the treatise on statecraft attributed to him, was lost for centuries and rediscovered in 1905 when a Tamil pandit handed a palm-leaf manuscript to the Mysore Oriental Research Institute. Scholars disagree about whether one man wrote it; the text as it survives shows layers from the first to the third century CE compiled around an older core. What is not in dispute is its content: a complete manual for running a state, covering taxation, spies, famine relief, mining, prostitution licences, poison detection, and when to assassinate a rival. Indian political thought and modern strategic studies both treat him as a founding figure, and his name is attached to India's diplomatic quarter in Delhi.