Ashoka’s edicts are the oldest state documents renouncing violence against children.

Evidence

This is — and I want to flag what this is — the earliest surviving state document, in any language, in which a ruler explicitly identifies the harm to children of state violence as the central reason to renounce that violence. It is forty-five centuries before the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is, in my reading, one of the great texts of the human moral inheritance. And it has been sitting on the rocks of Pakistan, Kashmir, and southern India the whole time. — , The Rod and the Child, 838

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis of nudging historical claims about child punishment and to the running theme of selective reception of silence/nonviolence texts.
• SEED: An essay angle: how a 2,300-year-old Indian edict undercuts the standard Lockean ‘human rights as a Western invention’ genealogy.