Ashoka invented the royal-victory inscription genre as renunciation rather than glorified violence.

Evidence

This is not what victorious ancient kings, in other surviving documents, do. The Assyrian victory inscriptions of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal — closely contemporary at the imperial scale — boast about the heaps of skulls. The Egyptian victory inscriptions of Ramesses and Thutmose — the same. The Roman triumphal inscriptions, centuries later — the same. The genre of the ancient royal-victory inscription is the genre of glorified violence. Ashoka invented a different genre. He took the medium of the carved stone royal monument and used it for renunciation. That is culturally unprecedented. It is, in my reading, the single most important cultural innovation in the entire history of state-level public communication. — , The Rod and the Child, 851