{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours","title":"Chanakya's 40 Ways to Steal: How Ancient India's Most Dangerous Book Catalogued Every Way to Rob a Government, and How a Librarian Found It Again Eight Hundred Years After It Vanished","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1156,"description":"In 1905, a young Sanskrit scholar named Rudrapatna Shamasastry was working through a heap of palm leaf manuscripts in the Mysore Oriental Library, doing the kind of routine cataloguing work a librarian does every day.Then he opened one written in the Grantha script, and the words stopped being routine.He was holding the Arthashastra. Chanakya's lost political treatise, written for the Mauryan Empire roughly twenty four centuries earlier. A book European scholars believed might never have survived, because it had vanished from circulation sometime around the 12th century and had not been seen by a single scholar anywhere on earth for nearly eight hundred years.Buried inside its second book is a chapter Chanakya titled, with characteristic bluntness, Detection of Embezzlement by Government Officials. In it, the man who helped build one of the largest empires in the ancient world catalogued, in exhaustive detail, exactly forty distinct ways a government treasury official could steal from the state.This episode tells the story of that chapter, the empire it was written to protect, and the librarian who rescued it from eight centuries of silence.What You Will Discover in This EpisodeThe complete story of Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, who helped a young Chandragupta Maurya build the first great political unification of the Indian subcontinent around 321 BCE, and his likely connection to the ancient university of TakshashilaThe forty distinct embezzlement techniques catalogued in Book Two, Chapter Eight of the Arthashastra, including mismatched gift records, phantom recipients and unrecorded raw materials, described with a precision that reads like a modern forensic accounting textbookChanakya's investigative method of separately interrogating every official connected to a suspicious transaction, the treasurer, the authoriser, the receiver, the payer, to prevent coordinated false testimony, a principle still used in fraud investigations todayThe honest limitation...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/eWrZ3doNBWF40S0S56sC17IDwfhLRtHiDkqKOrNCvtA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Yjg5/Y2Q3ODM2NzZkOTcz/NGJiMWMwMDEzMTFl/YjI3NC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}