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control the “Roman” robots. Emperor Asoka now commands a large
robot army himself.
In some versions, the whirling guardian automata are driven by a
waterwheel or some other mechanism. In one tale, the engineer god
Visvakarman helps Asoka, destroying the robots by shooting arrows
precisely into the bolts that hold the spinning constructions together. 49
The motif of cleverly disabling the mechanical guardians calls to mind
the techno- witch Medea’s destruction of the bronze robot Talos, when
he threatened to kill Jason and the Argonauts, by removing the crucial
bolt in his ankle (chapter 1).
The “science- fiction” saga of the Roman robots guarding Buddha’s
relics highlights the fear of losing control of artificial beings, an age- old
theme that appeared in the Greek myth of the sown dragon- teeth army
(chapter 4). “Robots can turn on their makers and kill them,” notes Signe
Cohen in her study of ancient Indian automata. But the story raises more
challenging questions. “Did such technology,” she asks, “really exist or
are these stories simply religious myths and folktales?”50
The story clearly relates the mechanical beings defending Buddha’s
relics to advanced automata inventions that originated in Roma- visaya,
the Greco- Roman West. These narratives, remarks Daud Ali, seem to
“encode, albeit obliquely, the real movement and circulation of cultures
of ‘techne,’ including both real and imagined objects,” between India
and the West. 51 How ancient is this kernel of historical reality in the lost
Sanskrit tale included in the Lokapannatti? Were the legendary robot
guardians in the stupa modeled solely on working automata created in
the late Byzantine or medieval Islamic and European periods, as scholars
generally assume? Or is it possible that oral lore about the robot guards
could have arisen even earlier, influenced by Indian knowledge of real
Hellenistic mechanical marvels like those created in Ptolemaic Alexan-
dria in the third century BC, the time frame of the Asoka story?
The historical setting of the tale points to technological exchange
about automata between the Mauryan emperors of India and Hellenistic
kings. Evidence from history and archaeology confirms cultural contact
by the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Notably, the ancient Jain texts, men-
tioned above, reported that King Ajatasatru’s engineers were construct-
ing military machines in the fifth century BC. Greco-Buddhist syncretism