No material culture ever evolves in void. And no space can be said to remain neutral to the developments of a material culture within it. The history of the book confirms it in many respects.

In order for the social practices of reading to be constituted over a specific historical period and space, some written objects must be circulated throughout this very space. Even though in a metaphorical sense, we can think or speak of a ‘memorized book’ and accordingly of reading from such a book, especially since certain regional Brahmin communities actually embodied the transmission of the Veda, it is the material form of the book with which I am predominantly concerned here. Accordingly, the memory-orality-performance complex, essential for an understanding of Vedic textuality as a specific type, shall be examined here from the point of view of its material and spatial situatedness and the consequences of this.

To the bewilderment of the first explorers of the remnants of the socalled Maurya empire, around the time of Emperor Aśoka, in the middle of the 3rd century BC, the initial finds of rock and pillar inscriptions turned out to represent a network of inscribed objects distributed over a huge area of subcontinental scale, from the present southern Karnaṭaka state in the south to the present Afghanistan in the north-west. Although they by no means can be regarded as books, we can hardly deny their medial dimension. The network of inscriptions set up within an apparently single project, spanning a relatively short period of time, appears to have had the function of communicating a cultural-political message of ‘an empire on the rise’ to a variety of different peoples inhabiting the vast tracts of the Indian subcontinent. To put into effect this earlier unprecedented and never- -seen-before enterprise, the imperial chancellery of Aśoka had to invent and standardize a system of writing and deploy a communication network that could distribute and display in stone inscription what must have been actually composed several hundred miles away by the chancellery professionals in Aśoka's capital in Pataliputra.