English: Maurya Empire conceptualized as a network of cities. Based on File:Maurya Empire, c.250 BCE.png, which was made by Avantiputra7.

Uncontrolled areas Original map, with large uncontrolled areas, based on:

• Kulke and Rothermund, A History of India. Network based on Smith (2005), Networks, Territories, and the Cartography of Ancient States, Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 95 (4): 832–849.

Neywork of core areas and trade and communication routes
Maurya Empire as a network of core areas connected by communication and trade routes:

• Smith (2005), Networks, Territories, and the Cartography of Ancient States" (PDF). Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 95 (4): 832–849
• Coningham and Young (2015), The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka, c.6500 BCE–200 CE, Cambridge University Press, following Smith's example.

Gedrosia

• Ceded territory of Gedrosia based on Smith (1914) and Tarn (1922), who limit the ceded territory to the Malin mountain range (Hingol river).
• Kosmin, Paul J. (2014), The Land of the Elephant Kings Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire, Harvard University Press, p.16: "Desert of Gedrosia [...] was left an unclaimed wilderness."

Lower Indus Valley

• Coningham & Young, p.452-453, question the extent of control over the lower Indus Valley and eastern Afghanistan, noting that "a growing number of of researchers would now agree that the Ashokan edicts may have represented 'an area of maximum contact rather than streamlined bureacrayic control'."
• Allchin, F. R. (1995). "The Mauryan State and Empire". In Allchin, F. R. (ed.). The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States. Cambridge University Press. pp. 183–221; p.208 also notes the absence of major cities in the lower Indus valley.
• Malcolm Robert Haig (1894), The Indus Delta Country: A Memoir, Chiefly on Its Ancient Geography and History, p.24: "the general rising of the northern peoples headed by Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya dynasty of Pataliputra, followed in rapid succession. The Lower Indus Valley now became free from foreign rule, and the local chiefs were no doubt left to their own devices. Nominally the territory may have been a dependency of the Mauryan kingdom, but, separated from the main body of that kingdom by a wide expanse of desert, and at a vast distance from the capital on the Ganges, its tie of allegiance must have been of the slightest. This independence, or semi-independence, lasted under no doubt varying degrees of definiteness […] till […] Demetrius, in the second century B.C., invaded Patalene in force and completely subjected it to Bactria."

Gujarat

• Chakrabarty (2010), p.29: "We are assuming that the basic historical-geographical configuration of the Magadhan power was achieved before the beginning of the Maurya dynasty, whose founder Chandragupta Maurya simply added to it the stretch from the Indus valley to the southern foot of the Hindukush, giving the Mauryan India a strong foothold in the Oxus to the Indus interaction zone of Indian history. The evidence is in some cases, as in the cases of Gujarat, Bengal, and Assam, shadowy, but if Chandragupta had undertaken expeditions in these directions, there would have been echoes of these expeditions in the literary traditions."

Traditionial map

For 'traditional' maps, which exaggerate the territory of the Mauryan empire, see File:Ashoka Maurya Empire.png, which has a neat overview of sources and maps describing and portraying this 'maximalized extent'.