At
that season of the year the hill-country must have been bitterly cold, and
probably to some extent under snow.
that season of the year the hill-country must have been bitterly cold, and
probably to some extent under snow.
Cambridge History of India - v1
C.
, the city of Takshaçilā (Taxila), long
eminent among the cities of India as a great seat of learning. In the year
327 it was the capital of a rāja, whose principality lay between the Indus
and its tributary the Jhelum (the ancient Vitastā, the Hydaspes of the
Greeks)'. Like Rāwalpindi to day, Takshaçilā guarded the chief gate of
India from the north-west: it was the first great Indian city at which
1 Although the courses of the great rivers of the Punjab have greatly changed in
historical times and are still changing, their names may be traced with certainty from
the Age of the Rigveda down to the present day. Those which are chiefly important
in the history of Alexander's Indian campaign are :
Ancient Indian
Greek Latin
Modern
Sindhu.
'Ivobs,
Indus.
Indus.
Kubhā.
Κωφην,
Cophen.
Kābul,
Suvāstu.
Σοαστος, Soastus.
Vitastā.
‘ydàrins, Hydaspes.
Jhelum.
Asikni, later Chandrabhāgā. ’Aksoivre, Acesines.
Chenāb.
Parushṇī, later Irāvati.
'yogantys, Hydrates
Rāvi.
Vipāç, later Vipācā.
"Ύφασις, Hyphasis.
Beās
Çutudri.
Zagados, Zaradrus, Hesydrus. Sutlej.
Swat,
309
## p. 310 (#346) ############################################
310
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
merchants who had come down the Kābul Valley and crossed the Indus
about Attock arrived, three days' journey beyond the river. Its ruler was
the first among the kings of the Punjab to hear any tidings which might
come down from the highlands of Afghānistān of events happening behind
those tremendous mountain walls. For many generations now the Punjab
must have had some knowledge of what went on in the dominions of the
King of Kings. For the Persian Empire founded two centuries before by
Cyrus had been a huger realm than had ever, so far as we know, existed in
the world under the hand of one man, and the power and glory of the
man who ruled it, the splendour of Ecbatana and Persepolis, must have
been carried by fame over the neighbouring lands.
The rājas of Takshaçilā must therefore have long lent an ear to the
rumbling of wars and rebellions which came across the western mountains.
They may indeed have known next to nothing of what went on at the
further extremities of the Persian Empire ; for the same realm which at its
utmost extension eastward touched the Indus reached at its other end the
Aegean and Black Seas ; and the great monarchic Empires of the east are
conglomerations too loosely organised for the troubles of one province to
be necessarily felt in the more distant ones. The Indian princes may there-
fore have been ignorant of the fact that the Persian king at the other end of
his realm had come into contact with a singular people settled in a
quantity of little republics over the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula,
along the coasts of Asia Minor, and in the intermediate islands, the people
whom the Persians called collectively Yavanas (Ionians). We do not know
whether it even produced any considerable shock on the banks of the Indus,
when a century and a half before 334 B. c. the Persian king had led his
armies to disaster in the land of the Yavanas, although those armies
included Indian tribesmen torn by Persi
torn by Persian officers from the frontier hills,
whose bones were destined to find their last resting-place on the field of
Plataea thousands of miles away. Of the long struggle which went on for
generations after that between the Yavana republics, especially the one
called Athens, and the western satraps of the Great King perhaps no
rumour was brought down the Kabul valley to Takshaçilā.
But in 334 B. C. and tbe following years the struggle between Persia
and the Yavanas took a turn which must have made talk even in the pala-
ces and bazaars of the Punjab. The Indian princes learnt that a Yavana king
had arisen in the utmost West strong enough to drive the Great King from
his throne. It may be that the western provinces, Asia Minor and Egypt,
were torn away in 331, 333 and 332 B. c. by the invader without yet bring.
ing the Indian princes to realise that so huge a fact in the world as the
Persian Empire was about to vanish. But there can have been no mistaking
the magnitude of the catastrophe, when Darius III was flying northward
for his life, when Alexander had occupied the central seats of government
## p. 311 (#347) ############################################
XV )
FROM KANDHAR TO KĀBUL
311
and set Persepolis on fire (330 B. C. ). If this man from the West was going
to claim the whole heritage of the Achaemenian kings, that would make him
the neighbour of the princes of India. It must have been a concern to
the rāja of Takshaçilā and his fellow-kings to learn in what direction the
victorious Yavana host would move next. And in fact the tidings came
before long that it was moving nearer. When the winter of 330 fell,
it was encamped in Seistān, and with the spring moved to the uplands
which to-day constitute the southern part of Afghānistān. Here the
awe-struck inhabitants, Pashtus probably, ancestors of the modern Afghāns
saw the European strangers set about a work which indicated a resolve
to make themselves at home for all time in these lands won by their
spear. They saw them begin to construct a city after the manner of the
Yavanas at a point commanding the roads; and when the rest of the
host had gone onward, there a body of Europeans remained, established
behind the fresh-built walls. If we may judge by analogies, some thousands
of the native people were induced by force or persuasion to settle side
by side with them in the new city. It was only one of the chain of cities
which marked the track of conquering Hellenism. Like many of the
others, this too was given the name of the conqueror. In the speech of
the Greeks it was known as Alexandria-among-the-Arachosians. To-day
we call it Kandahār.
A mountain barrier still separated the Yavana host at Kandahār
in the summer of 329 from the Kābul valley, that is to say, from the river
system of the Indus. And it would seem that, when the passes filled
with the first winter snows, the Yavanas had not yet crossed it. But the
army led by Alexander was one which defied ordinary obstacles. In
winter, under circumstances that made regular provisioning impossible, by
extraordinary endurance it pushed through the hills and descended into
the Kābul valley. The princes of the Punjab might feel that the outlandish
host stood indeed at the door.
But Alexander, having reached the Kābyl valley in the winter of
329-8, did not make an immediate advance upon India. Beyond the
mountain range which forms the northern side of the valley, the Hindu
Kush, lay the extreme provinces of the old Persian Empire towards the
north-east-Bactria (whose name still survives in the city of Balkh) and the
country now called Bukhāra. Not only were these provinces still unsubdued
but the Persian cause was upheld there by a prince of the old blood royal.
Alexander must beat down that opposition, before he could think of
invading India. He waited therefore for the rest of the winter in the
Kābul valley, till the spring should unblock the passes of the Hindu Kush.
And again here the inhabitants saw the Europeans make preparations
1 γπό “IIλειάδος δνσιν, Strabo, XV, C. 725. .
2 Diod. XVII, 82 ; Curt. VII, 3, 12.
1
## p. 312 (#348) ############################################
312
I ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
for permanent settlement. At the foot of the Hindu Kush, whence three
roads to Bactria radiatel, on the site probably of the still existing village
of Charikār, rose another Alexandria, Alexandria-under-the-Cauca. us. In
support of the Yavana colony to be left in this town, other little settlements
were established at points a day's journey off in what were henceforth to
be Greek towns ; Cartana, noted for the rectangular precision with which
its walls we traced out (modern Begrām, according to Cunningham) and
Cadrusi (Koratas ? ) are names given us. In this case we have an express
statement that 7000 of the people of the land were to be incorporated
as citizens of the new towns with those of Alexander's mercenaries who
cared to settle in this region 2800 miles away from their old home.
Another new city, or old city transformed with a new Greek :ame,
Nicaea, occupied apparently some site between Alexandria and the Kābul
rivers
As soon as the snow was melted enough to make the Khawak Pass
practicable, the Yavan ı arıny trailed up the Panjshir valley, leaving little
bodies of Europeans behind it to hold the Kābul valley under a Persian
satrap and a Macedonian episkopos. The main body of the army once
more contended with the hardships of a passage over the high ridges and
disappeared to the northwards. During the following twelve months (May
328 to May 327) such news of it as reached India showed that the Yavana
king still prevailed against all enemies. As far as the Syr Daria (Jazartes)
the peoples of Eastern Irān were broken before him. In the early spring of
327 he was again moving to the south.
The rāja of Takshaçilā must have realised at this juncture that
a momentous choice lay before him. It may be that the idea of a common
Indian nationality, in whose cause he and his brother kings might stand
together against the stranger, did not even occur to him : India was
too large and too disunited for the mind to embrace it as a unity. But he
might well tremble for his own power, if this new resistless deluge came
bursting into the land. On the other hand it might perhaps be turned to
his account. His policy was largely governed by his antagonism to the rival
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography, p. 24.
2 Diod. XVII, 83 ; Curt. VII, 3, 23, according to the MSS, bas 'vii millibus seni.
orum Macedonum. ' Hedieke in the Teubner text amends this, perhaps too boldiy, as
VII millibus subactarum nationum. '
3 The discussions of Dr Vincent Smith and of Sir Thomas Holdich as to the site
of Nicaea-the former puts it at Jalālābād and the latter at Kābul—are invalidated by
the fact that Nicaea, if we follow Arrian, was not on the river Kābul at all. Alexander
from Nicaea advances towards the Kābul; aơ:kousvos és Nikaiav. . . po-Xúper us ezt
vov Kuova. IV, 22, 6. Mr M-Crindle curiously omits the words in his translation. Not
Nicaea, but some place on the way to the river Kābul, was where the army was divided.
4 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 88.
.
## p. 313 (#349) ############################################
Xv]
THE RAJA OF TAKSHAÇILA
313
prince of the Pauraval house (Porus), who ruled on the other side of the
Hydaspes (Jhelum). The Paurava was indeed a neighbour to be dreaded.
He is described to us as a man of gigantic and powerful build, a warrior-
chief, such as in an unsettled world extends his power by aggressive
ambition and proud courage. He had conceived the idea of building up
for himself a great kingdom, and he was the man to realise it. He had
already made an attempt to crush the free tribes to the east, pushing his
advance even beyond the Hydraotes (Rāvi), in alliance with the raja of
the Abhisāra country (corresponding roughly with the Pūnch and Naoshera
districts in Kashmir) and with many of the free tribes whom he had
drawn into vassalage swelling his army, although the resistance he there
encountered from the Kshatriyas had made him temporarily give backs.
His hand had perhaps also reached westward across the Hydaspes into the
country which the rāja of Takshaçilā considered bis own'. It might well
seem to the rāja of Takshaçilā that, threatened on the one side by the
Paurava and on the other side by the European invader, his safest course
lay in allying himself with the European, riding on the crest of the wave
that would sweep his rival to destruction.
And yet the European host which had emerged out of the unknown
West to shatter the Persian Empire may have appcared too unfamiliar and
incalculable a power to make the decision easy. But, if the rāja hesitated,
his son Āmbhi (Omphis) had a clear opinion as to what the situation
required. He pressed his father to place his principality at the Yavana
king's disposal. While Alexander was still in Bukhāra, Āmbhi began to
negotiate on his own account. Envoys from Takshaçilā made their way
over the ridges of the Hindu Kush. They were charged with the message
that Āmbhi was ready to march by Alexander's side against any Indians
who might refuse to submit. Thus the European, at his first arrival at the
Gates of India, found India divided against itself. It was the hand of an
Indian prince, which unharred the door to the invader.
The summer of 327 B. C. was almost come before the hillmen of the
Hindu Kush saw the Yavana army re-appear on the ridges, cross prob-
ably by the Kushan Pass? , and stream down to the new Alexandria.
The satrap who had been left here was found to have done badly, and
Alexander appointed another in his place, Tyriespes, a Persian like his
predecessor. The population of the city was enlarged by drawing in more
1 Paurava is a title denoting the chief of the Pūrus, a tribe known in Vedic times
(v sup. Chapter IV, pp. 74 f. ).
2 In Greek Kathajoi, see Lassen, vol. II, p. 167. The general designation of the
warrior caste seems to be applied in this case to a particular people.
3 Arrian V, 22.
4 See Anspach, note 125.
5 See Sylvain Levi in Journal Asiatique, &me Serie XV (1890), p. 2341 .
6 'EŠ KOUTOS 987 Tou pos, Arr. IV, 22, 3.
? Strabo XV, Ç 697; Cunningham, Ancient Geography, p. 25.
## p. 314 (#350) ############################################
314
[сн.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
of the people of the land and setting down there more war-worn European
veterans. The work of making a city of Greek type bad really only been
begun, and a Macedonian of high rank, Nicanor', was now appointed to
see it carried through.
The army moved on from Alexandria to Nicaea, where Alexander
sacrificed to the Greek goddess Athena. From Nicaea he sent on a herald
to the rāja of Takshaçilā and the native princes west of the Indus to meet
him in the Kābul Valley. We know of one Indian chief, Çaçigupta
(Sisikottos), already in the conqueror's train. His had been probably
some little hill-state on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, whence he had gone
two years since, to help the Irānians in Bactria against Alexander. When
their cause was lost, he had gone over to the European. Messengers now
summoned the other chieftains of the lower Kābul Valley to meet their
overlord. At Takshaçilā too messengers appeared with the summops. And
the rāja, acting on the policy which his son had espoused so decisively,
rose up to obey.
Encamped in the Kābul Valley at some place not named the rāja of
Takshaçilā saw the hosi destined for the invasion of his mother-land. It
numbered, at the lowest estimate, from twenty-five to thirty thousand
menº -a strangely compounded army, which can only be called European
with qualification. Its strength indeed consisted in the Macedonian regi.
ments, stout yeomen and peasants carrying the long spear of the heavy-
arme I footsoldier, and troops of splendidly disciplined cavalry drawn from
the aristocracy of the country, the Companions' of the national King.
Euro, can too were the thousands of soldiers from the Greek cities, serving
as mercenaries, on foot or mounted, and the contingents of semi-barbarous
hillmen from the Balkans, Agrianes and Thracians, serving as light troops-
slingers. javelineers, and bowmen-invaluable for mountain warfare.
mingled with the Europeans were men of many nations. Here were troops
of horsemen, representing the chivalry of Irān, which had followed
Alexander from Bactria and beyond, Pashtus and men of the Hindu Kush
with their highland-bred horses', Central-Asiatics who could ride and
1 Dr Vincent Smith (Early History of India, 3rd edition, p. 49) seems to be in
error in identifying this Nicanor with the son of Parmenio.
2 The numbers in the ancient texts are often untrustworthy. The estimate in the
text is Delbrück's, Geschichte der Kriegskunst (1900), vol. I, p. 184. Anspach (note 20),
combining Arrian, Ind. 19, 5 with Diod. XVII, 95, reckons the ariny in the Kābul
Valley at about 85,000. Delbrück denies that so large an army with the necessary
camp-followers could have got across the Hindu Kush. This is a point for practical
strategists. Whether Plutarch's number (Alex. 56) is correct or not, he does not say, as
Or. Vincent Smith, p. 49, inadvertently quotes him, that Alexander entered India with
120,000 foot and 15,000 horres, but that Alexander left India with that number.
Reinforcements had been arriving from the West in the meantime,
3 Arr. IV, 17, 3.
4 Ib. V, 11, 3.
## p. 315 (#351) ############################################
XV]
FROM KABUL TO THE INDUS
315
His army
shoot at the same timel; and among the camp-followers one could find
groups representing the older civilisations of the world, Phoenicians inherit-
ing an immemorial tradition of ship-craft and trade, bronzed Egyptians
able to confront the Indians with an antiquity still longer than their own.
There was nothing to arrest this army between the point they had
now reached and the Indus. The local chieftains had indicated their sub-
mission. All along the north side of the Kābul however lay the hills, whose
inhabitants in their rock citadels, in the valleys of the Kūnar, the Panj.
kora, and the Swāt, were unschooled to recognise an overlord, and as pre-
pared to give trouble to anyone who tried to incorporate them in an
imperial system as their Pathān successors of a later day. But it was not
Alexander's way to leave unsubducd regions beside his road.
therefore broke up into two divisions. One, commanded by Hephaestion,
the king's friend, and Perdiccas, the proudest of the Macedonian nobles,
moved to the Indus by the most direct route. This would probably mean
a route along the south bank of the Kābul, whether through the actual
Khyber Pass or not? ; the other, led by the king himself, turned up into
the hills. The two divisions were to rejoin each other upon the Indus;
Hephaestion and Perdiccas, arriving there first, it was calculated would
have made all preparations for the passage of the great river.
The Europeans who had followed Alexander so far into Asia now
entered the region in which the armies of the English operate to-day.
At
that season of the year the hill-country must have been bitterly cold, and
probably to some extent under snow. It was the same hill-country whose
contours and tracks and points of vantage are studied now by British
commanders ; the tough highlander of the Balkans or of Crete climbed and
skirmished with bow and javelin in 327 B. C. where the Scottish highlander
was to climb and skirmish with rifle and bayonet two thousand two
hundred years later. And yet it is impossible to follow the track of
Alexander, over these hills with any precision. We hear of little moun-
tain towns stormed, of others abandoned by their inhabitants. But their
sites cannot be identified. One must however note that at this point Alex-
ander, in an ethnographical sense, entered India ; for these hills, whose
population at the present day is either Afghān or Kāfir, seem then to have
been possessed by Indian tribes. The Açvakas, as their name apparently
was in their native speech, were the first Indian people to receive the brunt
1 16. IV. 24, 1.
2 Dr Vincent Smith says that he did not go by the Khyber and cites Sir Thomas
Holdich in support of the assertion. Sir Thomas in his more recent book, Gates of India
(p. 94), says that he ‘urdoubtedly followed the main route which. . . is sufficiently well
indicated in these days as the “Khaibar". '
3 Metà svo uàs II Letà dwv, Aristobulus ap. Strabo XV, C. 691.
## p. 316 (#352) ############################################
316
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[ch.
of the invasion? . The fighting seems to have been of exceptional ferocity.
At one place, where Alexander was wounded, the whole population was
put to the sword. At another place we hear of a huge massacre, and 40,000
men taken captive. At a third place a body of Indians from the Punjab
had come to help the local chieftain for bire. When the town capitulated, it
was agreed that these mercenaries should transfer their services to Alexan-
der. They encamped on a little hill apart. There, as they talked together,
it seemed to them a horrible thing that they should march with the Yara-
nas against their own people. They determined to slip away, when night
fell, and make across the hills for home. But when night fell, they found
the hill beset on all sides with the soldiers of Alexander ; for some one had
betrayed their design. The Macedonians suffered none of them to live till
morning?
The town with which this incident is connected the Greeks call
Massaga. We know only that it was situated east of the Guraeus river and
apparently not far from the stream. The resistance which the eastern-most
branch of the h. ll-people, those called by the Greeks Assakēnoi, offered
to the invader seems to have been concentrated at this place. All
these tribes, as far as the Indus, recognised as overlord a chief whom the
Greeks call Assakēnos. His organisation for defence included an alliance with
the king of the Abhisāra country beyond the Indus, who sent contingents
to his support3. Assakēnos had himself taken command at Massaga, and
fell there, struck by a missile from one of the European siegemachines'.
His mother and daughter were left in the enemies' hands• ; but it was not
among Alexander's faults to fail in chivalry to the women whom war put
at his mercy.
1 In the Greek accounts a people called Aspasioi are found in Choes (either the
Alishang or Kūnar) Valley and a people called Assakenoi in the Swāt Valley. Both
names are supposed to represent the same Indian name Açvaka, connected with
açia
horse. If so, the two Greek names may be due to local varieties of pronunciation, and
it may be noted that the form Aspasioi would then approximate to Irānian speech, in
which aspa is the equivalent of aqua. Strabo, according to the MSS. (XV, C. 691,
C. 698), calls the Aspasioi Hypasioi ; this is often amended in modern texts to Hippasioi,
on the supposition that the Greeks knew their hippos to be the etymological equivalent
of aspa and attempted a translation. This is extremely unlike the Greek way in these
matters. The confusion is made worse by another people called Astakenoi appearing
in the Pushkalāvati region, whose name is supposed not to be connected etymologically
with that of their neighbours, the Assakenoi.
2 Arr. IV 27 ; Diod. XVII, 84 ; Plut. Alex. 69 ; Polyaen. Strateg. IV, 3, 20.
3 Arr. IV, 27, 7.
4 Arr. IV, 27, 2.
5 Arr. IV, 27, 4.
6 A strange story is given by Justin, XII, 7, 10, that it was the wife of Assakenos
who fell into Alexander's hands and that he had a son by her, who afterwards became
king of the Indians (! ) (cf. Curtius, VIII, 10, 35). It may be that the story was connec-
ted in later times in the interests of some petty king of this region, who wished to esta-
blish a claim to be descended from Alexander. That is a claim which is still common
in the Indian frontier hills.
## p. 317 (#353) ############################################
Xv]
TRIBES BEYOND THE N. W. FRONTIER
317
and we
are told
The loot in cattle in these regions was enormous,
that a herd of the finest animals was actually given by Alexander into the
charge of drovers who were to drive them all the way from the Hindu
Kush to Macedonia. A town called by the Greeks Arigaeon, which
apparently commanded the road between the Kūnar and the Panjkora
Valleys, was selected for recolonisation - a number of war-worn Europeans
and a number of the native people were to form the population, as in
similar cases before.
One curious incident relieves the story of blood shed. Somewhere
among these hills: -- probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked
Koh-i-Mor-dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders under-
stood them, that they were descendants of the western people who had
come into those parts with their god Dionysus ; for Dionysus, the Greeks
believed, had gone conquering across Asia, at the head of his revellers, in
the old heroic days. The Greeks always experienced a keen joy of recog.
nition, when they could connect foreign things with the figures of their
own legends, and they were delighted with the suggestion. The assonance
of names lent itself immediately to confirm the theory as usefully as it
does to confirm the adventurous speculations of modern archaeologists. In
the legend the name Nysa was specially connected with Dionysus—it was
the name of his nurse or of the place where he was born or of his holy
hill, and the name of this little town in the Hindu Kush, as it was pro-
nounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said
.
that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (mēros) of Zeus, and a neigh-
bouring summit, the Greeks discovered, was called Meru. What could be
clearer ? And when they saw the sacred plants of the god, the vine and ivy,
running wild over the mountain, as they knew them at home’, no doubt
could be left. Modern travellers have come upon certain fair Kāfir tribes
in this region, whose religious processions with music and dancing have
a Bacchanalian look, and the Nysaeans discovered by Alexander, they
suggest, may have been the ancestors of these Kāfirs; their processions
may have led the Greeks to connect them with Dionysus. This is possible,
but in the Greek books we hear nothing of the Nysaeans going in proces-
sion. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads
with ivy and range the bills in ecstasy, calling on the god by his sacred
names, as their people had done from old time on the woody spurs of the
Balkans. Hostilities, at any rate, with these interesting kinsmen could not
1 Holdich in discussing the site of Nysa (Gates of India, p. 122) gives a mistrans-
lation of Arrian. Arrian does not say that Alexander "then entered that part of the
country, but that somewhere in the country which Alexander had already traversed
there was a place called Nysa.
2 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 133.
>
## p. 318 (#354) ############################################
318
[ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
be thought of, and the 'Nysaeans were themselves prepared to act in
character ; three hundred of them on their mountain horses joined the
army of the Yavana king and followed him to battle in the plains of the
Punjab.
Whilst Alexander was fighting in the valleys to the north of the
Kābul, the other division of the Macedonian army under Hephaestion and
Perdiccas, accompanied by the rāja of Takshaçilā, made its way along the
Kābu] to the Indus. It may have been through the Khyber Pass that,
one day in the cold weather season at the end of 327 or beginning of 326
B. C. , the glitter of strange spears, long lines of mailed men, were seen
emerging into the plain about Peshāwar- the advance guard of the Euro-
pean invasion of India. A few days' march farther, and they came to the
Indus. Arrived there, the Europeans set about collecting material for the
bridge which was to transport their fellows into the interior of the land.
But their hold on the country west of the Indus was not yet secure. The
region in which the division of Hephaestion and Perdiccas was
now encamped formed part of the realm of a rāja, named by the Greeks
Astes', whose capital was the town of Pushkalāvati (Chārsadda) to the
north of the the Kābul river. The rāja at this moment declared himself an
enemy of the foreigners. He was not strong enough to hold the open field
against Hephaestion and Perdiccas, and shut himself desperately in some
walled town. For a month he held it against the besiegers, and then the
greater strength of the Europeans beat him down, and destroyed him. The
principality was given to one who had been his enemy and become a
hanger-on of the rāja of Takshaçilā, a certain Sangaya. He was a man
upon whose loyalty the Yavanas could count.
In the hills to the north, after a few months' fighting, the tribe
generally had submitted to Alexander and the strong places were in his
possession. He constituted the lower Kābul Valley and the recently
conquered hills a special satrapy, distinct from the satrapy of the
Paropanisadae, which Tyriespes ruled from Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.
The new satrapy, whose official name we do not know, but which can be
most conveniently described as India-west-of-the-Indus, got for its governor
a Nicanor, probably the same man who had been left a few months before
to superintend the building of Alexandria. The king himself came down to
Pushkalāvati at the lower end of the Guraeus (now usually called the Swāt)
valley, which was not in a position, after the defeat of its rāja, to offer any
resistance. He set a Macedonian garrison in the town under an officer
named Philip
But the effective occupation of the lower Kābul valley by the Yavanas
required still more to be done. The division of Hephaestion had meantime
1 One gue:s is that this represents the Sanskrit proper name Hasti ; a more
prohable one is that it is short for Ashțakarāja, king of the Ashtakas.
## p. 319 (#355) ############################################
Xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE INDUS
319
fortified and garrisoned a place the Greeks call Orobatis, and Alexander,
accompanied by two Indian chieftains, 'Cophaeus' and 'Assagets'l, moved
about to take possession of various small towns between Pushkalāvati and
the Indus. But one great labour remained. The reduction of a certain
mountain citadel, which crowned Alexander's work during that winter,
always seemed to the Greeks the great glory of the campaign. The Greek
books described the siege and storming at greater length than any other
episode in this region. The story was started that Heracles had attempted
to storm that very rock and failed. Unfortunately, it has so far been
impossible to fit the Greek description of Aornus to any rocky height
noted in the country to-daya.
Aornus, we are told, was not far from the modern Amb
;
it was a
great isolated mass of rock, 6670 feet high, flat on the top with precipitous
sides, which on the south went down straight to the river Indus. On the
summit were woods and watersprings and fields whose cultivation could
keep a thousand men employed. It seems plain that an object of this kind
can hardly have escaped modern geographers in search of it. The inference
is that some particulars in the Greek account are due to imagination. But
when once we begin to trim it so as to suit the actual topography, it
depends on a more or less arbitrary selection which particulars we elimi.
nate and which we retain. There is at any rate no reason to doubt that
the final conquest of this mountain region did involve the reduction of
some exceptionally strong rock-citadel, in which fugitives of the defeated
tribes made a last stand. The citadel, when taken, was held for Alexander
by a garrison under the Indian Çaçigupta. The capture of Aornus had to
be followed by another short expedition further up into the hills, in pur-
suit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of
the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga3 and had with them a herd of
fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these ani-
mals, so strange and wonderful to them, of whose value in battle they had
probably formed an even exaggerated notion, made their pursuit the more
eager. The hills were deserted before them, and Alexander pushed on as
far as a town which the Greek books call Dyrta. It was found empty of
inhabitants. Alexander learnt that the fugitive prince was dead by the
evidence of his severed head, brought by some hillmen one day into
camp. He had fallen a victim to some hostile tribe or to his own
followers. Two bodies of light troops were detached to scour the hills yet
further, and Alexander himself turned back with the rest of his division
1 Anspach suggests, p.
65, note 200 that Cophaeus=rāja of the region about
Pushkala near the Cophen, and Assagetes=the rāja of the Assakenoi (successor of the
rāja killed in Massaga).
2 See the note in Vincent Smith, pp. 56, 57.
3 Arr. IV, 30, 5 ; Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12, 1. His name is variously given
as Aphrikes, Aphices, Erices in different texts.
## p. 320 (#356) ############################################
320
[cu.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
to the Indus. Some natives of the region were caught by the Macedonians
on their way. They reported that the fugitives from Aornus and the
people of the hills had escaped into the country of Abhisāra, whose rāja
was watching the progress of the Yavanas with a doubtful mind. As
for the elephants, they had turned them loose in the country bordering
the Indus, more swampy in those days than it is now! An elephant
hunt accordingly followed ; Alexander had already, with his quick interest
in new things and his Macedonian sporting propensities, collected about
him Indians whose special business was elephant-hunting, and by their
means the scattered herd was driven in, and attached to the Macedonian
army”. The point at which Alexander's division struck the Indus on its
descent from the hills was some way above the point where Hephaestion
and Perdiccas had by this time constructed the bridge. Between the two,
the right bank of the river was largely overgrown with forest, which, if in
one way it impeded the advance of Alexander's division, in another way
helped the transport by furnishing timber for boats. Part of Alexander's
force floated down the river, and when he arrived at Hephaestion's bridge
the number of new boats was swelled by those brought down from up-
stream, The two divisions of the Yavana host now re-united for passage
into the heart of India. The place at which the bridge had been made has
been fixed by the most recent opinion at Ohind, about 16 miles above
Attock. The Greeks felt that they were crossing the threshold of a new
world. Sacrifices to the Greek gods, games and horse-races in their honour
on the river bank at Ohind marked their sense that they were about to
begin a new enterprise of formidable magnitude. Alexander was approach-
ing the bourne of the old Persian Empire, and it was evident that he meant
to press still onward towards the sunrise. The Greek diviners announced
that the omens were favourable. In the early dawn one day in the spring of
326 B. C. 3, the host began to defile over the bridge, the mingled line of many
races streaming all day into the Indian world. And the composition of the
army became now more singularly mixed by the contingents of native
Indian troops sent by the rāja of Takshaçilā, squadrons of Indian horse and
thirty elephants, endless trains moreover of oxen and sheep for sacrifice
and food, and silver brought in masses from his treasuries.
The rāja of Takshaçilā was now none other than Āmbhi himself ; for
the old rāja had not lived to see the Yavanas enter his city. The first act of
the new rāja had been to send a message of homage to Alexander ; he
would not assume his ancestral kingdom except pending the Great King's
pleasure. He would take his kingdom only from Alexander's hand.
As Alexander moved on Takshaçilā from the bridge, Āmbhi went out
1 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 122.
2 Cf. Diod. XVII, 86.
3 Strabo XV, C. 691. Cf. Vincent Smith, p. 61, note 1.
## p. 321 (#357) ############################################
Xv]
RECEPTION AT TAKSHAÇILĀ
321
to meet him in state at the head of the forces of his principality. For
a moment, when the Greeks saw an Indian army deployed across their
path, they suspected treachery. The rāja saw that there was trouble in
the ranks and galloped forward with a few attendants. He assured
Alexander through an interpreter that everything he had was his overlord's.
Alexander on his part ratified his assumption of the princedom'.
The gates of Takshaçilā were thrown open to the Europeans and the
Indian crowd watched, no doubt with a crowd's curiosity, the strange figures
and dresses which thronged their streets. But in one quarter the Greeks met
with an indifference which took them aback. At Takshaçilā, so far as we
know, the Greeks first noticed Indian ascetics. The report reached
Alexander himself of a strange set of men who were to be seen naked some.
where near the city, 'practising endurance', men commanding a great rever-
ence among the people. It was no use his sending for them, since
they would certainly refuse to come : those who wished to learn their secret
must go to them. Alexander, however, on his side, felt he could not go to
them consistently with his dignity; so he chose an envoy, a Greek officer
named Onesicritus, who had been a disciple of the Cynic philosopher
Diogenes, a figure obviously akin to the Indian ascetics. Onesicritus, in the
book he afterwards wrote, gave an account of his interesting mission, and
we may still read it in Strabo's version”. He found fifteen ascetics some ten
miles from the city, sitting naked and motionless in a sun so burning
that one could not even walk over the stones with bare feet. Onesicritus
could only communicate with them through a series of three interpreters, but
he made them understand that the Yavana king would like to learn their
wisdom. The ascetic to whom he first addressed himself answered bluntly
that no one coming in the bravery of European clothes-cavalry cloak and
broad-bripimed hat and top boots, such as the Macedonians wore - could
learn their wisdom. To do that, he must strip naked and learn to sit on the
hot stones beside them. Another answered more mildly that it was really
very creditable for such a man as Alexander to desire to know something of
the deeper wisdom, but one must remember that to attempt to convey their
teaching through three interpreters, common men incapable of under-
standing more than the mere words, would be like trying to make water
flow clear through mud. They seem however to have made an attempt,
and then they asked Oaesicritus whether among the Yavanas there was
any teaching of this kind, and he told them about Pythagoras and
Socrates and his old master Diogenes. The ascetics seemed pleased, but
expressed regret that the wise men of the Greeks had clung to such
superfluities as clothes? . One of these ascetics was ultimately persuaded
by the rāja of Takshaçilā to accompany Alexander and return to clothes
1 Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt.
eminent among the cities of India as a great seat of learning. In the year
327 it was the capital of a rāja, whose principality lay between the Indus
and its tributary the Jhelum (the ancient Vitastā, the Hydaspes of the
Greeks)'. Like Rāwalpindi to day, Takshaçilā guarded the chief gate of
India from the north-west: it was the first great Indian city at which
1 Although the courses of the great rivers of the Punjab have greatly changed in
historical times and are still changing, their names may be traced with certainty from
the Age of the Rigveda down to the present day. Those which are chiefly important
in the history of Alexander's Indian campaign are :
Ancient Indian
Greek Latin
Modern
Sindhu.
'Ivobs,
Indus.
Indus.
Kubhā.
Κωφην,
Cophen.
Kābul,
Suvāstu.
Σοαστος, Soastus.
Vitastā.
‘ydàrins, Hydaspes.
Jhelum.
Asikni, later Chandrabhāgā. ’Aksoivre, Acesines.
Chenāb.
Parushṇī, later Irāvati.
'yogantys, Hydrates
Rāvi.
Vipāç, later Vipācā.
"Ύφασις, Hyphasis.
Beās
Çutudri.
Zagados, Zaradrus, Hesydrus. Sutlej.
Swat,
309
## p. 310 (#346) ############################################
310
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
merchants who had come down the Kābul Valley and crossed the Indus
about Attock arrived, three days' journey beyond the river. Its ruler was
the first among the kings of the Punjab to hear any tidings which might
come down from the highlands of Afghānistān of events happening behind
those tremendous mountain walls. For many generations now the Punjab
must have had some knowledge of what went on in the dominions of the
King of Kings. For the Persian Empire founded two centuries before by
Cyrus had been a huger realm than had ever, so far as we know, existed in
the world under the hand of one man, and the power and glory of the
man who ruled it, the splendour of Ecbatana and Persepolis, must have
been carried by fame over the neighbouring lands.
The rājas of Takshaçilā must therefore have long lent an ear to the
rumbling of wars and rebellions which came across the western mountains.
They may indeed have known next to nothing of what went on at the
further extremities of the Persian Empire ; for the same realm which at its
utmost extension eastward touched the Indus reached at its other end the
Aegean and Black Seas ; and the great monarchic Empires of the east are
conglomerations too loosely organised for the troubles of one province to
be necessarily felt in the more distant ones. The Indian princes may there-
fore have been ignorant of the fact that the Persian king at the other end of
his realm had come into contact with a singular people settled in a
quantity of little republics over the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula,
along the coasts of Asia Minor, and in the intermediate islands, the people
whom the Persians called collectively Yavanas (Ionians). We do not know
whether it even produced any considerable shock on the banks of the Indus,
when a century and a half before 334 B. c. the Persian king had led his
armies to disaster in the land of the Yavanas, although those armies
included Indian tribesmen torn by Persi
torn by Persian officers from the frontier hills,
whose bones were destined to find their last resting-place on the field of
Plataea thousands of miles away. Of the long struggle which went on for
generations after that between the Yavana republics, especially the one
called Athens, and the western satraps of the Great King perhaps no
rumour was brought down the Kabul valley to Takshaçilā.
But in 334 B. C. and tbe following years the struggle between Persia
and the Yavanas took a turn which must have made talk even in the pala-
ces and bazaars of the Punjab. The Indian princes learnt that a Yavana king
had arisen in the utmost West strong enough to drive the Great King from
his throne. It may be that the western provinces, Asia Minor and Egypt,
were torn away in 331, 333 and 332 B. c. by the invader without yet bring.
ing the Indian princes to realise that so huge a fact in the world as the
Persian Empire was about to vanish. But there can have been no mistaking
the magnitude of the catastrophe, when Darius III was flying northward
for his life, when Alexander had occupied the central seats of government
## p. 311 (#347) ############################################
XV )
FROM KANDHAR TO KĀBUL
311
and set Persepolis on fire (330 B. C. ). If this man from the West was going
to claim the whole heritage of the Achaemenian kings, that would make him
the neighbour of the princes of India. It must have been a concern to
the rāja of Takshaçilā and his fellow-kings to learn in what direction the
victorious Yavana host would move next. And in fact the tidings came
before long that it was moving nearer. When the winter of 330 fell,
it was encamped in Seistān, and with the spring moved to the uplands
which to-day constitute the southern part of Afghānistān. Here the
awe-struck inhabitants, Pashtus probably, ancestors of the modern Afghāns
saw the European strangers set about a work which indicated a resolve
to make themselves at home for all time in these lands won by their
spear. They saw them begin to construct a city after the manner of the
Yavanas at a point commanding the roads; and when the rest of the
host had gone onward, there a body of Europeans remained, established
behind the fresh-built walls. If we may judge by analogies, some thousands
of the native people were induced by force or persuasion to settle side
by side with them in the new city. It was only one of the chain of cities
which marked the track of conquering Hellenism. Like many of the
others, this too was given the name of the conqueror. In the speech of
the Greeks it was known as Alexandria-among-the-Arachosians. To-day
we call it Kandahār.
A mountain barrier still separated the Yavana host at Kandahār
in the summer of 329 from the Kābul valley, that is to say, from the river
system of the Indus. And it would seem that, when the passes filled
with the first winter snows, the Yavanas had not yet crossed it. But the
army led by Alexander was one which defied ordinary obstacles. In
winter, under circumstances that made regular provisioning impossible, by
extraordinary endurance it pushed through the hills and descended into
the Kābul valley. The princes of the Punjab might feel that the outlandish
host stood indeed at the door.
But Alexander, having reached the Kābyl valley in the winter of
329-8, did not make an immediate advance upon India. Beyond the
mountain range which forms the northern side of the valley, the Hindu
Kush, lay the extreme provinces of the old Persian Empire towards the
north-east-Bactria (whose name still survives in the city of Balkh) and the
country now called Bukhāra. Not only were these provinces still unsubdued
but the Persian cause was upheld there by a prince of the old blood royal.
Alexander must beat down that opposition, before he could think of
invading India. He waited therefore for the rest of the winter in the
Kābul valley, till the spring should unblock the passes of the Hindu Kush.
And again here the inhabitants saw the Europeans make preparations
1 γπό “IIλειάδος δνσιν, Strabo, XV, C. 725. .
2 Diod. XVII, 82 ; Curt. VII, 3, 12.
1
## p. 312 (#348) ############################################
312
I ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
for permanent settlement. At the foot of the Hindu Kush, whence three
roads to Bactria radiatel, on the site probably of the still existing village
of Charikār, rose another Alexandria, Alexandria-under-the-Cauca. us. In
support of the Yavana colony to be left in this town, other little settlements
were established at points a day's journey off in what were henceforth to
be Greek towns ; Cartana, noted for the rectangular precision with which
its walls we traced out (modern Begrām, according to Cunningham) and
Cadrusi (Koratas ? ) are names given us. In this case we have an express
statement that 7000 of the people of the land were to be incorporated
as citizens of the new towns with those of Alexander's mercenaries who
cared to settle in this region 2800 miles away from their old home.
Another new city, or old city transformed with a new Greek :ame,
Nicaea, occupied apparently some site between Alexandria and the Kābul
rivers
As soon as the snow was melted enough to make the Khawak Pass
practicable, the Yavan ı arıny trailed up the Panjshir valley, leaving little
bodies of Europeans behind it to hold the Kābul valley under a Persian
satrap and a Macedonian episkopos. The main body of the army once
more contended with the hardships of a passage over the high ridges and
disappeared to the northwards. During the following twelve months (May
328 to May 327) such news of it as reached India showed that the Yavana
king still prevailed against all enemies. As far as the Syr Daria (Jazartes)
the peoples of Eastern Irān were broken before him. In the early spring of
327 he was again moving to the south.
The rāja of Takshaçilā must have realised at this juncture that
a momentous choice lay before him. It may be that the idea of a common
Indian nationality, in whose cause he and his brother kings might stand
together against the stranger, did not even occur to him : India was
too large and too disunited for the mind to embrace it as a unity. But he
might well tremble for his own power, if this new resistless deluge came
bursting into the land. On the other hand it might perhaps be turned to
his account. His policy was largely governed by his antagonism to the rival
1 Cunningham, Ancient Geography, p. 24.
2 Diod. XVII, 83 ; Curt. VII, 3, 23, according to the MSS, bas 'vii millibus seni.
orum Macedonum. ' Hedieke in the Teubner text amends this, perhaps too boldiy, as
VII millibus subactarum nationum. '
3 The discussions of Dr Vincent Smith and of Sir Thomas Holdich as to the site
of Nicaea-the former puts it at Jalālābād and the latter at Kābul—are invalidated by
the fact that Nicaea, if we follow Arrian, was not on the river Kābul at all. Alexander
from Nicaea advances towards the Kābul; aơ:kousvos és Nikaiav. . . po-Xúper us ezt
vov Kuova. IV, 22, 6. Mr M-Crindle curiously omits the words in his translation. Not
Nicaea, but some place on the way to the river Kābul, was where the army was divided.
4 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 88.
.
## p. 313 (#349) ############################################
Xv]
THE RAJA OF TAKSHAÇILA
313
prince of the Pauraval house (Porus), who ruled on the other side of the
Hydaspes (Jhelum). The Paurava was indeed a neighbour to be dreaded.
He is described to us as a man of gigantic and powerful build, a warrior-
chief, such as in an unsettled world extends his power by aggressive
ambition and proud courage. He had conceived the idea of building up
for himself a great kingdom, and he was the man to realise it. He had
already made an attempt to crush the free tribes to the east, pushing his
advance even beyond the Hydraotes (Rāvi), in alliance with the raja of
the Abhisāra country (corresponding roughly with the Pūnch and Naoshera
districts in Kashmir) and with many of the free tribes whom he had
drawn into vassalage swelling his army, although the resistance he there
encountered from the Kshatriyas had made him temporarily give backs.
His hand had perhaps also reached westward across the Hydaspes into the
country which the rāja of Takshaçilā considered bis own'. It might well
seem to the rāja of Takshaçilā that, threatened on the one side by the
Paurava and on the other side by the European invader, his safest course
lay in allying himself with the European, riding on the crest of the wave
that would sweep his rival to destruction.
And yet the European host which had emerged out of the unknown
West to shatter the Persian Empire may have appcared too unfamiliar and
incalculable a power to make the decision easy. But, if the rāja hesitated,
his son Āmbhi (Omphis) had a clear opinion as to what the situation
required. He pressed his father to place his principality at the Yavana
king's disposal. While Alexander was still in Bukhāra, Āmbhi began to
negotiate on his own account. Envoys from Takshaçilā made their way
over the ridges of the Hindu Kush. They were charged with the message
that Āmbhi was ready to march by Alexander's side against any Indians
who might refuse to submit. Thus the European, at his first arrival at the
Gates of India, found India divided against itself. It was the hand of an
Indian prince, which unharred the door to the invader.
The summer of 327 B. C. was almost come before the hillmen of the
Hindu Kush saw the Yavana army re-appear on the ridges, cross prob-
ably by the Kushan Pass? , and stream down to the new Alexandria.
The satrap who had been left here was found to have done badly, and
Alexander appointed another in his place, Tyriespes, a Persian like his
predecessor. The population of the city was enlarged by drawing in more
1 Paurava is a title denoting the chief of the Pūrus, a tribe known in Vedic times
(v sup. Chapter IV, pp. 74 f. ).
2 In Greek Kathajoi, see Lassen, vol. II, p. 167. The general designation of the
warrior caste seems to be applied in this case to a particular people.
3 Arrian V, 22.
4 See Anspach, note 125.
5 See Sylvain Levi in Journal Asiatique, &me Serie XV (1890), p. 2341 .
6 'EŠ KOUTOS 987 Tou pos, Arr. IV, 22, 3.
? Strabo XV, Ç 697; Cunningham, Ancient Geography, p. 25.
## p. 314 (#350) ############################################
314
[сн.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
of the people of the land and setting down there more war-worn European
veterans. The work of making a city of Greek type bad really only been
begun, and a Macedonian of high rank, Nicanor', was now appointed to
see it carried through.
The army moved on from Alexandria to Nicaea, where Alexander
sacrificed to the Greek goddess Athena. From Nicaea he sent on a herald
to the rāja of Takshaçilā and the native princes west of the Indus to meet
him in the Kābul Valley. We know of one Indian chief, Çaçigupta
(Sisikottos), already in the conqueror's train. His had been probably
some little hill-state on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, whence he had gone
two years since, to help the Irānians in Bactria against Alexander. When
their cause was lost, he had gone over to the European. Messengers now
summoned the other chieftains of the lower Kābul Valley to meet their
overlord. At Takshaçilā too messengers appeared with the summops. And
the rāja, acting on the policy which his son had espoused so decisively,
rose up to obey.
Encamped in the Kābul Valley at some place not named the rāja of
Takshaçilā saw the hosi destined for the invasion of his mother-land. It
numbered, at the lowest estimate, from twenty-five to thirty thousand
menº -a strangely compounded army, which can only be called European
with qualification. Its strength indeed consisted in the Macedonian regi.
ments, stout yeomen and peasants carrying the long spear of the heavy-
arme I footsoldier, and troops of splendidly disciplined cavalry drawn from
the aristocracy of the country, the Companions' of the national King.
Euro, can too were the thousands of soldiers from the Greek cities, serving
as mercenaries, on foot or mounted, and the contingents of semi-barbarous
hillmen from the Balkans, Agrianes and Thracians, serving as light troops-
slingers. javelineers, and bowmen-invaluable for mountain warfare.
mingled with the Europeans were men of many nations. Here were troops
of horsemen, representing the chivalry of Irān, which had followed
Alexander from Bactria and beyond, Pashtus and men of the Hindu Kush
with their highland-bred horses', Central-Asiatics who could ride and
1 Dr Vincent Smith (Early History of India, 3rd edition, p. 49) seems to be in
error in identifying this Nicanor with the son of Parmenio.
2 The numbers in the ancient texts are often untrustworthy. The estimate in the
text is Delbrück's, Geschichte der Kriegskunst (1900), vol. I, p. 184. Anspach (note 20),
combining Arrian, Ind. 19, 5 with Diod. XVII, 95, reckons the ariny in the Kābul
Valley at about 85,000. Delbrück denies that so large an army with the necessary
camp-followers could have got across the Hindu Kush. This is a point for practical
strategists. Whether Plutarch's number (Alex. 56) is correct or not, he does not say, as
Or. Vincent Smith, p. 49, inadvertently quotes him, that Alexander entered India with
120,000 foot and 15,000 horres, but that Alexander left India with that number.
Reinforcements had been arriving from the West in the meantime,
3 Arr. IV, 17, 3.
4 Ib. V, 11, 3.
## p. 315 (#351) ############################################
XV]
FROM KABUL TO THE INDUS
315
His army
shoot at the same timel; and among the camp-followers one could find
groups representing the older civilisations of the world, Phoenicians inherit-
ing an immemorial tradition of ship-craft and trade, bronzed Egyptians
able to confront the Indians with an antiquity still longer than their own.
There was nothing to arrest this army between the point they had
now reached and the Indus. The local chieftains had indicated their sub-
mission. All along the north side of the Kābul however lay the hills, whose
inhabitants in their rock citadels, in the valleys of the Kūnar, the Panj.
kora, and the Swāt, were unschooled to recognise an overlord, and as pre-
pared to give trouble to anyone who tried to incorporate them in an
imperial system as their Pathān successors of a later day. But it was not
Alexander's way to leave unsubducd regions beside his road.
therefore broke up into two divisions. One, commanded by Hephaestion,
the king's friend, and Perdiccas, the proudest of the Macedonian nobles,
moved to the Indus by the most direct route. This would probably mean
a route along the south bank of the Kābul, whether through the actual
Khyber Pass or not? ; the other, led by the king himself, turned up into
the hills. The two divisions were to rejoin each other upon the Indus;
Hephaestion and Perdiccas, arriving there first, it was calculated would
have made all preparations for the passage of the great river.
The Europeans who had followed Alexander so far into Asia now
entered the region in which the armies of the English operate to-day.
At
that season of the year the hill-country must have been bitterly cold, and
probably to some extent under snow. It was the same hill-country whose
contours and tracks and points of vantage are studied now by British
commanders ; the tough highlander of the Balkans or of Crete climbed and
skirmished with bow and javelin in 327 B. C. where the Scottish highlander
was to climb and skirmish with rifle and bayonet two thousand two
hundred years later. And yet it is impossible to follow the track of
Alexander, over these hills with any precision. We hear of little moun-
tain towns stormed, of others abandoned by their inhabitants. But their
sites cannot be identified. One must however note that at this point Alex-
ander, in an ethnographical sense, entered India ; for these hills, whose
population at the present day is either Afghān or Kāfir, seem then to have
been possessed by Indian tribes. The Açvakas, as their name apparently
was in their native speech, were the first Indian people to receive the brunt
1 16. IV. 24, 1.
2 Dr Vincent Smith says that he did not go by the Khyber and cites Sir Thomas
Holdich in support of the assertion. Sir Thomas in his more recent book, Gates of India
(p. 94), says that he ‘urdoubtedly followed the main route which. . . is sufficiently well
indicated in these days as the “Khaibar". '
3 Metà svo uàs II Letà dwv, Aristobulus ap. Strabo XV, C. 691.
## p. 316 (#352) ############################################
316
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[ch.
of the invasion? . The fighting seems to have been of exceptional ferocity.
At one place, where Alexander was wounded, the whole population was
put to the sword. At another place we hear of a huge massacre, and 40,000
men taken captive. At a third place a body of Indians from the Punjab
had come to help the local chieftain for bire. When the town capitulated, it
was agreed that these mercenaries should transfer their services to Alexan-
der. They encamped on a little hill apart. There, as they talked together,
it seemed to them a horrible thing that they should march with the Yara-
nas against their own people. They determined to slip away, when night
fell, and make across the hills for home. But when night fell, they found
the hill beset on all sides with the soldiers of Alexander ; for some one had
betrayed their design. The Macedonians suffered none of them to live till
morning?
The town with which this incident is connected the Greeks call
Massaga. We know only that it was situated east of the Guraeus river and
apparently not far from the stream. The resistance which the eastern-most
branch of the h. ll-people, those called by the Greeks Assakēnoi, offered
to the invader seems to have been concentrated at this place. All
these tribes, as far as the Indus, recognised as overlord a chief whom the
Greeks call Assakēnos. His organisation for defence included an alliance with
the king of the Abhisāra country beyond the Indus, who sent contingents
to his support3. Assakēnos had himself taken command at Massaga, and
fell there, struck by a missile from one of the European siegemachines'.
His mother and daughter were left in the enemies' hands• ; but it was not
among Alexander's faults to fail in chivalry to the women whom war put
at his mercy.
1 In the Greek accounts a people called Aspasioi are found in Choes (either the
Alishang or Kūnar) Valley and a people called Assakenoi in the Swāt Valley. Both
names are supposed to represent the same Indian name Açvaka, connected with
açia
horse. If so, the two Greek names may be due to local varieties of pronunciation, and
it may be noted that the form Aspasioi would then approximate to Irānian speech, in
which aspa is the equivalent of aqua. Strabo, according to the MSS. (XV, C. 691,
C. 698), calls the Aspasioi Hypasioi ; this is often amended in modern texts to Hippasioi,
on the supposition that the Greeks knew their hippos to be the etymological equivalent
of aspa and attempted a translation. This is extremely unlike the Greek way in these
matters. The confusion is made worse by another people called Astakenoi appearing
in the Pushkalāvati region, whose name is supposed not to be connected etymologically
with that of their neighbours, the Assakenoi.
2 Arr. IV 27 ; Diod. XVII, 84 ; Plut. Alex. 69 ; Polyaen. Strateg. IV, 3, 20.
3 Arr. IV, 27, 7.
4 Arr. IV, 27, 2.
5 Arr. IV, 27, 4.
6 A strange story is given by Justin, XII, 7, 10, that it was the wife of Assakenos
who fell into Alexander's hands and that he had a son by her, who afterwards became
king of the Indians (! ) (cf. Curtius, VIII, 10, 35). It may be that the story was connec-
ted in later times in the interests of some petty king of this region, who wished to esta-
blish a claim to be descended from Alexander. That is a claim which is still common
in the Indian frontier hills.
## p. 317 (#353) ############################################
Xv]
TRIBES BEYOND THE N. W. FRONTIER
317
and we
are told
The loot in cattle in these regions was enormous,
that a herd of the finest animals was actually given by Alexander into the
charge of drovers who were to drive them all the way from the Hindu
Kush to Macedonia. A town called by the Greeks Arigaeon, which
apparently commanded the road between the Kūnar and the Panjkora
Valleys, was selected for recolonisation - a number of war-worn Europeans
and a number of the native people were to form the population, as in
similar cases before.
One curious incident relieves the story of blood shed. Somewhere
among these hills: -- probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked
Koh-i-Mor-dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders under-
stood them, that they were descendants of the western people who had
come into those parts with their god Dionysus ; for Dionysus, the Greeks
believed, had gone conquering across Asia, at the head of his revellers, in
the old heroic days. The Greeks always experienced a keen joy of recog.
nition, when they could connect foreign things with the figures of their
own legends, and they were delighted with the suggestion. The assonance
of names lent itself immediately to confirm the theory as usefully as it
does to confirm the adventurous speculations of modern archaeologists. In
the legend the name Nysa was specially connected with Dionysus—it was
the name of his nurse or of the place where he was born or of his holy
hill, and the name of this little town in the Hindu Kush, as it was pro-
nounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said
.
that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (mēros) of Zeus, and a neigh-
bouring summit, the Greeks discovered, was called Meru. What could be
clearer ? And when they saw the sacred plants of the god, the vine and ivy,
running wild over the mountain, as they knew them at home’, no doubt
could be left. Modern travellers have come upon certain fair Kāfir tribes
in this region, whose religious processions with music and dancing have
a Bacchanalian look, and the Nysaeans discovered by Alexander, they
suggest, may have been the ancestors of these Kāfirs; their processions
may have led the Greeks to connect them with Dionysus. This is possible,
but in the Greek books we hear nothing of the Nysaeans going in proces-
sion. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads
with ivy and range the bills in ecstasy, calling on the god by his sacred
names, as their people had done from old time on the woody spurs of the
Balkans. Hostilities, at any rate, with these interesting kinsmen could not
1 Holdich in discussing the site of Nysa (Gates of India, p. 122) gives a mistrans-
lation of Arrian. Arrian does not say that Alexander "then entered that part of the
country, but that somewhere in the country which Alexander had already traversed
there was a place called Nysa.
2 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 133.
>
## p. 318 (#354) ############################################
318
[ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
be thought of, and the 'Nysaeans were themselves prepared to act in
character ; three hundred of them on their mountain horses joined the
army of the Yavana king and followed him to battle in the plains of the
Punjab.
Whilst Alexander was fighting in the valleys to the north of the
Kābul, the other division of the Macedonian army under Hephaestion and
Perdiccas, accompanied by the rāja of Takshaçilā, made its way along the
Kābu] to the Indus. It may have been through the Khyber Pass that,
one day in the cold weather season at the end of 327 or beginning of 326
B. C. , the glitter of strange spears, long lines of mailed men, were seen
emerging into the plain about Peshāwar- the advance guard of the Euro-
pean invasion of India. A few days' march farther, and they came to the
Indus. Arrived there, the Europeans set about collecting material for the
bridge which was to transport their fellows into the interior of the land.
But their hold on the country west of the Indus was not yet secure. The
region in which the division of Hephaestion and Perdiccas was
now encamped formed part of the realm of a rāja, named by the Greeks
Astes', whose capital was the town of Pushkalāvati (Chārsadda) to the
north of the the Kābul river. The rāja at this moment declared himself an
enemy of the foreigners. He was not strong enough to hold the open field
against Hephaestion and Perdiccas, and shut himself desperately in some
walled town. For a month he held it against the besiegers, and then the
greater strength of the Europeans beat him down, and destroyed him. The
principality was given to one who had been his enemy and become a
hanger-on of the rāja of Takshaçilā, a certain Sangaya. He was a man
upon whose loyalty the Yavanas could count.
In the hills to the north, after a few months' fighting, the tribe
generally had submitted to Alexander and the strong places were in his
possession. He constituted the lower Kābul Valley and the recently
conquered hills a special satrapy, distinct from the satrapy of the
Paropanisadae, which Tyriespes ruled from Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.
The new satrapy, whose official name we do not know, but which can be
most conveniently described as India-west-of-the-Indus, got for its governor
a Nicanor, probably the same man who had been left a few months before
to superintend the building of Alexandria. The king himself came down to
Pushkalāvati at the lower end of the Guraeus (now usually called the Swāt)
valley, which was not in a position, after the defeat of its rāja, to offer any
resistance. He set a Macedonian garrison in the town under an officer
named Philip
But the effective occupation of the lower Kābul valley by the Yavanas
required still more to be done. The division of Hephaestion had meantime
1 One gue:s is that this represents the Sanskrit proper name Hasti ; a more
prohable one is that it is short for Ashțakarāja, king of the Ashtakas.
## p. 319 (#355) ############################################
Xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE INDUS
319
fortified and garrisoned a place the Greeks call Orobatis, and Alexander,
accompanied by two Indian chieftains, 'Cophaeus' and 'Assagets'l, moved
about to take possession of various small towns between Pushkalāvati and
the Indus. But one great labour remained. The reduction of a certain
mountain citadel, which crowned Alexander's work during that winter,
always seemed to the Greeks the great glory of the campaign. The Greek
books described the siege and storming at greater length than any other
episode in this region. The story was started that Heracles had attempted
to storm that very rock and failed. Unfortunately, it has so far been
impossible to fit the Greek description of Aornus to any rocky height
noted in the country to-daya.
Aornus, we are told, was not far from the modern Amb
;
it was a
great isolated mass of rock, 6670 feet high, flat on the top with precipitous
sides, which on the south went down straight to the river Indus. On the
summit were woods and watersprings and fields whose cultivation could
keep a thousand men employed. It seems plain that an object of this kind
can hardly have escaped modern geographers in search of it. The inference
is that some particulars in the Greek account are due to imagination. But
when once we begin to trim it so as to suit the actual topography, it
depends on a more or less arbitrary selection which particulars we elimi.
nate and which we retain. There is at any rate no reason to doubt that
the final conquest of this mountain region did involve the reduction of
some exceptionally strong rock-citadel, in which fugitives of the defeated
tribes made a last stand. The citadel, when taken, was held for Alexander
by a garrison under the Indian Çaçigupta. The capture of Aornus had to
be followed by another short expedition further up into the hills, in pur-
suit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of
the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga3 and had with them a herd of
fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these ani-
mals, so strange and wonderful to them, of whose value in battle they had
probably formed an even exaggerated notion, made their pursuit the more
eager. The hills were deserted before them, and Alexander pushed on as
far as a town which the Greek books call Dyrta. It was found empty of
inhabitants. Alexander learnt that the fugitive prince was dead by the
evidence of his severed head, brought by some hillmen one day into
camp. He had fallen a victim to some hostile tribe or to his own
followers. Two bodies of light troops were detached to scour the hills yet
further, and Alexander himself turned back with the rest of his division
1 Anspach suggests, p.
65, note 200 that Cophaeus=rāja of the region about
Pushkala near the Cophen, and Assagetes=the rāja of the Assakenoi (successor of the
rāja killed in Massaga).
2 See the note in Vincent Smith, pp. 56, 57.
3 Arr. IV, 30, 5 ; Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12, 1. His name is variously given
as Aphrikes, Aphices, Erices in different texts.
## p. 320 (#356) ############################################
320
[cu.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
to the Indus. Some natives of the region were caught by the Macedonians
on their way. They reported that the fugitives from Aornus and the
people of the hills had escaped into the country of Abhisāra, whose rāja
was watching the progress of the Yavanas with a doubtful mind. As
for the elephants, they had turned them loose in the country bordering
the Indus, more swampy in those days than it is now! An elephant
hunt accordingly followed ; Alexander had already, with his quick interest
in new things and his Macedonian sporting propensities, collected about
him Indians whose special business was elephant-hunting, and by their
means the scattered herd was driven in, and attached to the Macedonian
army”. The point at which Alexander's division struck the Indus on its
descent from the hills was some way above the point where Hephaestion
and Perdiccas had by this time constructed the bridge. Between the two,
the right bank of the river was largely overgrown with forest, which, if in
one way it impeded the advance of Alexander's division, in another way
helped the transport by furnishing timber for boats. Part of Alexander's
force floated down the river, and when he arrived at Hephaestion's bridge
the number of new boats was swelled by those brought down from up-
stream, The two divisions of the Yavana host now re-united for passage
into the heart of India. The place at which the bridge had been made has
been fixed by the most recent opinion at Ohind, about 16 miles above
Attock. The Greeks felt that they were crossing the threshold of a new
world. Sacrifices to the Greek gods, games and horse-races in their honour
on the river bank at Ohind marked their sense that they were about to
begin a new enterprise of formidable magnitude. Alexander was approach-
ing the bourne of the old Persian Empire, and it was evident that he meant
to press still onward towards the sunrise. The Greek diviners announced
that the omens were favourable. In the early dawn one day in the spring of
326 B. C. 3, the host began to defile over the bridge, the mingled line of many
races streaming all day into the Indian world. And the composition of the
army became now more singularly mixed by the contingents of native
Indian troops sent by the rāja of Takshaçilā, squadrons of Indian horse and
thirty elephants, endless trains moreover of oxen and sheep for sacrifice
and food, and silver brought in masses from his treasuries.
The rāja of Takshaçilā was now none other than Āmbhi himself ; for
the old rāja had not lived to see the Yavanas enter his city. The first act of
the new rāja had been to send a message of homage to Alexander ; he
would not assume his ancestral kingdom except pending the Great King's
pleasure. He would take his kingdom only from Alexander's hand.
As Alexander moved on Takshaçilā from the bridge, Āmbhi went out
1 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 122.
2 Cf. Diod. XVII, 86.
3 Strabo XV, C. 691. Cf. Vincent Smith, p. 61, note 1.
## p. 321 (#357) ############################################
Xv]
RECEPTION AT TAKSHAÇILĀ
321
to meet him in state at the head of the forces of his principality. For
a moment, when the Greeks saw an Indian army deployed across their
path, they suspected treachery. The rāja saw that there was trouble in
the ranks and galloped forward with a few attendants. He assured
Alexander through an interpreter that everything he had was his overlord's.
Alexander on his part ratified his assumption of the princedom'.
The gates of Takshaçilā were thrown open to the Europeans and the
Indian crowd watched, no doubt with a crowd's curiosity, the strange figures
and dresses which thronged their streets. But in one quarter the Greeks met
with an indifference which took them aback. At Takshaçilā, so far as we
know, the Greeks first noticed Indian ascetics. The report reached
Alexander himself of a strange set of men who were to be seen naked some.
where near the city, 'practising endurance', men commanding a great rever-
ence among the people. It was no use his sending for them, since
they would certainly refuse to come : those who wished to learn their secret
must go to them. Alexander, however, on his side, felt he could not go to
them consistently with his dignity; so he chose an envoy, a Greek officer
named Onesicritus, who had been a disciple of the Cynic philosopher
Diogenes, a figure obviously akin to the Indian ascetics. Onesicritus, in the
book he afterwards wrote, gave an account of his interesting mission, and
we may still read it in Strabo's version”. He found fifteen ascetics some ten
miles from the city, sitting naked and motionless in a sun so burning
that one could not even walk over the stones with bare feet. Onesicritus
could only communicate with them through a series of three interpreters, but
he made them understand that the Yavana king would like to learn their
wisdom. The ascetic to whom he first addressed himself answered bluntly
that no one coming in the bravery of European clothes-cavalry cloak and
broad-bripimed hat and top boots, such as the Macedonians wore - could
learn their wisdom. To do that, he must strip naked and learn to sit on the
hot stones beside them. Another answered more mildly that it was really
very creditable for such a man as Alexander to desire to know something of
the deeper wisdom, but one must remember that to attempt to convey their
teaching through three interpreters, common men incapable of under-
standing more than the mere words, would be like trying to make water
flow clear through mud. They seem however to have made an attempt,
and then they asked Oaesicritus whether among the Yavanas there was
any teaching of this kind, and he told them about Pythagoras and
Socrates and his old master Diogenes. The ascetics seemed pleased, but
expressed regret that the wise men of the Greeks had clung to such
superfluities as clothes? . One of these ascetics was ultimately persuaded
by the rāja of Takshaçilā to accompany Alexander and return to clothes
1 Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt.
