The Historians' History of the World 02

The division of the Punjab into small independent and rival states must have rendered the conquest easy at the outset. Alexander made his appearance with one hundred and twenty thousand men, of whom the Greeks formed the kernel, while the rest of the number was made up by Persians. He had Indian guides and an understanding with some native chiefs, notably with the king of Taxila, a state situated on the left bank of the Indus, and which stretched between that river and the stream then known under the name of Hydaspes and to-day under that of Jhelum.

Alexander marched from Bactriana on the town which now bears the name of Kabul. Continuing his way to India, he crossed the Indus and encountered Porus, sovereign of a state enclosed between the Hydaspes and the Chenab: he beat him, but made him an ally by leaving him his kingdom. Various sovereigns, notably the sovereign of Kashmir, then sent him their submission.

After several battles against native chiefs, he marched on the Hyphasis (the present Beas); but the army refusing to follow him farther, he raised, on the banks of this stream, twelve commemorative altars, intended to mark the end of the expedition. Having returned to the banks of the Hydaspes, he constructed a fleet which descended that stream as far as the Indus, into which it passed. Fighting continually, Alexander arrived at Patala, at the mouth of the Indus, and then sent his fleet, under the orders of Nearchus, along the coast into the Persian Gulf, after which he divided his army into two corps. The one was sent back to Persia through Caramania, under the leadership of Craterus; the other, under his own direction, made its retreat by way of Gedrosia. The fleet having reached the Persian Gulf, and he himself having rejoined Craterus, the return of the expedition was celebrated with festivities.

Regarded solely from the standpoint of conquest, it may be said that the results of Alexander’s invasion were absolutely nil, since a few years after his departure not a single one of the Greek garrisons he had left behind remained in India. But this expedition, which for the first time put Europe in communication with India, was to have indirect consequences that were not without importance.

CHANDRA GUPTA

After the departure of Alexander, a Hindu king, Chandra Gupta, the Sandracottus of the Greeks, son of one of the petty chiefs of the Punjab, whom Alexander had scattered, gradually extended his empire over the whole of the north of the peninsula, and expelled or totally destroyed the Macedonian garrisons. He fixed the seat of his empire at Pataliputra (the modern Patna), capital of the kingdom of Magadha. Soon his renown became so great that, about the year 200 before our era, Seleucus Nicator, who, since Alexander’s death, was reigning in Syria, Babylonia, and all the provinces between the Euphrates and the Indus, sent to his court a Greek ambassador, named Megasthenes, for the purpose of making alliance with him. This ambassador stayed at Pataliputra for a long time, and it is from his narrative, part of which has been preserved, that we gain our first definite notions of the manners and customs of the Hindus of this epoch.

But the relations between the Greeks and Hindus were not confined to Alexander’s invasion and the embassy of Megasthenes; in default of the accounts of historians, we now know, from coins and the ruins of monuments, that the successors of the Græco-Bactrian empire of Seleucus Nicator conquered the Punjab, founded several kingdoms, and penetrated as far as Muttra. One hundred and twenty-six years before Christ an adventurer of the name of Menander founded a kingdom reaching from the Jumna to the mouth of the Nerbudda.

The sculptures and medals are the only relics which have come down to us from the Greek kingdoms of India. These kingdoms disappeared just about the beginning of our era, before the invasions of the Scythians. These invasions had commenced in the century before Christ. A Scythian people descended on the northwest of India and founded a kingdom comprising Bactriana, the banks of the Indus, the Punjab, and a part of Rajputana. This kingdom had a very ephemeral duration, since the Scythians were probably expelled from India in the early days of our era.

Setting aside this obscure part of the history of India, which recent researches have revived, let us go back to Chandra Gupta and his successors.

Chandra Gupta’s grandson was the celebrated Asoka, who reigned about 250 years before Christ. After having, according to certain Buddhist legends, massacred the hundred sons whom his father had had by sixteen different wives and thus prevented rivalries, he extended his empire throughout the north of India. Its limits are marked by inscriptions which still exist. They are to be found from Afghanistan to Bengal and from the Himalayas to the Nerbudda. In the west Asoka’s empire touched the Greek kingdom of Bactriana.