Alexander's putatuve Incursion into the Punjab

July 23, 2009

The invasion of India by Alexander while not directly connected with

Indology, is indeed a very curious episode in Indic History which has a

bearing on the chronology of India. First and foremost , there is

clearly no record of his invasion in any accounts of Indian history. He

appears to have fought a minor Baron or regional Governor or Satrap of

the Chakravarti by the name of Puru(porus - to paraphrase Rex harrison

why cant the Greeks and other Europeans learn to pronounce foreign

names)), who administered a region near present day Takshashila, if we

are to believe the accounts of the Greeks. Now who were these Greek

historians who reported on the victory of Alexander. The recounting is

done by Strabo and Arrian (Arrian was a proconsul in the employ of the

Roman empire and lived 400 years after the advent of Alexander's

expedition) as well as Pliny and Plutarch. They were certainly not

present at the time of the battle, but relied on the descriptions given

by Alexander's companions, Onesecritus, Aristibulus and his admiral

Nearchus .In what follows we give the gist of the Western acccount of

the event. It is incredible that very few western authors have bothered

to check the account of the Greek invasion in the Indian historical

record and if they did they rarely report that they found little or

nothing. This is especially curious because the English historians

based their entire chronology on the date of Alexander's battles and on

the second hand description of Megasthenes, the Seleucid Greek

ambassador who came to the court of Chandragupta, shortly after

Alexander died and Seleucus Nicator took over the Eastern part of

Alexander's empire>From

Wiki After the death of Spitamenes and his marriage to Roxana (Roshanak

in Bactrian) to cement his relations with his new Central Asian

satrapies, in 326 BC Alexander was finally free to turn his attention

to the Indian subcontinent. Alexander invited all the chieftains of the

former satrapy of Gandhara, in the north of what is now Pakistan, to

come to him and submit to his authority. Ambhi (Greek: Omphis), ruler

of Taxila, whose kingdom extended from the Indus to the Jhelum

(Greek:Hydaspes), complied. But the chieftains of some hilly clans

including the, Aspasios and Assakenois sections of the Kambojas

(classical names), known in Indian texts as Ashvayanas and Ashvakayanas

(names referring to the equestrian nature of their society from the

Sanskrit root work Ashva meaning horse), refused to submit. Alexander

personally took command of the shield-bearing guards, foot- companions,

archers, Agrianians and horse-javelin-men and led them against the

Kamboja clans—the Aspasios of Kunar/Alishang valleys, the Guraeans of

the Guraeus (Panjkora) valley, and the Assakenois of the Swat and Buner

valleys. Writes one modern historian: "They were brave people and it

was hard work for Alexander to take their strongholds, of which Massaga

and Aornus need special mention."[6] A fierce contest ensued with the

Aspasios in which Alexander himself was wounded in the shoulder by a

dart but eventually the Aspasios lost the fight; 40,000 of them were

enslaved. The Assakenois faced Alexander with an army of 30,000

cavalry, 38,000 infantry and 30 elephants.[7] They had fought bravely

and offered stubborn resistance to the invader in many of their

strongholds like cities of Ora, Bazira and Massaga. The fort of Massaga

could only be reduced after several days of bloody fighting in which

Alexander himself was wounded seriously in the ankle. When the

Chieftain of Massaga fell in the battle, the supreme command of the

army went to his old mother Cleophis (q.v.) who also stood determined

to defend her motherland to the last extremity. The example of Cleophis

assuming the supreme command of the military also brought the entire

women of the locality into the fighting.[8] Alexander could only reduce

Massaga by resorting to political strategem and actions of betrayal.

According to Curtius: "Not only did Alexander slaughter the entire

population of Massaga, but also did he reduce its buildings to

rubbles." A similar manslaughter then followed at Ora, another

stronghold of the Assakenois. In the aftermath of general slaughter and

arson committed by Alexander at Massaga and Ora, numerous Assakenian

people fled to a high fortress called Aornos. Alexander followed them

close behind their heels and captured the strategic hill-fort but only

after the fourth day of a bloody fight. The story of Massaga was

repeated at Aornos and a similar carnage on the tribal-people followed

here too. Writing on Alexander's campaign against the Assakenois,

Victor Hanson comments: "After promising the surrounded Assacenis their

lives upon capitulation, he executed all their soldiers who had

surrendered. Their strongholds at Ora and Aornus were also similarly

stormed. Garrisons were probably all slaughtered."[9] Sisikottos, who

had helped Alexander in this campaign, was made the governor of Aornos.

After reducing Aornos, Alexander crossed the Indus and fought and is

believed to have won an epic battle against a local ruler Porus, who

ruled a region in the Punjab, in the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC.

After the battle, Alexander was greatly `impressed' by Porus for his

bravery in battle, and therefore made an alliance with him and

appointed him as satrap of his own kingdom, even adding some land he

did not own before. Alexander then named one of the two new cities that

he founded, Bucephala, in honor of the horse who had brought him to

India, who had died during the Battle of Hydaspes. Alexander continued

on to conquer all the headwaters of the Indus River. East of Porus'

kingdom, near the Ganges River, was the powerful empire of Magadha

ruled by the Nanda dynasty. Fearing the prospects of facing another

powerful Indian army and exhausted by years of campaigning, his army

mutinied at the Hyphasis River (the modern Beas River) refusing to

march further east. This river thus marks the easternmost extent of

Alexander's conquests: As for the Macedonians, however, their struggle

with Porus blunted their courage and stayed their further advance into

India. For having had all they could do to repulse an enemy who

mustered only twenty thousand infantry and two thousand horse, they

violently opposed Alexander when he insisted on crossing the river

Ganges also, the width of which, as they learned, was thirty-two

furlongs, its depth a hundred fathoms, while its banks on the further

side were covered with multitudes of men-at-arms and horsemen and

elephants. For they were told that the kings of the Ganderites and

Praesii were awaiting them with eighty thousand horsemen, two hundred

thousand footmen, eight thousand chariots, and six thousand fighting

elephants. —Plutarch , Vita Alexandri, 62 [10]According to Henry

Rooke, the translator of Arrians History of Alexanders expedition into

English, as expressed in the preface of the book "Alexander's invasion

was checked even in Kaffirstan (present day Afghanistan) by

Samudragupta. The famous World conqueror was obliged to flee with the

remnant s of his army. Alexander never crossed the Indus to the east.

The crossing of the Indus, the defeat of Porus, and the establishment

of the Greek kingdom in the Punjab was all pure concoction by the Greek

writers, who followed Alexander as part of his retinue and who were

bent upon pleasing him by agreeable flattery. Or they may have been

satirical compositions by those same writers. It is worth noting that

the campaign of Alexander made no impression culturally or politically

on India, nor were they any references to it in Indian sources. The

most significant outcome of his campaign was that some of his Greek

companions, such as Onesecritus, Aristobulus, and his admiral Nearchus,

recorded their impressions of India . Strabo and Arrian, as well as

Pliny and Pkutarch, incorporated much of their material into their

writings. But some of these impressions are fanciful and make for

better fiction than history." So much for Alexander and his mythical

invasion into the Punjab and his even more emythical victory over

Porus, but what of the young man who warned Alexander of a vast army

waiting for him if and when he should decide to cross the Indus. It is

the contentionof English historians that this was Chandragupta Maurya

trhe founder of the Maurya empire . This was the sheet anchor upon

which they based the entire chronology of Ancient India. Every other

date was worked backward relative ot his date. So what if Alexander

never won the battle, this event should be a legitimate reference

point. In order to analyze this we have to do some research into

Megasthenes, the Seleucid Greek ambassador to the court of

Chandragupta. Source :Arrian's History of Alexanders expedition

translated by Henry Rooke, first published 1729Partly adapted from Antiquity and Continuity of Indian History by Prasad Gokhale (excerpt)Megasthenes

wrote extensively on India during his travels to the Indian

subcontinent. .Unfortunately none of his original manuscripts survive

today. Megasthenes book titled Indica is lost and nobody in the modern

world has been able to retrieve the book or its contents. So all we

have is the account of Arrian and Strabo who claim to quote him.

Megasthenes purportedly lived at the court of King Sandrocottus, for

some years after 302 BCE (approximately 20 years after the much

ballyhooed invasion of Alexander) as the ambassador of Seleucus Nicator

who proclaimed himself the emperor of the eastern dominions of

Alexander after his death. But we forget that there was more than one

Chandragupta in Indian History. There is also the first of the Imperial

Gupta dynasty Chandragupta I. Modern historians place him 600 years

after Sandrocottus (of the Mauryas). Note this is only a relative

dating and not an absolute one. The reason they gave was that this

would place Asoka Vardhana (Chandragupta's grandson) around the middle

of the third century. Of course this does not explain why it is so

sacrosanct to place Asoka in the middle of the third century BCE. But

assuming the answer and then adopting it as an assumption was probably

equally in vogue then, long before we had coined the phrase `circular

argument'. Other scholars such as M Troyer, Kuppiah, Narayana Sastry

objected to this identification with Chandragupta Maurya and they

pointed out that Chandragupta of the Gupta empire should be identified

with Sandrocottus. Troyer communicated this view to Max Mueller but M

Mueller did not even bother to reply.However, the Greek chronicles

are strangely silent on the names of Chanakya (Chandragupta's Guru) who

managed to install the Maurya on the Magadha throne, Bindusar (his son)

and even Ashoka (his grandson) whose empire extended far wider than

that of Chandragupta. The empire of Chandragupta, also known as the

Magadha empire, was very powerful and had a long history but is nowhere

mentioned by the Greeks. Even Buddha bhikkus and the flourishing

religion of the Buddha are not mentioned in their literature. This

imbroglio has been challenged by various scholars and is precisely

summarized by K. Rajaram (in "A Peep into the Past History, Seminar

Papers", Madras, 1982), "There are difficulties in calculating the date

of the coronation of Asoka .. In the first instance, the very

identification of Sandrokotus with Chandragupta Maurya is questioned.

In the second one, the date of the death of the Buddha has not been

fixed accurately and therefore, the date of Asoka based on it cannot be

accurate." Indeed, the Sandrocottus of the Greeks was not a Maurya. The

Greek records mention Xandramas and Sandrocyptus as the kings

immediately before and after Sandrocottus. These names in any way are

not phonetically similar to Mahapadma Nanda and Bindusar, who were the

predecessor and successor of Chandragupta Maurya, respectively.

However, if Sandrocottus refers to Chandragupta "Gupta", the Xandramas

reckons to be his predecessor Chandrashree alias Chandramas and

Sandrocyptus to be Samudragupta. The phonetic similarity becomes quite

apparent and also, with the assistance of other evidence, confirms the

identity of Sandrocottus to Chandragupta Gupta. In the Puranic and

other literature, there is no allusion anywhere to an invasion or

inroad into India by foreign peoples upto the time of Andhra kings; and

the only person who bore the name similar to Sandrocottus of the

Greeks, and who flourished at the time of Alexander, was Chandragupta

of the Gupta dynasty, who established a mighty empire on the ruins of

the already decayed Andhra dynasty and existing 2811 years after the

Mahabharata War, i.e., corresponding to 328 B.C. His date is currently

placed in the fourth century A.D., which obviously does not stand. It

is also interesting to note that the accounts in the life of

Sandrokotus of the Greeks, and the political and social conditions in

India at that time, match to those of in the era Chandragupta Gupta.

With this observation, it is therefore that the Greek and Puranic

accounts unanimously agree on the issue of the identity Chandragupta

Gupta and Sandrocotus. The ten kings of Shishunaga dynasty ruled for

360 years, beginning from 1994 B.C. and ending with 1634 B.C. At this

time, an illegitimate son, Mahapadma-Nanda, of the last Shishunaga

emperor, Mahanandi, came to the throne of Magadha. The total regal

period of this Nanda dynasty was 100 years. After this, with the

assistance of Arya Chaanakya( alias Vishnu Gupta), Chandragupta Maurya

ascended the throne of Magadha, and that is in year 1534 B.C. This date

can be arrived and confirmed using many independent accounts.Pargiter

also uses this false methodology of first fixing the date of

Chandragupta Maurya at 325 BCE and then working backward to the

Mahabharata War, instead f doing the conversePargiter 1.Dynasties of the kali Age

July 23, 2009

Dear Sunil Nairji,Thank you for the very nice collection.I will like to draw your attention particularly to one Greek concoction, which have been used as authentic by the historians very often. This concoction is in the following quote:Quote

After reducing Aornos, Alexander crossed the Indus and fought and is

believed to have won an epic battle against a local ruler Porus, who

ruled a region in the Punjab, in the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC.

After the battle, Alexander was greatly `impressed' by Porus for his

bravery in battle, and therefore made an alliance with him and

appointed him as satrap of his own kingdom, even adding some land he

did not own before. UnquoteAny historian with common sense will discard the cock-and-bull story

that Alexander (who tried all the tricks and treacheries possible to win the battles all the way till

he reached Jhelum) had a sudden change of heart and he become liberal

to return the kingdom to Porus (Puru) and also to donate more

territories from the west to Puru. For the Greeks it was a face-saving

account no doubt otherwise how could they own the ignonimity of being routed by Porus. But it is a pity that our own historians

lacked common sense and accepted these versions unquestioningly. In reality

Alexander himself was badly wounded in the battle with Porus and his horse, which was the only horse he rode since his boyhood,

was killed. Alexander was defeated and following the Hindu principles of war Porus did not kill him but allowed him to leave. Obviously the kingdom of Ambi, who was his enemy and who supported Alexander, was annexed by Porus. The story that the number of Alexander's Greek soldiers depleted so

alarmingly and that they revolted and also that he got his general, who supported

his revolting army, killed before returning does not carry any credibility. The story that he named a city after the name

of his horse may also be a Greek concoction as no such place has yet been clearly identified as connected with that episode.Regards,Sunil K. Bhattacharjya--- On Thu, 7/23/09, sunil nair <astro_tellerkerala wrote:sunil nair <astro_tellerkerala Alexander's putatuve Incursion into the Punjab Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009, 12:20 AM