Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 1).djvu/181

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ch. xvii]
HISTORY— PRE-MUHAMMADAN
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north of the Sutlej and the states of Chamba, Suket, and Mandi. The historians of Alexander's campaigns introduce us also to the kingdoms of the elder Poros on both banks of the Jhelam, of the younger Poros east of the Chenab, and of Sophytes (Saubhuti) in the neighbourhood of the Salt Range. We meet also with tribal confederacies, such as in Alexander's time those of the Kathaioi on the upper, and of the Malloi on the lower, Ravi.

Invasion by Alexander, 327-325 B.C.— The great Persian ing, Darius, in 512 B.C. pushed out the boundary of his empire to the Indus, then running in a more easternly course than to-day[1]. The army with which Xerxes invaded Greece included a contingent of Indian bowmen[2]. When Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire and started on the conquest of India, the Indus was the boundary of the former. His remarkable campaign lasted from April, 327 B.C., when he led an army of 50,000 or 60,000 Europeans across the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley, to October, 325, when he started from Sindh on his march to Persia through Makran. Having cleared his left flank by a campaign in the hills of Buner and Swat, he crossed the Indus sixteen miles above Attock near Torbela. The King of Taxila, whose capital was near the Margalla pass on the north border of the present Rawalpindi district, had prudently submitted as soon as the Macedonian army appeared in the Kabul valley. From the Indus Alexander marched to Taxila, and thence to the Jhelam (Hydaspes), forming *a camp near the site now occupied by the town of that name in the country of Poros. The great army of the Indian king was drawn up to dispute the passage probably not very

  1. See Sykes' History of Persia', pp. 179-180; also Herodotos in. 94 and 98 and iv. 44.
  2. "The Indians clad with garments made of cotton had bows of cane and arrows of cane tipped with iron." — Herodotos vii. 65.