Person · Macedonian conqueror · Greece

Alexander of Macedon

Also known as Alexander the Great, Alexander III of Macedon, Sikandar

Date

-356–-323

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

32.820, 73.600

Worth knowing

Arrian records that Alexander saw crocodiles in the Indus and beans on its banks like Egyptian ones, and concluded the river must be the upper Nile — which is part of why he sailed down it. He died at Babylon in 323 BCE without ever learning otherwise, and the Greek accounts of his Indian campaign are the earliest datable foreign descriptions of the subcontinent.

About the place

Placed at the Hydaspes crossing on the Jhelum, the furthest east a Macedonian army reached and the battle his Indian campaign is remembered for.

Connections (7)

• Court associationAmbhi of Taxila

  Ambhi of Taxila submitted before Alexander crossed the Indus, supplied him with elephants, five thousand troops and provisions, and was confirmed as satrap of his own territory. His motive was his quarrel with Porus across the Jhelum. Without this alliance there is no march to the Hydaspes, and the Greek sources call him Taxiles after the city rather than by his own name.

• CampaignHydaspes (Jhelum) battlefield

  Alexander crossed the Jhelum at night in monsoon flood and beat Porus's elephants and chariots on the far bank in 326 BCE, then reinstated him as a satrap. It is the furthest east a Macedonian army reached; the troops refused to cross the Beas a few weeks later, and the campaign turned back and went down the Indus instead.

• CampaignIndus basin

  Arrian records that Alexander saw crocodiles in the Indus and beans on its banks like Egyptian ones, and concluded that the river must be the upper course of the Nile — which is part of why he sailed down it rather than going back the way he had come. He died at Babylon in 323 BCE without learning otherwise, and Nearchus's fleet coasted from the Indus mouth to the Gulf instead.

• Life routeHund / Udabhāndapura

  Alexander bridged the Indus at Hund in the spring of 327 BCE, having sent Hephaestion ahead to build the crossing, and it was from here that he went on to Taxila and then to the Hydaspes to fight Porus. The reason is hydrological rather than strategic: the Indus is fordable at this reach and for long distances above and below it is not. Every army moving between the Kabul valley and the Punjab had to come to the same few hundred metres of bank, which is why the site keeps reappearing.

• CampaignBarikot / Bazira

  Arrian and Curtius name Bazira among the Swat towns Alexander took in 327 BCE, before the siege of Aornos and the crossing of the Indus, and the Italian mission's excavations at Barikot have found the Indo-Greek fortification that followed. The campaign in Swat was the hardest fighting of the Indian expedition and is described at length precisely because it was difficult, so a modern trench section at Barikot can be set against a classical narrative of the same walls — which is rare anywhere in the subcontinent.

• CampaignAornos / Pīr Sar

  Aornos is the siege Arrian makes most of, because Herakles was said to have failed at the same rock. The population of the Swat hills withdrew onto a flat-topped height above the Indus in 326 BCE and Alexander, unable to assault it, had his men build a mound across the intervening ravine until the artillery could reach. Aurel Stein rode the Indus bend in 1926 with Arrian's measurements in hand and identified the place as Pīr Sar in Shangla, which is still the strongest of the proposed sites.

• Biographical routeVipāśā / Beas

  The Beas is where the march ended. In 326 BCE, after the Hydaspes, Alexander’s army refused to cross the Hyphasis and go on towards the Ganga; he sulked in his tent, gave way, raised twelve altars on the bank and turned south down the Indus instead. The eastern limit of the Macedonian empire is a river in Punjab, fixed by soldiers who would not go further.

On these journeys

• India connected to the world

Sources

Wikipedia, “Alexander the Great”. Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, books IV–VI, and Indica; Strabo, Geography, book XV; A.B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire (1988).

• Wikipedia — Alexander the Great