Place · battle · Pakistan

Hydaspes (Jhelum) battlefield

Date

326 BCE

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

32.930, 73.730

Worth knowing

Arrian records that Alexander crossed the Jhelum at night in monsoon flood, and that after the battle he reinstated Porus as satrap of his own kingdom. A few weeks later the army refused to cross the Beas, and the campaign turned south down the Indus instead — partly because Alexander had concluded from the crocodiles and the beans on its banks that the river was the upper Nile.

Connections (6)

• CampaignKhyber Pass

  Alexander entered by the northern passes in 327 BCE, beat Porus on the Jhelum in 326 in the heaviest fighting of the whole campaign, and turned back at the Beas when his army refused to go further. He had been eight years marching and they had been told India ended much sooner than it does. What he left behind was a chain of Greek settlements in Bactria and the northwest, and the encounter through which classical Europe learned that India existed.

• Power passed toGandhāra

  Gandhara and the Hydaspes battlefield are connected through the ancient northwest Indian landscape encountered by Alexander’s armies. Gandhara lay west of the Indus, while the Hydaspes, identified with the Jhelum River, was farther east. Alexander crossed this broader region before fighting King Porus near the Hydaspes in 326 BCE, linking Gandhara with his Indian campaign.

• FolkloreKodagu (Coorg)

  Kodagu carries a persistent story that the Kodava descend from soldiers of Alexander who never went home. It is a colonial invention rather than a local memory: Mark Wilks proposed an Indo-Scythian origin in his Historical Sketches of the South of India (1810), and the Manual of Coorg (1870) of Moegling and Richter turned it into Greek descent, arguing from the Kodava tunic and dagger, the clan structure and the absence of Brahmin priests. Alexander's army in fact turned back at the Beas, two thousand kilometres north of this ridge, and no genetic study has found a Macedonian signal.

• CampaignAlexander of Macedon

  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.

• Route adjacencyHund / Udabhāndapura

  The Indus crossing at Hund and the Hydaspes battlefield are the two fixed points of Alexander's Punjab campaign, about two hundred kilometres apart. Having crossed at Hund he was received at Taxila by Ambhi, took on the elephants and cavalry that alliance provided, and met Porus on the Jhelum in the monsoon of 326 BCE. The route is the same one Mahmūd of Ghazni used in reverse a thousand years later to take Hund from the Shahis, and the Grand Trunk Road still runs it.

• River adjacencyVitastā / Jhelum

  The Hydaspes is the Vitastā, and the battle Alexander fought against Porus in 326 BCE turned on the crossing: he went upstream in the night and in the rain to ford it where he was not expected, and the elephants met the phalanx on the far bank. The exact site is not agreed on, because the river has moved repeatedly across the plain since.

Sources

List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts

• Wikipedia