The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.170

v1.c25.170

Some time apparently in September 325² India saw the Yavana columns move out of Pattala on the homeward road. It was some three years and a half since the brilliant figure of the warrior king had issued from the highlands of Kandahār to enter the confines of the Indian world: for the last year and a half he had flashed, a more than human wonder, before the eyes of the peoples of the Punjab and Sind; now his meteoric appearance in India was coming to its end, and obscurity falls once more on Indian history. Alexander started with the land-force, except such troops as were left with the satraps in the Indian provinces, for the river Hab³. The naval armament remained at Pattala with Nearchus, till the latter part of October, when the monsoon would change. Alexander again, when he approached the Hab, found the country empty; the tribesmen, a people of Dravidian stock, Arava, whom the Greeks called Arabitae, had deserted their villages in terror. The Europeans crossed the river (now the frontier of India and Baluchistān) into the country of the Oritae, who still, being Dravidians, belonged ethnologically to India⁴. Here some opposition, ineffectual enough, was made to the passage of the foreigners. One of the large villages of the Oritae, Rhambacia⁵, was occupied and destined for another Greek Alexandria⁶. Its new population was compounded largely of people from the Pashtu country (Arachosians)⁷.