The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.56

Language: English

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Aornus, we are told, was not far from the modern Amb; it was a great isolated mass of rock, 6670 feet high, flat on the top with precipitous sides, which on the south went down straight to the river Indus. On the summit were woods and watersprings and fields whose cultivation could keep a thousand men employed. It seems plain that an object of this kind can hardly have escaped modern geographers in search of it. The inference is that some particulars in the Greek account are due to imagination. But when once we begin to trim it so as to suit the actual topography, it depends on a more or less arbitrary selection which particulars we eliminate and which we retain. There is at any rate no reason to doubt that the final conquest of this mountain region did involve the reduction of some exceptionally strong rock-citadel, in which fugitives of the defeated tribes made a last stand. The citadel, when taken, was held for Alexander by a garrison under the Indian Çaçigupta. The capture of Aornus had to be followed by another short expedition further up into the hills, in pursuit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga² and had with them a herd of fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these animals, so strange and wonderful to them, of whose value in battle they had probably formed an even exaggerated notion, made their pursuit the more eager.

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The hills were deserted before them, and Alexander pushed on as far as a town which the Greek books call Dyrta. It was found empty of inhabitants. Alexander learnt that the fugitive prince was dead by the evidence of his severed head, brought by some hillmen one day into camp. He had fallen a victim to some hostile tribe or to his own followers. Two bodies of light troops were detached to scour the hills yet further, and Alexander himself turned back with the rest of his division to the Indus. Some natives of the region were caught by the Macedonians on their way. They reported that the fugitives from Aornus and the people of the hills had escaped into the country of Abhisāra, whose rāja was watching the progress of the Yavanas with a doubtful mind. As for the elephants, they had turned them loose in the country bordering the Indus, more swampy in those days than it is now¹. An elephant hunt accordingly followed; Alexander had already, with his quick interest in new things and his Macedonian sporting propensities, collected about him Indians whose special business was elephant-hunting, and by their means the scattered herd was driven in, and attached to the Macedonian army². The point at which Alexander’s division struck the Indus on its descent from the hills was some way above the point where Hephaestion and Perdiccas had by this time constructed the bridge.

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Between the two, the right bank of the river was largely overgrown with forest, which, if in one way it impeded the advance of Alexander’s division, in another way helped the transport by furnishing timber for boats. Part of Alexander’s force floated down the river, and when he arrived at Hephaestion’s bridge the number of new boats was swelled by those brought down from up-stream. The two divisions of the Yavana host now re-united for passage into the heart of India. The place at which the bridge had been made has been fixed by the most recent opinion at Ohind, about 16 miles above Attock. The Greeks felt that they were crossing the threshold of a new world. Sacrifices to the Greek gods, games and horse-races in their honour on the river bank at Ohind, marked their sense that they were about to begin a new enterprise of formidable magnitude. Alexander was approaching the bourne of the old Persian Empire, and it was evident that he meant to press still onward towards the sunrise. The Greek diviners announced that the omens were favourable. In the early dawn one day in the spring of 326 b.c.³, the host began to defile over the bridge, the mingled line of many races streaming all day into the Indian world.

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And the composition of the army became now more singularly mixed by the contingents of native Indian troops sent by the rāja of Takshaçilā, squadrons of Indian horse and thirty elephants, endless trains moreover of oxen and sheep for sacrifice and food, and silver brought in masses from his treasuries.