The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.94

v1.c25.94

Some of the pictorial features of the battle which followed we can gather from our Greek texts. But their account is too confused, in part perhaps through the mistakes of copyists, to allow us to reconstruct it as a military operation. Not knowing whether it was above or below the Indian camp that Alexander had landed, we do not know whether the right or the left of the Indian line rested upon the river; and yet that would be an essential point in understanding what happened. We know at any rate that the strength of the Indians was in the two hundred elephants—an arm to which the Europeans had no parallel and which was apt to terrify the foreign horses—whilst the superiority of the Europeans was in cavalry.