Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c7.44

c7.44

To the Persians, then, Greece owes her first knowledge of India. Darius had both Greeks and Indians as his subjects. Indian troops formed the light division of the army of Xerxes: they must have marched through the bloody defiles of Thermopylae, and their usefulness caused them to be retained by Mardonius¹ after the retreat of the king, to take part in the Boeotian campaign which ended so disastrously at the Asopus. Ionian officers in Persian employ, and probably Ionian traders, visited the Panjāb. But with the gradual break-up of the Persian Empire, the practical independence of eastern Irān, and the war with Greece, the traffic between India and the West sank to practically nothing. Probably the satrapy of the Panjāb, like Baktria, owed a merely nominal allegiance, as time went on, to the court at Susa. But the Persian Empire made a profound impression upon the Indian mind. The Kharōṣṭhī script, introduced no doubt by the Persians in their official documents, remained in use on the North-West Frontier till the fourth century A.D. The remains of Persian and Babylonian customs at Taxila may point to this place as the capital of the satrapy under the Persian Empire. The Maurya Emperors, as we gather from the account given by Megasthenes of the court of Sandrakottus¹, lived in Persian style. The Indian, like the Persian monarch, lived in seclusion, surrounded by his guards, and only appearing at rare intervals. The Buddhist architecture of Aśoka, with its bell-capitals and winged lions, shews many traces of Persian influence². Aśoka’s plan of propagating the *Dharma* by means of inscriptions upon the face of the rock, may have been borrowed from similar practices in vogue among the Persians—for instance the Behistūn inscription. Even the Royal Road running through the Maurya domains finds its parallel in Persia. How this influence precisely crept in, we are, in our ignorance of the history of the Panjāb at this period, unable to say. Was there a viceregal court at Taxila, where Sandrakottus had seen the stately Persian ceremonial in practice? Or did he merely assume Persian customs, as Alexander and the Syrian Seleukids assumed them, because Persia, even in decay, remained the greatest and most imposing empire known to the world at that time?