Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c8.8

c8.8

The account of the period opens with a chapter (I) on India in the Age of the Nandas from the pen of Prof. H. C. Raychaudhuri who reconstructs, with great ingenuity, from very meagre sources a vivid picture of the establishment of the empire of the Nandas and its polity; in his survey of the outlying parts of India, he offers a succinct treatment of the political geography of North-Western India and of the advance of Persia and its rule on the banks of the Indus, and prepares the ground for the detailed study of the Indian campaigns of Alexander by the present writer (Chap. II). The hardest fights in which that great Macedonian warrior engaged were all fought on Indian soil, and his Indian opponents, though they did not win victories against him, generally won his approbation of their fighting qualities. These campaigns have been treated at some length, and their place in the history of India and of the world has been adverted to above. Alexander was accompanied by several scientists and literateurs whose writings communicated to Europe a vast amount of knowledge about India; they also formed the basis of many of the observations made by the ambassadors of the Hellenistic monarchs to the Mauryan empire, of whom Megasthenes is, of course, the most celebrated; in one chapter (III) all the notices of India by Greek and Latin authors bearing on our period have been brought together and reviewed also at full length with a view to put the reader in possession of most of the primary data now available; the chapter is followed appropriately by a comprehensive note, by Dr. J. N. Banerjea, on the foreign coins of the period found in India.