The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c12.25

c12.25

² Arrian, *Anab.* v, 1, vi, 2; *Curtius*, viii, 10; *Justin*, xii, 7; Plutarch, *Alex.*, ch. lviii; *Strabo*, xv, 7–9. The conjectures concerning the identity of Nysa collected in McCrindle’s Note G are unsatisfactory. Sir H. T. Holdich, whose knowledge of the frontier is unsurpassed, has been more successful, and has indicated the approximate position of Nysa with tolerable certainty. ‘Elsewhere,’ he writes (*Geogr. J.* for Jan., 1876), ‘I have stated my reasons for believing that the Kamdesh Kafirs who sent hostages to the camp of Ghulam Haidar are descendants of those very Nysaeans who greeted Alexander as a co-religionist and compatriot, and were kindly treated by him in consequence. They had been there, in the Suwāt country bordering the slopes of the Koh-i-Mor (“Meros” of the Classics), from such ancient periods that the Makedonians could give no account of their advent; and they remained in the Suwāt country till comparatively recent Buddhist times . . . The lower spurs and valleys of the Koh-i-Mor [are] where the ancient city of Nysa (or Nuson) once stood. Apparently it exists no longer above ground, though it may be found in the maps of thirty years ago, figuring as rather an important place under its old name . . . Bacchanalian processions . . . chanting hymns, as indeed they are chanted to this day by certain of the Kafirs’ (Holdich, *The Indian Borderland*, Methuen, 1901, pp. 270, 342; *The Gates of India*, 1910, p. 123). Properly speaking, Mēros was the name of a single peak of the triple-peaked mountain (τρικόρυφον ὄρος). The other summits were named Korasibiē and Kondasbē respectively (Polyainos, I, 1; p. 7 in ed. Melbar). The three peaks are visible from Peshāwar. Compare the anecdote of Conolly and his ‘relatives, the Kāfirs’ (Raverty, *Notes*, p. 129). Philostratos (*Apollonios*, Bk. II, ch. 9) avers that ‘the inhabitants of Nysa deny that Alexander ever went up the mountain’, and adds that ‘the companions of Alexander did not write down the truth in reporting this’.