The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.195

c10.s1.195

The Paropamisadae was not among the provinces ceded by Seleucus to Chandragupta. Extravagant views have been put forward as to what Seleucus did cede,¹ but there is a passage from Eratosthenes, usually neglected, which seems plain enough.² It says that, before Alexander, the Paropamisadae, Arachosia,³ and Gedrosia all stretched to the Indus; the reference is to the Achaemenid satrapies, and it implies that in Persian times the Paropamisadae and Gandhāra were one satrapy. Alexander (it continues) took away from Iran the parts of these three satrapies which lay along the Indus and made of them separate κατοικίαι (which must here mean governments or provinces); it was these which Seleucus ceded, being districts predominantly Indian in blood. In Gedrosia the boundary is known; the country ceded was that between the Median Hydaspes (probably the Purali) and the Indus, as is shown by a later mention of the Hydaspes⁴ as the boundary of Iran in this direction. Of the satrapy which Eratosthenes calls Paropamisadae Chandragupta got Gandhāra, the land between the Kunar river and the Indus; this is certain, because Eratosthenes says that he did not get the whole, while the thorough evangelisation of Gandhāra by Asoka shows that it belonged to the Mauryas. The boundary in Arachosia cannot be precisely defined; but, speaking very roughly, what Chandragupta got lay east of a line starting from the Kunar river and following the watershed to somewhere near Quetta and then going to the sea by Kalat and the Purali river; that will serve as an indication. The Paropamisadae itself was never Chandragupta’s.