The Greeks in Bactria and India c18.4

c18.4

In the absence of excavation there can naturally be no certainty about the site of Alexandria; all the sites so far proposed—the most favoured has been the ruin-mounds at Opian near Charikar—are mere guess-work, and the French archaeological mission declined to locate it.² There is however no reason to doubt the statement that it was in Opiane,³ for Alexander founded it on his way northward by the Seistan-Ghazni-Kabul route, which would take him through Opiane on his way to the passes of the Hindu Kush; this means that it stood somewhere on the *west* of the united Panjshir-Ghorband river. We are also told that it was close to the Hindu Kush,⁴ that it was the gateway to India,⁵ and that it stood at the meeting-place of the three routes which crossed the Hindu Kush from Bactra (p. 139), the τρίοδος ἐκ Βάκτρων which was in the Paropamisadae. This last is shown by a comparison of the two surviving versions of the bematists’ account of Alexander’s march. Pliny (VI, 61) names as stages along the route the town of ‘the Arachosians’ (see App. 9), Ortospana (certainly Kabul, p. 471), and Alexandri oppidum, Alexander’s city, *i.e.* Alexandria. In Eratosthenes⁶ the name ‘the Arachosians’