by F S Naiden
During these opening weeks of the campaign, Alexander sought in vain for some religious justification for the invasion. He talked to his men about Dionysus, and also Heracles, but encountered no traces of either god. Then he and his light force arrived in Nysa, a town ensconced in a forest in the Kabul River valley, and camped outside. When the night turned cold, the soldiers cut timber and made fires so big that the flames sprang out of control, leapt into a cemetery full of wooden monuments, and destroyed them. This omen frightened the inhabitants, but they did not know whether to surrender or flee. Their priests suggested a third response. Ambassadors from Nysa supplicated Alexander and informed him that the town was the birthplace of Dionysus. To the north, toward the Himalayas, rose the mountain where the god was born, called Meru. Would Alexander take possession of the town and join them in worshipping this god?68
Alexander believed they said the name of the mountain was Meros, which was the Greek word for “thigh.” “Meros” commemorated Dionysus’s birth from the thigh of Zeus. These people even worshipped the god by wearing fawn skins, as Greeks did, and like Dionysus they played cymbals—the same cymbals the Macedonian heard Indian soldiers playing before the battle at Arbela. The soldiers remembered the Central Asian boundary stones erected by the god. The intellectuals remembered Midas, who had invited Alexander to invade Asia. Midas had sent the Greek satyr Silenus to India, to join Dionysus’s expedition.69
Were the Nysaeans Greeks? Alexander had come upon Greeks in the Near East, but here, in the heights above the Kabul River, the people spoke Pakrit, a language much like Sanskrit, and worshipped the gods of north India. Interpreters turning Pakrit into Aramaic, and then Greek, told the following story: Dionysus left the place of his birth, headed to the Indus, and conquered all India, bringing the cultivation of vines. Starting from Meru, the god invaded India by going from one high place to the next and avoiding the heat and flooding—a tactic Alexander could imitate. The Macedonians assumed that once they reached a bigger city with better informants, a genealogy of the god’s Indian descendants would be forthcoming.70
At the invitation of the local priests, Alexander climbed Mount Meru, retracing the god's steps. A wooden shrine satisfied his notion of Dionysus among the Indians. After descending, he granted autonomy to the people of Nysa, who responded by giving him supplies and a few volunteers.
No one informed Alexander that Lord Shiva sat on the mountain, not Dionysus, or that Shiva’s son, Scanda (the name means “Seed”), was born on the froth of the Ganges, not of his father’s thigh. Scanda was a war god, not a god of the vine or the arts, a god of theft and not drink, with no kingdom and no dynasty. Nor would Alexander have listened. For the first time since Babylon, he had got himself a god. For the first time since Syria, he could share his god with his men.71
He had not, however, found any way to share his god with the other settlements in the Kabul valley, which resisted him without even attempting to communicate. At the first fort the Macedonians reached, an arrow shot without warning hit him in the shoulder. Two more hit Leonnatus and Ptolemy. The defenders would regret their accuracy. After the Macedonians scaled both rings of walls, the defenders burst from the gate in flight. The Macedonians slew every prisoner they took. The rest of the enemy scrambled up to the heights. Alexander razed the site and ordered Craterus to stay behind and destroy all settlements that did not surrender.72
This, the first big battle in India, gave the invaders a false impression of enemy fecklessness. In the next valley, the enemy remained behind the mud walls of the biggest fort in northern Swat. Some were mercenaries, not tribesmen. Alexander’s officers staged a mock retreat to lure some troops out of the fort, and the Macedonians routed them, but Alexander took an arrow in the leg while leading the way. For four days catapults battered the walls and decimated the defenders, yet assaults with ladders failed to penetrate the fort. The engineers lowered a bridge from a siege tower onto the fort’s outer wall, but it collapsed. Alexander found it prudent to negotiate. He would spare the enemy, provided that their mercenaries join his army. The mercenaries agreed, but then withdrew to a nearby hill rather than join him. The other defenders escaped at night. Infuriated, Alexander attacked the mercenaries, exterminated them, and captured a now empty town.73
Alexander sent Coenus to attack a second settlement. Unable to take this fortified position, Coenus made a mock retreat. Out came the defenders, as unschooled as before, and the Macedonians turned and pounced, killing 500 of them. Meanwhile, Alexander besieged a third settlement. Panic spread among the defenders, and their commander, Abisaras, led a general withdrawal to Pir Sar, a redoubt more formidable than those the Macedonians had faced so far. The defenders knew it simply as Avarna, “the fortress.” This mountain stood 5,000 feet above the Little Una River, or 8,000 feet above sea level. A tableland twenty-five miles in circumference, it provided ample springs, timber, and arable land. Like the warlords in Sogdiana, Abisaras wished to compel Alexander to grant him autonomy. Failing that, he would cut Alexander’s supply lines.74
Hearing that Pir Sar was sacred to Krishna, the Indian counterpart to Heracles, the officers told their men Heracles had once attacked it, and that they would do likewise. Ptolemy built a camp and a palisade partway up the ravine below the enemy position, but Macedonian assaults from this spot failed twice. The engineers now did their best work since Tyre. They poured earth and rocks into the ravine, and in the face of enemy volleys they built a mound 200 yards high in one day. Stationing catapults atop the mound, they maintained artillery fire as they continued to build it higher. In two more days they filled the ravine. Amazed, the enemy opened negotiations, but Alexander, mistrustful after the recent episode with the mercenaries, set a trap. While the negotiations were under way, he withdrew some of the troops surrounding the redoubt, and gave the enemy a chance to escape. Forgetting negotiations, they left the redoubt and ran down the mountainside. As soon as they were gone, Alexander stormed the redoubt. Then he directed his men to march downhill and attack the fleeing enemy from behind. Those the Macedonians did not kill hurled themselves from rocky outcroppings and perished. Only Abisaras and a few others escaped. Alexander had once again prevailed, but without the benefit of obtaining a surrender. His foes yielded up their lives and their land, but they did not cooperate, let alone supplicate.75
Alexander made offerings to Heracles amidst the rocks and the funeral pyres of many dead Macedonians. To the north stretched barren country rising up to the Himalayas. More ravines and mountains blocked the western view, and to the south the Little Una, a rivulet beside a dirt road, dribbled down to the Kabul River between a few settlements. Eastward, in the direction of the subcontinent, Alexander and his acolytes glimpsed the Indus watershed in Punjab. They had never seen anything so green or so utterly boundless.76
Anonymous illustration of Alexander’s flight in the Histoire du bon roi Alexandre of Jean Wauquelin, ca. 1440.
National Library of France.
several versions of the Alexander Romance tell how somewhere in Asia he came to a dead end but wished to go on. This version, written in Byzantine Greek, apparently derives from a story in the Talmud. The story may have originated in the Babylonian legend, Etana, about a king and an eagle.77 Alexander is writing about his travels to his mother:
I began to ask myself if this place was really the end of the world—the place where the sky touched the earth. How could I discover the truth?
I ordered my men to capture two of the large, white birds that lived there. Since these birds fed on carrion, the dead horses around our camp attracted them, and a great many of them drew near us. Powerful but tame, they did not fly away when we approached them. Some of the soldiers climbed on their backs, hung on, and flew off. I captured two of the birds and ordered them to be given no food for three days. On the third day I had a wooden yoke built, and tied it to their necks. Then I had an ox-skin made into a large bag and tied it to the yoke. Holding two spears about 10 feet long, I climbed into t
he bag. After fixing a horse’s liver to the point of each spear, I held them out. When the birds soared up to seize the livers, I rose up with them into the air. I thought I must be close to the sky. As the birds’ wings beat, and pushed the cold air against me, I shivered all over.
Soon a flying creature that looked like a man approached me and said, “Alexander, you have not yet secured the whole earth. Why are you exploring the sky? Return to earth as soon as you can, or you will become food for these birds.” He went on, “Look down on the earth, Alexander!” Fearfully, I looked down and saw a dragon curled up in a circle, and in the middle of the circle a tiny threshing-floor. Then my companion said to me, “Point a spear at the threshing-floor. That is the world. The dragon is the Ocean that encircles the world.”
After this warning, I lowered both spears, leading the birds downward, and returned to earth. Frozen and half-dead with exhaustion, I landed about seven days’ journey from my army. I soon encountered one of the generals under my command. Levying 300 horsemen from him, I returned to camp. Now I have decided to make no more attempts at the impossible. Farewell.
In India’s high country, Alexander flew into the heavens. Once he arrived in the low country, he would end up traveling in the other direction.
9
Self-Defeat
the babylonians thought Asia was 40,000 years old, and the Hebrews thought it was younger, but Asia came into being 10 million years ago. After the Indian plate moved across the Gulf of Arabia, a journey of millions of years, it reached the rest of the continent and forced it northward. The Zagros arose, and so did the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. East of the mountains two troughs opened. The western trough became the Indus, which reached the Gulf of Arabia. The eastern trough became the Ganges, which reached the Bay of Bengal.1
About 7000 BC, after the last ice age, melting glaciers in the mountains filled the troughs. The Himalayas and the Hindu Kush hemmed in the rain clouds coming from the Gulf of Arabia during the monsoon and sent down more water. The flow of water in both the Indus and the Ganges became far greater than that of the Nile before the building of the Aswan Dam—so much greater that no one has ever even attempted to build such a dam in India. Every flood season, the rivers move and divide. Once there were two rivers to the west, the Indus and the Sarasvati. The Sarasvati flowed just east of the Indus, and perhaps reached the Rann of Kutch. The first Indian writings, the Rig Veda, called the Sarasvati the holy river. Some of the authors of the Veda lived beside it.2
The Indian plate kept moving, and around 2000 BC it shoved a tributary of the Sarasvati into the Indus. The Sarasvati diminished until it could no longer reach the Rann of Kutch. It expired in the desert that bordered the Indus. Or it would have expired had it not been a goddess as well as a river. The Hindus say that Sarasvati dove underground and took her waters the other way, toward the Ganges, into which she flows at a spot in the upper Ganges valley. This démarche occurred about 1000 BC.3
The plate kept moving, and the mountains kept rising. Even now, the Himalayas are rising inches every year. Each peak yields to another, bigger mountain, leading to some supernal or world mountain described in Sanskrit writings later than the Veda. It should be tall, of course—so tall that stars circle it as if in a whirlpool. Great rivers, including the Indus and the Ganges, should flow from it. The water at the foot of the world mountain should be sweet, calm, and stable—an object lesson to the rivers of the subcontinent. Gods should live on the mountain, and people should worship it—as they still worship Mount Kalaish in southern Tibet, where Buddhist pilgrims circle the mountain in a thirteen-mile circuit. Of course, these worshippers will never scale the world mountain. Rivers and mountains lie between it and us, seven concentric rings, the Hindus think, running outward from the mountain to the edge of the world.4
The Route of the Expedition Through India, 326–325 BC.
Ancient World Mapping Center.
In Alexander’s time, only the people of northern India knew this story. The Iranians possessed shards of it, and other foreigners knew even less. Foreigners knew little about India. The Veda does not report that any foreigner ever invaded it. The isolation of India explains why foreigners, even as late as the empire of the Achaemenids, did not know it was a subcontinent.5
When Alexander’s men encountered Anahita in Bactria, they did not realize that Harahvati, Anahita’s original name, was the Persian for Sarasvati, the fugitive water goddess of the subcontinent.6
after descending from Pir Sar and going back to the Kabul River Valley, Alexander and the light force reached the lowlands he had glimpsed from atop the mountain. The winter had now begun, but they scarcely knew it, for they were entering tropical jungles for the first time. As the engineers labored to clear a path, Alexander and his companions came upon some war elephants that fleeing Indian troops had abandoned. The king now learned to hunt them. The royal party captured some and dressed them for military service. Two others escaped capture by flinging themselves from a cliff.7
In spring 326, half a year after the Indian campaign began, Alexander reached the banks of the Indus. His chief engineer, Aristobulus, had a pontoon bridge ready and waiting. They had chosen the right season for crossing. Had they tried later, they would have faced a six-mile-an-hour current flowing several hundred yards wide, and the bridge would have been impossible to build. However confident he was in the bridge, Alexander gave the river two offerings, one before he crossed and one after. He had done this only twice before, at the Danube and at the Hellespont. In histories of the subcontinent, this crossing is the first event securely dated to a particular year. Along with his pontoons and his prayers, Alexander brought linear time to India.8
The army traveled a local road for several days to the first important city, Taxila, where Alexander hoped to extract a surrender, supplies, and information. The ruler of Taxila, Ambhi, had already contacted Alexander through ambassadors and sent a gift of elephants. He now marshaled some of his troops as an honor guard and marched out of town to receive the invaders. Mazdai had done the same to good effect, but Alexander doubted whether Ambhi was surrendering, and so he prepared the Macedonians for battle. The prince reassured the invaders, but he communicated with them very imperfectly, and so Alexander’s entourage mistook Ambhi’s hereditary title for a personal name.9
Ambhi presented his city to Alexander, along with thirty elephants. In return, Alexander appointed Ambhi as satrap over his own kingdom, which ran from the Indus to the Jhelum, the next river in the Punjab. Never before had Alexander turned a king into a satrap. In Ambhi’s eyes, Alexander made him autonomous. In Macedonian eyes, Ambhi was surrendering unconditionally.
In Taxila, the leading city in the Punjab, Alexander and the companions could form realistic ideas about India. The society of the Aryas, as many Indians called themselves, extended east into Punjab and the Ganges valley, and also south, along the banks of the Indus, much as Egypt extended along the banks of the Nile. To the north rose the Himalayas, visible in good weather. Contrary to what the people of Nysa had told the Macedonians, Mount Meru was in the Himalayas, far to the north.10
To learn more about the gods, Alexander and his interpreters could use Ambhi’s library of religious literature—the tales of the Puranas and the hymns and formulas of the Vedas, plus sacred commentaries and ritual manuals. The priests called Brahmins were both librarians and the practitioners of the polytheism described in the Vedas. This long-predominant religion differed from the polytheism of the Iranians and Greeks. Animal offerings were important, but the victim might be strangled, not clubbed or stabbed. The innards, crucial in a Greek sacrifice, might be cast aside, along with the excrement. The worshippers never ate even the smallest part of the animal. Instead they burned it whole, a very odd thing in Greek eyes.11
More important than any animal offering was pouring milk into a fire. Like the Babylonians, the Indians tended to pour offerings, not burn them, the Greek preference. Instead of wine, worshippers drank the hallucinat
ory juice of the soma plant and offered the rest of the plant to the god. Persians used soma, too, but Alexander probably had not noticed. So far as later writers knew, he had not taken part in any Persian religious rituals.12
When not hallucinating, the Indians followed rules as complex as any in Egypt or Babylon. One kind of priest chanted mantras from the Veda; others made libations or killed animals; others prepared soma. The most important priest watched the proceedings in silence, detecting any errors, and mending them in his mind without interfering. Indian kings did not act as priests, but the priests, eager for royal patronage, made kings the chief beneficiaries of some prayers and offerings. These rites let a king ascend to the realm of the gods and return safely to earth. Heracles had never done that. He had gone to Hades and back, not to heaven and back.
In Taxila, the invaders also encountered ascetics whom the Greeks called sophists, or, since they were half naked, gymnosophists, or “sophists with no clothes on.” These were the Jain and Buddhist monks whom the Indians called Shramanes, and whom the companions took to be Cynics. These two sects rejected animal sacrifice—a perverse idea to the Macedonians—but some aspects of the Jain religion might have appealed to them, and especially to Alexander. Jina, or Jain, meant “victor.” One of the titles of the Jain holy men, tirthankara, meant someone who gains a victory by finding a ford in a river and leading others safely across. Victors, water, fords—here was military intelligence, but what sort? It came from half-naked beggars sweeping the dust from their paths lest they crush a beetle or a seed.13
One of the ascetics, whom the companions called Calanus, joined Alexander’s entourage. He and others explained Indian basics to the Macedonians. According to the Brahmins, he said, Alexander did not need to be Zeus’s son. He only needed to underwrite royal rituals. According to the Jains, Alexander needed only to be a pilgrim, leading others to god. Other kings had embraced these sects. One Indian king on the Ganges turned to Buddhism in order to console himself after the death of his wife. For military purposes, Calanus or others recommended the cult of the warrior and sage Vasudeva. An image of this legendary champion appeared at the head of Indian armies, including the next army Alexander would fight. This god would make a suitable Heracles.14