Alexander’s time in India involved him in major battles and two failures, his forced return and then his march into Gedrosia, now Baluchistan and the Makran desert. Even so his name is famous in legend in Sindh. I will consider his presence there by addressing four main issues: its historicity and our knowledge of it, impressions which the land and its peoples made on him, the relevance, or not, of rule by Persian kings before him, his aims and others’ responses to them. These questions are large and much discussed: I will have most to say about the months following Alexander’s return from the river Beas and his presence in southern ‘India’.

Alexander was in Sindh for less than a year. Many centuries later, tales of his supposed exploits in India became part of a legendary Alexander Romance , but his campaign in what is now Pakistan, including Sindh, was not a legend too. No archaeological evidence has yet been found of his presence in Sindh, but we can follow his route and his experiences in histories which were composed by eyewitnesses .One such history was by his friend and future admiral Nearchus , writing before 315BC ,though it concentrated on his own voyage west from the mouth of the river Indus; another was by his lifelong friend and officer Ptolemy , writing ,I believe, near the end of his life c. 283/2BC, another by his admiring follower Aristobulus , writing before Ptolemy, but after 301BC; the earliest was by the steersman of his fleet ,Onesicritus, who wrote c.320BC. Onesicritus was recognised in antiquity to have told stories and given interpretations which were often fantastic, but unlike the legends in the Alexander Romance his were rooted in his own experience at sites which he and Alexander indeed visited.

There is an important complication for modern historians: none of these four histories survives intact. They are known to us only through the use of parts of them by authors in the Roman period ,especially Strabo the geographer (c.10BC-AD 20), Plutarch the biographer (c.AD100) and Arrian (no earlier than c AD130) , each of whom wrote in Greek. I will give a brief summary of how they used them, as it is a framework for any serious study of Alexander and is sometimes misunderstood.

Alexander had taken an official historian of his expedition into Asia, Callisthenes kinsman of Aristotle, but arrested him and left him to die in spring 327BC before the army entered India. Callisthenes, therefore, wrote nothing about Alexander’s time in Sindh. However, even without his history to guide them, Ptolemy and Aristobulus wrote independent narratives which still largely agreed. Their broad agreement about Alexander’s route and main exploits in India is an important reason for trusting in general the narrative which Arrian constructed from their works.

We also have narratives of the campaign in India in the 17th book of Diodorus Siculus’ Universal History (c.10BC),written in Greek, and in Quintus Curtius’ eighth and ninth book of his history of Alexander ( probably c 70AD) ,written in Latin. They are full of information but they must be used even more critically. Diodorus is a careless abbreviator and Curtius is a Roman, revelling in rhetoric and moralising, both of which he imposed anachronistically on his sources. He prefaces his account of the Indian campaign with a brief summary of aspects of India and its peoples. He notes how Indians consider trees which they look after to be divine, so much so that it is a capital offence to cut one down, a comment which can be supported from other evidence. However he also states that the seasons in India are the opposite to those elsewhere, being very hot when other places freeze and being snowy and freezing when other places are hot. He has stupidly confused them with the Antipodes.

As his sketch of India describes the river Ganges , which was never reached by Alexander, and a king and a palace,surely there too, it draws not just on authors with Alexander but probably on Megasthenes who wrote several decades later and went where they never did. It illustrates the problems in taking everything written by Curtius as valid for Alexander’s campaign. He also includes long speeches for Alexander and others, but they are not records of what they said. Curtius invented them, but sometimes he elaborated a precise detail which he had found in his underlying sources and made it into a rhetorical point. Only there do his speeches have any relevance for histories of Alexander and his contemporaries.

A further reason for caution is that one of Curtius’ main sources is clearly the same as the source which Diodorus greatly abbreviated. This shared source, a Greek one, contained some detailed information but it also confused parts of Alexander’s route and placed many incidents in the wrong sequence and context, as we can see if we compare it closely with the narrative which Arrian based on eyewitnesses. Ultimately this source is likely to be Cleitarchus, a Greek author in Alexandria in Egypt. The date when he wrote is disputed but is most likely to be c. 310BC. He was already known in antiquity to be highly unreliable and full of exaggerations and tall stories. He had probably not been present on the march in India, and so information in Diodorus or Curtius cannot be used with confidence to correct Arrian’s narrative when the two of them conflict. However, it is clear from Diodorus’ abbreviated version that Cleitarchus also drew on Nearchus and Onesicritus, two eyewitnesses. Despite Onesicritus’ flights of fancy, this use of them is a reason for taking some of the abbreviation seriously and assessing it for possible use as a supplement to Arrian’s narrative. It is a matter of judgement, not scientific fact, when and where to use such material. As a result even critically -grounded modern histories of Alexander and his campaign differ over what they include.

In ancient ‘India’, now Pakistan, the eyewitness historians described aspects of the remarkable land and people they saw. So far as they are known to us, they are fascinating evidence, plainly based on personal encounters. The further they marched into the Punjab, the more they realised that the land supported a big population, living in settled towns, a dense pattern which had a very long prehistory. The same was true in parts of Sindh. Aristobulus, an eyewitness with Alexander, remarked how he saw ‘more than a thousand cities with villages’ which had been left high and dry in land beyond the Indus when the river shifted westwards to its current course. The number is surely an exaggeration, but he was presumably referring to settlements of what we call the ancient Indus Valley civilisation beyond the eastern bank of the river, extending from Harappa south westwards.

This dense pattern of towns ,old and new, was very different from Syria or Iran when Alexander marched through them. Those lands had been under Persian rule by the Achaemenid line of kings for at least two hundred years, but from Egypt to central Asia only one new town had been founded by a Persian king : it was Cyropolis (modern Kurkath) near the river Jaxartes (Syr Darya), which the great king Cyrus had ordered in the 530’s BC. Since then there had been no others. India past and present was an astonishing contrast. Its big rivers made hundreds of dense settlements possible, a legacy which is still waiting to be found and excavated by archaeologists in Pakistan. They existed not just by the Indus but also by the rivers of the Punjab which Alexander and his army encountered in spate during the summer rains. The Hydaspes river, the Jhelum, spread to a width of about half a mile when it began to flood and three times more when it was in full spate. The Acesines river, the Chenab, was particularly wide and swift, as Alexander’s companion Ptolemy noted. This mass of water supported such fertility that it could sustain human settlement on a scale beyond any known in Greece ,even in Macedon’s lowlands which were broken up by big rivers. Three hundred cities were reckoned to exist between the river Jhelum and the Chenab and as many as five thousand, on some optimistic estimates, between the Jhelum and the Beas.

Eyewitnesses with Alexander in India noted remarkable birds, snakes and animals they encountered, including elephants and the method of hunting and catching them. They also observed unusual plants, including ones with fruits which were long ,curved and sweet. Evidently, they were bananas: they upset their visitors’ stomachs ,so Alexander forbade them to be eaten, a banana ban which I much approve as someone who dislikes their taste.

They also described people they encountered. They noted the men’s long bows and chariots, the types of bit they devised for their horses and the rich riders’ use of goads, made of ivory. They were impressed by their robes of cotton, ‘linen’ to the Greeks, and the men’s habit of tying their hair into a top knot: images on contemporary coins match these impressions .The very rich, they wrote, wrote ivory earrings. They also noted Indians’ love of bright colours, including the dyes they used on their beards to turn them red, blue and so forth. They described their white shoes with stacked heels and their habit of carrying parasols to shade them from the sun. In the north, one of Alexander’s historians observed, the colour of people’s skin was like the Egyptians’, but in the south, modern Sindh, it was dark. Neither in the north nor in the south, he wrote, did people have woolly hair :it was straight, this onlooker inferred, because of the dampness of the air. Presumably he was thinking of the rainy season.

Indians, observers said, were ’physically slender, of a good stature and light in movement, much more so than other people’. Alexander’s men encountered a kingdom, apparently by the river Jhelum, whose people were so good looking that they assumed that beauty was a necessary condition for a child to be reared there : the ruler of these beautiful people, Sopeithes, was a handsome example, superbly dressed and richly adorned with jewels, a forerunner of the bejewelled rajahs who remained so impressive in Indian history down to the 1960’s.

Indians were also very fond of dancing and music. When Alexander prepared to travel down the Jhelum in November 325BC with a huge fleet of at least 1800 boats, he began by holding musical competitions. They included a satirical play written for the occasion to make fun of his treasurer at Tarsus in western Asia who had been living with a top courtesan from Athens. His extravagances and her death had just been reported by reinforcements who had arrived from west Asia. The play, called the Agen, was the first new Greek play ever to be performed in India. Alexander also appointed 33 highly- honoured ship- commanders, or trierarchs, none of whom was Indian, but one, and only one, was Persian, Bagoas son of Pharnuches. He was plainly the eunuch Bagoas who was beloved by Alexander. He had founded a city in India in memory of his horse: now he made made his eunuch a ship captain.

Indian onlookers soon contributed to the spectacle. When Alexander’s men embarked horses onto their huge fleet, nearby Indians came running down to the river- banks and were amazed by the sight of horses travelling in boats: the trading of horses by boat from the Punjab and the north- west regions into the further subcontinent of India was to become important in later centuries, but it had evidently not yet begun. As the fleet set off, the Jhelum’s high banks and the adjoining woods echoed the plash of the oars, the shouts of the boats’ coxes and the rhythmic cry of the rowers, but Indians followed them for a long way, singing their own songs, ‘for ,of all people the Indians are lovers of song and dance, descendants from Dionysus and those who revelled with him through the land of India’. It is a magnificent scene, not at all one of terror and mutual hostility.

This Greek idea of descent from Dionysus incorporated Indians into what has been well called the ‘Greek family of peoples’: apparent traces of Dionysus in India caused Alexander and his entourage to infer that he had come into the land in the distant past and taught its tribal residents how to yoke oxen, plough, grow vines, and move down from the hills and found cities. Long before the British, Dionysus was credited with a civilising mission. Through it the early history of Indians and Greeks was linked. This way of making sense of foreigners was not new , nor was it a cynical lie, spread by Alexander and his companions in order to raise their troops’ morale among India’s hardships. In Egypt Alexander and others already believed they had found traces of the Greek hero Perseus and in Media, traces of Medea. In faraway Armenia two Thessalian officers, far from Alexander, had found much evidence, they believed, for tracing the Armenians’ origins back to the Greek hero Jason and Thessalians like themselves.

Long before entering India ,Alexander and his friends knew that Dionysus had passed through central Iran and gone at least as far as Bactra, because that journey was stated in Euripides’ fine play the Bacchae, composed in Macedon and no doubt learned and still performed there by Alexander and others in their youth. In 329BC, in modern Tajikistan beyond Bactra, they found ivy ,Dionysus’ plant, and then further east, grapes too, Dionysus’s fruit for his gift of wine, as well as ivy in what is now Nuristan. On his way back to the river Indus in 326BC, Alexander encountered envoys from the Oxydracae, an Indian people who had vines and wore dappled animal skins, like followers of Dionysus. Through interpreters they claimed to be descended from Dionysus , an origin which won favour with Alexander, as they no doubt hoped. Indians sometimes wore decorated robes and often beat drums and clashed cymbals when they advanced for battle: Greeks everywhere believed that these musical instruments had been played by Dionysus’ followers, some of whom were finely robed. Those who know the fine musical culture of Sindh in later centuries and who are fortunate enough to have seen the rhythmic dancing, drumming and singing at the great pilgrimage festival in the major Sufi shrine at Sehwan will readily sympathise with Alexander’s inference that people in Sindh were descended from Dionysus, the patron of such revelry .

As Alexander’s fleet and its horses travelled down the river Jhelum, the Indians sang barbarikōs. The meaning is that their songs were foreign, not that they were behaving barbarically. Descent from Dionysus linked Indians and Greeks and so did descent from Heracles. In late 326BC, just south of the confluence of the rivers Ravi and Jhelum, Alexander encountered a people they correctly called the Sibai: an inscription found in a mound near Shorkot names the place ’Sibipura’. These Sibai were seen to wear animal skins, like lion- skinned Heracles, and to carry clubs , again like Heracles. They even branded their cattle with the symbol of a club . As a result they too were linked to the Greek family of peoples. Alexander and his historians considered them to be Heracles’ kin . They did not regard them as sub-human, ‘gooks’ ,as American soldiers called their north Vietnamese enemies. Already in Homer’s Iliad Greeks were prone to assume that other peoples were more like themselves than they really were. They arrived in India, therefore, ready to think laterally. They surely saw worship of Siva and Krishna, divinities whom they could readily identify with their own Dionysus and Heracles. Our surviving histories do not happen to mention this similarity: they focus on others which were even more visible, the vines, the cymbals, the dancing and music and the styles of dress. In Persia, on the royal tomb of, probably, Artaxerxes 1, a delegation of Indians was sculpted, carrying elephant tusks and so forth. On one side of it each of the envoys wears a lion skin, its head pulled like a hood over his hair and its paws knotted on his chest. It is easy to think of Heracles when looking at drawings of them: Heracles in Greek art and legend wore a lion skin in the same way.

When authors with Alexander moved beyond observable externals and described Indians’ social customs and beliefs, they were on less sure ground. As none of them spoke a local language, they had to rely on interpreters, at best. They distinguished, rightly, practices of the rich from others’, stating that well- off Indians rode on elephants, whereas ‘most Indians rode around on camels or horses or donkeys: to be drawn by only one horse was to be without any honour.’ As for girls, when marriageable, they were brought by their fathers and stripped in public, first showing their backs ,then their fronts: they were displayed in order to be chosen by victors in ‘wrestling, boxing ,running or any such sport’, an interesting comment on Indians’ athletics before Alexander’s men arrived and held athletic contests of their own. Perhaps the historians witnessed such displays. They also stated that well behaved women could not be bribed to misbehave, except that ‘a woman will have sex with any man who gives her an elephant’ and nobody thinks that that is disgraceful: it is ‘fine and awesome for the women’s beauty to seem to be worth an elephant’. Perhaps this belief arose from a witty remark by an Indian, translated for a Greek questioner who asked if Indian women were easy to seduce.

On the whole Greek observers described Indian society with wonder, not disdain. However, .Megasthenes, visiting India after Alexander, probably in the 290’s BC, wrote that people who were found guilty of giving false testimony had their hands and feet cut off and that anyone who maimed someone was similarly maimed himself. These punishments were abhorrent to Greeks. Historians with Alexander were aware of another custom which struck them as cruel and barbaric: suttee, the burning of a wife on her husband’s funeral pyre. Aristobulus referred to it, but considered that it was not a universal practice. Onesicritus remarked it among the Cathaeans, a people located beyond the river Ravi, probably in the vicinity of modern Amritsar. Strabo, citing him, calls it a practice particular to the Cathaeans , but his language should perhaps not be pressed.

Greek onlookers soon gave an explanation of it. As Indian wives were married when very young, they surely often became disenchanted with their ageing husbands and took younger lovers.As they then wanted to poison their husbands to be rid of them, suttee was invented to deter them: they would be burned on their husband’s pyre if he died before they did. This devious explanation was a Greek one, unrelated to the truth. Perhaps here too they were misled by a cynical comment by an Indian , but they may have devised this explanation themselves. Megasthenes later claimed that Brahmins would not impart their teachings to their wives because a bad wife would share them with others and a good wife would take them to heart. As Brahmins disdained pleasure and hard work, a wife who learned their ethics would never agree to be subject to a husband.

Suttee was not universally practised in India but caste was everywhere a fact of life. It did not entirely escape the Greeks’ notice. Megasthenes stated that Indians are divided into seven classes, but he was probably influenced by the historian Herodotus’ earlier remarks about seven classes of priests in Egypt: the Indian castes were actually four in number. However, Megasthenes was aware, correctly, that these ‘classes’ were hereditary and connected to a person’s occupation and that people could not marry across their boundaries.

As for Buddha and his teaching, no explicit discussion survives in the histories of Alexander’s contemporaries, though Buddha’s name might perhaps underlie a Greek claim that the second king in India’s past was someone called ‘Boudyas’. One of the historians with Alexander claimed that Indians do not put up memorials to their dead and even Megasthenes, several decades later, stated that Indians used only small burial mounds. They were plainly unaware of Buddhist stupas, if stupas even existed so early.

Nonetheless ,people with Alexander made contact with Buddhists and Indian wise men. One of the philosophers accompanying him was Pyrrho, founder of sceptical philosophy. One type of reasoning ascribed to him is so similar to reasoning ascribed to Gautama Buddha that Pyrrho’s knowledge of it has been derived, convincingly, from personal contact with Buddhists. In Chinese texts, impossible for classicists to verify, Buddhist teaching has now been identified and dated back into the fourth century BC. Famously, one of the Indian wise men at Taxila joined Alexander and travelled on into Persia with him. His name was Sphines, in a Greek version of it, but Alexander and his men called him Calanos, because he liked to greet them by repeating the Greek word ‘kalē’, what we might translate as ’nice day’. His Greek was evidently rudimentary but it was enough to give him a nickname, ‘Mr Nicely’. He was not a Brahmin himself, but an ajīvika, as Richard Stoneman has recently established. He is said to have taught and lectured to some of Alexander’s entourage and indeed in later Greek texts about the calendar and weather, statements are attributed to one ‘Callaneus’ who is surely Calanos, this Indian. Even if his Greek was minimal there was a chain of interpreters who could turn his teachings into Greek for his hearers.

There is a lesson here for us too. On the whole, Greek observers in India, including Megasthenes, did not invent without evidence, even if they sometimes misunderstood what they saw or heard. One counter-example may be similarly explicable . In India there were said to be people who had such a big foot that they lay down and propped their leg up in the air and shaded themselves under the foot as if it was an umbrella. They were known as Sciapods and have been dismissed ever since as a fantasy. However, a specialist in diseies of the lymph system and associated swellings has observed that a particular type of worm, the filarial worm, attacks the soles of the feet of people in Africa who wade in mud and rivers which contain it: it then ruins their lymph system and causes gross swelling of the feet, ‘big foot’ disease. The filarial worm is attested in Indian rivers too and so the tale of the Sciapods may have arisen from reports of sufferers from this lymphatic condition which indeed causes them to prop their hugely swollen foot up against a wall to try to ease it.

Alexander’s historians do not mention Sciapods in what survives of their work but there are good examples of other tall stories repeated by respected members of his entourage. They too have a discernible origin. Nearchus, his admiral, remarks that no gold digging ants were seen in India, but skins of them were indeed brought into the camp: these legendary beings were probably based on reports of real -life marmots. Gold- digging ants in India were famous for Greeks because of their mention there in Herodotus’ Histories. As a result Nearchus expected to see them. Meanwhile in camp, Baton was responsible for the most tedious of jobs, measuring out pace by pace the distances between places which Alexander visited all across Asia. He compiled the results in a text, but even so, he mentioned the existence of people further away in the mountains above India who ran with their feet turned backwards. However, none of them could be captured, he wrote, and brought down for inspection because they could not survive at lower altitudes. Even here, local rumour underlay a Greek misunderstanding. Baton had surely heard tales of the yeti, the ‘abominable snowman’ of the Himalayas who is indeed said to have feet which are turned back to front.

Megasthenes’ remarks about India are known at particular length because Strabo made extensive use of them, but unlike Alexander, Megasthenes went far down the river Ganges. His comments, therefore, may not always apply to the peoples Alexander saw in Sindh and the Punjab. For them, the comments by historians with Alexander himself are invaluable. They travelled almost only in what is now Pakistan. They prove that Alexander went there. They are intriguing evidence for impressions which the land and its many peoples made on Greek visitors 2350 years ago.

What survives, based on writings of those with Alexander ,does not address a crucial question for understanding Alexander’s achievements in India, including Sindh: was the ‘India’ which he invaded ever, or still, in the Persian Empire, paying tribute to the Persian king? Was there an existing framework of imperial rule and financial control, in force for nearly two hundred years? Certainly, there had been one in the past. In his version of events in 522BC, the Persian King Darius 1 referred to two areas there as already being under Persian rule, Gandara and Thatagush . Evidently they had submitted to a previous Persian king, presumably Cyrus the Great on the march which took him beyond the river Oxus.

Gandara included the north-west region of modern Pakistan. Thatagush extended south east beyond modern Kandahar in Afghanistan and ran across the intervening mountains into modern Pakistan, in my view as far as the west bank of the river Indus. Its name was known to the Greek historian Herodotus as Sattagydia, but it is absent from the surviving texts about Alexander a hundred years or so later, as if the old Persian ‘regions’ had been forgotten.

These two regions had submitted to the Persia king before Darius’ reign. In his later inscriptions they are joined by a third, Hinduˇs ( from Sanskrit Sindhu ,’of the river’). It is often assumed to be Sindh, but there are difficulties in limiting it so narrowly. It paid a huge value of tribute to Darius, summed up as ‘360 talents of gold dust’ by Herodotus, almost a third of the entire tribute paid in his empire. No ancient gold mines were being worked in Sindh, let alone such productive ones. Even if we rephrase Herodotus’ figure to mean ‘silver to the value of 360 talents of gold dust’, there were no sources of silver there, either. I think, therefore, that Hinduˇs was land running to the east of the Indus, not just land beside its lower course towards the sea. It included part of the Punjab. If so ,Hinduˇs was on the east bank of the river and Thatagus/Sattagydia was on the west bank. The land south of Thatagus, west of the river Indus’ delta, probably belonged to a third region, Maka.

When was Hinduˇs added to the Persians’ empire? In 517BC Darius ordered explorers to go down the river Indus, the most prominent of whom was Scylax , a Carian from south west Asia who also spoke Greek: Carian sailors were important in the king’s service elsewhere, including the Persian Gulf. Herodotus refers to their voyage downstream to discover where the river flowed into the sea. Scylax, he says, set out from the land of Pactyica , probably part of the modern region of the Pakhtuns, and at first travelled east : he is best understood as beginning from Paskapyros, near modern Peshawar, on the Kabul river and travelling to where the Kabul joins the Indus. He then turned south- west down the Indus and passed through the Attock gorge, the place, surely , where he remarked on a mountainous bank, covered ‘in a thick wild wood and thorns’. Eventually he reached the river’s delta and from there, turned west and returned along the Persian Gulf. He wrote an account in Greek of his remarkable journey, but sadly it does not survive. After his voyage, Herodotus says, Darius subjected the Indians, in my view the peoples of Hinduˇs on the Indus’s eastern bank both in the Punjab and along its lower course to the sea .The subjection surely involved troops but we have no idea of the scale of any fighting.

Thereafter, Hinduˇs appears in inscribed lists of Darius’ conquests. We can picture some of its people because representations of them appear in sculptures in the palace at Persepolis and also in sculptures of the king in which they support him on his throne. Envoys from Hinduˇs are sculpted , five in all , with various items : one is bringing a donkey ,another, two double headed axes, and another, heavy offerings in containers on a yoke supported on his shoulders, probably gold. Their leader wears a cape and sandals, but the other four are bare-chested and go barefoot, socially his inferiors.