This paper is not about whether Alexander and his army were ever at Sehwan, because only future archaeological work can tell us more about the ancient history of the site. It is about how the story of Sehwan being the ‘fort of Alexander’ originated and was spread, by Britons and Indians, in the colonial period. In the following section, I will return to discuss whether Burton’s reasoning for Sehwan not being the fort of Alexander was correct, and to examine the archaeological evidence. In this section, I would like to consider why Burton already seems, in 1845, to have regarded stories of Alexander as ‘old hat’, a cliché worthy of mocking.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was already an obsession with tracing the route of Alexander the Great in the Indian Subcontinent. The works of armchair ancient historians in Europe, and British travellers on the ground in India mutually informed one another (Vasunia 2013, 51-53; Burnes 1831 maps Alexander’s route in Sindh, but does not make the association with Sehwan). The ancient Greek and Roman historical works on Alexander – such as Arrian, Plutarch or Quintus Curtius Rufus – were, moreover, widely read by British soldiers and officials of the East India Company, and not merely as dry ancient history. British writers of the time often treated the Subcontinent and its peoples as unchanging between time of Alexander and present day (Vasunia 2013, 57-58), a classically Orientalist trope.

Other contributors to this volume have covered the Greek and Roman sources on Alexander and his army along the lower Indus, so I will not delve into them further here. The name usually invoked in connection with Sehwan is the ancient Sindomana, capital of Sambos, but none of the ancient historians give detailed enough topographical information to identify this – or any of the other towns and fortresses Alexander conquered or garrisoned – specifically as the site of Sehwan. How, then, did the association come to be made, and to be regarded as clichéd in Burton’s day?

Burton views the association of Sehwan with Alexander as a foreign import, not tied to any existing local traditions – although I would be interested to hear from those present if they are aware of any Sindhi sources on the question. The earliest source I have found linking Sehwan and Alexander is in a 1797 work of historical geography on the voyage of Alexander’s admiral Nearchos by William Vincent (1739–1815), an English priest and headmaster of Westminster School, who certainly never visited Sindh for himself. Vincent writes:

Alexander marched against Oxykanus because he had received no embassy or acknowledgement from him; he took two of his largest cities by assault, and in one of them Oxykanus himself; the plunder was abandoned to the soldiers, and the elephants only reserved for the public service. Several other cities surrendered without resistance; for by this time, says Arrian, the spirit of all the Indians was completely subdued. Q. Curtius relates these circumstances with some shade of difference; Oxykanus, he says, was killed, and the people he calls Praesti. I desire to make but one more observation. Oxykanus was not on the river; for if he had been, Alexander need not have landed to march against him; he was near Sambus, and Sambus was satrap of the mountains. The conclusion is, therefore, that he was on the west of the Indus, and highly probable that his territory was at the foot of that range called Lukhy, consequently that Musikanus and Oxykanus were both chiefs in the circar of Sehwan.

(Vincent 1797, 132-133.)

Vincent, as can be seen, makes sweeping statements about matters of historical geography, drawing conclusions on the basis of remarks by ancient historians that are sometimes tenuous. He has no personal experience of the territories he writes about, and does not take into account important matters like the changing course of the river Indus and its various branches (on which in more recent periods at Sehwan, see Delage and Ortis 2014). What was his source of information on the geography of Sindh? He collaborated on his book with the hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808), who had worked for the East India Company in India and the Far East as a young man. By the time of Vincent’s book, Dalrymple was in London, as chief hydrographer to the East India Company and to the Admiralty. Dalrymple was therefore most probably Vincent’s source for the maps he used to trace Alexander’s route.

Some years later, the same identification was made by Henry Pottinger (1789-1865) of the East India Company, in his account of his travels in Sindh and Baluchistan in 1810-1811. Pottinger (who later became Resident Administrator of Sindh) was as interested in Alexander the Great as all contemporary Britons in Sindh seem to have been, and describes his campaigns against Oxykanos and Sambos:

After the subjugation of one, and the death of the other of these chiefs, the Macedonian hero returned to the river and, as we are informed, built a citadel at a commodious and commanding point; from which particular notice I have no scruple in saying that it must have been at the present Sehwan, that fortress being seated on a high hill that overlooks the ferries across the Indus and Larkhanu rivers, and otherwise admirably situated to awe the surrounding tracts.

(Pottinger 1816, 384.)

Pottinger had read Vincent, and alludes to his ideas on Sehwan (see Pottinger 1816, 9 and 383-384); he may or may not have arrived at his identification without this. It seems likely, therefore that the association of Sehwan with one of the forts conquered or rebuilt by Alexander on his campaign on the lower Indus originated with Vincent (using Dalrymple’s maps and testimony) was became popularised through the work of Pottinger.
Over the following decades, the identification became the accepted orthodoxy. A ‘Report on the Country between Kurrachee, Tatta, and Sehwan, Scinde’ published by E. P. De la Hoste, Quarter-Master General of the Sinde Reserve Force, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1840, quoted from his 1832 journal of his travels in Sindh:

This evening we landed near the town of Sehwan, and after visiting a ruined Eadgah, which at a distance we mistook for the fort built by Alexander, or rather said to have been built by him, we discovered by the aid of two Scindians that the mound was north-west of the town, through a part of which we walked and ascended the fort. It is an artificial mound, eighty or ninety paces high ; on the top, a space of 1 500 feet by 800 surrounded by a broken wall ; we examined the remains of several old towers of brick, and I took a hasty sketch of the gateway, which is remarkably lofty. The mound is evidently artificial, and the remains of several towers visible. The brickwork seems to extend to the bottom of the mound, or at any rate to a considerable depth, as we could see down the parts washed away by the rains. A well filled up, was observed. We were told that coins and medals were frequently found on and near the place, but we were not so fortunate as to obtain any. I regret now having had so little time to devote to the examination of this fort, but think the period of its construction is not of so ancient a date as is ascribed to it.

(De la Hoste 1840.)

De la Hoste may have had his doubts about the antiquity of the fort, but he still reported the association with Alexander. A few years later, Keith Jackson included a lithograph of Sehwan (Figure 2) in his Views in

Affghaunistaun. The caption reads:

On the north side of the town is the ruined castle or fortress of Sehwaun, by which it is completely commanded ; this is perhaps the most extraordinary building on the Indus, and no doubt existed before the invasion by Alexander the Macedonian. It consists of a natural mound sixty feet high, encased in many parts with burnt brick. In fact, the fortress and mount are so amalgamated, that it is difficult now to distinguish what portions of it are the work of art.

(Jackson 1840, unpaginated.)

In 1841, Edward Backhouse Eastwick visited Sehwan, and is one of the first, to my knowledge, to note that the changing course of the river may make the descriptions of the ancient Greek and Roman historians unreliable:

The 26th brought us on a mile or so to Sehwán, when my boatmen insisted on stopping and paying their respects to Láll Sháh Báz, the saint of the place. I did not land, the heat was so intense ; I saw nothing, therefore, of the old ruins of what is said to have been a castle built by Alexander. The truth is, one can make nothing of Arrian’s account of Sindh, and it is probable that the whole course of the river is altogether changed since the days of Macedonia’s madman.

(Eastwick 1849, 28)

Nevertheless, in the guidebook to the region which Backhouse would publish many years later, he noted the association with Alexander as a point of interest to travellers:

The chief object, however, of antiquarian interest in Sehwán [other than the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar] is the fort ascribed to Alexander the Great. This is an artificial mound, said once to have been 250 ft. high, but now only 60 ft., measuring round the summit 1,500 ft. by 800 ft., and surrounded by a broken wall. The remains of several towers are visible, but the fortifications are ruined. It is in the N.W. part of the town. There is a T. B. and a deputy collector’s banglá in the old fort.

(Eastwick 1883, 298.)

Thomas Postans (1808-1846) described Sehwan as follows, with a hint of Burton’s later attitude to the modern town:

Sehwun, built on the extremity of a spur from the Bilúchi range which here juts into the river, is the only portion of Sindh recognizable as described by the Greeks, and an old fortification that now stands had it origin probably in Alexander’s expedition: it was always a place of military importance, as it commands the passage of the river; but is now much dilapidated and of trifling extent. It is held in great sanctity by pious Mahommedans, from the gorgeous tombs of a noted saint who was buried here, and whose fame is universal also throughout India and the countries adjacent to Sindh. The town is infested with religious mendicants and beggars of every description, and coupled with its sanctity it has also, inconsistently enough, a high reputation for courtezans. For heat, filth, and a disreputable population Sehwun is pre-eminently distinguished, as before observed: it is the boundary between two great divisions of the country, and is the capital of a district known as Sewistan.

(Postans 1843, 29.)

In 1843, Sindh was invaded and annexed by the British East India Company (see further Cook 2016). General Sir Charles Napier (1782-1853) makes frequent references to Alexander the Great in his journals of the conquest, comparing Alexander’s campaign in Sindh to his own more than two thousand years later. In late November 1844 he visited Sehwan, something he keenly anticipated for the connection with Alexander: “To-morrow I shall reach Sehwan, where Alexander built his tower, and I shall stand where he stood, as indeed I have before, but not on the known spot” (Napier 1857, Vol. III, 184, journal entry for 28 November 1844). Disappointment followed:

Sehwan, 29th.—Rode to the top of Alexander’s tower, but do not believe he built it. It has circular arches of brick, and the Greeks used the flat binding: the learned doubt if they knew of the circular segment in architecture. This is however an enormous mass of brick ; nothing ever met my eyes before like it, so vast is the apparent solid mass; there are remains of towers on it also. To-morrow a minute examination, if well, but there is fever in my blood. I seldom complain, perhaps only when most people would be in bed. It is better that life should go sliding away, and then a sudden drop; but while it lasts let me be in harness and die with my sword by my side, like a gentleman: if in victory so best.

(Napier 1857, Vol. III, 84-85.)

Napier’s expressed desire to die in victorious battle rather than in his bed, of a fever, is also an oblique reference to Alexander. The following day, as he received petitions and complaints brought to him by local people at Sehwan, he leant still further into his self-identification with Alexander, comparing his decision-making process to Alexander cutting the Gordian knot.

By the time of Burton’s visit to Sehwan in 1845, then, the Alexander connection was indeed a cliché, but Burton was certainly not the first to doubt it, even if others had nevertheless found it irresistible to write about. Burton’s scepticism was more stridently voiced than most, but in the following decades the same mixture of interest and vaguely-worded doubt prevailed in mentions of Sehwan by British travellers. Edward Archer Langley is typical in this regard:

At Sehwan, the capital of Sewistan, we remained just long enough to take a hasty look at that interesting old place. Here a spur of the Lukhee range runs down close to the river, and on its extremity, which juts over the water, stands the town. At this place is an old fortification, which antiquarians imagine had its origin in Alexander’s expedition ; and Sehwan has always been considered a place of military importance, as commanding the passage of the Indus. … Alexander the Great built a tower on this spot, which commands the river, but these ruins are probably of much more recent date.

(Langley 1860, 105-106.)

At no point that I have found did a British visitor undertake any serious archaeological exploration of the fort in the nineteenth century, nor do any appear to have taken any interest in the knowledge or ideas of the location population of Sehwan about the pre-Islamic history of the site.

Although he did not excavate there, Sir Alexander Cunningham visited Sehwan in 1855, and wrote about it in his Ancient Geography of India. His account shows that he was familiar with previous writings on Sehwan, including those discussed here, but strangely he seems to have come to the conclusion from these that the Alexander association was definitely authentic:

I agree with all previous writers on the ancient geography of this part of India in identifying Sindomana with Sehwán; partly from its similarity of name, and partly from its vicinity to the Lakki mountains. Of its antiquity there can be no doubt, as the great mound, which was once the citadel, is formed chiefly of ruined buildings, the accumulation of ages, on a scarped rock, at the end of the Lakki range of hills.

(Cunningham 1871, 264.)

As we have seen, this is not in fact what most previous writers had to say about Sehwan. Only ‘armchair’ historical geographers in England, who had never visited the site, were more confident in their identification. Cunningham seems to take these as more authoritative than soldiers and travellers who visited the site. It is also likely that his judgement is clouded by the fact that the book in which he makes these remarks is specifically about identifying places and routes associated with Alexander. James Burgess’ listing of significant archaeological remains for the Archaeological Survey of Western India notes the shrine at Sehwan, but not the fort (Burgess 1875).
The beginning of more scholarly research at Sehwan did not come until the 1920s and 1930s. Henry Cousens’ work on Sindh for the Archaeological Survey of India remarked on the great archaeological potential of the site, but with scepticism – citing Burton – for its supposed association with Alexander:

On the north of the town are the remains of the great fort, or the Kāfir Qil‘ah as it is generally called by the people, thereby indicating that its origin had no connection with the Muhammadans. It is, indeed, said to date back to Alexander the Great, and to have been erected by him, but nothing of the original walling, or of any subsequent fort, is now discernible upon the surface. Nothing Greek has been found here except an occasional coin. But this only proves that the coin got there, not, necessarily, the Greeks. The nearest approach to such remains was when Burton faked a Greek vase, smashed and buried it in the line of excavation being made by an enthusiastic friend, and only confessed to his trickery in time to prevent a learned disquisition upon the find being published. The fort is now an immense mound of earth, measuring, roughly, 400×200 yards, and about 60 feet high, filled with potsherds, brickbats, broken china, bones, charcoal, ash and ghosts. The retaining walls which were, no doubt, of brick, having disappeared, the rains of countless seasons have washed down and furrowed the sides until -it is, now, practically a shapeless and honeycombed mass. In the deeper portions of these fissures parts of brick and mud walls are seen in all positions, but they are too confused and ruinous to make anything of in a casual inspection. They are seen at different levels and probably show the rebuilding of the fort at different periods, one upon the other.

(Cousens 1929, 138-141.)

Salim A. Ali, Assistant Curator at the Bombay Natural History Society, visited in 1928, and found it a “dusty little town … whose chief pride at the present day lies in the dilapidated ruins of a mud-and-brick fort claiming an abstruse connection with the invasion of Alexander the Great, and in the annual fair held at the dargah of a pir long-defunct but who continues to perform his miracles notwithstanding” (Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 32.3/4, 460). In 1938, Maneck B. Pithawalla emphasised that archaeological research in Sindh was “still in its infancy” (Pithawalla 1938, 1). He mentions Sindomana and the ancient Greek and Roman historians only very briefly with regard to Sehwan, and states that “it is the only Greek city relic in Sind today” (Pithawalla 1938, 13-14) – but like his predecessors, did not undertake excavations at the site.

N. G. Majumdar of the Archaeological Survey of India – who was tragically killed by bandits about 50 kilometres from Sehwan in 1938 – provides the first sober and scholarly assessment of the fort at Sehwan and the chances of it being associated with Alexander the Great:

In view of the identification of Sehwan with Sindimana accepted by Cunningham and others, it has often been contended that the ruined fort outside the modern town goes back to the time of Alexander the Great. But nothing could be more erroneous. On inspection it appeared to be the remains of a fort of Muhammadan times, in the debris of which glazed pottery and bricks of this period were lying in abundance. It is probable, however, that at this site there had existed some ancient buildings and over their remains the fort was erected. According to some visitors, pre-Muhammadan remains are occasionally found at its lower levels. It is even possible that the modern town is built on earlier Hindu ruins, but as Sehwan is a living town this could not be verified. In view of its being on an eminence it does not seem likely that the site of Sehwan has much changed since the earliest times.

(Majumdar 1934, 46.)

This fits well with N. M. Billimoria’s wry assessment of the Greek and Roman historical sources in a lecture read at the Sind Historical Society the same year as Majumdar’s study was published: “In this paper you will find several contradictory statements made, for all the authorities cannot agree on the same point” (Billimoria 1935, 1; this is the opening statement of the article).

Majumdar’s judgement of what he observed was reasonable, although more recent excavations have in fact confirmed that occupation at the site goes back to the fourth century BC (Collinet 2008, 3-4), the time of Alexander. Kervran – whose excavations at the site do not appear to have been published – is like many scholars before her sceptical about the identification of Sehwan with Sindimana, and more generally about the enterprise of tracing Alexander’s route along the lower Indus, in the face of such sparse and vague historical sources (Kervran 1995, 259, 263).

I would like to conclude, however, on a more positive note for the ancient historical significance of Sehwan. Few of the nineteenth-century writers whom I have discussed in this paper knew anything much about Sehwan at all. If they had been there, it was only very briefly, and none undertook – or were remotely qualified to undertake – archaeological investigations at the site. Nor did they undertake any serious historical enquiries among people at Sehwan about the town and the fort’s ancient past. There is no doubt that the fixation of these British writers with an ancient Macedonian who passed through Sehwan briefly more than two thousand years ago is colonialist and Orientalist. They would rather celebrate Alexander, with whom some of them personally identified, than look at the long and fascinating history of the site across the longue durée. This does not automatically mean, however, that Alexander was not at Sehwan: only that the reasons of these writers for placing him there were not sound.
Burton’s arguments against the “Grecian origin” of Sehwan do not in fact stand:

This Sehwan mound cannot be of Grecian origin, I humbly opine, for two reasons. The arches are Asiatic, and the broken bits of man’s handiwork found scattered about in its entrails are oriental. If we are to believe the chronicles, it was a Hindoo castle built to command a favourite ford of the Indus: in the lapse of years, as it was ruined and ruined over again, the site rose above the level of the plain, till at last it became conspicuous, and, catching the archaeologist’s eye, it received from his ready hand the honours of an illustrious origin. The natives of Sindh, excepting only the few readers of Persian poetry and history, had never heard of “Sikandar Shah” when we first entered the country.

The second point can be dismissed easily: there are plenty of places where Alexander was present where there is no uninterrupted historical record or folk memory of him between antiquity and the present. Burton’s first point – that there is no obviously Greek material culture at Sehwan – can also be challenged.

Archaeological theory over the past few decades has successfully demolished the traditional culture-historical view (propounded by Gustav Kosinna and others) that forms of material culture can be correlated with bounded ethic groups. In Central Asian archaeology in recent years, this means that the notion that the presence of Greeks means objects that look as though they come from the Greek Mediterranean had been widely rejected. Instead, current approaches take a much more flexible and contextual perspective on the material culture of Alexander’s campaigns and the later Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms (see for example Martinez-Sève 2010; Mairs 2014; Martinez-Sève 2018; Mairs 2020; Hoo 2022). Although there are some archaeological sites where we may be able to identify items or constructions associated specifically with Alexander’s – usually very brief – passing through (e.g. Samarkhand: Rapin and Isamiddinov 1994), these are the exception. Recent studies have also emphasised the continuities between the period after Alexander and that which preceded it.

So what should we expect Alexander’s presence at Sehwan to look like, archaeologically speaking? Burton’s modified ‘Etruscan’ sauce-jar was a good joke, but a painted Greek vase is emphatically not something that we should expect to turn up at Sehwan. None of the Graeco-Bactrian sites of Central Asia have yielded decorated Greek pottery. If future archaeological excavations revealed destruction levels, or new building of fortifications, in levels securely dated to the late fourth century BC, then we might argue that this has some connection with military instability in the region at the time. But we would be highly unlikely to be able to prove who built these fortifications, whether a foreign invader or a local ruler. Like other sites in Pakistan and Afghanistan along the route possibly followed by Alexander, or in territories under the later control of Graeco-Bactrian or Indo-Greek kings, I think by far the most productive, and potentially rewarding, approach to Sehwan is to focus on the longer, richer history of which Alexander’s campaign was only a brief episode.

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