THE GREAT ANCIENT EMPIRESlegend of their great treasure which they are supposed to have hidden in
the river Ganga reminds us of the old German story of the Nibelungen
whose treasure was hidden in the river Rhine. Mahapadma Nanda was
succeeded by his eight sons; each of them ruled only for a short time until
the last one was overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya.
In spite of the very short period of their rule, the Nandas must be
credited with having paved the way for their better-known successors, the
Mauryas. They united a very large part of northern India under their rule
(see Map 4). Their army and their administration were taken over by the
Mauryas as going concerns. But the empire of the Nandas lacked certain
qualities which emerged only under the Mauryas. Just as certain new ideas
coming from the West may have contributed to the rise of Magadha in the
fifth century BC under Bimbisara, another wave of Western influence may
have influenced the transformation of the empire of the Nandas into that
of the Mauryas.
The impact of Alexander’s Indian campaignThe Indian campaign of Alexander the Great is certainly one of the best-
known events of ancient Indian history as far as European historiography
is concerned. The historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries have devoted much attention to this event. But Indian sources
remain silent about Alexander’s campaign. To the Indians he was only
one of the nameless conquerors of the northwest who touched this part
of India in an endless sequence of raids. The memory of Alexander the
Great returned to India only much later with the Islamic conquerors who
saw him as a great ruler worth emulating. One of the sultans of Delhi
called himself a second Alexander, and the Islamic version of this name
(Sikander) was very popular among later Islamic rulers of India and
Southeast Asia.
Alexander crossed the Hindukush mountains in eastern Afghanistan in
the month of May, 327 BC. He fought for more than a year against
various tribes in what is now North Pakistan until he could cross the river
Indus in February 326 BC. The king of Takshashila (Taxila) accepted
Alexander’s suzerainty without putting up a fight. He was a generous host
to the Greeks and is reported to have fed them with the meat of 3,000
oxen and more than 10,000 sheep. Then he provided them with 5,000
auxiliary troops so that they could better fight his neighbour, King Poros.
King Poros belonged to the tribe of the Pauravas, descended from the Puru
tribe mentioned so often in the Rigveda. He joined battle with Alexander
at the head of a mighty army with some 2,000 elephants, but Alexander
defeated him by a sudden attack after crossing the river Hydaspes at night
although the river was in flood. Alexander then reinstated the vanquished
Poros and made him his ally.