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The Gates of India: Being an Historical Narrative

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Title: The Gates of India: Being an Historical Narrative

Author: Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GATES OF INDIA: BEING AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  "crank" on page 147 is a possible typo
  "Bamain" on page 213 is a possible typo
  "Semetic" on page 225 is a possible typo
  "Zoroastian" on page 270 is a possible typo
  "Aegospotami" (in index) not found in text
  "Kardos" (in index) not found in text

  Spelling differences between the index and the text were resolved
  in favor of the text.




     MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

     LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
     MELBOURNE

     THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
     NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
     ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

     THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
     TORONTO




     THE
     GATES OF INDIA
     BEING
     AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

     BY
     COLONEL SIR THOMAS HOLDICH
     K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., C.B., D.Sc.

     AUTHOR OF
     'THE INDIAN BORDERLAND,' 'INDIA,' 'THE COUNTRIES OF
     THE KING'S AWARD'

     _WITH MAPS_


     MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
     ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
     1910




PREFACE


As the world grows older and its composition both physical and human
becomes subject to ever-increasing scientific investigation, the close
interdependence of its history and its geography becomes more and more
definite. It is hardly too much to say that geography has so far
shaped history that in unravelling some of the more obscure
entanglements of historical record, we may safely appeal to our modern
knowledge of the physical environment of the scene of action to decide
on the actual course of events. Oriental scholars for many years past
have been deeply interested in reshaping the map of Asia to suit their
theories of the sequence of historical action in India and on its
frontiers. They have identified the position of ancient cities in
India, sometimes with marvellous precision, and have been able to
assign definite niches in history to historical personages with whose
story it would have been most difficult to deal were it not
intertwined with marked features of geographical environment. But on
the far frontiers of India, beyond the Indus, these geographical
conditions have only been imperfectly known until recently. It is
only within the last thirty years that the geography of the hinterland
of India--Tibet, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan--have been in any sense
brought under scientific examination, and at the best such examination
has been partial and incomplete. It is unfortunate that recent years
have added nothing to our knowledge of Afghanistan, and it seems
hopeless to wait for detailed information as to some of the more
remote (and most interesting) districts of that historic country. As,
therefore, in the course of twenty years of official wanderings I have
amassed certain notes which may help to throw some light on the
ancient highways and cities of those trans-frontier regions which
contain the landward gates of India, I have thought it better to make
some use of these notes now, and to put together the various theories
that I may have formed from time to time bearing on the past history
of that country, whilst the opportunity lasts. I have endeavoured to
present my own impressions at first hand as far as possible, unbiased
by the views already expressed by far more eminent writers than
myself, believing that there is a certain value in originality. I have
also endeavoured to keep the descriptive geography of such districts
as form the theatre of historical incidents on a level with the story
itself, so that the one may illustrate the other.

Whilst investigating the methods of early explorers into the
hinterland of India it has, of course, been necessary to appeal to
the original narratives of the explorers themselves so far as
possible. Consequently I am indebted to the assistance afforded by
quite a host of authors for the basis of this compilation. And I may
briefly recount the names of those to whom I am under special
obligation. First and foremost are Mr. M'Crindle's admirable series of
handy little volumes dealing with the Greek period of Indian history,
the perusal of which first prompted an attempt to reconcile some of
the apparent discrepancies between classical story and practical
geography, with which may be included Sir A. Cunningham's _Coins of
Alexander's Successors in Kabul_. For the Arab phase of commercial
exploration I am indebted to Sir William Ouseley's translation,
_Oriental Geography of Ibn Haukel_, and the _Géographie d'Edrisi;
traduite par P. Aimedée Joubert_. For more modern records the official
reports of Burnes, Lord, and Leech on Afghanistan; Burnes' _Travels
into Bokhara, etc.; Cabul_, by the same author; _Ferrier's Caravan
Journeys_; Wood's _Journey to the Sources of the Oxus_; Moorcroft's
_Travels in the Himalayan Provinces_; Vigne's _Ghazni, Kabul, and
Afghanistan_; Henry Pottinger's _Travels in Baloochistan and Sinde_;
and last, but by no means least, Masson's _Travels in Afghanistan,
Beluchistan, the Panjab, and Kalat_, all of which have been largely
indented on. To this must be added Mr. Forrest's valuable compilation
of Bombay records. It has been indeed one of the objects of this book
to revive the records of past generations of explorers whose stories
have a deep significance even in this day, but which are apt to be
overlooked and forgotten as belonging to an ancient and superseded era
of research. Because these investigators belong to a past generation
it by no means follows that their work, their opinions, or their
deductions from original observations are as dead as they are
themselves. It is far too readily assumed that the work of the latest
explorer must necessarily supersede that of his predecessors. In the
difficult art of map compilation perhaps the most difficult problem
with which the compiler has to deal is the relative value of evidence
dating from different periods. Here, then, we have introduced a
variety of opinions and views expressed by men of many minds (but all
of one type as explorer), which may be balanced one against another
with a fair prospect of eliminating what mathematicians call the
"personal equation" and arriving at a sound "mean" value from combined
evidence. I have said they are all of one type, regarded as explorers.
There is only one word which fitly describes that type--magnificent.
We may well ask have we any explorers like them in these days? We know
well enough that we have the raw material in plenty for fashioning
them, but alas! opportunity is wanting. Exploration in these days is
becoming so professional and so scientific that modern methods hardly
admit of the dare-devil, face-to-face intermixing with savage breeds
and races that was such a distinctive feature in the work of these
heroes of an older age. We get geographical results with a rapidity
and a precision that were undreamt of in the early years (or even in
the middle) of the last century. Our instruments are incomparably
better, and our equipment is such that we can deal with the hostility
of nature in her more savage moods with comparative facility. But we
no longer live with the people about whom we set out to write
books--we don't wear their clothes, eat their food, fraternize with
them in their homes and in the field, learn their language and discuss
with them their religion and politics. And the result is that we don't
_know_ them half as well, and the ratio of our knowledge (in India at
least) is inverse to the official position towards them that we may
happen to occupy. The missionary and the police officer may know
something of the people; the high-placed political administrator knows
less (he cannot help himself), and the parliamentary demagogue knows
nothing at all. My excuse for giving so large a place to the American
explorer Masson, for instance, is that he was first in the field at a
critical period of Indian history. Apart from his extraordinary gifts
and power of absorbing and collating information, history has proved
that on the whole his judgment both as regards Afghan character and
Indian political ineptitude was essentially sound. Of course he was
not popular. He is as bitter and sarcastic in his unsparing
criticisms of local political methods in Afghanistan as he is of the
methods of the Indian Government behind them; and doubtless his
bitterness and undisguised hostility to some extent discounts the
value of his opinion. But he knew the Afghan, which we did not: and it
is most instructive to note the extraordinary divergence of opinion
that existed between him and Sir Alexander Burnes as regards some of
the most marked idiosyncrasies of Afghan character. Burnes was as
great an explorer as Masson, but whilst in Afghanistan he was the
emissary of the Indian Government, and thus it immediately became
worth while for the Afghan Sirdar to study his temper and his
weaknesses and to make the best use of both. Thus arose Burnes'
whole-hearted belief in the simplicity of Afghan methods, whilst
Masson, who was more or less behind the scenes, was in no position to
act as prompter to him. It was just preceding and during the momentous
period of the first Afghan war (1839-41) that European explorers in
Afghanistan and Baluchistan were most active. Long before then both
countries had been an open book to the Ancients, and both may be said
geographically to be an open book to us now. There are, however,
certain pages which have not yet been properly read, and something
will be said later on as to where these pages occur.




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE

     INTRODUCTION                                                    1


     CHAPTER I

     EARLY RELATIONS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST--GREECE AND
     PERSIA AND EARLY TRIBAL DISTRIBUTIONS ON THE INDIAN
     FRONTIER                                                       11


     CHAPTER II

     ASSYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN--ANCIENT LAND ROUTES--POSSIBLE
     SEA ROUTES                                                     39


     CHAPTER III

     GREEK EXPLORATION--ALEXANDER--MODERN BALKH--THE BALKH
     PLAIN AND BAKTRIA                                              58


     CHAPTER IV

     GREEK EXPLORATION--ALEXANDER--THE KABUL VALLEY GATES           94


     CHAPTER V

     GREEK EXPLORATION--THE WESTERN GATES                          135


     CHAPTER VI

     CHINESE EXPLORATIONS--THE GATES OF THE NORTH                  169


     CHAPTER VII

     MEDIÆVAL GEOGRAPHY--SEISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN                   190


     CHAPTER VIII

     ARAB EXPLORATION--THE GATES OF MAKRAN                         284


     CHAPTER IX

     EARLIEST ENGLISH EXPLORATION--CHRISTIE AND POTTINGER          325


     CHAPTER X

     AMERICAN EXPLORATION--MASSON--THE NEARER GATES,
     BALUCHISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN                                   344


     CHAPTER XI

     AMERICAN EXPLORATION--MASSON (_CONTINUED_)--THE NEARER
     GATES, BALUCHISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN                            390


     CHAPTER XII

     LORD AND WOOD--THE FARTHER GATES, BADAKSHAN AND THE
     OXUS                                                          411


     CHAPTER XIII

     ACROSS AFGHANISTAN TO BOKHARA--MOORCROFT                      442


     CHAPTER XIV

     ACROSS AFGHANISTAN TO BOKHARA--BURNES                         451


     CHAPTER XV

     THE GATES OF GHAZNI--VIGNE                                    462


     CHAPTER XVI

     THE GATES OF GHAZNI--BROADFOOT                                470


     CHAPTER XVII

     FRENCH EXPLORATION--FERRIER                                   476


     CHAPTER XVIII

     SUMMARY                                                       500


     INDEX                                                         531




LIST OF MAPS


                                                             FACE PAGE

     1. General Orographic Map of Afghanistan and Baluchistan,
     showing Arab trade routes (see page 190 _et seq._)
                                                   _With Introduction_

     2. Sketch of Alexander's Route through the Kabul Valley to
     India                                                          94

     3. Greek Retreat from India (_Journal of the Society of Arts_,
     April 1901)                                                   135

     4. The Gates of Makran (_Journal of the Royal Geographical
     Society_, April 1906)                                         284

     5. Sketch of the Hindu Kush Passes                            500




  [Illustration: OROGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFGHANISTAN & BALUCHISTAN
    COMPILED BY SIR THOMAS H. HOLDICH, K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., C.B.]




INTRODUCTION


Since the gates of India have become water gates and the way to India
has been the way of the sea, very little has been known of those other
landward gates which lie to the north and west of the peninsula,
through which have poured immigrants from Asia and conquerors from the
West from time immemorial. It has taken England a long time to
rediscover them, and she is even now doubtful about their strategic
value and the possibility of keeping them closed and barred. It is
only by an examination of the historical records which concern them,
and the geographical conditions which surround them, that any clear
appreciation of their value can be attained; and it is only within the
last century that such examinations have been rendered possible by the
enterprise and activity of a race of explorers (official and
otherwise) who have risked their lives in the dangerous field of the
Indian trans-frontier. In ancient days the very first (and sometimes
the last) thing that was learned about India was the way thither from
the North. In our times the process has been reversed, and we seek
for information with our backs to the South. We have worked our way
northward, having entered India by the southern water gates, and as we
have from time to time struggled rather to remain content within
narrow borders than to push outward and forward, the drift to the
north has been very slow, and there has never been, right from the
very beginning, any strenuous haste in the expansion of commercial
interests, or any spirit of crusade in the advance of Conquest.

So late as the early years of the sixteenth century England was but a
poor country, with less inhabitants than are now crowded within the
London area. There was not much to spare, either of money or men, for
ventures which could only be regarded in those days as sheer gambling
speculations. The splendid records of a successful voyage must have
been greatly discounted by the many dismal tales of failure, and
nothing but an indomitable impulse, bred of international rivalry,
could have led the royal personages and the few wealthy citizens who
backed our earliest enterprises to open their purse-strings
sufficiently wide to find the necessary means for the equipment of a
modest little fleet of square-sailed merchant ships. National tenacity
prevailed, however, in the end. The hard-headed Islander finally
succeeded where the more impetuous Southerner failed, and England came
out finally with most of the honours of a long commercial contest. It
was in this way that we reached India, and by degrees we painted
India our own conventional colour in patches large enough to give us
the preponderating voice in her general administration. But as we
progressed northward and north-westward we realized the important fact
that India--the peninsula India--was insulated and protected by
geographical conformations which formed a natural barrier against
outside influences, almost as impassable as the sea barriers of
England. On the north-east a vast wilderness of forest-covered
mountain ranges and deep lateral valleys barred the way most
effectually against irruption from the yellow races of Asia. On the
north where the curving serrated ramparts of the north-east gave place
to the Himalayan barrier, the huge uplifted highlands of Tibet were
equally impassable to the busy pushing hordes of the Mongol; and it
was only on the extreme north-west about the hinterland of Kashmir,
and beyond the Himalayan system, that any weakness could be found in
the chain of defensive works which Nature had sent to the north of
India. Here, indeed, in the trans-Indus regions of Kashmir, sterile,
rugged, cold, and crowned with gigantic ice-clad peaks, there is a
slippery track reaching northward into the depression of Chinese
Turkestan, which for all time has been a recognised route connecting
India with High Asia. It is called the Karakoram route. Mile upon mile
a white thread of a road stretches across the stone-strewn plains,
bordered by the bones of the innumerable victims to the long fatigue
of a burdensome and ill-fed existence--the ghastly debris of former
caravans. It is perhaps the ugliest track to call a trade route in the
whole wide world. Not a tree, not a shrub, exists, not even the cold
dead beauty which a snow-sheet imparts to highland scenery, for there
is no great snowfall in the elevated spaces which back the Himalayas
and their offshoots. It is marked, too, by many a sordid tragedy of
murder and robbery, but it is nevertheless one of the northern gates
of India which we have spent much to preserve, and it does actually
serve a very important purpose in the commercial economy of India. At
least one army has traversed this route from the north with the
prospect before it of conquering Tibet; but it was a Mongol army, and
it was worsted in a most unequal contest with Nature.

India (if we include Kashmir) runs to a northern apex about the point
where, from the western extension of the giant Muztagh, the Hindu Kush
system takes off in continuation of the great Asiatic divide. Here the
Pamirs border Kashmir, and here there are also mountain ways which
have aforetime let in the irrepressible Chinaman, probably as far as
Hunza, but still a very long way from the Indian peninsula. Then the
Hindu Kush slopes off to the south-westward and becomes the divide
between Afghanistan and Kashmir for a space, till, from north of
Chitral, it continues with a sweep right into Central Afghanistan and
merges into the mountain chain which reaches to Herat. From this
point, north of Chitral, commences the true north-west barrier of
India, a barrier which includes nearly the whole width of Afghanistan
beyond the formidable wall of the trans-Indus mountains. It is here
that the gates of India are to be found, and it is with this outermost
region of India, and what lies beyond it, that this book is chiefly
concerned.

As the history of India under British occupation grew and expanded and
the painting red process gradually developed, whilst men were ever
reaching north-westward with their eyes set on these frontier hills,
the countries which lay beyond came to be regarded as the "ultima
thule" of Indian exploration, and Afghanistan and Baluchistan were
reckoned in English as the hinterland of India, only to be reached by
the efforts of English adventurers from the plains of the peninsula.
And that is the way in which those countries are still regarded. It is
Afghanistan in its relations to India, political, commercial, or
strategic, as the case may be, that fills the minds of our soldiers
and statesmen of to-day; and the way to Afghanistan is still by the
way of ships--across the ocean first, and then by climbing upward from
the plains of India to the continental plateau land of Asia. It was
not so twenty-five centuries ago. One can imagine the laughter that
would echo through the courts and palaces of Nineveh at the idea of
reaching Afghanistan by a sea route! Think of Tiglath Pilesur, the
founder of the Second Assyrian Empire, seated, curled, and anointed,
surrounded by his Court and flanked by the sculptured art of his
period (already losing some of the freshness and vigour of First
Empire design) in the pillared halls of Nineveh, and counting the
value of his Eastern satrapies in Sagartia, Ariana, and Arachosia,
with outlying provinces in Northern India, whilst meditating yet
further conquests to add to his almost illimitable Empire! No shadow
of Babylon had stretched northward then. No premonition of a yet
larger and later Empire overshadowed him or his successors,
Shalmaneser and Sargon. Northern Afghanistan was to these Assyrian
kings the dumping ground of unconsidered companies of conquered
slaves, a bourne from whence no captive was ever likely to return. No
record is left of the passing of those bands of colonists from West to
East. We can only gather from the writings of subsequent historians in
classical times that for centuries they must have drifted eastward
from Syria, Armenia, and Greece, carrying with them the rudiments of
the arts and industries of the land they had left for ever, and
providing India with the germs of an art system entirely imitative in
design, colour, and relief. The Aryan was before them in India.
Already the foundations were laid for historic dynasties, and Rajput
families were dating their origin from the sun and moon, whilst
somewhere from beneath the shadow of the Himalayas in the foothills of
Nipal was soon to arise the daystar of a new faith, a "light of Asia"
for all centuries to come.

It is impossible to set a limit to the number and variety of the
people who, in these early centuries, either migrated, or were
deported, from West to East through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or
who drifted southwards into Baluchistan. Not until the ethnography of
these frontier lands of India is exhaustively studied shall we be able
to unravel the influence of Assyrian, Median, Persian, Arab, or Greek
migrations in the strange conglomeration of humanity which peoples
those countries. Baktra (Balkh), in Northern Afghanistan, must have
been a city of consequence in days when Nineveh was young. Farah, a
city of Arachosia in Western Afghanistan on the borders of Seistan,
must have been a centre from whence Assyrian arts and industries were
passed on to India for ages; for Farah lies directly on the route
which connects Seistan with the southern passes into the Indus valley.
The Indus itself seems to have been the boundary which limited the
efforts of migration and exploration. Beyond the Indus were deserts in
the south and wide unproductive plains of the Punjab in the north, and
it is the deserts of the world's geography which, far more than any
other feature, have always determined the extent of the human tidal
waves and influenced their direction. They are as the promontories and
capes of the world's land perimeter to the tides of the ocean. Beyond
these parched and waterless tracts, where now the maximum temperatures
of sun-heat in India are registered, were vague uncertainties and
mythical wonders, the tales of which in ancient literature are in
strange contrast to the exact information which was obtained of
geographical conditions and tribal distributions in the basins of the
Kabul or Swat rivers, or within the narrow valleys of Makran.

A recent writer (Mr. Ellsworth Huntington) has expressed in
picturesque and convincing language the nature of the relationship
which has ever existed between man and his physical environments in
Asia, and has illustrated the effect of certain pulsations of climate
in the movement of Asiatic history. The changing conditions of the
climate of High Asia, periods of desiccation and deprivation of
natural water-supply alternating with periods of cold and rainfall,
acting in slow progression through centuries and never ceasing in
their operation, have set "men in nations" moving over the face of
that continent since the beginning of time, and left a legacy of
buried history, to be unearthed by explorers of the type of Stein,
such as will eventually give us the key to many important problems in
race distribution. But more important even than climatic influence is
the direct influence of physical geography, the actual shaping of
mountain and valley, as a factor in directing the footsteps of early
migration. Nowadays men cross the seas in thousands from continent to
continent, but in the days of Egyptian and Assyrian empire it was that
straight high-road which crossed the fewest passes and tapped the best
natural resources of wood and water which was absolutely the
determining factor in the direction of the great human processions;
and although change of climate may have set the nomadic peoples of
High Asia moving with a purpose more extensive than an annual search
for pasturage, and have led to the peopling of India with successive
nations of Central Asiatic origin, it was the knowledge that by
certain routes between Mesopotamia and Northern Afghanistan lay no
inhospitable desert, and no impassable mountain barrier, that
determined the intermittent flow from the west, which received fresh
impulse with every conquest achieved, with every band of captives
available for colonizing distant satrapies. To put it shortly, there
was an easy high-road from Mesopotamia through Persia to Northern
Afghanistan, or even to Seistan, and not a very difficult one to
Makran; and so it came about that migratory movements, either
compulsory or voluntary, continued through centuries, ever extending
their scope till checked by the deserts of the Indian frontier or the
highlands of the Pamirs and Tibet, or the cold wild wastes of
Siberia.

Thus Afghanistan and Baluchistan, the countries with which we are more
immediately concerned, were probably far better known to Assyrian and
Persian kings than they were to the British Intelligence Office (or
its equivalent) of a century ago. The first landward explorations of
these countries are lost in pre-historic mists, but we find that the
first scientific mission of which we have any record (that which was
led by Alexander the Great) was well supplied with fairly accurate
geographical information regarding the main route to be followed and
the main objectives to be gained.

In tracing out, therefore, or rather in sketching, the gradual
progress of exploration in Afghanistan and Baluchistan, and the
gradual evolution of those countries into a proper appanage of British
India, we will begin (as history began) from the north and west rather
than from the south and the plains of Hindustan.




CHAPTER I

EARLY RELATIONS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST. GREECE AND PERSIA AND EARLY
TRIBAL DISTRIBUTIONS ON THE INDIAN FRONTIER.


It is unfortunately most difficult to trace the conditions under which
Europe was first introduced to Asia, or the gradual ripening of early
acquaintance into inter-commercial relationship. Although the eastern
world was possessed of a sound literature in the time of Moses, and
although long before the days of Solomon there was "no end" to the
"making of books," it is remarkable how little has been left of these
archaic records, and it is only by inference gathered from tags and
ends of oriental script that we gradually realize how unimportant to
old-world thinkers was the daily course of their own national history.
India is full of ancient literature, but there is no ancient history.
To the Brahmans there was no need for it. To them the world and all
that it contains was "illusion," and it was worse than idle--it was
impious--to perpetuate the record of its varied phases as they
appeared to pass in unreal pageantry before their eyes. We know that
from under the veil of extravagant epic a certain amount of historical
truth has been dragged into daylight. The "Mahabharata" and the
"Ramayana" contain in allegorical outline the story of early conflicts
which ended in the foundation of mighty Rajput houses, or which
established the distribution of various races of the Indian peninsula.
Without an intimate knowledge of the language in which these great
epics are written it is impossible to estimate fully the nature of the
allegory which overlies an interesting historical record, but it has
always appeared to be sufficiently vague to warrant some uncertainty
as to the accuracy of the deductions which have hitherto been evolved
therefrom. Nevertheless it is from these early poems of the East that
we derive all that there is to be known about ancient India, and when
we turn from the East to the West strangely enough we find much the
same early literary conditions confronting us.

About 950 years before Christ, two of the most perfect epic poems were
written that ever delighted the world, the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ of
Homer. The first begins with Achilles and ends with the funeral of
Hector. The second recounts the voyages and adventures of Ulysses
after the destruction of Troy. With our modern intimate knowledge of
the coasts of the Mediterranean it is not difficult to detect, amidst
the fabulous accounts of heroic adventures, many references to
geographical facts which must have been known generally to the Greeks
of the Homeric period, dealing chiefly with the coasts and islands of
the Western sea. There is but little reference to the East, although
many centuries before Homer's day there was a sea-going trade between
India and the West which brought ivory, apes, and peacocks to the
ports of Syria. The obvious inference to be derived from the general
absence of reference to the mysteries of Eastern geography is that
there was no through traffic. Ships from the East traded only along
the coast-lines that they knew, and ventured no farther than the point
where an interchange of commodities could be established with the slow
crawling craft of the West, the navigation of the period being
confined to hugging the coast-line and making for the nearest
shelter when times were bad. The interchange of commodities between
the rough sailor people of those days did not tend to an interchange
of geographical information. Probably the language difficulty stood in
the way. If there was no end to the making of books it was not the
illiterate and rough sailor men who made them. Nor do sailors, as a
rule, make them now. It is left to the intelligent traveller
uninterested in trade, and the journalistic seeker after sensation, to
make modern geographical records; and there were no such travellers in
the days of Homer, even if the art of writing had been a general
accomplishment. In days much later than Homer we can detect sailors'
yarns embodied in what purport to be authentic geographical records,
but none so early. We have a reference to certain Skythic nomads who
lived on mare's milk, and who had wandered from the Asiatic highlands
into the regions north of the Euxine, which is in itself deeply
interesting as it indicates that as early as the ninth century B.C.
Milesian Greek colonies had started settlements on the shores of the
Black Sea. As the centuries rolled on these settlements expanded into
powerful colonies, and with enterprising people such as the early
Greeks there can be little doubt that there was an intermittent
interchange of commerce with the tribes beyond the Euxine, and that
gradually a considerable, if inaccurate, knowledge of Asia, even
beyond the Taurus, was acquired. The world, for them, was still a flat
circular disc with a broad tidal ocean flowing around its edge,
encompassing the habitable portions about the centre.

Africa extended southward to the land of Ethiop and no farther, but
Asia was a recognised geographical entity, less vague and nebulous
even than the western isles from whence the Ph[oe]nicians brought
their tin. There were certain fables current among the Greeks touching
the one-eyed Arimaspians, the gold-guarding griffins, and the
Hyperboreans, which in the middle of the sixth century were still
credited, and almost indicate an indefinite geographical conception of
northern Asiatic regions. But it is probable that much more was known
of Asiatic geography in these early years than can be gathered from
the poems and fables of Greek writers before the days of Herodotus and
of professional geography. There were no means of recording knowledge
ready to the hand of the colonist and commercial traveller then; even
the few literary men who later travelled for the sake of gaining
knowledge were dependent largely on information obtained scantily and
with difficulty from others, and the expression of their knowledge is
crude and imperfect. But what should we expect even in present times
if we proceeded to compile a geographical treatise from the works of
Milton and Shakespere? What indeed would be the result of a careful
analysis of parliamentary utterances on geographical subjects within,
say, the last half century? Would they present to future generations
anything approaching to an accurate epitome of the knowledge really
possessed (though possibly not expressed) by those who have within
that period almost exhausted the world's store of geographical record?
The analogy is a perfectly fair one. Geographers and explorers are not
always writers even in these days, and as we work backwards into the
archives of history nothing is more astonishing than the indications
which may be found of vast stores of accurate information of the
earth's physiography lost to the world for want of expression.

It was between the sixth century B.C. and the days of Herodotus that
Miletus was destroyed, and captive Greeks were transported by Darius
Hystaspes from the Lybian Barké to Baktria, where we find traces of
them again under their original Greek name in the northern regions of
Afghanistan. It was long ere the days of Darius that the hosts of
Assyria beat down the walls of Samaria and scattered the remnants of
Israel through the highlands of Western Asia. Where did they drift to,
these ten despairing tribes? Possibly we may find something to remind
us of them also in the northern Afghan hills.

It was probably about the same era that some pre-Hellenic race, led
(so it is written) by the mythical hero Dionysos, trod the weary route
from the Euxine to the Caspian, and from the southern shores of the
Caspian to the borderland of modern Indian frontier, where their
descendants welcomed Alexander on his arrival as men of his own faith
and kin, and were recognised as such by the great conqueror. Now all
this points to an acquaintance with the geographical links between
East and West which appears nowhere in any written record. Nowhere can
we find any clear statement of the actual routes by which these
pilgrims were supposed to have made their long and toilsome journeys.
Just the bare facts are recorded, and we are left to guess the means
by which they were accomplished. But it is clear that the old-world
overland connection between India and the Black Sea is a very old
connection indeed, and further, it is clear that what the Greeks may
not have known the Persians certainly did know. When Herodotus first
set solidly to work on a geographical treatise which was to embrace
the existing knowledge of the whole world, he undoubtedly derived a
great deal of that knowledge from official Persian sources; and it may
be added that the early Persian department for geographical
intelligence has been proved by this last century's scientific
investigations to have collected information of which the accuracy is
certainly astonishing. It is only quite recently, during the process
of surveys carried on by the Government of India through the highlands
and coast regions of Baluchistan and Eastern Persia, that anything
like a modern gazetteer of the tribes occupying those districts has
been rendered possible. Twenty-five years ago our military information
concerning ethnographic distributions in districts lying immediately
beyond the north-western frontier was no better than that which is
contained in the lists of the Persian satrapies, given to the world by
Herodotus nearly 500 years before the Christian era. Twenty-five years
ago we did not know of the existence of some of the tribes and peoples
mentioned by him, and we were unable to identify others. Now, however,
we are at last aware that through twenty-four centuries most of them
have clung to their old habitat in a part of the Eastern world where
material wealth and climatic attractions have never been sufficient to
lead to annihilation by conquest. Oppressed and harried by successive
Persian dynasties, overrun by the floatsam and jetsam of hosts of
migratory Asiatic peoples from the North, those tribes have mostly
survived to bear a much more valuable testimony to the knowledge of
the East entertained by the West in the days of Herodotus than any
which can be gathered from written documents.

The Milesian colonies founded on the southern and western shores of
the Euxine in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., whilst retaining
their trade connection with the parent city of Miletus (where sprang
that carpet-making industry for which this corner of Asia has been
famous ever since), found no open road to the further eastern trade
through the mountain regions that lie south of the Black Sea. Half a
century after Herodotus we find Xenophon struggling in almost helpless
entanglement amongst these wild mountains comparatively close to the
Greek colonies; and it was there that he encountered the fiercest
opposition from the native tribes-people that he met with during his
famous retreat from Persia. It is always so. Our most active opponents
on the Indian frontier are the mountaineers of the immediate
borderland--the people who _know_ us best, and therefore fear us most.
It was chiefly through Miletus and the Cilician gates that Greek
trade with Persia and Babylon was maintained. There were no Greek
colonies on the rugged eastern coasts of the Black Sea--sufficient
indication that no open trade route existed direct to the Caspian by
any line analogous to that of the modern railway that connects Batum
with Baku. On the north of the Euxine, however, there were great and
flourishing colonies (of which Olbia at the mouth of the Borysthenes,
or Dnieper, was the most famous) which undoubtedly traded with the
Skythic peoples north and west of the Caspian. From these sources came
the legends of Hyperboreans and Griffins and other similar tales, all
flavoured with the glamour of northern mystery, but none of them
pointing to an eastern origin. Recent investigations into the
ethnography of certain tribes in Afghanistan, however, seem to prove
conclusively that even if there was no recognised trade between Greece
and India before Miletus was destroyed by Darius Hystaspes, and Greek
settlers were transported by the Persian conqueror to the borders of
the modern Badakshan, yet there must have been Greek pioneers in
colonial enterprise who had made their way to the Far East and stayed
there. For instance, we have that strange record of settlements under
Dionysos amongst the spurs and foothills of the Hindu Kush, which were
clearly of Greek origin, although Arrian in his history of Alexander's
progress through Asia is unable to explain the meaning of them.

There is more to be said about these settlements later. The first
actual record of settlement of Greeks in Baktria is that of Herodotus,
to which we have referred as being affected by Darius Hystaspes in the
sixth century before Christ, and the descendants of these settlers are
undoubtedly the people referred to by Arrian as "Kyreneans", who could
be no other than the Greek captives from the Lybian Barke. Their
existence two centuries later than Herodotus is attested by Arrian,
and they were apparently in possession of the Kaoshan pass over the
Hindu Kush at the time of Alexander's expedition. Another body of
Greeks is recorded by Arrian to have been settled in the Baktrian
country by Xerxes after his flight from Greece. These were the
Brankhidai of Milesia, whose posterity are said to have been
exterminated by Alexander in punishment for the crimes of their
grandfather Didymus. The name Barang, or Farang, is frequently
repeated in the mountain districts of Northern Afghanistan and
Badakshan, and careful inquiry would no doubt reveal the fact that
surviving Greek affinities are still far more widely spread through
that part of Asia than is generally known. All these settlements were
antecedent to Alexander, but beyond these recorded instances of Greek
occupation there can be little doubt that (as pointed out by Bellew in
his _Ethnography of Afghanistan_ and supported by later observations)
the Greek element had been diffused through the wide extent of the
Persian sovereignty for centuries before the birth of Alexander the
Great. It is probable that each of the four great divisions of the
ancient Greeks had contributed for a thousand years before to the
establishment of colonies in Asia Minor, and from these colonies bands
of emigrants had penetrated to the far east of the Persian dominions,
either as free men or captives. Amongst the clans and tribal sections
of Afghans and Pathans are to be found to this day names that are
clearly indicative of this pre-historic Greek connection.

Persia at her greatest maintained a considerable overland trade with
India, and Indian tribute formed a large part of her revenues. All
Afghanistan was Persian; all Baluchistan, and the Indian frontier to
the Indus. The underlying Persian element is strong in all these
regions still, the dominant language of the country, the speech of the
people, whether Baluch or Pathan, is of Persian stock, whilst the
polite tongue of Court officials, if not the Persian of Tehran or
Shiraz, is at least an imitation of it. It is hardly strange that the
Greek language should have absolutely disappeared. We have the
statement of Seneca (referred to by Bellew in his _Inquiry_) that the
Greek language was spoken in the Indus valley as late as the middle of
the first century after Christ; "if indeed it did not continue to be
the colloquial in some parts of the valley to a considerably later
period." As this is nearly two centuries after the overthrow of Greek
dominion in Afghanistan, it at least indicates that the Greek
settlements established four centuries earlier must have continued to
exist, and to be reinforced by Greek women (for children speak their
mother's tongue) to a comparatively late period; and that the triumph
of the Jat over the Greek did not by any means efface the influence of
the Greek in India for centuries after it occurred. It is probable
that when the importation of Greek women (who were often employed in
the households of Indian chiefs and nobles at a time when Greek ladies
married Indian Princes) ceased, then the Greek language ceased to
exist also. The retinue and followers of Alexander's expedition took
the women of the country to wife, and it is not, as is so often
supposed, to the results of that expedition so much as to the long
existence of Greek colonies and settlements that we must attribute the
undoubted influence of Greek art on the early art of India.

Thus we have a wide field before us for inquiry into the early history
of ethnographical movement in Asia, as it affected the relation
between Europe and Afghanistan. Afghanistan (which is a modern
political development) has ever held the landward gates of India. We
cannot understand India without a study of that wide hinterland
(Afghan, Persian, and Baluch) through which the great restless human
tide has ever been on the move: now a weeping nation of captives led
by tear-sodden routes to a land of exile; now a band of merchants
reaching forward to the land of golden promise; or perchance an army
of pilgrims marching with their feet treading deep into narrow
footways to the shrines of forgotten saints; or perchance an armed
host seeking an uncertain fate; a ceaseless, waveless tide, as
persistent, as enterprising, and infinitely more complicated in its
developments than the process of modern emigration, albeit modern
emigration may spread more widely.

Living as we do in fixed habitations and hedged in not merely by
narrow seas but by the conventionalities of civilized existence, we
fail to realize the conditions of nomadic life which were so familiar
to our Asiatic ancestors. Something of its nature may be gathered
to-day from the Kalmuk and Kirghiz nomads of Central Asia. A day's
march is not a day's march to them--it is a day's normal occupation.
The yearly shift in search of fresh pasture is not a flitting on a
holiday tour; it is as much a part of the year's life as the change of
raiment between summer to winter. Everything moves; the home is not
left behind; every man, woman, and child of the family has a
recognised share in the general shift. Perhaps that of the Kirghiz man
is the easiest. He smokes a lazy pipe in the bright sunshine and
watches his boys strip off the felt covering of his wicker-built
"kibitka," whilst his wife with floating bands of her white headdress
fluttering in the breeze, and her quilted coat turned up to give more
freedom to her booted legs, gets together the household traps in
compact bundles for the great hairy camel to carry. Her efforts are
not inartistic; long experience has taught her exactly where every
household god can be stowed to the best advantage. Meanwhile the
happy, good-looking Kirghiz girls are racing over the grass country
after sheep, and ere long the little party is making its slow but sure
way over the breezy steppes to the passes of the blue mountains, which
look down from afar on to the warmer plains. And who has the best of
it? The free-roving, untrammelled child of the plain, quite godless,
and taking no thought for the morrow, or the carefully cultured and
tight-fitted product of civilization to whom the motor and the railway
represent the only thinkable method of progression? That, however, is
not the point. What we wish to emphasize is the apparent inability on
the part of many writers on the subject of ancient history and
geography to realize the essential difference between then and now as
regards human migratory movement.

There is often an apparent misconception that there is more movement
in these days of railways and steamers and motors than existed ten
centuries before Christ. The difference lies not in the comparative
amount of movement but in the method of it. In one sense only is there
more movement--there are more people to travel; but in a broader sense
there is much less movement. Whole nations are no longer shifted at
the will of the conqueror across a continent, trade seekers no longer
devote their lives to the personal conduct of caravans; armies swelled
to prodigious size by a tagrag following no longer (except in China)
move slowly over the face of the land, devouring, like a swarm of
locusts, all that comes in their way. Colonial emigration perhaps
alone works on a larger scale now than in those early times; but
taking it "bye and large," the circulation of the human race,
unrestricted by political boundaries, was certainly more constant in
the unsettled days of nomadic existence than in these later days of
overgrown cities and electric traffic. If little or nothing is
recorded of many of the most important migrations which have changed
the ethnographic conditions of Asia, whilst at the same time we have
volumes of ancient philosophy and mythology, it is because such
changes were regarded as normal, and the current of contemporary
history as an ephemeral phenomenon not worth the labour of close
inquiry or a manuscript record.

Such a gazetteer as that presented to us by Herodotus would not have
been possible had there not been free and frequent access to the
countries and the people with whom it deals. It is impossible to
conceive that so much accuracy of detail could have been acquired
without the assistance of personal inquiry on the spot. If this is so,
then the Persians at any rate knew their way well about Asia as far
east as Tibet and India, and the Greeks undoubtedly derived their
knowledge from Persia. When Alexander of Macedon first planned his
expedition to Central Asia he had probably more certain knowledge of
the way thither than Lord Napier of Magdala possessed when he set out
to find the capital of Theodore's kingdom in Abyssinia, and it is most
interesting to note the information which was possessed by the Greek
authorities a century and a half before Alexander's time.

One notable occurrence pointing to a fairly comprehensive knowledge of
geography of the Indian border by the Persians, was the voyage of the
Greek Scylax of Caryanda down the Indus, and from its mouth to the
Arabian Gulf, which was regarded by Herodotus as establishing the fact
of a continuous sea. This voyage, or mission, which was undertaken by
order of Darius who wished to know where the Indus had its outlet and
"sent some ships" on a voyage of discovery, is most instructive. It is
true that the accounts of it are most meagre, but such details as are
given establish beyond a doubt that the expedition was practical and
real. The Persian dominions then extended to the Indus, but there is
no evidence that they ever extended beyond that river into the
peninsula of India. The Indus of the Persian age was not the Indus of
to-day, and its outlet to the sea presumably did not differ materially
from that of the subsequent days of Alexander and Nearkos. Thanks to
the careful investigations of the Bombay Survey Department, and the
close attention which has been given to ancient landmarks by General
Haig during the progress of his surveys, we know pretty certainly
where the course of the Lower Indus must have been, and where both
Scylax and Nearkos emerged into the Arabian Sea. The Indus delta of
to-day covers an area of 10,000 square miles with 125 miles of
coast-line, and it presents to us a huge alluvial tract which is
everywhere furrowed by ancient river channels. Some of these are
continuous through the delta, and can be traced far above it; others
are traceable for only short distances. Without entering into details
of the rate of progression in the formation of Delta (which can be
gathered not only from the abandoned sites of towns once known as
coast ports, but from actual observation from year to year), it may be
safely assumed that the Indus of Alexander and Scylax emptied itself
into the Ran of Kach, far to the south of its present debouchment. The
volume of its waters was then augmented by at least one important
river (the Saraswati), which, flowing from the Himalayas through what
is now known as the Rajputana desert, was the source of widespread
wealth and fertility to thousands of square miles where now there is
nothing to be met with but sandy waste. As far as the Indus the
Persian Empire is known to have extended, but no farther; and it was
important to the military advisers of Darius that something should be
known of the character of this boundary river.

Wherever the ships sent by Darius may have gone it is quite clear that
they did not sail _up_ the Indus, or there would have been no
objective for an expedition which was organised to determine where the
Indus met the sea by the process of sailing down that river. Moreover,
the voyage up the Indus would have been tedious and slow, and could
only have been undertaken in the cold weather with the assistance of
native pilots acquainted with the ever-shifting bed of the river,
which, so far as its liability to change of channel is concerned, must
have been much the same in the days of Darius as it is at present. The
possibility, therefore, is that Scylax made his way to the Upper Indus
overland, for we are told that the expedition _started_ from the city
of Carpatyra in the Pactyan country. This in itself is exceedingly
instructive, indicating that the Pactyans, or Pathans, or Pukhtu
speaking peoples have occupied the districts of the Upper Indus for
four-and-twenty centuries at least; and coincident with them we learn
that the Aprytæ or Afridi shared the honour of being resident
landowners. Nor need we suppose that the beginning of this history was
the beginning of their existence. The Afridi may have rejoiced in his
native hills ten or twenty centuries before he was written about by
Herodotus. We need not stay to identify the site of Carpatyra. The
Upper Indus valley is full of ancient sites. A century and a half
later Taxilla was the recognized capital of the Upper Punjab, and
Carpatyra meanwhile may have disappeared. Anyhow we hear of Carpatyra
no more, nor has the ingenuity of modern research thrown any certain
light on its position. It is, however, probably near Attok that we
must look for it. Scylax made his way down the Indus in native craft
that from long before his day to the present have retained their
primitive form, a form which was not unlike that of the coast crawling
"ships" of Darius. He proved the existence of an open water-way from
the Upper Punjab to the Persian Gulf, and incidentally his expedition
shows us that the chief lines of communication through the width of
the Persian Empire were well known, and that the road from Susa to the
Upper Indus was open. The outlying satrapies of the Persian Empire
could never have been added one by one to that mighty power without
definite knowledge of the way to reach them. It was not merely a
spasmodic expedition, such as that of Scylax, which pointed the way to
the conquests of the Far East; it was the gathered information of
years of experience, and it was on the basis of this experience
(unwritten and unrecorded so far as we know) that Alexander founded
his plans of campaign.

The detailed list of peoples included in the satrapies of the Persian
Empire, whilst it is more ethnographical than geographical in its
character, is sufficient proof in itself of the existence of constant
movement between Persia and the borderland of Afghanistan, which
assuredly included commercial traffic. This enumeration has been
compared with a catalogue of tribal contingents which swelled the
great army of Xerxes, an independent statement, and therefore a
valuable test to the general accuracy of Herodotus; and it is still
further confirmed by the list of nations subject to the Persian king
found in the inscriptions of Darius at Behistan and Persepolis. We are
not immediately concerned with the satrapies included in Western Asia
and Egypt, but when Herodotus makes a sudden departure from his rule
of geographical sequence and introduces a satrapy on the remotest east
of the Persian Empire, we immediately recognize that he touches the
Indian frontier.

The second satrapy most probably corresponds with that part of Central
Afghanistan south of the Kabul River, which lies west of the Suliman
Hills and north of the Kwaja Amran or Khojak. Every name mentioned by
Herodotus certainly has its counterpart in one or other of the tribes
to be found there to this day, excepting the Lydoi (whose history as
Ludi is fairly well known) and the Lasonoi, who have emigrated, the
former into India and the latter to Baluchistan.

The seventh satrapy, again, comprised the Sattagydai, the Gandarioi,
the Dadikai, and the Aparytai ("joined together"), an association of
names too remarkable to be mistaken. The Sattag or Khattak, the
Gandhari, the Dadi, and the Afridi are all trans-Indus people, and
without insisting too strongly on the exact habitat of each,
originally there can be little doubt that the seventh satrapy included
a great part of the Indus valley.

The eleventh satrapy is also probably a district of the Indian
trans-frontier, although Bunbury associates the name Kaspioi with the
Caspian Sea. It is far more likely that the Kaspioi of Herodotus are
to be recognized as the people of the ancient Kaspira or Kasmira, and
the Daritæ as the Daraddesa (Dards) of the contiguous mountains. All
Kashmir, even to the borders of Tibet (whence came the story of the
gold-digging ants), was well enough known to the Persians and through
them to Herodotus.

The twelfth satrapy comprised Balkh and Badakshan--what is now known
as Afghan Turkistan. It was here that, generations before Alexander's
campaign, those Greek settlements were founded by Darius and Xerxes
which have left to this day living traces of their existence in the
places originally allotted to them. In Afghan Turkistan also was
founded the centre of Greek dominion in this part of Asia after the
conquest of Persia, and it is impossible to avoid the conviction that
there was a connection between these two events. The Greeks took the
country from the Bakhi; but there are no people of this name left in
these provinces now. They may (as Bellew suggests) be recognized
again in the Bakhtyari of Southern Persia, but it seems unlikely; and
it is far more probable that they were obliterated by Alexander as his
most active opponents after he passed Aria (Herat) and Drangia
(Seistan).

The sixteenth satrapy was north of the Oxus, and included Sogdia and
Aria (Herat). South of Aria was the fourteenth satrapy, represented by
Seistan and Western Makran, with "the islands of the sea in which the
King settles transported convicts"; and east of this again was the
seventeenth satrapy covering Southern Baluchistan and Eastern Makran.
It is only during the last twenty-five years that an accurate
geographical knowledge of these uninviting regions has been attained.
The gradual extension of the red line of the Indian border, with the
necessity for preserving peace and security, has gradually enveloped
Makran and Persian Baluchistan, the Gadrosia and Karmania of the
Greeks, and has brought to light many strange secrets which have been
dormant (for they were no secrets to the traveller of the Middle Ages)
for a few centuries prior to the arrival of the British flag in
Western India. It is an inhospitable country which is thus included.
"Mostly desert," as one ancient writer says; marvellously furrowed and
partitioned by bands of sun-scorched rocky hills, all narrow and sharp
where they follow each other in parallel waves facing the Arabian Sea,
or massed into enormous square-faced blocks of impassable mountain
barrier whenever the uniform regularity of structure is lost. And yet
it is a country full not only of interest historical and
ethnographical, such as might be expected of the environment of a
series of narrow passages leading to the western gates of India, but
of incident also. There are amongst these strange knife-backed
volcanic ridges and scarped clay hills valleys of great beauty, where
the date-palms mass their feathery heads into a forest of green, and
below them the fertile soil is moist and lush with cultured
vegetation. But we have described elsewhere this strangely mixed land,
and we have now only to deal with the aspect of it as known to the
Greeks before the days of Alexander. That knowledge was ethnographical
in its quality and exceedingly slight in quantity. Herodotus mentions
the Sagartoi, Zarangai, Thamanai, Uxoi, and Mykoi. These are Seistan
tribes. The Sagartoi were nomads of Seistan, mentioned both amongst
tribes paying tribute and those who were exempt. The Zarangai were the
inhabitants of Drangia (Seistan), where their ancient capital fills
one of the most remarkable of all historic sites. The Zarangai are
said to be recognizable in the Afghan Durani. No Afghan Durani would
admit this. He claims a very different origin (as will be explained),
and in the absence of authoritative history it is never wise to set
aside the traditions of a people about themselves, especially of a
people so advanced as the Duranis. More probable is it that the
ancient geographical appellation Zarangai covers the historic Kaiani
of Seistan supposed to be the same as the Kakaya of Sanscrit.

The Uxoi may be the modern Hots of Makran--a people who are
traditionally reckoned amongst the most ancient of the mixed
population which has drifted into the Makran ethnographic cul-de-sac,
and who were certainly there in Alexander's time. In eastern Makran,
Herodotus mentions only the Parikanoi and the Asiatic Ethiopian.
Parikan is the Persian plural form of the Sanscrit Parva-ka, which
means "mountaineer." This bears exactly the same meaning as the word
Kohistani, or Barohi, and is not a tribal appellation at all, although
the latter may possibly have developed into the Brahui, the well-known
name of a very important Dravidian people of Southern Baluchistan
(highlanders all of them) who are akin to the Dravidian races of
Southern India. The Asiatic Ethiopian presents a more difficult
problem. During the winter of 1905 careful inquiries were made in
Makran for any evidence to support the suggestion that a tribe of
Kushite origin still existed in that country. It is of interest in
connection with the question whether the earliest immigrants into
Mesopotamia (these people who, according to Accadian tradition,
brought with them from the South the science of civilization) were a
Semitic race or Kushites. It is impossible to ignore the existence of
Kushite races in the east as well as the south. We have not only the
authority of the earliest Greek writings, but Biblical records also
are in support of the fact, and modern interest only centres in the
question what has become of them. Bellew suggests that it was after
the various Kush or Kach, or Kaj tribes that certain districts in
Baluchistan are called Kach Gandava or Kach (Kaj) Makran, and that the
chief of these tribes were the Gadara, after whom the country was
called Gadrosia. This seems mere conjecture. At any rate the term
Kach, sometimes Kachchi, sometimes Katz, is invariably applied to a
flat open space, even if it is only the flat terrace above a river
intervening between the river and a hill, and is purely geographical
in its significance. But it was a matter of interest to discover
whether the Gadurs of Las Bela could be the Gadrosii, or whether they
exhibited any Ethiopian traits. The Gadurs, however, proved to be a
section of the Rajput clan of Lumris, a proud race holding themselves
aloof from other clans and never intermarrying with them. There could
be no mistake about the Rajput origin of the red-skinned Gadur. He was
a Kshatrya of the lunar race, but he might very possibly represent the
ancient Gadrosii, even though he is no descendant of Kush. The other
Rajput tribes with whom the Gadurs coalesce have apparently held their
own in Las from a period quite remote, and must have been there when
Alexander passed that way.

Asiatic negroes abound in Makran: some of them fresh importations from
Africa, others bred in the slave villages of the Arabian Sea coast, as
they have been for centuries. They are a fine, brawny, well-developed
race of people, and some of the best of them are to be found as
stokers in the P. & O. service; but they do not represent the Asiatic
Ethiopian of Herodotus, who could hardly compile a gazetteer for the
Greeks which should include all the ethnographical information known
to the Persians, any more than our Intelligence Department could
compile a complete gazetteer of the whole Russian Empire. To the
maritime Greek nation the overwhelming preponderance of the huge
Empire which overshadowed them must have created the same feeling of
anxious suspicion that the unwieldy size of Russia presents to us, and
it is not very likely that military intelligence of a really practical
nature was offered gratis to the Greeks by the Persian geographers and
military leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Herodotus did
not know all that existed on the far Persian frontier. There are
tribes and peoples about Southern Baluchistan who are as ancient as
Herodotus but who are not mentioned. For instance, the ruling tribe in
Makran until quite recently (when they were ousted by certain Sikh or
Rajput interlopers called Gichki) were the Boledi, and their country
was once certainly called Boledistan. The Boledi valley is one of the
loveliest in a country which is apt to enhance the loveliness of its
narrow bands of luxuriance by their rarety and their narrowness. It is
a sweet oasis in the midst of a barren rocky sea, and must always have
been an object of envy to dwellers outside, even in days when a fuller
water-supply, more widely spread, turned many a valley green which is
now deep drifted with sand. Ptolemy mentions the Boledis, so that they
can well boast the traditional respectability of age-long ancestry.
The Boledis are said to have dispossessed the Persian Kaiani Maliks,
who ruled Makran in the seventeenth century, when they headed what is
known as the Baluch Confederation. This may be veritable history, but
their pride of race and origin, on whatever record it is based, has
come to an end now; it has been left to the present generation to see
the last of them. A few years ago there was living but one
representative of the ruling family of the Boledis, an old lady named
Miriam, who was exceedingly cunning in the art of embroidery, and made
the most bewitching caps. She was, I believe, dependent on the bounty
of the Sultan of Muscat, who possesses a small tract of territory on
the Makran coast. Herodotus apparently knew nothing about the Boledis,
nor can it be doubted that the Greek knowledge of Makran was
exceedingly scanty. Thus, whilst Alexander marched to the Indian
frontier, well supplied with information as to the ways thither when
once he could make Persia his base, he was almost totally ignorant of
the one route out of India which he eventually followed, and which so
nearly enveloped his whole force in disaster.




CHAPTER II

ASSYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN--ANCIENT LAND ROUTES--POSSIBLE SEA ROUTES


With the building up of the vast Persian Empire, and the gradual
fostering of eastern colonies, and the consequent introduction of the
manners and methods of Western Asia into the highlands of Samarkand
and Badakshan, other nationalities were concerned besides Persians and
Greeks. Captive peoples from Syria had been deported to Assyria seven
centuries before Christ. The House of Israel had been broken up (for
Samaria had fallen in 721 B.C. before the victorious hosts of Sargon),
and some of the Israelitish families had been deported eastwards and
northwards to Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. With the vitality of
their indestructible race it is at least possible that a remnant
survived as serfs in Assyria, preserving their own customs and
institutions--secretly if not openly--intermarrying, trading, and
money-making, yet still looking for the final restoration of Israel
until the final break-up of the Assyrian Kingdom. They were never
absolutely absorbed, and never forgot to recount their historic
pedigree to their children.

With the final overthrow of the Assyrian Kingdom we lose sight of the
tribes of Israel, who for more than a century had been mingled with
the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. At least history
holds no record of their further national existence. From time
immemorial in Asia it had been customary for the captives taken in war
to be transported bodily to another field for purposes of colonization
and public labour. When the world was more scantily peopled such
methods were natural and effectual; the increase of working power
gained thereby being of the utmost importance in days when enormous
irrigation canals were excavated, and bricks had to be fashioned for
the construction of walled cities.

The extent and magnificence of Assyrian building must have demanded an
immense supply of such manual labour for the purpose of brickmaking.
All the mighty works of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon were
literally "the work of men's hands." In Mesopotamia was captured
labour especially necessary. Stone was indeed available at Nineveh,
but the barrenness of the soil which stretches flatly from the rugged
hills of Kurdistan across Mesopotamia rendered the country
unproductive unless enormous works of irrigation were undertaken for
the distribution of water. Mesopotamia is a country of immense
possibilities, but the wealth of it is only for those who can
distribute the waters of its great rivers over the productive soil.
The yearly inundations of the Euphrates and Tigris are but sufficient
for the needs of a narrow strip of land on either side the rivers, and
the crops of the country undeveloped by canals can only support a
scattered and scanty population. Towards the south there is another
difficulty. The flat soil becomes water-logged and marshy and runs to
waste for want of drainage. There is no stone for building purposes
near Babylon. Approaching Babylon over the windy wastes of
scrub-powdered plain there is nothing to be seen in the shape of a
hill. Long, low, flat-topped mounds stretch athwart the horizon and
resolve themselves on nearer approach into deeply scarred and
weather-worn accretions of debris, or else they are banks of ancient
waterways winding through the steppe, the last remnants of a
stupendous system of irrigation. Then there breaks into view the
solitary erection which stands in the open plain overlooking a wide
vista of marsh and swamp to the west, which represents the ruins
called Birs Nimrud, the Ziggurat or temple which, in successive tiers
devoted to the powers of heaven, supported the shrine of Mercury. It
is by far the most conspicuous object in the Babylonian landscape;
huge, dilapidated, and unshapely, it mounts guard over a silent,
stagnant, swampy plain.

Now the remarkable feature in all these gigantic remains of antiquity
is that they are built of brick. In the wide expanse of Mesopotamia
plain around there is not a stone quarry to be found. Of Nineveh, we
learn from the masterly records of Xenophon that as he was leading the
surviving 10,000 Greeks in their retreat from the disastrous field of
Babylon back to the sunny Hellespont, some 200 years after the
destruction of Nineveh, he came upon a vast desert city on the Tigris.
The wall of it was 25 feet wide, 100 feet high, with a 20-foot
basement of stone. This was all that was left of Kalah, one of the
Assyrian capitals. A day's march farther north he came on another
deserted city with similar walls. These were the dry bones of Nineveh,
already forgotten and forsaken. Two centuries had in these early ages
been sufficient to blot out the memory of Assyrian greatness so
completely that Xenophon knew not of it, nor recognized the place
where his foot was treading. Barely seventy years ago was the memory
of them restored to man, and tokens of the richness and magnificence
of the art which embellished them first given to the world. The mounds
representing Nineveh and Babylon are some of them of enormous size.
The mound of Mugheir (the ancient Ur) is the ancient platform of an
Assyrian palace, which is faced with a wall 10 feet thick of red
kiln-dried bricks cemented with bitumen. Some of these platforms were
raised from 50 to 60 feet above the plain and protected by massive
stone masonry carried to a height exceeding that of the platform. But
the Babylonian mound of Birs Nimrud, which rises from the plain level
to the blue glazed masonry of the upper tier of the Ziggurat, is
altogether a brick construction. The debris of the many-coloured
bricks now forms a smooth slope for many feet from its base; but
above, where the square blocks of brickwork still hold together in
scattered disarray, you may still dig out a foot-square brick with the
title and designations of Nebuchadnezzar imprinted on its face. These
artificial mounds could only have been built at an enormous cost of
labour. The great mound of Koyunjik (the palace of Nineveh) covers an
area of 100 acres and reaches up 95 feet at its highest point. It has
been calculated that to heap up such a pile would "require the united
efforts of 10,000 men for twelve years, or 20,000 men for six years"
(Rawlinson, _Five Monarchies_), and then only the base of the palace
is reached; and there are many such mounds, for "it seems to have been
a point of honour with the Assyrian Kings that each should build a new
palace for himself" (Ragozin, _Chaldaea_).

Only conquering monarchs with whole nations as prisoners could have
compassed such results. This, indeed, was one of the great objectives
of war in these early times. It was the amassing of a great population
for manual labour and the creation of new centres of civilization and
trade. Thus it was that the peoples of Western Asia--Egyptians,
Israelites, Jews, Ph[oe]nicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and even
Greeks--were transported over vast distances by land, and a movement
given to the human race in that part of the world which has infinitely
complicated the science of ethnology. The peopling of Canada by the
French, of North America by the English, of Brazil by the Portuguese,
of Argentina and Chile by Spaniards and Italians, is perhaps a more
comprehensive process in the distribution of humanity and more
permanent in its character. But ancient compulsory movement, if not as
extensive as modern voluntary emigration, was at least wholesale, and
it led to the distribution of people in districts which would not
naturally have invited them. The first process in the consolidation of
a district, or satrapy, was the settlement of inhabitants, sometimes
in supercession of a displaced or annihilated people, sometimes as an
ethnic variety to the possessors of the soil. Tiglath Pileser was the
first Assyrian monarch to consolidate the Empire by its division into
satrapies. Henceforward the outlying provinces of the dominions were
convenient dumping places for such bodies of captives as were not
required for public works at home.

Nothing would be more natural than that Sargon should deport a portion
of the Israelitish nation to colonize his eastern possessions towards
India, just as Darius Hystaspes later employed the same process to
the same ends when he deported Greeks from the Lybian Barke to
Baktria. There is nothing more astonishing in the fact that we should
find a powerful people claiming descent from Israel in Northern
Afghanistan than that we should find another people claiming a Greek
origin in the Hindu Kush.

Nor was the importance of peopling waste lands and raising up new
nations out of well-planted colonies overlooked ten centuries before
Christ any more than it is now. Then it was a matter of transporting
them overland and on foot to the farthest eastern limits of these
great Asiatic empires. Always east or south they tramped, for nothing
was known of the geography of the North and West. Eastwards lay the
land of the sun, whence came the Indians who fought in the armies of
Darius, and where gold and ivory, apes and peacocks were found to fill
Ph[oe]nician ships. To-day it is different. The peopling of the world
with whites is chiefly a Western process. Emigrants go out in ships,
not as captives, but almost equally in compact bodies--the best of our
working men to Canada, and many of the best of our much-wanted
domestic servants to South Africa. It is a perpetual process in the
world's economy, and perhaps the chief factor in the world's history;
but in the old, old centuries before the Christian era it was
necessarily a land process, and the geographical distribution of the
land features determined the direction of the human tide. Some twenty
years before the fall of Samaria and the deportation of the ten tribes
of Israel, Tiglath Pileser had effected conquests in Asia which
carried him so far east that he probably touched the Indus. Why he
went no farther, or why Alexander subsequently left the greater part
of the Indian peninsula unexplored, is fully explicable on natural
grounds, even if other explanations were wanting.

The Indus valley would offer to the military explorers from the West
the first taste of the quality of the climate of the India of the
plains which they would encounter. The Indus valley in the hot weather
would possess little climatic attraction for the Western highlander.
Alexander's troops mutinied when they got far beyond the Indus. Any
other troops would mutiny under such conditions as governed their
outfit and their march. It is more than possible that the great
Assyrian conqueror before him encountered much the same difficulty. It
is clear, however, historically, that the Assyrian knew and trod the
way to Northern Afghanistan (or Baktria), and if we examine the map of
Asia with any care we shall see that there is no formidable barrier to
the passing of large bodies of people from Nineveh to Herat (Aria), or
from Herat to the Indus valley, until we reach the very gates of India
on the north-west frontier. Four centuries later than Tiglath Pileser
the battle of Arbela was fought to a finish between Alexander and
Darius (who possessed both Greek and Indian troops in his army) on a
field which is not so very far to the east of Nineveh, and which is
probably represented more or less accurately by the modern Persian
town of Erbil. The modern town may not be on the exact site of the
action, and we know that the ancient town was some sixty miles away
from the battlefield. However that may be, we learn that in the
general retreat of the Persians which followed the battle, Darius made
his way to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of the Medes. There he
remained for about a year, but hearing of Alexander's advance from
Persepolis in the spring of 330 B.C. he fled to the north-east, with a
view to taking refuge with his kinsman Bessos, who was then satrap of
Baktria. This gives us the clue to the general line of communication
between Northern Mesopotamia and Baktria (or Afghanistan) in ancient
days; and the twenty-five centuries which have rolled by since that
early period have done little to modify that line.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century A.D. from the earliest
times with which we can come into contact through any human record,
this high-road (not the only one, but the chief one) must have been
trodden by the feet of thousands of weary pilgrims, captives,
emigrants, merchants, or fighting men--an intermittent tide of
humanity exceeding in volume any host known to modern days--bringing
East into touch with the West to an extent which we can hardly
appreciate. It may be said that the straightest road to Baktria did
not lie through Ecbatana. It did not; but independently of the fact
that Ecbatana was a city of great defensive capacity, and of reasons
both political and military which would have impelled Darius to take
that route, we shall find if we examine the latest Survey of India map
of Western Persia that the geographical distribution of hill and
valley make it the easiest, if not the shortest, route. The
configuration of Western Persia, like that of Makran and Southern
Baluchistan extending to our own north-west frontier, mainly consists
of long lines of narrow ridges curving in lines parallel to the coast,
rocky and mostly impassable to travellers crossing their difficult
ridge and furrow formation transversely, but presenting curiously easy
and open roads along the narrow lateral valleys. Ecbatana once stood
where the modern Hamadan now stands. The road from Arbil (or Erbil)
that carries most traffic follows this trough formation to Kermanshah
and then bends north-eastward to Hamadan. From Hamadan to Rhagai and
the Caspian gates, which was the route followed by Darius in his
flight from Ecbatana, the road was clearly coincident with the present
telegraph line to Tehran from Hamadan, which strikes into the great
post route eastward to Mashad and Herat, one of the straightest and
most uniformly level roads in all Asia. It must always have been so.
Remarkable physical changes have occurred in Asia during these
twenty-five centuries, but nothing to alter the relative disposition
of mountain and plain in this part of Persia, or to change the general
character of its ancient highway. All this part of Persia was under
the dominion of the Assyrian king when the tribes of Israel left Syria
for Armenia. He had but recently traversed the road to India, and he
knew the richness of Baktria (of Afghan Turkistan and Badakshan) and
could estimate what a colony might become in these eastern fields.

What more natural than that he should draft some of his captives
eastward to the land of promise? There is not an important tribe of
people in all that hinterland of India that has not been drafted in
from somewhere. There is not a people left in India, for that matter,
that can safely call themselves indigenous. From Persia and Media,
from Aria and Skythia, from Greece and Arabia, from Syria and
Mesopotamia they have come, and their coming can generally be traced
historically, and their traditions of origin proved to be true. But
there is one important people (of whom there is much more to be said)
who call themselves Ben-i-Israel, who claim a descent from Kish, who
have adopted a strange mixture of Mosaic law and Hindu ordinance in
their moral code, who (some sections at least) keep a feast which
strangely accords with the Passover, who hate the Yahudi (Jew) with a
traditional hatred, and for whom no one has yet been able to suggest
any other origin than the one they claim, and claim with determined
force; and these people rule Afghanistan. It may be that they have
justification for their traditions, even as others have; they may yet
be proved to stand in the same relationship to the scattered remnants
of Israel as some of the Kafir inhabitants of Northern Afghanistan can
be shown to hold to the Greeks of pre-Alexandrian days. It is
difficult to account for the name Afghan: it has been said that it is
but the Armenian word Aghvan (Mountaineer). If this is so, it at once
indicates a connection between the modern Afghan and the Syrian
captives of Armenia.

But whilst "men in nations" were thus traversing the highlands of
Persia from Mesopotamia to Northern Afghanistan by highways so ancient
that they may be regarded almost as geographical fixtures as
everlasting as the hills, we do not find much evidence of traffic with
the Central Asian States north of the Oxus.

Early military excursions into the land of the Skyths were more for
the purpose of dealing with the predatory habits of these warlike
tribes, who afterwards peopled half of Europe as well as India, than
of promoting either trade or geographical inquiry; and it was the
route which led to Northern Afghanistan and Baktria through Northern
Persia which was most attractive from its general accessibility and
promise of profit. It was this way that Northern Kashmir and the
gold-fields of Tibet were touched. The Indian gold which formed so
large a part of the Persian revenues in the time of Darius undoubtedly
came from Northern India and Tibet. Old as are the workings of the
Wynaad gold-fields in the west, and Kolar in the east, of the
peninsula, it is unlikely that either of these sources was known to
Persia.

The more direct routes to India from Ecbatana, passing through Central
Persia _via_ Kashan, Yezd, and Kirman, terminated on the Helmund or in
Makran, and there is no evidence that the mountain system which faces
the Indus was ever crossed by invading Persian hosts. There was,
indeed, a tradition in Alexander's time that an attempt had been made
to traverse Makran and that it had failed. This, says Arrian, was one
of the reasons why Alexander obstinately chose that route on his
retirement from India. In spite, however, of the geographical
difficulties which render it improbable that the hosts of Tiglath
Pileser (who could have dealt with the Skythians of the north readily
enough) ever broke across the north-western gateways of India's
mountain borderland, there was undoubtedly a close connection between
Assyria and India of which the evidence is still with us.

Throughout the golden age of the Second Empire of Assyria, after the
subjugation of Babylon and the consolidation of the Empire by Tiglath
Pileser, during the reigns of Sargon and Senacherib (who fought the
first Assyrian naval fight), Esar Haddon (who destroyed Sidon and
removed the inhabitants) and Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalus), to the
final overthrow of Assyria by Babylon in 625 B.C., when the star of
Nebuchadnezzar arose on the southern horizon, Assyria held the supreme
command of Eastern commerce, and Nineveh dictated the cannons of art
to the world. No event more profoundly affected the commerce of Asia
than the destruction of Sidon and the bodily transfer of its
commercial inhabitants to Assyria. This was the age of Assyrian art,
of literature, and of architecture; Assyrian culture realized its
culminating point in the reign of Assur-bani-pal, when the library at
Nineveh far surpassed any library that the world had ever seen. It was
then that intercourse between Assyria and India became unbroken and
intimate. Then public works of the largest dimensions were undertaken,
and colonies formed for the purpose of developing the riches of the
newly acquired lands in the East. Assyrian art found its way to India,
and the affinity between Assyrian and Indian art is directly traceable
still in spite of the impress subsequently effected by Greece and
Rome.

The carpets that are spread on the floors of every Anglo-Indian home
and which, as Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, or Indian, are to be
found in every carpet shop in London, usually possess in the
intricacies of their pattern some trace of ancient Assyrian art. As
Sir George Birdwood has long ago pointed out, general similarities
between Assyrian and Indian design in carpet patterns may possibly be
due to a common Turanian origin, pre-Semitic and pre-Aryan; but there
are details of architectural plan in the Southern Indian temples
which, quite as much as the reproduction of the ancient Assyrian "knop
and flower" in its infinite variety of form (all expressing more or
less conventionally the cone and the lotus of the original idea),
testify to an infinitely old art affinity, and at the same time
witness to the wonderful vitality of intelligent design.

The tree of life so largely interwoven into Eastern fabrics was the
"Asherah" or "grove" sacred to Asshur the supreme god of the
Assyrians, the Lord and Giver of life; and it appears to have been the
development of the "Hom" or lotus, which, although it is a Kashmir
valley plant, is always admirably rendered in Assyrian sculpture.
Eventually the date palm took the place of the Hom in the Euphrates
valley, just as the vine replaced it in Asia Minor and Greece. In
Central Asian rugs we find the cone replaced by the pomegranate, and
the tree of life becomes a pomegranate tree. There is too much
intricacy in such similarity of ornamental detail between Assyrian and
Indian art for the result to have been merely developments from a
common pre-historic stock along separate lines. They are clearly
imitations one of the other, and the similarity is but another link in
the chain of evidence which proves that the highways of Asia
connecting Assyria with India through Persia were well-trodden ways
seven centuries at least before Christ, even if the sea route from the
Red Sea and Euphrates had not then reached the Indus and western coast
of India.

Whilst all historical evidence points to the Tehran-Mashad route as
the great highway which linked Mesopotamia with Baktria in past ages,
there are certain curious little indications that the southern road
through Persia, viz. Yezd and Kirman, was also well known, for it is a
remarkable fact (which may be taken for what it is worth) that it is
in the villages and bazaars of Sind that the potters may be found
whose conservative souls delight in the reproduction of a class of
ornamental decoration which most clearly indicates an Assyrian origin.
The direct route to Sind from Mesopotamia is not by way of Herat. It
is (as will be subsequently explained) _via_ Kirman and Makran, but
there is absolutely no historical evidence to support the suggestion
that this was a route utilized by the Assyrians; and there is, on the
other hand, Arrian's statement that roads through Makran were unknown
or but legendary.

It is impossible, however, to ignore the fact that the sea route to
North-western India was utilized in very ancient times; and although
its connection with the northern landward gates of India may appear to
be rather obscure, that connection is a matter which actually concerns
us rather nearly in the present day. For it is by this ancient sea
route that Persia and Baluchistan, Seistan and Afghanistan derive
those supplies of small arms and ammunition which are abundant in
those countries, but which never pass through India. Muskat is the
chief depot for distribution, and the Persian ports of Bandar Abbas,
Jask, or Pasni on the Makran coast are utilized as ports for the
interior, leading by routes which are quite sufficiently good for
caravan traffic towards the point where Afghan territory meets that of
Persia and Baluchistan just south of Seistan. Once in Seistan they are
well behind the passes which split our nearer line of defence in the
trans-Indus hills. Even our command of the sea fails to suppress this
traffic, which has led to such a general distribution of arms of
precision (chiefly of German manufacture), that these countries may
fairly claim to be able to arm their whole population. No recent
researches in the Persian Gulf or on the Persian coast have added much
to the sum of our knowledge respecting the early navigation of these
Eastern seas, but there can be no question as to its immense
antiquity. The Ph[oe]nician settler in Syria and Mesopotamia has been
traced back to his primeval home in the Bahrein Islands, which, if
Herodotus is correct in his estimated date for the founding of Tyre
(2756 years B.C.), takes us back to very early times indeed for the
coast navigation of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Seas. Hiram, King
of Tyre, could look back through long ages to the days when his
Ph[oe]nician forefathers started their well-packed vessels (the
Ph[oe]nicians were famous for their skill in stowing cargo) to crawl
along the coasts of Makran and Western India for the purpose of
acquiring those stores of spices and gold which first made commerce
profitable, or else to make their way westward, guided by the
headlands and shore outlines of Southern Arabia, to gather the riches
from African fields. Makran is full of strange relics of immense age
for which none can account. Since Egyptology has become a recognized
science, who will lay the foundations of such a science for Southern
Arabia and Makran? When will some one arise with the wisdom and the
leisure to write of the power of ancient Arabia, and to trace the
impressions left on the whole world of commerce, of art, of
architecture, and literature by the ancient races who hailed from the
South?

We cannot tell when the first sea-borne trade passed to and fro
between India and the Erythrean Sea, a creeping, slow-moving trade
making the best shift possible of wind and tide, and knowing no guide
but the pole star of that period, and the rocky headlands and islands
of the Makran coast. Many of the ancient islands exist no more, but
the coast is a peculiarly well-marked one for the mariner still.
Probably the coast trade was earlier than the overland caravan
traffic; but the latter was certainly co-existent with the Assyrian
monarchy when Persia and Central Asia lay at the feet of the conqueror
Tiglath Pileser.




CHAPTER III

GREEK EXPLORATION--ALEXANDER--MODERN BALKH--THE BALKH PLAIN AND
BAKTRIA


Twenty-two centuries have rolled away since the first military
expedition from Europe was organized and led into the wilds of an Asia
which was probably as civilized then as it is now. Two thousand two
hundred years, and yet along the wild stretches of the Indian
frontier, where a mound here and there testifies to the former
existence of some forgotten camp, or where in the slant rays of the
evening sun faint indications may be traced on the level Punjab flats
of the foundation of a city long since dead, the name of the great
Macedonian is uttered with reverence and awe as might be the name of a
god who can still influence the lives of men, yet qualified by an
affix which indicates a curious survival of the mythological
conception of gods as human beings. You may wander through some of the
valleys cleft through the western frontier hills, where an
intermittent rivulet of water spreads a network of streamlets on the
boulder-covered bed of the nullah, and where the stony hills rise in
barren slopes on either side, and find, perchance half hidden by
weather-worn debris and tufts of stringy verdure, the remains of what
was once an artificial water-channel, stone built and admirably
graded, and you may ask who was responsible for this construction. Not
a man can say. There is no history, no tradition even, connected with
it. It passes their understanding. Doubtless it was the work of
"Sekunder" (Alexander)--that prehistoric, mythological,
incomprehensible, and yet beneficent being who lives in the minds of
the frontier people as the apotheosis of the Deputy Commissioner. Yet
the impression left on India by the Greeks is marvellously small. It
is chiefly to be found in the architecture and the sculpture of the
Punjab. The Greek language disappeared from the Indus valley about the
end of the tenth century A.D., and there is hardly a Greek place-name
now to be recognized anywhere on the Indus banks. But any unusual
relic of the past, the story of which has passed beyond the memory of
the present tribes-people (even though it may be obviously of mediæval
Arabic origin), is invariably attributed to Alexander. It is, however,
chiefly in the sculpture and decorations of Buddhist buildings (which
never existed in Alexander's day) that clear evidence exists of Greek
art conception. The classical features and folded raiment of the
sculptured saints and buddhas, which are found so freely in certain
parts of the Punjab, are obviously derived from original Greek ideals
which may very possibly have been transmitted through Rome.

With Alexander in India we have nothing to do in these pages. It is as
the first explorer in the regions beyond India, the Afghan and
Baluchistan hinterlands, that he at present concerns us; and it may
fairly be stated that no later expedition combining scientific
research with military conquest ever added more to the sum of the
world's knowledge of those regions than that led by Alexander. For
centuries after it no light arises on the geographical horizon of the
Indian border. Indeed, not until political exigencies caused by
Russia's steady advance towards India compelled a revision of
political boundaries in Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and India,
was any very accurate idea obtained of the geographical conditions of
Northern and Western Afghanistan, or of Baluchistan, or of Southern
Persia. The mapping of these countries has been recent, and the
progress of it, as year by year the network of Indian triangulation
and topography spread westward and northward, has reopened many
sources of light which, if not altogether new, have lain hidden ever
since the Macedonian conqueror passed over them. Long before the Greek
army mustered on the banks of the Hellespont we have seen that the
highways to the East were well trodden and well known. It was not
likely that Alexander's intelligence department was lacking in
information. For many centuries subsequent to that expedition the rise
of the Parthian power absolutely cut off these old-world trade
communications and set the restless tides of human emigration into new
channels. But in Alexander's time there was nothing in Persia to
interrupt the interchange of courtesies between East and West.

The great Aryan tide had already flowed from the Central Asian
highlands into India, but Jutes and Skyths had yet to make that great
drift westward which peopled half of Europe with nomadic tribes
speaking kindred tongues--a drift which never rested in its westward
advance till, as Anglians and Saxons, it had enveloped England and
faced its final destiny in an American continent. Assyria had passed
by with arts and commerce rather than with arms, and Persia had
followed in Assyrian tracks. Both had established colonies half-way to
India in the Afghan highlands, Persia with the aid of captive Greeks,
and Assyria with people taken from the Syrian land. The list of
Assyrian and Persian satrapies included all those lands which we now
call the hinterland of India, and which in Alexander's time must have
been absolutely Persianized. But beyond the historical evidence which
can be collected to prove the early, the constant, traffic which
ensued between Mesopotamia, or Asia Minor, and India, after the
consolidation of those two great empires, there is the tradition which
certain Greek writers (notably Arrian) treat rather scornfully, of the
conquest of Upper India by the mythical hero Bacchus. It is never wise
to treat any tradition scornfully, and Arrian is himself obliged to
admit the difficulty of explaining certain records connected with
Alexander's history, without assuming that the tradition was not
groundless.

Writing of the city of Nysa, Arrian says that "it was built by
Dionysos or Bacchus, when he conquered the Indians; but who this
Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the Indians
is hard to determine, whether he was that Theban who from Thebes, or
he who from Timolus, a mountain of Lydia, undertook that famous
expedition into India is very uncertain." There is a Greek epic poem
in hexameter verse, called the "Dionysiaka," or "Bassarika," which
tells of the conquest of India by Bacchus, the greatest of all his
achievements. The author is Nonnus of Panopolis in Egypt, who wrote
about the beginning of the fifth century of our era. Bacchus is said
to have received a command from Zeus to turn back the Indians, who had
extended their conquests to the Mediterranean, and in the execution of
this command he marched through Syria and Assyria. In Assyria he was
entertained with magnificent hospitality. Nothing further is said of
the route he took to reach India. The first battle which took place
in India was on the banks of the Hydaspes, where the Indians were
routed. Then followed as an incident in the war the destruction of the
Indian fleet in a naval battle, which is instructive. It took the
assistance of the goddess of war, Pallas Athene, to bring the campaign
to a conclusion, which terminated with the death of the Indian leader
Deriades. Here, then, is crystallized in verse the tradition to which
Arrian refers, and remembering that we are indebted to two great epics
of India, the "Ramayana" and the "Mahabharata," for such glimmering of
the ancient history of the Aryan occupation of India as we possess, we
may very well conceive that the germs of real historical fact lie
half-concealed in this poem of Nonnus. However that may be, it is
tolerably certain that Alexander found a people in Northern India who
claimed a Greek origin when he arrived there, quite apart from the
colonists of Baktria who had been transported there by Darius
Hydaspes, and that he recognized their claim to distant relationship.

When Alexander, then, mustered his army in the sunny fields of Macedon
he was preparing for an expedition over no uncertain ways between
Greece and Baktria or Arachosia (Northern and Western Afghanistan). He
knew what lay before him if he could once break through the Persian
barrier; and the strength of that barrier he must have been well aware
lay as much in the stern fighting qualities of the mercenary Greek
legions in the pay of Persia as in the hosts of Persian and Indian
troops which the Persian monarch could array against him. We have
lists of the component forces on both sides. The Macedonian legions
were homogeneous and patriotic. The Persian army was partly European,
but chiefly Asiatic, with a mixed company of Asiatic troops such as
has probably never taken the field since. The opposing forces, indeed,
partook of the nature of the two armies which fought out the issue of
the Russo-Japanese campaign, and the result was much the same. There
was no tie of national sentiment to bind together the unwieldy cohorts
of Persia. They fought for their pay, and they fought well; but when
big battalions are divided in religious sentiment and unswayed by
patriotism, they are no match for Macedonian cohesion, Mahomedan
Jehad, or Japanese Bushido.

It is quite interesting to examine the details of Alexander's army.
The main body consisted of six brigades of 3000 men, each united to
form an irresistible phalanx. Heavily armoured, with a long shield, a
long sword, and a four-and-twenty foot spear (sarina), the infantryman
of the phalanx must have possessed a powerful physique to enable him
to carry himself and his weapons in the field. The depth of the
phalanx was sixteen ranks, and the first six ranks were so placed that
they could all bring their spears into action at once. The bulk of
the phalanx consisted of Macedonians only. The light infantry, bowmen,
and dartsmen numbered about 6000. A third corps of 6000 men more
lightly armed, but with longer swords than the phalangists (called
Hypaspists), were intermediate. The cavalry consisted of three
classes, light, heavy, and medium, 3000 Macedonian and Thessalian
horsemen, heavily armoured, forming its main strength. The light
cavalry were Thracian lancers. The Royal Horse Guard included eight
Macedonian squadrons of horsemen picked from the best families in
Greece. It is useful to note that there were mounted infantry and
artillery (_i.e._ balistai and katapeltai) with the force. More useful
still to note that none of Alexander's victories were won by the solid
strength of his phalanx; it was the sweeping and resistless force of
his cavalry charges (often led by himself) that gained them.

Perhaps the most notable feature about this Greek expedition to India
was the fact that it was the first military expedition of which there
is any record which included scientific inquiry as one of its objects.
Alexander had on his personal staff men of literary if not of
scientific acquirements, and it is to them doubtless that we owe a
comparatively clear account of the expedition, although unfortunately
their records have only been transmitted to us by later authors. If we
could but recover originals what a host of doubtful points might be
cleared up! It is true that previous to the date of Alexander one man
of genius, Xenophon, had kept a record of a magnificent military
achievement, and had proved himself to be master of literature as he
was of the science of leading; but Xenophon stands alone, and it may
be doubted whether, during the many centuries which have passed away
since the era of Greek supremacy, any practical leader of men has ever
attained such a splendid position in the ranks of writers of military
history. Alexander appears, at any rate, to have been no historian,
but his staff of cultivated literary assistants and men of letters
included many notable Greek names.

Alexander crossed the Hellespont in the spring of the year 334 B.C.,
and first encountered the Persians near the Granikos River. The battle
was decisive although the losses on either side do not appear to have
been heavy. It was but the augury of what was to follow. The
subsequent advance of the Macedonian troops southward through the
lovely land of Iona, and the reduction of Miletus and Helikarnassos,
brought the first year's campaign to a close. The second year opened
with the conquest of Pamphyllia and Phrygia, the passage of the Tauros
ranges being made in winter. On the return of spring he recrossed the
Tauros and reduced the western hill-tribes of Kilikia. Part of his
force, meanwhile, had occupied the passes into Syria known as the
Syrian gates. Within two days march of the Syrian gates the Persian
hosts again were massed in an open plain under Darius, who had
advanced from the east, waiting to fall upon the Macedonian troops and
crush them as they debouched from the defile. Tired of waiting,
however, Darius moved forward into Kilikia by the Amanian passes to
look for Alexander, and thus it happened that when Alexander finally
emerged from the Syrian gates into the plains of Syria he found his
enemy behind him. He partially retraced his steps and regained the
pass by midnight, and there from one of the adjoining summits he
"beheld the Persian watch-fires gleaming far and wide over the plain
of Issos." The rapidity of Alexander's movements was only equalled by
the fierce energy of his onslaught when he led his cavalry against the
unwieldy formations of his Persian enemy. It was his own hand that
gained the victory both then and afterwards.

There is no more stirring story in all history than this progress of
the Macedonian force. Step by step it has been traced out from
Granikos to Issos and from Issos to Arbela; but this is not the place
to recapitulate that part of the story which applies only to Western
Asia. It is not until after the final decisive battle at Arbela, when
Darius fled in hot haste along the south-eastern road to Ecbatana, the
former capital of Media, and thence in the spring of 330 B.C.
retreated with a disorganized force and an intriguing court towards
Baktria, where he hoped to find a refuge with his kinsman Bessos the
satrap of that province, that we really touch on the subject with
which we wish to deal in this book, viz. the high-roads to Afghanistan
in those long past days. Alexander, meanwhile, had received the
submission of Babylon and restored the temple of Belus, and made
himself master of a more spacious empire than the world had yet seen.
It was then that the amazing results of his military success began to
turn his head. From this point the severe simplicity of the Macedonian
soldier is exchanged for the luxury, arrogance, and intolerance of the
despot and conqueror. As Alexander advanced in material strength so
did he slide down the easy descent of moral retrogression, and whilst
we can still admire his magnificence as a military leader we find
little else left to admire about him. From Babylon to the lovely
valley wherein lies Susa, and from Susa to Persepolis, was more or
less of a triumphal march in spite of the fierce opposition of the
satrap Artobaizanes. Of Persepolis we are taught to believe that
Alexander left nothing behind him but blackened ruins--the result of a
drunken orgy. During the winter, amidst snow and ice, he subdued the
Mardians in their mountain fastnesses (for he never left an active foe
on the flank or rear), and with the return of the sweet Persian spring
he renewed his hunt after Darius, turning his face to the north and
east.

There are two high-roads through Persia to the East--one leading to
Northern Afghanistan and the Oxus regions over Mashad, the other to
Kirman, Seistan, and Kandahar. Along both of them there now runs a
telegraph line connecting with the Russian system _via_ Mashad, and
the Indian system _via_ Kirman. They must always have been
high-roads--the great trade routes to Central Asia and India. Where
the orderly line of telegraph poles now stretches in unending
regularity to mark the dusty highway, there, through more ages than we
can count, the padded foot of the camel must have worn the road into
ridges and ruts as he plodded his weary way with loads of merchandise
and fodder. No geological evolution can have disturbed those tracks
since the Assyrian kings first drew riches from the East and started
colonies on the Baktrian highlands; they are now as they were 1000
years before Christ, and it is only natural that in the ordinary
course of the same unresting spirit of enterprise the telegraph posts
will sooner or later cast long shadows over a passing railway. The
desert regions of Persia separate these two roads: the wide flat
spaces of sand or "Kavir"; an unending procession of sand-hills on the
glittering fields of salt-bound swamp. The desert is crossable--it has
been fairly well exploited--but nothing so far has been found in it to
justify the expectation of great discoveries of dead and buried
cities, or traces of a former civilization such as once occupied the
deserts of Chinese Turkistan.

We may well believe that the central deserts of Persia were the same
in Alexander's time as they are in ours. Consequently any large
company of people would have been more or less forced into one or
other of the well-known routes which the geographical configuration of
the country presented to them. In his pursuit of Darius Alexander
followed the northern route to Baktria which strikes a little north of
east from Ecbatana (Hamadan), and in these days leads direct to Tehran
the modern capital of Persia. The tragical fate of Darius, and
Alexander's crocodile grief thereat, belongs to another story. It is
only when he touches the regions beyond Mashad that he figures as one
of the earliest explorers of Afghanistan, and certainly the earliest
of whom we have any certain record. Unfortunately these records say
very little of the nature of those cities and centres of human life
which he found on the Afghan border; nor is there any definite
allusion to be found in the writings of Alexander's historians to the
colonial occupation of Afghanistan which must have preceded the
Persian conquests. We have seen that Assyrian influence was strongly
and continuously felt in India for many centuries after the
consolidation of the Second Assyrian Empire, and the probability that
between the Tigris and the Oxus there must have been intercommunication
from the earliest days of the rise of Assyrian power.

There is one ragged and time-worn city in Afghan Turkistan which
certainly belongs to the centuries preceding the era of Alexander--it
was the capital of Baktria, the city of Bessos, and it has been a
great centre of commerce, a city of pilgrimage, Buddhist and
Mahomedan, for many a century since. This is Balkh, traditionally
known as the "Mother of cities," whose foundation is variously
ascribed to Nimrud, or to "Karomurs the Persian Romulus," Assyrian or
Persian as the fancy strikes the narrator. Of its extreme antiquity
there can be no doubt. It is certain that at a very early date it was
the rival of Ecbatana, of Nineveh, and of Babylon. Bricks with
inscriptions are said to have been found there some seventy years ago,
and similar bricks should certainly be there still. Officers of the
Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission passed through modern Balkh in 1884,
but no such bricks were found during the very cursory and entirely
superficial examination which was all that could be made of the place;
square bricks, without inscription, of the size and quality of those
which may any day be dug out of the Birs Nimrud at Babylon were
certainly found, and point to a similarity of construction in a part
of the ancient walls, which is surely not accidental. Modern Balkh
consists of about 500 houses of Afghan settlers, a colony of Jews, and
a small bazaar set in the midst of a waste of ruins and many acres of
debris. The walls of the city are 6½ or 7 miles in perimeter; in some
places they are supported by a rampart like the walls of Herat. These,
of course, are modern, as is the fort and citadel, or Bala Hissar,
which stands on a mound to the north-east. The green cupola of the
Masjid Sabz and the arched entrance to the ruined Madrasa testify to
modern Mahomedan occupation, as do the Top-i-Rustam and the
Takht-i-Rustam (two ancient topes) to the fervour of religious zeal
with which its Buddhist inhabitants invested it in the early centuries
of our era. Balkh awaits its Layard, and not only Balkh, for there are
mounds and ruins innumerable scattered through the breadth of the
Balkh plain.

As one approaches Balkh by the Akcha road from the west, one looks
anxiously around for some outward signs of its extreme antiquity. They
are not altogether wanting, but time and the mellowing hand of Nature
have rounded off the edges of the mounds of debris which lie scattered
over miles of the surrounding country, brushing them over with the
fresh green of vegetation, and leaving no sign by which to judge of
the age of them. It is difficult in this part of Asia to get back
farther than the age of the great destroyer Chenghiz Khan. His time
has passed by long enough to leave but little evidence that the hand
of the destroyer was his hand; but probably nothing visible on the
surface dates back further than the six centuries which have come and
gone since his Mongol hordes were set loose. Beyond these surface
ruins and below them there must be cities arranged, as it were, in
underground flats, one piled on another, strata below strata, till we
reach the debris of the pre-Semitic days of Western and Central Asia,
when the Turanian races who supplied Arcadian civilization to
Mesopotamia peopled the land. Just as we cannot tell exactly when
Babylon first became a city, so are we confounded by the age of Balkh.
Babylon belongs to the time when myths were grouped around the
adventures of a solar hero. Ultimately, however, the Ca-dimissa of the
Accad became the Bab-ili (the "gate of God") of the Semite. It was
always the "gate of God," but whether the presiding deity was always
the Accadian Merodach seems doubtful. Fourteen or fifteen centuries
before Christ there was probably a Balkh as there was a Babylon; and
from time immemorial and a date unreckoned Balkh and Babylon must have
been the two great commercial centres of Asia. What a history to dig
out when its time shall come!

As the Akcha road leads into the city it passes the outer wall, which
is about 30 feet high, by a gateway which is frankly nothing more than
a gap in the partially destroyed wall. It then skirts along, past a
ziarat gay with red flags, to a gateway in the second wall under the
citadel leading to an avenue of poplars ending with a garden. Here is
a pretentious and fairly comfortable caravanserai, facing a court
which is shaded by magnificent plane trees. At first sight Balkh
appears to consist of nothing but ruins, but ascending the mound,
which is surrounded by the dilapidated fort walls, one can see from
this vantage of about 70 feet how many new buildings are grouped round
the remnants of the old Mahomedan mosque, of which the dome and one
great gateway are all that is left.

The plain of the ancient Baktria, of which Balkh represents the
capital, lies south of the Oxus River, extending east and west for
some 200 miles parallel to the river after its debouchment from the
mountains of Badakshan. It is flat, with a scattering of prominences
and mounds at intervals denoting the site of some village or fortress
of sufficient antiquity to account for its gradual rise on the
accumulations of its own debris, probably assisted in the first
instance by some topographical feature. Looking south it appears to be
flanked by a flat blue wall of hills, presenting no opportunity for
escalade or passage through them, a blue level line of counterscarp,
which is locally known as the Elburz. This great flanking wall is in
reality very nearly what it appears to be--an unassailable rampart;
but there are narrow ways intersecting it not easily discernible, and
through these ways the rivers of the highlands make a rough passage to
the plains. Wherever they tumble through the mountain gateways and
make placid tracks in the flats below, they are utilized for
irrigation purposes, and so there exists a narrow fringe of
cultivation under the hills, which extends here and there along the
banks of the rivers out into the open Balkh plain. But these rivers
never reach the Oxus. This is not merely because the waters of them
are absorbed in irrigation, but because there is a well-ascertained
tectonic action at work which is slowly raising the level of the
plain. Thus it happens that whilst big affluents from the north bring
rushing streams of much silt-stained water to the great river, no such
affluents exist on the south. The waters of the Elburz streams are all
lost in the Oxus plain ere they reach the river. Nevertheless there
are abundant evidences of the former existence of a vast irrigation
system drawn from the Oxus. The same lines of level mounds which break
the horizon of the plains of Babylon are to be seen here, and they
denote the same thing. They are the containing walls of canals which
carried the Oxus waters through hundreds of square miles of flat
plain, where they never can be carried again because of the alteration
in the respective levels of plain and river. Ten centuries before
Christ, at least, were the plains of Babylon thus irrigated, and just
as the arts of Greece and India rose on the ashes of the arts of
Nineveh, so doubtless was the science of irrigation carried into the
colonial field of Baktria from Assyria, and thus was the city of
"Nimrud" surrounded with a wealth of cultivation which rendered it
famous through Asia for more centuries than we can tell. Whether or no
the science of irrigation drifted eastwards from the west it seems
more than probable that the ruined and decayed water-ways which
intersect the Balkh plain were primarily due to the introduction of
Syrian labour, and account for the presence in that historic region of
a people amongst others who claim descent from captive Israelites.
There are no practical irrigation engineers in the world (excepting
perhaps the Chinese) who can rival the Afghans in their knowledge of
how to make water flow where water never flowed before. It is of
course impossible, on such evidence as we possess as yet, to claim
more than the appearance of a probability based on such an undeniable
possibility as this.

After the death of Darius his kinsman Bessos escaped into his own
satrapy (probably to Balkh), and there assumed the upright tiara, the
emblem of Persian royalty, taking at the same time the name of
Artaxerxes.

True to his invariable principle of leaving no unbeaten enemy on the
flank of his advance, Alexander proceeded to subjugate Hyrkania, from
which country he was separated by the Elburz (Persian) mountains. He
crossed those mountains in three divisions by separate passes, and
effected his purpose with his usual thoroughness and without much
difficulty. Having crushed the Mardians he shaped a straight course
eastward to Herat on his way to Baktria, marching by the great highway
which connects Tehran with Mashad. The country around Mashad (part of
Khorasan) was a satrapy of Persia under Satibarzanes, who submitted
without apparent opposition and was confirmed in his government. The
capital of this province was Artakoana, described as a city situated
in a plain of exceptional fertility where the main roads from north to
south and from west to east crossed each other. To no place does such
a description apply so closely as Herat, and it has consequently been
assumed that Herat indicates more or less closely the site of the
ancient city Artakoana, which, indeed, is most probable. But Alexander
had not long passed that city in his march towards Baktria when the
news of the revolt of Satibarzanes reached him with the story of the
loss of the Macedonian escort which had been left with that satrap and
had been massacred to a man. He immediately turned on his tracks,
captured Artakoana, routed the satrap, and by way of leaving a
permanent monument of his victory founded a new city in the
neighbourhood which he called Alexandreia. This is probably the actual
origin of the modern Herat, and it is a tribute to the sagacity of the
Macedonian King that from that time to this it has abundantly proved
its importance as a strategical and commercial centre.

The forward march to Baktria would have taken the Greek army via
Kushk, Maruchak, and Maimana along the route which is practically the
easiest and safest for a large body of troops. It is the route
followed by the Afghan Boundary Commission in 1885. Alexander,
however, instead of resuming his march on Baktria, elected to crush
another of the Persian satraps who was concerned in the murder of
Darius and who ruled a province to the south of Herat. Crossing the
Hari Rud he therefore marched straight on Farah (Prophthasia), then
the capital of Seistan (Drangiana). Farah is considerably to the north
of any part of the Afghan province of Seistan at present, but it was
undoubtedly Alexander's objective, and the Drangiana of those times
was considerably more extensive than the Seistan of to-day--a fact
which will go some way to account for the exaggerated reports of the
ancient wealth and fertility of that province. Farah is a great
agricultural centre still, and would add enormously to the restricted
cultivable area of Seistan, even if one allows for the effects of sand
encroachment in that unpleasant region. Then occurred the plot against
Alexander's life which was detected at Prophthasia, and the consequent
torture and death of Philotas, who probably had no part in it. It is
one of the many actions of Alexander's life which reveals the ferocity
of the barbarian beneath the genius of the soldier. It was but the
barbarity of his age--a barbarity for the matter of that which lasted
in England till the time of the Georges, and which still survives in
Afghanistan. After a halt in Seistan, probably whilst waiting for
reinforcements, he struck north-eastwards again for Baktria. As it is
generally assumed that the Macedonian force now followed the Helmund
valley route to the Paropamisos, _i.e._ the Hindu Kush and its
extension westwards, it is as well to consider what sort of a country
it is that forms the basin of Helmund.

It is worth remarking in the first place that the Ariaspian
inhabitants of the Helmund valley had received from Cyrus the name of
Euergetai, or benefactors, because they had assisted him at a time
when he had been in great difficulties. This is enough to satisfy us
that the district was known and had been traversed by a military force
long before Alexander entered it, and that he was making no
venturesome advance in ignorance of what lay before him. The valley of
the Helmund (or Etymander) could not have differed greatly in its
geographical features 300 years before Christ from its present
characteristics. The Helmund of the Seistan basin then occupied a
different channel to its present outlets into the Seistan swamps. How
different it is difficult to tell, for it has frequently changed its
course within historic times, silting up its bed and striking out a
new channel for itself, splitting into a number of streams and
wandering uncontrolled in loops or curves over the face of the flat
alluvial plains to which it brought fertility and wealth. It has been
a perpetual source of political discussion as a boundary between
Afghanistan and Persia, and it has altered the face of the land so
extensively and so often that there is nothing in ancient history
referring to the vast extent of agricultural wealth and the immensity
of its population which can be proved to be impossible, although it
seems likely enough that false inferences have been drawn from the
widespread area of ruined and deserted towns and villages which are
still to be seen and may almost be counted. It is not only that the
water-supply and facilities for irrigation, by shifting their
geographical position, have carried with them the potentialities for
cultivation. Other forces of Nature which seem to be set loose on
Seistan with peculiar virulence and activity have also been at work.
The sweeping blasts of the north-west wind, which rage through this
part of Asia with a strength and persistence unknown in regions more
protected by topographical features, carrying with them vast volumes
of sand and surface detritus, piling up smooth slopes to the windward
side of every obstruction, smoothing off the rough angles of the gaunt
bones of departed buildings, and sometimes positively wearing them
away by the force of attrition, play an important part in the
kaleidoscopic changes of Seistan landscape. Villages that are
flourishing one year may be sand-buried the next. Channels that now
run free with crop-raising water may be choked in a month, and all
the while the great Helmund, curving northward in its course, pours
down its steady volume of silt from the highlands, carrying tons of
detritus into open plains where it is spread out, sun-baked, dried,
wind-blown, and swirled back again to the southward in everlasting
movement. Thus it is that the evidence of hundreds of square miles of
ruins is no direct evidence of an immense population at any one
period. Nor can we say of this great alluvial basin, which is by turns
a smiling oasis, a pestilential swamp, a huge spread of populous
villages, or a howling desert smitten with a wind which becomes a
curse and afflicted with many of the pests and plagues of ancient
Egypt, that at any one period of its history more than another it
deserved the appellation of the "granary of Asia." The Helmund of
Seistan, however, is quite a different Helmund from the same river
nearer its source. Its character changes from the point where it makes
its great bend northward towards its final exit into the lagoons and
swamps of the Hamún. At Chaharburjak, where the high-road to Seistan
from the south crosses the river into Afghan territory, the Helmund is
a wide rippling stream (when not in flood), distinguished, if
anything, for the clearness of its waters. From this point eastwards
it parts two deserts. To the north the great, flat, windswept
Dasht-i-Margo, about as desolate and arid a region as fancy could
depict. To the south the desert of Baluchistan, by no means so
absolutely devoid of interest, with its marshalled sand-dunes
answering to the processes of the winds, its isolated but picturesque
peaks like islands in a sand sea, a few green spots here and there
showing where water oozes out from the buried feet of the rocky hills,
decorated with bunches of flowering tamarisk and perchance a palm or
two--a modified desert, but still a desert. Between the two deserts is
the Helmund, running in a cliff-sided trough which is never more than
a mile or two wide, intensely green and bright in the grass and crop
season, with flourishing villages at reasonable intervals and a
high-road connecting them from which can be counted that strange
multitude of departed cities of the old Kaiani Kingdom, which are
marked by a ragged crop of ruins still upstanding in a weird sort of
procession. Sometimes the high-road sweeps right into the midst of a
roofless palace, through the very walls of the ancient building, and
outside may be found spaces brushed clean by the wind leaving masses
of pottery, glass, and other common debris exposed.

One constant surprise to modern explorers is the extraordinary
quantity of domestic crockery the remains of which surround old
eastern cities; and almost yet more of a surprise it is how far and
how widespread are certain easily recognized specialities, such, for
instance, as the so-called "celadon." Chips and fragments of celadon
are to be found from Babylon to Seistan, from Seistan to India, in
Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Siam. In Siam are all that remains of
what were probably the original furnaces. Every shower of rain that
falls in this extended cemetery of crumbling monuments reveals small
treasures in the way of rings, coins, seals, etc. Much of the
cultivation and of the extent of population indicated by the ruins in
this narrow valley must have existed in the times of Alexander of
Macedon and the Ariaspians, and we find no difficulty in accepting the
Helmund (or Etymander) as the line of route which he followed for a
certain distance. Indeed, there is much more than a passing
probability that he followed the line which gave him water and
supplies as far as the junction of the Argandab and Helmund, for the
problem of crossing the desert from the Helmund valley to Nushki and
the cultivated districts of Kalat is a serious one--one, indeed, which
gave the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commissioners much anxious thought. But
beyond the Argandab junction it is extremely improbable that Alexander
followed the Helmund. The Helmund and its surroundings have been
carefully surveyed from this point through the turbulent districts of
Zamindawar for 100 miles or more, and again from its source near Kabul
for some fifty miles of its downward flow. The Zamindawar section of
the river affords an open road, although the river, as we follow it
upward, gradually becomes enclosed in comparatively narrow (yet still
fertile) valleys, and rapidly assumes the character of a mountain
stream. North of Zamindawar and south of its exit from the Koh-i-Baba
mountain system to the west of Kabul, no modern explorer has ever seen
the Helmund. It there passes through the Hazara highlands, and
although we have not penetrated that rugged plateau we know very well
its character by repute, and we have seen similar country to the west
where dwell cognate tribes--the Taimani and the Firozkohi. This upland
basin of the Helmund to the west of Kabul and Ghazni, this cradle of a
hundred affluents pouring down ice-cold water to the river, is but a
huge extension southwards of the Hindu Kush, and from it emerge many
of the great rivers of Afghanistan. To the north the rivers of Balkh
and Khulm take a hurried start for the Oxus plains. Westward the Hari
Rud streams off to Herat. South-westward extends the long curving line
of the Helmund, and eastward flow the young branches of the Kabul. A
rugged mountain mass called the Koh-i-Baba, the lineal continuation of
the Hindu Kush, dominates the rolling plateau from the north and
continues westward in an almost unbroken wall to the Band-i-Baian
looking down into the narrow Hari Rud valley. It is a part of the
continental divide of Asia, high, rugged, desolate, and almost
pathless.

No matter from which side the toiler of the mountains approaches this
elevated and desolate region, whether emerging from the Herat
drainage he essays to reach Kabul, or from the small affluents of the
Helmund he strikes for the one gap which exists between the Hindu Kush
and the Koh-i-Baba which will lead him to Balkh and Afghan Turkistan,
he will have enormous difficulties to encounter. It can be done,
truly, but only with the pains and penalties of high mountaineering
attached. Taken as a whole, the highest uplands above the sources of
the minor rivers which water the bright and fertile valleys of Ghur,
Zamindawar, and Farah may be described much as one would describe
Tibet--a rolling, heaving, desolate tableland, wrinkled and
intersected by narrow mountain ranges, whose peaks run to 13,000 and
14,000 feet in altitude, enclosing between them restricted spaces of
pasture land. The Mongol population, who claim to have been introduced
as military settlers by Chenghiz Khan, live a life of hard privation.
They leave their barren wastes which the wind wipes clear of any tree
growth, for the lower valleys in the winter months, merely resorting
to them in the time of summer pasturage. The winter is long and
severe. It is not the altitude alone which is accountable for its
severity; it is the geographical position of this Central Afghan
upheaval which exposes it to the full blast of the ice-borne northern
winds which, sweeping across Turkistan with destructive energy, reduce
the atmosphere of Seistan to a sand-laden fog, and penetrate even to
the valley of the Indus where for days together they wrap the whole
landscape in a dusty haze. For many months the Hazara highlands are
buried under successive sheets of snowdrift. In summer, like the
Pamirs, they emerge from their winter's sleep and become a succession
of grass-covered downs. There are then open ways across them, and
travellers may pass by many recognizable tracks. But in winter they
are impassable to man and beast. Yet we are asked to believe that
Alexander, who had the best of guides in his pay, and who knew the
highways and byways of Asia as well, if not better, than they are
known now to any military authorities, took his army _in winter_ up
the Helmund valley till it struck its sources somewhere under the
Koh-i-Baba!

There was no madness in Alexander's methods. His withdrawal from India
through the defiles and deserts of Makran was most venturesome and
most disastrous, but he had a distinct object to gain by the attempt
to pass into Persia that way. Here there was no object. The Helmund
route does not, and did not, lead directly to his objective, Baktria,
and there was another high-road always open, which must have been as
well known then as, indeed, it is well known to-day. There can be very
little doubt that he followed the Argandab to the neighbourhood of the
modern Kandahar (in Arachosia), and from Kandahar to Kabul he took the
same historic straight high-road which was followed by a later
General (Lord Roberts) when he marched from Kabul to Kandahar. This
would give him quite difficulties enough in winter to account for
Arrian's story of cold and privations. It would lead him direct to the
plains of the Kohistan north of Kabul, where there must have ever been
the opportunity of collecting supplies for his force, and where,
separated from him by the ridges of the Hindu Kush, were planted those
Greek colonies of Darius Hystaspes whose assistance might prove
invaluable to his onward movement. It was here, at any rate, not far
from the picturesque village of Charikar, that he founded that city of
Alexandreia, the remains of which appear to have been recently
disturbed by the Amir, and to which we shall make further reference.
Military text-books still speak of the Unai, or Bamian, as a pass
which was traversed by the Greeks. It is most improbable that they
ever crossed the Hindu Kush that way, and the question obviously
arises in connection with this theory of his march--How was it
possible for Alexander to spend the rest of the winter near the
sources of the Helmund? It was not possible. His next step was to
cross the Hindu Kush. This he attempted with difficulty in the spring,
and reached a fertile country in fifteen days. He might have crossed
by the Kaoshan Pass (which local tradition assigns as the pass which
he really selected), or by the Panjshir, which is longer, but in some
respects easier. The Panjshir is the pass usually adopted for the
passage of large bodies of troops by the Afghans themselves, and there
is reported to be, in these days, a well-engineered Khafila road,
which is kept open by forced labour in snow-time, connecting Kabul
with Andarab by this route. The pass of the Panjshir is about 11,600
feet high, whereas the Kaoshan, though straighter, is 14,300.
Considering the slow rate of movement (fifteen days) it is more
probable that he took the easier route _via_ Panjshir. In either case
he would reach the beautiful and fertile valley of Andarab, and from
that base he could move freely into Baktria. The country had been
ravaged and wasted by Bessos, but that did not delay Alexander. The
chief cities of Baktria surrendered without opposition, and he pushed
forward to the Oxus in his pursuit of Bessos.

All this would be more interesting if we could trace the route more
closely which was followed to the Oxus. We know, however, that for
previous centuries Balkh had been the capital city, the great trade
emporium of all that region. There is therefore no difficulty in
accepting Balkh as the Greek Baktria. Between Balkh and the Oxus the
plains are strewn with ruins, some of them of vast extent, whilst
other evidences of former townships are to be found about Khulm and
Tashkurghan farther to the east, and on the direct route from Andarab
to the Oxus. Bessos had retreated to Sogdiana of which Marakanda was
capital, and the straight road to Marakanda (Samarkand) crosses the
Oxus at Kilif. The description of the river Oxus at that point tallies
fairly well with Arrian's account of it. It is deep and rapid, and the
hill fortress of Kilif on the right bank, and of Dev Kala and other
isolated rocky hills on the left, hedges in the river to a channel
which cannot have changed through long ages. Elsewhere the Oxus is
peculiarly liable to shift its channel, and has done so from time to
time, forming new islands, taking fresh curves, and actually changing
its destination from the Caspian to the Aral Sea; but at Kilif it must
have ever been deep and rapid, covering a breadth of about
three-quarters of a mile. Across the breadth nowadays is about as
peculiar a ferry as was ever devised. Long, shallow, flat-bottomed
boats, square as to bow and stern, are towed from side to side of the
river by swimming horses. This would not be a matter of so much
surprise if the horses employed for the purpose were powerful animals
from fourteen to fifteen hands in height, but the remarkable feature
about the Kilif stud is the diminutive and ragged crew of underfed
ponies which it produces. And yet two, or even one, of these
inefficient-looking little animals will tow across a barge of twenty
feet or so in length, crowded with weighty bales of Bokhara
merchandise, and filled as to interstices with its owners and their
servants. The ponies are attached to outriggers with a strap from a
surcingle or belly-band buckled to their backs, thus supporting their
weight in the water at the same time that it takes the haulage. With
their heads just above stream, snorting and blowing, they swim with
measured strokes and tow the boat (advancing diagonally in crab-like
fashion to meet the current) straight across the river. The inadequacy
of the means to the end is the first thing which strikes the beholder,
but he is, however, rapidly convinced of the extraordinary hauling
capacity of a swimming horse when properly trained. Alexander crossed
on rafts supported on skins stuffed with straw, and it took him five
days to cross his force in this primitive fashion.

On the right bank of the river, Bessos was given up by traitors in his
camp and was sent south to "Zariaspa" to await his doom. Zariaspa is
identified with Balkh by some authorities, but the name is probably a
variant on Adraspa which almost certainly was Andarab. Andarab was the
fertile and promising district into which Alexander descended from the
slopes of the Hindu Kush, by whichever route (Kaoshan or Panjshir) he
crossed those mountains. Directly on the route between Andarab and
Balkh is a minor province called Baglan, and a little less than
half-way (after crossing a local pass of no great significance called
Kotal Murgh) is a village or township, nowadays called Zardaspan,
which is sufficiently like Zariaspa to suggest an identity which is at
least plausible though it may be deceptive. But it is the fact that
the town of Baraki which lies farther on the same route is on the
outskirts of Baglan; and in this connection a reference to the theory
put forward by Dr. Bellew in his _Ethnography of Afghanistan_
(_Asiatic Quarterly_, October 1891) is at least interesting. He points
out that the captive Greeks who were transported in the sixth century
B.C. by Darius Hystaspes from the Lybian Barké to Baktrian territory
were still occupying a village called Barké in the time of Herodotus.
A century later again during the Macedonian campaign, Kyrenes, or
Kyreneans, existed in that region according to Arrian, and it is
difficult to account for them in that part of Asia unless they were
the descendants of those same exiles from Barké, a colony of Kyrene
whom Darius originally transported to Baktria. They were in possession
of the Kaoshan Pass too, and might have rendered very effective aid to
Alexander during his passage across the mountains. Another body of
Greek colonists are recorded to have been settled in this same part of
Baktria by Xerxes after his flight from Greece, namely, the
Brankhidai, whose original settlement appears to have been in Andarab.
As we shall see later, people from Greece or from Grecian colonies
undoubtedly drifted across Asia to Northern Afghanistan in even
earlier times than those of the Persian Empire. There can, indeed, be
very little doubt that Ariaspa, or Andarab, was an important position
for the Greeks to occupy from its strategic value as commanding the
most practicable of the Hindu Kush passes.

When Bessos, therefore, was deported across the Oxus to Zariaspa it is
probable that he was sent to Andarab; and here too Alexander returned
to winter towards the close of the year 329 B.C. after his
extraordinary success in Sogdia (Bokhara). With his trans-Oxus
campaign we have nothing to do; it is another history, and deeply
interesting as it would be to follow it in detail we must return to
Afghanistan. Nothing in all his Eastern campaign is more remarkable
than the facility with which Alexander recruited his army from Greece
during its progress. Gaps in the ranks were constantly filled up, and
the fighting strength of his force maintained at a high level. His
army was reorganized during the winter, and with the returning spring
he again started expeditions across the Oxus, in the course of which
he captured Roxana, the most beautiful woman in Asia (after the wife
of Darius) and married her. The particular fortress which held this
charming lady was perched on the top of an isolated craggy hill, and
the story of its capture is as thrilling as that of Aornos
subsequently. But, like Aornos, it is difficult to locate it. It might
have been Dev Kala, or Kilif, or any of a dozen such rock-crowned
hills which border the Oxus River. It is about this period that we
read first of his encounters with the Skythic races of Central Asia,
who gave him great trouble at the time and who subsequently subverted
the Greek power in Baktria altogether. In the spring of 327 B.C. he
moved out to invade a mountain district to the "East of Baktria"
(probably modern Badakshan), and subdued the hill-tribes under
Khorienes whom he confirmed in the government of his own country. It
was summer ere he set out finally from Baktria on his Indian
expedition. He recrossed the Paropamisos in ten days and halted at
Alexandreia near Charikar. Then commences the first recorded
expedition of the Kabul River basin.




CHAPTER IV

GREEK EXPLORATION--ALEXANDER--THE KABUL VALLEY TO THE INDUS


Alexander passed the next winter at the city of his own founding,
Alexandreia, in the Koh Daman to the north of Kabul. And from thence
in two divisions he started for the Indus, sending the main body of
his troops by the most direct route, with Taxila (the capital of the
Upper Punjab) for its objective, and himself with lighter brigades
specially organized to subdue certain tribes on the northern flank of
the route who certainly would imperil the security of his line of
communication if left alone. This was his invariable custom, and it
was greatly owing to the completeness with which these flanking
expeditions were carried out that he was able to keep open his
connection with Greece. There have been discussions as to the route
which he followed. Hyphæstion, in command of the main body,
undoubtedly followed the main route which would take him most directly
to the plains of the Punjab, which route is sufficiently well
indicated in these days as the "Khaibar." We hear very little
about his march eastwards.

  [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF ALEXANDER'S ROUTE]

In the days preceding the use of fire-arms the march of a body of
troops through defiles such as the Khurd Kabul or the Jagdallak was
comparatively simple. So far from such defiles serving as traps
wherein to catch an enemy unawares and destroy him from the cliffs and
hills on either side, these same cliffs and hills served rather as a
protection. The mere rolling down of stones would not do much
mischief, even if they could be rolled down effectively, which is not
usually the case; and in hand-to-hand encounters the tribespeople were
no match for the armoured Greeks. Alexander's operations would
preserve his force from molestation on its northern flank, and the
rugged ridges and spread of desolate hill-slopes presented by the
Safed Koh and other ranges on the south has never afforded suitable
ground for the collection of fighting bodies of men in any great
strength. General Stewart marched his force from Kabul to Peshawur in
1880 with his southern flank similarly unprotected with the same
successful result, his movements being so timed as to give no
opportunity for a gathering of the Ghilzai clans. On the northern
flank of the Khaibar route, however, there had been large tribal
settlements from the very beginning of things, and it was most
important that these outliers should feel the weight of Alexander's
mailed fist if the road between Kabul and the Indus were ever to be
made secure. He accordingly directed his attention to a more northerly
route to India which would bring him into contact with the Aspasians,
Gauraians, and Assakenians.

We need not follow the ethnologists who identify these people with
certain tribes now existing with analogous names. There may very
possibly be remnants of them still, but they are not to be identified.
They obviously occupied the open cultivable valleys and alluvial
spaces which are interspersed amongst the mountains of the Kabul River
basin, the Kohistan and Kafiristan of modern maps. The Gauraians
certainly were the people of the Panjkora valley, and there is no
difficulty in assigning to the Aspasians the first great fertile tract
of open valley which would be encountered on the way eastwards. This
is Laghman (or Lamghan) with its noble reach of the Kabul River
meeting a snow-fed affluent, the Alingar, from the Kafir hills. There
is, indeed, no geographical alternative. Similarly with even a cursory
knowledge of the actual geographical conformation of the country, it
is impossible to imagine that Alexander would choose any other route
from Alexandreia towards Laghman than that which carries him past
Kabul. The Koh Daman (the skirts of the hills) which intervene between
Alexandreia (or Bagram) and Kabul is one of the gardens of
Afghanistan. There one may wander in the sweet springtide amidst the
curves and folds of an undulating land, neither hill nor plain, with
the scent of the flowering willow in the air, and the rankness of a
spring growth of flower and grass bordering narrow runlets and
irrigation channels; an unwinking blue above and a varied carpet
beneath, whilst the song of the labourer rises from fields and
orchards. Westward are the craggy outlines of Paghman (a noble
offshoot of the Hindu Kush hiding the loveliness of the Ghorband
valley behind it), down whose scarred and wrinkled ribs slide
waterfalls and streams to gladden the plain. Piled up on steep and
broken banks from the very foot of the mountains are scattered
white-walled villages, and it is here that you may find later in the
year the best fruit in Afghanistan.

In November a gentle haze rests in soft indecision upon the
dust-coloured landscape--heavier and bluer over the low-lying fields
from which all vegetation has been lifted, lighter and edged with
filmy skirts where it rises from the sun-warmed brow of the hills. It
is a different world from the world of spring--all utterly
sad-coloured and dust-laden; but it is then that the troops and
strings of fruit-laden donkeys take their leisurely way towards the
city, where are open shops facing the narrow shadowed streets with
golden bulwarks of fruit piled from floor to roof. A narrow band of
rugged hills shuts off this lovely plain on the east from the only
valley route which could possibly present itself to an inexperienced
eye as an outlet from the Charikar region to the Kabul River bed, ere
it is lost in the dark defiles leading to the Laghman valley. The
hills are red in the waning light, and when the snow first lays its
lacework shroud over them in network patches they are inexpressibly
beautiful. But they are also inexpressibly rough and impracticable,
and the valley beyond is but a walled-in boulder-strewn trough, which
no general in his senses would select for a military high-road.
Alexander certainly did not march that way; he went to where Kabul is,
and there, at the city of Nikaia, he made sacrifice to the goddess
Athena. If Nikaia was not the modern Kabul it must have been very near
it. Does not Nonnus tell us that it was a stone city near a lake?
There is but one lake in the Kabul valley, and it is that at Wazirabad
close to the city. It is usual to regard Nonnus as a most
untrustworthy authority, but here for once he seems to have wandered
into the straight and narrow path of truth. So far there can be no
reasonable doubt about the direction of this great Pioneer's
explorations in Afghanistan. Beyond this, once again, we prefer to
trust to the known geographical distribution of hill and valley, and
the opportunities presented by physical features of the country,
rather than to any doubtful resemblance between ancient and modern
place, or tribal, names, for determining the successive actions of the
expedition. After the summons to Taxiles, chief of Taxila (itself the
chief city of the Upper Punjab), and the satisfactory reply thereto,
there was nothing to disturb the even course of Alexander's onward
movements but the activity of the mountain tribespeople who flanked
the line of route.

The valley of Laghman must always have been a populous valley. From
the north the snow-capped peaks of Kafiristan look down upon it, and
from among the forest-clad valleys at the foot of these peaks two
important river systems take their rise, the Alingar and the Alishang,
which, uniting, join the Kabul River in the flat plain, where villages
now crowd in and dispute each acre of productive soil. It is difficult
to reach the Laghman valley from the west. The defiles of the Kabul
River are here impassable, but they can be turned by mountain routes,
and Alexander's force, which included the Hyspaspists, who were
comparatively lightly armed, with the archers, the "companion" cavalry
and the lancers, was evidently picked for mountain warfare. The
heavier brigades were with Hyphæstion who struck out by the
straightest route for Peukelaotis, which has been identified with an
ancient site about 17 miles to the north-east of Peshawur on the
eastern bank of the Swat River, and was then the capital of the
ancient Gandhara. We are told that Alexander's route was rugged and
hilly, and lay along the course of the river called Khoes. Rugged and
hilly it certainly was, but the Khoes presents a difficulty. He could
not actually follow the course of the Kabul River (Kophen) from the
Kabul plain because of the defiles, but he could have followed that
river below Butkak to the western entrance of the Laghman valley where
it unites with the Alingar, or Kao, River. It is impossible to admit
that he reached the Kao River after crossing the Kohistan and
Kafiristan, and then descended that river to its junction with the
Kabul. No cavalry could have performed such a feat. Geographical
conditions compel us to assume that he followed the Kabul River, which
is sometimes called Kao above the junction of the Kao River.

It is far more impossible to identify the actual sites of Alexander's
first military engagements than it is to say, for instance, at this
period of history, where Cæsar landed in Great Britain, as we have no
means of making exhaustive local inquiries; but subsequent history
clearly indicates that his next step after settling the Laghman tribes
was to push on to the valley of the Choaspes, or Kunar. It was in the
Kunar valley that he found and defeated the chief of the Aspasians.
The Kunar River is by far the most important of the northern
tributaries of the Kabul. It rises under the Pamirs and is otherwise
known as the Chitral River. The Kunar valley is amongst the most
lovely of the many lovely valleys of Afghanistan. Flanked by the
snowy-capped mountains of Kashmund on the west, and the long level
water parting which divides it from Bajaor and the Panjkora drainage
on the east, it appears, as one enters it from Jalalabad, to be hemmed
in and constricted. The gates of it are indeed somewhat narrow, but it
widens out northward, where the ridges of the lofty Kashmund tail off
into low altitudes of sweeping foothills a few miles above the
entrance, and here offer opportunity for an easy pass across the
divide from the west into the valley. This is a link in the oldest and
probably the best trodden route from Kabul to the Punjab, and it has
no part with the Khaibar. It links together these northern valleys of
Laghman, Kunar, and Lundai (_i.e._ the Panjkora and Swat united) by a
road north of the Kabul, finally passing southwards into the plains
chequered by the river network above Peshawur.

The lower Kunar valley in the early autumn is passing beautiful. Down
the tawny plain and backed by purple hills the river winds its way,
reflecting the azure sky with pure turquoise colour--the opaque blue
of silted water--blinking and winking with tiny sun shafts, and
running emerald green at the edges. Sharp perpendicular columns of
black break the landscape in ordered groups. These are the cypresses
which still adorn in stately rows the archaic gardens of townlets
which once were townships. The clustering villages are thick in some
parts--so thick that they jostle each other continuously. There is
nothing of the drab Punjab about these villages. They are
white-walled and outwardly clean, and in at least one ancient garden
there is a fair imitation of a Kashmir pavilion set at the end of a
white eye-blinding pathway, leading straight and stiff between rows of
cypress, and blotched in spring with inky splashes of fallen
mulberries. The scent of orange blossoms was around when we were
there, luscious and overpowering. It was the oppressive atmosphere of
the typical, sensuous East, and the free, fresh air from the river
outside the mud walls of that jealously-guarded estate was greatly
refreshing when we climbed out of the gardens. All this part of the
river must have been attractive to settlers even in Alexander's time,
and it requires no effort of imagination to suppose that it was here
that his second series of actions took place. Higher up the river the
valley closes, until, long before Chitral is reached, it narrows
exceedingly. Here, in the north, the northern winds rage down the
funnel with bitter fury and make life burdensome. The villages take to
the hill-slopes or cluster in patches on the flat terraces at their
foot. The revetted wall of small hillside fields outline the spurs in
continuous bands of pasture, and at intervals quaint colonies of huts
cling to the hills and seem ready to slither down into the wild rush
of the river below. Such as a whole is the Kunar valley, which,
centuries after Alexander had passed across it, was occupied by Kafir
tribes who may have succeeded the Aspasian peoples, or who may indeed
represent them. All the wild mountain districts west of the Kunar are
held by Kafirs still, and there is nothing remarkable in the fact
(which we shall see later on) that just to the east of the Kunar
valley Alexander found a people claiming the same origin there that
the Kafirs of Kashmund and Bashgol claim now.

It was during the fighting in the Kunar valley that we hear so much of
that brilliant young leader Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, who was then
shaping his career for a Royal destiny in Egypt. With all the
thrilling incidents of the actual combat we have no space to deal, and
much as they would serve to lighten the prosaic tale of the progress
of Alexander's explorations, we must reluctantly leave them to Arrian
and the Greek historians. We are told that after the Kunar valley
action Alexander crossed the mountains and came to a city at their
base called Arigaion. Assuming that he crossed the Kunar watershed by
the Spinasuka Pass, which leads direct from Pashat (the present
capital of Kunar) into Bajaor, he would be close to Nawagai, the
present chief town of Bajaor. Arigaion would therefore be not far from
Nawagai. The place was burnt down; but recognizing the strategic
importance of the position, he left Krateros to fortify it and make it
the residence not only of such tribespeople as chose to return to
their houses, but also of such of his own soldiers as were unfit for
further service. This seems to have been his invariable custom, and
accounts for the traditions of Greek origin which we still find so
common in the north-western borderland of India. The story of this
part of his expedition reads almost as if it were journalistic. Then,
as now, the tribesmen took to the hills. Then, as now, their position
and approximate numbers could be ascertained by their camp-fires at
night. Ptolemy was intelligence officer and conducted the
reconnaissance, and on his report the plan of attack was arranged.
This was probably the most considerable action fought by Alexander in
the hills north of India. The conflict was sharp but decisive, and the
Aspasians, who had taken up their position on a hill, were utterly
routed. According to Ptolemy 40,000 prisoners and 230,000 oxen were
taken, and the fact that the pick of the oxen were sent to Macedonia
to improve the breed there shows how complete was the line of
communication between Greece and Upper India. The next tribe to be
dealt with were the Assakenians, and to reach them it was necessary to
cross the Gauraios, or Panjkora, which was deep, swift as to current,
and full of boulders. As we find no mention in Arrian's history of the
passage of the Suastos (Swat River) following on that of the Gauraios,
we must conclude that Alexander crossed the Panjkora _below_ its
junction with the Swat, where the river being much enclosed by hills
would certainly afford a most difficult passage. There are other
reasons which tend to confirm this view.

The next important action which took place was the siege and capture
of the city called Massaga, which was only taken after four days'
severe fighting, during which Alexander was wounded in the foot by an
arrow. M'Crindle[1] quotes the various names given in Sanscrit and
Latin literature, and agrees with Rennel in adopting the site of
Mashanagar, mentioned by the Emperor Baber in his memoirs as lying two
marches from Bajaor on the river Swat, as representing Massaga. M.
Court heard from the Yasufzais of Swat that there was a place called
by the double name of Mashkine and Massanagar 24 miles from Bajaor. It
is not to be found now, but there is in the survey maps a place on the
Swat River about that distance from Nawagai (the chief town in Bajaor)
called Matkanai, close to the Malakand Pass, and this is no doubt the
place referred to. It is very difficult even in these days to get a
really authoritative spelling for place-names beyond, or even within,
the British Indian border; and as these surveys were made during the
progress of the Tirah expedition when the whole country was armed,
such information as could be obtained was often unusually sketchy. If
this is the site of Massaga it would be directly on the line of
Alexander's route from Nawagai eastwards, as he rounded the spurs of
the Koh-i-Mor which he left to the north of him, and struck the
Panjkora some miles below its junction with the Swat. There can be
little doubt that it was near this spot that the historic siege took
place. His next objective were two cities called Ora and Bazira, which
were obviously close together and interdependent. Cunningham places
the position of Bazira, at the town of Rustam (on the Kalapani River),
which is itself built on a very extensive old mound and represents the
former site of a town called Bazar. Rustam stands midway between the
Swat and Indus, and must always have been an important trade centre
between the rich valley of Swat and the towns of the Indus. Ora may
possibly be represented by the modern Bazar which is close by.
Geographically this is the most probable solution of the problem of
Alexander's movements, there being direct connection with the Swat
valley through Rustam which is not to be found farther north.
Alexander would have to cross the Malakand from the Swat valley to the
Indus plains, but would encounter no further obstacles if he moved on
this route. Bazira made a fair show of resistance, but the usual Greek
tactics of drawing the enemy out into the plains was resorted to by
Koenos with a certain amount of success; and when Ora fell before
Alexander, the full military strength of Bazira dispersed and fled for
refuge to the rock Aornos.

So far we have followed this Greek expedition into regions which are
beyond the limits of modern Afghanistan, but the new geographical
detail acquired during the most recent of our frontier campaigns
enables new arguments to be adduced in favour of old theories (or the
reverse), and this departure from the strict political boundaries of
our subject leads us to regions which are at any rate historically and
strategically connected with it. With Aornos, however, our excursion
into Indian fields will terminate. Round about Aornos historical
controversy has ebbed and flowed for nearly a century, and it is not
my intention to add much to the literature which already concerns
itself with that doubtful locality. I believe, however, that it will
be some time yet before the last word is said about Aornos. Of all the
positions assigned to that marvellous feat of arms performed by the
Greek force, that which was advanced by the late General Sir James
Abbott in 1854 is the most attractive--so attractive, indeed, that it
is hard to surrender it. The discrepant accounts of the capture of the
famous "rock" given by Arrian (from the accounts of Ptolemy, one of
the chief actors in the scene), Curtius, Diodoros, and Strabo
obviously deal with a mountain position of considerable extent, where
was a flattish summit on which cavalry could act, and the base of it
was washed by the Indus. All, however, write as if it were an isolated
mountain with a definite circuit of, according to Arrian, 23 miles and
a height of 6200 feet (according to Diodoros of 12 miles and over 9000
feet). The "rock" was situated near the city of Embolina, which we
know to have been on the Indus and which is probably to be identified
more or less with the modern town of Amb. The mountain was
forest-covered, with good soil and water springs. It was precipitous
towards the Indus, yet "not so steep but that 220 horse and war
engines were taken up to the summit," all of which Sir James Abbott
finds compatible with the hill Mahaban which is close to Amb, and
answers all descriptions excepting that of isolation, for it is but a
lofty spur of the dividing ridge between the Chumla, an affluent of
the Buner River, and the lower Mada Khel hills, culminating in a peak
overlooking the Indus from a height of 7320 feet. The geographical
situation is precisely such as we should expect under the
circumstances. The tribespeople driven from Bazira (assuming Bazira to
be near Rustam) following the usual methods of the mountaineers of the
Indian frontier, would retreat to higher and more inaccessible
fastnesses in their rugged hills. There is but one way open from
Rustam towards the Indus offering them the chance of safety from
pursuit, and undoubtedly they followed that track. It leads up to the
great divide north of them and then descends into the Chumla valley
leading to that of Buner, and the hills which were to prove their
salvation might well be those flanking the Chumla on the south, rising
as they do to ever higher altitudes as they approach the Indus. This,
in fact, is Mahaban. By all the rules of Native strategy in Northern
India this is precisely the position which they would take up.

Aornos appears to have been a kind of generic name with the Greeks,
applied to mountain positions of a certain class, for we hear of
another Aornos in Central Asia, and the word translated "rock" seems
to mean anything from a mountain (as in the present case) to a
sand-bank (as in the case of the voyage of Nearkos). No isolated hill
such as would exactly fit in with Arrian's description exists in that
part of the Indus valley, and no physical changes such as alteration
in the course of the Indus, or such as might be effected by the
tectonic forces of Nature, are likely to have removed such a mountain.
Abbott's identification has therefore been generally accepted for many
years, and it has remained for our latest authority to question it
seriously.

The latest investigator into the archæological interests of the Indian
trans-frontier is Dr. M. A. Stein, the Inspector-General of Education
in India. The marvellous results of his researches in Chinese
Turkistan have rendered his name famous all over the archæological
world, and it is to him that we owe an entirely new conception of the
civilization of Indo-China during the Buddhist period. Dr. Stein's
methods are thorough. He leaves nothing to speculation, and indulges
in no romance, whatever may be the temptation. He takes with him on
his archæological excursions a trained native surveyor of the Indian
survey, and he thus not only secures an exact illustration of his own
special area of investigation, but incidentally he adds immensely to
our topographical knowledge of little known regions. This is specially
necessary in those wild districts which are more immediately
contiguous to the Indian border, for it is seldom that the original
surveys of these districts can be anything more than topographical
sketches acquired, sometimes from a distance, sometimes on the spot,
but generally under all the disadvantages and disabilities of active
campaigning, when the limited area within which survey operations can
be carried on in safety is often very restricted. Thus we have very
presentable geographical maps of the regions of Alexander's exploits
in the north, but we have not had the opportunity of examining special
sites in detail, and there are doubtless certain irregularities in the
map compilation. This is very much the case as regards those hill
districts on the right bank of the Indus immediately adjoining the
Buner valley both north and south of it. Mahaban, the mountain which
in Abbott's opinion best represents what is to be gathered from
classical history of the general characteristics of Aornos, is south
of Buner, overlooking the lower valley close to the Indus River. Dr.
Stein formed the bold project of visiting Mahaban personally, and
taking a surveyor with him. It was a bold project, for there were many
difficulties both political and physical. The tribespeople
immediately connected with Mahaban are the Gaduns--a most unruly
people, constantly fighting amongst themselves; and it was only by
seizing on the exact psychological moment when for a brief space our
political representative had secured a lull in these fratricidal
feuds, that Stein was enabled to act. He actually reached Mahaban
under most trying conditions of wind and weather, and he made his
survey. Incidentally he effected some most remarkable Buddhist
identifications; but so far as the identification of Mahaban with
Aornos is concerned he came to the conclusion that such identification
could not possibly be maintained. This opinion is practically based on
the impossibility of fitting the details of the story of Aornos to the
physical features of Mahaban. It is unfortunate (but perhaps
inevitable) that even in those incidents and operations of Alexander's
expedition where his footsteps can be distinctly traced from point to
point, where geographical conformation absolutely debars us from
alternative selection of lines of action, the details of the story
never do fit the physical conditions which must have obtained in his
time.

As the history of Alexander is in the main a true history, there is
absolutely no justification for cutting out the thrilling incident of
Aornos from it. There was undoubtedly an Aornos somewhere near the
Indus, and there was a singularly interesting fight for its
possession, the story of which includes so many of the methods and
tactics familiar to every modern north-west frontiersman, that we
decline to believe it to be all invention. But the story was written a
century after Alexander's time, compiled from contemporary records it
is true, but leaving no margin for inquiry amongst survivors as to
details. If, instead of ancient history, we were to turn to the
century-old records of our own frontier expeditions and rewrite them
with no practical knowledge of the geography of the country, and no
witness of the actual scene to give us an _ex parte_ statement of what
happened (for no single participator in an action is ever able to give
a correct account of all the incidents of it), what should we expect?
Some furtive investigator might study the story of the ascent of the
famous frontier mountain, the Takht-i-Suliman (a veritable Aornos!),
during the expedition of 1882-83, and find it impossible to recognize
the account of its steep and narrow ascent, requiring men to climb on
their hands and knees, with the fact that a very considerable force
did finally ascend by comparatively easy slopes and almost dropped on
to the heads of the defenders. Such incidents require explanation to
render them intelligible, and at this distance of time it is only
possible to balance probabilities as regards Aornos.

Alexander's objective being India, eventually, and the Indus (of
India, not of the Himalayas) immediately, he would take the road
which led straightest from Massaga to the Indus; it is inconceivable
that he would deliberately involve himself and his army in the maze of
pathless mountains which enclose the head of Buner. He would certainly
take the road which leads from Malakand to the Indus, on which lies
Rustam. It has always been a great high-road. One of the most
interesting discoveries in connection with the Tirah campaign was the
old Buddhist road, well engineered and well graded, which leads from
Malakand to the plains of the Punjab--those northern plains which
abound with Buddhist relics. If we identify Bazar, or Rustam, with
Bazireh we may assume with certainty that a retreating tribe, driven
from any field of defeat on the straight high-road which links
Panjkora with the Indus, would inevitably retire to the nearest and
the highest mountain ridge that was within reach. This is certainly
the ridge terminating with Mahaban and flanking the Buner valley on
the south, a refuge in time of trouble for many a lawless people.
Probability, then, would seem to favour Mahaban, or some mountain
position near it. The modern name of this peak is Shah Kot, and it is
occupied by a mixed and irregular folk. Here Dr. Stein spent an
unhappy night in a whirling snow-storm, but he succeeded in examining
the mountain thoroughly. He decided that that position of Mahaban
could not possibly represent Aornos, for the following reasons:--The
hill-top is too narrow for military action; the ascent, instead of
being difficult, is easy from every side; and there is no spring of
water on the summit, which summit must have been a very considerable
plateau to admit of the action described; finally, there is no great
ravine, and therefore no opportunity for the erection of the mound
described by Arrian, which enabled the Greeks to fusilade the enemy's
camp with darts and stones. Can we reconcile these discrepancies with
the text of history?

After the reduction of Bazira Alexander marched towards the Indus and
received the submission of Peukelaotis, which was then the capital of
what is now, roughly speaking, the Peshawur district. The site of this
ancient capital appears to be ascertained beyond doubt, and we must
regard it as fixed near Charsadda, about 17 miles north-east (not
north-west as M'Crindle has it) from Peshawur. From this place
Alexander marched to Embolina, which is said to be a city close
adjoining the rock of Aornos. On the route thither he is said by
Arrian to have taken "many other small towns seated upon that river,"
_i.e_. the Indus; two princes of that province, Cophæus and Assagetes,
accompanying him. This sufficiently indicates that his march must have
been up the right bank of the Indus, which would be the natural route
for him to follow. Arrived at Embolina, he arranged for a base of
supplies at that point, and then, with "Archers, Agrians, Cænus'
Troop" and the choicest, best armed, and most expeditious foot out of
the whole army, besides 200 auxiliary horse and 100 equestrian
archers, he marched towards the "rock" (8 miles distant), and on the
first day chose a place convenient for an encampment. The day after,
he pitched his tents much higher. The ancient Embolina may not be the
modern Amb, but Amb undoubtedly is an extremely probable site for such
a base of supplies to be formed, whether the final objective were
Mahaban or any place (as suggested by Stein) higher up the river. The
fact that there is a similarity in the names Amb and Embolina need not
militate against the adoption of the site of Amb as by far the most
probable that any sagacious military commander would select. A mere
resemblance between the ancient and modern names of places may, of
course, be most deceptive. On the other hand it is often a most
valuable indication, and one certainly not to be neglected.
Place-names last with traditional tenacity in the East, and obscured
as they certainly would be by Greek transliteration (after all, not
worse than British transliteration), they still offer a chance of
identifying old positions such as nothing else can offer excepting
accurate topographical description. Once again, if Embolina were not
Amb it certainly ought to have been.

Alexander's next movements from Embolina most clearly indicate that he
had to deal with a mountain position. There is no getting away from
it, nor from the fact that the road to it was passable for horsemen,
and therefore not insuperably difficult. At the same time he had to
move as slowly as any modern force would move, for he was traversing
the rough spurs of a hill which ran to 7800 feet in altitude. Further,
the mountain was high enough to render signalling by fire useful. The
"rock" was obviously either a mountain itself or it was perched on the
summit of a mountain. Ptolemy as usual had conducted the
reconnaissance. He established himself unobserved in a temporary
position on the crest, within reach of the enemy, who attempted to
dispossess him and failed; and it was he who (according to the story)
signalled to Alexander. Ptolemy had followed a route, with guides,
which proved rough and difficult, and Alexander's attempt to join him
next day was prevented by the fierce activity of the mountaineers, who
were plainly fighting from the mountain spurs. Then, it is said,
Alexander communicated with Ptolemy by night and arranged a combined
plan of attack. When it "was almost night" of the following day
Alexander succeeded in joining Ptolemy, but only after severe fighting
during the ascent. Then the combined forces attacked the "rock" and
failed. All this so far is plain unvarnished mountain warfare, and the
incidents follow each other as naturally as in any modern campaign. It
becomes clear that the "rock" was a position on the crest of a high
mountain, the ascent of which was rendered doubly difficult by fierce
opposition. But it was practicable. Nothing is said about cavalry
ascending. Why, then, did Alexander take cavalry? This question leads
to another. Why do our frontier generals always burden themselves with
cavalry on these frontier expeditions? They cannot act on the
mountain-sides, and they are useless for purposes of pursuit. The
answer is that they are most valuable for preserving the line of
communication. Without the cavalry Alexander had no overwhelming force
at his disposal, and it would not be very hazardous if we assumed that
the force which actually reached the crest of the mountain was a
comparatively small one--much of the original brigade being dispersed
on the route.

Dr. Stein found the ascent too easy to reconcile with history. This
might possibly be the effect of long weather action of the slopes of
mountains subject to severe snow-falls. Twenty-three centuries of wind
and weather have beaten on those scarred and broken slopes since
Alexander's day. Those twenty-three centuries have had such effect on
the physical outlines of land conformation elsewhere as absolutely to
obliterate the tracks over which the Greek force most undoubtedly
passed. What may have been the exact effect of them on Mahaban,
whether (as usual) they rounded off sharp edges, cut out new channels,
obliterated some water springs and gave rise to others, smoothing
down the ruggedness of spurs and shaping the drainage, we cannot say.
Only it is certain that the slopes of Mahaban--and its crest for that
matter--are not what they were twenty-three centuries ago. We shall
never recognize Aornos by its superficial features. Then, in the Greek
story, follows the episode of filling up the great ravine which yawned
between the Greek position and the "rock" on which the tribespeople
were massed, and the final abandonment of the latter when, after three
days' incessant toil, a mound had been raised from which it could be
assailed by the darts and missiles of the Greeks. Arrian tells the
story with a certain amount of detail. He states that a "huge rampart"
was raised "from the level of that part of the hill where their
entrenchment was" by means of "poles and stakes," the whole being
"perfected in three days." On the fourth day the Greeks began to build
a "mound opposite the rock," and Alexander decided to extend the
"Rampart" to the mound. It was then that the "Barbarians" decided to
surrender.

In the particular translation from which I have quoted (Rookes, 1829)
there is nothing said about the "great ravine" of which Stein writes
that it is clearly referred to by "all texts," and a very little
consideration will show that it could never have existed. No matter
what might have been the strength of Alexander's force it could only
have been numbered by hundreds and not by thousands, when it reached
the summit of the mountain. We might refer to the modern analogy of
the expedition to the summit of the Takht-i-Suliman, where it was
found quite impossible to maintain a few companies of infantry for
more than two or three days. Numbers engaged in action are
proverbially exaggerated, especially in the East; but the physical
impossibility of keeping a large force on the top of a mountain must
certainly be acknowledged. Even supposing there were a thousand men,
and that no guards were required, and no reliefs, and that the whole
force could apply themselves to filling up a "large ravine" with such
"stakes and poles" as they could carry or drag from the
mountain-slopes, it would take three months rather than three days to
fill up any ravine which could possibly be called "large." General
Abbott, as a scientific officer, was probably quite correct in his
estimate of the "Rampart" as some sort of a "trench of approach with a
parapet." There could not possibly have been a "great mound built of
stakes and poles for crossing a ravine." It may be noted that
Ptolemy's defensive work on his first arrival on the summit is called
(or translated) "Rampart," and yet we know that it could only have
been a palisade or an abattis. The story told by Arrian (and possibly
maltreated by translators) is doubtless full of inaccuracies and
exaggerations, but we decline to believe that it is pure invention.
There is nothing in it, so far, which absolutely militates against the
Mahaban of to-day (that refuge for Hindustani fanatics at one time,
and for the discontented tribesfolk of the whole countryside through
all time) being the Aornos of Arrian. No appearance of "precipices"
is, however, to be found in the survey of the summit which accompanied
Dr. Stein's report, and no opportunity for the defeated tribesmen to
fall into the river. The story runs that the defeated mountaineers
retreating from the victorious Greeks fell over the precipices in
their hot haste, and that many of them were drowned in the Indus. This
is indeed an incident which might be added as an effective addition to
any tall story of a fight which took place on hills in the immediate
neighbourhood of a river; but under no conceivable circumstances could
it be adjusted to the formation of the Mahaban hill, even if it were
admitted that armoured Greeks were any match in the hills for the
fleet-footed and light-clad Indians. Probably the incident is purely
decorative, but we need not therefore assume that the whole story is
fiction. It has been pointed out by Sir Bindon Blood, who commanded
the latest expedition to the Buner valley, that failing Mahaban there
is north of the Buner River, immediately overlooking the Indus, a peak
called Baio with precipitous flanks on the river side, which would fit
in with the tale of Aornos better even than Mahaban. The Buner River
joins the Indus through an impassable gorge steeply entrenched on
either side, and a mile or two above it is the peak of Baio. So far as
the Indus is concerned, that river presents no difficulties, for boats
can be hauled up it far beyond Baio--even to Thakot. Looking northward
or westward from above Kotkai one sees the river winding round the
foot of the lower spurs of the Black Mountain on its left or eastern
bank. Beyond is Baio on its right bank, towering (with a clumsy fort
on its summit) over the Indus and forming part of a continuous ridge,
beyond which again in the blue distance is the line of hills over
which is the Ambela Pass at the head of the Chumla valley. (It is
curious how the nomenclature hereabouts echoes faintly the Greek
Embolina.) Above Baio is the ford of Chakesar, from which runs an
old-time road westward to Manglaor, once the Buddhist capital of Swat.
It would be all within reach of either Indians or Greeks, so we need
not quite give up the thrilling tale of Aornos yet, even if Dr. Stein
defeats us on Mahaban.

Then follows the narrative of an excursion into the country of the
Assakenoi and the capture of the elephants, which had been taken for
safety into the hills. The scene of this short expedition must have
been near the Indus, and was probably the valley of the Chumla or
Buner immediately under Mahaban, to the north. There was in those
far-off days a different class of vegetation on the Indus banks to
any which exists at present. We know that a good deal of the Indus
plain below its debouchment from the hills was a reedy swamp in
Alexander's time, and it was certainly the haunt of the rhinoceros for
centuries subsequently, and consequently quite suitable for elephants,
and it is probable that for some little distance above its debouchment
the same sort of pasturage was obtainable. Most interesting perhaps of
all the incidents in Arrian's history is that which now follows. We
are told that "Alexander then entered that part of the country which
lies between the Kophen and the Indus, where Nysa is said to be
situate." Other authorities, however, Curtius (viii. 10), Strabo (xv.
697), and Justin (xii. 7), make him a visitor to Nysa before he
crossed the Choaspes and took Massaga. All this is very vague; the
river he crossed immediately before taking Massaga was certainly the
Gauraios or Panjkora.

There is a certain element of confusion in classical writings in
dealing with river names which we need not wait to investigate; nor is
it a matter of great importance whether Alexander retraced his steps
all the way to the country of Nysa (for no particular reason), or
whether he visited Nysa as he passed from the Kunar valley to the
Panjkora. The latter is far more probable, as Nysa (if we have
succeeded in identifying that interesting relic of pre-Alexandrian
Greek occupation) would be right in his path. Various authorities have
placed Nysa in different parts of the wide area indicated as lying
between the Kophen (Kabul) and the Indus, but none, before the Asmar
Boundary Commission surveyed the Kunar valley in the year 1894, had
the opportunity of studying the question _in loco_. Even then there
was no possibility of reaching the actual site which was indicated as
the site of Nysa; and when subsequently in 1898 geographical surveys
of Swat were pushed forward wherever it was possible for surveyors to
obtain a footing, they never approached that isolated band of hills at
the foot of which Nysa once lay. The result of inquiries instituted
during the progress of demarcating the boundary between Afghanistan
and the independent districts of the east from Asmar have been given
in the _R.G.S. Journal_, vol. vii., and no subsequent information has
been obtained which might lead me to modify the views therein
expressed, excepting perhaps in the doubtful point as to _when_, in
the course of his expedition, Alexander visited Nysa. In the first
engraved Atlas sheet of the Indian Survey dealing with the regions
east of the Kunar River, the name of Nysa, or Nyssa, is recorded as
one of the most important places in that neighbourhood, and it is
placed just south of the Koh-i-Mor, a spur, or extension, from the
eastern ridges of the Kunar valley. From what source of information
this addition to the map was made it is difficult to say, now that the
first compiler of those maps (General Walker) has passed away. But it
was undoubtedly a native source. Similarly the information obtained at
Asmar, that a large and scattered village named _Nusa_ was to be found
in that position, was also from a native (Yusufzai) source. No
possible cause can be suggested for this agreement between the two
native authorities, and it is unlikely that the name could have been
invented by both. At the same time Nysa, or Nusa, is not now generally
known to the borderland people near the Indian frontier, and it is
certainly no longer an important village. It is probably no more than
scattered and hidden ruins. Above it towers the three-peaked hill
called the Koh-i-Mor, whose outlines can be clearly distinguished from
Peshawur on any clear day, and on that hill grows the wild vine and
the ivy, even as they grow in glorious trailing and exuberant masses
on the scarped slopes of the Kafiristan hills to the west.

We may repeat here what Arrian has to say about Nysa. "The city was
built by Dionysos or Bacchus when he conquered the Indians, but who
this Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the
Indians is hard to determine. Whether he was that Theban who from
Thebes or he who from Tmolus, a mountain of Lydia, undertook that
famous expedition into India ... is very uncertain." So here we have a
clear reference to previous invasions of India from Greece, which were
regarded as historical in Arrian's time. However, as soon as
Alexander arrived at Nysa a deputation of Nysæans, headed by one
Akulphis, waited on him, and, after recovering from the astonishment
that his extraordinary appearance inspired, they presented a petition.
"The Nysæans entreat thee O King, for the reverence thou bearest to
Dionysos, their God, to leave their city untouched ... for Bacchus ...
built this city for an habitation for such of his soldiers as age or
accident had rendered unfit for military service.... He called this
city Nysa (Nuson) after the name of his nurse ... and the mountain
also, which is so near us, he would have denominated Meros (or the
thigh) alluding to his birth from that of Jupiter ... and as an
undoubted token that the place was founded by Bacchus, the ivy which
is to be found nowhere else throughout all India, flourishes in our
territories." Alexander was pleased to grant the petition, and ordered
that a hundred of the chief citizens should join his camp and
accompany him. It was then that Akulphis, with much native shrewdness,
suggested that if he really had the good of the city at heart he
should take two hundred of the worst citizens instead of one hundred
of the best--a suggestion which appealed at once to Alexander's good
sense, and the demand was withdrawn. Alexander then visited the
mountain and sacrificed to Bacchus, his troops meanwhile making
garlands of ivy "wherewith they crowned their heads, singing and
calling loudly upon the god, not only by the name of Dionysos, but by
all his other names." A sort of Bacchic orgy!

But who were the Nysæans, and what became of them? In Arrian's
_Indika_ he says: "The Assakenoi" (who inhabited the Swat valley east
of Nysa) "are not men of great stature like the Indians ... not so
brave nor yet so swarthy as most Indians. They were in old times
subject to the Assyrians; then after a period of Median rule submitted
to the Persians ... the Nysaioi, however, are not an Indian race, but
descendants of those who came to India with Dionysos"; he adds that
the mountain "in the lower slopes of which Nysa is built" is
designated Meros, and he clearly distinguishes between Assakenoi and
Nysaioi. M. de St. Martin says that the name Nysa is of Persian or
Median origin; but although we know that Assyrians, Persians, and
Medes all overran this part of India before Alexander, and all must
have left, as was the invariable custom of those days, representatives
of their nationality behind them who have divided with subsequent
Skyths the ethnographical origin of many of the Upper Indian valley
tribes of to-day, there seems no sound reason for disputing the origin
of this particular name.

Ptolemy barely mentions Nysa, but we learn something about the Nysæans
from fragments of the _Indika_ of Megasthenes, which have been
collected by Dr. Schwanbeck and translated by M'Crindle. We learn that
this pre-Alexandrian Greek Dionysos was a most beneficent conqueror.
He taught the Indians how to make wine and cultivate the fields; he
introduced the system of retiring to the slopes of Meros (the first
"hill station" in India) in the hot weather, where "the army recruited
by the cold breezes and the water which flowed fresh from the
fountains, recovered from sickness.... Having achieved altogether many
great and noble works, he was regarded as a deity, and obtained
immortal honours."

Again we read, in a fragment quoted by Strabo, that the reason of
calling the mountain above Nysa by the name of Meron was that "ivy
grows there, and also the vine, although its fruit does not come to
perfection, as the clusters, on account of the heaviness of the rains,
fall off the trees before ripening. They" (the Greeks) "further call
the Oxydrakai descendants of Dionysos, because the vine grew in their
country, and their processions were conducted with great pomp, and
their kings, on going forth to war, and on other occasions, marched in
Bacchic fashion with drums beating," etc.

Again we find, in a fragment quoted by Polyænus, that Dionysos, "in
his expedition against the Indians, in order that the cities might
receive him willingly, disguised the arms with which he had equipped
his troops, and made them wear soft raiment and fawn-skins. The spears
were wrapped round with ivy, and the thyrsus had a sharp point. He
gave the signal for battle by cymbals and drums instead of the
trumpet; and, by regaling the enemy with wine, diverted their thoughts
from war to dancing. These and all other Bacchic orgies were employed
in the system of warfare by which he subjugated the Indians and the
rest of Asia."

All these lively legends point to a very early subjugation of India by
a Western race (who may have been of Greek origin) before the
invasions of Assyrian, Mede, or Persian. It could not well have been
later than the sixth century B.C., and might have been earlier by many
centuries. The Nysæans, whose city Alexander spared, were the
descendants of those conquerors who, coming from the West, were
probably deterred by the heat of the plains of India from carrying
their conquests south of the Punjab. They settled on the cool and
well-watered slopes of those mountains which crown the uplands of Swat
and Bajaur, where they cultivated the vine for generations, and after
the course of centuries, through which they preserved the tradition of
their Western origin, they welcomed the Macedonian conqueror as a man
of their own faith and nation. It seems possible that they may have
extended their habitat as far eastward as the upper Swat valley and
the mountain region of the Indus, and at one time may have occupied
the site of the ancient capital of the Assakenoi, Massaga, which there
is reason to suppose stood near the position now occupied by the town
of Matakanai; but they were clearly no longer there in the days of
Alexander, and must be distinguished as a separate race altogether
from the Assakenoi. As the centuries rolled on, this district of Swat,
together with the valley of Dir, became a great headquarters of
Buddhism. It is from this part of the trans-frontier that some of the
most remarkable of those sculptures have been taken which exhibit so
strong a Greek and Roman influence in their design. They are the
undoubted relics of stupas, dagobas, and monasteries belonging to a
period of a Buddhist occupation of the country, which was established
after Alexander's time. Buddhism did not become a State religion till
the reign of Asoka, grandson of that Sandrakottos (Chandragupta) to
whom Megasthenes was sent as ambassador; and it is improbable that any
of these buildings existed in the time of the Greek invasion, or we
should certainly have heard of them.

But along with these Buddhist relics there have been lately unearthed
certain strange inscriptions, which have been submitted by their
discoverer, Major Deane,[2] to a congress of Orientalists, who can
only pronounce them to be in an unknown tongue. They have been found
in the Indus valley east of Swat, most of them being engraved on stone
slabs which have been built into towers, now in ruins. The towers are
comparatively modern, but it by no means follows that these
inscriptions are so. It is the common practice of Pathan builders to
preserve any engraved or sculptured relic that they may find, by
utilizing them as ornamental features in their buildings. It has
probably been a custom from time immemorial. In 1895 I observed
evidences of this propensity in the graveyard at Chagan Sarai, in the
Kunar valley, where many elaborately carved Buddhist fragments were
let into the sides of their roughly built "chabutras," or sepulchres,
with the obvious purpose of gaining effect thereby. No one would say
where those Buddhist fragments came from. The Kunar valley appears at
first sight to be absolutely free from Buddhist remains, although it
would naturally be selected as a most likely field for research. These
undeciphered inscriptions may possibly be found to be vastly more
ancient than the towers they adorned. It is, at any rate, a notable
fact about them that some of them "recall a Greek alphabet of archaic
type." So great an authority as M. Senart inclines to the opinion that
their authors must be referred to the Skythic or Mongolian invaders of
India; but he refers at the same time to a sculptured and inscribed
monument in the Louvre, of unknown origin, the characters on which
resemble those of the new script. "The subject of this sculpture seems
to be a Bacchic procession." What if it really is a Bacchic
procession, and the characters thereon inscribed prove to be an
archaic form of Greek--the forgotten forms of the Nysæan alphabet?

Whilst surveying in the Kunar valley along the Kafiristan borderland,
I made the acquaintance of two Kafirs of Kamdesh, who stayed some
little time in the Afghan camp, in which my own tent was pitched, and
who were objects of much interest to the members of the Boundary
Commission there assembled. They submitted gracefully enough to much
cross-examination, and amongst other things they sang a war-hymn to
their god Gish, and executed a religious dance. Gish is not supreme in
their mythology, but he is the god who receives by far the greatest
amount of attention, for the Kafir of the lower Bashgol is ever on the
raid, always on the watch for the chance of a Mahomedan life. It is,
indeed, curious that whilst tolerant enough to allow of the existence
of Mahomedan communities in their midst, they yet rank the life of a
Mussulman as the one great object of attainment; so that a Kafir's
social position is dependent on the activity he displays in searching
out the common enemy, and his very right to sing hymns of adoration to
his war-god is strictly limited by the number of lives he has taken.
The hymn which these Kafirs recited, or sang, was translated word by
word, with the aid of a Chitrali interpreter, by a Munshi, who has the
reputation of being a most careful interpreter, and the following is
almost a literal transcript, for which I am indebted to Dr. MacNab, of
the Q.O. Corps of Guides:--

     O thou who from Gir-Nysa's (lofty heights) was born
     Who from its sevenfold portals didst emerge,
     On Katan Chirak thou hast set thine eyes,
     Towards (the depths of) Sum Bughal dost go,
     In Sum Baral assembled you have been.
     Sanji from the heights you see; Sanji you consult?
     The council sits. O mad one, whither goest thou?
     Say, Sanji, why dost thou go forth?

The words within brackets are introduced, otherwise the translation is
literal. Gir-Nysa means the mountain of Nysa, Gir being a common
prefix denoting a peak or hill. Katan Chirak is explained to be an
ancient town in the Minjan valley of Badakshan, now in ruins; but it
was the first large place that the Kafirs captured, and is apparently
held to be symbolical of victory. This reference connects the Kamdesh
Kafirs with Badakshan, and shows these people to have been more
widespread than they are at present. Sum Bughal is a deep ravine
leading down to the plain of Sum Baral, where armies are assembled for
war. Sanji appears to be the oracle consulted before war is
undertaken. The chief interest of this verse (for I believe it is only
one verse of many, but it was all that our friends were entitled to
repeat) is the obvious reference in the first line to the mountain of
Bacchus, the Meros from which he was born, on the slopes of which
stood the ancient Nysa. It is, indeed, a Bacchic hymn (slightly
incoherent, perhaps, as is natural), and only wants the accessories of
vine-leaves and ivy to make it entirely classical.

That eminent linguistic authority, Dr. Grierson, thinks that the
language in which the hymn was recited is derived from what Sanscrit
writers said was the language of the Pisacas, a people whom they
dubbed "demons" and "eaters of raw flesh," and who may be represented
by the "Pashai" dwellers in Laghman and its vicinity to-day. Possibly
the name of the chief village of the Kunar valley Pashat may claim the
same origin, for Laghman and Kunar both spread their plains to the
foot of the mountains of Kafiristan.

The vine and the ivy are not far to seek. In making slow progress
through one of the deep "darras," or ravines, of the western Kunar
basin, leading to the snow-bound ri

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