Page:A Brief History of the Indian Peoples.djvu/91

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ALEXANDER AND CHANDRA GUPTA.
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through Sind, and followed the course of the Indus until he reached the ocean. In the apex of the delta, he founded or refounded a city—Patala—which survives to this day as Haidarabad, the native capital of Sind. At the mouth of the Indus, Alexander beheld for the first time the majestic phenomenon of the tides. One part of his army he shipped off under the command of Nearchus to coast along the Persian Gulf; the remainder he himself led through Southern Balúchistán and Persia to Susa, where, after terrible losses from want of water and famine on the march, he arrived in 325 B.C.

Results of Alexander the Great's Expedition.—During his two years' campaign in the Punjab and Sind, Alexander subjugated no Province; but he made alliances, founded cities, and planted Greek garrisons. He had given much territory to Indian chiefs devoted to his cause; every petty Indian court had its Greek faction; and the troops which he left behind at many points, from the Afghan frontier on the west to the Beas river on the east, and as far south as the Sind delta, seemed visible pledges of his return. A large part of his army remained in Bactria; and in the partition of the empire after Alexander's death in 323 B.C., Bactria and India fell to Seleukos Nikator, the founder of the Syrian monarchy.

Chandra Gupta.—Meanwhile a new power had arisen in India. Among the Indian adventurers who thronged Alexander's camp in the Punjab, each with his plot for winning a kingdom or crushing a rival, Chandra Gupta, an exile from the Gangetic valley, seems to have played a somewhat ignominious part. He tried to tempt the wearied Greeks on the banks of the Beas with schemes of conquest in the rich Provinces of Hindustán to the south-east; but, having personally offended Alexander, he had to fly the camp (326 B.C.). In the confused years which followed, he managed, with the aid of plundering hordes, to found a kingdom on the ruins of the Nanda dynasty in Magadha, or Behar (316 B.C.). He seized their capital, Pataliputra, the modern Patna ; established himself firmly in the Gangetic valley, and compelled the north-western principalities, Greek garrisons and Indian princes alike, to acknowledge his suzerainty. While the Greek general Seleukos was winning his