I. ed of being the ancientest of men, because SECT. their country was the most elevated; and whose desolating inundations have so often deformed the face of the eastern world. Menacing hordes of this ever warlike nation, he encountered on the banks of the Jaxartes, the northern boundary of Sogdiana or Sogdia. After wounding them from his engines erected on the southern bank of that broad river, he passed to the opposite shore on skins, and assailed the insolent barbarians in a manner so new to them, and so resistless, that they had recourse to a hasty submission. His friendship was then granted to the great Khan, who disavowed the hostile proceedings of a worthless part of his subjects; and Alexander having thus sustained the matchless fame of his arms, allowed himself with admirable policy to be restrained by divine warnings from violating the inward majesty of the desert, into which there was not any rational human motive that should induce him to penetrate." 60 58 Justin, l. ii. c. 1. The boast of those western Scythians in Justin is clearly derived from their eastern brethren the Calmouks and Zongones, who hold the same proud language to the present day. La Chappe Voyage en Siberie, p. 302. The ascent to Chinese Tartary is found by barometrical observations to be 16,000 feet above the Yellow Sea. Conf. Pallas. Act. Petropol. An. 1777. Staunton's Voyage to China, vol. ii. p. 206. and Kirwan's Geological Essays, p. 26. et seq. 59 Arrian, l. iv. c. 5. et seq. Conf. Plutarch in Alexand. p. 691. 60 Arrian, Ibid. Nothing can better show Alexander's superiority, than comparing his Scythian warfare with that of the Romans under Crassus, Antony, &c. To cope with Nomadic warriors, SECT. I. pamisus. To the sagacity of that conqueror, the ridges of Paropamisus were not less alluring than The Paro- Imaus had been repulsive. The southern mountains contained the inlets to India, a country disfigured, indeed, by Greek fables, but known to produce commodities peculiar to itself, and of universal demand among all the civilized nations of antiquity. In penetrating through the Paropamisus thither, Alexander pursued the same route that had been opened, or frequented, by ancient caravans, and which has been followed, as is well known, by all future conquerors. From the precision with which the avenues to India are defined by rivers and defiles, armies in different ages have constantly invaded that country by the same unvaried tract; all of them have traversed the Paropamisus so as to descend into the valley of Candahar, and all have crossed the Indus at Taxila, now Attock, because the only place on that river where the slackened rapidity of current conveniently admits a bridge. But, in his transactions in the neighbourhood of the Indus, and his return to that of the Euphrates, Alexander displayed views in his expedition altogether different from the merciless depredations of a Nadir Shah, a Tamerlane, and a Mahmut. The mountainous with whom flight is not disgrace, he divided his cavalry into small squadrons to intercept the enemy's escape. See this mode successfully practised in Bactria, Arrian. iv. 2. 61 Conf. Arrian, 1. iv. c. 22. and D'Anville Eclairciss. sur la Geograph. de la Haute Asie, p. 19. I. inlets to India were formed into a Macedonian SECT. province, under the name of the Satrapy of Paropamisus, and bridled by well-garrisoned cities, particularly two Alexandrias, upon, or near, the sites of the modern Cabul and Candahar, places still recognised as the two principal gates of Hindostan; the former towards Tartary, the latter. towards Persia. The high-lands sur rounding Cabul and Candahar, containing the sources of the Oxus and Indus, must always be important in a commercial point of view, since they connect the navigable courses of these great rivers; but they were of far greater relative importance in those ages, when the commerce of the East was carried on chiefly or solely by inland communications. In the Panjab again, or country watered by the five eastern branches of the Indus, the pacific Taxiles, and the warlike Porus, were alike reinstated in their dominions, and admitted to the rank of friends. 63 But a surer friend, Python, the son of Agenor“, was left with a body of Greeks in the Panjab, as superintendant of Macedonian affairs in that important and then valuable territory. These 65 62 Rennell's Memoir of a Map of Hindostan, p. 153–167.3d edit. 63 Arrian, 1. v. c. 20. 64 Thus named by Diodorus, xviii. 39. to distinguish him from Python, the son of Crateas, an officer, as we shall see, of higher rank in Alexander's service. 65 Plutarch, p. 699. says that Alexander subdued 5000 cities in India, as large as Cos; and Strabo, 1. xiv. p. 657. says that Cos, though a beauiful and elegant, is but a small city. "It contained about five or six thousand inhabitants: for Arrian informs us that the country of the Glaucæ in India contained 37 cities, which had from 5000 to 10,000 inhabitants." Arrian, l. v. c. 20. I. SECT. arrangements, so essential to the inland commerce carried on with India, were accompanied by naval undertakings of a bolder nature, but not less decided utility. On the banks chiefly of the Indus and Hydaspes a fleet was constructed, or collected, that from the trireme to the tender, amounted to two thousand sail. 66 While the land forces in divisions pervaded the country on either side, this great armament pursued its triumphant course for the space of six hundred miles down the Indus to the ocean. Having accomplished this voyage, the least serviceable vessels were laid up in the Indian Delta, a district formed by alluvions of the Indus, into the same triangular shape with the well-known Delta of the Nile. The stouter ships or gallies Alexander then manned with above ten thousand Greeks or Phoenicians, and entrusted them to Nearchus, the zealous friend of his youth and adversity during the suspicious reign of Philip, that he might explore the navigation between the mouth of the Indus, and the inmost recess of the Persian gulph; an enterprise which that commander successfully performed in the course of somewhat less than five months, and which he afterwards distinctly and elegantly described. 67 Meanwhile the Greek cities of Bucephalia and Nicæa, and others whose very names have perished, were built on the five 66 Arrian, l. v. c. 2. The numbers, however, are different in his Indian history, c. 19. 67 Apud Arrian, Hist. Indic. c. 20. et seq. 1. tributary streams which water the Panjab; and SECT. Pattala, now Tatta, was built on the Indus itself, near the top of the Delta 69, destined in Alexander's fond fancy to become the Memphis of the Indian world. sense Taurus may be as a correct In compliance with the example of ancient In what historians, I have thus traced mount Taurus to the extremity of the Macedonian conquests. regarded But truth obliges me to observe, that the deli- line of disneation of this stony girdle of Asia would far tinction. better discriminate the divisions of that continent, if its nature more exactly corresponded to the notions which Greek writers entertained of it. They considered this mountainous range, particularly in its prolongation eastward, as separating 70 the dark regions of cold and penury, from the delicious and bright plains of Southern Asia, from countries whose names revive the ideas of enjoyment and splendour; peculiarly adapted to the arts of peace, and the multiplication of men and animals; the first that were adorned by great cities, and which, as the warm genial soil, when softened by irrigation, is in no season of the year condemned to barren sleep, produced abundantly, through many successions of ages and empires, whatever can soothe the senses or 69 Strabo, 1. xv. p. 701. 70 Diodorus, xviii. 5. Conf. Strabo, 1. xiv. p. 673. and Arrian, l. v. c. 5. All these Greek writers considered Taurus also as an unbroken ridge, dividing the two great central regions of Asia, Iran and Turan, as they are called by the orientals. But in describing the roads from India to Turan, the more northern region, the Ayin Acbaree mentious one by the way of Candahar entirely free |