Achaemenid satrapies in India

The provinces

Achaemenid royal inscriptions list among the empire's lands Gandāra, Sattagydia and Hindush — the last a form of the river name Sindhu, from which both India and Hindu ultimately derive. Gandāra appears in the earliest lists, from Darius's Behistun inscription; Hindush is added later, indicating a further advance into the Indus valley in the late sixth century BCE.

Herodotus reports that the Indian province paid the largest tribute of any satrapy, three hundred and sixty talents of gold dust, and that Indian troops served in Xerxes's army in Greece. His figures are not independently checkable and the size of the tribute has been doubted, but the participation of Indian contingents in the Persian wars is corroborated in outline.

What it changed

Persian rule brought the northwest into contact with imperial practices that recur later in Indian history: satrapal administration, standardised silver coinage, the use of Aramaic as a chancery script, and monumental inscription as an instrument of rule. The Kharoṣṭhī script, used across the northwest for centuries, derives from Aramaic and is a direct legacy of this period.

Whether Achaemenid precedent shaped Mauryan administration and Aśoka's use of inscribed edicts is a long-standing argument. The parallels in form are real; the case for direct borrowing is inferential.

End

Achaemenid authority in the Indus lands appears to have weakened well before the empire fell. When Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush in 327 BCE he dealt not with satraps but with local kings and city-states — Ambhi at Taxila, Porus on the Jhelum, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan) — which suggests the provinces had long since fragmented into their constituent polities.