Alexander's heirs
After Alexander died in 323 BCE his generals fought over his empire. Seleucus, who had commanded Alexander's guard, established himself at Babylon in 312 BCE and then extended his rule over the eastern satrapies: Iran, Bactria and the lands towards India. In the Indus valley, however, Alexander's garrisons had already collapsed, and Chandragupta Maurya had taken over the region.
Seleucus and Chandragupta
Around 305 BCE Seleucus led an army towards India. Greek and Roman writers say little about the fighting, but the outcome is recorded: Seleucus made a treaty with Chandragupta by which he gave up territories bordering India and received five hundred war elephants, which he used to decisive effect at the battle of Ipsus in 301. The ceded lands are usually taken to include Arachosia, around Kandahar, Gedrosia in Baluchistan and the Paropamisadae around Kabul, though the extent is debated. The treaty included a marriage agreement, interpreted by some as the marriage of a Seleucid princess into the Mauryan family. Ashoka's later edicts at Kandahar, written in Greek and Aramaic, confirm that the region was part of the Mauryan empire.
Diplomacy
Seleucus sent Megasthenes as ambassador to Chandragupta's court at Pataliputra. His Indica, known from extracts in later writers, described the Mauryan capital, society and administration, and is one of the main Greek sources on India. His successor Antiochus I sent Deimachus to the court of Bindusara, who is said to have asked Antiochus for sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist. Ashoka's thirteenth rock edict names Antiochus II, Amtiyoga, as a ruler to whom he had sent envoys of the dharma, together with four other Hellenistic kings.
The loss of the east
Around the middle of the third century BCE the Seleucid governor of Bactria, Diodotus, made himself independent, founding the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, and the Parthians rose in north-eastern Iran. In about 206 BCE Antiochus III marched east, besieged the Bactrian king Euthydemus and made peace with him, then crossed the Hindu Kush and renewed friendship with an Indian king named Sophagasenus, receiving elephants. It was the last Seleucid campaign in the east. The Greek presence in the region continued through the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford University Press, 1997
- Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India. Pearson, 2008
See also
- Maurya Empire — The Maurya Empire was the first state to rule most of the Indian subcontinent, founded by Candragupta around 322 BCE and best known under his grandson Aśoka, whose inscribed edicts are the earliest decipherable writing in India.
- Indo-Greek Kingdom — The Indo-Greek kingdoms were the states ruled by Greek dynasties in Gandhāra and the Punjab from about 200 BCE, remembered for their bilingual coinage and for King Menander, who appears in Buddhist literature as the questioner of the monk Nāgasena.
- Greco-Bactrian Kingdom — The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was a Hellenistic state in northern Afghanistan and Central Asia, independent of the Seleucids from about 256 BCE, whose expansion south of the Hindu Kush produced the Indo-Greek kingdoms.
- Ashokan edicts — The Ashokan edicts are inscriptions on rocks and pillars across the subcontinent issued by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, the earliest deciphered Indian writing and the earliest direct testimony of an Indian ruler.
- Gandhara — Gandhara was an ancient region centred on the Peshawar Valley, Swat Valley, and Taxila in present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan that served for over a millennium as a crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the Persian and Hellenistic worlds, and as a major centre of Buddhist art and learning.
- Taxila — Taxila, or Takshashila, was an ancient city in the Gandhara region of the northwestern subcontinent, in present-day Punjab, Pakistan, that served for over a thousand years as a major political center and hub of learning under successive Achaemenid, Mauryan, Indo-Greek, and Kushan rule.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.