Down the Indus
After his army refused to go beyond the Beas in 326 BCE, Alexander turned back and descended the Jhelum and the Indus by river, fighting the peoples along the way, among them the Malloi, in whose town he was gravely wounded. In the summer of 325 BCE he reached Patala, at the head of the Indus delta, where the river divided. He explored both main channels to the sea, and the Greek accounts describe the astonishment of his men at the tides of the ocean, which they had not seen in the Mediterranean. He sacrificed to the gods of the sea at the river mouth.
The voyage
Alexander planned to return to Babylon, sending part of his army by sea and leading the rest overland. He gave the fleet to his boyhood friend Nearchus, a Cretan. The fleet waited for the change of the monsoon winds and set out in the autumn of 325 BCE, sailing west along the barren coast of Makran. Nearchus' account, which survives in extracts in the Indica of the Roman-era writer Arrian, describes harbours, water shortages, a whale that frightened the sailors until they drove it off with trumpets, and the Fish-eaters, people of the coast who lived on fish and built their houses from whale bones. After weeks at sea the fleet reached Harmozeia, near Hormuz, where Nearchus met Alexander inland, and then continued up the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Euphrates.
Alexander's march
Alexander himself led much of the army through Gedrosia, the desert of Baluchistan. The march, intended partly to support the fleet with supplies and wells along the coast, became a disaster. Arrian and Plutarch describe heat, thirst, a flash flood and great losses among the soldiers and camp followers. Ancient writers suggested that Alexander chose the route to rival the legendary marches of Semiramis and Cyrus, though modern historians also point to logistical aims.
Significance
The voyage opened the sea route between India and the Persian Gulf to Greek knowledge, and Nearchus' account became a basic source for later Greek geography of the Indian Ocean. For India, Alexander's campaign left little direct trace in Indian sources, and his garrisons in the Indus valley collapsed within a few years of his death, as Chandragupta Maurya took control. The Greek accounts of the campaign, however, are among the earliest detailed outside descriptions of the north-west of the subcontinent.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- 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.
- Warfare in ancient India — Warfare in ancient India spans the tribal conflicts described in the Rigveda and the epics through the large standing armies, war elephants, and dynastic campaigns of the Mahājanapada, Mauryan, and post-Mauryan periods, down to roughly the fourth century CE.
- 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.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.