Alexander The Great's Battle at the River Jhelum

http://www.richeast.org/htwm/greeks/alex/alex.html

by yoshizar • 13 years ago

92 42 13 years ago

Nobody told Alexander the Great about the Indian monsoon season? Surely he could have gained some information about the country he invaded before committing.

twilightfog• 13 years ago

I think an even better information could be that he would not reach the end of the world. If he couldn't even get this beforehand, then I think missing the Indian monsoon is a small oversight indeed.

charleshaanel• 13 years ago

Nice, different post. This is relevant to my interests...

acqq• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Hydaspes

attheodo• 13 years ago

His hometown is close to were I live. I've visited his father's, Philipos, tomb at Vergina. Massive structure, loads of gold, really impressive. Sometime they have to find Alexander's tomb too... it still remains an unexplored mystery.

saturdayplace• 13 years ago

It's fiction, but I recommend "The Virtues of War" by Steven Pressfield. It's a novel (based on history, but certainly dramatized) about Alexander's march to the East.

nlavezzo• 13 years ago

I second this. A great story and it focuses, as the title implies, on the virtues of the warrior. Lots of those virtues can be applied to entrepreneurship, in my opinion.

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

Pressfield's books are great. I'd additionally recommend following up the Virtues of War with The Afghan Campaign -- which is also about Alexander, but focused entirely on the time he spent in Afghanistan. There are some astounding parallels to today.

Then, when you're done, Gates of Fire is a classic (Pressfield's novel on the Battle of Thermopylae). Tides of War is on the Peloponnesian War that followed.

grey-area2• 13 years ago

A war like no other is also a classic on the Peloponnesian War; likewise surprsingly relevant to present day politics and wars.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

These stories make me hope that some code-savvy historians will one day create a visualization of famous battles using d3.js or something similar to what went into Snow Fall.

It'd be a fascinating way to teach history, and it'll work perfectly on tablets.

Detrus4• 13 years ago

Hard to search for snow fall visualization. Do you have a link?

Also these battles were visualized a million times by the Total War series. Although far from realistically with questionable educational potential. But that's largely a limitation of computer speeds. Still, more interesting than looking at charts.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

I was referring to the popular-by-name-but-not-readership Snow Fall feature by the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/.

derekp7• 13 years ago

I've seen that on some History channel programs recently. Had to look twice to make sure it was computer animated, not a filmed scene. Can't remember the exact program series though.

Detrus4• 13 years ago

You mean Decisive Battles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZHovydSFQ ? I think he's talking about charts, d3.js. The show is made with a real time video game from 2002/4.

doktrin3• 13 years ago

> 50,000 Infantry

How verifiable are these numbers? This seems like an awfully large army, given the context.

To put this in some perspective, that's about the size of the army Hannibal entered Gaul with in the second punic war [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Punic_War

curiousDog• 13 years ago

Since we are now in the business of citing wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Hydaspes

Remember, this was india and gathering a large, untrained army was probably not that hard (the number of casualties speak for themselves)

doktrin3• 13 years ago

> Since we are now in the business of citing wikipedia

The snark is not constructive.

Detrus4• 13 years ago

That's a reasonable army for the time period. I don't know how historians make their estimates but often these are just estimates. Many armies in the time period have 30-50-80K men. In Medieval times getting an army of 20K was a huge deal, most armies were 10K.

Different economics, populations, fighting styles, time periods. They probably estimate army size by time period sometimes.

kevin_rubyhouse3• 13 years ago

Why was it easier to field large armies in Alexander's time than in the medieval period? Does it have anything to do with the feudal system? Or was it that weapons, armor, and equipment was more expensive in the medieval times. Last guess: training was more valuable in the medieval times than it was earlier, so it was more effective to field smaller armies of better trained and equipped men than a horde of untrained peasants with archaic weapons (because that's all they could afford.) ?

grey-area2• 13 years ago

Not at all verifiable, at the very least they were rounded up, at worst they are cited from some hagiography (the source of much history at the time) and massively inflated. The citation on the Wikipedia page with such authority is from a massive history of the entire world in 40 volumes based on secondary sources by diodorus 300 years later, so no, it's not likely to be accurate or useful in comparisons with other times. History as a discipline based on verified facts is a relatively modern invention.

afterburner• 13 years ago

Very typical number for the great battles of the era. This was Alexander's great rampaging army after all, I'm not sure why you think his army shouldn't be on par with Hannibal's.

doktrin3• 13 years ago

>Very typical number for the great battles of the era. This was Alexander's great rampaging army after all

The 50k number was in reference to Porus' army. Allegedly, Alexander was outnumbered between 3 and 5 to 1.

As another basis of comparison, both sides at the battle of Waterloo also fielded about 50k infantry a piece.

takshak• 13 years ago

This number is vastly exaggerated. Porus was small king of a minor principality( modern day equivalent of a district). References: Ancient India : By R C Majumdar, Wonder That Was India : By A.L.Basham. I have only hard copy of these books. I don't know if e-book is available or not.

antman3• 13 years ago

These number are not verifiable but they are not they are not the army you would think it is. Most of Alexander's army was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and was later using local armies with Macedonian Genarals.

nu2ycombinator• 13 years ago

The king name is "Purushottam" not "Porus".

davidp• 13 years ago

Names don't normally survive intact when crossing languages; even more so when crossing multiple languages (original -> Greek -> Latin -> English).

Examples from Wikipedia:

- The Greek name for Alexander is Alexandros (Ἀλέξανδρος).

- The Persian name for Alexander is Iskandar (اسکندر).

- Porus is a similarly Latinized version of the Greek version (Πῶρος) of the Sanskrit name Purushottam (पुरुषोत्तम).

pm90• 13 years ago

Yes, its interesting to trace the routes of these words. The Persian word for Alexander is also Sikander and it was quite a popular name among sultans in medieval India. And my favorite: Tsar was derived from Caesar :)

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

The Greeks made very little effort to retain the phonetics of the original language. This is not a criticism of course, merely an observation, and perhaps partly driven by the impossibility of rendering certain sounds (eg "sh") in Greek. compare the Greek and native names of the various Egyptian gods for extreme examples.

vicks711• 13 years ago

Raja = King not warlord. Chandragupt Maurya the Emperor of Patliputra (now Patna) had an army much bigger than Porus'

kevin_rubyhouse3• 13 years ago

The article agrees with you, "it was fought against a powerful Indian rajah, an Indian equivalent to a king or warlord."

snambi• 13 years ago

The author is missing some other things that alexandar's men would not have seen on their journey from greece to india.

[1] crocodiles [2] tigers [3] monkeys [4] venomous snakes ( this is a major problem for moving at night) [5] mosquitoes [6] diseases ( with so much life, comes diseases )

He says alexandar would have won the war easily if he had attacked two months earlier. He had no idea about the heat in april and march. His horses don't stand a chance in the punjab heat. They would have lost more easily if they went two months earlier.

Alexander was accustomed to fight in temperate regions and deserts, where horses are very effective. Where as india is either tropical or sub-tropical, where horses don't do very well. What was once his weapon, has become his weakness.

krishashok• 13 years ago

Actually, the author is right. In Punjab, June and July is peak summer. April is quite pleasant comparatively. In the Southern part of India, April and May are horrible (I live there).

antman3• 13 years ago

There was an unprecedented failure of correlation vs causation and it was based on crocodiles. The whole idea was that the Indian Ocean was a lake and they would circumvent it, reach the top of the Nile and then sail to down to return to the Greek territory. Unfortunately this geographical mistake was based on the assumption that crocodiles (and lotus plants) they saw in India existed only in upper Egypt only so the two regions were somehow connected.

Regarding Alexanders army, most of it was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and then it was mostly local former persian empire subjects and officers (heteroi - εταιροι) with Macedonian Generals. They probably had a fair knowledge of the situation. The Persians said that they had already occupied some part of Indian territory but there are no Archeological evidence of sustained Persian presence after the Khyber Pass.

beloch• 13 years ago

Bizarre posting. This appears to be a high-school page (authored either by very-good students or not-so-good teachers) and last updated, according to the page, in 2000! I lean towards thinking this is a student project since some of the other articles on this site aren't very well researched. However, this would have been a fairly spiffy result from a group of students in 2000!

But... Why post this? I am not sure I understand.

easternmonk• 13 years ago

There is still a village in Himalays where the residents refuse to mix with other Indians claiming that they are descendants of Alexander.

Alexander The Great's Battle at the River Jhelum

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