Tribals were on the outskirts, who Alexander attacked and yet Porus gave him a freaking tough fight that he returned his kingdom to him, where had a previous record of razing cities to the ground and massacring the inhabitants after defeating them in battle.
Porus was a small time king who wouldn't have found any mention in history had it not been for his fight with Alexander. And the Macedonian turned back because across the river the Nanda empire was waiting for him.
You may wanna read it properly, because as much as you hate it, up until 1974, all history is shared between Pakistan and India.
I tend to agree with this ambiguous interpretation of the Battle of Hydaspes. It is not at all certain that Alexander won an outright and crushing victory, in contrast to his previous three set-piece battles. His behaviour towards the king the Greeks called Porus is also a 'tell'; he was never merciful to an enemy, and for him to have restored Porus to his kingdom, indeed, to add territories to it and to treat him as a trusted ally is quite exceptional.
We may take a look at the psychological impact of the Nandas along with subsequent posts on the subject.
I suspect that porus's territory was part of Nanda empire itself, because
a. why would the Nandas mobilize for war with alexander when their territory was not being attacked?
b. Nanda territories on their borders were known to be semi autonomous, with centralization in its core territories like magadh etc
the greek records do indicate that their rivals lay on the other side of the river, but it may also be based on core territory idea and not borderlands.
But this estimation needs references from greek records as well to verify it.
regards
Going backwards, sources on Alexander's campaign in India are uniformly suspect, either due to the loss of the accounts of contemporaries, or due to the long gap between the events and their narration.
There is compelling evidence, indirect, but compelling nevertheless, that Alexander did have concrete cultural drives to continuing his campaigns eastward across the Ganges-Yamuna rivers, into the Ganges Valley. If we consult contemporary maps, due to the very approximate nature of geographical knowledge of parts away from the Indus and its tributaries, those parts well-known and familiar to the imperial predecessors, the Achaemenid Persians, we find that they uniformly place Okean spanning the boundaries of the Icthyophagi in a more-or-less north-south orientation. We should not be looking at contemporary, well-defined maps, but at the maps of that age. And those maps showed the Ganges Valley and the rivers therein falling into an easterly Okean. Those maps had no indication of any territory further to the east, the Brahmaputra Valley, for instance. They all showed the Ganges Valley ending in the great world-encircling ocean.
Enough hints exist to suggest that Alexander, an avid student of Aristotle, had this wonderful dream of fighting his way to that mystical point, the great ocean, and, after bringing the Achaemenid Empire to its knees and making his grip on it as tight as possible in the days of horse-borne passage, and month-long intervals needed for the transmission of imperial commands, he had this objective in mind. We have to bear this frustration in mind when we observe his ruthless treatment of territories and cities that the army encountered on its unexpected turn and march to the sea.
As for the Nandas mobilising for war, for someone to topple the Achaemenids and not make a powerful impression of a large kingdom lying directly in line with his line of movement through north-west India is extremely unlikely. Only an imbecile ruler would have ignored the possible threat; considering that there was a great deal of contact between the Greek merchants and traders from Taxila and its purlieus and the local residents, the information about Issus-Granicus River-Gaugamela must have gotten back to the Nandas. We need not speculate too much about the exact status of Porus and of other possible vassal states around Alexander's line of march. It is enough that he had penetrated as far as the Hydaspes, after fighting his classic battles in Asia Minor and a ruthless pursuit through the north-east corners of the Achaemenid Empire.
No, Porus was an independent king.
When the army of a king who has been on a expedition across continents, burned hundreds of cities and killed hundreds of thousand of people, is right across the river that separates ur land from that king, you mobilise and wait for him to cross.
This is the nanda empire at its zenith under the Kind Dhana Nanda in 325BC..Battle of Hydaspes took place in 326BC east of Jhelum, land which now lies in Pakistan Punjab.
As you can see, Nanda empire never stretched even upto the western borders of modern day India.
It is very unsound to impose our own imaginings of the extent of long-deceased kingdoms and empires onto modern maps. We need to look back at the maps as they were presented to people of that era, and not at our own maps.
Second, there is absolutely no foundation for this so-called map. Nothing by way of facts exists to justify that depiction.
The Nanda empire map is wrong, first of all there is little evidence what the nanda empire fully extended looked like, secondly this is made by a user who edits wikipedia. Nanda empire probably stretched all the way to karnataka, some inscriptions from mysore declare that the nanda territory included mysore as well. There is also nanda reference in tamil sangham literature along with mauryas, which means nandas could have been present as far as borders of tamil nadu.
Same article also states that nanda empire stretched from punjab in the west to odisha in the east
This is another map i found from the web
there is also reference to Nanda arbitrating in western asia's political disputes, this cannot be possible if nandas were not already present in borderlands of western asia
regards
We are really on very thin ice here.
