Beginnings of Magadhan ascendancy and The Coming of Yavanas

Administrative arrangements made by Alexander

The Macedonian king had no desire to renounce his new conquests. He wished to incorporate them permanently into his extensive empire. He formed the districts to the west of the Hydaspes into regular satrapies under Persian or Macedonian governors who were assisted, in some cases, by Indian chiefs like Sasigupta of Aornos and Ambhi of Taxila. Beyond the river he created a system of protected States under vassal kings, among whom the great Paurava and the king of Abhisara were the most eminent.

Macedonian garrisons were stationed in Pushkalavati, Taxila, and other important strategic centres. New cities were built, mostly on the great rivers, to establish the authority of the conqueror firmly in the acquired territories and stimulate trade navigation in the Land of the Five Rivers.

Effect of the Persian and Macedonian Invasions

The Macedonian prefectures and garrisons were soon swept away by Chandragupta Maurya, and within Alexander and chandragupta wara few years all vestige of foreign domination disappeared from the Punjab and Sind. But the invasions of Darius and Alexander had not been in vain. The Persian conquest had unveiled India probably for the first time to the Western world and established contact between this country and the peoples of the Levant. Indian spearmen and archers fought under the Persian banner on European soil in the fifth century B.C. and quickened the interest of the peoples of Hellas in this land of strange folks and surpassing wealth. Persian and Greek officials found employment in the Indus provinces and made their presence felt in various ways. The introduction of new scripts-Aramaic, Kharoshthi and the alphabet styled Yavanani by Panini, is probably to be traced to this source. Whether some important features of the architecture of the Maurya period and certain phrases used in the Asokan edicts are also to be attributed to their enterprise, is a highly debatable question. The hold of the great king on the Indian frontier slackened considerably in the fourth century B.C. The arduous campaigns of Alexander restored the fallen fabric of imperialism and laid the foundation of a closer contact between India and the Hellenic world.

The Macedonian empire in the Indus valley no doubt perished within a short time. But the Macedonian had welded the political atoms into one unit and thus paved the way for the more permanent union under the Mauryas. The voyages, and expeditions planned by Alexander widened the geographical horizon of his contemporaries, and opened up new lines of communication and new routes for trade and maritime enterprise. The colonies that the conqueror planted in the Indian borderland do not appear to have been altogether wiped out by the Mauryas.

Yavana officials continued to serve the great king of Magadha as they had served the great king of Ecbatana as evidence. For the Madhya-desa or the upper Ganges valley, and particularly its western part, the land of the Kurus and the Panchalas which was the cradle and centre of Brahmanism, we have to look to the Brahmanical Sutras and the early epic. The epic, no doubt, looks back to the heroic age which is coeval with the later Vedic period, but the extant poems have a wider geographical outlook than the later Vedic texts.