Macedonian satrapies in India

The campaign

Alexander crossed the Indus in 326 BCE, was received at Taxila, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan), by its king Ambhi, and fought his last major battle on the Jhelum against Porus. The victory was expensive and the settlement afterwards unusual: Porus was restored to his kingdom and enlarged, which suggests that direct rule over the Punjab was never the intention.

The army refused to advance beyond the Beas. Alexander turned south down the Indus, fighting a brutal campaign against the Malloi in which he was severely wounded, and left India by the Makran coast and the fleet under Nearchus.

The arrangements

The territories were divided between Macedonian satraps in the west and the two Indian kings in the east, with garrisons at a number of new or refounded cities. The arrangement did not survive contact with reality: Philip was murdered by his own mercenaries before Alexander left Asia, and after Alexander's death in 323 BCE the remaining Greek forces were progressively withdrawn or destroyed. Eudemus left India in 317 BCE taking Porus's elephants, having first killed Porus.

What remained

Candragupta Maurya took the Punjab in this vacuum, and by around 305 BCE was strong enough to face Seleucus Nicator, who ceded the eastern satrapies in exchange for five hundred elephants and a marriage alliance. The Macedonian presence in India lasted about a decade in the Punjab and left no administrative continuity.

It did leave a documentary trace of the first importance. The historians who accompanied or followed the campaign — used later by Arrian, Strabo, Curtius and Diodorus — produced the earliest external description of Indian society, and Megasthenes, sent as Seleucid ambassador to Pāṭaliputra, wrote the first sustained foreign account of an Indian state.