The Persian Conquest of the Indus Valley

The Achaemenid Persians ruled the northwest of the Indian subcontinent for nearly two centuries, from the time of Cyrus or Darius I until Alexander’s arrival in 327 BCE. Gandhara, around modern Peshawar and Taxila, was already Persian by 520 BCE, and Darius added Hindush, the land along the Indus river, around 515 BCE. According to Herodotus this “Indian” province paid the largest tribute of the empire, in gold dust.

Gandhara before Darius

Persian rule east of the Hindu Kush probably began under Cyrus the Great, who is said by later Greek and Roman writers to have campaigned in the region of Kapisa, north of modern Kabul. When Darius listed his lands at Behistun in about 520 BCE, he included Gandhara and Sattagydia, but not yet the Indus valley itself. Gandhara was the land of the Kabul and Swat rivers, with its centres at Pushkalavati, near modern Charsadda, and Taxila, east of the Indus.

Scylax’s voyage

Herodotus (4.44) says that Darius wanted to know where the Indus reached the sea, and sent ships under a Greek captain, Scylax of Caryanda in Caria. They set out from a city called Caspatyrus in the land of the Pactyes, sailed down the river to the sea, and then turned west along the coasts of Iran and Arabia. In the thirtieth month they reached the head of the Red Sea, in Egypt. After this voyage, Herodotus says, Darius conquered the Indians and made use of the sea route.

Scylax later wrote an account of his travels, now lost apart from a few quotations. Herodotus gets one detail wrong: he says the Indus flows east, which it does not. The voyage fits with Darius’s canal in Egypt, which completed a sea link from the Nile to the Persian Gulf (see Darius’s canal from the Nile to the Red Sea).

Hindush: the new province

The name Hindush first appears in Darius’s inscriptions at Persepolis, Susa and Naqsh-e Rostam, carved after the Behistun text. The conquest of the Indus valley is therefore placed after 520 BCE, often around 518–515. No account of the fighting survives. Hindush probably covered the middle and lower Indus, in what is now Pakistan, but its exact borders are not known.

The Old Persian name Hindu-, from Sanskrit Sindhu, “river”, is the source of many later words. The Persians pronounced the initial s as h, and the Greeks, borrowing from them, dropped the h: Indos for the river and India for the land. Modern Persian keeps both forms: Hend for India and Send for the Indus and Sindh.

Gold dust and ants

Herodotus calls the Indians the most numerous people known to him and says they paid 360 talents of gold dust a year, more than any other province. He explains where the gold came from with a famous story: in a desert of the north, ants smaller than dogs but larger than foxes dig up sand full of gold, and Indians steal it on fast camels before the ants can catch them. Scholars have suggested that the story grew from tales of burrowing marmots in the Himalayan highlands or from a confusion of words; it should not be taken literally.

The Indian delegates on the Apadana staircase at Persepolis, wearing short kilts and sandals, carry containers usually read as gold dust and lead a donkey. Indian soldiers stand among the throne-bearers on the tomb of Darius at Naqsh-e Rostam. The Apadana reliefs page discusses how these delegations should be read.

Goods, soldiers and travellers

Darius’s foundation charter from his palace at Susa lists the materials brought from across the empire. Ivory came from Kush, from Sind and from Arachosia, and a kind of timber called yaka came from Gandhara and Carmania. The Persepolis Fortification Tablets record travellers on the roads between Persepolis and India carrying sealed travel documents, as described on the Royal Road.

Indian soldiers served in Persian armies. Herodotus describes the Indians in Xerxes’ army of 480 BCE wearing cotton clothes and carrying cane bows with iron-tipped arrows, with the Gandharans armed differently. At Gaugamela in 331 BCE, Indian contingents fought for Darius III, along with a small number of war elephants.

What Persian rule left behind

The clearest legacy is writing. Imperial Aramaic, the administrative language of the empire, gave rise to the Kharoshthi script, used to write the local Prakrit languages of Gandhara for centuries afterwards. When the Indian emperor Ashoka issued edicts in the 3rd century BCE, some in this region were written in Aramaic, and others in Kharoshthi. Some historians also see Persian models in the Mauryan court and its stone columns, a view that others think is overstated.

At Taxila and Charsadda, archaeologists have found levels of the Achaemenid period, though it is hard to tie specific buildings to Persian rule. By the time Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush in 327 BCE, Persian control over the Indus seems to have weakened, and local rulers such as the king of Taxila acted largely on their own.