Arrian’s narrative indicates neither in what part of the Kôphên and Indus Dôâb Nysa was situated, nor at what time Alexander made his expedition to the place. But we learn from Curtius (viii. 10), Strabo (xv. 697), and Justin (xii. 7) that he was there before he had as yet crossed the Choaspes and taken Massaga, and Arrian says nothing from which it can be inferred that his opinion was different. Nysa was therefore most probably the city which Ptolemy calls Nagara or Dionysopolis, and which has been identified with Nanghenhar (the Nagarahâra of Sanskrit), an ancient capital, the ruins of which have been traced at a distance of four or five miles west from Jalâlâbâd. This place was called also Udyânapura, i.e. “the city of gardens,” which the Greeks from some resemblance in the sound translated into Dionysopolis, a compound meaning “the city of Dionysos.” At some distance eastward from this site, but on the opposite bank of the river, there is a mountain called Mar-Koh (i.e. snake-hill) which, if Nysa be Nagara, may be regarded as the Mount Meros which lay near it, and was ascended by Alexander. It has, however, been assumed that, in Arrian’s opinion, the expedition to Nysa was not an early incident of the campaign in the Dôâb, but the last of any importance after the capture of Aornos. The only ground for this assumption is that his account of the expedition to Nysa follows that of all the other transactions recorded to have occurred west of the Indus. But the reason of this is not far to seek. Arrian, on examining the accounts given by different writers of the visit to Nysa and Meros, concluded that they were for the most part apocryphal, and as he did not wish to mix up romance with history, reserved the subject for separate treatment. Abbott, who took it for granted that Arrian wished it to be understood that Alexander visited Nysa after the capture of the rock, looked for the site of that city nearer the Indus than the plain of Jalâlâbâd; and found one to suit the requirements in the neighbourhood of Mount Elum, called otherwise Râm Takht or “the throne of Râm.” This remarkable mountain, he says, rises like some mighty pagoda to the height of nine or ten thousand feet, and answers in many points to the descriptions given of Meros, being densely covered with forests, full of wild beasts and of a height at which, in that part of India, ivy, box, etc., flourish. At its roots are the following old towns with names all derivable from Bacchos: Lusa (Nysa), Lyocah (Lyaeus), Elye, Awân, Bimeeter (Bimêtêr), Bôkra (Bou-Kera), and Kerauna (Keraunos). Beneath the town of Lusa flows the river Burindu, which is occasionally unfordable during the spring. Abbott makes this remark about the river with reference to the statement in Plutarch that when Alexander sat down before Nysa, the Macedonians had some difficulty of advancing to the attack on account of the depth of the river that washed its walls. V. de Saint-Martin and Dr. Bellew identify Nysa with Nysatta, a village near the northern bank of the Kâbul river about six miles below Hashtnagar, but except some correspondence between the names, there seems little to recommend this view. Strabo has one or two passages concerning Nysa. “In Sophoclês,” he says, “a person is introduced speaking the praises of Nysa, as a mountain sacred to Bacchos: ‘Whence I beheld the famed Nysa, the resort of the Bacchanalian bands, which the horned Iacchos makes his most pleasant and beloved retreat, where no bird’s clang is heard.’ From such stories they gave the name Nysaians to some imaginary nation, and called their city Nysa, founded by Bacchos; a mountain above the city they called Mêros, alleging as a reason for imposing these names that the ivy and vine grow there, although the latter does not perfect its fruit, for the bunches of grapes drop off before maturity in consequence of excessive rains” (xv. 687). In a subsequent passage (697) he says: “After the river Kôphês follows the Indus. The country lying between these two rivers is occupied by the Astakênoi, Masianoi, Nysaioi, and the Hippasioi. Next is the territory of Assakanos, where is the city Masoga.” Pliny also has one or two notices of Nysa. “Most writers,” he says (H. N. vi. 21), “assume that the city Nysa and also the mountain Merus, consecrated to the god Bacchus, belong to India. This is the mountain whence arose the fable that Bacchus issued from the thigh (μηρός) of Jupiter. They also assign to India the country of the Aspagani so plentiful in vines, laurel, and box, and all kinds of fruitful trees that grow in Greece.” In Book viii. 141, he says “that on Nysa, a mountain in India, there are lizards 24 feet in length, and in colour yellow or purple or blue.”
The legend that Dionysos was bred in the thigh of Zeus owes its origin to a figurative mode of expression, common among the Phoenicians and Hebrews, which was taken by the Greeks in a literal sense. See the Epistle to the Hebrews, vii. 10. The Kafîrs who now occupy the country through which Alexander first marched on his way from the Kaukasos to the Indus, are said by Elphinstone to drink wine to great excess, men and women alike. “They dance,” he adds, “with great vehemence, using many gesticulations, and beating the ground with great force, to a music which is generally quick, but varied and wild. Such usages would certainly have struck the Macedonians as Bacchanalian.” So certainly would such a spectacle as the following, described by Bishop Heber in his Indian Journal: “The two brothers Rama and Luchman, in a splendid palkee, were conducting the retreat of their army. The divine Hunimân, as naked and almost as hairy as the animal he represented, was gamboling before them, with a long tail tied round his waist, a mask to represent the head of a baboon, and two great pointed clubs in his hands. His army followed, a number of men with similar tails and masks, their bodies dyed with indigo, and also armed with clubs. I was never so forcibly struck with the identity of Rama and Bacchus. Here were before me Bacchus, his brother Ampelus, the Satyrs, smeared with wine-lees, and the great Pan commanding them.” I may, in conclusion, subjoin a notice of Bacchos in India from Polyainos: “Dionysos marching against the Indians in order that the Indians might receive him did not equip his troops with armour that could be seen, but with soft raiment and fawn skins. The spears were wrapped round with ivy, and the thyrsus had a sharp point. In making signals he used cymbals and drums instead of the trumpet, and, by warming the enemy with wine, he turned them (from war) to dancing. These and all other Bacchic orgies were the stratagems of war by which Bacchos subjugated the Indians and all the rest of Asia. Dionysos, when in India, seeing that his army could not endure the burning heat, seized the three-peaked mountain of India. Of its peaks one is called Korasibiê, another Kondaskê, but the third he himself named Mêros in commemoration of his birth. Upon it were many fountains of water sweet of taste, abundance of game and fruit, and snows, which gave new vigour to the frame. The troops quartered there would take the barbarians of the plains by surprise, and put them to an easy rout by attacking them with missiles from their commanding position on the heights above. Dionysos having conquered the Indians, invaded Baktria, taking with him as auxiliaries the Indians themselves and the Amazons.”
Note H.—Gold-digging Ants
Herodotos was the first writer who communicated to the Western nations the story of these ants. He relates it thus (iii. 102): “There are other Indians bordering on the city of Kaspatyros and the country of Paktyike (Afghânistân) settled northward of the other Indians, who resemble the Baktrians in the way they live. They are the most warlike of the Indians, and are the men whom they send to procure the gold (paid in tribute to the King of Persia), for their country adjoins the desert of sand. In this desert then and in the sand there are ants, in size not quite so big as dogs, but larger than foxes. Some that were captured were taken thence, and are with the King of the Persians. These ants, forming their dwelling underground, heap up the sand as the ants in Greece do, and in the same manner; and are very like them in shape. The sand which they cast up is mixed with gold. The Indians therefore go to the desert to get this sand, each man having three camels ... (c. 105). When the Indians arrive at the spot they fill their sacks with the sand, and return home with all possible speed. For the ants, as the Persians say, having readily discovered them by the smell, pursue them, and, as they are the swiftest of all animals, not one of the Indians could escape except by getting the start while the ants were assembling.”
Nearchos (quoted by Strabo, xv. 705) says that he saw skins of the ants which dig up gold as large as the skins of leopards. Megasthenes also (as quoted in the same passage) says that among the Dardai, a populous nation of the Indians living towards the east and among the mountains, there was a mountain plain of about 3000 stadia in circumference, below which were mines containing gold, which ants not less in size than foxes dig up. In winter they dig holes and pile up the earth in heaps, like moles, at the pit-mouths. Pliny (xi. 31) repeats the story in these terms: “The horns of the Indian ant fixed up in the temple of Hercules at Erythrae were objects of great wonderment. These ants excavate gold from mines found in the country of those Northern Indians who are called the Dardae. They are of the colour of cats and of the size of Egyptian wolves. The Indians steal the gold which they dig up in winter during the hot season when the ants keep within their burrows to escape the stifling sultriness of the weather. The ants, however, aroused by the smell, sally out and frequently overtake and mangle the robbers, though they have the swiftest of camels to aid their flight.” It is now understood that the gold-digging ants were neither, as the ancients supposed, an extraordinary kind of real ants, nor, as many learned men have since supposed, larger animals mistaken for ants, but Tibetan miners who, like their descendants of the present day, preferred working their mines in winter when the frozen soil stands well and is not likely to trouble them by falling in. The Sanskrit word pîpilika denotes both an ant and a particular kind of gold.
The Dards consist now of several wild and predatory tribes which are settled on the north-west frontier of Kashmir and by the banks of the Indus. The gryphons who guarded the gold were Tibetan mastiffs, a breed of unmatched ferocity. Gold is still found in these regions.
Note I.—Taxila
Pliny, in his Natural History (vi. 21), gives sixty miles as the distance from Peukolatis (Hashtnagar) to Taxila. This would fix its site somewhere on the Haro river to the west of Hasan Abdâl, or just two days’ march from the Indus. But according to the itineraries of the Chinese pilgrims, Fa-Hian and Hwen Thsiang, Taxila lay at three days’ journey to the east of the Indus, and as they made that journey, their authority on the point cannot be questioned. Taxila, it may be therefore concluded, must have been situated in the immediate neighbourhood of Kâla-ka-Sarâi. Now at the distance of just one mile from this place, near the rock-seated village of Shah-Dheri, Cunningham discovered the ruins of a fortified city scattered over a wide space, extending about three miles from north to south, and two miles from east to west, and these ruins he took to be those of Taxila. They lie about eight miles south-east of Hasan Abdâl, thirty-four miles west from the famous tope of Manikyâla, and twenty-four miles north-west from Rawal Pindi. The most ancient part of these ruins, according to the belief of the natives, is a great mound rising to a height of sixty-eight feet above the bed of the stream, called the Tabrâ Nala, which flows past its east side. Cunningham’s identification has now been accepted by all archaeologists, and a Greek text hitherto neglected strikingly confirms its correctness. This text is to be found in the Pseudo-Kallisthenes, and I here translate the remarks made upon it by Sylvain Lévi in a paper which he submitted last year to the Société Asiatique, and which will be found printed at pp. 236, 237 in the 15th volume of the 8th series of the Journal of that society: “The Pseudo-Kallisthenes dwells complacently on the sojourn of Alexander at Taxila and his conversations with the Brahmans. The Brahmans (III. xii. 9, 10) blame the conduct of Kalanos, who, in violation of the duties of his caste, went to live with the Macedonians. ‘It has not pleased him,’ say they, ‘to drink the water of wisdom at the river Tiberoboam.’ And further on (III. xiii. 12) they ask, ‘How could Alexander be the master of all the world when he has not yet gone beyond the river Tiberoboam?’ The Latin of Julius Valerius gives, in the first case, Tiberunco fluvio; in the second, Tyberoboam. The various readings of the Greek manuscripts, indicated by C. Müller in his edition (Didot, 1846), give Boroam, Baroam, Tiberio-potamos, and lastly (MS. A.) Tibernabon. The site fixed by Cunningham for the city of Taxila is distinctly traversed by a river called Tabrâ Nala, which divides into two the ancient city, and washes the foot of the citadel. The ease of confounding the β with λ in the manuscripts permits the correction of Tibernabon into Tibernalon. The essential part of the name is, moreover, Tabrâ, nala being a designation common to small affluents. The resemblance of the two words Tabrânala and Tibernalos is at once apparent; the persistence of geographical names has nothing surprising in it, especially in India. The city of Takshaśila ought then to be placed definitely on the banks of the Tabrânala (a small affluent of the Haro, which bends its course to the Indus, into which it falls twelve miles below Attock) in the position proposed by General Cunningham.”
Taxila, as Alexander found it, was very populous, and possessed of almost incredible wealth. Pliny states that it was situated on a level where the hills sink down into the plain, while Strabo praises the soil as extremely fertile from the number of its springs and water-courses. The Chinese pilgrim, Hwen Thsiang, by whom it was visited in 630 A.D., and afterwards in 643, confirms what Strabo has reported. Taxila, which in Ptolemy’s Geography appears as Taxiala, represents either the Sanskrit Takshaśilâ, i.e. “hewn stone,” or, more probably, Takshakaśilâ, i.e. “Rock of Takshaka,” the great Nâga King. Others, however, take it to represent the Pali Takkasila, i.e. the rock of the Takkas, a powerful tribe which anciently occupied the regions between the Indus and the Chenâb (v. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xx. p. 343). The famous Aśôka, the grandson of Chandragupta (Sandrokottos), resided in Taxila during the lifetime of his father, Vindusâra, as viceroy of the Panjâb. About the beginning of the second century B.C. Taxila appears to have formed part of the dominions of the Graeco-Baktrian king, Eukratides. In 126 B.C. it was wrested from the Greeks by the Sus or Abars, with whom it remained for about three-quarters of a century, when it was conquered by the Kushân tribe under the great Kanishka. In the year 42 A.D. it is said to have been visited by Apollonios of Tyana and his companion, the Assyrian Damis, who wrote a narrative of the journey, which Philostratos professes to have followed in his life of Apollonios. In 400 A.D. it was visited by Fa-Hian, who calls it Chu-sha-shi-lo, i.e. “the severed head,” the usual name by which Taxila was known to the Buddhists of India (v. Cunningham’s Anc. Geog. of India, pp. 104-121).