Whether Bactria formed part of the Median empire, we do not know; but it was subjugated by Cyrus and from then formed one of the satrapies of the Persian empire. When Alexander had defeated Darius III., his murderer Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, tried to organize a national resistance in the east. But Bactria was conquered by Alexander without much difficulty; it was only farther in the north, beyond the Oxus, in Sogdiana, that he met with strong resistance. Bactria became a province of the Macedonian empire, and soon came under the rule of Seleucus, king of Asia (see SELEUCID DYNASTY and HELLENISM). The Macedonians (and especially Seleucus I. and his son Antiochus I.) founded a great many Greek towns in eastern Iran, and the Greek language became for some time dominant there. The many difficulties against which the Seleucid kings had to fight and the attacks of Ptolemy II., gave to Diodotus, satrap of Bactria, the opportunity of making himself independent (about 255 B.C.) and of conquering Sogdiana. He was the founder of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Diodotus and his successors were able to maintain themselves against the attacks of the Seleucids; and when Antiochus III., "the Great," had been defeated by the Romans (190 B.C.), the Bactrian king Euthydemus and his son Demetrius crossed the Hindu Kush and began the conquest of eastern Iran and the Indus valley. For a short time they wielded great power; a great Greek empire seemed to have arisen far in the East. But this empire was torn by internal dissensions and continual usurpations. When Demetrius advanced far into India one of his generals, Eucratides, made himself king of Bactria, and soon in every province there arose new usurpers, who proclaimed themselves kings and fought one against the other. Most of them we know only by their coins, a great many of which are found in Afghanistan and India. By these wars the dominant position of the Greeks was undermined even more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. After Demetrius and Eucratides, the kings abandoned the Attic standard of coinage and introduced a native standard; at the same time the native language came into use by the side of the Greek. On the coins struck in India, the well-known Indian alphabet (called Brahmi by the Indians, the older form of the Devanagari) is used; on the coins struck in Afghanistan and in the Punjab the Kharosh[t.]hi alphabet, which is derived directly from the Aramaic and was in common use in the western parts of India, as is shown by one of the inscriptions of Asoka and by the recent discovery of many fragments of Indian manuscripts, written in Kharosh[t.]hi, in eastern Turkestan (formerly this alphabet has been called Arianic or Bactrian Pali; the true name is derived from Indian sources). Entry: BACTRIA
ATTOCK, a town and fort of British India, in the Rawalpindi district of the Punjab, 47 m. by rail from Peshawar, and situated on the eastern bank of the Indus. Pop. (1901) 2822. The place is of both political and commercial importance, as the Indus is here crossed by the military and trade route through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. Alexander the Great, Tamerlane and Nadir Shah are believed to have successively crossed the Indus at or about this spot in their respective invasions of India. The river runs past Attock in a deep rapid channel about 200 yds. broad, but is easily crossed in boats or on inflated skins of oxen. The rocky gorges through which it flows, with a distant view of the Hindu Kush, form some of the finest scenery in the world. In 1883 an iron girder bridge of five spans was opened, which carries the North-Western railway to Peshawar, and has also a subway for wheeled traffic and foot passengers. The fort of Attock was built by the emperor Akbar in 1581, on a low hillock beside the river. The walls are of polished stone, and the whole structure is handsome; but from a military point of view it is of little importance, being commanded by a hill, from which it is divided only by a ravine. On the opposite side of the river is the village of Khairabad, with a fort, also erected by Akbar according to some, or by Nadir Shah according to others. The military importance of Attock has diminished, but it still has a small detachment of British troops. Entry: ATTOCK
ASOKA, a famous Buddhist emperor of India who reigned from 264 to 228 or 227 B.C. Thirty-five of his inscriptions on rocks or pillars or in caves still exist (see INSCRIPTIONS: _Indian_), and they are among the most remarkable and interesting of Buddhist monuments (see BUDDHISM). Asoka was the grandson of Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya (Peacock) dynasty, who had wrested the Indian provinces of Alexander the Great from the hands of Seleucus, and he was the son of Bindusara, who succeeded his father Chandragupta, by a lady from Champa. The Greeks do not mention him and the Brahmin books ignore him, but the Buddhist chronicles and legends tell us much about him. The inscriptions, which contain altogether about five thousand words, are entirely of religious import, and their references to worldly affairs are incidental. They begin in the thirteenth year of his reign, and tell us that in the ninth year he had invaded Kalinga, and had been so deeply impressed by the horrors involved in warfare that he had then given up the desire for conquest, and devoted himself to conquest by "religion." What the religion was is explained in the edicts. It is purely ethical, independent alike of theology and ritual, and is the code of morals as laid down in the Buddhist sacred books for laymen. He further tells us that in the ninth year of his reign he formally joined the Buddhist community as a layman, in the eleventh year he became a member of the order, and in the thirteenth he "set out for the Great Wisdom" (the _Sambodhi_), which is the Buddhist technical term for entering upon the well-known, eightfold path to Nirvana. One of the edicts is addressed to the order, and urges upon its members and the laity alike the learning and rehearsal of passages from the Buddhist scriptures. Two others are proclamations commemorating visits paid by the king, one to the dome erected over the ashes of Konagamana, the Buddha, another to the birthplace of Gotama, the Buddha (q.v.). Three very short ones are dedications of caves to the use of an order of recluses. The rest either enunciate the religion as explained above, or describe the means adopted by the king for propagating it, or acting in accordance with it. These means are such as the digging of wells, planting medicinal herbs, and trees for shade, sending out of missionaries, appointment of special officers to supervise charities, and so on. The missionaries were sent to Kashmir, to the Himalayas, to the border lands on the Indus, to the coast of Burma, to south India and to Ceylon. And the king claims that missions sent by him to certain Greek kingdoms that he names had resulted in the folk there conforming themselves to his religion. The extent of Asoka's dominion included all India from the thirteenth degree of latitude up to the Himalayas, Nepal, Kashmir, the Swat valley, Afghanistan as far as the Hindu Kush, Sind and Baluchistan. It was thus as large as, or perhaps somewhat larger than, British India before the conquest of Burma. He was undoubtedly the most powerful sovereign of his time and the most remarkable and imposing of the native rulers of India. "If a man's fame," says Köppen, "can be measured by the number of hearts who revere his memory, by the number of lips who have mentioned, and still mention him with honour, Asoka is more famous than Charlemagne or Caesar." At the same time it is probable that, like Constantine's patronage of Christianity, his patronage of Buddhism, then the most rising and influential faith in India, was not unalloyed with political motives, and it is certain that his vast benefactions to the Buddhist cause were at least one of the causes that led to its decline. Entry: ASOKA
INDO-SCYTHIANS, a name commonly given to various tribes from central Asia, who invaded northern India and founded kingdoms there. They comprise the Sakas, the Yue-Chi or Kushans and the Ephthalites or Hunas. Entry: INDO
The dynasties of the Andhras in the centre and south and of the Kushans in the north came to an end almost at the same time (c. A.D. 236-225 respectively). The history of India during the remainder of the 3rd century is all but a blank, a confused record of meaningless names and disconnected events; and it Is not until the opening of the 4th century that the veil is lifted, with the rise to supreme power in Magadha (A.D. 320) of Chandragupta I., the founder of the Gupta dynasty and empire (see GUPTA), the most extensive since the days of Asoka. He was succeeded by Chandragupta II. Vikramaditya, whose court and administration are described by the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien, and who is supposed to have been the original of the mythical king Vikramaditya, who figures largely in Indian legends. The later Guptas were overwhelmed (c. 470) by the White Huns, or Ephthalites (q.v.), who after breaking the power of Persia and assailing the Kushan kingdom of Kabul, had poured into India, conquered Sind, and established their rule as far south as the Nerbudda. The dominion of the Huns in India, as elsewhere, was a mere organization for brigandage on an imperial scale and it did not long survive. It was shaken (c. 528) by the defeat, at the hands of tributary princes goaded to desperation, of Mihiragula, the most powerful and bloodthirsty of its rulers--the "Attila of India." It collapsed with the overthrow of the central power of the White Huns on the Oxus (c. 565) by the Turks. Though, however, this stopped the incursions of Asiatic hordes from the north-west, and India was to remain almost exempt from foreign invasion for some 500 years, the Ephthalite conquest added new and permanent elements to the Indian population. After the fall of the central power, the scattered Hunnish settlers, like so many before them, became rapidly Hinduized, and are probably the ancestors of some of the most famous Rajput clans.[8] Entry: HISTORY
Ibn Batuta, the great Arab traveller, is separated by a wide space of time from his countrymen already mentioned, and he finds his proper place in a chronological notice after the days of Marco Polo, for he did not begin his wanderings until 1325, his career thus coinciding in time with the fabled journeyings of Sir John Mandeville. While Arab learning flourished during the darkest ages of European ignorance, the last of the Arab geographers lived to see the dawn of the great period of the European awakening. Ibn Batuta went by land from Tangier to Cairo, then visited Syria, and performed the pilgrimages to Medina and Mecca. After exploring Persia, and again residing for some time at Mecca, he made a voyage down the Red sea to Yemen, and travelled through that country to Aden. Thence he visited the African coast, touching at Mombasa and Quiloa, and then sailed across to Ormuz and the Persian Gulf. He crossed Arabia from Bahrein to Jidda, traversed the Red sea and the desert to Syene, and descended the Nile to Cairo. After this he revisited Syria and Asia Minor, and crossed the Black sea, the desert from Astrakhan to Bokhara, and the Hindu Kush. He was in the service of Muhammad Tughluk, ruler of Delhi, about eight years, and was sent on an embassy to China, in the course of which the ambassadors sailed down the west coast of India to Calicut, and then visited the Maldive Islands and Ceylon. Ibn Batuta made the voyage through the Malay Archipelago to China, and on his return he proceeded from Malabar to Bagdad and Damascus, ultimately reaching Fez, the capital of his native country, in November 1349. After a journey into Spain he set out once more for Central Africa in 1352, and reached Timbuktu and the Niger, returning to Fez in 1353. His narrative was committed to writing from his dictation. Entry: PROGRESS
BADAKSHAN, including WAKHAN, a province on the north-east frontier of Afghanistan, adjoining Russian territory. Its north-eastern boundaries were decided by the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1873, which expressly acknowledged "Badakshan with its dependent district Wakhan" as "fully belonging to the amir of Kabul," and limited it to the left or southern bank of the Oxus. Much of the interior of the province is still unexplored. On the west, Badakshan is bounded by a line which crosses the Turkestan plains southwards from the junction of the Kunduz and Oxus rivers till it touches the eastern water-divide of the Tashkurghan river (here called the Koh-i-Chungar), and then runs south-east, crossing the Sarkhab affluent of the Khanabad (Kunduz), till it strikes the Hindu Kush. The southern boundary is carried along the crest of the Hindu Kush as far as the Khawak pass, leading from Badakshan into the Panjshir valley. Beyond this it is indefinite. It is known that the Kafirs occupy the crest of the Hindu Kush eastwards of the Khawak, but how far they extend north of the main watershed is not ascertainable. The southern limits of Badakshan become definite again at the Dorah pass. The Dorah connects Zebak and Ishkashim at the elbow, or bend, of the Oxus with the Lutku valley leading to Chitral. From the Dorah eastwards the crest of the Hindu Kush again becomes the boundary till it effects a junction with the Muztagh and Sarikol ranges, which shut off China from Russia and India. Skirting round the head of the Tagdumbash Pamir, it finally merges into the Pamir boundary, and turns westwards, following the course of the Oxus, to the junction of that river and the Khanabad (Kunduz). So far as the northern boundary follows the Oxus stream, under the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush, it is only separated by the length of these slopes (some 8 or 10 m.) from the southern boundary along the crest. Thus Badakshan reaches out an arm into the Pamirs eastwards--bottle-shaped--narrow at the neck (represented by the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush), and swelling out eastwards so as to include a part of the great and little Pamirs. Before the boundary settlement of 1873 the small states of Roshan and Shignan extended to the left bank of the Oxus, and the province of Darwaz, on the other hand, extended to the right bank. Now, however, the Darwaz extension northwards is exchanged for the Russian Pamir extension westwards, and the river throughout is the boundary between Russian and Afghan territory; the political boundaries of those provinces and those of Wakhan being no longer coincident with their geographical limits. Entry: BADAKSHAN
The beys became divided in their wishes, one party being desirous of co-operating with the British, the other with the pasha. These delays proved ruinous to their cause; and General Fraser, despairing of their assistance, evacuated Alexandria on the 14th of September. From that date to the spring of 1811 the beys from time to time relinquished certain of their demands; the pasha on his part granted them what before had been withheld; the province of the Fayum, and part of those of Giza and Beni-Suef, were ceded to Shahin; and a great portion of the Sa'id, on the condition of paying the land-tax, to the others. Many of them took up their abode in Cairo, but tranquillity was not secured; several times they met the pasha's forces in battle and once gained a signal victory. Early in the year 1811, the preparations for an expedition against the Wahhabis in Arabia being complete, all the Mameluke beys then in Cairo were invited to the ceremony of investing Mehemet Ali's favourite son, Tusun, with a pelisse and the command of the army. As on the former occasion, the unfortunate Mamelukes fell into the snare. On the 1st of March, Shahin Bey and the other chiefs (one only excepted) repaired with their retinues to the citadel, and were courteously received by the pasha. Having taken coffee, they formed in procession, and, preceded and followed by the pasha's troops, slowly descended the steep and narrow road leading to the great gate of the citadel; but as soon as the Mamelukes arrived at the gate it was suddenly closed before them. The last of those to leave before the gate was shut were Albanians under Salih Kush. To these troops their chief now made known the pasha's orders to massacre all the Mamelukes within the citadel; therefore, having returned by another way, they gained the summits of the walls and houses that hem in the road in which the Mamelukes were confined, and some stationed themselves upon the eminences of the rock through which that road is partly cut. Thus securely placed, they began a heavy fire on their victims; and immediately the troops who closed the procession, and who had the advantage of higher ground, followed their example. Of the betrayed chiefs, many were laid low in a few moments; some, dismounting, and throwing off their outer robes, vainly sought, sword in hand, to return, and escape by some other gate. The few who regained the summit of the citadel experienced the same fate as the rest, for no quarter was given. Four hundred and seventy Mamelukes entered the citadel; and of these very few, if any, escaped. One of these is said to have been a bey. According to some, he leapt his horse from the ramparts, and alighted uninjured, though the horse was killed by the fall; others say that he was prevented from joining his comrades, and discovered the treachery while waiting without the gate. He fled and made his way to Syria. This massacre was the signal for an indiscriminate slaughter of the Mamelukes throughout Egypt, orders to this effect being transmitted to every governor; and in Cairo itself the houses of the beys were given over to the soldiery. During the two following days the pasha and his son Tusun rode about the streets and tried to stop the atrocities; but order was not restored until 500 houses had been completely pillaged. The heads of the beys were sent to Constantinople. Entry: A
MAIWAND, a village of Afghanistan, 50 m. N.W. of Kandahar. It is chiefly notable for the defeat inflicted on a British brigade under General Burrows by Ayub Khan on the 27th of July 1880 during the second Afghan War (see AFGHANISTAN). Ayub Khan, Shere Ali's younger son, who had been holding Herat during the British operations at Kabul and Kandahar, set out towards Kandahar with a small army in June 1880, and a brigade under General Burrows was detached from Kandahar to oppose him. Burrows advanced to the Helmund, opposite Girishk, to oppose Ayub Khan, but was there deserted by the troops of Shere Ali, the wali of Kandahar, and forced to retreat to Kushk-i-Nakhud, half way to Kandahar. In order to prevent Ayub passing to Ghazni, Burrows advanced to Maiwand on the 27th of July, and attacked Ayub, who had already seized that place. The Afghans, who numbered 25,000, outflanked the British, the artillery expended their ammunition, and the native portion of the Brigade got out of hand and pressed back on the few British infantry. The British were completely routed, and had to thank the apathy of the Afghans for escaping total annihilation. Of the 2476 British troops engaged, 934 were killed and 175 wounded or missing. This defeat necessitated Sir Frederick Roberts' famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Entry: MAIWAND
_The Pisaca Languages._--Before proceeding farther, it is advisable to discuss the fate of another small group of languages spoken in the extreme north-west of India. After the great fission which separated the main body of the Indo-Aryans from the Iranians, but before all the special phonetic characteristics of Iranian speech had developed, another horde of invaders crossed the Hindu Kush from the Pamirs, journeying directly south. They occupied the submontane tract, including the country round Chitral and Gilgit, Kashmir and Kafiristan. Some even followed the course of the Indus as far as Sind, and formed colonies there and in the western Punjab. Here they mingled with the Indo-Aryans who had come down the Kabul valley, and to a certain extent infected the local dialect with their idioms. How far their influence extended over the rest of India is undecided, and will probably never be known, but traces of it have been detected by some inquirers even in the dialects of modern Marathi. Those who remained behind in the hill country, the whole of which is popularly known as Dardistan, were isolated by the inhospitable nature of their home and by their own savage character. They seem to have had customs allied to cannibalism, and in later Indian literature legends grew around them as a race of demons called _Pisacas_, [Greek: hômophagoi], who spoke a barbaric tongue called _Paisaci_. This language appears now and then in the Sanskrit drama, and Sanskrit philologists wrote still-extant grammatical notices of its peculiarities. These show that it possessed an extremely archaic character, and the same fact is prominent in the Pisaca languages of the present day. Some words which were spoken in the oldest time are preserved with hardly a change of letter, while in India proper the corresponding forms have either disappeared altogether or have been so changed as to be hardly recognizable at first sight. The principal modern Pisaca languages are three or four spoken in Kafiristan, Khowar of Chitral, Shina of Gilgit, Kashmiri, and Kohistani. The last two are border tongues, much mixed with the neighbouring languages of India proper. The only one which has any literature is Kashmiri (q.v.). The rest are entirely uncultivated. Their general character may be described as partly Indian and partly Iranian, although they have in their isolated position developed some phonetic laws of their own. Entry: INDO
_Historical Notices._--Hindu Kush is the Caucasus of Alexander's historians. It is also included in the Paropamisus, though the latter term embraces more, Caucasus being apparently used only when the alpine barrier is in question. Whether the name was given in mere vanity to the barrier which Alexander passed (as Arrian and others repeatedly allege), or was founded also on some verbal confusion, cannot be stated. It was no doubt regarded (and perhaps not altogether untruly) as a part of a great alpine zone believed to traverse Asia from west to east, whether called Taurus, Caucasus or Imaus. Arrian himself applies Caucasus distinctly to the Himalaya also. The application of the name Tanais to the Syr seems to indicate a real confusion with Colchian Caucasus. Alexander, after building an Alexandria at its foot (probably at Hupian near Charikar), crossed into Bactria, first reaching Drapsaca, or Adrapsa. This has been interpreted as Anderab, in which case he probably crossed the Khawak Pass, but the identity is uncertain. The ancient Zend name is, according to Rawlinson, Paresina, the essential part of Paropamisus; this accounts for the great Asiastic _Parnassus_ of Aristotle, and the _Pho-lo-sin-a_ of Hsüan Tsang. Entry: HINDU
Meanwhile, the Yue-chi had themselves crossed the Hindu Kush to the invasion of north-western India (see YUE-CHI). They were originally divided into five tribes, which were united under the rule of Kadphises I.[5] (? A.D. 45-85), the founder of the Kushan dynasty, who conquered the Kabul valley, annihilating what remained there of the Greek dominion, and swept away the petty Indo-Greek and Indo-Parthian principalities on the Indus. His successors completed the conquest of north-western India from the delta of the Indus eastwards probably as far as Benares. One effect of the Yue-chi conquests was to open up a channel of commerce with the Roman empire by the northern trade routes; and the Indian embassy which, according to Dion. Cassius (ix. 58), visited Trajan after his arrival at Rome in A.D. 99, was probably[6] sent by Kadphises II. (Ooemokadphises) to announce his conquest of north-western India. The most celebrated of the Kushan kings, however, was Kanishka, whose date is still a matter of controversy.[7] From his capital at Purushapura (Peshawar) he not only maintained his hold on north-western India, but conquered Kashmir, attacked Pataliputra, carried on a successful war with the Parthians, and led an army across the appalling passes of the Taghdumbash Pamir to the conquest of Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan. It is not, however, as a conqueror that Kanishka mainly lives on in tradition, but as a Buddhist monarch, second in reputation only to Asoka, and as the convener of the celebrated council of Kashmir already mentioned. Entry: HISTORY
Throughout this vast space of elevated plateau and mountain face geologists now trace a system of main chains, or axes, extending from the Hindu Kush to Assam, arranged in approximately parallel lines, and traversed at intervals by main lines of drainage obliquely. Godwin-Austen indicates six of these geological axes as follows: Entry: HIMALAYA