Paurava Kingdom

A kingdom in the Punjab whose ruler lost a battle to Alexander and was given a larger kingdom for the way he lost it. The Pauravas held the land between the Jhelum and the Chenab, one of several independent states in the north-west that the Persians had never fully absorbed and that the Mauryas had not yet reached. In 326 BC Alexander crossed the Jhelum in a night storm several miles upstream, leaving campfires and a decoy force opposite the Indian camp. Porus fought the resulting battle at Hydaspes with about two hundred war elephants, which broke the Macedonian phalanx's formation and terrified the cavalry horses, and it was the hardest battle Alexander fought in Asia. Bucephalus died of wounds after it. The exchange afterwards is the reason the story survives. Asked how he wished to be treated, Porus is reported to have said: as a king. Alexander restored his kingdom and added territory to it, and made him a satrap - a settlement that says as much about how thin Macedonian control of the Punjab actually was as it does about magnanimity. It was at the next river, the Beas, that the army refused to go further, having heard what the Nanda kingdom of Magadha could put in the field. Porus held his territory until he was assassinated by a Macedonian commander around 317, and the region passed to Chandragupta Maurya within a few years. The battle is also the first securely dated event in Indian history, which is why it matters out of all proportion to its scale. Indian sources say nothing about Alexander at all; everything known comes from Greek and Roman accounts written centuries later, and aligning them with the Indian dynastic lists is how the chronology of the whole subcontinent before the Mauryas is anchored. Porus is known only by a Greek rendering of his name.

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