HISTORY--PRE-MUHAMMADAN PERIOD, 500 B.C.--1000 A.D.
~In Hindu period relations of Panjáb were with western kingdoms.~--The
large tract included in the British province of the Panjáb which lies
between the Jamna and the Ghagar is, having regard to race, language,
and past history, a part of Hindustán. Where "Panjáb" is used without
qualification in this section the territories west of the Ghagar and
south of Kashmír are intended. The true relations of the Panjáb and
Kashmír during the Hindu period were, except for brief intervals, with
Persia, Afghánistán, and Turkistán rather than with the great kingdoms
founded in the valley of the Ganges and the Jamna.
~Normal division into petty kingdoms and tribal confederacies.~--The
normal state of the Panjáb in early times was to be divided into a
number of small kingdoms and tribal republics. Their names and the areas
which they occupied varied from time to time. Names of kingdoms that
have been rescued from oblivion are Gandhára, corresponding to Pesháwar
and the valley of the Kábul river, Urasa or Hazára, where the name is
still preserved in the Orash plain, Táxila, which may have corresponded
roughly to the present districts of Ráwalpindí and Attock with a small
part of Hazára, Abhisara or the low hills of Jammu, Kashmír, and
Trigartta, with its capital Jalandhara, which occupied most of the
Jalandhar division north of the Sutlej and the states of Chamba, Suket,
and Mandí. The historians of Alexander's campaigns introduce us also to
the kingdoms of the elder Poros on both banks of the Jhelam, of the
younger Poros east of the Chenáb, and of Sophytés (Saubhutí) in the
neighbourhood of the Salt Range. We meet also with tribal confederacies,
such as in Alexander's time those of the Kathaioi on the upper, and of
the Malloi on the lower, Ráví.
~Invasion by Alexander, 327-325 B.C.~--The great Persian king, Darius, in
512 B.C. pushed out the boundary of his empire to the Indus, then
running in a more easternly course than to-day[4]. The army with which
Xerxes invaded Greece included a contingent of Indian bowmen[5]. When
Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire and started on the conquest of
India, the Indus was the boundary of the former. His remarkable campaign
lasted from April, 327 B.C., when he led an army of 50,000 or 60,000
Europeans across the Hindu Kush into the Kábul valley, to October, 325,
when he started from Sindh on his march to Persia through Makrán. Having
cleared his left flank by a campaign in the hills of Buner and Swát, he
crossed the Indus sixteen miles above Attock near Torbela. The King of
Táxila, whose capital was near the Margalla pass on the north border of
the present Ráwalpindí district, had prudently submitted as soon as the
Macedonian army appeared in the Kábul valley. From the Indus Alexander
marched to Táxila, and thence to the Jhelam (Hydaspes), forming a camp
near the site now occupied by the town of that name in the country of
Poros. The great army of the Indian king was drawn up to dispute the
passage probably not very far from the eastern end of the present
railway bridge. Favoured by night and a monsoon rain-storm--it was the
month of July, 326 B.C.--Alexander succeeded in crossing some miles
higher up into the Karrí plain under the low hills of Gujrát. Here,
somewhere near the line now occupied by the upper Jhelam Canal, the
Greek soldiers gave the first example of a feat often repeated since,
the rout of a large and unwieldy Indian army by a small, but mobile and
well-led, European force. Having defeated Poros, Alexander crossed the
Chenáb (Akesines), stormed Sángala, a fort of the Kathaioi on the upper
Ráví (Hydraotes) and advanced as far as the Biás (Hyphasis). But the
weary soldiers insisted that this should be the bourn of their eastward
march, and, after setting up twelve stone altars on the farther side,
Alexander in September, 326 B.C., reluctantly turned back. Before he
left the Panjáb he had hard fighting with the Malloi on the lower Ráví,
and was nearly killed in the storm of one of their forts. Alexander
intended that his conquests should be permanent, and made careful
arrangements for their administration. But his death in June, 323 B.C.,
put an end to Greek rule in India. Chandra Gupta Maurya expelled the
Macedonian garrisons, and some twenty years later Seleukos Nicator had
to cede to him Afghánistán.
~Maurya Dominion and Empire of Asoka, 323-231 B.C.~--Chandra Gupta is
the Sandrakottos, to whose capital at Pataliputra (Patna) Seleukos sent
Megasthenes in 303 B.C. The Greek ambassador was a diligent and truthful
observer, and his notes give a picture of a civilized and complex system
of administration. If Chandra Gupta was the David, his grandson,
Asoka, was the Solomon of the first Hindu Empire. His long reign,
lasting from 273 to 231 B.C., was with one exception a period of
profound peace deliberately maintained by an emperor who, after his
conversion to the teaching of Gautama Buddha, thought war a sin.
Asoka strove to lead his people into the right path by means of pithy
abstracts of the moral law of his master graven on rocks and pillars. It
is curious to remember that this missionary king was peacefully ruling a
great empire in India during the twenty-four years of the struggle
between Rome and Carthage, which we call the first Punic War. Of the
four Viceroys who governed the outlying provinces of the empire one had
his headquarters at Táxila. One of the rock edicts is at Mansehra in
Hazára and another at Sháhbázgarhí in Pesháwar. From this time and for
many centuries the dominant religion in the Panjáb was Buddhism, but the
religion of the villages may then have been as remote from the State
creed as it is to-day from orthodox Brahmanism.
~Graeco-Bactrian and Graeco-Parthian Rule.~--The Panjáb slipped from the
feeble grasp of Asoka's successors, and for four centuries it looked
not to the Ganges, but to the Kábul and the Oxus rivers.
[Illustration: Fig. 57. Coin--obverse and reverse of Menander.]
Up to the middle of the first century of our era it was first under
Graeco-Bactrian, and later under Graeco-Parthian, rule directly, or
indirectly through local rulers with Greek names or Sáka Satraps. The
Sákas, one of the central Asian shepherd hordes, were pushed out of
their pastures on the upper Jaxartes by another horde, the Yuechí.
Shadowy Hellenist Princes have left ~us~ only their names on coins; one
Menander, who ruled about 150 B.C., is an exception. He anticipated the
feats of later rulers of Kábul by a temporary conquest of North-Western
India, westwards to the Jamna and southwards to the sea.
~The Kushán Dynasty.~--The Yuechí in turn were driven southward to the
Oxus and the Kábul valley and under the Kushán dynasty established their
authority in the Panjáb about the middle of the first century. The most
famous name is that of Kanishka, who wrested from China Kashgár,
Yarkand, and Khotan, and assembled ~a~ notable council of sages of the law
in Kashmír. His reign may be dated from 120 to 150 A.D. His capital was
at Purushapura (Pesháwar), near which he built the famous relic tower of
Buddha, 400 feet high. Beside the tower was a large monastery still
renowned in the ninth and tenth centuries as a home of sacred learning.
The rule of Kushán kings in the Panjáb lasted till the end of the first
quarter of the third century. To their time belong the Buddhist
sculptures found in the tracts near their Pesháwar capital (see also
page 204).
~The Gupta Empire.~--Of the century preceding the establishment in 320
B.C. of the Gupta dynasty at Patna we know nothing. The Panjáb probably
again fell under the sway of petty rájas and tribal confederacies,
though the Kushán rule was maintained in Pesháwar till 465 A.D., when it
was finally blotted out by the White Huns. These savage invaders soon
after defeated Skanda Gupta, and from this blow the Gupta Empire never
recovered. At the height of its power in 400 A.D. under Chandra Gupta
II, known as Vikramaditya, who is probably the original of the
Bikramajít of Indian legends, it may have reached as far west as the
Chenáb.
~The White Huns or Ephthalites.~--In the beginning of the sixth century
the White Hun, Mahirakula, ruled the Panjáb from Sakala, the modern
Siálkot. He was a worshipper of Siva, and a deadly foe of the
Buddhist cult, and has been described as a monster of cruelty.
The short-lived dominion of the White Huns was destroyed by the Turks
and Persians about the year 565 A.D.
~Panjáb in seventh century A.D.~--From various sources, one of the most
valuable being the Memoirs of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang,
who travelled in India from 630 to 644 A.D., we know something of
Northern India in the first half of the seventh century. Hiuen Tsang was
at Kanauj as a guest of a powerful king named Harsha, whose first
capital was at Thanesar, and who held a suzerainty over all the rájas
from the Brahmaputra to the Biás. West of that river the king of Kashmír
was also overlord of Táxila, Urasa, Parnotsa (Punch), Rájapurí (Rajaurí)
and Sinhapura, which seems to have included the Salt Range. The Pesháwar
valley was probably ruled by the Turkí Shahiya kings of Kábul. The rest
of the Panjáb was divided between a kingdom called by Hiuen Tsang
Tsekhia, whose capital was somewhere near Siálkot, and the important
kingdom of Sindh, in which the Indus valley as far north as the Salt
Range was included. Harsha died in 647 A.D. and his empire collapsed.
~Kashmír under Hindu Kings.~--For the next century China was at the height
of its power. It established a suzerainty over Kashmír, Udyána (Swát),
Yasín, and Chitrál. The first was at this period a powerful Hindu
kingdom. Its annals, as recorded in Kalhana's Rájataranginí, bear
henceforward a real relation to history. In 733 A.D. King Muktapida
Lálitáditya received investiture from the Chinese Emperor. Seven years
later he defeated the King of Kanauj on the Ganges. A ruler who carried
his arms so far afield must have been very powerful in the Northern
Panjáb. The remains of the wonderful Mártand temple, which he built in
honour of the Sun God, are a standing memorial of his greatness. The
history of Kashmír under its Hindu kings for the next 400 years is for
the most part that of a wretched people ground down by cruel tyrants. A
notable exception was Avantidharman--855-883 A.D.--whose minister,
Suyya, carried out very useful drainage and irrigation works.
[Illustration: Fig. 58. Mártand Temple.]
~The Panjáb, 650-1000 A.D.~--We know little of Panjáb history in the 340
years which elapsed between the death of Harsha and the beginning of the
Indian raids of the Sultans of Ghazní in 986-7 A.D. The conquest of the
kingdom of Sindh by the Arab general, Muhammad Kásim, occurred some
centuries earlier, in 712 A.D. Multán, the city of the Sun-worshippers,
was occupied, and part at least of the Indus valley submitted to the
youthful conqueror. He and his successors in Sindh were tolerant rulers.
No attempt was made to occupy the Central Panjáb, and when the Turkish
Sultán, Sabaktagin, made his first raid into India in 986-7 A.D., his
opponent was a powerful rája named Jaipál, who ruled over a wide
territory extending from the Hakra to the frontier hills on the
north-west. His capital was at Bhatinda. Just about the time when the
rulers of Ghazní were laying the train which ended at Delhi and made it
the seat of a great Muhammadan Empire, that town was being founded in
993-4 A.D. by the Tunwar Rájputs, who then held sway in that
neighbourhood.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: See Sykes' _History of Persia_, pp. 179-180; also Herodotos
III. 94 and 98 and IV. 44.]
[Footnote 5: "The Indians clad with garments made of cotton had bows of
cane and arrows of cane tipped with iron."--Herodotos VII. 65.]