~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 Kabul valley, to October, 325, when he started from Sindh on his march to Persia through Makran. Having cleared his left flank by a campaign in the hills of Buner and Swat, he crossed the Indus sixteen miles above Attock near Torbela. The King of Taxila, whose capital was near the Margalla pass on the north border of the present Rawalpindi district, had prudently submitted as soon as the Macedonian army appeared in the Kabul valley. From the Indus Alexander marched to Taxila, 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 Karri plain under the low hills of Gujrat. 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 Chenab (Akesines), stormed Sangala, a fort of the Kathaioi on the upper Ravi (Hydraotes) and advanced as far as the Bias (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 Panjab he had hard fighting with the Malloi on the lower Ravi, 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 Afghanistan.