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NOVEMBER, 1905.)
ALEXANDER, PORUS, AND THE PANJAB.
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moved eastwards, while the Satlaj and other Panjab rivers have moved considerably to the west."
A tourist who keeps his eyes open will in time become a good judge of things which are not likely to be found in histories. When he sees a new church in an old churchyard be has not much difficulty in forming an imaginary picture of the old church, and in the same way can decide whether a castle attributed to Sher Shah or Akbar occupies an ancient site. In what follows, the reader must suppose, if no authority is quoted, that the antiquity of a town or road is inferred from some traces of the works of a bygone age. The most conspicuous testimony to the existence of ancient habitation is a mound. Villages often stand upon mounds, and mounds mark the site of deserted villages. Such mounds are formed antomatically from the sun-dried mad with which the houses were built and repaired. The lofty mounds which were the citadels of ancient capitals are in part at least artificial. It is certain that these high places were already in existence when Alexander invaded the Pañjáb, and it is dov.btfol whether any have been built up since. It would seem that after burnt brioks came izin use, a few centuries before the Christian era, it was no longer the fashion to heap up a linge mound for a fortress.
General Cunningham, who made a careful survey of Shôrkôt, found that the towers and walls were formed of solid masses of sun-dried bricks faced with burnt bricks. There wero numerous walls of both kinds of bricks down to 50 and 60 feet below the main level of the fort, which is itself 100 feet high. M. Foucher remarks that the outline of the BAIA-Hisar at Chârsada is strangely like the mounds of Babylonia. The interior, as is the case with similar mounds in Swât, consists of alternate layers of earth and of boulders collected from the bed of the river. Only he seems to have been misled by his Buddhist pre-occupations as to the age of the mound, which assuredly is much older than the stúpa seen by Hiuen-tsang.
From the study of ancient mounds, as well as for other reasons, we know that the whole of the lower Panjab, until recently & waterless waste, was covered by a dense population two thousand years ago. As Cunningham jnstly remarks, the chief towns were near the great rivers. So were Baghdad and Babylon. But the choice of roads from the North-West to Rajputâna or the valley of the Ganges would of course depend mach upon the state of the lower plains of the Pañjab. In 1832 Barnes, travelling by the old road from Lahore to Pind Dadan Khân, passed through a desert where water was drawn from a depth of 65 feet, and this seems to have been the character of the country for at least a thousand years.
Anoient roads may be recognised in many ways. Besides the mounds which have been already described, there are holy shrines with legends attached to them and ruins of some sort in brick or stone. In the Northern Pañjáb all roads converge upon Lahore. Multán is the centre of another system. It may be doubtful whether Shôrk őt was the capital of a kingdom or a frontier fortress. Every strong place seems to have been either tbe one or the other.
"It may create a feeling of disappointment," says Pergusson," in some minds when they are told that there is no stone architecture in India older than two and a half centuries before the Christian era. According to Arrian, in Alexander's time cities near rivers or the sea were built of wood, but in 'high places, ont of the reach of floods, of brick and clay.10 In the District of Peshawar, the ancient Gandhára, a peculiar kind of Buddhist masonry is very abundant. It has been described by Foucher" and by Cole. Irregular blocks of partially squared stone are evenly laid in rows, and the interstices are filled ap with horizontal flakes of Blate. These Buddhist walls seem always to be coeval with the Græco-Buddhist sculptures, which Fergusson rightly judges to be Byzantine in character, or of a date corresponding to that of a specimen from Hashtnagar, of which a photograph is given in the Early History of . Ibid. Vol. XIII. p. 10.
• Reports, Vol. V. p. 97. Geographie ancienne du Gandhdra, p. 18.
• Burnes, I. p. 49. • Indias Architecture, p. 1.
** Indica, Chap. X. Il Gandhara, p. 34.
