The author is missing some other things that alexandar's men would not have seen on their journey from greece to india.

[1] crocodiles [2] tigers [3] monkeys [4] venomous snakes ( this is a major problem for moving at night) [5] mosquitoes [6] diseases ( with so much life, comes diseases )

He says alexandar would have won the war easily if he had attacked two months earlier. He had no idea about the heat in april and march. His horses don't stand a chance in the punjab heat. They would have lost more easily if they went two months earlier.

Alexander was accustomed to fight in temperate regions and deserts, where horses are very effective. Where as india is either tropical or sub-tropical, where horses don't do very well. What was once his weapon, has become his weakness.

Actually, the author is right. In Punjab, June and July is peak summer. April is quite pleasant comparatively. In the Southern part of India, April and May are horrible (I live there).

There was an unprecedented failure of correlation vs causation and it was based on crocodiles. The whole idea was that the Indian Ocean was a lake and they would circumvent it, reach the top of the Nile and then sail to down to return to the Greek territory. Unfortunately this geographical mistake was based on the assumption that crocodiles (and lotus plants) they saw in India existed only in upper Egypt only so the two regions were somehow connected.

Regarding Alexanders army, most of it was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and then it was mostly local former persian empire subjects and officers (heteroi - εταιροι) with Macedonian Generals. They probably had a fair knowledge of the situation. The Persians said that they had already occupied some part of Indian territory but there are no Archeological evidence of sustained Persian presence after the Khyber Pass.

> 50,000 Infantry

How verifiable are these numbers? This seems like an awfully large army, given the context.

To put this in some perspective, that's about the size of the army Hannibal entered Gaul with in the second punic war [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Punic_War

Not at all verifiable, at the very least they were rounded up, at worst they are cited from some hagiography (the source of much history at the time) and massively inflated. The citation on the Wikipedia page with such authority is from a massive history of the entire world in 40 volumes based on secondary sources by diodorus 300 years later, so no, it's not likely to be accurate or useful in comparisons with other times. History as a discipline based on verified facts is a relatively modern invention.

That's a reasonable army for the time period. I don't know how historians make their estimates but often these are just estimates. Many armies in the time period have 30-50-80K men. In Medieval times getting an army of 20K was a huge deal, most armies were 10K.

Different economics, populations, fighting styles, time periods. They probably estimate army size by time period sometimes.

Why was it easier to field large armies in Alexander's time than in the medieval period? Does it have anything to do with the feudal system? Or was it that weapons, armor, and equipment was more expensive in the medieval times. Last guess: training was more valuable in the medieval times than it was earlier, so it was more effective to field smaller armies of better trained and equipped men than a horde of untrained peasants with archaic weapons (because that's all they could afford.) ?

In Medieval Europe there was less surplus, a crappier economy, a population closer to the edge. Rome linked prosperous lands in Italy, Egypt, Gaul, North Africa into one empire. Romans overfarmed Italy at their peak and depended on Egypt for grain. After 500AD these luxuries could not be sustained. Economies became local and if you mismanaged your farmland you had to live with it. Italy's recovered by ~1000AD. Much of Europe faced similar issues. Cities declined all over around 500 because farmers could not produce the same surplus locally.

Most fighting inside Europe was done with 5-20K armies during 400-1500. It started with the Romans. As they faced rebel "Romans" ever more frequently, they faced similarly equipped and trained men so results of big battles were unpredictable. They would favor skirmishes over big decisive battles. And if your fighting is indecisive, why field large armies at great expense?

The well trained, well armed foot soldiers, "man of arms" was equivalent to a Roman legionnaire and formed the basis of these armies. At the time a full suit of mail armor cost as much as a Ferrari today. Now this is an issue of economics because there were few complaints about the price of similar kit from Roman times.

Well trained and equipped armies could face numerically superior "peasant uprisings" with predictable results, just like in Roman times. Romans faced a lot of poorly armed opponents in Europe.

BUT it's hard to say what these trends were driven by. There was a lot of traditionalism around warfare.

Macedonian armies were actually poorly equipped early on. They used long pikes instead of reasonable spears like the Greeks. Macedonians wore rags for armor, while some Greeks they faced wore 70 lb almost full body armor. And similarly in Europe, states started fielding cheap pikemen combined with crossbowmen, archers, muskets and a few well trained melee fighters.

Such armies could stand up to more expensive Ferrari suited, trained all their lives, born into a higher class men. It was probably the noise of firearms that changed military traditionalism. But handheld firearms of the period were mostly noise and smoke. And as Macedonians demonstrate not really necessary to face better armed and trained opponents.

But I don't think any historian could untangle all the factors without a Matrix level simulator, complex systems and all that.

In Medieval times there were more local conflicts than large scale invasions - it was a time of fragmented states (that's what the feudal system is about).

Plus, in Medieval times, people were paid to wage war, therefore keeping a large army was extremely expensive, and often you did not keep an army on your own but hired mercenaries to wage war with/for you. In Antiquity, I believe the reward system was different.

It pays here to look at a map of how small an average principality would be in medieval times versus how large Alexander's empire was.

The population densities were, it should be noted, not that different in the two periods. It was not until the mid-1700s that we started to see sustained significant improvements in the carrying capacity of the land thanks to agricultural improvements in England. Until then the carrying capacity would vary, higher during a warm period in the 1200s, falling significantly when things cooled down again in the 1300s.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%9313... to get a sense of how much worse life was in the 1300s than the 1200s.

In Medieval Europe the King was not that important figure and some Kings had to make agreements so that the nobles with their armies would not leave the battle if they did not like it. A very good analysis in a book by Barbara Tuchman of the "Guns of August" fame is in another of her books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Distant_Mirror

Since we are now in the business of citing wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Hydaspes

Remember, this was india and gathering a large, untrained army was probably not that hard (the number of casualties speak for themselves)

> Since we are now in the business of citing wikipedia

The snark is not constructive.

This number is vastly exaggerated. Porus was small king of a minor principality( modern day equivalent of a district). References: Ancient India : By R C Majumdar, Wonder That Was India : By A.L.Basham. I have only hard copy of these books. I don't know if e-book is available or not.

Very typical number for the great battles of the era. This was Alexander's great rampaging army after all, I'm not sure why you think his army shouldn't be on par with Hannibal's.

>Very typical number for the great battles of the era. This was Alexander's great rampaging army after all

The 50k number was in reference to Porus' army. Allegedly, Alexander was outnumbered between 3 and 5 to 1.

As another basis of comparison, both sides at the battle of Waterloo also fielded about 50k infantry a piece.

These number are not verifiable but they are not they are not the army you would think it is. Most of Alexander's army was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and was later using local armies with Macedonian Genarals.

These stories make me hope that some code-savvy historians will one day create a visualization of famous battles using d3.js or something similar to what went into Snow Fall.

It'd be a fascinating way to teach history, and it'll work perfectly on tablets.

I've seen that on some History channel programs recently. Had to look twice to make sure it was computer animated, not a filmed scene. Can't remember the exact program series though.

You mean Decisive Battles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZHovydSFQ ? I think he's talking about charts, d3.js. The show is made with a real time video game from 2002/4.

Ah yes, I recall watching that, too. It was one of the Total War games.

Hard to search for snow fall visualization. Do you have a link?

Also these battles were visualized a million times by the Total War series. Although far from realistically with questionable educational potential. But that's largely a limitation of computer speeds. Still, more interesting than looking at charts.

I was referring to the popular-by-name-but-not-readership Snow Fall feature by the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/.

Bizarre posting. This appears to be a high-school page (authored either by very-good students or not-so-good teachers) and last updated, according to the page, in 2000! I lean towards thinking this is a student project since some of the other articles on this site aren't very well researched. However, this would have been a fairly spiffy result from a group of students in 2000!

But... Why post this? I am not sure I understand.

His hometown is close to were I live. I've visited his father's, Philipos, tomb at Vergina. Massive structure, loads of gold, really impressive. Sometime they have to find Alexander's tomb too... it still remains an unexplored mystery.

It's fiction, but I recommend "The Virtues of War" by Steven Pressfield. It's a novel (based on history, but certainly dramatized) about Alexander's march to the East.

Pressfield's books are great. I'd additionally recommend following up the Virtues of War with The Afghan Campaign -- which is also about Alexander, but focused entirely on the time he spent in Afghanistan. There are some astounding parallels to today.

Then, when you're done, Gates of Fire is a classic (Pressfield's novel on the Battle of Thermopylae). Tides of War is on the Peloponnesian War that followed.

A war like no other is also a classic on the Peloponnesian War; likewise surprsingly relevant to present day politics and wars.

I second this. A great story and it focuses, as the title implies, on the virtues of the warrior. Lots of those virtues can be applied to entrepreneurship, in my opinion.

The king name is "Purushottam" not "Porus".

Names don't normally survive intact when crossing languages; even more so when crossing multiple languages (original -> Greek -> Latin -> English).

Examples from Wikipedia:

- The Greek name for Alexander is Alexandros (Ἀλέξανδρος).

- The Persian name for Alexander is Iskandar (اسکندر).

- Porus is a similarly Latinized version of the Greek version (Πῶρος) of the Sanskrit name Purushottam (पुरुषोत्तम).

The Greeks made very little effort to retain the phonetics of the original language. This is not a criticism of course, merely an observation, and perhaps partly driven by the impossibility of rendering certain sounds (eg "sh") in Greek. compare the Greek and native names of the various Egyptian gods for extreme examples.

Yes, its interesting to trace the routes of these words. The Persian word for Alexander is also Sikander and it was quite a popular name among sultans in medieval India. And my favorite: Tsar was derived from Caesar :)

And the scandinavian word "kejser/keisare", which meaning is equivalent to the English "emperor" (As in "Holy roman emperor")

And "Caesar" is properly pronounced "kaisar". Try to guess where the German "Kaiser" comes from.

Nice, different post. This is relevant to my interests...

There is still a village in Himalays where the residents refuse to mix with other Indians claiming that they are descendants of Alexander.

Raja = King not warlord. Chandragupt Maurya the Emperor of Patliputra (now Patna) had an army much bigger than Porus'

The article agrees with you, "it was fought against a powerful Indian rajah, an Indian equivalent to a king or warlord."

Nobody told Alexander the Great about the Indian monsoon season? Surely he could have gained some information about the country he invaded before committing.

I think an even better information could be that he would not reach the end of the world. If he couldn't even get this beforehand, then I think missing the Indian monsoon is a small oversight indeed.