14 A PILGRIMAGE FOR PEACE
Ghazni and Kabul on one side and through Kandahar and
the Sulaiman mountains on the other, to the country water-
ed by the river Indus. In the great epic Mahabharata,
which is supposed to have been composed in about 3000
B.C., figures the celebrated heroine Gandhari — native
of Gandhar (modern Peshawar) the mother of the Kaura-
vas, the rulers of Hastinapur (modern Delhi). Panini, the
great Sanskrit grammarian — perhaps the greatest gram-
marian that the world has produced — was born and. bred
in this region. Peshawar is said to have been founded by
Parashurama, the great brahmana warrior who figures in
the other ancient epic of India — the Ramayana. About
the 5th century B. C. Cyrus, King of Persia, led his army
into the territory that corresponds to the modem Afghan-
istan and Baluchistan, and Darius I annexed Gandhar
(modern Peshawar and Rawalpindi Districts). The pro-
vince provided troops to Xerxes for his invasion of Greece.
In 326 B. C. the Greeks under Alexander the Great,
entered India and conquered the Peshawar valley which
was at that time under the rule of a Raja whose capital
was Pushkarwati — the modern Charsadda, on the Kabul
river — and made it into a Governor's province under a
Macedonian officer named Philip. The Hindu chief of
Taxila, then a great centre of Buddhistic learning, labour-
ing under a grievance against his neighbour, King Porus,
invited the foreign invader to attack his rival. Porus was
overthrown in battle and Alexander, after restoring his
kingdom to him, pushed on as far as the Beas where his
troops refused to march further against the powerful King
of Magadha and the Macedonian had to retreat. After
Alexander's death in 323 B. C., Ambhi, the Governor of
Taxila, and Porus — their power broken by the Greek in-
vasion—were subdued by Chandragupta and their terri-
tory was incorporated in the Maurya Empire of the King
of Magadha. The whole of Afghanistan and Frontier tracts
of northern India, including Kashmir,, came under the
highly developed civil and military administrative system
of Chandragupta, as detailed in the Arthashastra of Kau-
tilya, his world-famed Minister of State. In Chandragupta's