Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. Holt

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      Beyond the Jaxartes stretched the open steppes of central Asia, where various independent Scythian tribes lived out a nomadic existence.³ These hardy peoples, renowned for their fighting spirit and horsemanship, sometimes joined forces with their sedentary neighbors to the south. Bessus had staked his last hopes on such an alliance, and that gave Alexander very good reason to bar the door. Like the present borderlands nominally separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, and other nations, the Jaxartes frontier offered rebels a place to hide, smuggle, and recruit. Alexander intended to fortify this frontier and prevent any such collusion in the future by setting up a permanent military barrier between Sogdiana and the Scythians. The king had done this sort of thing before; in fact, he began his reign in 336 B.C.E. with a Balkan campaign north to the Danube River, where he bullied some Scythian tribes that threatened interference in his realm.⁴ It had worked wonders back home, but he was not in the Balkans any more.

      At his leisure, Alexander moved his army northward through Sogdiana. He may have been following the old caravan route that threaded the Iron Gates and emerged in the territory of Nautaca south of Maracanda (modern Samarkand). The long pursuit of Bessus, though anticlimactic, had taken its toll on the cavalry horses. Therefore, in the fine horse-rearing country around Karshi (site of a critical air base used by the Soviets and, later, by U.S. Task Force Dagger), Alexander requisitioned fresh mounts for his men.⁵ This may, in retrospect, have touched a nerve among a local population always sensitive to any loss of livestock. More unwelcome intrusions soon followed.

      Alexander’s army paused briefly in Maracanda, the largest city in Sogdiana. Inside its impressive circuit of walls and strong citadel, the king left a thousand men as a garrison.⁶ About 180 miles farther to the northeast lay the Jaxartes frontier. Alexander’s plans for this area were no doubt already taking shape, and the king’s preparations could not have been overlooked by the indigenous population. Near the river there existed only one substantial city, an old Persian foundation named Cyropolis (perhaps modern Ura-Tyube), plus six walled towns. Though impressive, Cyropolis stood twenty-five miles south of the crucial river, too far to effect the kind of control that the king now envisaged. Given the surplus population available from these settlements, Alexander decided to construct a new, powerful military post right on the Jaxartes (probably at modern Khodzhent). Surrounded by almost seven miles of defensive walls and named Alexandria Eschate (“the farthermost Alexandria”), it would henceforth guard the edge of his empire.⁷

      This was apparently more meddling than the locals were willing to bear. Plans for the new city signaled a permanent Greek presence on the Sogdian-Scythian border. This would diminish the commercial and administrative standing of Cyropolis and probably meant that area croplands and pasturage would be attached to Alexandria Eschate as dependencies. In other ways, militarily closing the frontier would disrupt traditional patterns of life in an environment where rivers naturally attracted disparate peoples together rather than divided them. Scythians and Sogdians-Bactrians enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, especially through economic interactions and occasional military alliances. The Persian Empire had accepted this fluid state, but Alexander would not.⁸ He intended to isolate the region from its neighbors. It was becoming obvious that the new ruler of Persia had his own ideas about the governance of Bactria. Wary warlords like Spitamenes began to wonder about their trade of Bessus for Alexander. Their formal summons to attend the Afghan council at Bactra to witness the punishment of Bessus emphasized the inauguration of a new regime and put the Bactrians ill at ease about their uncertain futures.⁹

      Without warning, the entire region exploded into armed resistance. An unsuspecting party of Greek soldiers out collecting supplies was suddenly attacked. Those not slain were taken prisoner into the nearby mountains. Stunned and then furious, Alexander led a retaliatory strike against the insurgents, whose numbers quickly swelled to twenty thousand.¹⁰ In the forefront of the fighting, the king took an arrow through his leg that splintered the bone. He had not suffered an injury since leaving the Mediterranean coast, and his men reacted bitterly to the sight. They stormed the enemy stronghold, killing most of the defenders.¹¹

      The uprising spread rapidly to Cyropolis and the neighboring towns, whose inhabitants murdered Alexander’s garrisons and closed the towns’ gates. Alexander dispatched one of his best generals, Craterus, to put Cyropolis under siege. Meanwhile, though wounded, the king began a systematic attack against each of the six outlying towns. As they fell one by one, huge fires and plumes of smoke announced to the next in line that Alexander was coming. Without mercy, the angry Greeks and Macedonians slaughtered the males and reduced the women to slavery. Hardly innocent, the Sogdians also proved treacherous, reneging on pledges and luring the invaders into an ambush under a flag of truce. Returning to Cyropolis, Alexander pressed the siege begun by Craterus. The king noticed that a streambed ran under its walls, carrying water inside through several channels. With a small commando force, Alexander personally slipped through the conduits and entered the city. He and his men broke open a gate and admitted their comrades. Many of Cyropolis’s fifteen thousand defenders were killed.¹²

      Across the land, tens of thousands lay dead and countless others were wounded or captured. The ferocious, close-order fighting spared no one; even Alexander suffered another serious injury. The king fell unconscious when struck in the head and neck by a large stone. For many days, his vision blurred and he could barely speak. The scab on his wound kept opening, prolonging his painful recovery. This wound, perhaps the first reported case of transient cortical blindness, combined with the leg injury to make it impossible for Alexander to walk, ride a horse, see clearly, or speak audibly.¹³ He was in bad shape at a terrible moment, for the news became grimmer by the hour.

      A similar thing later happened in 1879 when Lord Roberts sent out foragers from Kabul to bring in supplies for the winter. Local villagers refused to give up willingly what they needed themselves, so Roberts tried next to seize some local chieftains in order to force their cooperation. The British came under immediate attack, compelling Roberts to storm the nearest villages, burn down the houses, and plunder the grain and livestock. Town by town, the insurrection spread. Roberts split his forces and attacked the villages in a bloody cycle of retribution. Officers wondered aloud what had gone wrong: “A change has indeed come over the vision of our dream—last night we were all cock-a-hoop, thinking ourselves fine fellows, and that all we now had to do was to walk around and burn some villages; and within twenty-four hours we are locked up, closely besieged, after a jolly good licking and all communications with the outer world cut off.”¹⁴ Alexander’s troops could have expressed the same shock as they counted up their losses. Almost overnight, what seemed a successful invasion had turned into a debacle. The Greeks and Macedonians were unprepared for the consequences of Alexander’s actions, and they realized too late that the fighting extended all the way back along their lines of communication to Bactria. The cakewalk had become a death march.

      Alexander must have felt himself trapped and cut off from the outside world when, beleaguered at the Jaxartes, he learned that his huge garrison at Maracanda was also under serious attack. Adding insult to Alexander’s injuries, Spitamenes and his associates—the captors of Bessus—had taken up arms and brought the Bactrian cavalry back into the war.¹⁵ None of these insurgent warlords, called hyparchs (commanders) by the Greeks, claimed to be a king. They ruled, in a rough sense, no more than isolated locales. Some controlled a valley, others a mountain fortress or string of villages. When not in revolt, they normally served as local princes or chiefs, levying fighting men and taxes for the Bactrian satrap who, in turn, answered to the King of Kings. They commanded their own contingents in war. This loose arrangement gave each hyparch a great deal of autonomy and preserved the powerful sense of localism so natural in places like Afghanistan. An easygoing loyalty to the state and its representatives could vanish in a flash once parochial interests seemed threatened. When such “commanders” (a title still popular among Afghan warlords) repudiated their oaths to a king or state, they might at times band together against a common foe or break off and fight alone at the head of their own followers and kinsmen.¹⁶ From Alexander’s day, we know a few of СКАЧАТЬ