Remorseless Chronicles of Slaughter: Fatal First Contact Between Ancient Greece and the Tribes of India
Colonialism hasn’t changed much.
More than 2000 years ago, when Alexander the Great conquered the Persia, he sent an ancient explorer named Nearchus to sail down the Indus River and map the lands ahead. It was a voyage filled with some strange and unnerving echoes of the explorers of the world to come.
Like the men who first journeyed into the heart of the Congo, Nearchus sailed down a great river, discovering new tribes the Greek world never knew existed. And just like the explorers of the Congo, he called them “savages” and he killed them all.
Nearchus’s Journey Down the Indus River
Nearchus was an admiral in Alexander the Great’s army . He helped lead the Greek fleet into battle with Persia and helped them advance through their lines. And when Persia had fallen on their feet, Alexander the Great sent him to travel down the Indus River and write down everything he saw.
He was an explorer thousands of years before the Age of Exploration – one of the forgotten early men who ventured out into uncharted territories and came home with incredible stories of exotic animals and civilizations the likes of which the Greek world had never seen.
Map showing voyages of Nearchus and the campaigns of Alexander until shortly after acquiring the Persian Empire – from A History of the Ancient World, George Willis Botsford Ph.D., The MacMillan Company, 1913. ( Public Domain )
One of the First Greek Explorers in India
Most of what he saw left him in awe. Nearchus was enamored by the Indian civilization, the great kingdom that rivaled Greece in strength. He wrote eager and excited stories about a type of bird the Indians called “parrots”, insisting to his countrymen back home that these things could speak with “a human voice”.
And he was every bit as impressed with the people. He praised their army, saying that “nothing can stand against an arrow shot by an Indian archer”; he praised the women, calling them beauties “of great modesty”; and he praised their very civilization as a tolerant and level-headed place from which the Greeks, in many ways, could learn.
But India was an advanced civilization, and the people who lived in its great cities weren’t the only people living on the Indus River. And Nearchus’s encounters with the others weren’t quite so peaceful.
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Family of Darius before Alexander by Francesco Fontebasso. ( Public Domain )
The Fish Eaters: A Stone Age Tribe
The coasts of the Indus River were dotted with tribes that still used Stone Age technology. Nearchus called most of them the “Fish-Eaters”, so-called because their staple food was fish. They fished with nets made out of date-palm bark and ate their food raw.
Metal, it seems, had not yet reached these people. The only weapons they had were wooden spears, the tips sharpened with rocks and hardened over a fire. They still dressed in animal pelts, used large stones as hammers, and tore their food apart with their bare fingers.
Indus River in Kharmang District, Pakistan. ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )
A Massacre on The Indus River
On their way home, Nearchus and his men met a group of tribesmen at a lagoon at the mouth of the river. The tribesmen had never seen anything like the great convoy of Greek ships that was approaching them, and they were filled with terror and awe.
Not sure what to expect, they lined up to the beaches, wooden spears in hand. There were about six hundred men in all, according to Nearchus’s writings, but they had no armor and nothing more to fight with than the pointed sticks. They weren’t much of a threat to the Greek soldiers on his boats, men who’d fought the most powerful armies in the world.
Nearchus slaughtered every one of them on the spot. He had lightly-armored men swim over to the shore and get into formation in the water, where the natives could not attack efficiently with