esty”; 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 They fished with nets made out of date-palm bark and ate their food raw.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 their spears. Then, when he gave the order, they charged the natives while those on the ships unleashed a hail of arrows and missiles down upon them.
The tribesmen didn’t even try to fight back. Nearchus described the scene of the massacre with pride, writing:
“They, astounded at the flash of the armor, and the swiftness of the charge, and attacked by showers of arrows and missiles, half-naked as they were, never stopped to resist but gave way. Some were killed in flight; others were captured; but some escaped into the hills.”
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The battle of Issus as painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder. ( Public Domain )
The Slaughter of an Innocent Town
It wouldn’t be his only massacre. Nearly every encounter with a technologically inferior tribe ended in slaughter.
A little while after, Nearchus and his men came upon a tribal town surrounded by a wooden wall. They were running low on provisions now, and Nearchus was afraid his men would grow hungry. He told his men he would move in close and scope them out, then give the signal to attack.
When the tribesmen spotted him, though, they did something he didn’t expect. They rushed out to greet him with fish, cakes, and dates, inviting the Greek explorer to come into their town and join them in a great feast. They were thrilled to have visitors, and they were happy to share anything he needed.
Nearchus pretended to be thankful and followed into the city walls. But as soon as he was in, he climbed the city wall and signaled to his men to attack.
These people had offered him anything he needed – but he just used their hospitality to fling open their town’s gates and let his men storm in and slaughter them. Then he forced them to submission and threatened them until they gave him every bit of food that they