inscription which had not yet been studied or translated. The four men worked separately, and produced four translations which were so nearly identical that the committee reported unanimously that the new science had been established.

It is almost impossible to put an estimate on the value of Rawlinson's work. The science which he made possible is still in its infancy, and, while great things have been done, the future holds promise of greater things to come. At the present time an expedition is engaged in excavating ruins in the lands occupied by the ancient Assyrians. The value of the discoveries thus being made is derived mainly from the key which Rawlinson placed in the hands of modern scholarship.

One of the benefits which we have already derived from the science is in connexion with the Old Testament history. Not as much confirmation as was sought and hoped for by Biblical scholars has yet been obtained, but sufficient has been done to show that the historical record of events in the Old Testament is a record of actual happenings. In this way the historicity of several books of the Old Testament has been definitely established. An obelisk of Shalmaneser II. speaks of the tribute paid by Jehu, King of Samaria, and has drawings of Hebrew captives. The most interesting case is that of Sennacherib. The Second Book of Kings tells us of his conquests in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem and of his threat to King Hezekiah, in answer to whose prayers the Lord slew the army of Sennacherib, so that in the morning 'they were all dead corpses.' The Court historian of Sennacherib refers to this campaign into Palestine, but, being wise in his day and generation, makes no mention of reverses. Ancient kings were not in the habit of putting up memorials to their losses. The Assyrian record does tell, however, of the murder of Sennacherib by his sons in the temple of his god, just as we have it in the Old Testament.

What secrets are yet to be unlocked by the key forged by the soldier-scholar no one, of course, can say; but even if nothing is added to the work already done, the fame of Rawlinson is assured,

ERNEST G. BLACK

THE ROCK OF AORNOS

THERE have been certain legends in the East only recently dispelled, and there have been certain mysteries of history but lately unravelled. For long it was believed that a Macedonian colony remained in some semi-primitive State away in the inaccessible mountains of Kafristan where the men were handsome and the women fair, where huge lumps of turquoise were worked as ornaments, and where romance reigned supreme. The story by Rudyard Kipling, The Man who would be a King, of the two adventurers who succeeded for a while in ruling in some such out-of-the-way mountain valley by means of an incomplete masonic ritual, ministered to the popular belief. Alas! towards the end of last century Sir George Scott-Robertson, the British Agent at Gilgit, penetrated into the wonderland to find an interesting but not supremely romantic relict of Dard peoples. The fascinating bubble of the last Greeks was pricked, and then the heavy hand of the armies of Kabul lifted the purdah of remoteness. Farewell romance!

Then till the British penetrated to Lhassa a few years ago that remarkable city was an unknown land of romance-romance, perhaps, which remains, even since the veil was raised, but not in the same intensity; so ever the outlying world grows less remote, and the West penetrates to every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.

Now the wonderful painstaking, prying eyes of Sir Aurel Stein, of the Indian Archæological Department, already famous for his discoveries in sand-buried Khotan, has lifted yet another veil. Of all the stories and legends of the past, the invasion of India by Alexander of Macedon is perhaps the most fascinating, the more so, perhaps, because of the exactness with which ancient historians have described his doings, and because of the traces he has left behind him. Does Arrian speak of the Pactydæ in the neighbourhood of Jellalabad? We find the Paktan, or the people who speak Pakhtoo, there to this day. Does he speak of the Aprœtæ in the region of the Khaiber Pass? Have we not the Afridi, 1 who calls himself' Apriti,' 1 in the same region in the year 1 Pronounced 'afreedee' or 'apreetee.'

VOL. C-No. 595

of grace 1926. In the frontier region Greek carvings adorn the ruins of the ancient fanes. As the Irish doctor said when describing what he had seen, ‘An' ye could tell the carvings were Grayco-Bactrian by the Roman togas depicted on the figures which is by the way. Incidentally, people often forget that Alexander's colonies of C3 men were speedily overwhelmed or absorbed when he and his able-bodied troops passed away down the Indus on their return journey to Babylon, and that it was the Macedonian kingdom of Bactria which conquered Northern India a few centuries later and was really responsible for Greek legend and Greek relicts.

But the name of Alexander is still a household name in the long-lived memories of the East. If you wander about among the hills of Hazara some old peasant will pass the time of day with you and untie the tail of his shirt to offer for sale some Græco-Bactrian coins, which he will describe to you as those of Sikunder Bakshah-Sikunder being Central Asian for Alexander. And it is seemingly all very close and by no means a myth. And Lord Gough fought his set battle of Chillianwahah hard by where King Poros fought Alexander's phalanx. In 1849 this is what the army sang:

Sabres drawn and bayonets fixed
Fight where fought Alexander,
Oh Paddy Gough's a cross betwixt
Bulldog and Salamander.

The secret which Sir Aurel Stein has claimed to have unravelled is the hitherto baffling mystery of the site of the Rock of Aornos, of which the storming has been so graphically described by the Alexandrine historians, and which, since the capture of the Punjab brought the British into possession of the scenes of the Alexandrine legend, has greatly interested antiquarians. So puzzling and baffling has been the search, that a few years ago Sir Aurel Stein himself was inclined to think the whole story might be fiction or perhaps a practical joke played on the historian.

The Alexandrine historians are many. First and foremost is Flavius Arrianus, usually referred to as Arrian; but, as Alexander invaded India in B.C. 327 and Arrian was not born until 96 A.D., he was but a careful compiler from earlier narratives. Contemporary narratives, however, did exist in some number, but are not actually extant. Quintin Curtius, Plutarch, Justin, and Diodorus all compiled narratives from what was available. The circumstantial accounts of the storming of the Rock of Aornos are apparently compiled from accounts by Ptolemy, who founded the dynasty in Egypt, and Aristoboulos, both of whom took part in the storming.

Briefly, Alexander in his conquests first installed himself at Kandahar in B.C. 329 and then in the Kabul Valley in 329-28, and finally in B.C. 327 entered India by routes north of the Khaiber and the Kabul River, and reached the Peshawar Valley through Swat. The valleys through which he came were far more populated than now, and probably by an Aryan people akin to those of the Northern Punjab, from whom some of the Pathan or Pushtoo (or Pakhtan and Pakhtoo) speaking tribes are probably descended. There are many remains and ruins to throw light on this which will some day be explored.

The general route of the invasion and the identification of many of the places is fairly complete, especially since the Indian Archæological Department have devoted themselves to the excavation of the great city of Taxila at the entrance to Hazara. But the interest in Aornos has been in the circumstantial accounts of how Alexander, hearing of a great fortress and place of refuge on his northern flank to which many Indians had retreated, turned aside to capture it—especially moved thereto, so it is said, by the story that Herakles (which Herakles is obscure) had found it impregnable. The size as given in Arrian's Anabasis makes it 200 stadia (23 miles) in circumference and II stadia (6700 feet) high.

The difficulties and details of the feat of arms involved in its capture, so fully recorded, have made its identification a matter of very burning interest during the last seventy years. General Abbott, who in his younger days settled Hazara and founded Abbottabad, and General Cunningham, who was such a student on the antiquities of Northern India, both searched long for Aornos, which they believed, if it existed at all, must have been close to the crossings of the Indus, between the Peshawar Valley and the Punjab, in the vicinity of Attock or Ohind, 15 miles to the north. So far back as 1836 General Court had pointed out 'Raja Hodis Castle,' near Attock, as a possible site, while General Cunningham thought Ranigal, 16 miles from Ohind, would be a possibility. Both these suggestions in no way coincided with the vast extent of the fastness described by the Greek historians. General Abbott perhaps gave the subject the most attention, and finally propounded his opinion that the great mountain of Mahabun, some 40 miles north-west of Attock, and due west of the town of Amb, on the Indus, which he thought might be the Embolina of history, would prove to be the site, but he could only reconnoitre it by telescope. Mahabun stood inaccessible in the midst of tribes among whom it was impossible to penetrate, a mysterious blue mass fringed with snow, so that the theory could not be put to the proof; but General Abbott's view practically held the field till 1904, for want of a better or of one actually tried by exploration.

To realise the difficulties of the identification and the romance inherent, some idea of the terrain involved is necessary.

The tumbled mass of mountain which lies between the Indus and the Swat River has ever been a desire to the explorer, and always a forbidden land, where law and order ran not and the Pax Britannica was a joke. Even on the hither side of the Indus the mass of the Black Mountain between the fertile valley of Hazara and the river has never been administered, and only penetrated when from the 'sixties to the 'nineties of the last century British forces came a-meddling in reply to tribal raids against our own people. Across the Indus the tribes were even more intractable. In 1863, as an aftermath of the Mutiny, British troops had entered Buner, partly in quest of a colony of Hindustani fanatics of the Wahabi persuasion, to which the wolves' heads of India were wont to resort, and whence they had been active during the Mutiny. This expedition had evoked a very widespread conflagration, and tribes from far and near flocked to fight the invaders. Since then this border has been closed. It is the country of the Lost Legion, that wonderful Kipling story, born of the fate of the 55th Bengal Native Infantry which mutinied in Peshawar in 1857. But it has long been known that this tangled mass of mountain contained ethnographic, archæological, and linguistic remains of great value and entrancing interest. It fringed on great Buddhist and early Hindu kingdoms, and in Hazara, hard by, were rock edicts, Buddhist stupras, the great city of Taxila, now being uncovered, while ever through the veil of the border traders would bring bits of Ghandaric and Græco-Buddhist carvings, showing remains of great civilisations and wearing the same 'Roman tōgas,' which I have mentioned.

This dead end of high-level valleys and mountain peaks, surrounded on the far side by the valleys of Gilgit and the backstairs route to Chitral along which Colonel Kelly's forces had ventured in 1895, was also known to contain tag-ends of forgotten races. Up into its pockets where no man cared to follow, the incoming Aryan invasion had in the mists of time forced those old peoples of India whom they could not enslave.

Beyond the reach of invader and traveller, Dardish tribes and remnants, rich in long-forgotten glossaries and vocabularies, lived, so far as their lesser hearts would let them, the same lawless tribal lives as their Pathan neighbours in the more accessible slopes which border the Peshawar Valley. Thus the romance of Alexander fringes on that of Buddha and the Bhuddist kingdoms which were arising in India in the reign of Asoka, who had died but five years before the invasion, and whose rock-hewn edicts are to be seen to this day even in Hazara and close