Alexander over the Hindu Kush — ALEXANDER III · 329 BC

In spring 329 BC Alexander the Great took his army across the Hindu Kush from the Kabul region into Bactria in pursuit of Bessus, the satrap of Bactria who had led the plot that killed Darius III and then claimed the Persian throne. No ancient source gives the army's size at this point; the ~40,000 shown on the map is a modern estimate. Arrian says the march was made through deep snow and short of supplies; Strabo and Curtius say the soldiers ate their pack animals — raw, Strabo adds, for lack of firewood. No ancient source names the pass. Most modern accounts favour the Khawak Pass (about 3,850 m on modern maps); the Salang, Kushan and Shibar passes have also been proposed.

By winter 330 BC Darius was dead, but the man behind his murder was not. Bessus — satrap of Bactria, now calling himself Artaxerxes, King of Asia — had retreated north of the Hindu Kush, behind the range the Greeks called Mount Caucasus. Alexander wintered at the foot of the range, founded a city there (Alexandria in the Caucasus, near modern Begram), and waited for the passes to be merely lethal instead of impossible.

He moved in early spring 329 BC, while deep snow still lay on the high route. Bessus had about 7,000 Bactrians with him, by Arrian's count (Curtius says 8,000), and a simpler plan: burn everything on the far side so the invaders would starve. Arrian says Alexander kept marching anyway, 'though with difficulty, both on account of the deep snow and from the want of necessaries' (Arrian 3.28, tr. Chinnock).

The climb was a white ordeal. Curtius's most harrowing scenes — frostbitten feet, snow-blind eyes, men who sat down to rest and did not get up — belong to the winter march of 330/329 that brought the army to the foot of the range; of the crossing itself Arrian records only the deep snow and the want of supplies. The col — about 3,850 m on the traditional Khawak route — stands nearly 900 m above the highest pass proposed for Hannibal, the Col de la Traversette.

On the northern side the scorched earth bit. Grain gone, the army lived on river fish and herbs, Curtius says, then slaughtered its own pack animals; Strabo adds that for lack of firewood the flesh was eaten raw, with the wild silphium that grew there to help it down.

Then it worked. The exhausted column came down into Bactria at Drapsaca (probably Kunduz), rested, and was suddenly close. Arrian says that when Bessus heard it he fled north across the Oxus and burned his boats, and his Bactrian horsemen dispersed to their homes. Aornus and Bactra — the capital — were taken at the first assault (Arrian). Alexander had taken a province without fighting a battle for it; within months — that summer — Bessus was handed over by his own officers, Spitamenes and Dataphernes, and brought to Alexander by Ptolemy, naked and in a wooden collar (Arrian 3.29–30).

Which pass carried the army? No ancient source names it. The Khawak, up the populated Panjshir valley, is the scholars' pick — the long way round, but the one with food. The Salang is the short, brutal direct road; the low Shibar is the old caravan route west, which some (Frank Holt among them) assign to the return in 327. March one and pick your side.

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