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The battle itself has become famous, but it was in fact a skirmish. Today, the old crossing is dominated by a large fortress, Mangla.
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Essentially, Uttarāpatha is the ancestor of the Grand Trunk Road, but we know that until the sixteenth century, the ford was southwest of the modern bridge. This was the main road along the Cophen, to Peucelaotis, across the Indus, to Taxila, into the direction of Lahore, and beyond, to Patna on the plains of the Ganges. The actual place where the two armies clashed, must have been the place where the Uttarāpatha crossed the river. Scholars have proposed other sites further down the stream (at Haranpur and Jalalpur), but palaeohydrological research has shown that the Jhelum was far from these places until the eighth century CE. This must have been somewehere near modern Jhelum.
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Porus thought he'd have a chance, if only he could win time and keep the river, in Antiquity known as Hydaspes or Vitaçtä, between his own army and that of his enemy. There were heavy rains - the monsoon seems to have started early - and the river Jhelum, already wide in May because of the melting waters of the Himalayas, became very wide. In May 326, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great and his ally, raja Ambhi of Taxila, defeated Porus, a raja who had not been able to surrender himself to Alexander. Hydaspes, possible location of the battlefield