ABSTRACT
India was perhaps the first of the great Asian cultures to have interactions with the West, beginning in 530 BCE when the forces of Darius, emperor of the Achaemenoid (Persian) Empire, expanded his realm over the Hindu-Kush mountains into what is now Pakistan and then pushed further east to the Indus River. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great conquered the Persians and added that empire to his own, maintaining the boundary at the Indus and Beas Rivers. Subsequent interactions brought Hellenic sculpture to India, where it influenced Gandaran art. But how much influence may have moved in the opposite direction to Alexandrian Greece is not clear, though Chinese silks were being transported west. The Roman historian Strabo records that the Greco-Bactrian kings in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan had made contact by 200 BCE with the Chinese in the region of what is now called Chinese Turkestan, thus establishing the first recorded direct contact between West and East.
