Marital alliance happened between Selecus' hot daughter and Chandragupt after the latter slapped his to-be Sasurji in the one war where the Maurya empire expanded over what is now Afghanistan.
Chandragupt got his hot daughter and his territory.
Selecus got 400 elephants or some shit, big deal.
There was one nibba called Megasthenes who toured most of Bharat, he couldn't believe there was another civilization that was equal-equal to or even exceeding the Greek one, so he huffed on some copium that one of their wine-premi gods came here and taught Indians civilization, also believed one of the gods here was Hercules .
TLDR is these tribes were racist af and so we were back in the day, but both were ancient civilizations equal-equal to us.
What we have now is Gora doing WE WUZ KANGZ with his construct of "Western Civilization" and inferiority complex pajeet Elites after being under foreign heel for 1k years believe as gospel truth.
PS: I feel bad for Chandragupta's kanjoosi towards his sasurji - judging by prior period and later period records, its pretty clear that Chandragupta had at least 7000 war elephants, most likely around 10,000.
So giving sasurji 3-4 hundred is a drop in the bucket, yet he gave him ' retirees'. Or maybe there is some chanakya-niti of ' gib these pohren barbs shitty elephants, so they dont figure out the real deal with elephants and maybe figure out how to beat them and come beat our ass'.
I dunno. But the Seleucids were mighty disappointed with the elephants eventually. they went from ' BOO YA OLIPHAUNTS' to the other diadochi to ' we got shit elephants, who just fucks off in middle of battle/dies in sleep' in 10 years flat.
But then again, the greeks were no genius at figuring out this genius animal- they thought they could use ' MUH MIGHTY OLIPHAUNTS' as giant battering rams to crush through phalanxes. Like yes, this smart creature is gonna go full steam ahead at what looks like a forest-sized porcupine to it. Brilliant plan, i guess thats exactly how the Injuns, thais, burmese, cambodians have been using elephants as, right ? giant battering ram to thousands of men holding pointy sticks pretending to be a forest-sized porcupine...right ? RIGHT ?
Oh wait. nvm.They never quite figured out that elephants are meant to be archery/javelin platforms who are ' stand your ground' defensive fighters, because elephants are MUCH MUCH better at ' standing their ground and fighting trouble' than figuring out a plan on how to chase and seek out trouble to kill it- it is still a PREY animal and not a PREDATOR animal in its instincts and its not a dumb gobshyte one like a horse who will charge into whatever so long as its blinded ( hence blinkers).
In short, if you want your war elephant to fight and fight well against dudes with pointy sticks or sharp shiny things, you dont want your elephant chasing it to go look for it, while its running away. you want those men to come attack your elephant, who is surrounded by other elephants and is activating its ' this predatory idiot wants a piece of me. Oh lets go !! imma gonna chase it away in 10 seconds flat and if i cant, imma just kill it after that' instinct.
So what do you do while you sit around on top of the elephant, waiting for it to get attacked ? you throw things at your enemy- DUH. Javelins ( usually the ones of choice, like Puru, Hemu,etc) if you aint weaksauce or else, archer. Shoot at people from platform, that makes you outrange them/throw deadly javs at them and impale them by the dozens, to basically make them come kill u up close, aka fight ur elephant and u. Or throw their elephants at u, if they got elephants too.
Greeks and Romans, never quite got this aspect right. Neither did Hannibal the carthagenian genius ( who himself only saw much later in his life, that too a much more limited degree, on how to use war elephants real effectively, after he had lost and become refugee from carthage).
