26 OCTOBER 1918, Page 22

A Guide to Taxila. By Sir John Marshall. (Calcutta :

Superin- tendent of Government Printing. 4s. 6d.)—When Alexander the Great invaded India, the old and famous city of Taxila, ruling a large part of the Indus Valley, received him as a friend and assisted hi a in the war with Porus. Taxila continued to flourish under Asoka, the patron of Buddhism, under Bactrian Greeks, Scythians, Parthians- in whose time Apollonius of Tyana visited the city—and Kushans from China, until in the fifth century of our era it was laid waste by the White Huns. Sir John Marshall, the energetic Director of Archaeology in India, has now excavated a large part of the ruins for the first time, and he sums up in this masterly little guide-book the results of his researches, which are recorded at length in his official Reports, already noticed briefly in these pages. The Taxila discoveries are of very great interest for the students of Buddhism. and, as the illustrations show, of early Indian art and its relations with Greece through the Greek colonies in Central Asia. Sir John Marshall's book opens to our view an almost untrodden field of history.