Alexander's two-year campaign in Bactria and Sogdiana was the most destructive phase of his eastern conquest. The ancient accounts describe the systematic devastation of rebel districts, the storming of fortified rocks with the crucifixion of leaders and enslavement of the population, and the annihilation of the Branchidae, a community of Greek descent accused of an ancestral sacrilege. Alexander then concentrated populations in new fortified foundations, the best known being Alexandria Eschate on the Jaxartes, settling them with Greek and Macedonian veterans, mercenaries and local inhabitants — a policy of forced urban synoecism intended to hold the country. The settlers themselves regarded the posting as a form of exile: Greek colonists in the upper satrapies revolted around 326 BCE and, after Alexander's death, some 23,000 of them attempted to march back west. The reported casualty figures come from Curtius and Diodorus, writing centuries later, and are widely doubted; the pattern of destruction and forced settlement, by contrast, is supported by the archaeology of Hellenistic Central Asia.
Alexander III of Macedon suppressed the Bactrian–Sogdian revolt with mass killings and enforced resettlement, and planted garrison cities settled with Greek and Macedonian troops and local populations
The only evidence is Greek and Roman narrative accounts of the campaign, which give army and captive numbers rather than populations, and archaeological survey of irrigation systems along the Oxus and Zarafshan, which establishes intensive settlement without supporting a headcount. Published guesses for the two satrapies vary by an order of magnitude.
No defensible range. Roman-era accounts give figures such as 120,000 killed across the campaign, which modern scholarship treats as rhetorical; there is no independent basis for a total.
Curtius Rufus, Diodorus and Arrian record the devastation of rebel districts, the crucifixion of captured leaders and the destruction of the Branchidae settlement, as discussed in the modern scholarship on the Sogdian revolt.
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