Alexander III of Macedon and his army crossed the Jhelum in BCE 326 at the Battle of the Hydaspes River, where he defeated an Indian king, Porus.

According to Arrian (Anabasis, 29), he built a city "on the spot whence he started to cross the river Hydaspes", which he named Bukephala (or Bucephala) to honour his famous horse Bucephalus, buried in present-day Jalalpur Sharif.

[citation needed] According to Gujrat district historian Mansoor Behzad Butt, Bukephalus was buried in Jalalpur Sharif, but the people of Mandi Bahauddin, a district close to Jehlum, believed that their tehsil Phalia was named after Alexander's dead horse, saying that the name Phalia was a distortion of Bucephala.

[11] According to Hindu puranas, the goddess Parvati was requested by the sage Kashyapa to come to Kashmir to purify the land from the evil practices and impurities of the pishachas living there.

The poet Nonnus in the Dionysiaca[14] calls the Hydaspes a titan-descended god, the son of the sea-god Thaumas and the cloud-goddess Elektra, the brother of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, and half-brother to the harpies, the snatching winds.

The river Jhelum rises from Verinag spring at the foot of the Pir Panjal in the southeastern Kashmir Valley administered by India.

It is joined by its tributaries It flows through Srinagar and Wular Lake before entering Pakistan-administered Kashmir through a deep narrow gorge.