Travels with Alexander the Great

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Breathing life into Babylon's ruins

http://www.theage.com.au/travel/breathing-life-into-babylons-ruins-20110103-19ds6.html

Thanks for that contribution! It's great to see that moves are afoot to reveal more of ancient Babylon and protect what is there. As it happens, Theodore May, whose adventures in the footsteps of Alexander we have been following on this thread, finally arrived in Babylon himself and here is his latest report posted on his site at Globalpost on December 27 with photos.



Theodore May with Babylon in the background.

At about 6:30 in the morning on Thursday, my eyes sprung open. It was Babylon day. In truth, I hadn’t slept much that night because I was too excited to get the rest I needed. 8 months on the trail had led to a one-day shot at one of the ancient world’s most magnificent cities, a city that Alexander the Great conquered and eventually died in.

As is usual for me in situations like these, I had been too preoccupied with the logistics of the trip (and there were a lot of logistics) to really allow myself to get worried about the security situation. A man has only so much he can worry about. As we rolled through the start and stop traffic of Baghdad, therefore, I found myself checking and rechecking all of my documents, equipment, and contact phone numbers. It was all business at that point, with none of the emotional impact of the day hitting me.

The Iraqi capital gradually gave way to old industrial yards and fields of scrap metal, towns nestled in and around them. Heading south down the Baghdad-Basra highway, suburban Baghdad turned into the classic Iraqi landscape I had long envisioned: semi-arid countryside, littered with date palms, farm fields, and small villages.

At about 10:30, 50 miles south of Baghdad, we arrived at Babylon. Getting out of the car, I was greeted by Abou Zayed, my tour guide for the day. Even though I had done as much advance work as possible, I remained concerned that authorities on-site would try to prevent my visit. I had worried for nothing, though, because after a brief stop-in at the site’s main office, I was given the blessing of the interim director and sent on my way.

The first thing to understand about the site is that much of what you see today was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, a fact that drives modern-day archaeologists up the wall. According to them, Saddam did not adhere to the conventions of restoration, instead hurrying to recapture the glory of ancient Babylon without regard for the original ruins.

Saddam’s method had at least two drawbacks, from what I gather. The first was aesthetic. Much of Babylon looks like a modern reconstruction, with little effort spent recapturing the spirit of the ancient city. Seeing steel beams protruding from a supposedly ancient site does take away from the authenticity. Second, Saddam did his reconstructions on top of the original walls, meaning that many pieces of the original site are no longer visible and the modern brick walls are putting tremendous pressure on the original ruins.

With that in mind, my first stop was at the amphitheater built by Alexander the Great. It was an imposing semi-circular structure, complete with an ancient courtyard for the actors and musicians in the back. Abou Zayed is from the city of Hillah, just a few kilometers from Babylon. As a result, he visited the ruins as a child, meaning he was able to recall what they looked like before Saddam’s reconstruction. According to Abou Zayed, the amphitheater used to be a mound of bricks, still vaguely resembling its ancient past. Saddam, though, made the site into a modern performance space, with numbers etched into the seats and a massive viewing booth erected for the President himself.

From the amphitheater, we proceeded to the ancient city center, passing abandoned restaurants built by Saddam. At the heart of Babylon lies a handful of palaces and temples. As I walked from one to the next, the exercise became familiar: we’d go wall by wall, and Abou Zayed would explain to me which portions were original and which were Saddam’s reconstruction. The trick, I quickly learned, was to look for the black bitumen in between the bricks. That meant they were original. If there was concrete instead of bitumen, that meant the bricks were modern. Often, there would be four or five rows of ancient bricks at ground level with Saddam’s hulking reconstruction piled stories high on top.

The magnitude of reaching Babylon finally hit me when we made it to the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way that ran along it. According to Abou Zayed, Alexander the Great would have entered the city from near the tower of Babel and followed the Processional Way through the Ishtar Gate to one of the city’s temples. Lining the tall walls of the gate were carved lions, original pieces of the ancient city. Much of this area was excavated, though not reconstructed by Saddam. It was stunning to stand in the midst of the city’s original grandeur.

Next, we made our way to a museum that had been constructed on site. Much of the museum was filled with models of Babylon and photographs of the site.

The goose bumps moment came as I entered the third room of the museum. In front of me was a portion of wall from the Ishtar Gate. This segment of wall was painted in a vibrant blue with a lion in the middle and flowers along the edges. Suddenly, all the effort I had spent imagining what Babylon would have looked like became unnecessary. There, not faded by time nor destroyed by a dictator, was one sliver of ancient Babylon as it would have been. As I raised my camera to snap a photo, though, the realities of modern Iraq reasserted themselves as the power cut off and the room plunged into darkness. I could still make out the shape of the lion in front of me, but the colors had disappeared with the power. So I switched my imagination back on and headed back out into ancient Babylon.

May's Babylon photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/57662766@N08/sets/72157625694399428/

http://alexanderthegreat.globalpost.com//index.php

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Two paintings on the same theme

Alexander the Great receiving the keys of Babylon from the High Priest (18th century). Johann Georg Platzer

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Read how the MTV school of filmmaking entered the world of “sword and sandal” movies like Alexander making possible spectacular graphic effects such as Alexander's entry into Babylon and the Battle of Gaugamela.

http://www.awn.com/articles/production/ialexanderi-digitally-pushing-sword-and-sandal-genre

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View of the Babylonian Palace in Alexander.

Not all the spectacular effects in the movie Alexander originated from a computer. London’s Pinewood Studios housed enormous environments created by Jan Roelfs & company. The piece de resistance proved to be the magnificent city of Babylon. “Babylon is definitely the richest set I’ve ever done,” enthuses its designer Roelfs. “Alexander’s entry into Babylon is the pinnacle of his career. He’s never seen such splendor in his life, never before encountered a culture which in many ways is superior to his own.” The lush Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, were incorporated into the design.

Set decorator Jim Erickson called upon his gardening skills and horticultural knowledge to acquire plants appropriate to the historical time and place. Scenic artist Steve Mitchell painted a 150 foot long, 45 foot tall, wraparound cyclorama depicting a photo-realistic, microscopically detailed panoramic view of Babylon as seen from the palace terrace’s apex.

Perhaps the most dazzling part of the set is Darius III’s bedroom, which Alexander takes as his own after defeating the Persian King. The intricate wooden screens were all hand-carved in Morocco, as was the huge overhead fan featuring the woven image of the Persian supreme deity Ahura Mazda, and all of the canopies and drapings, fabricated in Pakistan.

http://www.alexander-the-great.co.uk/production_design_and_costumes.htm

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Babylon of fantasy



Babylon of ancient times



Babylon Today

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The Entrance of Alexander the Great into Babylon by Francesco Fontebasso

Quintus Curtius Rufus, who based his account on earlier Greek sources, describes Alexander’s entry into Babylon.

A large number of the Babylonians had taken up a position on the walls, eager to have a view of their new king, but most went out to meet him, including the man in charge of the citadel and royal treasury, Bagophanes. Not to be outdone by Mazaeus in paying his respects to Alexander, Bagophanes had carpeted the whole road with flowers and garlands and set up at intervals on both sides silver altars heaped not just with frankincense but with all manner of perfumes . Following him were his gifts - herds of cattle and horses, and lions, too, and leopards, carried along in cages.

Next came the Magians chanting a song in their native fashion, and behind them were the Chaldaeans, then the Babylonians, represented not only by priests but also by musicians equipped with their national instrument. (The role of the latter was to sing the praises of the Persian kings, that of the Chaldaeans to reveal astronomical movements and regular seasonal changes.) At the rear came the Babylonian cavalry, their equipment and that of the horses suggesting extravagance rather than majesty.

Surrounded by an armed guard, the king instructed the townspeople to follow at the rear of his infantry; then he entered the city on a chariot and went into the palace. The next day he made an inspection of Darius' furniture and all his treasure, but it was the city itself, with its beauty and antiquity, that commanded the attention not only of the king, but of all the Macedonians.

Full description of Alexander's entry and the city of Babylon itself by Curtius here:

http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t44.html

More descriptions of Babylon ancient and modern here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/babylon.htm

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 The Romans’ Alexander is “our Alexander”



According to writer and reviewer Steve Donohue, the Roman version of Alexander is “our Alexander” and a “posing, petulant Alexander is the boy we’re stuck with, until somebody better (and perhaps even less believable) comes along”.

Donohue asserts that it wasn’t enough for the Romans that they eventually won their wars, they had to control the story too, and that includes the story of Alexander. “Perhaps feeling a bit retroactively threatened by this legendary young conqueror from the past, they wanted to read that his mighty efforts fell apart, that he himself was eventually reduced to fortune’s fool. They wanted scenes where even his loyal officers and rank-and-file soldiers ultimately refuse to endorse his ambition”.

In reviewing History of Alexander by Roman historian Quintus Rufus Curtius, Donohue writes:

But once they start controlling things, controllers aren’t happy until they control everything, and surely this as much as anything explains why the Romans latched so tightly onto the story of Alexander the Great. There was no story from the past the Romans couldn’t finesse to the advantage of their self-regard, but in this case, there was no story – because unlike Hannibal (and the Tarquins, and the Etruscans, and everybody else), Alexander looked west to the fledgling little nationality forming on the banks of the Tiber and calmly decided it wasn’t worth his time. Roman historians (our old friend Livy foremost among them) were convinced that this was a narrow escape for Rome: against the might of Alexander’s army (and the magic of his luck), the Rome of 325 B.C. would have been defenseless.

‘Defenseless’ was intolerable to the Romans, who set about right away fitting this world-conqueror with feet of clay heavy enough to sink him in, well, the Gowanus Canal. We have only a handful of ancient literary sources for Alexander’s life. None of the dozens of contemporary lives survive, except as tantalizing echoes in later works – and the vast majority of those later works, major and minor, are Roman. When we think of Alexander, the figure we’re thinking of is a Roman construct, tailored to Roman tastes and suited to Roman needs. The most critically respected of these accounts is by Flavius Arrianus (who wrote under the rule of Hadrian, for a Roman reading public), the most widely read is by Plutarch (who wrote under the rule of Hadrian, for a Roman reading public), and the most Roman is by Quintus Curtius Rufus, whose full-length biography of Alexander is the only one to come down to us from antiquity even remotely intact.

Since Quintus Curtius Rufus’ point always involves fortuna – the concept that Alexander’s reckless audacity (temeritas) was his besetting vice, and that as his self-discipline gave way to it more and more, he tempted fate by literally tempting the Fates to remove or reverse his fortuna, that unbeatable luck that had allowed him to conquer the world. In making this point, QCR might be channeling a Greek idea (even high school kids have heard of hubris), but he’s doing it to give a quintessentially Roman kind of comfort: we might be plodders, but we’d have beaten Alexander because unlike him, we never get too full of ourselves (anyone who’s ever seen an Italian mother wallop her adult son up the side of his head will know the deep roots of this comfort) – and even if we hadn’t been able to beat him, he’d have beaten himself in good time. QCR makes this point explicitly in Book Three, right after the famous scene in which Alexander isn’t miffed at all that King Darius’ captured mother mistakes Alexander’s friend Hephaiston for Alexander:

"Had he been able to maintain this degree of moderation to the end of his life, I would certainly consider him to have enjoyed more good fortune than appeared to be his during his drunkenly victorious march through all the nations of the world from the Hellespont to the Ocean. For then he would surely have overcome the defects he failed to overcome, his pride and his temper; he would have stopped short of killing his friends at dinner, and he would have been reluctant to execute without trial men who had distinguished themselves in battle and had conquered so many nations along with him. But good fortune had not as yet overwhelmed him: while it was on the increase, he bore it with self-control and reserve, but when it eventually peaked, he failed to control it."

This is the Roman Alexander in miniature: a great conqueror, gradually undone by sycophancy, decadence, and over-indulgence. It’s a familiar arc, certainly, but QCR tweaks it for his Roman audience by underscoring the essential effeminacy of Alexander’s Eastern conversion, the increasingly despotic way he treats his former boon companions. QCR never misses an opportunity to make or at least hint at this pattern. His Alexander – and again, his Alexander is the archetypical Roman Alexander, which is our Alexander for good or ill – starts out well, remembering the sacrifices of his mighty father Philip of Macedon, honoring his native gods, treating his loyal Macedonian soldiers and officers with respect, presuming on nothing. But gradually he becomes drunk on his own successes (QCR observes that since his outrageous gambles almost always worked, nobody could get anywhere calling him rash) and sought more than fortuna was prepared to allow him. At one point Alexander consults some Scythian savants on the fate of his rule, and QCR makes a point of telling us that what follows is only his transcription of what they said – uncouth as their phrasings might appear to us now, he says, this is the most accurate version his researches were able to uncover:

“Had the gods willed that your might match your mania, there would be no stopping you. You would touch the east with one hand and the west with the other, and reaching the west you’d look first for where the Almighty’s sun was hidden. Even as it is, you covet things beyond your reach. From Europe you head for Asia; from Asia you cross to Europe. Then, if you defeat the whole human race, you will be ready to make war on woods, on snow, on rivers, on wild animals. Big trees take many years to grow, but it only takes an hour to uproot them – don’t you know this? It’s a stupid man who looks only at their fruit and doesn’t measure their height. Beware that, while striving to reach the top, you don’t fall down right along with the branches you’re climbing. The lion, too, is sometimes the carrion of tiny birds, and iron is eaten by rust. Nothing is so strong that it’s beyond attack, even by the weak. After all, what do we have to do with you? We’ve never set foot in your country. May we not live in our deep forests entirely ignorant of who you are and where you come from? We will not be slaves to anyone and likewise seek no mastery.”

The point of the elaborate disclaimer of accuracy (it’s not common for this author) is to assure the reader that they aren’t being lectured, that our historian is merely showing us all the signs of accumulating bad fortune that Alexander himself might have heeded, had he been in control of his baser desires. That pose, where the writer is the bearer of hard lessons rather than a carping scold, is as old as literature itself (the Biblical prophets, for instance, always said it was God who told them to rain on everybody’s parade) and not exactly unknown in today’s market for reheated polemic, and in QRC’s day (whichever day that was), it was catnip to the Romans.

Perhaps feeling a bit retroactively threatened by this legendary young conqueror from the past, they wanted to read that his mighty efforts fell apart, that he himself was eventually reduced to fortune’s fool. They wanted scenes where even his loyal officers and rank-and-file soldiers ultimately refuse to endorse his ambition, and QRC provides. We don’t know that any of this happened, and we certainly don’t know how it happened; that’s important to remember. Even while he was alive (in fact, the whole time he was alive, even from childhood), Alexander was being used as one or another kind of morality tale by virtually everybody who wrote anything about him – we have as our main sources of his life some of the morality tales woven by the Romans, but all we can view with appropriate suspicion these stories about a headstrong prince become suddenly decadent on Persian flatteries.

It’s true that Alexander halted his eastward progression, and the Romans (none more so than QRC) want us to believe this was a moral rather than a logistical thing. Perhaps the sharpest example of this is the so-called Revolt at the Hypasis River, where Alexander for the first time reveals to the army his grand plan of eternal conquest – not a return to Macedon at long last, but a pushing onward, to the great Ocean stream, from which they could all sail home. The great classicist Peter Green, author of the only truly indispensible modern biography of Alexander, summarizes the dynamics of the situation in refreshingly specific terms:

Alexander was not a man to be deterred by mere geographical considerations. If he could lure the army forward one river at a time, with Ocean a glittering goal always just over the next hill, he might yet attain his end. Such a confidence-trick depended entirely on his knowing more than the army about local conditions, and this he usually did. But at the Beas there were no more hills to deceive his men, only a vast expanse of plain stretching away eastward, and beyond that – visible on a fine day from Gurdaspur, where Alexander probably reached the river – the great rampart of the Western Himalayas. No more potent incitement to mutiny could well be imagined. A diplomatic lie had been nailed, once and for all, by the brute facts of geography.

When confronted with that mutiny, QCR’s Alexander throws what in modern parlance would be called a hissy fit:

“I am abandoned, forsaken, delivered up to the enemy. But even alone, I shall press on. Expose me to rivers, to wild animals, the all those barbarian tribes whose very names seem to make you afraid, no matter. I’ll find other men to follow me, though you all desert me. The Scythians and Bactrians will stick with me – recent enemies who are now my friends. Better to die than to be dependent on the whims of others! Go back home! Go ahead and desert me, and do it proudly! I’ll find some way to win the victory you think is impossible – or else I’ll die trying, but die with honor, at least.”

This is the ultimate break, QCR implies, the most fundamental invitation any commander can give to bad fortune – this ungrateful scorning of men who’ve fought and died for their leader (like most Roman historians, QCR forgets that it was the Romans who invented the mind-staggering military punishment of decimation). Small wonder this life of Alexander crowds up with conspiracies and assassination plots the further along it goes; the implication is that once Alexander stopped living decently, decency called for him to stop living. At least, these are the words QCR puts in the mouth of Hermolaus, leader of a plot meant, as he puts it, to kill a corrupt Persian monarch, not a virtuous Macedonian king:

You wanted Macedonians to kneel before you and worship you like a god! You betrayed the memory of your father Philip, and if some fashion elevated a god over Jupiter, you’d despise Jupiter too! We are free men – are you surprised we can’t endure your vanity? What can we hope for from you, if even innocent men must face death, or worse than death?

It’s possible that by this point in his world conquest, Alexander really did fancy the idea of Persian-style absolute monarchy over the hillbilly egalitarianism of his native Macedon. We lack the written records to say for certain, but men have been known to become thus corrupted. But even if such contemporary records survived – even if Alexander’s own copious dispatches and letters survived – our Quintus Curtius Rufus would have been undeterred. His Alexander was a bright paragon brought low by uncontrolled pride – a perfect polarity to present to friends, Romans, and countrymen who might be tempted to disdain their mother’s cooking. And that posing, petulant Alexander is the boy we’re stuck with, until somebody better – and perhaps even less believable – comes along.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/year-romans-quintus-curtius-rufus/

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Two great historians discuss Megalexandros

The conversation continues here:

Part 4 - http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/01/03/two-great-historians-talk-alexander-the-great-part-4/?boxes=financechannelforbes

Part 5 - http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/01/10/how-great-a-general-was-alexander/?boxes=financechannelforbes

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Sikandar (or Sikander ) is a 1941 Bollywood film directed by Sohrab Modi and starring Prithviraj Kapoor as Alexander the Great. The film is a historic epic set in 326 BC. The film begins after Alexander the Great (Sikander in Hindi/Urdu) conquers Persia and the Kabul valley and approaches the Indian border at Jhelum where he defeats king Porus in battle. Sohrab Modi plays the Indian king Puru (Porus to the Greeks).

Prithviraj Kapoor as Alexander in Sikander

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikandar_(1941_film)

http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/sikandar-1941/

Watch a scene from the movie here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4u4Qm9oM4Q&feature=related

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This is the first publication in English of Pierre Briant's classic short history of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian empire, from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. Eschewing a conventional biographical focus, this is the only book in any language that sets the rise of Alexander's short-lived empire within the broad context of ancient Near Eastern history under Achaemenid Persian rule, as well as against Alexander's Macedonian background. As a renowned historian of both the Macedonians and the Persians, Briant is uniquely able to assess Alexander's significance from the viewpoint of both the conquerors and the conquered, and to trace what changed and what stayed the same as Alexander and the Hellenistic world gained ascendancy over Darius's Persia.

After a short account of Alexander's life before his landing in Asia Minor, the book gives a brief overview of the major stages of his conquest. This background sets the stage for a series of concise thematic chapters that explore the origins and objectives of the conquest; the nature and significance of the resistance it met; the administration, defense, and exploitation of the conquered lands; the varying nature of Alexander's relations with the Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians; and the problems of succession following Alexander's death.

For this translation, Briant has written a new foreword and conclusion, updated the main text and the thematic annotated bibliography, and added a substantial appendix in which he assesses the current state of scholarship on Alexander and suggests some directions for future research. More than ever, this masterful work provides an original and important perspective on Alexander and his empire.

Pierre Briant is the Professor of the History and Civilization of the Achaemenid World and the Empire of Alexander the Great at the Collège de France. His many books include From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire

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"The Onward Sweep of Mighty Alexander” by Dudley Tennant

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Theodore Judson's post-apocalyptic version of the life of Alexander the Great is brilliantly imagined, written, and executed. Judson's 25th century Alexander the Great-like hero, Isaac Fitzpatrick, has a powerful father, scheming mother, limitless charisma, and tenuous tie to sanity as he uses a mix of high and low-tech military might to conquer the world. Fitzpatrick’s War is the memoir of Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce an engineer and soldier in the Yukon Confederacy (a vast nation composed of the entire English world). He is quickly drawn into the inner circle of the charismatic young Fitzpatrick who plans to be the next Alexander the Great. But is all as it seems? Is he, perhaps even the entire world being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy?

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“I have taken notice, as of an extraordinary thing, of some great men, who in the highest enterprises and most important affairs have kept themselves in so settled and serene a calm, as not at all to break their sleep. Alexander the Great, on the day assigned for that furious battle betwixt him and Darius, slept so profoundly and so long in the morning, that Parmenio was forced to enter his chamber, and coming to his bedside, to call him several times by his name, the time to go to fight compelling him so to do.”

- Michel de Montaigne (16th century French essayist)