Travels with Alexander the Great

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Alexander's Castle restored

One of the oldest extant structures in the historic center of Herat in Afghanistan is Qal'a-i Ikhtiyar al-Din. The current structure (known as Alexander's Castle) was built on the site of an ancient citadel that some historians claim was established by Macedonian warrior-king Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. The battlements and towers that still stand are believed to date from the 14th or 15th century when it was reconstructed after being destroyed by Mongol invaders. Some of the blue tile work from that period can still be seen on some towers.

UNESCO did extensive renovation at the site in the 1970s. The Culture Ministry took over stewardship at the site in 2005 and has worked since 2008 with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the U.S. and German governments to restore the structure and set up a museum at the site. U.S. support for the citadel restoration came from the U.S. Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation and is the fund's largest project in the world.

Mohammad Rafiq, a mason from Herat who worked on the project, said he took pride in the work because he sees it as part of the country's broader reconstruction. "It was not only about making money. It was good work to do," he said. "This is the biggest monument in the region. We tried our best to do the reconstruction so that it recopied the old styles of the building."
Housed at the citadel is the National Museum of Herat, one of four provincial museums in Afghanistan to reopen to the public. The Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin worked with the German Archaeological Institute to document and restore artifacts and prepare them for display.

See a panoramic view of the citadel here (click on the photo):

http://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/images/afgh05-089-10.jpg

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The citadel as it looks now. In the 1970s, tourists travelled to western Afghanistan to climb on its ruins which stood overlooking the city of Herat for thousands of years. The citadel was crumbling but today it is a newly restored structure and offers a hopeful sign of progress in a country beset by war.

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James Romm and ATG

“I don’t idolize him and I don’t demonize him. Everything he did has to be looked at in terms of cataclysmic transformation. He took extreme measures. But he lived in extreme times. ... So when he burned Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, he did so not out of drunken rage or in revenge for Persian atrocities against the Greeks but from the desire to send a message to the Persian elite that there was no going back and he had to be accepted as the monarch.” It was gesture politics on a grand, terrifying scale."

Georgette Gouveia writes:

James Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, is one of a few historians worldwide who can be numbered among the Alexander experts. He is the editor of The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, a juicy guide to the Roman general and historian Arrian’s account of Alexander, one of the few surviving ancient sources on the subject. Now Romm has followed this up with Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, which charts not only the brutal unraveling of an empire but what happens when there’s no center that can hold.

Bluntly put, however, why should our Kim Kardashian culture care?

“(Alexander’s) one of the most world-changing individuals in all of history,” Romm said.  “He created a global Greek culture that went from the Adriatic to India.” In creating a new dynamic in which commerce, culture and power flowed west to east, he also spurred and reflected the tensions between the West and the East that are still with us today. The soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are walking in his footsteps.

“In Afghanistan especially…he fought a bitterly entrenched guerrilla war for two years,” Romm said. It took all of his considerable charisma and tactical brilliance – plus his marriage to the beautiful daughter of an Afghan warlord, Rhoxane – to succeed, “and even then it was hard to hold on.” That he did so is attributable not only to his dynamic command – he led from the front and was secure enough to surround himself with first-rate generals – but to his autocratic will.

“I don’t idolize him and I don’t demonize him,” he said. “Everything he did has to be looked at in terms of cataclysmic transformation. He took extreme measures. But he lived in extreme times.” So when he burned Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, he did so, Romm said, not out of drunken rage or in revenge for Persian atrocities against the Greeks but from the desire to send “a message to the Persian elite that there was no going back and he had to be accepted as the monarch.” It was gesture politics on a grand, terrifying scale.

That brutality – coupled with a capacity for chivalry, mercy and generosity – made Alexander one of history’s most complex figures and the scorching but indispensible sun around which an empire revolved. His death in Babylon in June of 323 B.C. – just a month shy of his 33rd birthday – left a world suddenly grown cold. Into this frigid void leapt an array of ambitious generals, female relatives and would-be heirs seeking to become new lights by centralizing authority once again or, barring that, carving up pieces of the empire.

Romm likens this to the ungluing of the economically wobbly European Union. Ironically, some of today’s European tensions stem from Alexander himself.  The Republic of Macedonia recently erected a statue said to be of Alexander and his famed steed, Bucephalus, in the capital of Skopje – to go along with the nation’s Alexander the Great Airport. This sparked furor in Greece, where Alexander is a national hero, even though the ancient Greeks despised him and his father, Philip II. (Their kingdom of Macedon, in what is now northern Greece, had a hegemony over the Greek city-states.)

Proving that it is in some ways still Alexander’s world, and we are merely living in it.

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Alexander - to be admired or deplored?

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Mary Beard precedes her comments on several recent books on Alexander with this consideration of how the Roman world perceived the man.

In 51 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had reluctantly left his desk in Rome to become military governor of the province of Cilicia in southern Turkey, scored a minor victory against some local insurgents. As we know from his surviving letters, he was conscious that he was treading in the footsteps of a famous predecessor: “For a few days,” he wrote to his friend Atticus, “we were encamped in exactly the same place that Alexander occupied when he was fighting Darius at Issus”—hastily conceding that Alexander was in fact “a rather better general that you or I.”

Whatever the irony in Cicero’s remarks, almost any Roman, given the command of a brigade of troops and a glimpse of lands to the East, would soon dream of becoming Alexander the Great. In their fantasies at least, they stepped into the shoes of the young king of Macedon who, between 334 and 323 BC, had crossed into Asia, conquered the Persian Empire under Darius III, and taken his army as far as the Punjab, some three thousand miles from home—before dying, on the return journey, in the city of Babylon, at the age of thirty-two, whether (as the official version had it) from a deadly fever or (as others insinuated) from poisoning or some alcohol-related condition.

Other Romans had a much better claim to be “new Alexanders” than the normally desk-bound Cicero; and they made even more of the connection, with less sense of irony. Cicero’s contemporary Cnaeus Pompeius has been eclipsed in the modern imagination by his rival Julius Caesar, but as a young man he had achieved even more decisive victories over even more glamorous enemies than Caesar ever did. After conquests in Africa in the 80s BC, he returned to Rome to be hailed “Magnus” (or “Pompey the Great,” as he is still known), in direct imitation of Alexander. And as if to drive the point home, in his most famous surviving portrait statue (now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen), Pompeius is shown aping Alexander’s distinctive hairstyle, with a rising “quiff” (or anastole as the Greeks called it) brushed back from the center of his forehead (see picture).



Pompey with Alexander's hairstyle.

Julius Caesar was not to be entirely outdone. When he visited Alexandria, where Alexander’s body had finally ended up (hijacked in its hearse on the way back from Babylon to Macedon and claimed for Egypt by one of Alexander’s “successors”), he made sure to make a pilgrimage to the tomb: one demented despot paying homage to another, as the Roman poet Lucan derided the stunt.

There were, nonetheless, divergent views on Alexander at Rome (as Lucan’s sour account of the tomb visit hints). In one of the first known attempts at counterfactual history, Livy raised the question of who would have won if Alexander had decided to invade Italy. Predictably, Livy concluded that the Roman Empire would have proved as invincible against Alexander as it had against its other enemies. True, Alexander was a great general, but Rome at that period had many great generals and they were made of sterner stuff than the Persian king, with his “women and eunuchs in tow,” who was by any reckoning “an easy prey.”
Besides, from early on, Alexander showed signs of fatal weaknesses: witness the vanity, the obeisance he demanded from his followers, the vicious cruelty (he had a record of murdering erstwhile friends around his dinner table), and the infamous drinking. An invasion of Italy would have been a tougher test than the invasion of India, which “he strolled through on a drunken revel with an intoxicated army.”

Even Cicero, in his more hardheaded moments, could see the problems in Alexander’s career. In a now fragmentary passage of his treatise On the State, he seems to have quoted an anecdote that would turn up again, almost five hundred years later, in the pages of Saint Augustine. The story was that a petty pirate had been captured and brought before Alexander. What drove him, Alexander asked, to terrorize the seas with his pirate ship? “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world,” the man sharply replied. There were plenty of acts of terror he could have cited: the total massacres of the male population after the sieges at Tyre and Gaza; the mass killing of the local population in the Punjab; the razing of the royal palace at Persepolis, after (so it was said) one of Alexander’s inebriated dinner parties.

But, for the most part, the debates about Alexander, and the evidence on which they are based, have not changed very much over two millennia: the basic dilemma—for writers, filmmakers, artists, and statesmen—is still whether Alexander is to be admired or deplored. For many, he has remained a positive example of a “great general,” heroically leading his army to victory in increasingly distant terrain.

Read the full discussion plus Mary Beard's reviews of four recents books on Alexander and one on his father Phillip:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/alexander-how-great/?page=1

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Napoleon was a famous admirer of Alexander and a striking relic of his admiration survives in this precious table he commissioned, which ended up in Buckingham Palace. Made of porcelain and gilded bronze, it features the head of Alexander at the center of the tabletop, surrounded by a supporting cast of other military giants of the ancient world. According to Mary Beard "for Alexander, read Napoleon".

To study the table in close up click on this link:

http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery/object.asp?category=279&object=2634&row=77&detail=magnify

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At distant intervals a major art show leads to a new understanding of events that changed the course of world history “In the Kingdom of Alexander the Great, Ancient Macedonia” on view at the Louvre Museum does so through stunning visual evidence. Discovered mostly within the past four decades, it reveals “the other Greece” — one that does not fit the image cherished by the European cultivated elites since Renaissance times.

Gone is the cliché of Alexander invading an unknown Middle East in retaliation for the “Median Wars” waged by the emperors Darius and Xerxes against Greece. Intercourse between Iran and Macedonia started long before, and it left an imprint on Macedonian art that has yet to be acknowledged. Better still, the show demonstrates that the supposedly remote Macedonia isolated in the far north of the Hellenic world was influenced at an early date by lands very far to the east.

The distant Mecenian civilization fascinated Macedonia, as witness the pottery excavated at Livadia near Aiane. Some two-handled vessels — say “kantharos” if you wish to sound sophisticated — have profiles that call for comparison with artifacts found in the heart of present-day Turkey where the Hittites laid the foundations of one of their Indo-European cultures in the early second millennium B.C. A bird-shaped pouring vessel, “askos” in Greek, reproduces a type established in Iran as early as the beginning of the second Millennium B.C. By the seventh century B.C., the Iranian connection can be verified in a whole range of Macedonian objects.

Full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/arts/22iht-MELIKIAN22.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Another review:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204002304576629160830311304.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Louvre exhibition website here:

http://alexandre-le-grand.louvre.fr/en/introduction/home.html

Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkhfTEkJRQ

(Be patient with the interviews in Greek and French in the following videos as the exhibits are interspersed between them)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9TIdVpRTyQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFfvsvEqtYo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QiZAzrEyeQ

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Over the Hindu Kush Mountains

“Nothing put him off. Starvation, freezing cold, nothing. He just kept coming on and on.
And in the end his enemies were struck with fear and amazement.” - Arrian

Artaxerxes V, also known as Bessus, was a prominent Persian nobleman and satrap of Bactria. Having killed his predecessor Darius III after the Persian army had been defeated by Alexander he proclaimed himself king and fled north across present-day Afghanistan. Alexander went in hot pursuit.
 
Alexander had the choice of crossing the Hindu Kush by a number of passes. But being a shrewd tactician he speculated that Bessus would have expected him to come by the easiest pass, so to confound him, he chose the more difficult Khawak Pass.

Alexander waited until the worst of the winter weather had passed but he couldn't wait any longer and set off before the winter snows had melted (Probably late March) His army marched up the Panjcher valley and suffered terribly from cold and severe food shortages. Marching through the sheer-sided Panjcher gorge which marks the entrance of the long valley, there would have been layers of frost as the sun touches the ground for a mere few minutes at this time of year. They climbed up to the Khawak Pass where many soldiers fell by the wayside with snow blindness or exhaustion and were abandoned.

Through the Khawak Pass

The Khawak Pass is 11,640 feet and on a cold windy March day temperatures can drop to - 30oC. Dodge describes it thus: "The ancient historians dismiss this march with a few words; but it has no parallel, except Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, and it is the first undertaking of the kind of which we have any record. Hannibal, from unexpected delays, started too late in the fall; Alexander from over=eagerness, started too early in the spring. Both contended with heavy snows, and suffered from their attendant trials."

The snow was still deep, the cold was intense, food was scarce and fuel non-existent. The men, struggling through drifts up to their armpits, suffered terribly from exhaustion, snowblindness and frostbite. Literally in their thousands they were frozen solid to the rocks as they leaned against them. The horses and pack-asses suffered an even higher ration of casualties, but at least their bodies, eaten rawbecause there was no fuel to cook them, provided the troops with food. Alexander lost more men and more animals crossing the Hindu Kush than all his subsequent campaigns in central Asia.

A new terror

Having final crossed the mountains, a new terror was waiting for the soldiers: the march to the river Oxus, across 75 kilometer of waterless desert. The Roman author Quintus Curtius Rufus describes the death march: it was too hot to travel by day, and the troops -who had suffered from cold only weeks ago- were now forced to walk during the night, During the advance to the Oxus, one of the most famous incidents of Alexander's life took place: when someone offered him water, he refused it, saying that he wanted to share the hardships of the rank and file. When the army finally reached the river, many soldiers died from uncontrolled drinking.

Bessus tried to prevent the Macedonian crossing of the Oxus river by burning all available ships. However, Alexander's men built rafts: they stuffed their tents with hay, and five days later, the army was on the other bank in the southeast of what is now called Turkmenistan. The crossing of the Hindu Kush, the pebble desert and the Oxus were impressive deeds and the enemy lost heart. Bessus' courtiers Spitamenes and Datames arrested Artaxerxes V Bessus and handed him over to Ptolemy, Alexander's friend and future biographer.

Alexander had Bessus cruelly mutilated: his ears and nose were cut off. This was shocking to the Greeks and Macedonians, but it was what Alexander had to do as a Persian king who punished a regicide. After the mutilation, Alexander handed Bessus over to Darius' brother Oxyathres, ordering that he should bring the rebel to the place where he had killed his master, crucify him and keep the vultures away from the dead body.

   

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View of the Hindu Kush ("Hindu killers") mountain range.

"Here, the army entered mythical space and time: marching under mountains where, so it was said, the Titan Prometheus had been tortured for aeons by Zeus for revealing to humankind the secret of fire and the arts of civilization." - Michael Wood

From the ruins of Kabul, Michael Wood follows Alexander's route across the towering Hindu Kush through the formidable Khawak Pass. He travels by Land Rover, then horse, and finally on foot, all the while recounting the ancient writers' descriptions of the suffering endured by Alexander's army from starvation, cold, exhaustion, and altitude sickness. At the head of the 12,000-foot pass, from which the land stretches away into central Asia, Wood notes that after "following Alexander's footsteps up here with this wind you can really feel, whatever you think about him, what an amazing achievement it was to drive an army over these mountains."   
   
http://www2.salon.com/wlust/pass/1998/01/08pass.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thAS28SWKKU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp2BOBNLAZg

"Across the Mountains" – the soundtrack from the film Alexander

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMpBp5hnaE

The Greeks in Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0KwPdWA0f4&feature=related

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Recently, sensational news and documentary reports have studied the obscure Kalash tribe of northern Pakistan (the Hindu Kush) that claims descent from the Greek settlers of Alexander the Great's empire. Many have been puzzled by their light features, green eyes, and "European looks," although this has been intensely debated. Some have been anxious to claim that these are ethnic Greeks in Asia. James Mayfield analyzes the tribe's culture, racial physiognomy, rituals, and traditional origin myths. He also overviews the historical process of Alexander's conquests in the region and his foundation of the longstanding Greek cultural legacy that may explain whether or not the Kalash are of Greek genetic roots or not.

Kalash foundation myths describe their progenitor and founder as a "horned-god" and an equestrian conquerer with demon horns. Alexander was sometimes depicted in writings, imagery, and numismatic evidence to have donned a dual-horned helmet with red tassels (although this is often highly exaggerated). This is significant in tracing their lineage to Alexander and his conquering army. Perhaps their claim of “descent” from Alexander the Great and “his army” originally referred to soldiers conscripted in Alexander's campaign after his conquests in Iran, regardless of their race. The Kalash may mean that they descend from the political legacy of Alexander's empire (as most of Eurasia did for many centuries) rather than descending from Alexander's Greek settlers themselves. They were surely aware of the dominant hegemon with his horned helmet in the region.

Read the complete article here:

http://euroheritage.net/greeksinasia.shtml

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Virtual Pella

Wandering around the ruins of Pella, capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and birthplace of Alexander and his father Philip, it is hard to imagine what life there looked like two thousand and more years ago. We need wonder no more.

The Foundation of the Hellenic World have created the virtual representation of a major Hellenistic house in Pella, the so-called "House of Dionysos" which is exhibited in the Louvre exhibition called "Macedonia. The kingdom of Alexander the Great". The exhibition will run from 12/10/2011 until 16/01/2012. The house was conventionally named after a mosaic, depicting Dionysus riding a panther, which adorned one of the androns. The house is restored according to scientific publications and, in some cases, with the use of architectural details preserved in the neighboring houses, found in excavations.

Read and see more:

http://pella.virtualreality.gr/

Watch the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyZx4lDUtIE&feature=player_embedded

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Pella today.

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The Fourth Beast

“After this I kept looking, and behold, another one, like a leopard, which had on its back
four wings of a bird; the beast also had four heads, and dominion was given to it.” (Daniel 7:6)*

By introducing Hellenic culture into Syria and Egypt, Alexander had probably more influence on the development of Judaism than any one non-Jewish individual. Yet, curiously enough, there are no personal details which connect him with Jewish history, save that after the siege of Tyre, 332 B.C., he marched through Palestine unopposed, except in the case of Gaza, which was razed to the ground. He is mentioned by name only in the Apocryphal I Macc. (i. 1-8, vi. 2). It is supposed that the Book of Daniel alludes to Alexander when it refers to a mighty king that "shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion," whose kingdom shall be destroyed after his death (Dan. xi. 3). The vision was of a "fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly, devouring and breaking all in pieces".

The only historical event connecting Alexander the Great with the Jews is his visit to Jerusalem after he had taken Gaz., which is recorded by Josephus in a somewhat fantastic manner. Jaddua, the high priest, had a warning from God received in a dream, in which he saw himself vested in a purple robe, with his miter—that had the golden plate on which the name of God was engraved—on his head. Accordingly he went to meet Alexander at Sapha. Followed by the priests, all clothed in fine linen, and by a multitude of citizens, Jaddua awaited the coming of the king. When Alexander saw the high priest, he reverenced God , and saluted Jaddua; while the Jews with one voice greeted Alexander.

When Parmenio, the general, gave expression to the army's surprise at Alexander's extraordinary act—that one who ought to be adored by all as king should adore the high priest of the Jews—Alexander replied: "I did not adore him, but the God who hath honored him with this high-priesthood; for I saw this very person in a dream, in this very habit, when I was at Dios in Macedonia, who, when I was considering with myself how I might obtain dominion of Asia, exhorted me to make no delay, but boldly to pass over the sea, promising that he would conduct my army, and would give me the dominion over the Persians."

Alexander then gave the high priest his right hand, and went into the Temple and "offered sacrifice to God according to the high priest's direction," treating the whole priesthood magnificently. "And when the Book of Daniel was shown him [see Dan. vii. 6, viii. 5-8, 20-22, xi. 3-4], wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that he was the person intended, and rejoiced thereat.

The following day Alexander asked the people what favors he should grant them; and, at the high priest's request, he accorded them the right to live in full enjoyment of the laws of their forefathers. He, furthermore, exempted them from the payment of tribute in the seventh year of release. To the Jews of Babylonia and Media also he granted like privileges; and to the Jews who were willing to enlist in his army he promised the right to live in accordance with their ancestral laws. Afterward the Samaritans, having learned of the favors granted the Jews by Alexander, asked for similar privileges; but Alexander declined to accede to their request.

The historical character of this account is, however, doubted by many scholars. Although, according to Josephus, Alexander permitted the Jews to hold the country of Samaria free from tribute as a reward for their fidelity to him, it was he who Hellenized its capital.

Read more: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1120&letter=A#ixzz1b7KOdUeB

The Fourth Beast

The prophet Daniel's vision of the four-winged leopard was said to represent the Greek empire. If one set of wings represented swiftness, this beast was exceedingly swift and indeed Alexander the Great would conquer the whole known world in a matter of just a few years. Daniel's prophecy also stated: "The first king ... being broken ... four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation" (Dan. 8:21-22). Upon Alexander’s death bed his generals asked him who would become the next appointed ruler, seeing as he had no heir. Alexander, reportedly, said, “It will go to the strongest.” Sure enough, after his death, all his generals fought it out, and four of them succeeded in capturing great pieces of his kingdom. his four generals, Cassander(Macedonia), Lysimachus(Thrace), Seleucus (Syria) and Ptolemy (Egypt) took over the empire and divided it into four parts.

http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t46.html

NOTE: The most widely accepted critical view posits that the author of the text was an anonymous writer living in the Maccabean period under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, during the 2nd century BCE, who compiled ancient legends with a pseudepigraph of "visions." Other more conservative textual scholars, however, maintain with the historic Judeo-Christian tradition that Daniel, the protagonist of the narrative set in the 6th century BCE, is likely also the historical author of the text.