Chapter 11 : Conqueror and Creator - Alexander the Great
The appearance of Alexander the Great on the stage of history is a remarkable example of how one person's strength of will in a leadership position can change the course of world events. From out of nowhere Alexander burst upon the ancient world and turned it on its head, and then, just as quickly, he vanished.
Above: A detail from the Alexander Sarcophagus, showing Alexander on a horse supported by an infantryman. Alexander's hair is portrayed as blond-red, as is the pubic hair of the infantryman on the left - sure indicators of the racial types present. The Sarcophagus dates from the 4th Century BC, and is currently in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.
ALEXANDER SARCOPHAGUS
The famous Alexander Sarcophagus (also known as the Sarcophagus of Sidon, dating from 310 BC and presently in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul) depicts Macedonians as having White skin, fair hair and blue eyes while Alexander himself was a stereotype Aryan. (For a photograph of the Alexander Sarcophagus, see Chapter seven).
PHILIP II - FATHER OF ALEXANDER
The Macedonians were a relatively quiet people until their potential was unleashed by an energetic king, Philip II, in 359 BC. After firmly establishing Macedonian unity, Philip set about invading the Greek peninsula, occupying Athens in 338 BC. He then turned his attention to the Persian empire to the East.
Before he could actually invade Persia, Philip was assassinated in 336 BC, soon after he discarded his queen, Olympias, (who was Alexander's mother) and had taken a new wife, Cleopatra (not the one famed as an Egyptian queen).
It is cause for speculation that this domestic upheaval led to Philip's assassination, possibly arranged even by his son, Alexander. Whatever the case, Philip was given a royal burial, his tomb being discovered intact and in pristine condition in 1977 AD.
Philip's crown passed to his 20 year old son, Alexander, who in the year 334 BC set out to crush the Persians once and for all. In doing this he managed to unite most of the Greeks and became undisputed master of the Greek peninsula.
Above: Alexander the Great, conqueror of the then known world with his mighty Indo-European army, which swept down from north of Greece and went as far as India.
WARS AGAINST PERSIA - 334 BC
Alexander began his war against Persia in the spring of 334 BC by crossing the Dardanelles with an army of 35,000 Macedonian and Greek troops. His chief officers, all Macedonians, were Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus, all to later play significant roles in history themselves.
At the river Granicus, near the ancient city of Troy, Alexander launched a surprise attack on a 40,000 strong Persian force. The Macedonians defeated the Persians, losing, according to Alexandrian exaggeration, only 110 men. Whatever the truth, the victory was overwhelming, and as news of the decisive victory spread throughout Turkey, all of the sub-continent submitted to Alexander without putting up a fight.
Alexander then took on the main Persian army, commanded personally by King Darius III, at Issus, in modern north eastern Syria. Still only having around 35,000 soldiers, Alexander attacked the Persian army estimated by Macedonian records to be 500,000 strong - probably another exaggeration - but nonetheless indicative of the odds that Alexander faced. Incredibly enough, and probably due to his genius as a military leader, Alexander won the day at the Battle of Issus, in 333 BC - which saw the utter rout of the Persian forces.
Above: The basic unit, or speira, in Alexander's army. The 256 men are ranked in close order, 16 deep. In a charge, the spears of the first five ranks projected forward to break the enemy ranks - the rest of the men held their spears skywards to deflect arrows or other projectiles. Tactics such as these helped Alexanders army overcome overwhelming odds time and time again during their breathtaking march from Greece right through the Near East, to India itself.
LEBANON AND EGYPT
Pushing southwards, Alexander then stormed the fortified city port of Tyre in modern Lebanon, seizing the city after a siege of seven months. Alexander then captured Gaza and in quick succession occupied Egypt, the disorganized and enfeebled non-White chieftains there offering little real resistance.
In 332 BC Alexander founded a new city in Egypt - which he modestly called Alexandria. This city would later became the literary, scientific, and commercial center of the Greek world. Cyrene, the capital of the ancient North African kingdom of Cyrenaica, submitted to Alexander soon afterwards, extending his dominion to the lands of the city of Carthage, where his troops set up a ruling aristocracy (and from whom ultimately the great General Hannibal would emerge to test the Roman Empire some 200 years later).
THE FALL OF BABYLON
Turning northward again, Alexander drew up reinforcements and with an army of 40,000 infantrymen and 7,000 cavalry, marched on Babylon. Crossing the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, he met the Persian King Darius once again, who, according to Macedonian records, had drawn up a new army one million strong - certainly once again an exaggeration, but still without any doubt badly outnumbering Alexander's forces.
At the Battle of Gaugamela, on 1 October, 331 BC, Alexander once again beat Darius, who fled and was killed by two of his own generals. The city of Babylon then surrendered and Alexander occupied the Persian capital city of Persepolis. Within three years, Alexander had occupied a huge stretch of land, and all resistance crumbled before his ruthless army. His empire extended along and beyond the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, including modern Afghanistan and northward into central Asia.
Above: Alexander and his great foe, Darius III of Persia, meet at last. After his defeat, Darius fled to Medea, in 331 BC where he was murdered just before Alexander caught up with him. Here the final meeting is reconstructed according to original accounts: Alexander still paid respect to his dead foe who had long been the scourge of Greece and Macedonia.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ARYANS - ALEXANDER INVADES INDIA
In order to complete his conquest of the remnants of the Persian Empire, which had once included part of western India, Alexander crossed the Indus River in 326 BC, and invaded the Punjab region, following the footsteps of the Aryans of some 1,200 years previously.
At this point Alexander's army rebelled and refused to go any further, seeing no point in marching endlessly on, getting further and further away from their homes without any respite in sight. Sensing that he had to get his men home quickly, Alexander then pulled off another incredible feat. He constructed a fleet of ships then and there and sailed down the Indus river, reaching its mouth in September 325 BC. He then sailed with his army to the Persian Gulf and returned overland across the desert, arriving in Babylon in 323 BC.
It was while on this return journey that Alexander contracted fever and died in Babylon.
ALEXANDER'S AMAZING LEGACY
All in all, Alexander founded 25 cities - an amazing achievement all by itself. Many of them bore his name, or local translations of his name, but one became most famous of all: Alexandria in Egypt. Founded in 332 BC, this city became the new capital of Egypt and in 300 BC a library and a place of learning was started, later to become world famous as the Alexandrian library. The library was said to have contained the greatest single concentration of contemporary knowledge in the world at that time.
Alexandria also became noted for its famous lighthouse - 70 meters tall with a fire being reflected by mirrors and visible 50 kilometers away, this soon became one of the seven wonders of the world. Although only active for a very short period of 13 years (336 BC - 323 BC) and dying at the age of 33, Alexander etched his name into history by single handedly creating what was until that time, the greatest land empire ever seen. He was buried in Alexandria in Egypt.
ALEXANDER'S RACIAL UNITY - DOOMED TO FAILURE
Despite having easily overcome all the mixed race peoples of the Middle and Near East, Alexander himself publicly declared himself to be in favor of further racial integration.
To this end he was an ardent exponent of ensuring the compliance of invaded nations by issuing orders that his Macedonian occupiers be integrated with the subject peoples. He ordered for example that all his generals to take wives from the conquered peoples, most of whom were racial mixtures.
Alexander himself took a non-White wife, a Persian princess who was of mixed race. He also started dressing like the peoples he had conquered, and in 324 BC at a city called Susa he personally officiated at an arranged mass wedding of 9,000 of his senior army officers to Middle Eastern wives - the famous "marriage of East and West" meant to symbolize the new racial unity he was hoping to create.
Upon Alexander's early death, virtually all of his senior officers who had been forced into these multiracial marriages renounced their imposed wives and set up pure White Macedonian ruling classes in the areas which had been placed under their control.
ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE DIVIDED
At the time of his death there was no obvious successor to Alexander (as his one son was very young and the other was retarded - both were murdered in 305 BC and that ended the debate on succession), and within two decades his empire split into four units, three of them ruled by his former generals. Asia was ruled by Seleucus and his family - who founded the Seleucidian empire - Greece and Macedonia by Antigonus - and Egypt by the most famous of these generals, Ptolemy. The fourth unit, Asia Minor (Turkey) became independent.
ANTIGONID GREECE
Antigonus and his successors ruled most of the Greek mainland from 281 BC until 168 BC, when they were finally defeated by the Romans. The conflict with Rome had escalated slowly, and had finally come to a head when the Antigonid kings, notably Philip V, had provided help to the famous general Hannibal of Carthage in his campaigns against Rome. This led to three wars with Rome, leading to the eventual defeat of the Macedonians in 168 BC. The Romans removed the Antigonids from power, but a pro-Macedonian revolt in 147 BC led directly to the Roman occupation of mainland Greece.
PTOLEMAIC EGYPT - WORLD'S FIRST MUSEUMS
Alexander's General Ptolemy, established the Ptolemaic reign in Egypt, which lasted from 323 to 30 BC. By far the best known Ptolemaic Egyptian queen was Cleopatra VII, a White woman who won fame due to her relationships with the Romans Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.
Although the Ptolemies in particular ensured that their line was always pure Macedonian, they did take on many of the dress and cultural aspects of the long past ancient Egypt, calling themselves Pharaohs, producing monuments and buildings in the style of the ancient White Egyptians. Embalming and mummification became common once again.
Ptolemy I established a center of learning and research known as the musea, or as we know the type of institution today, a museum - the first in the world.
The Ptolemaic reign provided a new short lease of life to Egypt, but the largely Arabic/mixed race local population soon overwhelmed the heavily outnumbered White Macedonians, who had also had to contend with the vigorous new White civilization of Rome.
Ptolemaic Egypt included modern day Israel, parts of Syria and even a small part of southern Turkey. Most of these lands were however lost to military attacks by the Seleucidians - descendants of yet another of Alexander's generals - around the year 220 BC.
The loss of Palestine marked the waning of the Ptolemaic power in Egypt, with tensions between the overwhelmingly non-White Egyptians and the White Greek immigrant rulers erupting into violence.
Upper Egypt broke away and between 205 BC and 185 BC and was for that time ruled by its own non-White population. In spite of these pressures, the ruling White Macedonian Ptolemies preserved their Greek culture, and only the very last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII, (the most famous one) ever bothered to learn the Egyptian language.
bove: White Macedonians rule Egypt: left, Ptolemy I Soter; and right, Queen Cleopatra VII - the first and the last of the Macedonian rulers of Egypt. Ptolemy was Alexander the Great's general who, upon the latter's death, took the land of Egypt as his kingdom in 323 BC. He set up a White ruling class over the large mass of mixed race inhabitants, then living amongst the ruins of the previous White civilization in Egypt. The Ptolemies kept themselves separate from the mass of non-White Egyptians, never even bothering to learn their language, but taking on the ways and customs of ancient Egypt. The Ptolemy family were to rule Egypt for another 300 years until the last, and most famous member of their line, Cleopatra VII, committed suicide and Egypt was added to the Roman Empire.
It was this Cleopatra who, after first becoming the lover of the great Roman, Julius Caesar, married his friend Mark Anthony after the former's murder. A Roman army subsequently defeated Cleopatra and Mark Anthony's combined forces (the battle of Actium) and after this Cleopatra and Mark Anthony committed suicide.
This event marked the end of the very last Hellenistic kingdom, that of Ptolemaic Egypt.
After the battle of Actium, Ptolemaic Egypt was handed over to Rome as yet another province. As the racial balance in the other parts of the area occupied by Alexander shifted increasingly against the Macedonians, so the remains of Alexander's empire slowly crumbled away to oblivion.
By the time of the defeat of Cleopatra VII, Alexander's empire had long since ceased to exist. As there were far too few pure Macedonians to colonize the entire empire, the Macedonian outposts were little more than islands in a sea of people who had long since lost any semblance of racial homogeneity.
It was therefore only a matter of time before these islands were submerged.
THE SELEUCIDIAN EMPIRE
Alexander's general Seleucus seized an enormous part of Alexander's empire, stretching from southern Turkey to the Sinai Desert (areas seized from Ptolemaic Egypt) and eastward to include Mesopotamia and parts of modern day Iraq and Iran. Despite repeated attempts to encourage Macedonian settlers into the region, the Seleucids never had enough manpower to control the vast area properly, and fairly soon their empire also began to crumble under the pressure of trying to contain large numbers of widely diverse racial and ethnic groupings within the borders of one state.
In the northern parts of the Seleucidian empire, for example, descendants of Macedonian soldiers teamed up with scattered Indo-European tribes and local mixed race peoples to break away from the Seleucids to form the relatively short lived states of Bactria and Parthia. Some of these Indo-Europeans were in fact marauding Celts, who had also occupied a part of Northern Macedonia itself.
The eastern reaches of the Seleucidian empire at one stage reached to the borders of India, but this region also steadily drifted out of control. In 168 BC, king Perseus of Macedonia, was defeated by the Romans at the battle of Pydna and the Macedonian monarchy was abolished.
In 146 BC, Macedonia and Greece became direct Roman provinces after a short-lived rebellion by the Macedonians, and in 64 BC, the Seleucid empire was conquered by the Roman general Pompey and became a Roman province.
The Romans did not realize it then, of course, but in occupying these regions they themselves took on the problem which had led to dissolution of Alexander's empire - the huge numbers of non-Whites who would soon overwhelm them in these regions and eventually penetrate right to Rome itself.
Above: Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals who founded the Kingdom of Syria; from an original Macedonian sculpture.
THE CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE
The period from 320 BC - 30 BC is known as the Alexandrian age, and contributed a number of philosophic, cultural and scientific advances to Western civilization. It was during this time that three well known philosophies were formulated: Epicureanism, Stoicism and Skepticism.
*
Epicureanism was started by the philosopher Epicurus (342 BC - 270 BC) of Samos on the Ionian coast in Turkey. Epicurus did not believe in an afterlife and taught that the highest good was to obtain material benefits during one's lifetime. This philosophy was later misinterpreted to mean merely sensual pleasure.
*
In opposition to Epicurus was Zeno of Cyprus, who argued that there should be only one aim in life - freedom from the desires of life, where the ideal state was to be tranquil and indifferent to both pain and pleasure. This philosophy was called stoicism.
*
Skepticism said that all opinions about pain or pleasure were subjective so there could not be one sensible truth or dogma - the skeptics questioned the very basis of all facts.
CIRCUMFERENCE OF EARTH MEASURED
As a result of Alexander's conquests, Greek science merged with what he had found in Babylon and Egypt and produced a number of advances. The expansion of geographic knowledge allowed scientists to make maps and plot the size of the earth, which was already identified as a globe through the observation of its shadow during a lunar eclipse.
*
The keeper of the library at Alexandria, Erastosthenes (276 BC - 195 BC) calculated the circumference of the earth to within some 200 miles by measuring the difference in angles of shadows cast at midday by two identical poles set in the earth in the north and south of Egypt.
*
In the third century BC Aristarchus of Samos first propagated the theory that the earth rotates on its own axis and revolves around a stationary sun. Not until the 1500s AD were scientists to realize that Aristarchus was right.
*
Another great man from Alexandria was Euclid the mathematician (circa 300 BC) who developed the forms and theorems of geometry as still used today.
*
Archimedes (207 BC - 212 BC) of Syracuse is most famous for his discovery of the laws of hydraulics, that a solid object displaces liquid to the same volume as the object itself (which he, probably apocryphally, is said to have discovered while in the bath and then run outside naked in the street shouting "Eureka"). Archimedes also calculated the exact ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, known as Pi - and developed the famous Archimedes screw, a means of pumping water uphill through the use of a large screw in a tube.
The greatest contribution of the Alexandrian age was however the transference of a large amount of classical knowledge to the new power in Europe - Rome.
When Roman legions finally physically occupied Athens and mainland Greece, they marveled at what they found, and substantial amounts of sculpture, designs and other objects were physically looted and taken back to Rome, in many cases laying the basis for much of what is, quite wrongly, regarded as Roman Classical culture.
