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Primary sources for gods are as rare as hen’s teeth. There are many divine men in Antiquity, from Buddha to Apollonius of Tyana and Jesus, and we have no primary sources for any of them. Alexander the Great was also venerated as a god – he is even said to have claimed divinity for himself. Is he the exception: do we have primary sources for him? There are many ancient sources on the career of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great: the Library of world history of Diodorus of Sicily, Quintus Curtius Rufus’ History of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, a Life of Alexander by Plutarch of Chaeronea and the Anabasis by Arrian of Nicomedia are the best-known. All these authors lived more than three centuries after the events they described, but they used older, nearly contemporary sources, that are now lost.
- Alexander the Great: the ‘good’ sources That’s a guess, that they used earlier sources. because we have only their word for it. We all know that Alexander is a historical figure, don’t we? Just like we all know Jesus Christ was born in Nazareth. And that Muhammad met the Archangel Gabriel in a cave in 610. Or that Siddh?rtha Gautama was a prince of South Asia some 2,600 years ago. We are free to believe what we want, just as we are free to make our own mistakes. That’s the great benefit of a liberal, western democracy, as opposed to the oppression in China. That’s what we live, kill and die for – to be as ignorant, self-obsessed and wrong as we wish. The great source of reliable information on archaeology online – archaeology.about.com – assures us Archaeological evidence of the sites and campaigns of Alexander is less evident; but there are some – here is their authoritative list:
Surely some mistake? None of these sites contains any archaeology for Alexander. So let us take a short cut to the hard facts: coins. You must have seen them – on the web alone there are innumerable examples of these fabulous silver and gold coins, with Alexander’s wonderful face gleaming out at us (look at my icon). Don’t they prove – beyond all doubt – that Alexander existed and did those heroic deeds? Let us take a look and see. This is how the British Museum puts it: It is generally accepted that this coin is from a series issued by the victorious Alexander, perhaps after his return to Babylon in 324 BC, although there is no firm evidence for its place of production, and Alexander’s name is absent from these coins and their accompanying issues. If they were issued by Alexander then they are remarkable historical documents. Not so clear, is it? Let us look further. The numismatics of Alexander is founded in the 19th century, as are the foundations of the field of archaeology. Ludvig Müller was a Danish scholar whose work of 1855, Numismatique d’Alexandre le Grand, suivie d’un appendice contenant les monnaies de Philippe II et III, was the first comprehensive study of the coinage. Many of Müller’s mint attributions remain uncontested today. Archaeology is the study of cultural layers and artefacts – such as coins – from a sealed layer can be dated secure in the knowledge that the layer has not been tampered with. A series of layers can therefore provide reliable data from such a methodology archaeologists have been able to provide time-lines to construct historical frameworks. This not, however, the methodology used to make the claims for coins issued by Alexander.
The description from the museum: Initially Alexander continued to mint Philip’s gold and silver coins. Soon, however, the need for a silver coinage that could be widely used in Greece caused him to begin a new coinage on the Athenian weight-standard. His new silver coins, with the head of Herakles on one side and a seated figure of Zeus on the other, also became one of the staple coinages of the Greek world. They were widely imitated within the empire he had forged. The coins attributed commonly to Alexander show Herakles, not Alexander. Heracles of Macedon is the son of Alexander. Heracles is also a god, a Helios, like Apollo – and Alexander. There are few series which present more difficulties in the way of chronological classification than the ‘Alexanders.’ The mass of material is so vast and the differences between the varieties so minute, so uninteresting to anyone but the numismatic specialist, and so difficult to express in print, that very little progress has been made since the publication of L. Müllerr’s remarkable work in 1855… (G.F. Hill, “Notes on the Alexandrine Coinage of Phoenicia,” Nomisma 4 (1909) 1-15) The successors of Alexander issued the same type of coins, eventually substituting their own names for that of Alexander. In the last quarter of the third century, over a hundred years after his death, fifty-one mints were still producing Alexanders. The numismatics for Alexander depends on a historical framework. The history has no extant primary sources and looks to archaeology. There is none. There are claimed some 70 cities founded by Alexander and many great battlefields which should be littered with metalware. The locations for most of the cities and all of the battles are unidentified. Those which have been identified have produced nothing to support Alexander. Maybe there was a king named Alexander, though the image we have of him is due as much from the Romance of the second century of this era as it is to historicity. This is the problem with all divine men: the closer you get to them, the less there is to see. On the evidence, I would say that Alexander is more legendary and a part of our cultural heritage than a historical fact. Archaeologists search for his tomb as they do for the ossuary of Jesus. Will they be more successful? |
Left: Silver tetradrachm of Alexander the Great, Mint of Amphipolis (modern Amfípolis, northern Greece), 336-323 BCE (British Museum)
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- The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 4. Persepolis
- The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 3. Babylonian Diary
- The message of Alexander the Great
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- Archaeology of Ein Gedi
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- The language of Buddhist archaeology
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