The message of Alexander the Great

Statuette of a Greek soldier, from a 3rd century BCE burial site north of the Tian Shan, Urumqi Xinjiang Museum (drawing).

It’s a wrap on Greco-India.

We entered Greco-India with the legendary Alexander the Great, glimpsed in an astronomical diary from Babylon, possibly in the ashes of Persepolis, and maybe on a coin.

When we looked for Alexander in some of those 70 cities named for him, we found, instead, his successors, the Diadochi – the Ptolemies in Egypt and Seleucids in Persia. One other, Lysimachus, was defeated and by his former ally, Seleucus I, but his dynasty lived on within the Ptolemaic dynasty. Seleucus was assassinated by Ptolemy Keraunos near Lysimachia.

These dynastic squabbles made our history and in the East, made Greco-India and Buddhism, for in my last post, we saw how a Seleucid satrap of Bactria rebelled and created his own eastern empire, fusing Greek and Indian languages and traditions.

Buddhism contained nothing substantially new, except the Greek concept of Helios-Apollo – a divine man, in this case, Buddha, a Persian prince named  Siddhartha Gotama, who split from Zoroastrianism. The Edicts of Ashoka are the recorded attempt by Diodotus I/Theodotus to provide good governance of a mixed people descended from Greece and India.

It is therefore not coincidental that some of these Edicts were inscribed on the Zoroastrian fire altars taken eastwards by Alexander.

The Western mind, in considering Classical Antiquity, seems to stop when it reaches the Tigris and Euphrates, afraid of whatever exotic mystery it may find in the Orient.

In this period, though, what we find when we look East beyond Europe is Greeks as far as the Indian Ocean, atop the Roof of the World and in China.

Zhou/Han Chinese bronze mirror with glass inlays and perhaps Greco-Roman influence from Hellenized Central Asia.

Dated 300-200 BCE. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Diodotus I did not act in isolation, for not only was he a satrap of the Macedonians in Persia who founded a Greco-Indian empire (mislabelled Mauryan), but this new, Hellenistic world now stretched from the Mediterranean – Greece, Asia Minor, Judea and Egypt, across the Middle and Near East, to the Himalayas and India.

Note the contemporary rulers adopting distinctly religious titles, in particular Soter - Saviour:

Alexander had a dream, says his legend, of uniting Persian and Greek, the societies and faiths of Europe and the Orient, and so he may, though its realisation came at the hands of his successors – Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus – and their descendants. They were the builders of the numerous Alexandrian cities that became the trading posts and ports connecting East and West with Persia as the centre.

When this fusion modifies old faiths and produces new, the result became mysterious to us in the far west.

Plate depicting Cybele, a votive sacrifice and the sun God. Ai Khanoum, 2nd century BCE

We have Mithraic Mysteries, Mithras and numerous kings adopting the title Mithradites – and nobody knows from whence they came – other than Persia seems to be involved somehow – or what they mean, other than having some connection to Helios. Then Sol Invictus appears and a Christ in the same image.

Oh what a set of mysteries!

Thomas, Pantenaeus and Apollonius of Tyana go to India, but could that be Arabia, scholars ponder? Surely not India?

What is going on in Alexandria, where philosophers play with Indic, Jewish, Greek and Egyptian beliefs? Asians in Africa and Europe? Are they not irrelevant to Classical Antiquity?

Historians and theologians have managed to confuse thoroughly themselves and near everyone else by not accounting for Greco-India.

What does it matter to the wider world: isn’t this all a bit academic?

Tell that to the Jihadists (and Crusaders) who say, as they do, they have to be right because scientists have not been able to disprove their religious nonsense. Tell that to anyone who thinks their sacred texts are more sacred than those of anyone else – and then murders a medic for performing an operation against their fundamentalist belief.

History matters to a lot of people. Whole nations base their image of themselves on their perceived history. Laws and wars result. Yes, it does matter.

Related posts:

1. The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 3. Babylonian Diary
2. The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 4. Persepolis
3. The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 1. Coins
4. The archaeology of Alexander the Great: 2. Altars
5. Helios and Selene in Alexandria on the Oxus
6. Hadrian’s perverted insanity
7. Helios rising
8. Alexander the Great
9. An army of divine men and the secret army of Mithras
10. Archaeology of a magical, distant land