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The subject of this weblog is the history of Classical Antiquity and our approach is archaeological.

The purpose is to discover what we know for this period, rather than what has been believed traditionally.

We begin with Alexander the Great. What do you think you know about him? Much has been written and even turned into Hollywood blockbusters, but what do we actually know, for certain?

The answer is that we know very little about Alexander – not much more than could be written on a postage stamp. Everything else is uncertain, because we do not have the original texts which later authors claimed to have used as the basis for their histories.

The coins, for example: people claim that Alexander appears on masses of coins, but the reality is that these are generally 'late', produced after Alexander was dead, by his successors and other kings who wanted to be associated with him.

Many will claim that the image of Alexander appears on these coins, but in reality, nobody knows how he looked. It may be that the images on these late coins, said to be of Alexander, are either of the kings who produced them, or of a god.

A god? How could anyone confuse the image of Alexander for that of a god?

Alexander was worshipped as a god. People built temples and placed in them statues of Alexander, then worshipped him.

This is where the problem begins for the traditional accounts of Classical Antiquity – it is replete with characters who are also divine and we cannot be sure what is historical and what is 'cultural' (mythological, or legendary).

There is probably an Alexander in an astronomical diary of Babylon, and if so, that is the only 'certain', contemporaneous mention of him.

What we don't have is any of his battlefields, or any sign of him at the many cities he is said to have founded.

So how did we come believe the vast array of detail we have for Alexander? That is an intriguing question we can apply to all these divine men and the answer, when somebody writes the history of our cultural heritage, should tell us a lot about our need to believe, how scholars are willing to feed that need with supportive histories, and how institutions formed to promote our cultural heritage become self-perpetuating.

Here is a clue, which we explore further here: the accounts of Alexander appear in the same time and place as the accounts for many other divine men: Alexandria in the early second century.

This is when Pythagoras appears (coin, right) and Jesus Christ, and when Buddha first takes human form. There are others.

We therefore explore this time and place, examining the people through inscriptions and texts.

 

The Panhellenic World

Starting in the middle of the second century BCE, in every aspect of the private culture of the upper classes of Rome, Greek culture was increasingly in ascendancy, in spite of tirades against the "softening" effects of Hellenised culture from the conservative moralists in Roman society.

By the time of Augustus, cultured Greek household slaves taught the Roman young (sometimes even the girls); chefs, decorators, secretaries, doctors, and hairdressers—all came from the Greek East. Greek sculptures adorned Hellenistic landscape gardening on the Palatine or in the villas, or were imitated in Roman sculpture yards by Greek slaves. The Roman cuisine preserved in the cookery books ascribed to Apicius is essentially Greek. Roman writers disdained Latin for a cultured Greek style. Only in law and governance was the Italic nature of Rome's accretive culture supreme.

In 285, Diocletian split imperial administration between East and West and in 324, Constantine I transferred the eastern capital from Nicomedia (in Anatolia) to Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which became Constantinople (alternatively "New Rome"). The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 as Romulus Augustus was forced to abdicate by Odoacer. Heraclius in 610 changed the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire from Latin to Greek and today, from which point we todat use the term Byzantine Empire.

The panehellenic world can therefore be seen to dominate 'Western Civilisation' from Alexander the Great in 331 BCE until the fall of Constantinope in 1453 – almost 18 centuries. The period of the Roman Empire – when the Roman emperor ruled from Rome – is, by comparison, a relatively short-term 'blip': 27 BCE to 285 CE, hardly more than three centuries.

Rome never settled or dominated the panehellenic world of the east: Mesopotamia, Persia and Greco-India. Rome struggled in the Near East:, as demonstrated by the three Mithridatic wars and the three Jewish-Roman wars.


Map of Alexander's empire and the paths he took

Throughout the history of Classical Antiquity there is a process named Hellenisation, in which Greek culture is dominant across the region conquered by Alexander, from the Indus River, across Persia and the whole of the Levant – the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt.

Hellenisation is not purely Greek, for it was built on Persian foundations and the religion of Persia – Zoroastrianism – contained a duality, light and dark, day and night, good and evil, which we find, through the archaeology – including 'sacred' texts – of each society in this region.

This was a deliberate, syncretic process, begun by Persia when it ruled from India to Egypt, then Hellenised by the conquering Greeks, adopted by Greco-Roman and Judaic societies, and finally, by the Christian world of the Levant – the Coptic and Syriac Churches.

The same process took place in the East, in Gandhara, which we refer to here as Greco-India. The extent was limited by geography, but is nevertheless measurable.

At History Hunters International, we call this culture 'panhellenism'; its history begins with the Macedonian conquests, continues through the Greco-Roman period and into Rome and the Roman empire. It became usual for Romans to employ Greek secretaries and for the education of their children, Greek tutors.

In the early second century, the emperor Hadrian adopts Greek customs.

Our world today is built on these foundations. Our culture derives from the Greco-Roman: our laws, art and architecture, education, even our values.

The people we examine in Alexandria two thousand years ago are the architects of our world. They created divine men and built institutions to ensure they were worshipped thereafter.

We therefore examine the divination and magical practises of these Alexandrians, by which they conjured these divine men into existence. We will see the institutions they used and the offices they created in order to carry forward faith in their divine men.

On what basis is our world still dominated by this pagan magic?

That is another history, describing the relationship between Church and State, in which government regulates faith, the education system teaches mythology as history and scholarship is skewed as universities promote theology.

The whole can be seen as a confusion as to our understanding of 'knowledge': what do we know and how do we know it?

There is the subjective and the objective – personal experience and trust, and faith in what we are told by our 'betters' – senior family and those in authority, as opposed to empirical knowledge, the scientific process and rational thought. We have been and are taught both, without discrimination, when they are, in fact, contradictory.

This irrationality becomes more apparent with time, with the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution, in which the products of the rationalist mind function in a real, empirical sense: machines work, hygiene preserves health and medicines cure, transport delivers, and now digital media connect and communicate.

We are now capable of understanding – if only through everyday demonstration – the difference between knowledge based in personal faith and objective knowledge flowing from rational, empirical reason. Which would you rather trust to transport you and your loved ones: a modern, technological means of transport such as car, train and aeroplane, or a flying carpet?

Yet our education system still allows the irrational: astrology, telepathy, luck, fate, 'alternative' medicines, saints, sacred texts and anointing of monarchs, miracles and a variety of divine men, who supposedly walked our Earth, lived as we do, yet with inexplicable powers granted by a god or gods.

Who were these divine men and do they exist in history, as opposed to being figures of our cultural heritage?

Many of our records have angels visiting such characters and prophecies either concerning, or from them. Often, they perform miracles.

Less well-known, perhaps, is that the same claims for divinity are made for many historical characters whom today few if any would consider divine. The 'histories' by Josephus, for example, relate many prophecies and even one by himself, for Vespasian to become emperor – and would anyone today consider this soldier as divine?

Did an angel visit Monobazus, as Josephus relates, and tell him that his pregnant wife and sister, Helen, would give birth to a special son, whom he called Izates (Angel)? Does any god work that way?

Yet, as we see, these chronicles by Josephus become the basis for a series of parodies we know today as the New Testament, centred on a divine man known as Jesus Christ – and people are still taught that this divine man is both historical and the "Son of God".

We don't expect scientists and engineers to add miracles to their calculations as they build our airliners. We should expect no less in any field of study today, including history and archaeology.

These posts provide an overview of where we are going:

Primary author:

First, thank you for your interest in coming here. Whether you're curious, or have an abiding interest in history, I appreciate the opportunity to share knowledge and ideas with you.

My approach is archaeological because that's what I do, starting in Cambridge in the 1960s. In the few years I have been preparing this blog, I have been collecting data from archaeological projects and historians across the whole field of Classical Antiquity.