Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic world

In eleven years Alexander’s army marched from Macedonia to the Indus and back to Babylon, where he died in 323 BCE at the age of 32.

Macedon and Philip II

Macedon, north of Greece, was a kingdom, not a polis, and many southern Greeks thought of Macedonians as half outsiders. Philip II, king from 359 BCE, changed that by building the best army in the Greek world. His infantry carried the sarissa, a pike several metres long, so that a Macedonian phalanx showed the enemy a wall of spear points, while heavy cavalry called the Companions struck the decisive blow. In 338 BCE Philip defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and became master of Greece. He was planning an invasion of Persia when he was murdered in 336 BCE.

The young king

His son Alexander was born at Pella in July 356 BCE and became king at 20. As a teenager he had been taught by the philosopher Aristotle. In 334 BCE he crossed into Asia with an army of Macedonians and Greeks and won his first battle at the Granicus river. In 333 BCE at Issus he defeated the Persian king Darius III, who fled. Alexander then took the coast: Tyre fell after a siege of about seven months in 332 BCE, and Egypt welcomed him. In 331 BCE he founded Alexandria near the mouth of the Nile and visited the oracle of Ammon at the Siwa oasis in the desert.

To the end of the known world

On 1 October 331 BCE Alexander beat Darius again at Gaugamela, in what is now northern Iraq. Babylon and Susa opened their gates, and in 330 BCE the palace at Persepolis burned while the Macedonians were there. Darius was killed by his own nobles that year. Alexander pushed on into Bactria and Sogdiana, today’s Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, where he fought a hard guerrilla war and married a local noblewoman, Roxana. In 326 BCE he crossed into the Punjab and defeated King Porus at the Hydaspes river. At the Hyphasis river his exhausted soldiers refused to go further. He turned back, and part of the army suffered terribly crossing the Gedrosian desert. Alexander reached Babylon and died there in June 323 BCE, after a short illness whose cause is still debated.

The Hellenistic kingdoms

Alexander left no adult heir, and his generals, the Successors, fought for decades over the pieces. Three large kingdoms emerged: the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids across Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran, and the Antigonids in Macedonia. Historians call the three centuries after 323 BCE the Hellenistic period, from Hellas, Greece. Greek became the common language of government and trade from Egypt to Afghanistan, a form called the koine, or "common" Greek, in which the New Testament was later written. Alexandria grew into the largest city of the Mediterranean, with its lighthouse on the island of Pharos and its great library. There Eratosthenes estimated the size of the Earth by comparing the Sun’s angle at Alexandria and at Syene to the south. The last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII, died in 30 BCE, and Egypt became Roman.