Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge

Author:Paul Cartledge [CARTLEDGE, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: e9781590208427
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2011-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

Just beyond the oasis town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan (then in Soviet Central Asia) a tell, or man-made mound, known locally as the Hill of Gold yielded a remarkable series of burials to the spades of Soviet archaeologists in the winter of 1978–9. The burial mound lay in ancient Bactria, on the plain running south to the Hindu Kush and north to the banks of the Amu-Darya (the ancient Oxus). The finds were simply stunning: twenty-one thousand pieces of gold in six burial chambers. They are datable to the later part of the last millennium BCE and were deposited by Kushan nomads. The cultural mixture of native Asian and borrowed Greek is particularly significant. In one chamber there was a horse skull, in another the skull of a young woman with a silver coin in her mouth, the fare to pay to Charon the ferryman of the Greek underworld (Hades). On a gold scabbard, turquoise-winged dragons are depicted mauling leopards; alongside this was an image of the Greek Aphrodite, represented according to local Bactrian ideas of female pulchritude (stern and plump, with small, jutting breasts).

In purely organizational, administrative terms, though, Alexander’s new Empire left only a slight legacy. It was his name rather than his ideas or his achievements that the extraordinarily able – and no less extraordinarily ambitious – Successor dynasts sought to appropriate and perpetuate. And it was forms of Greek culture – religious, literary, artistic (theatre, music) – that provided such unity as the post-Alexander Hellenistic world was able to achieve.

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