Alexander the Great in Firdawsi's Book of Kings
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Beyond that, the best source I know is Life of Alexander by Plutarch. It reads beautifully (even if it could probably benefit from some modern editing). Highly recommended! https://lexundria.com/plut_alex/1-77/prr
I suppose the point of the OP is that—it’s quite hard to know exactly what happened back then! For instance, the Greeks would never admit that Alexander was the son of the King of Persia and grandson of Philip. Yes, it’s unlikely but it’s not implausible…
That’s interesting, because Alexander is the one movie I truly regret not having left during the break. I found it boring, incoherent and in parts (especially Angelina Julie’s parts) really annoying. But to be fair, I watched it with German synchronisation. Perhaps that is to blame.
It does jump about a lot— and it might help me that I’m really familiar with the history. For instance, it is probably better if you already know that Aristotle trained Alexander and his military commanders—otherwise you might be wondering why Aristotle is featured so heavily.
And they have a number of short scenes to communicate important vignettes in his life—like his conquest of Egypt is only referred to obliquely.
Also, I thought Angelina Jolie’s role as Olympias was awesome. All the family dynamics were pretty well represented! Even Alexander’s love of his horse Bucephalus… like, there were some great scenes in there.
Given that we know about Alexander's parentage from multiple contemporary sources, the idea that a pro-Persian epic poem written 1300 years later is plausible when it tells us something different is not very sensible.
What's probably going on is a bit of retconning to resolve two contrary ideas. On the one hand, by the time Ferdowsi was writing, several hundred years of Arab rule in Iran had made stories about Alexander (who the Arabs thought was pretty awesome) popular. On the other hand, Persians remembered that Alexander had conquered an ancient Persian empire. (We know the pre-Islamic Sassanid Persians hated Alexander.) How do you reconcile this in a patriotic Persian poem?
Solution: make it so Alexander was secretly Persian! (I have no idea whether this was Ferdowsi's innovation or something that had evolved over a few centuries of storytelling prior to Ferdowsi coming along.)
There's a nice discussion of the background to this (including why Ferdowsi did things like refer to Alexander as "Caesar of Rome") here https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/20f0yh/historic...
Indeed, it's sometimes overlooked in the West that much of the Middle East and Southwest Asia consider their cultures at least in part descended from Greece, much as Europe and places like the US consider Greece the starting point of their cultures. And that's mainly because of Alexander. So you see some of the same stuff there that you see in Europe with Greek (and, by the transitive property, Roman) history, not seeing Alexander so much as a conqueror who defeated them, but rather as a vital part of the fabric of their history and society, as the British celebrate their Roman ruins rather than being angry or ashamed of them despite the Romans being, at one time, foreign conquerors, and even freely tie major cultural founding-myths to Rome (e.g. King Arthur), much as the Aeneid ties Roman culture to Greek.
Something Dan said has really stuck with me. He says that science is less interesting. If you don't invent a light bulb, someone else will. It's inevitable. Science can of course impact history (eg the development of the atomic bomb) but a lot of other events could go either way and it dramatically changes history.
IIRC Cyrus (one of the great Persian kings in that podcast) ordered the rebuilding of the Temple Mount and probably singlehandedly saved Judaism from extinction. Had that died then would we have had Christianity and Islam?
The Battle of Marathon was the major turning point that allowed the Greeks to survive and obviously go on to impact the Romans and really the rest of Europe. How different would history have been if the Persians had won and Europe had become Persian?
There is another thread that attempts to explain history as more closely “deterministic”. And over long time periods this seems reasonable. CF guns germs and steel.
I doubt it made much difference to progress. Having knowledge locked up without the culture that made it is not that helpful.
On the other hand, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols had far reaching impact. Not only were the books destroyed (supposedly the river ran black with the ink of all the books tossed into it) but the populate was massacred (after which the river ran red with blood).
This had a profound effect on the Arab/Muslim world that I think is still felt to this day.
Dan Carlin has an episode on what he calls the Celtic Holocaust, the conquest of Gaul (ie modern day France). It's called this because it's estimated a third of the population was killed in the process. From a historical perspective, Caesar also could've lost here, which again would've massively changed history. There would be conquering and settling of Britannia without Gaul. And Britannia was important for many Roman emperors after that (eg Constantine, who converted Rome to Christianity, was proclaimed emperor by his troops in modern day York).
Anyway, part of what drove the Roman psyche with Gaul was that early in Roman history (the 4th century BCE IIRC), Rome was sacked by the Gauls. It's why we don't have much history before this and why the origins of Rome are shrouded in mystery and legend (ie most view the tales of Romulus and Remus as apocryphal at best).
But historians make the case of why conquering Gaul was so important to Rome. I was reminded of this when you mentioned the conquest of Baghdad. The damage can be well beyond the loss of culture or literary works.
Current Spain and Portugal's territory required from Rome no less than 190 years of wars. Romans kept going on submitting a few tribes there every year for two centuries.
A sort of "proof" of this assertion is that Rome, in the end, conquered all territories around the Mediterranean Sea and far beyond. Of course, the course of events are by nature unpredictable but I find it reasonable tosay that the odds for a long term victory of Gaul were slim.
However, but that was much earlier, the two Punic wars against Carthage were much more existential threats to Rome.
For those who bring up the positive effects of such a figure (Alexander spread Hellenism, Genghis created the Pax Mongolica), Carlin said that these were not intended by such figures but simply happened as a result of their statecraft. Alexander for example did not expressly conquer peoples in order to spread Hellenism, he did so because he was expected to as being the son of a king.
People simply have a recency bias as a default cognitive effect. One day, Carlin says, someone will also write about the positive effects of the Third Reich, just as they write about Alexander and Genghis, once all the people who might have been affected have died off.
https://jewsforjesus.org/learn/the-messianic-time-table-acco...
Amazing experience, I even remember cross-referencing certain passages in Tajik edition to try to get some idea of original rhyming and rhythmic techniques mentioned by the translators (I don't know the language, but since it was written in Cyrillic I could get at least a general idea how it sounds).
For whatever reason I stopped right before the Iskandar (Alexander the G.) parts, have to get back to it someday.
https://classicsforall.org.uk/news-and-events/events/moot-tr...
Some years ago, the National Gallery of Art had a very interesting exhibit on Alexander.
Nepali kukri knife is estimated to come from modified sword of his armies. Things like this scattered all over whole area they went through.
> Buddhist gravestones from the Ptolemaic period have been found in Alexandria in Egypt decorated with depictions of the dharma wheel, showing that Buddhists were living in Hellenistic Egypt at the time Christianity began.[16] The presence of Buddhists in Alexandria has led one author to note: "It was later in this very place that some of the most active centers of Christianity were established."[14] Nevertheless, modern Christian scholars generally hold that there is no direct evidence of any influence of Buddhism on Christianity, and several scholarly theological works do not support these suggestions.[17][18] However, some historians such as Jerry H. Bentley suggest that there is a real possibility that Buddhism influenced the early development of Christianity.[19]
> It is known that prominent early Christians were aware of Buddha and some Buddhist stories. Saint Jerome (4th century CE) mentions the birth of the Buddha, who he says "was born from the side of a virgin"; it has been suggested that this virgin birth legend of Buddhism influenced Christianity.[20] The early church father Clement of Alexandria (died 215 AD) was also aware of Buddha, writing in his Stromata (Bk I, Ch XV): "The Indian gymnosophists are also in the number, and the other barbarian philosophers. And of these there are two classes, some of them called Sarmanæ and others Brahmins. And those of the Sarmanæ who are called 'Hylobii' neither inhabit cities, nor have roofs over them, but are clothed in the bark of trees, feed on nuts, and drink water in their hands. Like those called Encratites in the present day, they know not marriage nor begetting of children. Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha (Βούττα) whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours."[21]
Alexander was no Ozymandias.
> Less has been used this way for well over a thousand years—nearly as long as there's been a written English language. But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of personal preference. Somewhere along the way—it's not clear how—his preference was generalized and elevated to an absolute, inviolable rule. ...
> Despite the rule, less used of things that are countable is standard in many contexts, and in fact is more likely than fewer in a few common constructions, especially ones involving distances (as in "less than three miles"), sums of money (as in "less than twenty dollars"), units of time and weight (as in "less than five years" and "less than ten ounces"), and statistical enumerations (as in "less than 50,000 people")—all things which are often thought of as amounts rather than numbers. ...
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/no%20less%20than