Extracts from the Preface to In Search of the lost testament of Alexander the Great |
Posted: May 24, 2017 |
The surviving texts and Babylonian cuneiform tablets recorded that on the 10th, or more likely the 11th, of June in the year 323 BCE in the 114th Olympiad, or the year 5,176 according to The Greek Alexander Romance, King Alexander III of Macedonia died in Babylon in his thirty-third year; with him died his extraordinary eleven-year campaign that changed the face of the Graeco-Persian world forever. Some 2,340 years on, five barely intact accounts survive to tell a hardly coherent story. At times in close agreement, though frequently in opposition, they conclude with a contradictory set of suspicious claims and death-scene rehashes. One portrayed Alexander dying silent and intestate; he was Homeric and vocal in another, whilst a third detailed his Last Will and Testament though it is attached to the end of a book of romance. Which account do we trust? The texts available for autopsy have been termed ‘both many and few’; many accounts of Alexander were written but only a few survive as coherent narratives. More often than not our knowledge is reliant upon fragments from philosphers, antiquarians, poets, politicians and propaganda pamphleteers, whose accounts range from the sound and sober, to the downright suspicious and the outright fabrication. This raises a larger philosophical conundrum: what indeed is ‘history’, and how is the literary evidence to be detached from the ‘historical’? After reading the available texts, both the ancient testimony and modern reconstructions, I too was dissatisfied with conclusions drawn to date and suspicious of an opacity that ought to have been black and white. Whilst readers may well be familiar with the names attached to these narratives, I was more interested in the ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ their books emerged, and in asking them a number of awkward questions and in looking them in the eye. This book was substantially written to answer my own questions about the era. The journey took me in many unexpected directions, some oblique, but all relevant to the heart of the investigation, and all retained here. I soon learned that fundamental to any understanding of Alexander’s legacy is the twenty-three-year reign of his extraordinary father, Philip II, and the first twenty-three-year story of Alexander’s equally remarkable successors who fought no less spectacular warfare for their piece of the vastly expanded Macedonian-governed empire. So here we bring the subject of historical fraud, duplicity and political manipulation into the vortex of our case, out of which emerges one unavoidable verdict: after these 2,340 years, the Last Will and Testament of Alexander III of Macedonia needs to be extracted from ‘romance’ and reinstated to its rightful place in mainstream history: Babylon in June 323 BCE, the gateway of the gods.
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