Alexander the Great was born in Pella, capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, in July 356 BC. Succeeding his father Philip in 336 BC, by the age of 25 he had become ruler of Asia Minor, pharaoh of Egypt, and successor to Darius III, the ‘Great King’ of Persia. During the next seven years, Alexander became master of an empire that stretched from Greece in the west, into Central Asia and North Africa, and beyond the river Indus in the east, all before his early death in Babylon in 323 BC.
In different cultures across the world, Alexander has been seen as a superhero, religious icon, philosopher-king, adventurer par excellence, but at the same time a greedy despotic ruler who failed in his ultimate quest to gain immortality. There have been many exhibitions about the historical Alexander, but in the newly opened Alexander the Great: the making of a myth at the British Library we instead explore the rich 2,000-year history of storytelling and mythmaking around his life. With objects from 25 countries in 21 languages, the exhibition shows how it was that one figure could serve so many purposes, creating shared narratives of universal appeal.
At the heart of this storytelling was the Alexander Romance, a compilation of stories that was composed, originally in Greek, in Egypt well before the end of the 3rd century AD. Over time, the Greek original was expanded and translated into almost all the languages of medieval Europe, in addition to Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, and Syriac. Particularly through the medium of Arabic and Persian, the stories of Alexander spread through Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent as far as South-east Asia and even China. The Persian Shahnamah (‘Book of Kings’) by Firdawsi (d. 1019 or 1025), and the Khamsah (‘Quintet’) of Nizami (c.1141-1209) – of which the Iskandarnamah (‘Story of Alexander’) forms the fifth book – are still today among the best-loved and most lavishly illustrated works of the Persianate world. Unsurprisingly, both these works feature prominently throughout the exhibition.
Feats of engineering