In the spring of 327 B. C., Alexander marched through what is now Afghanistan, crossed the Indus, and defeated an Indian king, Porus, on the banks of the Hydaspes (the Jhelum). On his way to the Indus he stormed the capital of an Indian tribe, now Mooltan, and was himself severely wounded. In 326 he sailed in a fleet, built on the spot, down the Indus, into the ocean; despatched a part of the army on board the ships, under his admiral Nearchus, by sea coastwise into the Persian Gulf, and marched himself with the rest through what is now Beluchistan, reaching Susa early in 325 B. C.
ALEXANDER SETTLES IN
BABYLON
During the rest which the troops took here, Alexander, many of his generals, and many thousands of his soldiers, married Asiatic women, and, with the same view of bringing Europe and Asia into one form of civilization, great numbers of Asiatics were enrolled in the victorious army, and trained in the European fashion. For the improvement of commerce, the Tigris and Euphrates were cleared of obstructions. From Susa, in the autumn of 325 B. C., Alexander visited Ecbatana (in Media) and thence proceeded to Babylon, which he entered again in the spring of 324 B. C.
It was the intention of Alexander to make Babylon the capital of the empire, as the best medium of communication between east and west; and he is said to have meditated the conquests of Arabia, Carthage, Italy, and of Western Europe. For commercial and agricultural purposes he intended to explore the Caspian Sea, and to improve the irrigation of the Babylonian plain. All his plans were made vain by his sudden death by fever at Babylon, in the summer of 323 B. C.
ESTABLISHMENT OF VARIOUS
GREEK KINGDOMS
Alexander the Great left no heir to his immense empire. In Bactria (the modern Bokhara), Asia Minor, Armenia, Syria, Babylonia, and above all in Egypt, Greek kingdoms were established as centers of science, art, and learning, from which Greek light radiated into the world around them. In Europe, besides that of Macedon, a kingdom of Thrace, stretching beyond the Danube, another in Illyria, and another in Epirus, were under the rule of Greek princes. To Alexander the world owed, among other great cities built by him or his successors, Alexandria in Egypt, and Antioch in Syria.
LASTING INFLUENCE OF GREEK
THOUGHT IN ASIA
The Greek language became the tongue of all government and literature throughout many countries where the people were not Greek by birth. Throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt the Hellenic character that was thus imparted remained in full vigor down to the time of the Mohammedan conquests; and the early growth and progress of Christianity were aided by that diffusion of the Greek language and civilization.
Beyond the Euphrates, Grecian influences largely modified Hindu science and philosophy and the later Persian literature. The intellectual influence of ancient Greece, poured on the Eastern world by Alexander’s victories, was brought back to bear on Mediæval Europe through the Saracenic conquests. The learning and science of the Arabians, communicated at that epoch to the western parts of Europe, were merely the reproduction, in an altered form, of the Greek philosophy and the Greek learning acquired by the Saracenic conquerors along with the territory of the provinces which Alexander had subjugated, nearly a thousand years before the armed disciples of Mohammed began their career in the East.
ALEXANDER’S SUCCESSORS