![]() ![]() It was one of the sites to be surveyed in the region after the Iraq War by a French mission in 2013. The site was registered in the records of the antiquities general directorate in Baghdad in 1973. The ancient town of Qalatga Darband has been dated to the Late Hellenistic period or to the transition between the Hellenistic and Parthian periods. One of the most recent archaeological discoveries in the Kurdish part of Iraq indicates that there are Greco-Roman ruins in the region that likely date back to Alexander the Great’s campaign in Asia. It is believed that the city was destroyed, never to be rebuilt, at about the time of the death of the Greco-Bactrian king Eucratides in approximately 145 BC. The ancient city had a Greek theater, a gymnasium and several Greek houses with graceful colonnaded courtyards.Īï-Khanoum became an extremely important Greek city in the Seleucid Empire and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Strategically located on the Oxus River, Ai-Khanoum has a vast array of artifacts and structures from the Hellenistic era. The ancient city of Alexandria Bucephalous, now in dusty ruins, once had large dockyards, suggesting it was intended to be a center of commerce.Īi-Khanoum (or Alexandria on the Oxus), Afghanistanĭiscovered by accident in the 1960s, this amazing archaeological site was soon determined to be the historical city of “Alexandria on the Oxus.” Also possibly later named Eucratidia, this was one of the primary cities of Alexander’s Greco-Bactrian kingdom. The garrison was settled with Greek and Persian veterans and people from the surrounding Pauravas area. ![]() At the same time, the great general expanded an existing Persian fortress.Ī city founded by Alexander the Great in memory of his beloved horse, Bucephalus was located just west of the great Indus River. Now known as Herat, it is the third-largest city in Afghanistan.Īlexander’s Greek armies moved the capital of the satrapy of Aria from Artacoana to the new site in 330 BC. The first of many Alexandrias in the far east of the Macedonian Empire, “Alexandria in Ariana,” in what is now Afghanistan, was one of the more than twenty cities founded or renamed by Alexander the Great. No ancient Greek buildings have been found in the area, but numerous coins have been discovered in various areas of the city, and there are Greek inscriptions and graves there. Proximity to a mountain pass, a river, and the junction of three long-distance trade routes meant the location was of vital strategic importance. Plutarch tells us that when Alexander left Egypt, he left behind a “large and populous Greek city.”Ī city that was first dubbed “Alexandria in Arachosia” in ancient times is now the modern city of Kandahar in Afghanistan.Īlexander appears to have founded this town on the site of a sixth-century BC Persian garrison. The Alexandrians were not actually interested in anything having to do with Egypt at all, viewing their city more as a kind of divine foundation of the Greek people. The city and its museum and library attracted many of the greatest scholars of the day, including Greeks, Jews, and Syrians. The second-largest city in Egypt was founded around a small, ancient Egyptian town around the year 332 BC.Īlexandria was intended to not only become a Hellenistic center in Egypt but to serve as a vital link between Greece and the rich Nile valley.Īlexandria was the intellectual and cultural center of the ancient world for some time. Here are some of the most important cities he founded across the known world of the time. However, after years of never-ending war across the Near East, the mighty general was finally making his way back home at the demand of his homesick troops.Īlexander the Great died in Babylon, the city which he planned to establish as his capital, in 323 BC before he could execute a series of planned campaigns that would have begun with an invasion of Arabia.īefore his untimely death, the son of Philip of Macedon founded some twenty cities which bore his name, most notably Alexandria in Egypt.Īlexander’s policy of settling Greek colonists in conquered lands and cities, and the resulting spread of Greek culture in the East, resulted in a new Hellenistic civilization. More importantly, however, he laid the cultural foundations for the establishment of the ancient Hellenistic world, all the way from Alexandria in Egypt to the borders of India.īy his own admission, Alexander endeavored to conquer lands all the way to the “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea.” He and his legions invaded India in the year 326 BC, winning an important victory over the Pauravas at the Battle of the Hydaspes. Alexander the Great conquered all the way to India and along the way founded new cities, from the East Mediterranean all the way to the Punjab. ![]()
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