Alexander the Great, a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon, led his victorious army into Egypt in the autumn of 332 BC and back again into Asia in the following spring.
Nevertheless, he changed the course of history in Egypt and constituted there the most durable of all the Macedonian kingdoms - one destined to last three centuries and be succeeded by European domination for some six centuries more.
In addition, he founded a city which would become in fifty years the greatest port in the world, and is still the greatest in the Eastern Mediterranean; he diverted the trade of his age and created, for future ages, a new commerce between continents; and he increased the dominion of Egypt by the addition of all north Africa as far west as the Syrtis.
He found time, too, to do consciously at least one other thing of no small importance, of which I shall speak presently; and, all unconsciously, he started a Romance which went over the world, inspiring early literary efforts in some scores of languages European, Asiatic, and even African.
It is clear from the genesis of that famous Alexander-Romance, already alluded to, that nationalist Egyptian feeling survived the reconquest by Darius Ochus, and continued to identify itself with the Greek against the Persian.
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Originally composed in or near Alexandria, as its author's local knowledge of the city shows, the Romance starts as what the Germans call a Tendenzschrift, designed to affiliate the actual Macedonian régime to the succession of former native kings.
Alexander respected Egyptian culture and religion, but he installed a Greek government to control his administration of Egypt.
The Strategic Context of the Invasion
He had opened his great venture, as we have seen, with an army of forty thousand men; but with no sufficient war-fleet ready to take the sea.
He was strong enough, he well knew, to deal with the Persian army of Asia Minor; but there is no reason to suppose he knew himself to be strong enough to meet a general levy of the Persian Empire.
At Issus he enjoyed the proverbial fortune of the brave; but his situation there would have been very serious if Darius had adopted any other strategy than he did - if, for example, he had let his enemy get well into Syria and then had crossed Amanus and closed the defiles.
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The treasonable correspondence, which fell into the latter's hands at Issus, sufficiently proves it, even if we had no other evidence; and, in fact, there is plenty.
Alexander had relied on the Greek cities of Europe supporting him, following his march with obedient fleets, and sending him reinforcements before he should leave Asia Minor.
He started prematurely, without being assured by earnests of ships or men, that the agreement of Corinth would be loyally kept.
The Greek fleets did not come to his aid in western Asia Minor, and if they appeared, it was as enemy ships.
Miletus and Halicarnassus, the two most powerful of the Greek cities, which he had come to liberate, shut him out and only succumbed after regular sieges and desperate fighting.
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His own Macedonian ships, which had now taken the sea, were overawed by larger hostile fleets.
He went up to Gordion to await the reinforcements to come by the Hellespontine road, but only Macedonian levies appeared in the spring.
It was clear he was playing a "lone hand" - Macedonia contra mundum! How was he to go on into inner Asia with his rear thus insecure?
He must first obtain command of the Eastern Mediterranean.
But, inferior on the sea itself, he could only hope to achieve that end by land, i.e. by closing to the Greeks all ports round the Levant, where they could refit and provision, or whence they might draw allies.
He had done this already on the coasts from the Dardanelles to the Gulf of Adalia.
He must do it now from the latter right round to Cyrene, the last Greek stronghold before barbarism and Carthage began.
These last had long been the Persian's stand‑by for ships and sailors, and only a few years before, had reconquered Cyprus for the Great King.
Now Tyre was to give Alexander more trouble than any single city theretofore, or thereafter.
He took it after the greatest and longest of his sieges, crushed it, and went on convinced that some measure must be devised to prevent its revival.
Such a measure he took a few months later. It was the foundation of Alexandria in Egypt.
This policy of mastering the east Mediterranean coasts, I think, sufficiently explains on the one hand his marching to Egypt, although the direct road to the accomplishment of his primary object had forked off •three hundred miles back, and he was giving Darius a good year to prepare to frustrate that object: in consequence, as you know, Alexander's army was to come within very little of disaster next year at Arbela, which, of all his great battles, brought him his worst moments, thanks to the enormous weight of the force which the Persian had had time to collect.
On the other it explains his new foundation in Egypt, the care with which its site was chosen, and the scale, immense for the age, on which it was laid out by Alexander himself.
That he meant it to be a Macedonian Tyre, I feel no doubt.
As for the site of the city, it has often been pointed out why wretched little Egyptian Rhacotis was selected to be transformed into a world-capital.
The Canopic mouth of the Nile had long served for the comparatively little sea-borne commerce with the alien Levant, which Egypt had hitherto had.
Of the other mouths, the Pelusiac alone remained open to anything much larger than a fishing boat.
Even the Canopic had a dangerous bar.
If merchant ships might enter, it offered nevertheless no good port to the Macedonian war-fleets, which must henceforth keep the Levant.
Entry, exit, conditions ashore, which made for neither health nor security, were all against it.
But at Rhacotis, a few miles west, Alexander found a dry limestone site, raised above the Delta level, within easy reach of drinkable and navigable inland water by a canal to be taken off the Nile, not seriously affected by the Canopic silt which the point of Abukir directs seaward, and covered by an island which, if joined to the mainland by a mole, would give alternative harbours against the sea-winds, blow they whence they might.
The roadways were first made - a system which marked an advance in the organization of urban amenities, for the civilized world to imitate.
It may seem extraordinary that Alexander's invasion of Egypt should have met (as seems to be the fact) with no opposition whatever.
He found himself as free as in his own Emathia to busy himself with founding a city; and he could pass out with large part of his army into the eastern desert, bound for distant Cyrene, without the slightest apprehension about his base.
Further, after he had left Egypt for good in the spring of the following year, the country remained perfectly quiet under his extortionate governor, Cleomenes, during all the Far Eastern campaigns; and after Alexander's death, it accepted his successor as a matter of course.
But all this would have surprised no contemporary student of Near Eastern politics, and was, doubtless, confidently expected by Alexander himself.
Remember what had been happening for nearly a century.
Egypt had expelled its Persian rulers about eighty years before, and had successfully resisted all Persian attempts to recover the province till less than ten years before the coming of the Macedonians.
This it had effected with the aid, first and foremost, of Greeks; in return for which service Egyptian kings had been sending help to any Greek, who, like Evagoras of Salamis, might be embroiled with Susa.
Indeed, much longer ago the nationalist party had begun to call in these aliens and rely on them.
Even the liberation of Egypt from Assyria more than two centuries back had been carried through by Psammetichus I with help of Anatolians whom Gyges of Lydia had sent to his ally; and if those Carians and Pisidians were not, strictly speaking, Greeks, they brought Ionian civilization with them, as Petrie's discoveries at Daphnae and Memphis have demonstrated, and probably were not distinguished from Hellenes too nicely, if at all, by the Egyptians of the time.
Not to mention any influence which Naukratis may have exercised upon him, the Egyptian (especially the sturdiest element, the Delta man) had long been used not only to the presence of Greeks but to absolute reliance on them as protectors.
In the year 332 therefore no Egyptian was in the least likely to raise a finger against forty thousand trained Macedonians, even had these no fresh prestige of brilliant victories to their credit.
Moreover, were they not regarded as come to deliver Egypt once more from the Persian yoke recently reimposed and no more welcome than of old?
Greek influence in Egypt was reinforced by the settlement of Greek veterans throughout Egypt, where they became a privileged aristocracy that gradually assimilated with the Egyptians.
The Greatest General in History? Alexander the Great (All Parts)
The Ptolemaic Dynasty
In the crisis after Alexander’s death, Ptolemy, one of his generals, claimed Egypt as his kingdom and established hereditary rule.
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