JFoliveras

Done for my project about Alexander the Great.

Indian armies of the 4th century BC relied a lot on archers. These archers used human-size bows made of bamboo, and could carry swords of different sizes as a secondary weapon. Some Indian swords were large enough to be used with two hands, something unusual at the time.

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AZEMILCUS OF TYRE

Azemilcus was the Phoenician king of the island of Tyre (in modern Lebanon) during the siege of Alexander the Great (332 BC). The event took place during the early stages of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire. The other Phoenician city-states, Byblos, Arwad and Sidon, had been taken without any fight. When Alexander approached Tyre, he informed the inhabitants that he wished to make a sacrifice at the temple of Melqart, who the Greeks identified with Heracles. The Tyrians, unsure of who would win the war, told Alexander that no Greeks or Persians would be allowed to enter the city. After a few failed attempts to negotiate, in which some Macedonian emissaries were killed, Alexander decided to attack. Tyre was located on an island, which made the use of siege towers and artillery impossible. So, Alexander built a causeway to allow the siege towers, catapults and ballista to cross the strait of sea that separated the island from the mainland and reach the walls. The Phoenicians counterattacked crashing fire ships into the causeway, attempting to make the Greek siege towers burn. During the siege, Carthage (a former Tyrian colony in Africa that had grown into a powerful empire) may have sent military assistance to Tyre. Alexander finally conquered Tyre and spared the lives of king Azemilcus and those citizens who took shelter in the temple of Melqart. But many Tyrians were crucified, and many others sold into slavery. With the defeat of the Phoenicians, the Persian Empire lost control over the eastern Mediterranean. As a result of the causeway built by Alexander, today the old ruins of Tyre are no longer located on an island, but on a peninsula.

THE PHOENICIANS were a Semitic-speaking, Canaanite people of the Levant. They were known as merchants who traded and founded colonies along the Mediterranean, from their native region in the Levant, to as far west as Spain. One of these Phoenician colonies, Carthage, became a great empire that eventually rivalled with Rome in a series of wars that would eventually make Rome the new Mediterranean superpower. The Phoenicians stablished a bridge between the East and the West, and their art and customs were a mix of Egyptian, Greek, Assyrian and Babylonian, among other influences. The most priced products that Phoenicians traded were beads and objects made of glass, wine, olive oil, and purple textiles and dyes. Tyrian purple was the most luxurious dye in the Ancient World, being the colour of power for centuries. The most notorious legacy of the Phoenicians is their writing system, which is regarded as the origin of most of the writing systems used today in the World, including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Runic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.


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During his campaign in Central Asia, Alexander the Great wanted to secure the north-eastern borders of his empire. For centuries, the Persian Empire and its precursors had been under constant threat by war-like nomadic peoples who inhabited the Eurasian steppes, the Scythians. Ancient Greeks were quite familiar with the Scythians, as these nomads also inhabited Eastern Europe, not far from Greece. The Greeks had been fighting the Scythians of the Balkans and the Black Sea for centuries, and a contingent of Scythians fought on the Persian side at the battle of Gaugamela, but this time, Alexander would face them in Central Asia. The army of Alexander defeated a Scythian army at the battle of the Jaxartes river.

But who were the Scythians? The term refers to a large number of Indo-European, Iranic-speaking nomadic peoples whose territory stretched from modern-day Ukraine, all the way across Siberia and the Eurasian steppe to the Great Wall of China (not so great at that time). They were occasional allies and enemies of the also Iranic Persians. They imported Persian carpets, Chinese silks and Greek jewellery and military equipment, stablishing a precedent for the Silk Road. The domestication of the horse also began among the direct ancestors of the Scythians in the steppes, so they were skilled horsemen. And they were the origin of the Greek myths of the amazons (as Scythian women were also skilled warriors) and the centaurs, and the Abrahamic legend of Gog and Magog.

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