Campaigns of Alexander the Great

Alexander of Macedon overthrew the Persian Empire and built an empire reaching the Indus.

Philip II of Macedon defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea (338 BC), bound the Greek city-states into the League of Corinth and was preparing to invade Persia when he was assassinated. His son Alexander, who came to the throne at twenty, crossed the Hellespont in 334 BC.

He won at the Granicus and at Issus (333 BC), took Tyre, occupied Egypt and founded Alexandria. His victory over Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 BC brought down the Achaemenid Persian Empire. He then pushed through Central Asia to the Indus basin, but his exhausted soldiers refused to go further and he turned back; he died suddenly in Babylon in 323 BC, aged thirty-two.

After struggles among his successors the empire split into Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria, Antigonid Macedon and other kingdoms. Along the cities he founded spread Hellenistic culture, a blend of Greek and Near Eastern traditions, together with a cosmopolitanism that looked beyond the polis and the Stoic and Epicurean schools.

Hellenistic influence carried into the Gandhara art of north-western India and, travelling with Buddhism through China, left its mark on Buddhist sculpture in Korea and Japan.