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Philip of Macedon, used a combination of military force and aggressive diplomacy to muscle in on successive city-states. Macedon (the Macedonian region of modern Greece) wasn’t a mighty empire like Persia, but a small, mountainous country. Yet the Greeks failed to unite against Philip. He conquered, coerced, and negotiated peace treaties with individual city-states until he was in position to set himself up as protector of Greece. Philip formed the city-states into a league that helped his son put together the biggest empire yet.

      Philip planned to lead the Greeks against Persia as payback for Persia’s invasions of more than a century before, but he was murdered before he could mount the expedition. Some historians say that his wife, Olympias, paid the killer so that her son, Alexander, could succeed his dad. Nineteen-year-old Alexander, well educated in war and philosophy (one of his tutors was the Athenian philosopher Aristotle), joined her in killing other candidates for the throne of Macedon.

      His power at home secure, Alexander quickly disabused the Greeks of any notion that they would have an easy time resisting him, nearly destroying Thebes in the process (not to be confused with the ancient Egyptian capital also called Thebes).

      Director Oliver Stone’s 2004 film Alexander, starring Colin Farrell in the title role, is an ambitious attempt to trace Alexander the Great’s entire life, from his difficult relationship with Philip and his complex feelings for his mother through his greatest conquests and beyond. As always with movies, it’s more entertainment than education.

      Extending an empire to the farthest reaches

      In a career marked by one victory after another, Alexander the Great built an empire beyond the limits of what had been the known world. By the middle of 331 BC, Alexander and his Macedonian-Greek army defeated two great Persian forces, the second led by King Darius III.

      Although he was a brilliant, fearless, and inventive warrior, Alexander didn’t do it all by force or ingenuity. The Egyptians, conquered earlier by the Persians, gladly chose Alexander as their leader instead. When the young conqueror marched into Mesopotamia, ancient cities opened their gates to him and took him as king. When Darius III was out of the way (murdered by his own men), the Persians fell down before Alexander and made him feel almost as though he were a god. He liked that treatment, but his officers didn’t.

      Alexander marched on beyond the frontiers of Persia, clashing with Afghan tribes, founding cities, and crossing the Himalayas. In India, his forces prevailed against the battle elephants of King Porus. Finally, his troops refused to go any farther. Returning as far as Babylon, Alexander died of a fever (perhaps malaria) at age 32 in 323 BC.

      Leaving a legacy

      Alexander’s clout didn’t die with him. Legend says that his body was preserved in honey while his followers spent more than two years building an ornate funeral wagon. When the wagon was ready, mourners loaded the imperial casket onto it and began a ponderous, 1,500-mile funeral procession to Macedon for burial. They never got there. Alexander’s General Ptolemy, appointed governor of Egypt, diverted the procession to Alexandria, one of the cities the conqueror had named for himself. There, the possession of Alexander’s corpse gave Ptolemy the status to become ruler in his own right. He founded Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, which continued until his descendant Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC.

      

One of Alexander’s enduring achievements is that he spread the infectious Greek way of questioning and thinking about the world. He and his largely-Greek forces disseminated Greek attitudes. Alexandria, Egypt, became a center of Hellenistic culture, meaning that Greek-influenced ideas and language networked beyond the widespread Greek city-states and lasted into much later eras.

Rationality, democracy, individualism, citizenship, free debate, and the inquiry born of Greek-style philosophy percolated through other cultures. Some anthropologists, and some historians too, like to call this “cultural diffusion” or “trans-cultural diffusion.” Those terms just mean that ideas — including philosophy, but including technology, cuisine, and fashion — migrate to new places as diverse groups of people come into contact with each other. After Alexander, philosophy became a cornerstone of science, and the scientific approach became a primary tool for interpreting reality. In that way, the Classical Greeks still exert a powerful influence.

Developing Cultures Abounding

      Over the thousands of years since the first cities and civilizations rose and spread in the Middle East and Asia, many other cultures in the following areas took significant strides. Here are just a few examples:

       Africa: In what’s now northern Nigeria, the Nok people cleared tropical rainforest for farmland, using iron-bladed axes and hoes, around 600 BC. The Nok were also sculptors, making realistic figurines of terra cotta.

       Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, France, and Spain: Hundreds of years before the first pyramids in Egypt, people in Western Europe built communal graves out of stone and earth. Surviving examples date back to 3500 BC; some particularly good ones remain in Orkney, a group of islands off the coast of Scotland, and at Newgrange, Ireland. Europeans of the late Stone Age also left entire villages built of stone. More spectacular yet are the huge stone circles called megaliths (or “big rocks”) that these people erected. Stonehenge, the most famous, was raised in southern England between 3000 and 2000 BC.

       Japan: People lived in small villages on the mountainous islands that would become Japan as early as 9000 BC, mostly near the ocean and along rivers. They transitioned from a hunter–gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, first growing vegetables and millet. These people were potters, too, and their cord-pattern pots give the period its name, Jomon. By the end of the Jomon era, around 300 BC, Japanese potters showed a broader view of the world as they borrowed Chinese-style decorations. Another Chinese innovation, rice growing, also spread to Japan.

Tracking the Centuries

      9000 BC: People live in a walled community at Jericho, a crossroads town at a spring-fed oasis near the Jordan River. It would grow into a city.

      About 5000 BC: Barley and flax farmers dig networks of irrigation canals and build villages along those canals between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what would become Iraq.

      About 3100 BC: King Menes unites Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt into one kingdom with its capital at Memphis.

      2000 BC: Egypt conquers the neighboring Kush culture to the south.

      About 1700 BC: Earthquakes and sudden mass flooding may be responsible for ending the sophisticated Indus River Valley civilization.

      512 BC: Cyrus, a young Persian king, leads troops against his grandfather, king of the Medes.

      404 BC: Sparta defeats Athens in the 27-year Peloponnesian War.

      323 BC: While staying in Babylon, Alexander the Great comes down with a sudden fever and dies.

Chapter 5

      Rising and Falling Empires

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Tracing the life cycle of the Roman Empire(s)

      

Bringing states together in a united Indian empire

      

Uniting and organizing China

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