Alexander the Great: Walling off Gog and Magog
In the summer of 329 BC, Alexander, son of Philip, King of Macedon, and commander of the Hellenic League, stood on the banks of the Jaxartes (Syr Darya).1 In his mind, he had nearly reached the limits of the world, for, as Aristotle had taught him, this river with its banks lined by fir trees must flow into the Tanis (Don) and so empty into the Black Sea. To the north, beyond the river, lay steppes and then frozen wastes washed by the Great Ocean encircling the earth. To his southeast lay the eastern Caucasus (today the Hindu Kush) and then the great river valley of the Indus at the extreme eastern limit of the world. For beyond this river valley, India, was again the Great Ocean.2 The Indus, flowing south and filled with crocodiles, must join the Nile. Alexander was apparently unaware that King Darius had known better, for the Great King had sent the Carian explorer Scylax to navigate the river in 515 BC.3
On the Jaxartes, Alexander confronted the task of defeating the Scythians and securing the northeastern frontier of his world empire. In less than six years, Alexander had achieved the unimaginable: the overthrow of the Persian Empire, stretching from the Aegean world to the Hindu Kush. He had fought under every conceivable condition without a single defeat. He now commanded a grand army of seventy-five thousand comprising loyal Macedonians, Greek mercenaries, and new Persian subjects. As heir of Darius III, the last Achaemenid King of Persia, Alexander had to secure the rich Upper Satrapies of Bactria and Sogdiana between the Oxus (Amu Darya) and Jaxartes, today Transoxiana.4 Hence, he, just like his Persian predecessors, had to reckon with the Scythians on the northern steppes, who would encourage and even ally with rebel Persian nobles of Bactria and Sogdiana. Wisely, the young conqueror planned no conquest of the steppes, but rather he aimed to chastise the nomads, and then fortify the frontier whereby he could regulate the nomads’ movements across the Jaxartes.5 After crossing the Jaxartes River, he lured the Dahae, the leading Scythian tribe, into a tactical trap.6 Alexander sent forward as skirmishers his light cavalry, who quickly retired, drawing the Dahae into attacking the Macedonian phalanx backed up by archers. Meanwhile, the Dahae were caught by surprise as the heavy Macedonian cavalry encircled and attacked the Dahae in the flanks and rear. Over a thousand Scythian horsemen were trapped and slain with minimal loss to the Macedonians. The survivors sued for peace. Alexander granted them clemency, extended their trading rights, and recruited Dahae horse archers into his own army for the invasion of India.
Alexander the Great is still hailed the greatest military genius ever—a rank acknowledged by his emulators from Hannibal to Napoleon. He is also today the most recognized secular historical figure best documented by polls taken in the arbiter of American taste, the mall.7 Yet it is easy to overlook his victory over the Scythians, for Alexander was the first to wage battle against nomads on the steppes and win decisively. Informed by superb reconnaissance, he devised a tactical deployment based on deception, surprise, and shock rather than amassing overwhelming numbers as Persian kings had done. Alexander thus ambushed nomadic horse archers who were themselves the masters of ambush. Alexander, however, had already studied his nomadic foe. Six years earlier, Alexander, then age twenty-one, waged a campaign to pacify the tribes of Thrace and Illyria. These Balkan tribes dwelling south of the lower Danube would provide a shield to guard Macedon against Scythian attacks from the north while Alexander was on campaign in Persia.8 In early summer 335 BC, Alexander reached the southern banks of the lower Danube, the Ister, which Aristotle had taught him marked the northern limit of inhabitable Europe. Across the river, he confronted mounted horse archers of Getae, numbering 14,000, who had adopted the nomadic way of war from their Scythian masters. The Getae not only opposed Alexander’s crossing but also, from the opposite bank, taunted him with threats that they would soon cross themselves once Alexander had withdrawn. Alexander reasoned that he could not secure his northern frontier unless he punished the nomads and imposed a treaty on them. At night, he led a daring crossing of one thousand five hundred cavalry and four thousand infantry, who swam across the river assisted by their leather knapsacks stuffed with straw. The Macedonians concealed themselves in a wheat field. At dawn, when the Getae descended from their camp to the northern banks of the Danube, the main Macedonian army on the river’s opposite bank greeted them with a barrage of missiles from their artillery. The Macedonians then began to cross the river in force. The Getae, with their attention fixed on the obvious threat, were thrown into confusion when Alexander and his detachment suddenly arose from among the wheat stalks and charged the Getae in the flank and rear. Audacity and surprise delivered to Alexander his first victory over nomads. The Getae submitted, and, for a generation, dared not cross the Danube.
The Roman senator and historian Arrian, in his account of Alexander’s military exploits, stressed both these victories over the nomads. In his own tactical manual, Arrian recommended an improved version of Alexander’s battle line, stressing the importance of cavalry guarding the infantry’s flanks and rear, large numbers of bowmen, slingers, and crossbow men, and, whenever possible, supporting field artillery.9 A commander must keep strict discipline over his men lest they break ranks in pursuit whenever the nomadic horsemen feigned retreat to lure the more heavily armored Romans into an ambush. Until the advent of firearms, it is no accident that every army that defeated nomadic horsemen either adapted or independently devised the tactics first used by Alexander. Chinese generals of the Han and Tang dynasties came up with comparable formations against their nomadic foes, the Xiongnu and the Gök Turks. The Han general Wei Qing, in addition, strengthened his line by interspersing his infantry with squadrons of chariots acting as platforms for crossbow men who laid down supporting fire.10 Song military experts wrote memoranda to their emperor advocating the same tactics against the Khitans, Tanguts, and Mongols.11 Byzantine military writers between the sixth and twelfth centuries repeated the same recommendations, and they pointed out debacles when commanders failed to follow these sound tactics.12 As late as the opening of the eighteenth century, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant Habsburg commander and partner of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, applied the same principles when he was battling Ottoman cavalry on the Hungarian plains.13
Alexander not only won victories against the Scythians but also knew how to use them. Strategically, he thought in the long term and devised a sound frontier policy to deal with the nomads. He built highways and forts along the Jaxartes River, whereby he sought to regulate the seasonal movement of nomadic pastoralists across the frontier and to tax and direct trade with them. Alexander settled over twenty thousand of his Greek and Macedonian veterans in Hellenic cities, invariably named Alexandria, in Sogdiana and Bactria, to provide manpower for his frontier army.14 The colonists were rewarded with generous grants of estates tilled by the native agriculturalists. The colonists and their descendants ruled from Hellenic cities as an elite supported by the rents and labor services of their tenants. Alexander thus laid the foundation of a future Greco-Bactrian kingdom that lasted for two centuries after his death. Alexander’s Greco-Bactrian cities soon prospered on the growing trade of the Silk Road across Eurasia in the third and second centuries BC.15 French, Soviet, and Afghan archaeologists have excavated one such city near Ai-Khanoum, ancient Alexandria on the Oxus (and later the Greco-Bactrian royal capital Eucratidia).16 Excavations have yielded beautiful Greek sculpture, Greek inscriptions, and a perfectly planned Greek city that have awed archaeological enthusiasts and inspired a documentary.17 These Hellenized cities, notably Maracanda and Bactra (the future Samarkand and Balkh, respectively), survived and prospered even after new nomads, the Tocharians, overran the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in the later second century BC.
Alexander was an explorer as well as a conqueror, for he was accompanied by savants and engineers who measured the distances traversed and recorded anything of note. They clarified misconceptions about geography, classified flora and fauna, documented trade routes, and recorded the customs of many new peoples. Alexander revealed to the Greeks, for the first time, the immensity of India, the Eurasian steppes, and what might lie beyond, the land of the Seres, the people of the silk.18 His successors, the Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian kings, maintained diplomatic missions at the court of the Mauryan emperor of India.19 They also sponsored explorers who proved the Caspian and Aral Seas were inland salt lakes, charted the course of the Jaxartes River, and charted the passes over the Pamirs and Hindu Kush into the Tarim Basin and India. Alexander was hailed in history and legend as an explorer, whose longing to learn, called pothos by his biographer Plutarch, provided the information essential for the success of the later Silk Road. The results of this age of exploration initiated by Alexander can be seen five hundred years later in the world map drawn by Claudius Ptolemy.20
The Scythians across the Eurasian steppes benefited from the trade with the Greek cities and the courts of the successors of Alexander, the Diadochoi, who forged the Hellenistic world. The volume of trade can be sensed by the rise of imported wares found in the numerous kurgans of the fourth and third centuries BC. In turn, Scythian jewelry (with its distinct genius in rendering of animals), weapons, leather goods, and textiles were exported to the courts of Macedonian kings and Hellenized cities across the Near East. The Scythians, locked in a daily struggle of surviving on the steppes, gained vital foodstuffs, spices, and manufactured goods from this trade. The nomads of the central Eurasian steppes also learned how to use coins as money. The prime trade coins in international commerce of the Hellenistic Age were large, handsome silver tetradrachmae struck by Seleucid or Greco-Bactrian kings. Whenever these coins were in short supply, the nomads struck their own imitations as supplements.21 Trade brought wealth and craftsmen so that elite Scythian warriors could commission lamellar armor and iron helmets, and elaborate body armor for their horses. Henceforth, heavily armored cavalrymen, armed with thrusting lancers, fought as shock troops in tandem with the traditional lightly armed horse archers who wore felt caps and leather jerkins. These so-called cataphracti, never numbering more than 10 percent of any nomadic army, delivered the decisive charge against foes who lost formation by pursuing Scythian horse archers. By this combination of firepower and shock actions, the Scythians, as well as later Sarmatians and Parthians, could defeat the more numerous armies of Hellenistic kings or imperial Rome. The Scythians thus devised their own tactics to counter those Alexander had devised against them. Hence, Scythian, and later Sarmatian, cavalry units were hired in large numbers as mercenaries in the Hellenistic royal armies and civic militias. Furthermore, as trade from the caravan cities of Sogdiana and Bactria extended ever farther east, Scythian lords grew rich in hiring out their warriors as guards, scouts, and interpreters. By the opening of the second century BC, the cultural and commercial ties between the Western and Central Eurasian steppes and the urban Hellenistic world had become so intertwined that the two worlds came to depend on each other in what has been dubbed the first era of a global economy.
Yet Alexander was not best remembered for his sound frontier policy against the Scythians, but rather for his dealings with such legendary peoples as the Amazons and the “Unclean Nations” (as designated in Greek and Latin texts) of Gog and Magog, who dwelled on the horizonless northern steppes. Immediately after Alexander’s death, the historian Cleitarchus, writing at the court of King Ptolemy, circulated these fabulous tales that have captured the imagination of so many since. They quickly became the staple for popular works about Alexander, who was hailed as divine and the favored son of Zeus by his successors and their subjects. Six hundred years after Alexander’s death, many of these tales were incorporated into the fictitious biography known as the Alexander Romance.22 Composed in Greek during the later fourth century AD, the romance proved a bestseller in the Medieval world and inspired translations into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and every major Medieval European vernacular as far as Iceland. In these later translations, each writer concocted new fabulous tales or embellished old ones, operating under the literary axiom that no writer deserves to write about Alexander unless he improves the story.23 Alexander’s dealings with the nomads became ever more fantastic and heroic with each retelling. The tales in these different versions of the romance fixed Medieval Christians’ prejudices about steppe nomads.
Foremost, Alexander encountered the Amazons, the female warriors of Scythia, and this legend magnified his greatness over his ancestors Heracles and Achilles, each of whom had fought Amazon queens. Instead, Queen Thalestris, accompanied by three hundred of her Amazon warriors, visited Alexander in Hyrcania (northern Iran) because she desired to conceive a wondrous child with the Macedonian conqueror.24 Thalestris, however, might have been a bit disappointed, because she towered over Alexander, who was rather short in stature. Quite likely she made the common error of mistaking Hephaestion, Alexander’s taller best friend and alter ego, for the king himself. Later retellings of the legends report that she rode on a tiger, returned to her homeland, and gave birth to the child. Mother and child tragically died soon after. Many historians included the tale as fact. Onesicritus, an otherwise reliable historian who had accompanied Alexander, years later recited the incident from his history at the court of Lysimachus, a tough veteran general of Alexander who had turned himself into the king of Thrace and Western Asia Minor. Upon hearing the tale, the no-nonsense Lysimachus was amused and quipped that he could not recall why he had somehow missed the encounter.
The tale of Alexander and the Amazons might have been concocted from a mission sent by the Scythian king Pharasmanes, who ruled over the steppes around the Aral Sea. Pharasmanes offered a marriage alliance between his daughter and Alexander.25 The Scythian king, like many others before him, sought to cement an alliance and win trading privileges with each new Great King. At the time, Alexander was already assuming the guise of the Great King to win the loyalty of his Iranian subjects. Hence, Alexander adopted Persian royal dress and court protocol, much to the resentment of his Macedonian soldiers and Greek allies. He also kept a harem so that he could link himself by marriage with prominent Iranian families and vassal rulers. After capturing the Persian capital of Persepolis, Alexander married Barsine, the stunning Iranian beauty who, along with her father, had once sought refuge at the Macedonian court. Alexander, then fifteen years old, had been so smitten by Barsine that he married her years later, once he had overthrown the Persian monarchy. He also married two of Darius’s daughters, and his love match and principal wife, Roxane, daughter of a Sogdian baron who ruled a strategic mountain fastness. Taking Scythian brides would have been a sound way of securing valuable allies north of the Jaxartes River. A dull but sensible political marriage alliance with a Scythian king was far less exciting than an encounter with the Amazon queen. Even Plutarch felt so, although he doubted the veracity of the story. The legend prevailed. Later Greeks relished in deploring female warriors, outlandishly attired in armor, riding alongside or fighting against Scythians. Greek storytellers even claimed, falsely, that the name of Amazon denoted the practice of the warrior princesses surgically removing their right breast so that they could, unimpeded, draw their bows.26 Christian Europeans inherited this prejudice so that they denounced later Turkish and Mongol princesses as Amazons. With Alexander, the Amazons were enshrined as the warrior princesses of the steppes. In Homer’s day, Greeks had believed that the Amazons dwelled on the northeastern shores of Asia Minor (today Turkey), along the Thermodon River (Terme Çayı), which arises in the Pontic Alps and empties into the Black Sea midway between the modern Turkish cities of Samsun and Ordu. Herodotus relocated the realm of the Amazons to Scythia beyond the Caucasus Mountains. As later Europeans gained ever more accurate knowledge of the Eurasian steppes, the Amazons retreated to ever more remote regions. Yet Medieval ethnographers and chroniclers of Christian Europe never ceased to hope that these warrior maidens might be courted into an alliance against the dreaded nomads of the steppes.27 Once the Amazons could no longer be found on the Eurasian steppes, the Portuguese transferred them to Brazil.
Even more popular was Alexander as the architect of a fabulous wall and his Iron Gate to seal off the civilized world from the “Unclean Races” of Gog and Magog (rendered in later Greek as Goth and Magothy). The Gates of Alexander were most commonly located in the Caucasus, either at the Dariel or Derbent Pass, which Alexander never reached. In the many versions of the Alexander Romance, Alexander, cast as a virtuous Christian king, defeated these “Unclean Races” and pursued them for fifty days over the northern wastelands until he reached the great mountain range of the Caucasus (conceived as stretching from the Black Sea across the northern steppes to India).28 As Alexander approached, the two separate chains of the Caucasus, by the power of God, miraculously moved toward each other to form a narrow pass, which Alexander blocked with a massive bronze gate. Thereafter, the accursed nomadic races of the steppes were condemned to dwell forever outside the civilized world until the end of time.29 In the imagination of Greeks, Romans, and Medieval Christians, the Gates of Alexander symbolized the same barrier between civilized and barbarian nations as did the Great Wall for the Chinese. The megalomaniacal emperor Nero, a self-styled emulator of Alexander, briefly toyed with the idea of leading his own expedition to the famed Gates (as well as an expedition to find the sources of the Nile).30 But Nero reconsidered, preferring a Greek trip where he could display his creative genius on the stage to the acclaim of adoring crowds. His eventual successor, the blunt and pragmatic Vespasian, instead sent engineers and legionary detachments to secure the Dariel and Derbent Passes, and diplomats with rich gifts to court the nomadic tribes on the Kuban steppes.31
The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing in the later first century, identified the Scythians with the descendants of Magog of Genesis, who is described as a descendant of Noah’s son Japheth. Josephus witnessed the invasion of Alans, who had crossed the Caucasus and wantonly devastated Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Media in 72 AD. Josephus was so shocked that he could only conclude the Sarmatian Alans were nothing more than Scythians.32 At approximately the same time, the author of Revelation, drawing on Jewish apocalyptic texts, recast Gog and Magog from an impious individual and his land into two races who served Satan.33 In the final days, the “Unclean Races” of Gog and Magog would rise up and wreak destruction on the world once Satan broke free from the bonds of his imprisonment of one thousand years. Henceforth, to Jews and Christians alike, all the Eurasian nomads were the children of Cain and the Devil’s horsemen. Yet the Christians of Medieval Europe, as they gained more knowledge of the peoples on the Eurasian steppes, were ever moving the homeland of these impious races farther east.34
In the Koran, Alexander, called Dhu al-Qarnayn or “the righteous king of the two horns,” traveled east and erected a great wall to shut out Gog and Magog, rendered in Arabic Yajuj and Majuj.35 In the Koranic tradition too, Yajuj and Majuj will burst through the barrier in the final days, and bring about the ultimate reckoning of Allah. Successive Medieval Muslim geographers and chroniclers embroidered upon the legends of Alexander’s Gate.36 The Turkish nomads were initially identified as an accursed race sprung from Gog and Magog. Alexander, in his Islamic guise as Dhu al-Qarnayn, had traversed the Far East, receiving the submission of the civilized lands of India, Tibet, and China. Then, at God’s command, Alexander constructed a great gate of brass and iron to wall off the Turks forever in the land of darkness.37 But as ever more Turkish tribes embraced Islam from the tenth century on, Muslim writers turned the children of Gog and Magog into monstrous giants and relocated them in ever more remote northern frozen climes beyond the steppes.38 Ahmad ibn Fadlan, envoy of the Abbasid Caliph of al-Muqtadir, journeyed across the steppes between the Aral and Caspian Sea to the Bulgar khan’s settlement at the juncture of the Volga and Kama Rivers. The Turkish khan had recently embraced Islam, and had requested both teachers in the true faith and an alliance with the caliph. Ibn Fadlan recalled years later the bitter cold he and his attendants endured crossing the steppes in 921/2. Once at the Bulgar capital, the khan showed ibn Fadlan the bones of a giant who had terrorized the realm and was captured and hanged.39 The khan assured ibn Fadlan that the giant was an escaped child of Gog and Magog who dwelled even farther north where the winter was perpetual and where they were sealed off by a great gate until Allah would release them at the end of days. Ibn Fadlan, a polished courtier of Baghdad, must have shivered as he penned this memory.40 By the thirteenth century, the legends were turned into a cosmic struggle in which the races of Gog and Magog toiled each day to undermine the Gate of Alexander, but during the night, Allah repaired the damage.41 The hordes of Gog and Magog were condemned to a Sisyphean task until Allah, in the fullness of time, would release them in the final days.
In legends for the next fifteen centuries after his death, Alexander was remembered foremost as the pious defender of the civilized world from monstrous races and fabulous creatures of Inner Asia, India, and Ethiopia. None of these nations was more hostile to civilization than the Eurasian nomads. The legends cast the nomads as barbarians beyond the pale, beyond assimilation as civilized peoples, and beyond redemption by the God of Abraham. Yet these fears and prejudices hardly reflected reality on the northern frontiers of Alexander’s empire. Alexander had pursued a pragmatic policy based on his own experience with and out of respect for his nomadic foes. He improved upon the frontier policy inherited from his Persian predecessors, and promoted and protected trade between the Scythians and his Greek cities of Sogdiana and Bactria. In so doing, he created the conditions for the development of the western half of the Silk Road, and so the first global trade network.