Alexandria (Eskandariyeh)

Eskandar dies at Babylon, at the end of his journeys to the edges of the world. In his last letter he asks his mother to have him laid in the soil of Misr (Egypt), in a golden coffin filled with honey and lined with brocade of Chin. When the coffin is lifted, the army splits. The Persians say he should lie in Iran, where the dust of the kings of kings lies already; the Rumans want him taken back to the land he came from. A Persian suggests asking a mountain at a place called Jarm, which answers anyone who calls to it. The voice replies that Eskandar's dust belongs in Alexandria, the city he built in his lifetime.

In Alexandria, the poem says, more than a hundred thousand men, women and children crowd round the coffin. The sage Arastalis (Aristotle) lays his hand on it and asks where the king's wisdom has gone, that this narrow box should be his home. Then the sages of Rum speak one by one. "You hoarded so much gold," says one, "and now gold holds your body." Another: "No one escaped your hand; why did you lay hands on death?" His mother and Roshanak mourn him last, and Roshanak asks where Dara is now, and the other kings he brought down. Ferdowsi closes the reign by saying that Eskandar built ten cities that are now thorn-brakes, and that only his story remains.

The city is real. Alexander founded it in 331 BCE on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, at the western edge of the Nile Delta, and after his death at Babylon in 323 BCE his body was brought to Egypt by his general Ptolemy and later entombed in Alexandria. The tomb was a famous sight in Roman times, but its site has since been lost. The poem's version, with its talking mountain, keeps the historical ending: the world-conqueror is carried back to the one city that bears his name.