Babylon

Ferdowsi's Eskandar is not quite the Alexander of the history books. The Shahnameh makes him the son of the Iranian king Darab and a daughter of Filqus, Philip of Macedon, so that when he fights Dara, the last Kayanian king, he is fighting his own half-brother. The conquest becomes a quarrel inside one royal family. Dara, dying after being stabbed by his own ministers, asks Eskandar to marry his daughter Roshanak and to protect the Iranian nobility, and Eskandar weeps over him.

Then the poem sends Eskandar travelling to the ends of the world: to India, to the land of the Brahmins, in search of the Water of Life in the Land of Darkness, to the edge of the world where he builds a wall against Gog and Magog, and to a talking tree that foretells his death. On his return he reaches Babylon, where a strange birth, of a child with a lion's head, is read as a sign that his end is near. He writes a last letter to his mother and dies. His body is carried in a golden coffin to Alexandria, and philosophers speak over it about the vanity of power.

The ruins today

The historical Alexander did die in Babylon, in 323 BCE, at the age of 32. Babylon, on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, had been one of the great cities of the ancient world; Cyrus the Great took it in 539 BCE. Its ruins, much rebuilt in the twentieth century, were added to UNESCO's World Heritage list in 2019. In the poem's long view, Babylon is where the world-conqueror learns that the world cannot be conquered.