Alexander the Great in Arabic tradition

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Zeus Ammon, wearing what would become the Horns of Alexander as originally signified by the Horns of Ammon. Legends of Alexander's exploits coalesced into the third-century Alexander Romance which, in the premodern period, went through over one hundred recensions, translations, and derivations and was translated into almost every European vernacular and every language of the Islamic world.[2] After the Bible, it was the most popular form of European literature.[3] It was also translated into every language from the Islamicized regions of Asia and Africa, from Mali to Malaysia.[4]

The first appearance of Alexander traditions in Arabic literature occurs in the first extant Arabic book, the

Hebrew throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the most popular being the Sirat al-Iskandar. These stories about Alexander were believed to be historically factual by the people who transmitted them.[6]

Quran

Dhu al-Qarnayn

Main article: Theories about Alexander the Great in the Quran

Alexander was often identified with Dhu al-Qarnayn (Arabic: ذو القرنين; lit. "The Two-Horned One"), a figure that appears in the Quran.[7][8][9] This identification would play a role in enhancing the popularity of the Arabic Alexander tradition, which often made Alexander synonymous with his attributed Two-Horned title.[10]

Other

Earlier in Surah al-Kahf, a pericope in the Quran presents Moses in search for the

Babylonian Talmud, and the Song of Alexander.[11][12] Some studies have looked into why the protagonist was shifted from Alexander to Moses in the version as the narrative appears in the Quran.[13]

Recently, Zishan Ghaffar has also argued for the role played by Alexander legends in shaping the narrative that appears in 27:15–44.[14]

Genres

Classification

Doufikar-Aerts has divided the Arabic Alexander literature into four categories or genres of literature. The first is the literature in the tradition of Pseudo-Callisthenes, or the 'Pseudo-Callisthenes tradition' or the Arabic Alexander Romance tradition, which focused on the biographical elements of Alexander's career. The second is the 'Alexander and Wisdom literature' tradition. The third is the Dhu al-Qarnayn tradition, related to texts from the Qisas al-Anbiya (Tales of the Prophets) literature. This tradition was rooted in the Quranic figure of Dhu al-Qarnayn. The fourth is the Sirāt al-Iskandar tradition, which follows in the tradition of a popular romance known as the Sīrat al-Iskandar.

Wisdom literature

The Alexander Romance also had an important influence on Arabic wisdom literature. Arabic was introduced as the court language of the caliphate during the Umayyad Caliphate around the year 700. One of the first texts translated into Arabic was the Rasāʾil Arisṭāṭālīsa ilāʾl-Iskandar (The Letters of Aristotle to Alexander or the Epistolary Romance), which consists of a set of apocryphal letters meant to confirm Alexander's reputation as a wise ruler. It was composed during the reign of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743) from Greek sources like the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem.

Part of this text became a constituent of the Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār (Book of Secret of Secrets) by Yahya ibn al-Batriq (d. 815), a Pseudo-Aristoteliean treatise which became immensely popular and was translated directly from the Arabic into many other (including European) languages. Both Alexander and Aristotle became important figures in Islamic wisdom literature, such as in the chapter dedicated to Alexander in the 9th-century Ādāb al-Falāsifa (Sayings of the Philosophers) written in the name of the famous Christian translator and physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq. Other texts in this tradition from the tenth century onward included Ṣiwān al-Ḥikma (Chest of Wisdom) of Abu Sulayman Sijistani, the Al-Ḥikma al-Khālida (Everlasting Wisdom) of Miskawayh, and the Al-Kalim al-Rūḥānīya fīʾl-Ḥikam al-Yūnānīya (Spiritual Sayings about Greek Maxims) of Ibn Hindu.[15]

Notably, the

amulets, from Greek and Latin into Arabic. The Greek work Thesaurus Alexandri was attributed to Hermes (the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology) and similarly contained supposed letters from Aristotle addressed to Alexander.[16][17]

In

Yahya ibn al-Bitriq
(?–815 AD). It appears, however, that the treatise was actually composed originally in Arabic.

Another piece of Arabic Alexander literature is the Laments (or Sayings) of the Philosophers. These are a collection of remarks supposedly made by some philosophers gathered at the tomb of Alexander after his death. This legend was originally written in the 6th century in Syriac and was later translated into Arabic and expanded upon. The Laments of the Philosophers eventually gained enormous popularity in Europe.[18]

Romance literature

The Syriac Alexander Romance, alongside some apocalyptic traditions it incorporated from the shorter Syriac Alexander Legend, would become the main source for Arabic Alexander Romance tradition and for Arabic-language historians who wanted to discuss the role of Alexander in pre-Islamic history. One such history was the Kitāb al-Akhbār al-Ṭiwal (Book of Comprehensive History) of Abu Hanifa Dinawari (d. 896), itself based on an older version in Pseudo-Aṣma‛ī's Nihāyat al-Arab (Ultimate Aim), includes a short history of the kingdom of Alexander in this tradition. Other examples include the Tārīkh (Historiae) of al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897), the al-Rusul waʾl-Mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings, or simply Annales) of al-Tabbari (d. 923), the Murūj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold) of al-Masudi (d. 956), and the Naẓm al-Jawhar (String of Pearls) of Eutychius of Alexandria.[19]

The earliest full-length Arabic Alexander Romance was the

Talmudic traditions about Alexander as well as in Persian traditions.[16][20]

The other prominent Arbaic versions would be the Qissat Dhulqarnayn (9th century), a second Qissat Dhulqarnayn in the Ara'is al-majalis fi Qisas al-anbiya' (Book of Prophets) of al-Tha'labi (11th century), the Hadith Dhulqarnayn (15th century), the Sīrat al-Iskandar (15th century), the Sirat al-malek Eskandar Dhu’ l-Qarneyn, and the Tārīkh al-Iskandar al-Makdūni (History of Alexander of Macedon) (17th century).[21]

Tales of the prophets

One figure transmitting Alexander legends in the tradition of the qiṣaṣ genre was

Brahmins of India. The South Arabian legend was composed within the context of the division between the South Arabs and North Arabs that began with the Battle of Marj Rahit in 684 AD and consolidated over two centuries.[16]

Another transmitter who Alexander traditions are attributed to was Ka'b al-Ahbar.[6]

Sirat al-Iskandar

Isrāfīl (angels), who instead give him the wonderstone. Shortly after, Alexander writes a letter of consolation to his mother and dies. He is buried in Alexandria.[28]

Representations

Arabic literature produced stories about heroes, saints, poets, and men of wisdom. Biographies, romances, poems, and so forth celebrated literary protagonists, among them one of the most popular being Alexander the Great. While portraits and representations of Alexander in the Arab and Islamic tradition has continuity with earlier representations, it also developed its own nuances.[2]

One representation was of Alexander as a strategist, especially in light of his vast conquests from such a small territory, including the subjugation of many lands that the Umayyads reconquered later. A group of apocryphal letters translated during the reign of the caliph Hisham between Alexander and Aristotle (Alexander's tutor) describes how Alexander was advised by Aristotle as to how he should go about his campaigns. These include recommendations in good government, rulership, fair treatment to subdued nations, and more. Though Alexander never pursued Arabia, the letters describe the Arabians as one of his subjects. One piece of advice was that Alexander should allow troops nightly drinking parties (a pre-Islamic recommendation which was not conformed into Islamic ethics in the text). These texts went on to have an enormous impact on Arabic-related Alexander traditions.[29]

Another was that of the sage. This is especially visible in wisdom literature, which included wise sayings, maxims, anthologies of anecdotes, and ascriptions of exemplary conduct on great figures from the past. Such stories are rooted in Hellenistic sources and often remained closer to their originals during translation. The Greek historian Plutarch wrote in his "On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great" argued that Alexander would qualify as a true philosopher by the same criteria used to judge others like Pythagoras and Socrates: by judging him based on his manner of life and the principles he taught. Maxims emphasizing the greater nature of what Alexander gained from Aristotle, in knowledge, over what he gained from his father Philip, in weaponry, was repeated by the Arabic compiler Mubashshir ibn Fatik; Mubashshir recorded a maxim where when Alexander asked if he valued his teacher or father more, he answered "My father is the cause of my life, but my teacher is the cause of the quality of my life". Representations of Alexander as a philosopher king were widespread. Another text where they can also be found in Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Anecdotes of Philosophers and Sages.[30]

Alexander as a pioneer was another popular portrait. In the Arabic Epistola Alexandri, Alexander describes his personal observations during his journeys. He constructs temples for prayer and was seen as a proto-monotheist foreshadowing the coming of Christianity and Islam. His exploits were depicted as deeds of cleverness and boldness, and the result of divine providence. He sent many letters to the rulers of foreign nations in order to compel them into monotheism.[31]

Geography and cartography

One of the most famous elements of Alexander's biography was his concealment of Gog and Magog behind a barrier which they remain imprisoned by until the end of the world. Such ideas caught the attention of geographers, who were interested in finding these barriers or representing them in the maps they produced. Like in medieval Christendom, medieval world maps, also known as mappa mundi, were produced which depicted Gog and Magog in the far corners of the Earth. One tenth-century Arab geographer and chronicler, Ibn Hawqal, produced maps based on his own travels and inspired by earlier ones by Ptolemy. His map was part of his geographical work, the Ṣūrat al-ʾArḍ ("Image of the Earth"), a manuscript for which exists dating to 1086. The "regions of Gog and Magog" in this map is situated in the northwestern part of the world. Muhammad al-Idrisi was an Arab geographer who, in 1154, was commissioned by the Norman king Roger II of Sicily into producing a work that came to be known in Western languages as the Tabula Rogeriana (or the "The Excursion of One Eager to Penetrate the Distant Horizons" in Arabic). In this map, a considerable part of the world is in the northernmost section and is inhabited by Gog and Magog. One copy of this map known as the Charta Rogeriana depicts Gog and Magog as being enclosed by a mountain range called the jabal Qūfāia and has an Arabic caption in a Latinized script which reads sadd ḏī ’l karnajin, al musamma bi al rad[ ] (radm?), "The Barrier of Dhū ’l-Qarnayn, called the Rampart". The words sadd and radm were taken from the Quran, 18:94, 95. This practice was followed into Iranian maps, such as the fifteenth-century Mojmal al-Tawārīkh wa ’l-Qeṣaṣ.[32]

Several expeditions in the Muslim world were undertaken to try to find and study Alexander's wall, specifically the

Abbasid Caliph Al-Wathiq (d. 847) dispatched an expedition to study the wall of Dhu al-Qarnayn in Derbent, Russia. The expedition was led by Sallam-ul-Tarjuman, whose observations were recorded by Yaqut al-Hamawi and by Ibn Kathir:

...this expedition reached ... the Caspian territory. From there they arrived at Derbent and saw the wall [of Dhul-Qarnayn].[34]

The Muslim geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi further confirmed the same view in a number of places in his book on geography; for instance under the heading "Khazar" (Caspian) he writes:

This territory adjoins the Wall of Dhul-Qarnain just behind Bab-ul-Abwab, which is also called Derbent.[34]

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid (763 – 809 AD) even spent some time living in Derbent. Not all Muslim travellers and scholars, however, associated Dhul-Qarnayn's wall with the Caspian Gates of Derbent. For example, the Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta (1304–1369 AD) travelled to China on order of the Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq and he comments in his travel log that "Between it [the city of Zaitun in Fujian] and the rampart of Yajuj and Majuj [Gog and Magog] is sixty days' travel."[35] The translator of the travel log notes that Ibn Battuta confused the Great Wall of China with that supposedly built by Dhul-Qarnayn.[36]

Translations

An Arabic translation of Pseudo-Callisthenes is evidenced by the Akhbār Al-Iskandar, a brief biography. This text in turn is known from the Mukhtār al-Ḥikam wa-Maḥāsin al-Kalim ('Selection of Proverbs and an Anthology of Sayings') by Mubashshir ibn Fātik. In Europe, this text was known as the Bocados de Oro. The question of the source language for the major Arabic version of Pseudo-Callisthenes, however, has been contentious. According to Theodor Nöldeke in the late 19th century, the lost δ recension of the Greek Romance was translated into Middle Persian (Pahlavi). The Pahlavi version, also lost, was translated into Syriac as the Syriac Alexander Romance and it was the Syriac version that was the ultimate source of the Arabic sometime before the 9th century.[37] More recently, this theory has been questioned and others have suggested that a translation could have been made directly from the Greek.[38][39]

In

Leo the Archpriest. The Hebrew translation of this text is thought to have been produced not directly from the Latin, but from a now-lost Arabic intermediary translation that must have been produced prior to 1061.[40]

The Tārīkh al-Iskandar al-Makdūni (History of Alexander of Macedon), translated into Arabic by the Melkite bishop Yuwāsif ibn Suwaydān (c. 1669) from the Byzantine ζ-recension of Pseudo-Callisthenes. It is fairly late and so had little influence on the Arabic Alexander tradition.[41]

History of scholarship

The study of the Arabic tradition of the Alexander Romance was founded by Theodor Nöldeke with his publication Beiträge zur geschichte des Alexanderromans in 1890.[42] In 1901, Karl Friederich Weymann published a study on translations of the Romance into Arabic and Ethiopic, titled Die aethiopische und arabische Übersetzung des Pseudocallisthenes. In this study, Weymann proposed a tentative reconstruction of an Arabic version of the Romance which might have served as an intermediary between the Syriac and Ethiopic versions. He dated the Arabic translation, which he thought must exist, to the first half of the 9th century. However, the existence of an Arabic translation would remain conjectural until the accidental discovery of a manuscript of the Hadith Dhulqarnayn (or the Leyenda de Alejandro) in 1929 by Emilio Garcia Gomez. This constituted definitive evidence for the translation, and also demonstrated the importance of the Syriac recension in the transmission of the Romance into Arabic.[43]

Another strand of scholarship focused on

Aya Sofya collection of an Arabic adaptation of the Epistolary Romance cycle, a fictionalized correspondence between Alexander and Aristotle. It was composed during the reign of the caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik in the first half of the 8th century. This finding also confirmed Alexander's place and importance in the Arabic Wisdom literature.[43]

In 1978, Tilman Nagel published his Alexander der Grosse in der frühislamischen Volksliteratur. Nagel pioneered a new way with dealing with the material in Ibn Hisham's Kitab, forsaking the older method of the comparative study of legend and instead aimed at deducing the earliest sources and origins of the different elements of the narrative. He also placed the work in its historical and social context, viewing it as an autonomous literary phenomena that occupied a particular national consciousness. His work would anticipate additional innovations in the study of popular Arabic literature towards the end of the 20th century. In these decades, a few short surveys appeared of the oriental Arabic tradition, including that of Stephen Gero, Hamad Bin Seray, and a proceedings of a congress on Alexander published by Fahd, Mazzaoui, Macuch, and Marin. Other recent developments include the work of the historian François de Polignac and, most importantly of all, the edition and translation of Islamic Legends Concerning Alexander the Great by Z. David Zuwiyya.[43]

Today, the Arabic tradition of Alexander legends is the best-research of all divisions of the eastern tradition about Alexander, in large (but not exclusive) part to the more recent contributions by Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, such as in her book Alexander Magnus Arabicus.[39][44]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ Bloom, Jonathan M.; Blair, Sheila S. (2009) The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture: Mosul to Zirid, Volume 3. (Oxford University Press Incorporated, 2009), 385; "[Khojand, Tajikistan]; As the easternmost outpost of the empire of Alexander the Great, the city was renamed Alexandria Eschate ("furthest Alexandria") in 329 BCE."
    Golden, Peter B. Central Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 25;"[...] his campaigns in Central Asia brought Khwarazm, Sogdia and Bactria under Graeco-Macedonian rule. As elsewhere, Alexander founded or renamed a number of cities, such as Alexandria Eschate ("Outernmost Alexandria", near modern Khojent in Tajikistan)."
  2. ^ a b Doufikar-Aerts 2020.
  3. ISBN 978-1-032-54990-3
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  4. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020, p. 1.
  5. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020b, p. 401–402.
  6. ^ a b Doufikar-Aerts 2010, p. 10.
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  12. ISBN 978-0-300-18132-6
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  13. ISSN 0008-4298
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  14. ISBN 978-3-506-70432-0
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  15. ^ Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine; Doufikar-Aerts, Faustina (2022). "Alexander the Great in Medieval Literature". Literature: A World History, Volumes 1-4. Wiley. pp. 532–533.
  16. ^ a b c Stoneman 2003
  17. ^ Yucesoy, Hayrettin. Messianic Beliefs & Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam: The Abbasid Caliphate in the Early Ninth Century. 2009. University of South Carolina. pp. 122–123
  18. ^ Brock 1970.
  19. ^ Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine; Doufikar-Aerts, Faustina (2022). "Alexander the Great in Medieval Literature". Literature: A World History, Volumes 1-4. Wiley. p. 534.
  20. ^ Southgate, Minoo. S. Portrait of Alexander in Persian Alexander-Romances of the Islamic Era. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 97, No. 3, (July – September 1977), pp. 278-–284
  21. ^ Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine; Doufikar-Aerts, Faustina (2022). "Alexander the Great in Medieval Literature". Literature: A World History, Volumes 1-4. Wiley. pp. 534–535.
  22. ISSN 0075-4390
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  23. ISBN 978-3-11-059774-5
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  24. ISBN 978-1-78453-739-5
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  25. JSTOR 600734
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  26. ^ Nagel, Tilman (2008). Alexander der Grosse in der frühislamischen Volksliteratur. University of Michigan Press. p. 40.
  27. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2003, p. 505.
  28. ^ a b Doufikar-Aerts 2003, pp. 508–509.
  29. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020, p. 2–3.
  30. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020, p. 3–5.
  31. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020, p. 6–7.
  32. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2020b, p. 397–398.
  33. ^ Tafsir al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Vol. III, pp. 235–239
  34. ^ a b Mu'jam-ul-Buldan, Yaqut al-Hamawi
  35. ISBN 0-904180-37-9
    ), p. 896
  36. ^ Gibb, p. 896, footnote #30
  37. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2010, p. 13–16.
  38. doi:10.2143/MUS.114.1.302
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  39. ^
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  40. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2010, p. 16–17.
  41. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2010, p. 17–19.
  42. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2010, p. 3.
  43. ^ a b c Doufikar-Aerts 2010, pp. 4–7.
  44. ^ Doufikar-Aerts 2010.

Sources

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