Macedonian (Argead) Period
Alexander III the Great
Macedonian Dynasty · 332-305 BCE
Open full-size illustration →Source: Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)
Background
Alexander was crowned pharaoh at Memphis after Egypt fell to him without a fight, and later that winter marked out his new city of Alexandria in a way ancient writers themselves treated as a story worth telling rather than a plain fact. Background from: UCL Digital Egypt.
Reign dates: Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)
Full profile
The Macedonian conqueror
Alexander III the Great entered Egypt in late 332 BCE, where Persian satrap Mazakis peacefully surrendered the country along with its treasury. Respecting traditional Egyptian religious customs, Alexander traveled to Memphis, offered sacrifices to the Apis bull, and was officially crowned pharaoh, adopting the throne name Setenra-Meryamun ("chosen of Ra, beloved of Amun"). He founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast and undertook a legendary pilgrimage to the Oracle of Ammon at the Siwa Oasis, where he was hailed as the son of the god, before leaving the region to continue his conquest of the Persian Empire.
A city planned in flour, and a good omen from the birds
According to Plutarch, when Alexander marked out the site of Alexandria on 20 January 331 BCE, his surveyors ran out of the chalk normally used to trace a new city's streets and instead outlined the walls, temples, and canals with barley flour. Flocks of seabirds descended and ate the outline before construction could begin, which Alexander's companions took as an alarming omen, but his seers reinterpreted it as a sign that the city would one day feed a much wider world, a reading later generations found fitting once Alexandria grew into a major grain-exporting metropolis. Ancient sources themselves record the episode as an anecdote circulating around Alexander rather than a plainly documented fact, and Alexander left the actual construction to his architect Dinocrates before departing to continue his campaign against Persia.
Sources for this profile
- Shaw, I. (Ed.). (2000). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press.
- Dodson, A., & Hilton, D. (2004). The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson.
- University College London. Kings of Ptolemaic Egypt.
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. Chronology. UCLA.
The complete, APA-formatted reference list is on the Academic Sources & Bibliography page.