Macedonian Empire Research Paper

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During the fourth century BCE, in the span of little more than fifty years, the ancient center of gravity in southwest Asia shifted from Mesopotamia (between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) and southwestern Iran to the eastern Mediterranean basin. The Persian Empire, which had dominated the vast region from India to Anatolia (in modern Turkey) for more than two centuries, disappeared, being replaced by a series of Macedonian kingdoms. The social and cultural changes were equally profound. Greeks became the new elite, and knowledge of the Greek language and Greek culture became the key to social and political influence. The incentive to learn millennia-old hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts and the cultures encoded in them declined sharply, leading to their eventual disappearance during the early centuries CE.

History

Balkan (relating to countries of the Balkan Peninsula, including Macedonia) nationalism has made the identity of the Macedonians a controversial subject. Recent discoveries suggest, however, that the Macedonian language was, in fact, a form of Greek related to the dialects spoken in northern Greece. Although Macedonian may have been a Greek dialect, this linguistic relationship was obscured by sharp differences in culture between Macedonians and Greeks. The most important of these differences was that Macedon was a territorial state ruled by kings, not a state divided into mutually independent city-states, as Greece was.

During most of its early history the Macedonian monarchy was weak. Situated in the northern Balkans, Macedonian kings, to retain their thrones, had to struggle constantly against foreign enemies and powerful nobles with royal ambitions. Only in the mid-fourth century BCE did this situation change as a result of the political and military reforms of King Philip II (360–336 BCE), which transformed Macedon into the strongest military power in the eastern Mediterranean and overseer of an empire that stretched from southern Greece to the Danube River. Threatened with ruin by Philip’s assassination in 336 BCE, his work was saved by the accession of his son Alexander III (Alexander of Macedon, commonly called Alexander the Great, 336–323 BCE), who carried out his father’s plans to invade the Persian Empire.

Alexander was twenty years old when he became king. When he died in Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-three, he had transformed the world that the Greeks knew. In the course of a campaign that extended from the Mediterranean to western India, his army repeatedly defeated the armies of the Persian Empire and brought under Macedonian rule Egypt and all of ancient southwest Asia. Whatever plans Alexander may have had for his empire, however, were aborted by his premature death, leaving to his successors the task of creating a new state system in the territories of the former Persian Empire.

Four decades of bitter struggle were required for that state system to emerge. Efforts to keep Alexander’s empire intact were frustrated by the ambitions of his generals, who sought to divide it among themselves. When the wars of Alexander’s successors ended in 281 BCE, his empire had been replaced by a state system dominated by three large kingdoms: that of the Antigonids in Macedon, the Seleucids in Asia, and the Ptolemies in Egypt. From the beginning, however, the new kingdoms’ survival was repeatedly threatened by both internal and external threats.

The Seleucids’ kingdom was the most vulnerable. King Seleucus I (311–281 BCE) ceded India to Chandra Gupta (c. 324–300 BCE), the founder of the Maurya dynasty, and his successors lost much of the territory conquered by Alexander in Central Asia to the Parthians (Iranian-speaking nomads) and rebellious Greek settlers, who carved out kingdoms in eastern Iran and Bactria (modern Afghanistan). Meanwhile, struggles with the Seleucids to preserve their holdings in southern Syria and Palestine and native rebellions in southern Egypt undermined the Ptolemies’ hold on Egypt. Attempts to restore royal authority in the early second century BCE by King Antiochus III (223–187 BCE) and King Ptolemy V (204–180 BCE) were frustrated by Rome, and a little more than a century later the last vestiges of Alexander’s conquests had disappeared, having been absorbed into the empires of the new masters of southwest Asia: the Romans and the Parthians.

Macedonian Kingdoms

The emergence of the Macedonian kingdoms created a new world for the Greeks. While the cities of Greece declined, the kings founded splendid new Greek cities in their kingdoms. Although Greek literature contains little evidence concerning the operation of the Macedonian kingdoms, archaeological evidence in the form of inscriptions and papyri has remedied this deficiency, making clear that the kingdoms were conquest states organized on the basis of two principles. First, a kingdom belonged to the king; and second, his business had priority over everything else. Although these principles were common to all the kingdoms, their application is clearest in Egypt because of the rich papyrological (relating to papyrus) evidence for the functioning of the government.

Egypt’s wealth was its rich agricultural land, which the Ptolemies divided into two categories: royal land dedicated to basic agricultural production and “released land” used to support soldiers, government officials, and even Egypt’s numerous temples. The main nonagricultural sectors of the economy, such as textile, papyrus, and oil production, were organized as state monopolies in order to maximize royal revenue. An extensive administration based in the capital Alexandria but with agents—Greek at the upper levels and Egyptian at the lower—throughout Egypt supervised the system. Over the system as a whole was the king, who ruled as an autocrat whose word was law. The establishment of a cult of the living ruler and his ancestors enhanced the legitimacy of royal autocracy and afforded subjects a means of demonstrating their patriotism, loyalty, and gratitude for the protection and other benefits provided them by their ruler.

Life and Culture

Whereas Alexander may have hoped to govern his empire with the aid of native elites who accepted his rule, his successors rejected that hope, relying instead on Greeks to fill key administrative posts. As a result, for more than a century Greeks moved east to populate the new cities founded by the kings. For the first time Greeks and other travelers could be confident that the Greek language was sufficient to find them ready welcome everywhere from the Mediterranean to the borders of India.

The greatest of the new cities was Alexandria in Egypt, which eventually grew to enormous size with a population reaching half a million people and possessed splendid public buildings and amenities unknown to the cities of old Greece. The greatest of these amenities was the lighthouse known as the “Pharos,” a 121-meter-high polygonal tower whose beacon fire guided ships to Alexandria harbor.

Alexandria was the first of Alexander’s foundations and the site of his tomb, but the Ptolemies made it the capital of Egypt and the premier city of the Hellenistic (Greek) world. Built on the site of an Egyptian town named “Rhakotis,” Alexandria possessed a multiethnic population that included Macedonians, Greeks, Egyptians, and a large Jewish community. Despite the diversity of its population, Alexandria was organized as a Greek city-state, and only Greeks and Macedonians enjoyed full citizenship rights.

In the new kingdoms culture became a tool to enhance royal prestige. Like Alexander, the Ptolemies encouraged prominent Greek intellectuals to settle in Alexandria. Supported by Egypt’s riches, they subsidized artistic and scientific work by establishing cultural institutions of a new type, namely, the Museum, a research center where scholars supported by government stipends could pursue their studies, and the Library, which was intended to contain copies of every book written in Greek. Eventually, its collection supposedly reached 700,000 papyrus rolls.

The Ptolemies were passionate about expanding the royal library’s collections. Jewish tradition claimed that King Ptolemy II ordered the preparation of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible; King Ptolemy III stole the official Athenian copy of the works of the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. However its books were acquired, the Library offered unprecedented resources for scholarly research in every field of intellectual endeavor. Doctors and writers receiving government stipends had, however, to earn their keep, serving as physicians and tutors to members of the royal family and celebrating its achievements. The poet Callimachus created a monumental catalogue of 120 books in the library while writing elegant poems in honor of the royal family. Similarly, the poet Theocritus also extravagantly praised the achievements of Ptolemy II in his poems.

The greatest achievements of Hellenistic intellectuals, however, were in scholarship and applied science, where their works remained standard for the rest of antiquity. Callimachus and other scholars such as Zenodotus and Aristarchus founded the critical study of Greek language and literature and prepared standard texts of the Greek poet Homer and the other poets that are the ancestors of those texts we still use. The mathematician Euclid summed up the results of three centuries of Greek mathematics in his Elements, which was still used to teach plane geometry until the early twentieth century. The geographer Eratosthenes established the principles of scientific cartography and produced a strikingly accurate estimate of the circumference of the Earth on the basis of evidence collected by Hellenistic explorers. The physicist Ctesibius pioneered the study of ballistics and the use of compressed air as a source of power, while other scientists experimented with the use of steam to operate simple machines. Medicine also advanced greatly. The doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus made fundamental discoveries concerning the anatomy and functions of the human nervous, optical, reproductive, and digestive systems by dissecting corpses, even vivisecting criminals whom the government provided for the advancement of science.

Alexandria was the greatest of the new cities founded by Alexander and his successors, but it was not atypical. The rulers of the other kingdoms pursued the same goals as the Ptolemies in their urban plans. Like Alexandria, the Seleucid capitals—Antioch in Syria and Seleucia in Mesopotamia—were large-scale, planned, multiethnic urban centers with splendid monuments. Even in remote Bactria, archaeology has revealed at Ai Khanum near the Oxus River a Greek city with broad streets, a special government center, and elegant temples and villas. These cities were also cultural centers. Thus, Antioch also had a library like Alexandria, albeit smaller, as did the city of Pergamon in Anatolia, while at Ai Khanum the remains of imported Greek books have been found in the royal treasury. The kings also encouraged native elites to transform their cities into Greek cities complete with the same amenities found in the royal capitals by rewarding them with citizenship and tax privileges.

End of the Macedonian Era

Despite their achievements, the Macedonian kingdoms had serious weaknesses, most importantly the limited support of their non-Greek subjects. In these kingdoms ethnicity and privilege were linked, and Greek identity was the ethnicity that counted even though Greeks and Macedonians made up less than 10 percent of their population. Thus, although elite non-Greeks sought Greek status through education, few Greeks acquired a sound knowledge of the languages and cultures of Egypt and Asia. The new Greek cities were essentially islands of foreign domination and culture in a largely non-Greek landscape. As a result, native unrest and separatism prevented the last Ptolemies and Seleucids from mounting effective resistance to the advances of the Romans and Parthians.

The end of the era of the Macedonian kingdoms did not, however, mean the end of Greek influence in their former territories. Macedonian conquest had effectively linked culturally and commercially the entire vast territory from India to the Mediterranean, and that linkage not only survived but also expanded westward to the Atlantic and northeastward toward China under Roman and Parthian rule. Likewise, Greek culture and the Greek language also continued to function as a common elite culture and language in the Roman West, while Greek art and the Greek alphabet found new uses in Central Asia, providing Buddhism with the iconography (traditional images or symbols associated with a subject, especially a religious or legendary subject) to express the humanity of the Buddha and enabling the Saka and other peoples of the region to write their languages for the first time.

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