ALEXANDER THE GREAT (356 BC – 323 BC) riding his horse Bucephalus across the Hindu Kush mountains, the westernmost part of the Himalayas, on his way to India. Also known as Alexander III, he was the king of the Greek kingdom of Macedonia from 336 BC to 323 BC. Alexander’s father, Philip II, reformed the Macedonian army, turning it into a formidable military force that allowed him to subdue the Greek city-states, weakened after the wars between Athens and Sparta. Philip’s next plan was to launch an invasion against the main rival of the Greeks: the gigantic Achaemenid Persian Empire. But Philip was murdered in 336 BC, being succeeded by his 20-year-old son Alexander. Immediately after being crowned king, Alexander dealt with some anti-Macedonian rebellions in Greece, then launched a campaign against the Balkan tribes to secure his northern borders, and in 334 BC he started his conquest of the Persian Empire, which lasted 10 years. In 332 BC, at the age of 24, he took control of Egypt and was proclaimed pharaoh. In the Nile Delta he founded the first of his many cities named Alexandria. In 331 BC, Alexander defeated the Persian king of kings Darius III at the decisive battle of Gaugamela, from which Darius escaped. Then he entered Babylon triumphally, making it the capital of his new empire, and the next year he took the Persian throne at the Persian administrative capital of Susa. Also in 330 BC, Alexander reached the Persian ceremonial capital, Persepolis, and had it torched as retribution for the destruction of Athens by the Persian king Xerxes. Then Alexander advanced to Central Asia searching for Darius, but the Persian king had been betrayed and killed by his own men. What followed was the hardest campaign in Alexander’s military career, the conquest of Bactria and Sogdiana and the Saka nomads. His final campaign was in India, fighting first the tribes of the Hindu Kush and then entering the Indo-Gangetic Plain, where in 326 BC he faced the war elephants of king Porus at the battle of the Hydaspes. Alexander died in Babylon at the age of 32, leaving a world that would never be the same. The Hellenistic Age had begun.
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