Macedonian Empire

The largest empire the world had seen, assembled in eleven years by one man and divided among his generals within a decade of his death. Macedon was a peripheral kingdom the Greek cities regarded as barely Greek until Philip II reformed its army around the sarissa pike phalanx and combined arms, and took control of Greece at Chaeronea in 338 BCE. Alexander inherited that instrument at twenty and used it to destroy the Achaemenid empire in three battles - Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela - then pushed on through Bactria to the Indus, where his army refused to go further. He founded cities named after himself from Egypt to Afghanistan, and the Alexandria in Egypt became the intellectual centre of the Mediterranean world. He died at Babylon in 323 BCE aged thirty-two, having named no heir. The wars of the successors split the empire into the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid kingdoms, and the Hellenistic world they created carried Greek language, art and philosophy across Asia for centuries - Greek-influenced Buddhist sculpture in Gandhara is its most visible residue. Aristotle had been his tutor. The empire covered around five million square kilometres at its greatest extent. Alexander's body was diverted to Egypt by Ptolemy and its tomb has never been found. The Macedonian phalanx pike was around six metres long, far longer than the Greek spear. Aigai, the old royal capital, holds the tomb widely believed to be Philip's. Koine Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean for a thousand years.

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