Conquests of Alexander the Great
Learn about Alexander the Great's military campaigns — the conquests that destroyed the Persian Empire and created a Hellenistic world from Greece to India.
Between 334 and 323 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon conducted one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in human history. Starting with an army of roughly 40,000, he crossed into Asia Minor, defeated the Persian Empire, conquered Egypt, marched through Central Asia, and pushed into India before his exhausted troops finally refused to go further. He was thirty-two when he died in Babylon, ruler of the largest empire the world had known.
Alexander's military genius was undeniable. The Battle of Issus (333 BCE) and the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE) — where he decisively defeated the Persian King Darius III despite being vastly outnumbered — demonstrated a tactical brilliance that generals have studied for two millennia. He combined the Macedonian phalanx, Companion cavalry, and psychological warfare into an integrated fighting system that no opponent could match.
But Alexander's legacy extends far beyond military conquest. His campaigns opened channels of cultural exchange between the Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Indian worlds that persisted for centuries. The Hellenistic cities he founded — Alexandria in Egypt being the most famous — became centers of a new, cosmopolitan civilization. Greek became the common language of educated elites from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. Whether Alexander intended this cultural fusion or whether it was an unintended consequence of conquest remains debated. What is clear is that the world he left behind was fundamentally different from the one he entered.