How Alexander Spread Hellenism (And Great Food) Across the World
A History of Mankind (141)
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As Alexander’s successors, the Diadochi, fought for prominence, tens of thousands of mostly intelligent, highly-cultivated Greeks flooded the recently-founded Alexandrias across Africa and the Middle East1.
This flood, which may have reached the low hundreds of thousands over a few decades, also ended in older cities ranging from Antioch-on-the-Orontes/Antiochia to Bactria. All those Greeks chased riches and the protection of Macedonian warlords who went on to becoming dynasty-founders like Ptolemy and Seleucus.
The language these people spoke is evidence enough of the Hellenic world’s greatness: Greek may have been the only ancient language with a word meaning “freedom” in the abstract (“eleutheria”2; a word for “practical intelligence” and the ability to give good counsel (”phronesis”); a word for “protection from reprisals by the powerful” (“asylia,” from which “asylum” sprung); a word for the extraordinary, uniquely Greek idea of “freedom of expression” (“parrhesia”3) and yet another for the right to use such freedom (“isegoria”); one for “orderly government” (“eunomia”), one for “excellence” that combines the roots for “beautiful and good” (“kalokagathia”4) and also a wonderful word for “vulgarity,” (“apeirokalia,” meaning “lack of experience in things beautiful”) that really sums up much of the classical Greek mindset5.
Even a land as ancient and proud and Egypt ended up heavily Hellenized, to the extent that Egypt’s own demotic script came to be replaced by Coptic script – still in liturgic use to this day – in just over a century: Horwennefer/Hurganophor, an Upper Egyptian who launched the largest native rebellion against Ptolemaic rule between 205 and 197 BC, left behind a graffito written in Egyptian using Greek letters, the oldest testimony of a development which would end in the creation of Coptic script.
With the soldiers and adventurers went engineers, builders, philosophers and historians. By the Fourth Century BC, Greece – a land that uniquely cherished the myth of a mechanical monster, Talos, in one version forged by the god Hephaestus – had surpassed Egypt, Phoenicia and Babylon in every conceivable sort of technological field, and the old country would keep producing all sorts of inventors, cranks and creative minds for centuries.
Greek artists had an even bigger impact on the East, and the effect of the cultural exchange between Europe and Asia during this time can hardly be overstated. Statues of the Buddha started to appear only after the cult of Apollo became established in the Gandhara valley and western India and Buddhists felt sufficiently threatened by the success of new religious practices that they began to create their own images.
Indeed, there is a correlation not only in the date of the earliest statues of the Buddha, but also in their appearance and design6. Stone altars adorned with Greek inscriptions, the images of Apollo and exquisite miniature ivories depicting Alexander from what is now southern Tajikistan reveal just how far influences penetrated. So too did the impressions of the cultural superiority brought from the Mediterranean basin.
Greek, the language of Socrates and Anaxagoras, of Gorgias and Aristotle, was in daily use in the further reaches of current-day Afghanistan more than a century after Alexander's death7. As late as the First and Second Century AD, Nahapana, king of the Western Kshatrapas in Northwestern India, issued silver coins were based on the Indo-Greek silver drachmas. The obverse bore his portrait along with a legend in a corrupt form of the Greek script.
Indeed, the Greek language penetrated deep into the Indian subcontinent, ruled by those distant cousins of the Hellenes, the Indian Aryans. Some of the edicts issued by Mauryan ruler Ashoka, the most powerful of the early Indian rulers, were on Greek- and Persian-style pillars made with parallel Greek (and Aramaic) versions, evidently for the benefit of the local population; well into modern times, isolated groups of mountain tribes in Central Asia still claim Greek ancestry and ties to Alexander and his companions.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
The Rise of Macedon
Alexander’s campaigns popularized the use of saffron – the king of spices, almost certainly of Iranian origin8, and one that was very profitable to carry around and sell due to its exorbitant prices – found on the Achaemenid hinterland, so that it became sought-after in the West but also in South Asia, where it became a basic ingredient for many dishes. Alexander himself carefully kept stocks of saffron — but not for culinary use, since he used the pistils of the flower Crocus Sativus from which saffron is extracted, as a conditioner and dye for his famously golden hair.
The entire culinary tradition of the lands Alexander conquered and visited was upended. Bharta – a dish made of roasted eggplant pulp, enriched with garlic, spices and aromatic herbs – became extremely popular in South Asia, using a recipe similar to that for the Greek “melitzanosalata” that Macedonians and other Greeks cooked since time immemorial.
In Middle Eastern cooking, the same dish came to be called “baba ghanoush”; in Romania and Hungary, “salata de vinete,” and as far away as France is “caviar d’aubergine.” Greek pita bread turned into a staple food in each of the lands visited by Alexander, all the way to India, where it became naan by the addition of yogurt and ghee (clarified butter) to the dough.
Greek ”tzatziki,” on the contrary, may have arrived from the East. The dish known as Raitas, characteristic of South Asian cuisine, has the same recipe of tzatziki: that is a white sauce with garlic and aromatic herbs; in the Greek recipe, the base of the dish is made of yogurt, whereas in the Indian world the use of curd prevails. Rice, unheard of in the West before Alexander, was first introduced as a food into Europe and parts of the Fertile Crescent by Alexander’s veterans who came across the staple in Bactria9 – even though rice flour may have been known earlier as a beauty product and medicine.
Indian astronomy and astrology became forever polluted by Greek-Babylonian notions that spread over time into Southeast Asia and even Japan and influenced Chinese knowledge as part of the Buddhist cultural compact that arrived in China over the next millennium10. More than anything else, the Greeks in Asia were widely credited in India for their skill in the sciences: “they are barbarians,” says the First Century text known as Garga-Samhita, “yet the science of astronomy originated with them and for this they must be revered like gods.”
Besides Egypt's Alexandria, we have, for example: Herat (Alexandria in Aria), Kandahar (Alexandria in Arachosia) and Bagram (Alexandria ad Caucasum).
Which may, or may not be, inspiration for the similarly abstract Latin word “libertas.”
A word that, like so many other Greek words and ideas, heavily influenced Judaism, to the point that it’s cited verbatim, as a loanword, in Jewish Biblical exegesis (“Midrashic” literature).
H.G. Dakyns (1838-1911), in his English translation of Xenophon’s Symposium, provides alternative, more metaphorical readings that may well reflect the usage of “kalokagathia” among the Greek elite: “nobleness of soul” and "beautiful and gentle manhood."
I owe this insight to Leo Strauss' 1959 lecture “What Is Liberal Education?”, in which Strauss at his most Hellenic explains: “Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity... Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.”
See Peter Frankopan's “The Silk Roads” (2015).
As tax receipts and documents relating to soldiers’ pay from Bactria from around 200 BC show.
As of the 21st century AD Iranian saffron is still renowned as the best in the world, and saffron remains the planet’s most expensive spice.
The next century, Aristophanes of Alexandria describes rice rolls as an accompaniment to Hellenistic royal feasts and banquets in one of his poems.
In the paper “Greco-Babylonian Astral Science in Asia: Patterns of Dissemination and Transformation,” Bill M. Mak concludes that “in both India and China during the first millennium of the Common Era, foreign astral science was highly sought after given the important role such knowledge played in the indigenous cultures. A long and established tradition of astral learning both India and China often means that foreign ideas could only be properly introduced in reference to existing concepts and customs. This is in contrast to cases where indigenous systems were incomplete or undeveloped; in such cases the foreign system overtook the former. This is the case of Japan and Southeast Asia where the Indian variety of Greco-Babylonian astral science survived intact and became a recognizable feature in their method of time reckoning and cosmological vision.”