Newfie wrote:Tanada,
No doubt all you say is true, and I always enjoy your thoughtful posts.
My comment was more that he left no great legacy, he conqured existing empires and moved on. Had he lived perhaps that would have come, but it does not seem likely.
If you judge greatness by vicotory your outcome will be different than if you leave behind some greater culture. Napoleon had a good bit of Alexander, but he left behind The Naooleonic Code and other reforms. What was Wellington’s legacy? Washington did not have a glorious military history but he left a huge legacy through his leadership.
Hope this clarifies.
Well on the topic of Alexander one of his leading generals was Ptolemy who ended up with the Egyptian portion of the Alexandrian Empire and where Alexander had laid out and ordered the construction of the city of Alexandria. The City started construction in the 320's BC and from them until 397 AD the Library of Alexandria was the premier center of learning and knowledge of the western world. At the time the Christians demolished and burnt it in 397 AD it contained 500,000 books, more than any other center of knowledge anywhere up until that time and all the great mathematicians and philosophers from 320 BC to 397 AD would travel to or correspond with the library leading a large number of inventions being developed and recorded in the Library. One of the great developments of the library was the Sextant, which as a sailor I presume you are familiar with, and the Astrolabe. These scientific instruments let you know your precise latitude in the first case and in the second case the Astrolabe developed from the simple Sextant will let you know your exact longitude as well because it has a built in method of calculating your three coordinate position on the surface of the earth by time of a given objects rise over the horizon and prior knowledge of your latitude. An Astrolabe also has the built in capacity to survey distant objects like mountains or rivers to calculate how high the mountain is or how wide the river is. These and many other scientific advances are the legacy of Alexander the Great.
Sure you are familiar with the Napoleonic Code and the legacy of George Washington because these are recent historical events and emphasized in our culture. But I suspect your discounting of ancient 'great leader' type individuals is more from lack of knowledge about those persons rather than the lack of their accomplishments. Alexandria quickly became the capitol of Egypt and remained so for millennia until the recent post colonial government moved the capitol to Cairo as a way of distancing themselves from outside interference.
Other examples, the Code of Hammurabi became the basis of law and the justice system concept for thousands of years before the creation of the Napoleonic code. You probably know it from the oft quoted 'an eye for an eye' but the bedrock of the code was the concept that if someone did you an injury you deserved recompense or they had to suffer a similar injury for justice to be served.
Another example possibly just as familiar was the Julian Calendar created by Julius Caesar back in about 50 BC (I would have to look up the exact year and I am too lazy) that was used in Western Europe until the Gregorian Calendar of Pope Gregory came into common use and which is still used in Eastern Europe to this day in Russia and a few other places. How about the creation of the Linear B method of recording Greek language with an alphabet that allowed much more precision in recording thoughts and records than the earlier clumsy symbology of the Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic writing systems of Mesopotamia and Egypt respectively? Linear B made it possible for modern persons like ourselves to translate and understand Homer and Euripides and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Surely the Egyptians and Babylonians had poets and mathematicians, but their methods of recording knowledge were too cumbersome for the vast bulk of their work to make it through to the present. The Bronze age Greek on the other hand has survived to be translated and studied over 3600 years of time! Now we can not say precisely who adapted Linear B from the language of the Minoans recorded in still untranslated Linear A, but we have a pretty good idea of when in the history of the Mycenae Greeks this event took place because suddenly there are records in the symbology where before they used a form of glyphs just as clumsy as the Cuneiform and Hieroglyph systems their neighbors used. The unnamed person who developed Linear B has left a mark on our culture that can not be overestimated because it gives us a window into Mycenae and also into the Hittite and Egyptian cultures of the same period because they wrote about their trade partner/neighbors/competitors through the latter half of the Bronze Age.
Don't sell your ancient ancestors short, they were just as smart or smarter than we are and starting with nothing but stone tools and observation they developed agriculture and ways of recording information to pass down to us. Smart phones don't make us particularly intelligent and our actions in regards to exhaustible resources like Oil demonstrate we are not particularly wise either.