Who Killed Alexander the Great?
Who killed Alexander the Great? No one truly knows. Alexander’s adventurous military expeditions, covering twenty-two thousand miles in ten years, from Greece to India and back to Babylon, suddenly ended in perplexing circumstances with his mysterious death in 323 BC.[1]
Even after two millennia, no one has confirmed how the great emperor died prematurely at the age of thirty-three. Alexander’s sudden death has puzzled historians ever since its tragic occurrence. His epic conquests and his doomed destiny have given birth to endless speculation over the ages. Alexander’s death was unnatural; he had always shown considerable energy and physical strength on the battlefield all throughout the hazardous campaigns across Europe, Egypt, and Asia. The event was a cataclysm that would change the world forever.
The murder of Alexander is one of those vexing problems in ancient history, short on convincing solutions, to which many modern scholars have applied their minds. Many are thus likely to question this fresh attempt to solve the age-old mystery because, based on the available records, no one has been able to resolve the puzzle with any reasonable certainty. Still, the sacred Sanskrit texts of India known as the Puranas tell a different story. According to the legends narrated in these ancient chronicles, Alexander, the king of the Asuras, who invaded Indian domains of the Aryan tribes, was deceitfully subdued, redirected from India and then secretly murdered.
A process of “myth mining” of the Puranas has now yielded results that will expose, for the first time, the assassin and his secret weapon. The discovery could finally put to rest the restless murdered soul of Alexander.
Narrative history is an attempt to re-create the past from the shreds of evidence that survive through the ages. In the history of Alexander, the copious sources of historical data available from the Indian Sanskrit texts remain unexplored and untold. The Puranas kept the truth hidden for more than two millennia, as the sages who recounted these ancient tales decreed that the Indian war strategy should be kept censored as a celestial secret (“deva-guhyam susamvrtam” in Sanskrit).
The main textual sources for this narrative include the eighteen Puranas, the epic Mahabharata, and Chanakya’s Arthashastra. Several additional pieces of evidence, including numismatic, cartographic, and textual evidence as well as various “rock inscriptions,” have also been examined to reconstruct the true history of Alexander’s disastrous Indian invasion and the cause of his premature death. Seventy-two sensational pieces of evidence in this book finally lead to the name of the assassin and the means and motive for the crime.
The book also includes twenty interesting discoveries of historical importance.
The search for the real story of Alexander’s Indian invasion started in the first volume of this book, The Puranas, yet there is no need to go back and read the first book to follow the story in this second part. In the second volume, The Secret War, we will examine in detail the secret Indian military strategy that stopped Alexander’s conquest of the world. The book traces Alexander’s decade-long expedition to the unknown boundaries of the primitive world and tracks his disastrous return trip, which ended in his deathbed in Babylon.
The Indian Puranas apparently tell us the history of the ancient world through enchanting mythology, and one can only admire at the huge share of historical information available in the Indian scriptures. The Sanskrit word Purana literally means ancient history. Puranas, according to Vedic scholars, formed a class of texts considered Itihasa or sacrosanct history.[2] In this tradition, the Vamana Purana, Bhagavata Purana, and the Skanda Purana tell us the history of Mahabali and the untold story of Alexander.
[1] Alexander’s death is recorded in Justinus, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus' "Philippic histories", Translated by Rev. J.S. Watson, 12.13–14; Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackman (London, 1961), 30.53; Pseudo-Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators, 56; Plutarch, Morals, trans. Henry Frowde (Loeb Classical Library, 1904), 849 F; Plutarch, Alexander, “Dryden translation,” 77.1; and Diodorus, Universal History, 17.118.
[2] The Arthasastra of Chanakya labels “ancient history” by the term “Itihasa.” Purana [ancient knowledge], Itivritta [chronicles], Akhyayika [illustrative legends], Udaharana [illustrative stories], Dharmasastra (theology), and Arthasastra (Politics) are the branches of Itihasa [history]. (Arthasastra 1.5) Moreover, Arthasastra instructs that a minister skilled in the Arthasastra should advise a king, who is in trouble, by means of the history found in Itivritta and Purana.
