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Further Reading

THE HELLENISTIC INFLUENCE

This rule lasted until 331 B.C. when the Macedonian Alexander the Great overthrew the reigning power. Had Alexander lived, he intended to establish a world empire with the great Babylon as its capital. However, upon his premature death there in 323 B.C. at the age of thirty-two, his empire was left to be divided among his generals. Babylonia and Assyria fell to Seleucis I who ruled from 301 - 281 B.C. Under the Seleucid Dynasty, Hellenistic influences were increasingly introduced to the population.

These influences continued under the succeeding Arsacids (or Parthians) whose rule lasted from 250 B.C. until 224 A.D. During this time the Parthians built as their capital the city of Ctesiphon, not far from the future site of Baghdad. It is noted for a fabulous arch which still stands among its ruins still the largest single span brick-built arch in the world.

During the last two centuries of their reign, the Parthians were constantly besieged by Rome. Emperor Trajan Optimus invaded and by 110 A.D. briefly held all of present day Iraq. However, the Roman sovereignty lasted but a decade.

The final demise of the Parthians came at the hands of the Sassanids, and for the next four centuries the area was under constant cruel religious and political upheaval.

By the fourth century B.C., nearly all of Babylon opposed the Achaemenids. Thus, when the Iranian forces stationed in Babylon surrendered to Alexander the Great of Macedon in 331 B.C. all of Babylonia hailed him as a liberator. Alexander quickly won Babylonian favor when, unlike the Achaemenids, he displayed respect for such Babylonian traditions as the worship of their chief god, Marduk. Alexander also proposed ambitious schemes for Babylon. He planned to establish one of the two seats of his empire there and to make the Euphrates navigable all the way to the Persian Gulf, where he planned to build a great port. Alexander's grandiose plans, however, never came to fruition. Returning from an expedition to the Indus River, he died in Babylon--most probably from malaria contracted there in 323 B.C. at the age of thirty-two. In the politically chaotic period after Alexander's death, his generals fought for and divided up his empire. Many of the battles among the Greek generals were fought on Babylonian soil. In the latter half of the Greek period, Greek military campaigns were focused on conquering Phoenician ports and Babylonia was thus removed from the sphere of action. The city of Babylon lost its preeminence as the center of the civilized world when political and economic activity shifted to the Mediterranean, where it was destined to remain for many centuries. Although Alexander's major plans for Mesopotamia were unfulfilled, and his generals did little that was positive for Mesopotamia, the effects of the Greek occupation were noteworthy. Alexander and his successors built scores of cities in the Near East that were modeled on the Greek city-states. One of the most important was Seleucia on the Tigris. The Hellenization of the area included the introduction of Western deities, Western art forms, and Western thought. Business revived in Mesopotamia because one of the Greek trade routes ran through the new cities. Mesopotamia exported barley, wheat, dates, wool, and bitumen; the city of Seleucia exported spices, gold, precious stones, and ivory. Cultural interchange between Greek and Mesopotamian scholars was responsible for the saving of many Mesopotamian scientific, especially astronomical, texts.