Posted on 07/09/2016 3:17:30 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
He didn’t kill most of them, he set up a marker “here Alexander stopped”, and they spent six months building ships to take a bunch of the army, and camp followers, back to Mesopotamia by sea. Once the ships were ready, he led the rest of the army along the Indus; they parted ways when the ships reached the Indian Ocean and sailed west. Most of the army left on the land marched back via a populated route, Big Al split off with some of his best and favorites and reconn’ed a really nasty piece of desert, where they all almost died of thirst. Eventually they reached Babylon, which is where he took ill and died.
The Afghans who claim descent (well, I think there’s more than one group that does, and there are probably literally tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people throughout the old Persian/Alexandrian empire and successor Hellenistic kingdoms who are descended from members of that army and don’t know it) are the Black Pagans of Hindu Kush, the Kalash:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2025399/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2344909/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3050795/posts
I don’t really understand the answer that this article wants to give about the the relationship between the Mycenaean and the Scythians.
They seem to suggest that there was no dark age.
But what jumps out at me is that more likely they were all one people until the sea peoples destroyed the Mycenaeans and flattened their cities.
The Ionic Greeks were a different people than the Mycenaeans. The Ionic Greeks were descended from the Sea Peoples. That’s why they have no memory of the Mycenaeans or their language except Homer.
The “sea peoples” were themselves for all practical purposes invented to try to explain the imaginary dark age, so, no, they don’t have descendants, they didn’t wipe out the Mycenaeans, etc. For such a significant and large and devastating group, they left no dynasties, no tombs, no graveyards, no graves, no towns, no geographic traces, no characteristic weapons, no characteristic pottery, no coins, no nothin’.
He marched his battle weary troops through the Gedrosian Desert after a few revolts and a good bit of them died of heat exhaustion and thirst.
A lot of ancient historians chronicle that death march. This is what I was referring to. He marched his army through the Gedrosian Desert and killed a good many of them through heat exhaustion and thirst.
Have you ever read the theories on what happened to Marcus Licinius Crassus’s 10,000 surrendered after Carrhae?
There’s a theory that they were sent to Western China as slaves. Lots of Western Chinese have blond hair/light eyes. Makes for interesting speculation.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/romans-china-lost-legions-carrhae.html
And yet we have the example of the dark ages in Europe.
Recent archaelogy has it that all of the towns along the coasts of southern france italy and greece were flattened in the 600’s AD. what came afterwards were walled towns further inland — suggesting that what destroyed the coastal towns came from the sea. no trace was left of the destroyers.
It has fallen out of European memory just what happened in the 600’s.
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