Empire336 BCE – 323 BCE · 13 years
Empire of Alexander the Great
A 12-year campaign that fused the Greek and Persian worlds into a single Hellenistic culture.
What it was
Alexander of Macedon inherited a unified Greece in 336 BCE and was dead by 323 BCE — but in between he conquered the Persian Empire, reached the Indus, and founded dozens of Greek cities from Egypt to Afghanistan.
Why it mattered
The successor kingdoms (Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, Antigonid Macedon) Hellenized the Near East for three centuries and seeded the cultural soil Christianity later grew in.
From Wikipedia
Macedonia, also called Macedon, was an ancient kingdom on the periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece, which later became the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece. The kingdom was founded and initially ruled by the royal Argead dynasty, which was followed by the Antipatrid and Antigonid dynasties. Home to the ancient Macedonians, the earliest kingdom was centred on the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, and bordered by Epirus to the southwest, Illyria to the northwest, Paeonia to the north, Thrace to the east and Thessaly to the south.
Wikipedia: Macedonia (ancient kingdom)·CC BY-SA 4.0
Borders & accuracy
Solid borders are reconstructed from canonical historical-basemap data or hand-crafted from scholarly atlases.
- SOURCEaourednik / historical-basemaps
- DETAILhistorical-basemaps
- SNAPSHOT323 BCE
- POLITY TYPEstate
Wars of this empire17
Conflicts whose belligerents name this polity, best-documented first.
- Macedonian Conquests of Alexander the Great336–323 BCEWorld-changing · 100K dead
- Battle of Gaugamela331 BCEWorld-changing · 50K dead
- Battle of the Granicus334 BCEMajor conflict
- Battle of Issus333 BCEMajor conflict
- Alexander's Conquest of Egypt332–331 BCEMajor conflict
- Battle of the Hydaspes326 BCEMajor conflict
- Wars of the Diadochi323–281 BCEMajor conflict
- Battle of Thebes335 BCERegional
- Battle of Halicarnassus334 BCERegional
- Battle of Miletus334 BCERegional
- Battle of Gaza332 BCERegional
- Battle of Tyre332 BCERegional
- Battle of Megalopolis331 BCERegional
- Battle of Jaxartes329 BCERegional
- Battle of Sogdian Rock327 BCERegional
- Battle of Lamia323 BCERegional
- Lamian War323–322 BCERegional
Open in the atlas →Seeks the timeline to 336 BCE and fits the map to these borders.
Cite as: Empire of Alexander the Great (336 BCE – 323 BCE). War Atlas. https://waratlas.org/e/macedonian-alexander · Sources & methodology