The King Explorer: a cosmographic approach to the Persian Alexander

Many Arabic and Persian literary texts concerning Alexander the Great contain reference to Aristotle or Plato entrusting a geographical text to him. According to a long tradition, the Macedonian king was seen as the ‘king explorer’ for antonomasia, whose power and political projects were based principally on a detailed cosmographical knowledge, and whose legendary exploits could be the occasion for a general mapping of the world. Through a comparative philological analysis of four key sequences of the Alexander Romance’s multilingual literary tradition – with a particular focus on the Persian versions – this paper explores some of the geographical, geopolitical, ethnographical, and even technological issues which were dealt with in many sections of the saga. The aim is to suggest that the Alexander Romance as a whole can be read as a broad cosmographical narrative, where it is possible to trace fragments of knowledge circulating throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, sometimes as updated and topical discussions, other times as dormant ‘fossils’ of literary transmission.