The reverse of the coin shows Athena Nikephoros, and Greek letters spell ‘of King Lysimachus’
Alexander the man was the son of Philip II of Macedon, a small kingdom a few hundred miles north of Athens. Philip expected great things of his son, and he employed the great philosopher Aristotle as his tutor. Alexander came to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, with an almost limitless sense of self-belief. His stated goal was to reach the ‘ends of the world and the Great Outer sea’, and to do this he embarked on a series of wars, first crushing rebellions by Athens and the other Greek cities, then turning east to confront the long-standing enemy of the Greeks – Persia. Persia controlled at that point the greatest empire on earth, sprawling from Egypt across the Middle East and central Asia to India and almost to China. The young Alexander campaigned brilliantly for a total of ten years, until he defeated the whole of the Persian Empire. He was clearly a driven man. What drove him on? We asked the leading expert on Alexander, Robin Lane Fox:
Alexander was driven by the heroic ideals that befitted a Macedonian king, ruling over Macedonians, the ideals of personal glory, prowess; he was driven by a wish to reach the edge of the world, he was driven by a wish to excel for ever his father, Philip, who was a man of significance but who pales almost to a shadow beside Alexander’s global reputation.
Alexander’s victories didn’t just depend on his armies. They required money – and lots of it. Luckily, Philip had conquered the rich gold and silver mines of Thrace, the area that straddles the modern borders of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. That precious metal financed the early campaigns, but this inheritance was later swelled by the colossal wealth Alexander captured in Persia. His imperial conquests were bankrolled by nearly five million kilos of Persian gold.
With irresistible force, huge wealth and enormous charisma, it’s no wonder that Alexander became a legend, seeming to be more than mortal, literally superhuman. In one of his early campaigns into Egypt, he visited the oracle of the god Ammon, which named him not just the rightful pharaoh, but a god. He left the oracle with the title ‘son of Zeus-Ammon’, which explains the characteristic ram’s horns in images of him like the one on our coin. He was received by many of the conquered peoples as though he were a living god, but it’s not altogether clear whether he actually believed himself to be one. Robin Lane Fox suggests he saw himself more as the son of god:
He certainly believed he was the son of Zeus, [that] in some sense, Zeus had entered into his begetting, a story possibly told to him by his mother Olympias herself, though he is, in earthly terms, the son of the great king Philip. He is honoured as a god, spontaneously, by some of the cities in his empire, and he is not displeased to receive honours equal to the gods. But he knows he’s mortal.
Alexander conquered an empire of more than two million square miles and founded many cities in his name, the most famous being Alexandria in Egypt. Although nearly every large museum in Europe has an image of Alexander in its collection, they are not consistent and there’s no way of knowing whether he looked like any of them. It was only after Alexander’s death in 323 BC that an agreed, idealized image, constructed for public consumption, came into being – and that’s the image found on our coin. The reverse of the coin reveals that this is not Alexander’s coin at all – he’s making a posthumous guest appearance in somebody else’s political drama.
The other side of the coin shows the goddess Athena Nikephoros, bringer of victory, carrying her spear and shield. She is the divine patroness of Greeks and a goddess of war. But it’s not Alexander that she’s favouring, because the Greek letters beside her tell us that this is the coin of King Lysimachus. Lysimachus had been one of Alexander’s generals and companions. He ruled Thrace from Alexander’s death until his own death in 281 BC. Lysimachus didn’t mint a coin that showed himself. He decided instead to appropriate the glory and the authority of his predecessor. This is image manipulation – almost identity theft – on a heroic scale.
Alexander died in his early thirties, and his empire quickly disintegrated into a confusion of shifting territories under competing warlords – Lysimachus was just one of them. All of the warlords claimed that they were the true heirs of Alexander, and many of them minted coins with his image on them to prove it. This was a struggle fought out not just on the battlefield but on the currency. It’s a textbook early example of a timeless political ploy: harnessing the authority and the glamour of a great leader of the past to boost yourself in the present.
Dead reputations are usually more stable and more manageable than living ones. Since the Second World War, for example, Churchill and de Gaulle have been claimed by British and French political leaders of all hues when it suited the day’s agenda. But in democratic societies, this is a high-risk strategy, as the political commentator and broadcaster Andrew Marr points out:
The more democratic a culture is, the harder it is to appropriate a previous leader. It’s very interesting at the moment to see the revival of Stalin as an admired figure in Putin’s Russia, having been knocked down as a bloodthirsty tyrant before. So the possibility of taking a figure from the past is always open, but the more conversational, the more confrontational, more democratic, the more argumentative a political culture is, the harder it is. You can see this in the case of Churchill, because there are still lots and lots of people who know a great deal about what Churchill thought and said. Any mainstream party which tried to say ‘we are the party of Churchill’ would get into trouble because Churchill changed his mind so much that he can be quoted against you as often as he can be quoted in favour of you.
Dead rulers are still very present, and they’re still on the currency. A thoughtful alien handling the banknotes of China and the United States today might well assume that one was ruled by Mao and the other by George Washington. And, in a sense, that’s exactly what the Chinese and American leaders want us all to think. Political giants like these lend an aura of stability, legitimacy and above all unquestionable authority to modern regimes struggling with huge problems. Lysimachus’s gambit still sets the pace for the world’s superpowers.
And it worked for Lysimachus himself – up to a point. He’s a mere historical footnote in comparison to Alexander; he didn’t get an empire, but he did get a kingdom, and he hung on to it. Twenty years after Alexander’s death, it was clear that his empire would never be reconstituted, and for the next 300 years the Middle East would be ruled by many cultured but competitive Greek-speaking kings and dynasties. The most famous monument of any of these Greek-speaking states, the Rosetta Stone, features in Chapter 33. But my next object comes from India, where the great emperor Ashoka linked himself to a different kind of authority to strengthen his political position – not the authority of a great warrior, but one of the greatest of all religious teachers – the Buddha.
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Pillar of Ashoka
Stone fragment of a pillar, erected in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, India
AROUND 238 BC
Around 2,000 years ago the great powers of Europe and Asia established legacies that are still with us. They laid down the fundamental ideas concerning the right way for a leader to rule, how rulers construct their image and how they project their power. They also showed that a ruler can actually change the way the people think. The Indian leader Ashoka the Great took over a vast empire and, through the strength of his ideas, began a tradition that leads directly to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and still flourishes today – a tradition of pluralistic, humane, non-violent statecraft. Those ideas are incorporated in this object. It’s a fragment of stone, sandstone to be exact, and it’s about the size of a large curved brick – not much to look at all, but it opens up the story of one of the great figures of world history. On the stone are two lines of text, inscribed in round, spindly-looking letters – once described as ‘pin-man script’. These two lines are the remains of a much longer text that was originally carved on a great circular column, about 9 metres (30 feet) high and just under a metre (3 feet) in
diameter.
Ashoka had pillars like this put up across the whole of his empire. They were great feats of architecture, which stood by the side of highways or in city centres – much as public sculpture does in our city squares today. But these pillars are different from the Classical columns that most of us in Europe are familiar with: they’ve got no base and they’re crowned with a capital in the shape of lotus petals. On top of the most famous of Ashoka’s pillars are four lions facing outwards – lions that are still one of the emblems of India today. The pillar that our fragment comes from was originally erected in Meerut, a city just north of Delhi, and was destroyed at the palace of a Mughal ruler by an explosion in the early eighteenth century. But many similar pillars have survived, and they range across Ashoka’s empire, which covered the great bulk of the subcontinent.
These pillars were a sort of public-address system. Their purpose was to carry, carved on them, proclamations or edicts from Ashoka, which could then be promulgated all over India and beyond. We now know that there are seven major edicts that were carved on pillars, and our fragment is from what’s known as the ‘sixth pillar edict’; it declares the emperor Ashoka’s benevolent policy towards every sect and every class in his empire:
I consider how I may bring happiness to the people, not only to relatives of mine or residents of my capital city, but also to those who are far removed from me. I act in the same manner with respect to all. I am concerned similarly with all classes. Moreover, I have honoured all religious sects with various offerings. But I consider it my principal duty to visit the people personally.
There must have been somebody to read these words out to the mostly illiterate citizens, who would probably have received them not only with pleasure but with considerable relief, for Ashoka had not always been so concerned for their welfare. He’d started out not as a gentle and generous philosopher but as a ruthless and brutal youth, following in the military footsteps of his grandfather, Chandragupta, who had risen to the throne following a military campaign that created a huge empire reaching from Kandahar in modern Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. This included the great majority of modern India, and was the largest empire in Indian history.
In 268 BC Ashoka took his place on the throne – but not without considerable struggle. Buddhist writings tell us that in order to do so he killed ‘ninety-nine of his brothers’ – presumably metaphorical as well as actual brothers. The same writings create a legend of Ashoka’s pre-Buddhist days as filled with self-indulgent frivolity and cruelty. When he became emperor he set out to complete the occupation of the whole subcontinent and attacked the independent state of Kalinga – modern-day Orissa on the east coast. It was a savage, brutal assault and one which seems afterwards to have thrown Ashoka into a state of terrible remorse. He changed his whole way of life, embracing the defining concept of Dharma, a virtuous path that guides the follower through a life of selflessness, piety, duty, good conduct and decency. Dharma is applied in many religions, including Sikhism, Jainism and of course Hinduism – but Ashoka’s idea of Dharma was filtered through the Buddhist faith. He described his remorse and announced his conversion to his people through an edict:
The Kalinga country was conquered by the king, Beloved of the Gods, in the eighth year of his reign. 150,000 persons were carried away captive, 100,000 were slain, and many times that number died. Immediately after the Kalingas had been conquered, the king became intensely devoted to the study of Dharma …
The Beloved of the Gods, conqueror of the Kalingas, is moved to remorse now. For he has felt profound sorrow and regret because the conquest of a people previously unconquered involves slaughter, death and deportation.
From then on Ashoka set out to redeem himself – to reach out to his people. To do so, he wrote his edicts not in Sanskrit, the ancient Classical language that would later become the official language of the state, but in the appropriate local dialect couched in everyday speech.
With his conversion Ashoka renounced war as an instrument of state policy and adopted human benevolence as the solution to the world’s problems. While he was inspired by the teachings of Buddha – and his son was the first Buddhist missionary to Sri Lanka – he did not impose Buddhism on his empire. Ashoka’s state was in a very particular sense a secular one. The Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen comments:
The state has to keep a distance from all religion. Buddhism doesn’t become an official religion. All other religions have to be tolerated and treated with respect. So secularism in the Indian form means not ‘no religion in government matters’, but ‘no favouritism of any religion over any other’.
Religious freedom, conquest of self, the need for all citizens and leaders to listen to others and to debate ideas, human rights for all, both men and women, and the importance given to education and health, the ideas Ashoka promulgated in his empire, all remain central in Buddhist thinking. There’s still today a kingdom in the Indian sub-continent that is run on Buddhist principles – the small Kingdom of Bhutan, sandwiched between northern India and China. Michael Rutland is a Bhutanese citizen and the Hon. Consul of Bhutan to the UK. He also tutored the former king, and I asked him how Ashoka’s ideas might play out in a modern Buddhist state. He began by offering me a quotation:
‘Throughout my reign I will never rule you as a king. I will protect you as a parent, care for you as a brother and serve you as a son.’ That could well have been written by the emperor Ashoka. But it wasn’t. It was an excerpt from the coronation speech, in 2008, of the 27-year-old fifth king of Bhutan. The fourth king, the king that I had the great privilege to teach, lived and continues to live in a small log cabin. There is no ostentation to the monarchy. He is probably the only example of an absolute monarch who has voluntarily persuaded his people to take away his powers and has instituted elective democracy. The fourth king also introduced the phrase ‘gross national happiness’ – to be a contrast to the concept of ‘gross national product’. Again, as Ashoka would have felt, the happiness and contentment of the people were more important than conquering other lands. The fifth king has very much followed the Buddhist precepts of monarchy.
Ashoka’s political and moral philosophy, as he expressed it in his imperial inscriptions, initiated a tradition of religious tolerance, non-violent debate and a commitment to the idea of happiness which has animated Indian political philosophy ever since. But – and it’s a big but – his benevolent empire scarcely outlived him. And that leaves us with the uncomfortable question of whether such high ideals can survive the realities of political power. Nevertheless, this was a ruler who really did change the way that his subjects and their successors thought. Gandhi was an admirer, as was Nehru, and Ashoka’s message even finds its way on to the modern currency – on all Indian banknotes we see Gandhi facing the four lions of Ashoka’s pillar. The architects of Indian independence had him often in mind. But, as Amartya Sen points out, his influence extends far wider, and the whole region sees him as an inspiration and a model:
The part of his teaching that the Indians particularly empathized with at the time of independence was his secularism and democracy. But Ashoka is also a big figure in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Thailand, in Sri Lanka; he is a pan-Asian figure.
My next object involves another kind of inscription and another ruler closely linked with a religious system, but in this case the religion is now dead and the ruler is no longer of any consequence – indeed he never really was. The inscription is one of the most famous objects in the British Museum – and possibly the world.
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Rosetta Stone
Found at el-Rashid, Egypt
196 BC
Every day when I walk through the Egyptian sculpture gallery at the British Museum there are tour guides speaking every imaginable language addressing groups of visitors, all craning to see this object. It is on every visitor’s itinerary, and, with the mummies, it’s the most popular object in the British Museum. Why? I
t’s decidedly dull to look at – a grey stone about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels at airports. The rough edges show that it’s been broken from a larger stone, with the fractures cutting across the text that covers one side. And when you read that text, it’s pretty dull too – it’s mostly bureaucratic jargon about tax concessions. But, as so often in the Museum, appearances are deceptive. This dreary bit of broken granite has played a starring role in three fascinating and different stories: the story of the Greek kings who ruled in Alexandria after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt; the story of the French and British imperial competition across the Middle East after Napoleon invaded Egypt; and the extraordinary but peaceful scholarly contest that led to the most famous decipherment in history – the cracking of hieroglyphics.
The Rosetta Stone is a particularly fascinating and special case of power projection. It’s associated with a ruler who was not strong but weak, a king who had to bargain for and protect his power by borrowing the invincible strength of the gods or, more precisely, the priests. He was Ptolemy V, a Greek boy-king who came to the throne of Egypt as an orphan in 205 BC, at the age of 6.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 19
