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The life and exploits of Alexander the Great
The life and exploits of Alexander the Great Author:Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: its turn, have acquired it through some Semitic language. There is little doubt that the story was also fastened on to Gilgamish, a famous Accadian and Assyrian ... more »hero, even as it was fastened on to Alexander, and probably, if we had all the evidence we should find that it was told of some other hero who lived long before Etanna;1 in fact it seems as if we had here one of the stories with which men amused themselves in a primitive period. Its existence in the legends of Alexander is another proof of the marvellous manner in which history and stories are preserved in the East where none of these things ever seems to have had a beginning. Travels of We have mentioned above the name of the andGiiga- hero Gilgamish, whose travels and fabulous history mish com- are recorded on the clay tablets of Assur-bani-pal's pared. ' library,2 and it can be shewn that the legends which had clustered round him were laid under contribution for the history of Alexander. Gilgamish fell sick and sought out the sage Atrahasis to ask The water him how he might obtain eternal life,3 and Alexander's constant quest was the well of the "Water "of Life" (p. 261). The mountain through whichGilgamish travelled was called Mashi,1 and the identical name is preserved by the Greek2 geographers, and in the Syriac and Arabic versions of the Alexander story (p. 228), In his journey over the ocean on which no man had before sailed Alexander took with him eagles which he set free, one after the other, to see if he was near land; the first two eagles found resting-places and, therefore, returned not, but the third returned to the ship after three days, "for the earth had appeared "unto it" (p. 282). Here it is quite clear that we have a reminiscence of the story of the Hebrew Alexander patriarch Noah, or of his A...« less