In his History of Prophets and Kings, better known as History of Al-Tabari, Al-Tabari has devoted a chapter to the tale of Darius the Great and Darius the Younger (see Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, Paris-Leuven, 2010, 22-3 with notes 35-7. It is more famous in western literature as the Annales of Al-Tabari, as noted by D.M. Dunlop, Arab Civilization to AD 1500, London, 1971, 88-9. See also Boaz Shoshan, Poetics of Islamic Historiography: Deconstructing Tabari’s History, Leiden, 2004, xxvi-xxvii). As it turned out, however, the main character in this chapter became Alexander the Great, and the main topic was his conquest of Persia (See Paul Weinfield, The Islamic Alexander: A Religious and Political Theme in Arabic and Persian Literature, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 2008, 4, 11).

1. Like the preceding story, the third one begins with a vague reference to its source. Although his reference to “some knowledgeable people of the histories of the predecessors” does not tell us much about the source, it is interesting to note that Al-Tabari introduces this version by a verb (za‛ama), meaning “claimed,” which indicates that he himself probably did not believe at least in some of its details.
2. [2:10 PM]Compared with these stories of Darius and Alexander in Al-Tabari, which flatly contradict all that we know from the historical sources, there is, for example, the narrative of the authoritative work on Alexander’s campaigns, by Arrian who sought to save what he thought to be the authentic record of the events from the growing romance stories looming around the historical figure (E. Badian, “Conspiracies,” in Alexander the Great in Fact and in Fiction, ed. by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham, Oxford, 2000, 84-8).
3. The Romance Themes in Al-Tabari’s Stories
4. To classify Al-Tabari’s history of Alexander as belonging mainly to the realm of Romance, we are helped by some recurrent themes which figure prominently in three of his stories (Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 29-20; and her reference to Al-Tabari, 23). These themes are the alleged brotherhood between Alexander and Darius, Alexander’s ‘character’ or ‘persona’, Darius’s death scene and the symbolic exchange of gifts between the two kings. Variations did exist and they were either considerable bearing upon, for example, the nature of the relationship between the two kings and Alexander’s character and his role in Darius’s death, or they were minor differences, as in the fate of the hen laying golden eggs, or in the place and number of the encounters between Darius and Alexander.

The other view, however, casts some shadows on the role of Alexander and presents us with a bad image of him particularly because he was accused in this case of plotting against his brother. According to these stories, there occurred some contact between Alexander and Darius’s murderers. Further glimpses of the bad image of Alexander are given in the addendum to the stories of the encounters between Alexander and Darius. Here we have a passing reference to Alexander’s destruction of Persian cities, fortifications and temples. Alexander was also accused of killing Persian priests and of burning their religious books and Darius’s court. He is also said to have carried Persian books and sciences of astronomy and of wisdom after he had them translated them into Syriac and Greek (Rūmiyya) languages. Although Al-Tabari does not specify the source of these glimpses, it is not difficult to attribute it to a Zoroastrian Persian source which continued to see in Alexander the invader and the conqueror (Southgate, Portrait of Alexander, 278 and Weinfield, The Islamic Alexander, 23, 42-3, 47). Indeed, later representations of this bad image are found in some famous Persian epic works (Stoneman, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend, 35, 41).

Al-Tabari’s Tales in Context

To begin with Al-Tabari’s time, it may be summarily noted that he was one of the great Arab historians of the third and fourth AH/AD ninth and the tenth centuries (Al-Tabari lived between 224-310AH/AD839-923. Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 20; Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 89). Thus, he precedes the epic poem of Firdausi with almost a century. He also precedes the fourth/tenth century historians, Al-Mas‛udi and Al-Tha‛alibi, but belongs almost to the same era as Al-Ya‛qubi and AlDinawari (see Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 21-9; Weinfield, The Islamic Alexander, 33-69 and Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 71-117). All these historians wrote in Arabic and were influenced by the great movement of translation into Arabic, but they also geographically belonged to different worlds which were then newly united. Second, Al-Tabari got hold of the cultures of two worlds: the Persian, where he was born, grew up and spent the first half of his life; and the Arab world to which he owes his name and origin and where he spent the second half of his life (Franz Rosenthal, trans., The History of Al-Tabari, Volume 1: General Introduction and From the Creation to the Flood, Albany, 1989, 11-12). Thus, owing to his knowledge of the Persian language (Rosenthal, The History of Al-Tabari, 45), he may be considered the first Arab historian to have had a real access to historical material concerning ancient Persian history that was not previously known to Arab historians. The point becomes clear when we compare the first tale with the remaining three tales.

As for Al-Tabari’s methodology in writing his History, the first point to note is that it is different from his methodology in his Tafsīr (Rosenthal, The History of Al-Tabari, 55). In the history he was satisfied in general, as he himself states clearly in the introduction to his History, to tell us the stories without expressing his opinion and left it for the reader to determine what he wants to accept. He might have abridged or summarized some details of the stories which he wrote about Darius and Alexander, but he has given what he thought to be a fair representation of the important issues of these stories (Shoshan, Poetics of Islamic Historiography, 109). It is important to note Al-Tabari’s sources for this information since they were undoubtedly the same for his tales of Alexander just as much as it is interesting to note that he has attributed some of his information to the Rūm whom he distinguished from the Christians. An Arabic translation of Pseudo-Callisthenes may indeed have been the source of the information which he loosely attributed to the Rūm and to the Christians as opposed to the Persians. One might even wonder as well whether the opposition between the Rūm and the Christians corresponds to two different traditions of the Alexander Romance available to Al-Tabari; the latter of them (the Christian) being an earlier translation from the Syriac (Weinfield, The Islamic Alexander, 74-6). That a new translation of the Alexander Romance was available in the ninth century AD, when Al-Tabari lived, has recently been confirmed (Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 13-4).