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The Seleucid kingdom....
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Seleucus I the Victorious
312-280 BC
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After the death of Alexander the Great
in the afternoon of 11 June 323
BC, his empire was divided by his generals, the Diadochi (successors). One
of them was his friend Seleucus, who became king of the eastern provinces
- more or less modern Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, and Lebanon, together with parts of Turkey, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and
Tajikistan. His kingdom had two capitals, which he founded in c.300:
Antioch in Syria and Seleucia in Mesopotamia.
Babylon was a third
important city. The empire was, like the empire of
Alexander, actually the
continuation of the empires before: the Assyrian, Babylonian, and the Achaemenid Empire. The empire ended in 64 BC when the
Romans made Syria a
Roman province.
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The death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) saw the
Macedonian army in a great confusion. The centralised
Persian Empire was
easy to govern once it was conquered, and the Macedonian military hegemony
was by and large unthreatened, but the king had died without appointing a
successor. Even a powerful heir would have found it hard to maintain
Alexander's unifying authority, but as things were the kingship was divided
between his feeble half-brother Philip III and his posthumous son Alexander
IV. None of them were more than puppets in the hands of the
Macedonian
generals, the Diadochs, who soon sliced up the empire between them. |
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Their wars started soon after Ptolemy I seceded from the
empire in the province of Egypt, but the complicated details of the fighting
could not be accounted for here. Suffice to say that Persia proper was
divided between various Macedonian satraps, who tried as best as they could
to gain local support but relied mostly on their Greek mercenaries. In the
outskirts of the empire, Persian satraps managed to claim independence
during the wars; small kingdoms were established in Cappadocia and in the
so-called Media Atropatene (today's Azerbaijan). |
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The founder of the
Greco-Bactrian kingdom, Diodotus ca. 250 BC.
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The satrap of Babylonia, the focal point between east
and west, was called Seleucus and was a formidable administrator who soon
formed a solid network of local supporters. After several wars with the
leading Diadoch Antigonos the One-eyed, Seleucus crowned himself king in
Babylonia in the year 306 BC. A few years after, all the satrapies to the
east of Babylonia had yielded to him. In 301 BC, Antigonos was defeated by
a coalition of other generals, and Seleucus became master of Syria as
well, and in 281 BC he took Asia Minor and the wars of the Diadochs ended.
At the age of eighty Seleukos was murdered by a fugitive Egyptian prince,
but the throne passed on to Antiochus I (281-261 BC), his son by
Persian
noblewoman Apamea, and after that to his son Antiochus II (261-246 BC),
who ruled as Great Kings from Samarkhand to the Aegean Sea. |
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