Tristan Hughes

And then that last kind of great stage in Alexander's military campaigning, which is he crosses the Hindukush into India.

And, you know, this was seen as when the Persian Empire was at its height under, let's say, Darius the Great more than a century earlier.

This was like the largest extent was also Persian territories down the Indus River Valley.

So he gets the Indus River Valley, gets the Hyphasis River, where his soldiers famously say they won't go any further.

Bit of a debate whether he decides to turn around on his own accord or if the soldiers force Alexander to turn around.

But he does turn around.

He marches his army down the Indus River Valley.

He then has this terrible logistics nightmare of crossing the Gedrosian desert where he loses a lot of, maybe not his troops, but a lot of the camp followers, a lot of people along with this army that is probably nearing, maybe not at 100,000, but it's certainly between, let's say, 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers by this time.

And it's an incredibly diverse army by this time as well.

It's not just the Macedonian soldiers that you picture with Alexander the Great from great epic movies like the 2004 Colin Farrell epic.

with the Irish accents and so on.

But that's another story.

And then he finally returns to Mesopotamia.

He will ultimately end up in the great city of Babylon, one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, where he will die aged 32 in early June of 323 BC.

A big debate whether he's poisoned or he dies of illness.

I think it's very much the latter, that he dies of illness.

But that is the empire that he rules, that he conquered, that the Macedonians

Which you've got to remember as well, some 30 or so years earlier were very much at the back end of the Greek world.

They were really struggling as a kingdom.

They weren't the most prominent in mainland Greece.