Ancient prophets foretold the destruction of the merchant city of Tyre.[1]See Ezekiel 26-28 and Isaiah 23. Ezekiel prophesied that Tyre would be attacked by Nebuchadrezzar (Ezk. 26.7) and that “he shall slay with the sword thy daughters in the field” (Ezk. 26.8) and “break down thy towers” (Ezk. 26.9) and slay the inhabitants of the city (Ezk. 26.11). The prophecy emphasized that the city will become לִצְחִיחַ סָֽלַע “like the top of a rock” (Ezk. 26.4, 14).[2]This construction seems to indicate that Tyre will shine or glow by being exposed to the light. The Hebrew word sela סֶלַע conveys the idea of a fortress or cliff, stronghold. The princes of the city, once it is conquered (according to this prophecy), will “sit upon the ground” (Ezk. 26.16), and the city will become desolate, “like the cities that are not inhabited, when I shall bring up the deep upon thee, and great waters shall cover thee” (Ezk. 26.19). Ezekiel ends this portion of his prophecy, stating “I will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord God” (Ezk. 26.21).
Alexander the Great and his Conquest of Tyre
The capitulation of Sidon was a necessary precursor of the main event, the siege of the great mercantile seaport of Tyre farther down the Phoenician coast (in today’s Lebanon).
The city stood proud and unconquerable (its inhabitants were certain of this) half a mile from shore. It was built on a rocky island with a circumference of two and three quarter miles and was surrounded by a towering wall, 150 feet high on its landward side. Space within these fortifications was limited, and multistory houses were crowded together to provide homes for some forty thousand souls.
Tyre was the richest and most powerful of the many Phoenician settlements along the Syrian littoral. It had two fine harbors, the Sidonian in the north and the Egyptian in the south. Across the water on the mainland, Old Tyre was the city’s original site although now a suburb of the island. Herodotus paid a visit in the mid-fifth century B.C. and was told Tyre had been founded more than two millennia previously.
The historian was much impressed by the temple of Melqart, the city’s tutelary god, whom the Greeks equated with Heracles. He reported: “I visited the temple and found that the offerings which adorned it were numerous and valuable, not the least remarkable being two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald which gleamed in the dark with a strange luminosity.”
For centuries Tyre had made its living, and a very prosperous one, from trade, and its ships did business across the Mediterranean. As long ago as the seventh century B.C., the Jewish prophet Ezekiel had Jehovah pronounce:
You say, Tyre, “I am perfect in beauty.”
Your domain was on the high seas;
your builders brought your beauty to perfection.
They made all your timbers of juniper from Senir;
they took a cedar from Lebanon to make a mast for you.
Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars;
of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus
they made your deck, adorned with ivory.
Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail
and served as your banner;
your awnings were of blue and purple
from the coasts of Elishah.
Tyrians’ income in kind included copper, lead, and other metals, ivory tusks and ebony, perfumes, oil, and precious stones. They were famous for the production of a purple or dark red dye, especially prized for the fastness of its color. The dye was extracted from sea snails of the family Muricidae. It was difficult to manufacture, in great demand and very expensive. Phoenicia, the semitic region of which Tyre was a leading member, was so named after the Greek word for dark red, phoinos.
A shadow fell across Tyre’s uninterrupted prosperity. According to Ezekiel, Jehovah would not forgive the city for its hostility to his chosen people and predicted its destruction:
Your end will be sudden and terrible,
and you will cease to exist for all time.
But ages passed without catastrophe and the city’s future remained as bright as ever.
The verdict of Issus and the surrender of Phoenician cities such as Sidon captured the attention of the Tyrians, but they did not expect serious trouble even when in January 332 the Macedonian army marched down from Sidon twenty miles away and encamped on the mainland opposite the island city.
At heart the Tyrian authorities, including the crown prince (in the absence of their king, Azemilcus, in service with the Persian fleet), were loyal to the Persian empire and, faced by the force majeure of a victorious Macedonian army, preferred alliance to capitulation. They did not want to let foreign troops into their city. Already on cordial terms with Alexander, they had supplied provisions to the Macedonian army, but they knew they had to tread carefully. They sent envoys across the channel and presented the king with a golden crown, offering to obey any orders he might give.
The king thanked them warmly, but seems to have sensed that something was being withheld. He asked the envoys to tell their government that he intended to “pay his dues to Heracles,” or in plain terms sacrifice to Melqart, at his sanctuary on the island. In other words, he was going to enter the city. This was closer to surrender than entente.
When the embassy returned, the message had slightly changed. The Tyrians would obey any orders Alexander might give, except to allow either Persians or Macedonians to enter their city. In an attempt to sweeten the pill, they added that there was a temple of Melqart in Old Tyre, where he would be more than welcome to sacrifice.
Unlike Sidon, Tyre had opted for apparent neutrality. Alexander lost his temper and dismissed the embassy with the bleak promise: “I will either enter your city, or storm it.” The envoys were shaken by Alexander’s performance and once back home they advised their fellow citizens that it might be wise to let him in after all. However, the Tyrians were certain that, thanks to its fortifications, their island fastness was impregnable. Besides, the Persian navy ruled the waves. Their colony, the powerful north African merchant city of Carthage, promised practical aid. Alexander’s threats were empty.
According to Diodorus, they cheerfully agreed to undergo a siege:
Because they were doing Darius a good turn, they were confirming their loyalty to him. They thought they would get great rewards from the king for this favor, which involved drawing Alexander into a protracted and difficult siege. In that way they would give Darius a breathing space for his preparations.
But Alexander determined to destroy Tyre and nothing would hold him back. His first step was that of a typical Macedonian monarch; he took counsel of his army. He summoned his Companions and army leaders and explained his case for capturing Tyre. He was aware this would not be a popular decision, for sieges tended to be bloody affairs.
He said that it would be unsafe to proceed to Egypt, their next stop, with a hostile or at least ambivalent Tyre in the rear. The Persians still held Cyprus and with their fleet, mostly consisting of Phoenician galleys, they could very well win back the Mediterranean seaboard and stir up an already restless Greece, as Memnon had once planned. On the other hand, with Tyre taken most of Phoenicia would fall under Macedonian control. There was then every likelihood that their navies would defect and join Alexander’s fleet. The Great King would lose Cyprus and his supremacy at sea would be at an end.
Alexander concluded:
When we have conquered Egypt, we shall have no further worries for Greece or our own country, and we can then make our move on Babylon with security ensured at home, our reputation enhanced, and the Persians cut off from the entire sea and all the land this side of the Euphrates.
To make assurance doubly sure, the king announced that in a dream Heracles had ushered him into Tyre. The ever reliable Aristander was on hand to offer the correct interpretation, namely that Tyre would fall (not too difficult a deduction). The gathering applauded and work began at once on the siege.
The challenge facing the Macedonians appeared insurmountable and Alexander knew he would have to deploy every resource at his disposal. The engineer Diades, together with his fellow Thessalian Charias, headed his siege team. More artillery specialists were recruited from Phoenicia and beyond.
Their task was simply expressed. Using a battering ram and catapults, they had to break down a section of wall through which troops could then launch an assault. Tall wheeled towers would be pushed up against the wall. Once inside Tyre, the besiegers would face fierce opposition, but the defenders would almost certainly be disorganized and panic-stricken, and resistance would soon be over. Alternatively, if Alexander was not in a hurry, he could set up a blockade and starve the defenders to death. That could take months and was a less desirable option.
But how would it be possible to accomplish any of these things when the city in question was inaccessible, heavily fortified, and encircled by the sea? Furthermore, it had its own warships and could call on the Persian navy for assistance. The newly recommissioned Macedonian fleet was not yet battle ready, except for twenty Athenian triremes.
For the king, this was simply another Gordian knot through which to slice. Dash and determination would find a way. The siege was opened in January 332. The first hugely ambitious step was to build a mole or causeway, reportedly two hundred feet wide at its maximum, from shore to island. The army was put to work, aided by local people. In the beginning the going was easy, for the first part of the channel consisted mainly of shallow pools and mudflats. Nearer the island, though, the water deepened to three fathoms.
Old Tyre was demolished to provide the large quantities of stones and wood needed. Stakes were driven into the mud to hold the rubble in place, and planks were laid on top. Little by little the causeway lengthened. Then the Tyrians disrupted proceedings. Their ships sailed up to the mole and shot missiles at the unarmored workers. They jeered at these “famous fighters loaded down like donkeys.” Construction came to a halt until two towers, covered in animal hides to resist burning arrows, were pushed to the end of the mole.
The Tyrians now began to take the siege seriously. To reduce the number of mouths to feed, the women, children, and men too old to fight were evacuated to Carthage and the Tyrians requested military reinforcement from their colony. They were daring and imaginative in their response to the inexorably lengthening causeway. They converted a broad-beamed horse transport into a fireship. They stuffed it full of dry branches, wood shavings, pitch, and sulfur. They rigged a double yardarm from which they suspended buckets of some flammable substance (probably naphtha), and then set them alight. Triremes pulled the boat toward the mole and at just the right moment the crews lit the yardarms. These burned through and the buckets fell onto the fuel-packed fireship. The triremes then released the fireship and flames shot high into the air just when it plowed into the towers. To prevent firefighters from approaching, the men in the triremes maintained a barrage of arrows at the towers, which soon blazed out of control.
This was a major setback for Alexander. He gave orders for the mole to be widened and for new towers to be built, but he realized that he would never take the city without command of the sea. Taking with him the hypaspists and the Agrianians, he marched to Sidon to pick up some warships there and bring them back. He then had a marvelous stroke of luck—or, rather, his policy of marching through Phoenicia collecting capitulations paid off almost immediately.
Phoenician contingents made up the better part of the Persian fleet. As their various cities surrendered to Alexander, these felt obliged to sail home and abandon the Great King’s cause. Unexpectedly, eighty Phoenician ships put in at Sidon and agreed to sail under the Macedonian flag. Then ten triremes arrived from Rhodes, three from Cilicia, ten from Lycia, and, as a small bonus, a penteconter (a fifty-oarsman galley) from Macedonia. Not long afterward, 120 ships came in from Cyprus, whose kings had collectively decided that it was time to join the winning side.
All of a sudden, Alexander controlled the eastern Mediterranean.
While preparations went ahead to sail his warships in battle array southward to Tyre, the king amused himself by leading a small force on a ten-day campaign against Arab tribes in the Lebanese mountains. His aim was probably to protect his supply lines. This was essential if he was to continue feeding his army in front of Tyre as days became weeks and months, and the city still stood. Water was abundant, but most provisions were either requisitioned locally or had to be ferried in by sea.
Here was an opportunity for Alexander to behave with the utmost irresponsibility. His onetime tutor Lysimachus insisted on accompanying him on the march, but he was old and fell behind the main body. Alexander and a few others loyally stayed with him. The sun was setting and it became bitterly cold. With nightfall, the king saw in the distance some scattered watch fires. According to Plutarch,
trusting to his speed and agility, he dashed to the nearest campfire, dispatched with his dagger the two barbarians who were sitting by it and, snatching a firebrand, ran back to his own party. They quickly built up a huge fire which scared some of the enemy into flight, while those who dared to attack were quickly driven off and the Macedonians spent the rest of the night in safety.
Circumstances had allowed the king to act out something very like an episode in the Iliad. This was the occasion when the brave warrior Diomedes and the wily Odysseus crept by night into the Trojan encampment, slaughtered sleeping soldiers, and made their way back to safety. Diomedes, Homer recounts,
laid about him with his sword and killed them right and left.
Hideous groans came up from the dying men
and the earth ran red with blood.
This otherwise pointless incident in the Lebanese mountains was a reminder that Alexander lived in the age of heroes as much as he did in the present. It hardly occurred to him that he had been reckless. In the flickering darkness, he was Diomedes reborn.
The king returned to Sidon, where his grand fleet was now prepared for action. With himself in command, it set out in battle formation on the short journey south to the island city. The Tyrians had intended to offer battle, but knew nothing of the recent reinforcements and were astounded when they saw the number of warships approaching. They went about and retreated to their two harbors. To prevent the Macedonians from finding anchorage in them, they blocked the entrances, using warships lashed together sideways. The following morning Alexander ordered the Phoenicians to set up a permanent blockade of the Egyptian harbor, and the Cypriots to blockade the Sidonian. This meant that at last the enemy navy was out of action.
During the king’s absence a large number of siege engines had been built. Some of them were mounted on ships and others pushed to the end of the mole, which was creeping nearer and nearer to the high walls of Tyre. Floating battering rams were a remarkable technical innovation. They probably rested on platforms supported by two vessels and, provided that they were anchored firmly, could do a great deal of damage.
For their part, the ever-ingenious Tyrians came up with trick after trick. Among the torments they devised were metal containers filled with red-hot sand, which they poured onto agonized attackers below. They built towers on the battlement facing the mole, which overshadowed Alexander’s, and hastily put up an inner wall in case the main one was breached. They also placed catapults on the battlement, which released showers of fire arrows at the floating rams. To blunt the force of flying stones, they hung over the wall hides stitched together and stuffed with dried seaweed. They dropped large rocks into the water at the foot of the wall to deter ships from coming near. The Macedonians then had the awkward task of moving the rocks into deeper water with ropes and cranes.
The siege reached a hyperactive stalemate. Both sides could see that something radical had to be done to break it. But what? The defenders’ answer was to send in some vessels, armored against missiles, to cut the anchor hawsers of the Macedonian ram ships. When these were driven off, they were replaced by divers with knives. The problem was solved only when the hawsers were replaced with chains. At last, despite the temporary inconvenience of a violent storm, it proved possible to get alongside the wall.
The Tyrians recognized the threat posed by the maritime blockade and attempted a desperate remedy. They noticed that the ships’ crews went ashore every day for lunch and that Alexander usually took a nap at the same time. They decided that this would be the ideal moment for a surprise sortie. Sails were erected across the entrance to the Sidonian harbor to hide the preparations and then, at about noon one day, ten of the Tyrians’ most powerful ships, with picked crews and their best armed marines, sailed out and fell on the temporarily empty Cypriot ships.
Luckily Alexander had forgone his siesta and was visiting the Phoenician fleet in the Egyptian harbor when he received news of the breakout. He immediately assembled a squadron of the quickest galleys to be crewed and rowed at full speed around the island. The Tyrians on the battlements saw what was afoot and shouted warnings to the men on their own ships. These were inaudible because of the din of the engagement, but eventually the men got the message and turned tail. A few of them reached their harbor in time, but most were caught and put out of action, sunk or captured. It was the Tyrian navy’s last gasp; from now on, the Macedonian fleet could sail wherever it wanted without hindrance.
About this time, the mole reached the city wall, but despite the blood and toil that had gone into its making, it did not bring the end of the siege any closer. The Tyrians put all their energy into defending the fraction of the wall where it met the mole. Alexander belatedly realized this and, now that the enemy was excluded from the sea, sailed round the island looking for any weakness in the fortifications. He brought his battering-ram platforms to the battlement near the Sidonian harbor, but without success.
He then settled on a stretch of weak-looking wall immediately south of the Egyptian harbor. His battering rams soon shook it loose and partly broke it down. A drawbridge or ramp was laid across the breach and a tentative assault launched. This failed, but the king knew he had found a weak spot.
A couple of days later Alexander ordered a major attack by detachments of hypaspists, led by an officer called Admetus, and of infantry Companions. The breach had been widened and two ramps were laid down. Alexander joined the hypaspists and was in the middle of the mêlée (how could it have been otherwise?). Admetus was first to clamber through the ruined fortification, but a spear hit him and he died where he stood.
Meanwhile the fleet encircled the island, equipped with archers and missile-throwers. Squadrons attacked the two harbors and broke through into them. Arrian writes: “Under fire from all directions the Tyrians were confronted with danger wherever they turned.”
Alexander and the infantry captured several towers and the curtain wall between them. They moved on along the battlements toward the royal palace, an area that offered an easy route to the city center. The main body of the defenders abandoned the wall and regrouped for a last stand at the Shrine of Agenor, a legendary king of Tyre who was credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet. They saw that the city and its harbors were lost and sold their lives as dearly as they could. According to Arrian,
the Macedonians stopped at nothing in their fury. They were enraged by the wearisome length of the siege, and by the behavior of the Tyrians when they had captured some of their men sailing in from Sidon. They had paraded them on the wall in full view of the camp, then cut their throats and thrown them into the sea.
The slaughter was terrible, although from compassion for their fellow Phoenicians, Sidonian sailors saved many defenders and hid them away in their ships. Some eight thousand Tyrians died, whereas over the whole siege Macedonian losses were about four hundred.
A number of dignitaries sought refuge in the temple of Melqart, including the Tyrian king, Azemilcus, and other government officials together with a delegation from Carthage, which in the event had done nothing at all to help its founder. They were all pardoned, but other survivors were not so lucky. Two thousand men of military age were crucified. A total of about thirty thousand Tyrians and other foreigners found in the city were sold into slavery.
At last Alexander was able to make the sacrifice to the god for which he had sought permission seven months earlier. As was his custom at the end of a campaign, the king held a celebration. He staged a parade of his entire army in honor of Melqart and also a naval review. Athletic competitions were held and a torch race in the temple precincts.
As in the case of Thebes, the complete destruction of a renowned city whose merchants were a familiar sight across the Mediterranean made an indelible impression on public opinion. The world learned that it was wisest to cooperate with the young Macedonian conqueror.
What Ezekiel foretold had now come to pass in all its terrible finality.
Nobody could be bothered to dismantle the mole; as the centuries passed, it silted up and slowly became a permanent isthmus. Tyre was repopulated and, whatever Hebrew prophets may say, thrives again today. But beneath the impedimenta of the modern city, its streets and buildings, lies the stone causeway, an unforgotten but unseen reminder of the wrath of Alexander. Anthony Everett, Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death, Random House, 2019, p. 176-183, emphasis added.
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