Atlas’s Bones is a major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe. D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa.

The first half of the book, “Reading Africa,” traces Egypt’s, Libya’s, and Carthage’s influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions. In the excerpt below, Smith explores the influence of African culture on medieval stories about Alexander the Great, who, he reminds us, named himself the son of an African god.

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One of the most popular narratives in the Middle Ages was the story of Alexander’s conquest of the “world.” It came out of a vast archive of stories about Alexander, some derived from his actual deeds, many completely made up. These were not biographies so much as sprawling imaginative episodes, often referred to collectively with the German term Alexander- roman. It spread through much of the known world well into the Middle Ages. The only book in Europe that was translated more than the Alexander Romance was the Gospels. There are versions of it—to name a few—in Syriac, Persian, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Middle Mongolian, and Ge’ez (“Ethiopic,” as it was sometimes called), and every medieval European vernacular language. There are often multiple translations and versions in the same language. Some of it is echoed in the Talmud. An Old English version of one part of it—Alexander’s letter to Aristotle—is in the same codex as Beowulf. Alexander emerges as a complex figure, someone who embodies important but sometimes contradictory aspects of late medieval European culture. In some versions of the Romance, such as the Roman d’Alexandre, he appears as what Jonathan Morton describes as an “icon of princely or military power”; in others, he is a bloodthirsty tyrant or a sly, devious trickster. But he is also associated with the transmission and spread of knowledge, both arcane and scientific, from Arabic and earlier Greek (and Egyptian) hermetic writing. The Alexander Romance and its associated texts, along with the art that they inspired, reached almost as far and as deep as the world religions of the era, and further than Alexander’s empire itself.

The Alexander Romance itself appears in so many forms and folds that it makes most sense to think of it as the Alexander Universe. Along with sober instruction and philosophy, it includes episodes with Alexander the superhero, under the sea in a diving bell, flying to the moon in a chair carried by birds, and building a wall to keep apocalyptic monsters from destroying the earth. Yet one thing that all the versions of the Romance have in common is that they make Alexander’s involvement with Africa more extensive and profound than it is in the standard “canonical” history that may be familiar to many of us. The Ethiopian version makes him a conqueror of almost the entire continent of Africa: Egypt, yes, but Nubia and Ethiopia itself. On the other hand, the Ethiopian version doesn’t have Alexander go to the shrine of Egyptian deity Ammon: he is a good Monophysite Trinitarian, like Ethiopian Christians.

But that Ammon episode is still crucially important. All versions of the Romance begin in Egypt before Alexander’s birth, rather than in Macedonia. But they begin in Egypt because of Alexander’s birth. In the canonical history, the revelation that Ammon is Alexander’s father comes as a surprise; indeed, it’s such a surprise that the Romance opens with the events that bring that genealogy about. In a sense, the genealogy is also the genesis of the narrative itself. The story, in other words, begins with the puzzle that began this chapter: how did Alexander come to be the son of an African god? How did that work?

The Romance begins, actually, with an ending—with the last originally Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo II, who fled to Nubia when the Achaemenid empire invaded. In the Romance, Nectanebo is among the greatest magicians (or “clerks,” as medieval romances called them), a kind of conflation of scholar and soothsayer. The first version of the Romance, which was the template for all of the others, is clear about both the divine and geographical source of Nectanebo’s power: it is Ammon, “the god of Libya.” Some versions of the Romance add additional details that make Libya seem less random in the story, like the Ethiopian version, which says that Nectanebo escaped in a “ship of Libya” (Budge, A History, 14–15). Nectanebo then travels further, to Macedonia, where he causes Alexander’s mother, Olympias, to dream that Ammon impregnates her. After she reports the dream to Nectanebo, he tells her to prepare herself for an actual visit from Ammon. The next night, Nectanebo disguises himself as Ammon and sleeps with Olympias. After Alexander is born, the story picks up from the canonical history, but Alexander’s visit to the Oasis of Siwa is no longer a surprise. It’s a reminder that the Alexander story begins in Africa, because Alexander is a son of Africa.

There are, of course, different reasons that writers thought Africa should play a more important role. It seems obvious that the Ethiopian version, for instance, would want to expand the role of Africa. What’s more surprising are the intricate and extensive references to Africa in northern European versions, especially before the so-called age of exploration, although trade connections between Africa and Europe in the Middle Ages were far more extensive than previously assumed. Even in the age of the Crusades, when as Geraldine Heng argues there may have been some hardening of Africa and Africans into caricatures of a Muslim or racial other, European literature imagined in increasing detail and scope the events of an African past.

I’ll discuss two closely related European versions of the Romance, the Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie and the Middle English King Alisaunder, a loose translation of the Roman. The Roman uses the story of Alexander to think globally about the history of the world and its future, about climate theory, about the Crusades, about forms of knowledge, and about the diversity of the natural world. Its writer, Thomas of Kent, treats the Alexander legend with a simultaneous magpie curiosity and scholarly rigor. He’s skeptical about some events but throws in references to the Latin texts he uses for readers who want to dig deeper. He opens up the possibilities of the story in a number of ways, attuned to the contemporary resonances of the Alexander story with the Second Crusade and the fraught relations among the English king Henry II, his barons, France, and the church. Thomas of Kent’s book tries to be a number of things: a heroic epic, a romance, and a history. He follows the cardinal role of improvisational theater: “yes, and,” rather than “no.”

Except when it comes to Egypt. Rather than exploit the many possibilities that Egypt’s ambiguous location among the continents might give it, the Roman de toute chevalerie neglects Egypt almost completely. It slides all of the early action of the story out of Egypt and distributes it across Africa. Nectanebo, for instance, is neither a pharaoh nor a ruler of Egypt, but the King of Libya. There’s a kind of anxiety that Nectanebo not be associated with Egypt: he himself tells Olympias that she will be impregnated by Amon le dieu de Libye. Small details in the poem make the role of Africa inevitable, almost unremarkable: the mules that both Olympias and Philip’s second wife, Cleopatras, ride, are from “Aufriqke” (Thomas of Kent, 107.10; 686.27). It is Africa, not Egypt—or not Egypt alone—that becomes the first stage for Alexander’s world conquest.

In the Roman, Alexander celebrates turning fifteen by attacking and destroying a Greek city (Elim), which was ruled by a king (Nicholas) who was born in Carthage. Like the episode of Alexander’s visiting the shrine of Siwa, this brief reference seems to have triggered a major revision of the story. In King Alisaunder, Alexander travels to attack Carthage itself because its king is an old enemy of Philip’s. After landing on the African

shore, Alexander and his army destroy Carthage and return to Macedonia with Carthage’s treasure and the coroune of þe lond.

The triumphant Alexander with the crown of a destroyed Carthage in his hand echoes two events at Carthage that resonate powerfully through European literature and political thought. The first is the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE by Scipio Africanus, which opened the way for Roman dominance. The crown that Alexander takes with him from Carthage is a literal version of this process, the so-called translatio imperii, the passage of world dominion from one reign to another. As I show in chapter three of this book, the destruction of Carthage is the focus of theoretical reflection of all kinds in the Middle Ages, from political theology to the philosophy of history to dream theory.

The second event that Alexander’s attack on Carthage echoes is equally resonant: Aeneas’s landing at Carthage after the destruction of Troy. That’s the event that kicks off Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic that celebrates the rise of the Roman empire under Caesar Augustus, and a text that became part of the literary imagination of almost every writer in medieval Europe. There’s perhaps an event closer in history to King Alisaunder that made Alexander’s attack on Carthage an intriguing subject. In 1270, King Louis IX of France launched a crusade (now known as the Eighth Crusade) to retake the Holy Land. His plan was to convert the ruler of Tunis—medieval Carthage—to Christianity, and march on Jerusalem with his help. None of that worked out, because Louis died of dysentery outside the walls of Tunis. To the extent that King Alisaunder reflects on the failures of the Crusades, the destruction of Carthage reads like a revenge fantasy.

But in both the Roman and King Alisaunder, Africa is far more than the site of a historical grudge. It is the real target of Alexander’s first phase of conquest. After a blistering campaign through Greece and Italy, Alexander invades Libya and conquers it within two weeks. Egypt is almost an afterthought. In the Roman, Alexander pauses briefly on his way to Asia to found Alexandria; King Alisaunder doesn’t mention Alexandria at all, until Alexander’s body is taken there at the end of the poem. It’s almost as if both poems imagine the visit to the Oasis of Siwa as the only important event in what was originally Alexander’s Egyptian campaign. It becomes a Libyan campaign, with a brief foray into Egypt. It’s in part an attempt to rehabilitate Alexander as a proto-Christian subject: he visits a pagan temple in Tripoli where a gaslighting “bishop” tells him that he is not, in fact, the son of Nectanebo. But it also makes Africa, and not Egypt alone, the ground on which Alexander’s legitimacy is established. Alexander’s visit to Siwa is the nucleus of another part of the Alexander narrative that distributes “Egypt” into Africa. In the first version of the Romance (the third-century “Pseudo-Callisthenes”), Alexander discovers monuments and graves in Egypt that commemorate the rule of Candace, the Queen of Meroë, and Ammon’s support of her campaigns. He writes to Candace, asking her to meet him at the frontier of Egypt and Meroë with the “shrine and statue” of Ammon. She refuses but sends him the kinds of gifts from Nubia that are often represented as the spoils of victory on friezes. They come in two allotments. The first is for Alexander: one hundred solid bricks of gold, two hundred parrots, two hundred sphinxes, and five hundred young Ethiopians. She makes it clear that these gifts do not indicate her submission to a conquered Egypt. The second batch of gifts is directed to Ammon alone and is both more lavish and representative of Nubian plenty: an elaborate crown, jewels, ivory caskets, rhinoceroses, elephant tusks, and leopard hides. They are a kind of reverse tribute, in which the regalia of office—represented by the crown—swerve by Alexander only to go to the god who legitimates rule. Candace underlines the gesture by calling Ammon our god, who “presides over the boundaries of Egypt.” It’s a complex gesture of both historical and cultural legitimacy: Candace has a greater right to Egypt than Alexander, having already ruled it under the aegis of Ammon, whose approval Alexander sought. In some versions, Alexander calls Candace to Siwa, as if to stage a transfer of power, which Candace refuses. Candace’s gesture also underscores the identity of Ethiopia and/or Nubia: it has wealth that Egypt lacks, and retains the aura, if not the outright presence, of Egypt’s chief god. Despite the fictionality of the encounter between Alexander and Candace (and there is much more in the Romance), the story echoes the real history of Nubia and Egypt. The name Candace is actually the title for Queens of Nubia, Kandake, and the reference to Candace as a ruler of Egypt may echo the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, when the rulers of Egypt were Nubian.

The Candace episode in the Romance dramatizes the permeability of Egypt and Nubia: in the story, Egypt is unthinkable without Nubia. The frontier of Egypt is determined not by Egypt’s hegemony but by a Nubian god. In the Romance, Alexander’s conquest of the world is halted at that point. Candace tells him she will not submit but asks him to return when he has conquered the rest of the world. He never returns to Nubia, although, as we have seen, his body does return to Alexandria. In Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie, Alexander’s career follows three of the four cardinal points of the compass. He does not travel very far west, because, as Thomas says, the Irish, Spanish, and British live in inhospitable territories. Suzanne Akbari suggests that Alexander’s body in Alexandria is poised at the cusp of a future westward movement (remember that Dio Chrysostom called Alexandria the crossroads of the world)—indeed, as Akbari says, the future itself, of “the European nations to come.” This opening to the future comes at the expense, Akbari says, of the “identity of the traveler himself.” The exotic orient in the Roman, she suggests, is still signified by Egypt, a “formerly foreign land recently absorbed into the Macedonian Empire.” Alexander’s body represents the starting point of a process of “domestication and stabilization” that the Romance tradition will continue—and extend—into the far west of Europe.

The return of Alexander’s body to Alexandria is not just a return to a city that was a passing thought for Alexander. It’s not just a return to Egypt, a country he adorned his trophy case with, as Napoleon was to do centuries later. It’s a return to an origin in the profoundest sense: to the place where Alexander found his deepest, African self as the son of a god who was simultaneously a Libyan, Nubian, and Egyptian deity. Alexander’s resting place in Alexandria is not just the establishment of a point of stability in a capricious and exotic locale. Even if he had just “acquired” Egypt, it was already a place from which he came. His tomb is one of the many nodes in a network of religious, cultural, and political history that extended across Africa, including Libya, Nubia, Cush, Ethiopia—and, not least, Egypt.

Alexander’s tomb was the focus of a cult under the Ptolemies, but it’s not clear how long it stood. Accounts contradict each other, and some are downright sketchy. The tomb had either disappeared by 400, when John Chrysostom, on a visit to Alexandria, was told it was gone. Or it was still there when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798—at least according to Edward Daniel Clarke, a British antiquities enthusiast who came to Egypt with the British army in 1801, when it drove Napoleon’s army out. Following a trail of rumors, Clarke discovered a massive sarcophagus hidden in the hold of a French ship that was poised to carry it off to France. It was, Clarke said, the tomb of Alexander. He backed up his claim in a book with a multitude of citations and quotations from classical and early modern writers that established, Clarke argued, the presence of the sarcophagus in Alexandria since Alexander’s death, and its long association with Alexander. Clarke’s references include multiple versions of the Romance of Alexander. The sarcophagus was sent to the British Museum, but, despite Clarke’s ardent and somewhat petulant lobbying, it wasn’t displayed as Alexander’s Tomb (another object he gave to the Museum, the Rosetta Stone, was better appreciated). Hieroglyphic writing was fully deciphered shortly after the sarcophagus was installed, and the texts on the sarcophagus were read: it was, it turned out, not Alexander’s. It belonged to Nectanebo II.

Whether or not Alexander’s body ever ended up in Nectanebo’s sarcophagus, the urban myth joined the ends of the Alexander Romance together: Alexander came to rest in the tomb designed for his Egyptian father. Whether or not Napoleon really wanted it for his own sarcophagus, as Clarke hinted, Napoleon knew quite well that the myth of Alexander was a powerful way to legitimate his conquest.

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D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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