The Islamic Republic of Iran intends to shift its capital from Tehran in the north to Makran in the south of the country, according to media reports.
The government is citing economic and ecological concerns for the move. If this move does happen, it will be nothing short of historic.
Makran is part of the plateau of Balochistan, which is shared between Pakistan and Iran. It is a semi-desert coastal strip of land, bounded by the Arabian Sea. The Pakistani port of Gwadar and the Iranian port of Chabahar are a gateway to the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The Strait is a ‘choke point’, through which much of the world’s oil supply passes and is thus strategically important.
But while Makran is in the news now for being in the offing to be the next Iranian capital, it was famous in the ancient world for another reason: Alexander the Great passed through this region on his way back home to Macedonia (which he did not reach eventually) and lost up to a third of his men in the harsh region, although some historians feel this number is exaggerated.
Alexander’s campaign in the Indian Subcontinent (Today’s Pakistan and northwestern India) lasted from 327 Before Common Era till 325 BCE.
Alexander and the Macedonians defeated Porus, the Indian king, in the Battle of the Hydaspes river (Today’s Jhelum river). But just as Alexander’s army reached the Hyphasis (Beas river), his soldiers refused to move further into the Gangetic Plain of north India. They had been away from their homeland for a long time. And they had heard that a huge army, much larger than them, lay in wait somewhere in that vast plain.
Alexander acquiesced to his men’s demands. He spent much of his army back to Persia under one of his generals while he led the rest of the soldiers through the desert of Gedrosia. Or Makran.
The march through Gedrosia turned out to be a lethal one for Alexander’s men. The region had a very harsh environment.
The Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia describes the terrible hardships endured by the army on the march through the Gedrosian desert in his The Anabasis of Alexander.
“Thence Alexander marched through the land of the Gadrosians, by a difficult route, which was also destitute of all the necessaries of life; and in many places there was no water for the army. Moreover they were compelled to march most of the way by night, and a great distance from the sea,” writes Arrian in the version translated by British cleric Edward James Chinnock.
Chinnock’s version notes that Alexander’s endeavour to traverse the harsh desert of Gedrosia was born out of a desire to best Cyrus the Great, who had tried to cross it but had been unsuccessful.
“The scorching heat and lack of water destroyed a great part of the army, and especially the beasts of burden; most of which perished from thirst and some of them even from the depth and heat of the sand, because it had been thoroughly scorched by the sun,” writes Arrian.
The soldiers had to slaughter and eat their own horses and mules and then lie that the animals had died of thirst or perished in the heat.
Some of the men “were left behind along the roads on account of sickness, others from fatigue or the effects of the heat, or from not being able to bear up against the drought; and there was no one either to show them the way or to remain and tend them in their sickness”.
There were soldiers who fell asleep due to exhaustion when the army marched at night and were left behind.
“When, after enduring the burning heat and thirst, they lighted upon abundance of water, many of them perished from drinking to excess, not being able to check their appetite for it,” Arrian states.
“It took many weeks to cross the Indus River and almost another week to cross the Gedrosian desert. It was a painful experience, as thousands of his soldiers died in the desert. Out of the 120,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalries that Alexander took into India, only one in four returned,” Shri K Mishra, Adam Mengestab and Shaweta Khosa note in the 2022 paper Historical Perspective and Medical Maladies of Alexander the Great.