Episode Details

In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great stood on the Mediterranean coast staring at a seemingly impossible target.

Tyre sat on an island roughly half a mile offshore, protected by massive walls rising directly from the sea. Previous conquerors had spent years trying to take the city.

Alexander was 23 years old.

His solution was extraordinary: build a road to it.

For seven months, Alexander's army dumped stone, timber, and rubble into the Mediterranean, constructing a massive causeway toward Tyre. When defenders attacked it with fire ships, the Macedonians rebuilt. Alexander assembled a fleet, mounted siege engines aboard ships, and eventually breached the city's defenses.

Tyre fell in July 332 BCE.

But Alexander's greatest monument there may be the battlefield itself. His causeway altered currents, accumulated sediment, and eventually transformed the island into a permanent peninsula.

More than 2,300 years later, modern Tyre still sits upon it.

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