pothos.org

http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/li ... stexts.php

Quite a few things in Alexander's life make more sense once you have studied the lands he conquered, but it can be hard to get a background in the later unless you happen to live close to a university which still has some orientalists. Lots of people learn a bit of Greek and Latin in school, and find the Perseus Project and Lacus Curtius (or just a library with bookcases of Teubners and Loebs), but not so many learn how to learn about other parts of the ancient world. The members of the Melammu project (including your humble correspondent) have compiled a list of online resources on ancient Southwest Asia. Only a few of them are directly relevant to Alexander and his age, but I hope that there is something of interest. The only surviving contemporary description of one of Alexander's battles is in Babylonian after all! And there are a few things from the Ionians and even stranger and more exotic nations such as the Romans if you look.

Quite a few sources are available in translations, although not necessarily into English. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature is sort of what Perseus would be if it could afford new translations and modern editions. There are online dictionaries and beginner's courses for most ancient languages, not just the three which Erasmus knew. And some of the things which are online are amazing; all those Buddhist texts from the Tarim Basin for example.

This is a very important post because we have few written testimonies from the adversaries of Alexander.Thank you very much for sharing this knowledge, and for the bibliography too.

Thanks system_1988. I really think that putting sources and grammars online is important ... reading a translation or looking up a word in a dictionary does not make someone an expert, but it makes them know more than they did before.

Best wishes to everyone for the holidays.

Could not agree more, cuneiform tablets are an important resource and difficult for non-specialists (like me), with erasures, breaks and linguistic ambiguity; but, whilst an amateur is unlikely to ever read these in the raw, an approach via transcripts (in latin script) is certainly possible. Livius has a number of relevant texts complete with commentary, we have even ventured onto that ground here on occaision, the Diadoch Chronicle being the subject in question although the Astronomical Diaries recording both Gaugamela and Alexander's death have also figured. Paralus is fond of the fact that a major war between Seleukos and Antigonos is known only from cuneiform evidence too (that and carts re-logistics ).

Teach Yourself's 'Complete Babylonian' by Martin Worthington is an accessible start, though not cheap and it is strikingly weak on cuneiform characters, being almost entirely in latin transcription, it does give a start on the language even if at one remove from the actual text; Cambridge also issue a set of tome 'Ancient Languages of...' which group material by region and are concerned with the structure of the various tongues, their syntax and morphology; only having dipped in via the Amazon 'Read it now' button, I cannot comment authoritively but they seem well organised and I will probably buy one soon.

http://www.avesta.org/op/op.htm

Provides Persian inscriptions, transcribed and translated, (from Akkadian and Elamite for the most part, I think) and has a glossary of some Old Persian terms.

Forthose in London, Birkbeck college certainly used to run evening classes in Akkadian at three levels, not sure it is still running though, they were/are short units and tend to get moved around the year.