Image Resource Bank
Image Gallery | 
2 of 15 
Battle of Gaugamela (Batalla de Gaugamela)
The last great pitched battle between the forces of Alexander the Great and the massed army of the Achaemenid Persian emperor Darius III took place at Gaugamela, in northern Mesopotamia, in 331 BCE. Alexander’s victory gave him control of Babylonia and opened the way for his conquest of the eastern territories of the Persian Empire as far as western India.
This eighteenth-century ivory carving interprets the event as a representative of conflicts between East and West, with many historical allusions. Some of the figures are in classical attire, arms, and poses, but others wear nearly contemporary armor. Some of the defeated Persians are depicted in the guise of the Parthians and Sasanians who battled the Roman emperors centuries after Alexander, and others are even shown in the guise of Ottomans, who battled European emperors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The background shows the siege of a walled city, meant to evoke, as Alexander himself did, the siege of Troy, the archetypal conflict of Europe and Asia.
Name: Battle of Gaugamela (Batalla de Gaugamela)
Material: Ivory
Size: Unknown
Date: 18th century CE
Place of Origin: Unknown
Location: National Archeological Museum of Spain, Madrid, Spain
Source and Registration#: Wikimedia Commons. Link to resource
(accessed August 17, 2009).
Attribution: Work of Luis García
Official License: Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0. (accessed August 17, 2009).
Matthew W. Stolper
Professor of Assyriology and the John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies
