05/15/2007

Mother Nature's Helping Hand

Mystery of Alexander's Great Conquest Unravelled

The island-city of Tyre was considered unconquerable, until Alexander the Great marched up its causeway. Researchers have now revealed that the conquerors actually had a little help -- from Mother Nature.

The Lebanese town of Tyre, one of the longest standing settlements in the world, sits atop the remains of an ancient, bloody and peculiar military battle. In 332 B.C., Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great laid waste to the wealthy trading city, which was at the time considered unassailable atop a small rocky island. Today, Tyre juts out from the Lebanese coast on a tongue-shaped strip of land, the days of island refuge long since past.

The siege is famous not only for its strategic and historical significance -- capturing the city was key to Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire -- but also for the engineering feat that won Alexander the battle.

At some point during his seven-month siege of Tyre, Alexander built an almost kilometer-long causeway of timber and stone to get from the mainland to the island. But it had remained a mystery just how an army of sparsely equipped soldiers were able to lay a road through the several-meters-deep sea. Researchers now believe Alexander the Great had some help from Mother Nature.

French geo-archaeologist Nick Marriner analyzed long cores of sediment from the land now connecting Tyre with the Lebanese coast. "We found several fragments, ceramic tiles and pieces of wood," Marriner told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But there was no proof that these were used in the construction." The researchers also found several shells of a certain kind of mussel in the sediment that thrived in shallow coastal waters. The researchers concluded that rising sea levels had shrunk the island over time, leaving the newly covered areas as brackish lagoons.

While Tyre was approximately six kilometers wide 8,000 years ago, it shrank to about four kilometers over the next 2,000 years, Marinner reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The researcher concluded that the newly sunken parts of the island made it difficult for waves to reach the shore. As a result, sediment from the coast accumulated in the space between the mainland and the island, leaving a sandy land-bridge just below the surface of the water, on top of which Alexander the Great could build his road to an historic victory.

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