Alexander the Great: Homo Mirabilis within Chinese and Mongolian Sources. The Transmission of Legendary Narratives from West to East

What really ties Alexander the Great to people throughout the ages is the dream, the ambition to go beyond the extreme limit. In the combination of the historical figure and the legendary character, which makes up the peculiar physiognomy of the hero whose fame still survives today, real and legendary traits are blurred in the nuances of the contour lines, which determine the boundary between reality and fiction. For this very reason, pages and pages of literature have woven plots to follow up his mortal life, making him the protagonist of a thousand and even more imagined adventures to tell us of that desire to go further and further: where no one had ever gone before, over and beyond, towards the eastern point. Alexander is the hero, the Homo Mirabilis capable of living in the burning flame beyond his mortal existence thanks to his timé. Since the late Hellenistic era, the continuous process of rewriting Alexander's Romance has been perpetuated. Its translations have spread his deeds and fame in numerous different geographical contexts, to the point of taking on peculiar aspects of framework and narrative typification increasingly linked to the indigenous cultural landscape in which they were transmitted. This tale is a kind of sublimation of his actual military expedition, which drives him through the unknown from the West to the East, 'orienting' himself under the firmament of the stars and triggering events of a prodigious order. The Eastern sources about Alexander the Great constitute a counterpart to the Greco-Roman ones and show how his historical figure also exerted an influence in territories not directly affected by his military conquest, such as the caravan routes of the Silk Road. The narratives of Alexander's literary character were thus absorbed into the legendary episodes of indigenous heroic figures, as, for instance, happened in the case of the tradition of the Alexander Romance in Mongolia and China. An example of this is the reception of the episode of the 'Land where the Sun rises' - also reported in the Historia Mongalorum compiled by Giovanni di Pian del Carpine - in connection with the figure of Genghis Khan- who, like Alexander, was the founder of a universal empire that would extend from East to West - or in the episode of the 'Gog and Magog' peoples, mentioned in the Bible, the Koran and the Arabic tradition, which were incorporated into the Mongolian folk tradition. The journey to Mongolia of these legendary themes converged in the ancient and fragmentary manuscript 'TID 155', found during a German archaeological survey at the beginning of the 20th century together with other documents in Turfan, Xinjiang. The image of Alexander can also be glimpsed within Chinese sources. Starting from the Southern Song era (1127-1279), in geographical sources such as Zhao Rugua's Zhufan Zhi and in the coeval Shilin Guangji, compiled by Chen Yuanjing, the ruler is briefly described in a mythical light, with an aura that conveys a faint idea of the splendour - at times even mystical - of his divinised memory. The spread of Alexander the Great's fortune in China can be seen as a legacy that the Arab world donated to the Far East. In Chinese travel literature, news of the unknown and fantastic worlds of the distant West were noted, where the memories and deeds of the conquering hero, wise ruler and builder of unprecedented monumental works persisted.