Alexander's funeral cortege.
The preparations for Alexander's funeral were conducted upon a great scale of magnificence and splendor.
It was two years before they were complete.
The body had been given, first, to be embalmed, according to the Egyptian and Chaldean art, and then had been placed in a sort of sarcophagus, in which it was to be conveyed to its long home. Alexander, it will be remembered, had given directions that it should be taken to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in the Egyptian oasis, where he had been pronounced the son of a god. ...
It was a long journey. To convey a body by a regular funeral procession, formed as soon after the death as the arrangements could be made, from Babylon to the eastern frontiers of Egypt, a distance of a thousand miles, was perhaps as grand a plan of interment as was ever formed. It has something like a parallel in the removal of Napoleon's body from St. Helena to Paris, though this was not really an interment, but a transfer. Alexander's was a simple burial procession, going from the palace where he died to the proper cemetery—a march of a thousand miles, it is true, but all within his own dominions. The greatness of it resulted simply from the magnitude of the scale on which every thing pertaining to the mighty here was performed, for it was nothing but a simple passage from the dwelling to the burial-ground in his own estates, after all.
Source: The Baldwin Project
by Jacob Abbott
The preparations for Alexander's funeral were conducted upon a great scale of magnificence and splendor.
It was two years before they were complete.
The body had been given, first, to be embalmed, according to the Egyptian and Chaldean art, and then had been placed in a sort of sarcophagus, in which it was to be conveyed to its long home. Alexander, it will be remembered, had given directions that it should be taken to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in the Egyptian oasis, where he had been pronounced the son of a god. ...
It was a long journey. To convey a body by a regular funeral procession, formed as soon after the death as the arrangements could be made, from Babylon to the eastern frontiers of Egypt, a distance of a thousand miles, was perhaps as grand a plan of interment as was ever formed. It has something like a parallel in the removal of Napoleon's body from St. Helena to Paris, though this was not really an interment, but a transfer. Alexander's was a simple burial procession, going from the palace where he died to the proper cemetery—a march of a thousand miles, it is true, but all within his own dominions. The greatness of it resulted simply from the magnitude of the scale on which every thing pertaining to the mighty here was performed, for it was nothing but a simple passage from the dwelling to the burial-ground in his own estates, after all.
Source: The Baldwin Project
by Jacob Abbott
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