Death of Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great dies after a fever in Babylon
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗A Babylonian temple observer reduced Alexander's death to four words: “The king died. Clouds.”
29 Aiaru: the entry beside the cloud cover
A contemporary Babylonian astronomical diary records under 29 Aiaru: “The king died. Clouds.” The calendrical entry corresponds to the period from the evening of 10 June to the evening of 11 June, 323 BCE, and the death was logged beside planetary observations, river levels and commodity prices.
The form of the entry indicates a daytime report, making 11 June the preferred modern date; comparison with the Macedonian Royal Diaries places the death probably in the late afternoon.
Fever, silence, and the soldiers filing past
Arrian's account, drawing on the purported Royal Diaries, says Alexander had been in continuous high fever and had become unable to speak, though he recognized his officers. He died in Babylon soon after his soldiers filed past his bed.
What killed him is not recoverable. The underlying disease cannot be diagnosed reliably from the sparse and partly conflicting ancient narratives, and poisoning and modern medical diagnoses alike remain conjectural.
An unborn child and a half-brother
Alexander left no undisputed adult heir at 32. His death immediately opened a struggle among commanders and infantry over whether his half-brother Arrhidaeus, Roxane's unborn child, or another arrangement should inherit the kingship.
Reaching the final Babylon settlement took more than a month, and it did not carve the empire into independent kingdoms: the compromise made Philip III and the future Alexander IV joint kings under effective guardianship, while generals received territorial commands.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at -0323-06-11.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The Babylonian date covers sunset-to-sunset, so an earlier death on June 10 followed by delayed reporting cannot be excluded; nevertheless, diary syntax and the Royal Diaries make daytime June 11 the preferred reconstruction.
- The detailed illness narratives survive through authors writing centuries later, even where they claim access to Royal Diaries or eyewitness-derived histories.
- No proposed diagnosis—malaria, typhoid, West Nile disease, pancreatitis, poisoning, or another condition—can be proved from the surviving evidence.
- Stories about omens, Calanus's prophecy, poisoning, miraculous preservation, and Alexander's last words belong to later literary traditions of unequal reliability.