The Malay Alexander Legend

About the Book

Alexander the Great was born in 356 BC and died in 323 BC. By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to Northwest India. The first part is the story of the lost prince, which is part of the collection of half-mythical stories written in Bahasa Indonesia generated by the historical Alexander’s meteoric rise and fall. It comes to us via Persian romances and later mentions the two-horned Alexander who is mentioned in the Holy Koran. These legends probably arrived in Malaysia brought by Muslim Indian merchants via Aceh. They wanted spices and pepper and traded them for silks and embroidered clothes. I am indebted to my former colleagues, Irene Mutto and Sudeshni Iachimpadi, who worked on the massive task of translating into English the Indonesian text collected by the Dutch scholar Van Leeuwen in the 1930s and also to Joe Stantor of Stantography and Wendy Kirby of the Glossop Craft Centre for their technical assistance. This edition has simplified Alexander’s story so children can enjoy it too and colour in the illustrations themselves. For the full text in English and Bahasa Indonesia, I refer you to my earlier book: The Malay Alexander Legend (ISBN: 9781467882798).

About the Author

When Catherine was given a silver tetradrachm of Alexander the Great on her wedding day, little did she know then that the fascination of this coin would set her off on a lifetime’s discovery of Alexander the Macedonian King who conquered the known world in his lifetime and entered the legends of countries throughout the world, including Malaysia. It was discovering the Malay texts in Bahasa Indonesia through a 1930s edition of De Maleische Alexanderroman by the Dutch scholar van Leeuwen that prompted her desire to make this Malay story accessible to people today by rendering it into English. Eirene Mutto and Sudeshni Iachimpadi did sterling work in interpreting the old Indonesian text and turning it for the first time into English.