High atop the Karasis, a mountain in southern Turkey's heart of the Taurus Mountain Range, rises a mysterious stronghold discovered in recent years. Speculations run high whether or not this could be the legendary fortress of Kyinda, where the war booty of Alexander the Great was being kept. The location in Cilicia is mentioned by Strabo in his Geography (Book 14-5.10) "Above Anchiale lies Cyinda, a fortress, which at one time was used as a treasury by the Macedonians." Diodorus (Book 18-62.2 and 19-56.5) refers to Cyinda while talking about Eumenes and Antigonus Monophthalmus retrieving money from its treasury during the Diadochi Wars. Still, so far, the location has not been found. (After Eumenes had exploited its resources in 318 BC, some 10,000 talents remained for Antigonus in late 316 BC. Later, Antigonus paid his army for three months out of the money he took from Cyinda for the campaign of Ipsus – see Bosworth, The Legacy of Alexander).
Alexander was the wealthiest man on earth when he died in Babylon in 323 BC. During his campaigns, he had amassed colossal booty, including the treasuries of the Persian Kings in their Royal Palaces of Ecbatana, Persepolis, Susa, and Pasargadae. All this wealth was in the hands of Alexander and, at his death, became a severe subject of dispute and fight among his generals until forty years later, his Empire was finally divided between Seleucos,
Ptolemy, Lysimachos, and Cassander. We know about the occupied territories, the underlying killings, and the personal greed of Alexander's successors (the Diadochi), but what happened to his treasures?
Alexander's first substantial booty was taken in Damascus after the Battle of Issus. Briant accounts for it as follows: "silver earmarked for enormous payments to the army, vestments of a host of noblemen and women, gold place settings, golden horse-bits, tents decorated with royal splendor, and chariots abandoned by their owners and overflowing with unheard-of wealth." At that time, Alexander needed the money badly to pay his army for future campaigns as he had left Macedonia in debt and with borrowed money, but it gave him a first glimpse of the wealth that could be his.
When Darius fled the Battlefield of Gaugamela, he left Alexander "a treasure worth roughly 4,000 talents (between 75 and 100 tons of silver), his bow, his arrows and his chariot". Yet Alexander was just starting his march through the Persian Empire, taking possession of one Royal City after the other, and evidently, there was more to come.
The first stop was at Susa, "which boasted one of the Empire's largest treasure stores, where the Great Kings stocked their precious metals. The ancient authors estimated its value at between 40,000 and 50,000 talents –from 1,000 to 1,250 tons of gold- plus 9,000 talents (225 tons) of the gold coins known as darics." By the way, the value of the textiles alone was worth more than 5,000 talents and included more than 100 tons of purple cloth colored with a mixture of dye from the Gulf of Spetses and honey to keep the color fresh. Do we have any idea what this looked like, I wonder?
At this stage, Alexander possessed more than substantial reserves of precious metal, and his financial worries were history. Previously, Pelusium in Egypt had contributed to the royal treasury with 800 talents (20 tons of silver and gold), Babylon with 18,000 talents (4,500 tons of silver and gold), and now he was heading for the grand palace of Persepolis, where the unbelievable sum of 120,000 talents or 3,000 tons of gold awaited him! According to Plutarch, 10,000 spans of mules and 5,000 camels were needed to transfer this enormous load to Susa. The wealth and figures are beyond comprehension, even in antiquity, as according to the standards of the 5th century BC, the booty at Persepolis alone was about 300 times the equivalent of the annual national income of Athens.
After Persepolis, Alexander laid siege to nearby Pasargadae, the former capital of Persia, where another 6,000 talents were added to his financial reserves. Meanwhile, Darius was still on the run ahead of him, supported by a small but faithful band of soldiers, using 7,000 or 8,000 gold talents (175 or 200 tons) from the treasury of Ecbatana before leaving the remaining sum to Alexander. The size of this booty is not mentioned by the ancient writers, but we do know that Alexander left 6,000 Macedonian soldiers in Ecbatana to guard it. However, he could have used every single man for his upcoming campaigns further East. I wonder how many men were ever in charge of guarding Fort Knox.
Anyway, a simple sum of all the figures above gives us the most impressive amount of gold and silver alone, and we only know the main provenances of the money.
Alexander's booty in talents
Pelusium 800
Babylon 18.000
Gaugamela 4.000
Susa 50.000
Susa, golden Darics 9.000
Persepolis 120.000
Persepolis, Darius personal 8.000
Pasargadae 6.000
Total 215.800
This list does not include the Indian campaigns, which must have yielded vast amounts of precious stones, ivory, and textiles. We get a subtle hint when we read Arrian's account of the gifts from Taxiles when Alexander reaches the Indus: "200 talents of silver, 3,000 oxen and over 10,000 sheep for sacrificial purposes, and some thirty elephants." These were only gifts, meaning Taxiles could easily spare them! There was gold and silver from minor cities and towns, livestock, horses, cattle, slaves, jewelry, etc. After campaigning around the Aornos fortress, for instance, Arrian casually tells us, "the Macedonians took possession of more than 230,000 oxen, of which Alexander chose the finest specimens since they seemed to him of remarkable beauty and stature and he wished to send them back to Macedonia to work the land." A casual remark, it seems, but just try to picture 230,000 pieces of cattle together in a field!
On the other hand, it is evident that Alexander was confronted with huge expenses on logistics; moving and feeding an army of tens of thousands was not a small matter. We know he loved rewarding his friends and granting bonuses to his most meriting and valorous soldiers. The army winded up spending more money than they ever thought they would possess, and although it helped to boost the world economy of those days, the men got used to living above their means. We'll remember that at the splendid Susa wedding of 324 BC, Alexander had to step in and with a gesture that once more shows his magnanimity, he acquitted their debts, paying the incredible amount of 20,000 talents from his own pocket (this is more than what the treasury of Babylon had yielded!). Another chunk was taken by Harpalos, who, unfit for military service, had been appointed by Alexander as Imperial Treasurer. He led a life of crime and debauchery in Babylon. So when he learned that Alexander was heading back for Babylon in 324 BC, Harpalos cowardly fled to Athens, taking "considerable sums" of the kings' money with him.
But all this was minor compared to the enormous wealth left after Alexander's death, which his successors undoubtedly divided among themselves. We know, for instance, that Lysimachos' money was safely kept on the Acropolis of Pergamon - a mere 9,000 talents in silver and gold, roughly worth several billion in today's value. A similar or higher amount must have been the share of Ptolemy, Seleucos, and Cassander. Where can one find a safe and trustworthy place to keep such enormous amounts of money, jewelry, and precious stones?
This brings us back to Strabo, who names the stronghold of Kyinda (or Cyinda), which was never found until now. In recent years, a strange-looking ruin was spotted on a nearly 2,000-meter-high mountain top in the remoteness of the rough Taurus Mountains. Could this be Seleucos' secret hiding place? After all, his capital city of Antiochia, modern Antakya, lies only 150 km further south and certainly was not defendable enough to keep the treasury safe.
When Mustapha Sayar, a Turkish archaeologist, and his friend and colleague Adolf Hoffmann, Manager from the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, set out by helicopter in search of what could be Kyinda, they could not believe their eyes. A closer look at the walls perched high on the needle rocks in the Cilician landscape reveals ruins of massive straight walls; slowly, their trained eye discovers building after building, thick outer walls and watchtowers, and even a large hall right above the precipice. A secret building complex, hidden from the human eye for eons, as even the local farmers are not aware of anything up there. Soon an expedition is put together. An expedition it is, for there are no roads on this steep slope, and the climb upwards is demanding and strenuous. Archaeologists, as well as the local manpower, are full of excitement and anticipation. Who were the builders of this fortification on the Karasis? When was it built? And most of all, for what purpose?
Strategically this fortress is ideally situated. The ruins emerge out of nowhere, and the high straight walls wrap around the entire mountaintop. It is almost a miracle that the spot has never been discovered before.
Both archaeologists soon agree that this must be a fortress from the days of the Diadochi, Alexander's successors. Wrestling through the thick undergrowth, they marvel at the perfect cut stone blocks and their precise fitting. The architects from antiquity must have been near geniuses. Pretty soon, they discover a relief of an elephant above one of the doorways, the emblem used by Seleucos and his successors - a solid confirmation that this fortification matches the period they suspected. The elephant was the wonder weapon of the ancients. We all remember Alexander's victory over Porus and his war elephants in 326 BC. Since then, the elephant has been considered a symbol of power, and it was used by Seleucos on the reverse of the coins he minted.
At the bottom of the imposing walls, the archaeologists find a hidden entrance leading through a vaulted tunnel with smooth close-fitting stone walls. Niches covered with soot lead us to believe that oil lamps once lit the passageway and high air shafts guaranteed good air circulation. Is this tunnel leading them to the hidden treasure? But then suddenly, the corridor ends, and all that is left to see is a pool of clear water, a treasure of another kind, for, without water, life up here would not have been possible.
Back on the mountaintop, Hoffmann's men figured out that the large hall right above one of the steep faces of the Karasis must have served as a storage area, measuring 60 x 12 meters. By deduction, they estimate that approximately 700 tons of wheat could be stored there, a sound supposition as the room shows a good ventilation system. Thanks to such storage space, the fort could be manned and defended for years in a row. Next to it is a small vaulted room, built in the same fashion as the underground passage to the water spring. Maybe this is where the treasure was kept? Yet not a single coin, no jewelry, and indeed no treasure has been found here either, although the historian Diodorus tells us that the Kyinda treasure amounted to at least 10,000 talents, i.e., 200 tons of pure silver.
The place was practically impregnable, so what happened? Too many questions still need to be answered, despite all the high-tech equipment used to measure the place's layout. It is generally agreed that the Celts swept down to cities like Delphi, Ephesus, and Pergamon to loot the precious gifts stored in their temples. The same may have happened at Kyinda.
Finally, Mustapha Sayar and Adolf Hoffmann end up with an excellent computer reconstruction of what they believe to be the legendary Kyinda, but no trace of a treasure. So the place still remains shrouded in mystery.
I'm curious to hear what happened since this program aired on German television ZDF in March 2006. So far, all is quiet, and even on the internet, very little information is available about Kyinda (or Cyinda). It feels like hunting for the Golden Fleece, but who knows what secrets are buried somewhere. We may need Schliemann's luck to find the treasure of Alexander the Great. Let's keep our eyes peeled!
[pictures of Kyinda come from the Terra-X program on German TV]
Alexander the Great. Man of Action/Man of Spirit (ISBN 0-8109-2833-7) is a tiny book but definitely worth its value. Pierre Briant manages to give the reader a brief but captivating overview of Alexander’s life and conquests. The book is richly illustrated with colored photographs of good quality, each carrying its own comment, meaning that even the superficial reader will pick up plenty of information about the thundering exploits of Alexander the Great without having to strain himself. There are also a couple of colored maps to clarify the routes which Alexander and his army followed, a non-negligible asset in my eyes.
