When I was studying history in grade school and high school, I remember seeing a map pf Asia on which were marked the cities named after Alexander the Great – there were a lot of Alexandria’s, most founded and named by Alexander the Great himself. Wikipedia says there were at least twenty
A lot of these are known, at least locally and usually officially by names that are varied from our “Alexandria”. The Egyptioan city is pronounced “eskende”, and Alexandretta in Turkey* is officially Iskenderun. Kandahar in Afghanistan is another of those Alexander-founded cities, which derives its name from him as well.
In the late 19th and early 20th cdentury there was a vogue in fantastic literature for “Lost Cities of Alexander”, I suspect because this was the age of Lost Cities/Empirres/Worlds, and because Alexander was one of those historuic figures whose life and career people recall. There were lots of far-reaching conquerors among the descendants of Genghis Khan, for instance, but most people don’t know about them. And if they did, they wouldn’t identify with them they way they feel a connection to the Western Civ character of Alexander.
Rudyard Kipling seems to have gotten it started, with his The Man Who Would be King, where Daniel Dravot and “Peachy” Carnahan find a pocket of isolated Kafirs whose religion is based on Masonic ritual handed down from Alexander, and they hail Dravot as Alexander’s son.
Kipling was friends with H. Rider Haggard, who has been acclaimed as the creator of the “Lost World” story. He wasn’t the first to use it, although arguably he was the first to use it in straight adventure, and not as a metaphorical or didactic tool, first in King Solomon’s Mines, then in She, Ayesha, The People of the Mist, and others. He used the idea of the “lost/isolated pocket of people in an Alexander-founded city” in Ayesha: the Return of She, where he managed the trick of resurrecting his heroine, whose body had been destroyed in the first book. She gets reincarnated in Alexander’s city, and the heroes of the first book go on an arduous trip into the Himalayas to find her.
Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, wrote a series of “Arabian” adventures about his hero Francis Xavier Gordon/ “El Borak” (Arabian and
“Oriental” adventures were big in the 1930s pulps), in one of – “Swords of the Hills” – which he goes to the Lost Valley of Iskander. It was published for the first time, long after his death, under that title.
The trope sort of died out after that, as far as I can tell, except for two later eruptions. John Huston had long wanted to make a film of Kipling’s story, and Bogart did as well. The project kept getting delayed, but was finally turned into a film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine (the earlier choices for the leads had pretty much died off by then) in 1974. It was a good film, but seemed weirdly anachronistic at the time – a throwback to the days of the Glories of Empire.
About the same time, Marvel comics did a sort-of adaptation of Howard’s story, adapting an El Borak story (as L. Sprague de camp and others had done before) into a Conan the Barbarian story. Of course, Conan lived in the made-up Hyborian Age, which long predated Alexander, but they still hand-waved a connection in the future betwen the people living in that Valley with the yet-to-be-born Alexander, even giving a full-page picture of the image of Alexander the Great brooding over the skyline of the city.
*Yes, like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The “Republic of Hatay” is really the Turkish province of Hatay, in which the city and the district Iskenderun reside. İskenderun - Wikipedia
