Others took the theme further. Besides the rivalry with Greek heroes, 'Alexander set out for Ammon with the added intention', wrote the Roman Arrian, possibly taking his cue from Ptolemy's history, 'of learning about himself more accurately or at least of saying that he had so learnt.' This personal problem was connected already with his parentage, 'for he was referring a part of his birth to Ammon', and this belief can be most naturally explained by his new position as Pharaoh, eventually inherited by Ptolemy. For the Pharaoh was the 'begotten son of Amun-Ra, beloved of Amun'; on this view, Alexander went to the Siwah oasis in Libya in order to find out the meaning of the Pharaoh's titles, a motive which seems as confused as the rivalry with heroes of Greek legend. Why should Libyan Ammon know the truths of Egyptian Amun-Ra and why should the remote Siwah oasis have been brought to Alexander's notice as the place to find the truth? Only if Ammon and Siwah are set in context can the motives for the pilgrimage be narrowed to a plausibility; Ptolemy is known to have added miracles to the visit and his account of its motive is unlikely to be impartial.

In the god Ammon, the traditions of three different peoples had long combined. Originally the Siwah oasis had been home of a local Libyan god, who may have been related to Baal Hainan of the Carthaginians on his western border; his shrine lay some four weeks' journey from the centre of the Egyptians' kingdom, and it is very possible that for a thousand years, he had never come under the Pharaohs' control. But two hundred years before Alexander, if not earlier, Egypt had mastered Siwah beyond any doubt, and the Pharaoh Amasis is known from hieroglyphics to have built the oracular temple which Alexander was going to visit. The temple's architecture is not distinctively Egyptian, and its carvings show the native Libyan king of the oasis in an independent rank. Egypt, it seems, had merged with Libya, not taken her over completely, and so she was left with a new foreign god to explain. She identified him with her own lord Amun, ram-god and begetter of the universe, married to Mut and father of Khonsu; the ceremonies at Siwah took an Egyptian turn and oracles were given in the Egyptian fashion.

A third people had also intruded. During Amasis's reign, colonists from Greece had been settling in Cyrene, a Libyan town to the west of the Siwah desert, where they intermarried with the native Berbers and heard of the local divinities. Always attracted by an oracle, they had visited Siwah in its Egyptian phase and given its god the Greek name Ammon, which suggested both the Egyptians' own Amun and the Greek word ammos' or sand, as befitted a god in the desert. Just as Egypt had already equated Siwah's god with her own pre-eminent ram-god Amun, so too the Greeks explained this highly honoured Ammon as a form of their Olympian Zeus, king of the Greek gods. In Cyrene they were soon to build a splendid Doric temple to Zeus Ammon, and to use his features, distinguished by a ram's horn, on the plentiful coinage of the city. The complex origins of the god were established from Greek, Libyan and Egyptian sources and it only remained for him to spread.

Since 500 B.C .Ammon's expansion had been astonishing. Throughout, it was the Greek city of Cyrene which passed on the god's name to Greece, and it is very striking that Pharaoh Amasis, the first Egyptian known to have taken an interest in Siwah, maintained a Cyrenean mistress. Many of Cyrene's Greek settlers had family links with Sparta on the Greek mainland, so that worship of Ammon soon spread by sea to Sparta's southern harbour town and thence inland; the great shrine of Zeus at Olympia set up a cult of this new Zeus whom Cyrene had discovered, and in the Theban poet Pindar, 130 years before Alexander's visit, Ammon had found his most able publicist. Pindar had visited the King of Cyrene to write a hymn in his honour and had been so impressed with Zeus Ammon that he had set up the god's statue in his home town of Thebes on his return and written him a poem; the priests of Siwah were said to have prayed that Pindar should receive life's greatest blessings, whereupon, in fulfilment, the poet died peacefully. Pindar, moreover, had honoured connections with the Macedonian kings.

Pindar was not the last of Amnion's famous Greek admirers. Presumably through Cyrene, the family of Lysander the Spartan general had connections with Siwah, and Lysander was to use the god during his career in the late fifth century. While besieging a town on the eastern borders of Macedonia he claimed to have seen Ammon in a dream, and he withdrew from the siege on the god's advice, so unexpectedly that the defending city set up a cult of Ammon in gratitude, which Alexander may have known from his nearby home before he ever reached Egypt. Athens, meanwhile, had been equally receptive. In the 460s Cimon the Athenian general had tried to consult the Siwah oracle while his fleet was moored near Cyprus; before invading Sicily, the Athenians had sent envoys to do likewise and at least thirty years before Alexander's visit a temple of Zeus Ammon had been built in the Piraeus port, perhaps by merchants who knew the god through the grain-trade with Cyrene. Gold had been sent from Athens to Siwah; Ammon was a recognized oracle among Athenian poets, which was not surprising as the gods' fame had long spread right through Asia Minor, from Cyzicus on the Sea of Marmara to the Lycian kings in the far south, and had entered the islands of the Greek Aegean. Zeus Ammon had spanned the Greek world for more than a hundred years before Alexander set out in search of him, and this background helps to explain his decision.

As a well-known Greek god, Ammon would have attracted Alexander's attention whether or not he had become Pharaoh at Memphis. Although the ceremonies at Siwah followed an Egyptian pattern, Egypt and the Pharaohs are scarcely known to have troubled the priesthood of the oasis, and no Pharaoh is known to have travelled the 500 miles through desert from Memphis to Siwah, an unnecessary exertion for a man who believed that its semi-Libyan god was a form of his own lord Amun, as Amun had

more illustrious temples within reach of a boat trip down the Nile. Nor was the oracle thought to be an Egyptian puppet. When nearby border tribes had wished to know whether or not to support the Pharaoh, it was Amnion to whom they had sent for impartial advice. There is only one exception to the Pharaoh's apparent disinterest. Some ten years before Alexander's arrival, Nectanebo II, the last independent Pharaoh, had dedicated a secondary temple in the Siwah oasis to the Egyptian Amun-Ra, but as Nectanebo may himself have been of Libyan birth his sudden interest in Siwali is of no consequence for Egyptian policy or for Macedonian Alexander. Siwah was not a convenient or obvious place to learn about the mystique of Amun, even if Alexander had set out with this in mind; it was the Delphi of the Greek East and as a Hellene, not as Pharaoh, Alexander would be curious about a god who was known and patronized by Greeks because of his truthfulness. Zeus Amnion at Siwah was the last available oracle of Greek repute before Alexander led his troops inland into Asia, and Alexander wished to consult him for this simple reason alone. Curiosity, it is agreed, was matched by a spirit of adventure, attracted by the hazards of the journey, and it may be relevant that in a work on Thirst, his tutor Aristotle had told the vivid story of an Argive pilgrim who had starved his body to the limit and travelled many weeks through the desert to Siwah without once drinking water on the way. This feat of endurance might have appealed to his emulous pupil, had it ever been told in the schoolroom.

But in Egypt, Aristotle seemed far distant and a nearer reminder of Ammon was needed, which owed nothing to the Pharaoh's tides as son of Amun-Ra. While busied with the site of his new city, Alexander had received envoys from Cyrene who invited him to pay their cities a visit, offering him friendship and alliance, 300 horses and five four-horsed chariots. In Arrian's history, suggesting that Alexander set out for Ammon seized by a sudden desire to inquire about himself, this detail is suppressed, probably because he was following the word of King Ptolemy who was ruler, not ally of Cyrene by the time he wrote his history and might not have relished a reference to the city's pact with his predecessor. But it is an important clue, for it was through Cyrene that the Greek world had first come to think highly of Ammon and it was surely the same city's envoys who first reminded Alexander of the god's existence. Very possibly, they did not mention the oasis until Alexander had taken up their offer, gone to visit their cities and reached the town of Paraetonium, 165 miles west of Alexandria and ten miles beyond a usual turning-off point for pilgrims to Siwah. If so, Alexander would have turned west not to consult the god but to follow his envoys from Cyrene and secure his frontier with Libya, an aim which is in keeping with his methods as a general. Only when strategy was satisfied did he think of a detour to Ammon, a familiar and truthful oracle. He did not march from Alexandria as a mystic with a master plan, and as the theme of his divine father only arose by accident at Siwah, from an unpredictable incident 6n the temple steps, it cannot have been his motive for setting out from Alexandria into the desert.