The Otago Alexander

Tūhura Otago Museum's collection includes what is believed to be the only ancient sculpture of Alexander the Great in the Southern Hemisphere. The marble head was originally located at Parthian Kish, in Iraq, about 80km from Baghdad and about 12km from Babylon. Its provenance, from the eastern half of Alexander's empire, makes the portrait one of the rarer images of the king, as most others come from the western part in Greece and Egypt.

Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC) succeeded his father as king of Macedonia, and when he was only twenty, he unified and led a league of Greek city states in a war against the Persian Empire. He conquered a vast empire, spreading Greek civilisation to Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, and northwest India.

For the identification of Alexander portraits, and particularly for heads alone, scholars rely traditionally on the hairstyle, the diadem, the youthfulness, the lack of a beard, the turn of the neck, and the consequent turn of the eyes skywards. Depictions of Alexander repeatedly changed into the current style of the time, and this practice allows us to date the head in the Museum's collection to about 330 – 300 BC. Its scale would suggest it was made for a private context, not a public one, and therefore in a house, perhaps not far from Babylon.

The sculpture was given to the Museum in 1948 by Dr Lindsay Rogers, a Dunedin-born surgeon and Otago University medical graduate who was Professor of Clinical Surgery at the Royal School of Medicine, Baghdad, at the time. He had served as a doctor among Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Emeritus Professor Robert Hannah published his research on this sculpture in a volume of essays on Alexander the Great that he also co-edited: R. Hannah, The 'Otago Alexander', in P. Wheatley and R. Hannah (eds), Alexander and his Successors: Essays From the Antipodes (Claremont: Regina Books 2009), 299–309.

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