Got super curious about this Alexander the Great map thing after seeing a messy textbook graphic. You know those static maps where they just shove arrows everywhere? Yeah, useless. So I decided to actually make it move. Show the empire growing month by month.
Starting Point: Chaos
First step? Total mess. Dug out a blank map of Europe and Asia Minor. Easy enough. Then the nightmare hit: where the heck did he conquer things, and in what order? Books online had like ten different opinions. Some said he marched here first, others argued he went that way. Drove me nuts.
Sat down for hours comparing like five different sources:
- Crammed dates and battle names from three websites
- Double-checked locations on Google Maps – cities changed names! Persia? Iran now? Ugh.
- Jammed sticky notes on my monitor: 334 BC Granicus? 333 BC Issus? So many little wars!
- Kept getting the areas around Egypt confused with Anatolia. Which chunk did he grab before Egypt?
The Tool Hunt
Okay, locations and dates sort of figured out (mostly guessing in the end). Now how do I even animate this? My graphic design skills? Zero. Found this online GIF maker tool where you upload pictures and it flips through them. Perfect! Kinda clunky, but free.
Started drawing:
- Grabbed that blank map.
- Opened it in MS Paint (lol, yeah, Paint!). Zoomed way in.
- Used a stupid green paintbucket for ‘Alexander’s Kingdom’. Clicked it on Macedon – splotch!
- Saved that as ‘Map_*’.
- Opened ‘Map_*’ again. Painstakingly filled in bits of Anatolia he took next. Saved as ‘Map_*’.
- Repeat repeat REPEAT for like 25 maps! Syria, Egypt, Persia… Babylon? Paint bucket struggles with rivers and coasts, had to zoom way in and tiny brush the edges. Took forever.
The Big Reveal?
Finally dumped all 25 jpgs into the GIF-maker site. Set the timing to 1 second per map for the early years when he was zooming around, 2 seconds for later stuff in India to make it clearer. Hit ‘Create GIF’. Held my breath. Uploaded… waited…
And boom! There it was. Like a fast-growing mold, that green blob pulsed out from Macedon, swallowing up Greece, surging across Turkey, flooding south to Egypt, then blobbing east across Persia all the way to India. It looked less like a ‘great empire’ plan and more like a hungry monster eating the world. Mind blown at how FAST it spread in just 10 years. The timeline made sense finally.
Way better than any textbook map. You actually SEE how insanely quick it was. The GIF looks kinda basic, but man, does it tell the story.
