Temple
Ara Alexandri
Listen to the story
Ara Alexandri, the altar of Alexander, marks the farthest point Alexander the Great reached in Sogdiana, in Central Asia. The map sets it apart with a drawing that seems to show an altar and links it to no road, as if to say that beyond here the world is barely known. The Greek geographer Strabo explains that altars marked such farthest points. According to the Roman writer Pliny, Alexander raised several to Apollo of Didyma beyond the river Jaxartes, which he mistook for the Don, an error that confused later mapmakers. Medieval world maps still set his altars at the edge of the earth.