THE FIRST RELIGIOUS-HISTORICAL SOURCES OF ISKANDER THEME

Abstract

The genesis of Iskander theme is related to the distant past, and it has a history of twenty centuries even when compared to the period of Alisher Navoi (15th century). The basis of the topic is the life and work of the famous Macedonian ruler Alexander (356-323 BC). Most plot lines, characters, motives, episodes and interpretations are directly or indirectly connected with this core. But a group of experts and researchers who have studied the history of the issue believe that the genesis of the topic was even before the birth of Alexander. They hypothesize that a revelation (dream) in the prophetic book “Daniel” (Doniyor) in the third part of the Torah (Tanach) – “Holy Writings” (Ktuvim) – is the first prophecy about Alexander, in which it was reported that Alexander would lay the foundation for a great empire in the future.

In this article, the fragments considered as the foundations of the subject in the Torah are studied in detail, as well as the information about the history of Alexander recorded in “The First Book of the Maccabees” (2nd century BC) from the non-canonical books of the Torah is analyzed. There were researched the compatibility of the information found in these two sources with the Eastern ones, the tradition of khamsa writing, in particular, the interpretations in “Khamsa” by Alisher Navoi, or how they were changed in the process of transformation, as well as their causes.