March 14, 2018 – During the eleven years he spent conquering the Achaemenid Persian empire, Alexander the Great took part in the rites of Babylonian Marduk and Egyptian Ammon, and reportedly sought enlightenment from the holy men of the Indus river valley. After Alexander’s death in 323 BC, legends that formed around his life story showed him crossing even greater cultural boundaries—seeking to convert to Judaism, or to become a Hindu ascetic. In one of the manuscript illustrations in “Romance and Reason,” a small, intriguing exhibition at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in which he has a starring part, Iskandar—as Alexander came to be known in Arabic and Persian texts—can be seen visiting the holy Kaaba stone in Mecca, as though performing the hajj. That image foregrounds the show’s principal theme, the startling continuities between the ancient Greek world and medieval and early modern Islam.