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260 documented by his campaign historian Callisthenes and other historians, his personal quest for Immortality is mostly known from sources deemed to be pseudo-Callisthenes, or “Alexander Romances” that embellished fact with legend. As detailed in The Stairway to Heaven, the Egyptian priests directed Alexander from Siwa to Thebes. There, on the Nile River’s western shore, he could see in the funerary temple built by Hatshepsut the inscription attesting to her being fa- thered by the god Amon when he came to her mother dis- guised as the royal husband—exactly like the tale of Alexander’s demigod conception. In the great temple of Ra- Amon in Thebes, in the Holy of Holies, Alexander was crowned as a Pharaoh. Then, following the directions given in Siwa, he entered subterranean tunnels in the Sinai penin- sula, and finally he went to where Amon-Ra, alias Marduk, was—to Babylon. Resuming the battles with the Persians, Alexander reached Babylon in 331 B.c.£., and entered the city riding in his chariot. In the sacred precinct he rushed to the Esagil ziggurat temple to grasp the hands of Marduk as conquerors before him had done. But the great god was dead. According to the pseudo-sources, Alexander saw the god lying in a golden coffin, his body immersed (or preserved) in special oils. True or not, the facts are that Marduk was no longer alive, and that his Esagil ziggurat was, without ex- ception, described as his tomb by subsequent established historians. According to Diodorus of Sicily (first century B.C.E.), THE END OF DAYS FIGURE 121