The Life and exploits of Alexander the Great: being a series of translations of the Ethiopic histories of Alexander

Commissioned and translated by the renowned Egyptologist and Orientalist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, this work was first published in 1896 by Cambridge University Press. It serves as an English translation of various Ethiopic manuscripts recounting the legendary life of Alexander the Great. Budge, who served as the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, sought to make these obscure Eastern literary traditions accessible to a Western scholarly audience, framing them as a fascinating cultural intersection of Greek, Persian, and Semitic narrative motifs.

The design and scholarly apparatus of the volume reflect the rigorous, albeit tradition-bound, academic standards of late Victorian-era philology. Budge provided extensive introductions and notes to contextualize the Ethiopic texts, which draw heavily from the Pseudo-Callisthenes tradition. Upon release, the volume was lauded for its linguistic ambition and remains a foundational, if historically singular, point of reference for students of Ethiopic literature and the expansive, often mythologized, legacy of Alexander in the Horn of Africa.