The military feats of Alexander the Great were legendary in the ancient world. In his short and eventful life—Alexander died at just 32 years old—the Macedonian Greek king toppled the mighty Persians and came to rule over a massive empire stretching from Greece to India.
A fearless leader fueled by restless ambition, Alexander’s conquests and cruelties were recorded by many ancient authors, but only a handful of those texts survive. Two of our best sources on Alexander lived hundreds of years after the king’s death, but they based their stories on eyewitness accounts written by people like Alexander’s close friend and successor, Ptolemy.
Both ancient authors—Arrian of Nicomedia and Quintus Curtius Rufus —recorded an unforgettable event from Alexander’s adventures in Central Asia around 328 or 327 B.C. In a siege of a mountaintop fortress, Alexander offered prizes to soldiers who climbed towering cliff faces in the fastest time. Dozens of men died attempting to scale the sheer walls, but others made it to the top using a combination of iron spikes and linen ropes—techniques still used by climbers today.
Much of Alexander’s history is shrouded in myth, but if his daring siege of the “Sogdian Rock” was true, it may be the oldest recorded speed-climbing contest in history.
Alexander the Great's 'Flying' Soldiers
The ancient authors Arrian and Curtius disagree on the details of Alexander’s ancient climbing competition, including exactly when and where it took place. Was it the spring of 327 B.C., when the cliffs were still covered in snow and ice, or the summer of 328 B.C.? Was it called the Sogdian Rock or the Rock of Ariamazes? While the names and dates are different, the core of the story remains the same.
In both accounts, there was a local Bactrian king who refused to surrender to Alexander and retreated with his soldiers and subjects to a mountaintop fortress surrounded by sheer cliffs. Not only did the king defy Alexander’s orders to surrender, but he taunted the Macedonians, saying that only soldiers with wings could take his mountain stronghold.
Curtius, who wrote his history of Alexander in the 1st century, said that Alexander was so “inflamed” by the barbarian king’s taunts he promised “on the following night he would make him believe that the Macedonians could even fly.”
Alexander Offered Prize Money to Top Climbers
Both Curtius and Arrian (who lived in the 2nd century) wrote that Alexander quickly summoned soldiers with climbing experience. In Curtius’ version, they were 300 young men who were “accustomed to drive their flocks over mountain pastures and almost impassable rocks.” In Arrian’s account, the volunteers were 300 men who had rock climbing experience from previous sieges.
Knowing the risks that the climbers faced, Alexander offered prize money for the men who reached the top of the cliffs the fastest. The first to climb the rock would receive 10 talents. The second-place finisher would receive 9, the third-place finisher 8, and so on until the prize money was spent. While it’s impossible to know the exact value of a talent in the time of Alexander, it was a huge sum worth many times the annual pay of a Greek soldier.
If the money wasn’t enough motivation, Alexander also gave his climbers a pep talk. “Nature has placed nothing so high, that valor cannot overcome it,” Alexander said, according to Curtius’s account. “It is by trying what others have despaired that we have Asia in our power.”
Ancient Climbing Techniques
In Arrian’s version, the siege took place in the spring, when there was still snow and ice on the cliffs. Here’s how Arrian describes the climbing technique of Alexander’s men:
“They had provided themselves with small iron tent-pegs, which they proposed to drive into the snow, where it was frozen hard, or into any bit of bare earth they might come across, and they had attached to the pegs strong flaxen lines… then, driving their pegs either into bare ground or into such patches of snow as seemed most likely to hold under the strain, they hauled themselves up, wherever each could find a way.”
There are some striking similarities between ancient and modern climbing techniques. The tent pegs served as improvised versions of the bolts and anchors that climbers use today. Flax is one of the oldest and strongest natural fibers used to make rope, which Alexander’s men tied to the pegs the same way that modern climbers clip nylon ropes onto anchors.
Curtius similarly described the ancient climbers outfitting themselves with “iron wedges… and strong ropes… [W]hen they came to very steep places, some grasped projecting stones with their hands and pulled themselves up, others made their way by using nooses of rope, still others drove wedges between the stones and made steps on which to stand.”
But without modern safety equipment like belays, harnesses and carabiners, Alexander’s men were one misstep away from disaster, and at least 30 men died attempting the ascent.
“They spent a day amid fear and toil,” wrote Curtius. “After having struggled over rough places, still harder ones awaited them, and the height of the rock seemed to grow. That indeed was a pitiful sight, when those whom their unsteady step had betrayed were hurled down a sheer drop; and the example of others’ disaster showed that they must soon suffer the same fate.”
When the first exhausted climbers finally made it to the summit, they signaled to Alexander with white linen flags. Alexander sent a messenger to inform the Bactrian king that his men did indeed have wings and had the fortress surrounded. The Bactrian king was so shocked by the appearance of Alexander’s soldiers that he didn’t bother to count their small numbers and surrendered immediately.
Is the Story True?
Ancient Sogdia would have been located in modern Uzbekistan, but archeologists have failed to find the rock cliffs described in these stories. Yet even though the rocks can’t be identified, and Arrian and Curtius ascribe the defiance to two different kings, that still doesn’t mean that the story of Alexander’s climbing competition isn’t true, says Daniel Leon, a classics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“First of all, it would be a weird thing to make up,” says Leon, author of Arrian the Historian: Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire. “Also, it’s an unfamiliar type of military narrative. Usually they focus on stuff like infantry and cavalry movements. If there’s a siege, they like to focus on the technology. But rarely do you get a detailed description of people actually scaling walls. That oddness, to me, makes it seem like an event that really stuck in the memories of people who actually witnessed it and caused them to write it down.”
Other scholars agree. Vasileios Liotsakis is a professor of Ancient Greek literature at the University of the Peloponnese in Greece. He says that authors like Arrian and Curtius gathered their stories from much earlier, eyewitness sources. While these sources differed in their details, they all agreed that some type of climbing contest occurred.
“We have no reason to believe that this was not a true story,” says Liotsakis. “It was a very common practice in antiquity to climb walls or hills.”
In fact, the siege of the Sogdian Rock wasn’t even the first time that an ancient Greek emperor rewarded his soldiers for scaling a high wall. The ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus recorded the siege of a city in Sicily by the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, who lived a century before Alexander.
Dionysius ordered his men to use ladders to scale the high walls of the besieged city under the cover of darkness. The dangerous maneuver resulted in victory. “After this success he rewarded Archylus, who had been the first to mount the wall, with one hundred minas,” wrote Diodorus, “and honored according to their merits all others who had performed deeds of valor.”
“Promising reward money was a common practice in antiquity,” says Liotsakis. “This is not something alien or out of the ordinary.”
Origins of Modern Competitive Climbing
While it’s impossible to know for certain if Alexander really offered a reward to the first climbers to reach the top of the Sogdian Rock, scholars like Liotsakis and Leon think it’s likely. If that’s the case, there’s still a very long gap between the ancient origins of competitive climbing and the creation of the modern sport.
Competitive climbing, particularly for speed, was born in the Soviet Union in the mid-20th century, according to Gripped, a climbing magazine. Russia has a long history of mountaineering, but speed competitions developed in the 1940s to choose elite Soviet climbers to attend state-run climbing camps in the Caucuses. In 1955, the Russian Climbing Federation established rules for speed climbing competitions, and by the 1970s the USSR opened up the competitions to international climbers.
It wasn’t until 1986, at a climbing competition in Lyon, France, that competitors raced head-to-head on identical artificial climbing walls. The 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were the first to include sport climbing as an official event. The Tokyo games awarded medals to the best all-around climbers in three disciplines: bouldering, speed climbing and lead climbing (how high athletes can climb in six minutes without seeing the route ahead of time). At the 2024 Olympic games in Paris, sport climbing is its own event.
