The chronology of the period 323-311 BC, from the death of Alexander the
Great until the battle of Gaza, and the way how Diodor of Sicily depicts
it in the books 18-20 of his Universal History has occupied the
scholarly world from the nineteenth century onwards. Two schools have
dominated chronological research: the traditional or so-called high
chronology and its opponent the low chronology. These chronological
hypotheses disagree by one year at the end of the First Diadoch War and
at the end of the Second Diadoch War, but the chronological gap is
narrowed down to approximately six months at the end of the Third
Diadoch War. A final complication is that both hypotheses agree on the
chronology for the events in Asia Minor following Antipaters return to
Europe until Eumenes retreat to the East during the Second Diadoch War.
The author explores the chronological information in Babylonian,
Aramaic, Egyptian and Lydian source material to reconstruct the events
mentioned by Diodor. On the basis of Babylonian cuneiform evidence and
the date formulas from Aramaic ostraca originating from Idumaea he
proposes to combine the low chronology at the beginning with the high
chronology later.