stringent timings otherwise required for the legend to influence the Syriac metrical homily and Quranic versions, and the difficulty of otherwise explaining the presence of the first ex-eventu prophecy about the Sabir Hun invasion of 515 CE in the legend, which was already circulating as an apocalyptic revelation in John of Ephesus's Lives of the Eastern Saints in the sixth century CE. Search for the water of life Besides the Dhul Qarnayn episode, Surah al-Kahf contains another story which has been connected with legends in the Alexander romance tradition. Tommaso Tesei notes that the story of Alexander's search at the ends of the world for the water of life, featuring his cook and a fish, which appears in various forms in the Syriac metrical homily about Alexander mentioned above, recension β of the Alexander romance (4th/5th century) and in the Babylonian Talmud (Tamid 32a-32b), is "almost unanimously" considered by western scholars to be behind the story of Moses journeying to the junction of the two seas, his servant and the escaped fish earlier in Surah al-Kahf, verses 18:60–65. Besides the full English translation by E.A.W. Budge of both the Metrical Homily and the Syriac Legend, an English translation of the relevant part of the Metrical Homily is available in Gabriel Said Reynolds' commentary on the Quran. Philological evidence The two-horned one The literal translation of the Arabic phrase "Dhul-Qarnayn," as written in the Quran, is "the Two-Horned man." Alexander the Great was portrayed in his own time with horns following the iconography of the Egyptian god Ammon-Ra, who held the position of transcendental, self-created creator deity "par excellence". Rams were a symbol of virility due to their rutting behaviour; the horns of Ammon may have also represented the East and West of the Earth, and one of the titles of Ammon was "the two-horned." Alexander was depicted with the horns of Ammon as a result of his conquest of ancient Egypt in 332 BC, where the priesthood received him as the son of the god Ammon, who was identified by the ancient Greeks with Zeus, the King of the Gods. The combined deity Zeus-Ammon was a distinct figure in ancient Greek mythology. According to five historians of antiquity (Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, Justin, and Plutarch), Alexander visited the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa in the Libyan desert and rumours spread that the Oracle had revealed Alexander's father to be the deity