Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An Alexander the Great-era tomb found in near Thessaloniki contains at least five corpses, leading to rampant speculation regarding exactly who was buried there.
The vast and lavishly decorated burial site, which was discovered last year at Amphipolis in northern Greece, contains a total of 550 bones, 157 of which belonged to a woman at least 60 years of age, a newborn child, two men between 35 and 45, and a cremated adult.
Was this a tomb for mommy-dearest?
According to BBC News, the woman suffered from osteoporosis and was approximately 5-feet, 1-inch tall. The youngest of the two men had died of a stab wound, and the gender of the fourth adult could not be determined. It is not clear when each of the five individuals died.
Andrew Chugg, author of The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great told Discovery News that the woman should be the most interesting of the finds. He believes that she could be Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mother, and that the decorations (a Persephone mosaic, large statues of females known as caryatids) indicate that the tomb was designed for a female.
“It is stated that the skull and mandible and the majority of the larger bones are [the woman’s], that her skeleton is the most complete and that her bones were found mainly in the bottom of the cist burial,” he said. “A lady in her sixties is consistent with Olympias.”
“We do not know the year of her birth, but she died in 316 B.C., and she married Philip in about 357 BC,” Chugg added. “She would have been 20 when she gave birth to Alexander in 356 BC, if she died at 60. There are no other historically prominent female members of the royal family who died in the time frame of the last quarter of the fourth century BC as far as we know.”
The tomb is believed to date from between 325 BC, shortly before Alexander the Great’s death, and 300BC, according to the BBC. While some in the Greek media support the hypothesis that it was the tomb of Olympias, others reject that suggestion outright.
“Inscriptions are very clear and several indicate Olympias was buried at Pydna,” classical archaeologist Dorothy King told Discovery News on Tuesday, “so if she is in the tomb she would have to be the badly damaged bones with no sex determined.”
The two bros just chillin’
As for the two men, researchers said that both appeared to suffer from degenerative osteoarthritis or degenerative joint disease, as well as a condition known as spondylitis, which causes the spine or vertebrae to become inflamed. This discovery suggests that they may have been related.
King believes that Philip III Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s half-brother and the man who ascended to the throne following Alexander’s death, is likely to be one of them. He was murdered, she noted, and would have been the right age for one of the men. Sources claim that Phillip and his wife Eurydice are buried at Vergina, but King attributes this to a copying error.
“The age and condition of the individuals buried in the massive tomb has played a key role in the Amphipolis heated guessing game,” Discovery News said. “It ruled out candidates such as Roxane, Alexander the Great’s wife, Cleopatra, the daughter of Olympias, and Hephaestion, Alexander’s close friend who died – not stabbed – at 32.”
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