In Search of the Lost Testament of Alexander the Great Read online

  IN SEARCH OF THE LOST TESTAMENT OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  IN SEARCH OF THE LOST TESTAMENT OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  DAVID GRANT

  Copyright © 2017 David Grant

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  CONTENTS

  Press Release: The Bones of Philip II Confirmed

  Prolegomenon. Forgery and Philology: The Bag of Tricks Played Upon the Dead

  The Art of the Correct Sacrifice

  Lighting Dim Candles in the Dark Abyss: Accessing the Evidence

  1.The Reborn Wrath of Peleus’ Son

  2.Sarissa Diplomacy: Macedonian Statecraft

  3.Hierarchic Historians and Alexandrian Alchemy

  4.Mythoi, Muthodes and the Birth of Romance

  5.Classicus Scriptor, Rhetoric and Rome

  6.Guardians and Ghosts of the Ephemerides

  7.The Damaging Didactic of the Classical Death

  8.Wills and Covenants in the Classical Mind

  9.Babylon: the Cipher and Rosetta Stone

  10.The Tragic Triumvirate of Treachery and Oaths

  11.The Silent Siegecraft of the Pamphleteers

  12.The Precarious Path of Pergamena and Papyrus

  13.Comets, Colophons and Curtius Rufus

  14.Lifting The Shroud of Parrhasius

  Postscript: Of Bones, Insignia and Warrior Women –The Return to Aegae

  Bibliography

  ‘The Macedonia of Alexander has disappeared, almost without a trace. Its older capital Aegae is a malaria-ridden site and nothing more… The tombs of the Macedonian rulers, where Alexander had thought to be gathered to his fathers, have never been found; his own capital, Pella, is a mass of shapeless ruins…’1

  Albert Olmstead, 1948

  ‘Half a century after the start of systematic, large-scale excavations, the huge labour by archaeologists, who have dragged from the earth ruins hidden in the past, and the patient work of all the scholars, who have concentrated the expertise on their finds, have revealed an inhabited land that had been terra incognita and given a face to the people, enigmatic until that point, whom Alexander led to the ends of the earth.’2

  Miltiades Hatzopoulos, 1996

  PRESS RELEASE

  REMAINS OF PHILIP II,

  FATHER OF ALEXANDER

  THE GREAT, CONFIRMED FOUND

  10 October, 2014, by April Holloway for Ancient Origins

  ‘Buried beneath a large mound located in the village of Vergina in northern Greece, an archaeological excavation carried out in 1977 by Greek archaeologist, Manolis Andronikos, uncovered a spectacular tomb holding the remains of ancient Macedonian royalty.

  The historically important tomb has been the subject of intense debate ever since, dividing archaeologists over whose cremated remains were housed inside two golden caskets – Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, and one of his wives; or Philip III Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s half-brother, who assumed the throne after Alexander’s death, with his wife Eurydice.3 Discovery News reports that, finally, the most detailed and extensive study ever conducted on the remains has settled the decades-old argument, confirming the bones indeed belong to the Macedonian King Philip II.

  The ‘Great Tumulus’, as it came to be known, over 330 feet in diameter and 40 feet tall at the centre, was found to contain three primary burial sites. Tomb I, which was looted, contained fragmentary human remains believed to belong to three individuals.4 The main chamber of Tomb II, measuring approximately 15 feet by 15 feet by 17.5 feet high, around which the debate is centered, contained relatively complete cremated remains of a male, which had been placed within a golden larnax (chest) bearing an embossed starburst, the emblem of the Macedonian royal family, and the remains of a female in the antechamber, wrapped in a golden-purple cloth with a golden diadem. Also within the burial chamber were a gilded silver diadem, an iron helmet, an elaborate ceremonial shield, an iron and gold cuirass, and two small ivory portrait heads believed to represent Philip II and Alexander. Tomb III contained a number of silver vessels and a silver funerary urn with the bones of an adolescent believed to be Alexander IV of Macedon, son of Alexander the Great.

  Numerous studies have been published concerning the relatively intact human remains found in the twenty-four-carat gold casket in Tomb II. A study published in the journal Science in 2000, for example, concluded that the remains could not be Philip II as they did not bear traces of injuries that Philip supposedly suffered during his lifetime. Then, a study released in 2010 conversely stated that the remains must be Philip II as a notch in the eye socket is consistent with a battle wound received by Philip II at the siege of Methone in 355/354 BCE, years before he died.5

  To settle the score once and for all, an extensive anthropological investigation was launched to fully analyse more than 350 bones and fragments found in the two golden caskets. The research team, led by anthropologist Theodore Antikas, utilised X-ray-computed tomography, scanning electron microscopy, and X-ray fluorescence, to uncover any pathologies, activity markers, or trauma that could lead to the identification of the remains.

  The results revealed features in the bones not previously seen or recorded. Antikas explained that the skull showed signs of sinusitis, which may have been caused by an old facial trauma, such as the arrow that is known to have hit and blinded Philip II at the siege of Methone.6 Furthermore, there are signs of chronic pathology on the surface of several rib fragments, which are believed to be linked to Philip’s trauma when he was struck with a lance around 345 BC. Finally, the bones reflect a fully-fleshed cremation, which disproves the theory that the remains belong to Philip III Arrhidaeus who had been buried for some time before being exhumed and cremated.

  The analysis also revealed that the remains of the female in the antechamber are consistent with a female warrior and horse-rider, aged thirty to thirty-four. This find rules out the wife of Philip III Arrhidaeus, who was under twenty-five.7 Furthermore, a major fracture in her left tibia, causing leg shortening, explains the presence of a pair of Scythian greaves, in which the left side is shorter than the right. This indicates the Scythian weaponry and armour must have belonged to the female occupant of the tomb. Antikas told Discovery News that: ‘No Macedonian king other than Philip II is known to have had relations with a Scythian.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Discovery News also reported on further revelations that additionally shed light on Tomb I. During the study being undertaken by Antikas’ team, a young archeologist working on his thesis at Vergina found three wooden crates in a storage place filled with bone fragments and ar
tefacts from Tomb I: three plastic bags containing well over one hundred bone fragments never before studied. Until then, Tomb I had been thought to hold solely a male, female and infant. But the seventy identified bones suggest the chamber held at least seven individuals: an adult male, a female, a child, four babies aged eight-ten lunar months and one foetus of six and a half lunar months. Antikas believes: ‘This find disproves every previous hypothesis of historians and archaeologists alike that Tomb I was intended for Philip II and his last wife.’ Discovery News, October 10, 2014.

  The two small ivory portrait heads found in Tomb II and believed to depict Philip II and Alexander.

  ‘Do not bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles But let them lie together, just as we were raised in your house… So may the same vessel contain both our bones The golden amphora, which your lady mother gave you.’

  Homer Iliad8

  EXCAVATING HOMERIC HEROES: AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY

  The ancient city of Aegae where the royal tombs are located dates back to the 7th century BCE; it became Macedonia’s first capital after it was conglomerated from a collection of villages into a city in the 5th century BCE. Aegae was eventually supplanted by a new capital at Pella in the 4th century BCE but retained its status as the spiritual home and burial ground of the Macedonian kings.

  Both settlements were partially destroyed by Rome in 168 BCE following the Battle of Pydna when Macedonia was finally defeated, and a landslide buried the older capital in the 1st century, after which it was uninhabited. The name ‘Aegae’ ceased to be used and its history was grazed over by goats and sheep and survived in oral legend only, while papyri and faded vellums told of a former city of kings. Only a nearby early Christian basilica built from the stones of the ancient ruins marked the forgotten location. In the 1920s, on what had once been the southeast side of the Macedonian royal palace, Greek refugees from the Euxine Pontus region of Asia Minor founded the village of Vergina, and the still unidentified fallen stones were used as masonry in the new houses.9

  Supervised excavations at what turned out to be the founding city of the Argead (otherwise, Temenid) dynasty go back to the 1860s when a dig by French archaeologist, Léon Heuzey, sponsored by Napoleon III, revealed a Macedonian tomb next to the village of Palatitsia, ‘the small palaces’, a name that hinted tantalisingly at its former significance, though it was erroneously thought to be the site of the ancient city of Valla. In the 1930s, Konstantinos Romaios, a professor of archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, revealed a further tomb, but as Albert Olmstead’s above despondent summation affirms, as late as 1948 archeologists still had not pinpointed the location of Aegae.

  Between 1958 and 1975 excavations in the area were extended by Georgios Bakalakis and Fotis Petsas, the antiquities curator (from 1955-65). Professor Manolis Andronikos, a pupil of Romaios, eventually became convinced the so-called Great Tumulus, Megali Toumba, must house the tombs of the Macedonian kings. But it was the British historian, Nicholas Hammond, who first voiced the idea (in fact in 1968) that the ancient ruins lying between Vergina and Palatitsia (rather than those at the town of Edessa) were in fact the lost city of Aegae, a contention that was not immediately accepted.10

  After initial disappointment in 1977 when shafts were sunk through the centre of the mound (where remains of a stoa and/or cenotaph tumulus, might have nevertheless been found) with some 60,000 cubic feet of earth removed, and while preparing an access ramp on the southeast perimeter for works planned the following season, Andronikos stumbled across gold, literally: two royal tombs were finally revealed.11 Tombs I and II had originally been buried together under a single low tumulus with Tomb II at its centre; Tomb III, close by, was discovered the following year. Andronikos was exposing what is now referred to as the ‘royal burial cluster of Philip II’, Alexander’s father.12

  The precious articles found within suggested to Andronikos that in the ‘monumental death chamber’ of Tomb II, ‘laid on an elaborate gold and ivory deathbed wearing his precious golden oak wreath’ – which features 313 oak leaves and 68 acorns – King Philip II had been ‘surrendered, like a new Heracles, to the funeral pyre’.13 For the flesh-boned cremation (the evidence lies in the colour, warping and minute forms of bone fractures) which took place soon after its occupant’s death (distinct from ‘dry-boned’ which takes place long after death when flesh has rotted away) revealed traces of gold droplets, a clue that the king was placed on the pyre wearing his crown. A more recent analysis suggests that in the holokautoma, the total incineration, his body was wrapped in an asbestos shroud to help separate the bones from the pyre debris.14

  Within the Great Tumulus of Aegae, Andronikos discovered some ‘forty-seven complete or nearly complete stelae’ [commemorative stone slabs] representing commoners’ graves dating back to the second half of the 4th century BCE. Since his death in 1992, the Eucleia and Cybele sanctuaries, the acropolis and vast necropolis with graves dating mostly to the Early Iron Age (1,000-700 BCE), and the northeast gate, have all been revealed, along with the royal palace, which is now considered to be the largest building in classical Greece. Occupying 41,259 square feet, it is three times the size of the Athenian Parthenon. Archeologists have unearthed the fortress walls, more cemeteries with more sanctuaries and over 1,000 identified graves in total, besides the burial clusters of royal women and earlier Temenid kings (clusters ‘B’ and ‘C’), including the Heuzey and Bella clusters closer to Palatitsia. All in all, some 500 tumuli have been exposed covering over 900 hectares between Vergina and Palatitsia and they reveal the extent of the ancient city, which, with its suburbs, covered some 6,500 hectares.15

  Having survived numerous battles, skirmishes, city sieges and hostile alliances against him, Philip’s death was sudden and unexpected. Intending to show the Greek world his impressive enhanced religious capital at Aegae with its revolutionary palace design that would have been visible from afar as visitors crossed the plains below, and when entering its older amphitheatre at which the tragedies of the resident Euripides must have once been heard, Philip was stabbed at the wedding of his daughter, Cleopatra, in 336 BCE. It was nothing short of a ‘spectacular, world-shaking event’. Unearthing in 1977 what is thought by many to be his tomb was no less dramatic and it has since been dubbed the ‘discovery of the century’.16

  Philip’s funeral had been overseen by a grief-stricken, or perhaps a quietly elated, king-in-the-waiting, Alexander the Great.17 His bones appear to have been washed in emulation of the rites described in Homer’s Iliad in which Achilles’ remains were similarly prepared before being steeped in wine and oil. After cremation the bones were carefully collected and placed in the twenty-four carat gold chest or larnax weighing 11 kilograms, in a similar manner to the burial rites of Hector and Patroclus, and they were possibly covered in a soft purple cloth.18 However, the discovery of traces of the rare mineral huntite and Tyrian purple (porphyra) hint that Philip may in fact have been cremated in an elaborate funeral mask.19

  The remains of bones and trappings of four horses have been found in what appears to have been a purifactory fire above the cornice. Along with two swords and a sarissa (pike), they were left to decay in a (now collapsed) mud brick structure above the tomb. Some scholars believe the remains include the mounts of Philip’s assassins and/or his famous chariot horses. Once again, this would have followed the funerary rites Homer described for Patroclus.20 The Macedonian burial tradition, clearly following a heroic template, may have influenced Plato when he was writing his Laws which outlined the ideal burial in an idealised state.21

  What are believed by some scholars to be Philip’s remarkable funerary possessions provide a testament to a warrior king: a sword in a scabbard and a short sword, six spears and pikes of different lengths, two pairs of greaves, a throat-protecting gorget besides the aforementioned ceremonial shield (‘completely unsuitable to ward off the blows of battle’, according to Andronikos), body armour and the impressive once-plumed iron helmet.22 The weaponry
is representative of a soldier who fought in both the Macedonian cavalry and infantry regiments.23 In front of the sarcophagus in the main chamber were found the remains of a wooden couch decorated with five (of fourteen finally recovered) chryselephantine miniature relief figures thought (by some) to represent the family of Philip II.24

  Winthrop Lindsay Adams insightfully stated back in 1980 that the contents of the antechamber of Tomb II are ‘crucial to identification of the king in the main chamber’.25 And the contents are fascinating; they include a Scythian gold gorytos, the distinct two-part quiver that traditionally held arrows (seventy-four were found) often poison-tipped and unleashed by a compact powerful Scythian compound bow. This is suggestive of a warrior woman whose identity we probe further in the epilogue. The gorytos, along with the exquisite items retrieved from the main chamber of Tomb II, are now on display in the Archaeological Museum at Vergina; the gold wreaths and the diadem have been described as the most beautiful pieces of jewellery of the ancient world.

  Osteoarchaeological studies on the bones of the two individuals from Tomb II, one of the longest and tallest of the chamber tombs at Aegae, have led to conflicting conclusions, as the press release made clear.26 But as Antikas’ 2014 report points out, the ‘… cremains had been studied insufficiently and/or misinterpreted, causing debates among archeologists and anthropologists for over three decades.’27 Fortunately, the last thirty years have witnessed significant advances in bioarchaeology. Working on behalf of the Aristotle University Vergina Excavation, Prof. Antikas explains that from 2009 to 2014 osteological and physiochemical analyses backed by CT and XRF scans (X-ray-computed tomography, scanning electron microscopy and X-ray fluorescence) have provided new theories regarding age, gender, paleopathology and morphological changes to the bones which are now catalogued by 4,500 photos.

  Although the new investigations employed the latest tools in the science of physical anthropology that the earlier examinations of teams had not benefitted from in the 1980s, the technology has not yet put an end to the debate. In 2008, and prior to the highly scientific post-mortem by Antikas’ team in 2014, the Greek historian, Dr Miltiades Hatzopoulos, summarised the background to the previous research: ‘The issue has been obscured by precipitate announcements, the quest for publicity, political agendas and petty rivalries...’28 The summation sounds remarkably like the motives of the agenda-driven historians who gave us Alexander’s story.