PAUL SIEVEKING digs up the latest discoveries, incuding ancient wood and some royal skeletons
ALEXANDER STATUE FOUND
Last September, the head of a marble statue of
Alexander the Great was unearthed amid the ruins of a second century AD theatre at Konuralp, north of the city of Düzce near Turkey’s northwest coast. Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, so the statue may have been made more than 400 years after his death, showing the enduring popularity of the Macedonian warrior. The remains of other marble statues, including heads of the Greek god Apollo and the mythical monster Medusa, were also found in the ruins of the theatre. One reason for Alexander’s enduring popularity was that his successors promoted him as an ideal ruler whom they hoped to emulate. It also became common for later rulers to make coins depicting Alexander’s image as a way to legitimise their reigns.
“The two tufts of hair in the middle of the forehead, which are separated to the back and sides, are like a lion’s mane,” according to a statement by Düzce Municipality officials. “This depiction is a hairstyle unique to Alexander the Great.” At its height, Alexander’s empire stretched from Greece and Egypt to Bactria, roughly in what’s now Afghanistan, to the Punjab in what’s now Pakistan. But his army refused to go any farther, and Alexander returned to Babylon, where he died – probably from an illness, but possibly from drinking too much or because he was poisoned.
Alexander’s habit of shaving his face – as opposed to sporting a beard, like most past rulers did – influenced Roman emperors and led Romans to shave, because it was thought to be the correct thing for rulers to do. Alexander wanted to be seen like the Greek god Apollo, who was portrayed without a beard. For the same reason, many statues of Alexander portrayed him looking upward, toward the gods, as is the case with the Konuralp statue. livescience.com, 5 Oct 2023.
ROYAL MACEDONIAN TOMBS
Archaeologists say they have unravelled the identities of human remains in an ancient Greek royal tomb that are “among the most historically important” skeletons in Europe. According to a study published in the
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the skeletons they investigated belong to the father, the half-brother and the son of Alexander the Great. They were found in the so-called “Great Tumulus” in the vast necropolis of AEgae – located at Vergina in northern Greece. AEgae was the first capital of ancient Macedon. The Great Tumulus contains three significant tombs (called Royal Tombs I, II and III) that are thought to date to around the late 4th century BC, but there has been a long-running debate over the identities of the occupants of these tombs.
They were excavated in the 1970s and archaeologists subsequently proposed that the tombs contained the burials of Macedonian royals: Alexander the Great’s father (Philip II), son (Alexander IV) and halfbrother (Arrhidaeus Philip III). Researchers originally identified the occupant of Royal Tomb II as that of Philip II, who died in 336 BC. Meanwhile, Tomb I was associated with Arrhidaeus and Tomb III with Alexander IV.
In order to shed new light on the burials, a team of researchers studied the skeletal remains, as well as reviewing the available archaeological and historical data. These investigations revealed that the male remains in Tomb I actually belong to Philip II. The tomb also contains the remains of a woman and a very young baby, which the researchers concluded were his wife Cleopatra and their newborn child. This fits with historical accounts of the death of Philip, who was assassinated shortly after his wife, Cleopatra, gave birth. Cleopatra and the baby were also killed shortly after.
“First, it was known from the historical sources that Philip II was injured in the eye. The traditional position claimed that there was an eye injury in the male skeleton of Tomb II, meaning the occupant was Philip II. However, we have shown that this notion was based on a description of a non-existent injury in the eye area,” said Antonis Bartsiokas, lead author of the study with the Department of History and Ethnology at the Democritus University of Thrace. “Second, there was a fused leg in the male skeleton of Tomb I consistent with the notorious lameness of Philip II. Third, the presence of a newborn in Tomb I confirms the identification Tomb I as that belonging to Philip II because the newborn was the only assassinated newborn known from any royal Macedonian couple. Fourth, the biological age of the female at 18 years old is consistent with that of the last wife of Philip II, Cleopatra – it is known from the ancient sources that she was a young girl when she was assassinated along with her newborn child.”
Furthermore, no evidence of trauma was found in the male skeleton of Tomb
II, which also contains the remains of a female. Evidence of cremation in the male and female skeletons is consistent with the historic evidence for Arrhidaeus. As a consequence, the researchers concluded that Tomb II belongs to King Arrhidaeus and his wife Adea Eurydice. Finally, the researchers found no evidence to refute the widely accepted view that Tomb III belongs to Alexander IV. “These conclusions refute the traditional speculation that Tomb II belongs to Philip II,” the authors wrote. Given their conclusion that Tomb II belongs
“The two tufts of hair in the middle of the forehead, separated to the back and sides, are like a lion’s mane”
to Arrhidaeus, not Philip II, the researchers suggest that some of the objects found inside of it, such as the armour, were once the property of Alexander the Great. newsweek.com, 28 Jan 2024.
SURPRISINGLY EARLY
A reindeer bone fragment dating back 33,000 years and bearing chop marks from a flint or stone tool has upended previous assumptions that humans first came to Ireland 12,500 years ago. The reindeer bone fragment, found at Castlepook Cave, near Doneraile, in north Cork during naturalist Richard Ussher’s excavation of Castlepook Cave between 1904 and 1912, has only recently been radiocarbon-dated. The hind rear reindeer femur contains chop marks consistent with butchering with a flint or stone tool. “This bone just changed Irish human history,” said Dr Ruth Carden, one of Ireland’s leading consultant zooarchaeologists. “We have humans coming into Ireland 33,000 years ago, which changes everything for Ireland and changes north Western Europe as a whole. This research is cutting edge and very exciting as it impacts on how we view humans and animals traversing the lands at that time, and their interactions with each other and past ecosystems.” irishcentral.com, 2 Jan 2024.
MEGA MEETING HALL
A colossal Bronze Age building, thought to be the fabled meeting hall of King Hinz, a legendary figure purported to be interred in a golden coffin, has been found in Brandenburg, Germany, near the “King’s Grave” at Seddin, northwest of Berlin. The grave, discovered in 1899, is considered the most important grave complex of the ninth century BC in northern central Europe. The newly discovered building measures 31m by 10m (102ft by 33ft), its size suggesting it served as a palatial residence. It had walls of wooden planks, wattle and daub, topped with a thatched roof. Due to the estimated building height of seven meters (23ft), it is assumed that there were additional floors for living and storage. ancient-origins.net, 27 Dec 2023; arkeonews, 5 Feb 2024.
WORLD’S OLDEST WOODEN STRUCTURE
The discovery of ancient wooden logs in the banks of a river in Zambia (the Kalambo Falls archaeological site) in 2019 has changed our understanding of ancient human life. The wood had been used to build a structure almost half a million years ago. The findings, published in Nature, suggest stone-age people built what may have been shelters. The researchers also uncovered ancient wooden tools, including digging sticks. But what excited them most were two large interlocking logs, found at right angles to each other with shaped ends and wide, carved notches at the point they overlap. Both logs showed evidence of chopping and scraping, and were buried near tools used for scraping or carving, hand axes and other crafting equipment. Luminescence dating confirmed the logs were about 476,000 years old.
Until now, evidence for the human use of wood has been limited to making fire and crafting tools such as digging sticks and spears. One of the oldest wooden discoveries was a 400,000-year-old spear in prehistoric sands at Clacton-on-Sea,
Essex, in 1911 – although the earliest known example of modified wood is a polished plank from Israel dating to around 780,000 years ago.
Unless it is preserved in very specific conditions, wood simply rots away. But in the meandering riverbanks above the Kalambo Falls, close to the ZambiaTanzania border, it was waterlogged and essentially pickled for millennia. The size of the two logs, the smaller of which is about 1.5m (5ft), suggests whoever fitted them together was building something substantial. Unlikely to have been a hut or permanent dwelling, it could have formed part of a platform for a shelter, a raised walkway, a place to store wood or somewhere to sit.
It is unclear what species of ancient human – or hominid – built it. No bones have been found at this site so far. And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human – or Homo sapiens – fossils, which are about 315,000 years old. “It could have been Homo sapiens and we just haven’t discovered fossils from that age yet,” University of Aberystwyth archaeologist Prof Geoff Duller said. “But it could be a different species – Homo erectus or Homo naledi – there were a number of hominid species around at that time in southern Africa.” Homo heidelbergensis, for example… BBC News, sciencenews.org, 20 Sept 2023.