Unearthing the Family of Alexander the Great

The Remarkable Discovery of the Royal Tombs of Macedon

David Grant

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526763440
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

In October 336 BC, statues of the twelve Olympian Gods were paraded through the ancient capital of Macedon. Following them was a thirteenth, a statue of King Philip II who was deifying himself in front of the Greek world. Moments later Philip was stabbed to death; it was a world-shaking event that heralded in the reign of his son, Alexander the Great. Equally driven by a heroic lineage stretching back to gods and heroes, Alexander conquered the Persian Empire in eleven years but died mysteriously in Babylon. Some 2, 300 years later, a cluster of subterranean tombs were unearthed in northern Greece containing the remains of the Macedonian royal line. This is the remarkable story of the quest to identify the family of Alexander the Great and the dynasty that changed the Graeco-Persian world forever. Written in close cooperation with the investigating archaeologists, anthropologists, and scientists, this book presents the revelations, mysteries and controversies in a charming, accessible style. Is this really the tomb of Philip II, Alexander’s father? And who was the warrior woman buried with weapons and armour beside him?

Chapter 1

The Day of Archangels

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

—Aristotle

It was 8 November 1977, Archangels Day in Greece. Professor Manolis Andronikos, head of the archaeological excavations at the town of Vergina, looked about him at the dignitaries, police, priests and a gathering tribe of archaeologists descending upon the burial ground of the ancient city of still-debated identity he had been slowly unearthing for years. It was late in the excavation season and Andronikos had been planning to wrap up the year’s dig, with funds only available for a few more days of work.1 But now television cameras were arriving, tensions were high, and the weather was unseasonably mild and, thankfully, dry. He wondered what the day would reveal as he anxiously lit another cigarette.

The determined excavator was standing in what was left of the ‘Great Tumulus’, as the conspicuous man-made hill overlooking the town had been lately named. It was a mound that had defied him since 1962 when the first exploratory trenches were dug into the 100-metre-wide perimeter of soil and stone that has been compacted 12-metres high.2 But not until the spring of 1977 had sufficient funding and political support become available for a full-scale investigation of the tumulus, which was by now covered in 20-year-old pines.

Andronikos had logically assumed that its major secret lay under the hill’s hardest-to-excavate apex, where a hollow crater suggested the collapse of a significant structure below, when he and his colleagues, Professors Stella Drougou and Chrysoula Paliadeli, had begun probing the soil there in the late-August heat. Early exploratory trenches penetrated 8 metres down but still without results; the shallow crater at the summit turned out to be a time-consuming red herring and the disappointment of finding nothing more than virgin soil and scattered broken gravestones weighed heavy on the team. With no sign of construction or human activity below, they were beginning to wonder if the tumulus was a barren folly, and if it did hold subterranean secrets from antiquity, whoever buried them was outwitting modern archaeology.

Five new trial trenches were carved out, and over the next thirty-five days 18,000 cubic metres of earth were removed until a different soil texture told the excavators they had reached ancient ground level. But no structures were found; any tombs hidden by the tumulus must lie below the original terrain.

Manolis Andronikos was in the process of preparing an access ramp for the following season’s dig when he noted yet another change in the colour of the earth. The distribution of this redder soil, similar to that in the smaller mounds running across the adjacent cemetery, suggested an older and smaller tumulus originally stood under what was now the south-west perimeter of the great hill, so all efforts were concentrated there. Professor Drougou was studying the unearthed pottery and she immediately dated the sherds and bowls that lay about in hollows to the last quarter of the fourth century BC;3 here the charred remains of small animals suggested some form of burial ritual had been performed. A crudely constructed wall of unfired bricks was next encountered, but still it did not appear to be part of a recognizable structure.

On 11 October, the team finally revealed the foundations of a once freestanding building which appeared to have been destroyed and looted in antiquity. A second oblong box-like tomb lay beside it, below ancient ground level, with a stone slab missing from its roof; the soil heaped inside made it clear that it had also been opened and pillaged. Further into the mound, they slowly unearthed a stone facade which stood proud of a larger and more ornate building, and the importance of what lay below was betrayed by a remarkable hunting-scene painting above the entrance. The presence of protective limestone slabs holding back the weight of soil suggested that the sturdy marble doors beyond were still sealed. Andronikos’ pulse started racing.4

Greece was in the grip of election fever, the second democratic ballot to be held in seven years following an earlier dictatorship, but the nation was about to have its attention divided between politics and tombs. Manolis Andronikos had been excavating at Vergina for over twenty-five years on never-sufficient funds and with dwindling hope of finding an intact grave, work sobered by the fact that fifty of the fifty-one tombs already discovered in ancient Macedon had been robbed.5 But on that day the Olympian Gods smiled down. Each year on 8 November, the Greek Orthodox Church recognizes the feast of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel in a celebration of the sobriety and unity of the angelic powers; this was the day chosen for the first opening of the structure labelled ‘Tomb II’.

The heavy marble entrance doors were wedged closed under a warped stone lintel, and not trusting the ancient hinges, Andronikos adopted the method of the tomb robbers of old: he had the keystone from the rear of the vaulted roof removed, on this occasion by technicians from the Restoration Service of the Museum of Thessalonica.6 Andronikos was carefully lowered into a 5-metre-deep gloom cut by the first shafts of light in 2,300 years. Suspended on an ungrounded ladder, he slowly peered around him and then up with disappointment at the roughly plastered and undecorated walls of a square chamber measuring some 4.5 metres on each side.

A conservator was roped down and a clearing was found where the ladder could be grounded; they finally stepped onto the tomb floor. With security in mind and wishing to keep whatever the tomb contained undisclosed for the time being, Andronikos and the conservator, along with a member of the archaeological team, had the keystone replaced above them; the three were immersed in a black, sepulchral silence.7 Andronikos shone his torch about the chamber until the beam fell upon an ancient object standing in one corner. And then his breathing stopped.

It was convention to conduct a thorough analysis of a site and its artefacts before a discovery as momentous as this was made public. Although Andronikos had tried to remain ‘cool, calm and collected in order to live up to the responsibilities of the situation’ as he emerged from the tomb, following the tenets of his mentor, the archaeologist Konstantine Rhomaios, he felt the discovery demanded more than ‘a single, solemn announcement’ to the world.8 He called for a press conference in Thessalonica, but he first informed the President of the Republic and the newly re-elected Prime Minister of Greece, Konstantine Karamanlis.9 Dignitaries, politicians, historians, archaeologists and those sufficiently aware of the gravitas of the find were soon descending upon the hillside village of Vergina.

Ancient Macedon was finally yielding up its secrets to a world no less fractured by politics and war than the nation Philip and his son Alexander had left behind them. And for a brief moment, when standing apart from his colleagues after they ascended from the crypt, Manolis Andronikos inhaled the very essence of the day of the ancient burials, without revealing to anyone else what he had just witnessed inside.

Chapter 2

A Meeting of Controversies

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

—Cicero

30 January 2017

M oments before the plane descended into the low cloud that shrouded Thessalonica, I was dazzled by the rugged snow-capped peaks that separated north-western Greece from Albania, or, in another age, divided the cantons of ancient Macedon from the neighbouring kingdom of Epirus. It was the last sun I was to see on this journey, but not the last snow on a day when heaven and earth seemed to converge on the windscreen of my car. I drove through the unfinished network of concrete overpasses and new ring roads that catapult you out of the city and headed south-west towards the Thermaic Gulf, whose marshes were malaria-ridden until the last century. On the fog-bound horizon, I could just make out the hills at the foot of the Pierian mountains that still cradle ancient secrets in the modern village of Vergina.

I had unknowingly landed in the middle of a nationwide strike which had become a regular calendar event; the day was witness to the chaotic closing of highways by a legion of farmers’ tractors in protest at pension reforms and other austerity measures to prop up the beleaguered economy. Mandatory detours confounded my GPS and sent me towards the inland ranges that back-dropped Veria, a settlement first mentioned by the Greek historian Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War.1 With the navigation system barking in one ear like a frustrated Balkan dictator, and the traffic police bellowing diversions in the other, I swung south over the once gold-rich Haliacmon River and its new hydroelectric dam, a torrent that in centuries past cut off entire communities when its waters were swollen.

Mist still shrouded the adjacent hills and snow clung precariously to sunless slopes; what should have been a one-hour journey had taken almost three-and-ahalf hours. A piercing wind was rolling off the mountains as I parked, and it was now 3.35 pm. I knew the Vergina museum was due to close at 5.00 pm, so I pulled my jacket tight around my shoulders, purchased a ticket and quickly headed to the entrance and down into the bowels of the earth.

Although this was my first visit to the archaeological site, I was familiar with the museum’s layout, contents and exhibits, as well as their history and provenance, because the reign of Alexander the Great and his family started and ended rather tragically here at the ancient royal necropolis. But I had little time to let my thoughts drift through the gloom of the eerie catacomb, made more otherworldly by the fact that I was the last remaining visitor on this short winter day. I darted between the tombs to better gauge their relative positions, because this had been difficult to fathom from the few research papers and pictorials that had been published; each structure, I knew, still guarded a particular secret and a deep historical conundrum.

A security guard became suspicious and tracked me all the while to make sure flashes were not going off, because photography is strictly forbidden. I made mental notes, I listed questions in my head and vowed to come back in better weather to tramp the aboveground ruins of the cemetery, the palace with its close-by theatre and the city walls that sprawl towards the neighbouring town of Palatitsia, a reminder of the vastness of the former capital of Macedon.

When I emerged into the late-January twilight, heavy iron doors were swung closed and bolted behind me; I had lingered rather longer than the museum staff had hoped. Then I realized I would be late for my meeting with Professor Theodore Antikas and Laura Wynn-Antikas, the anthropologists who, for the past eight years, had been analyzing the bones from Tomb II, now dubbed the ‘Tomb of Philip II’. I had many questions for them; a few of them obscure, some more fundamental and others that might prove uncomfortable, but I judged my first had to be: ‘how does it feel to be holding the remains of the family of Alexander the Great?’

On Theo’s advice, I took the inland route from Vergina through the Pierian hills and its scattered villages to meet up with the southbound highway. The road was almost deserted as I wound my way past Palatitsia, Meliki and southeast through the white houses and orange-tiled roofs of Neokastro, Livadi and Paliampela. I arrived in Makrygialos at 6.45 pm and made my way to one of the only two open tavernas on the grey, windswept seafront, and after dialling the number I had been given, I heard the warm familiar voice of Theo in tones of comfortably ageing leather.

‘Kalispera David, you were supposed to be here yesterday, no?’

‘No Theo, I was stuck in Berlin yesterday and rescheduled for today.’

‘No matter, welcome to ancient Pydna; why they stupidly renamed it “Makrygialos” I have no idea. Laura will drive down to collect you. You can’t miss her: she is a redhead amongst Greeks.’

Apparently, in 1923, the bishop of the nearby new town of Kitros suggested the new name for its neighbour: ‘Makrygialos’, meaning ‘long beach’, though Theo is raising support to have the decision reversed. That might prove tricky, because Kitros has since staked its own claim to be the site of the ancient city of Pydna where famed sieges and the final battle between Macedon and Rome took place.

I had not yet met Laura, a Californian by birth but of clearly Celtic descent, and I had only spoken to Theo once in person when he was visiting his son in England the previous Christmas. I quickly downed the small aperitif I believed I deserved for getting there at all in the face of the strike, sleet, roadblocks and a petulant GPS, and I tried to settle up with the taverna owner, who politely refused payment; he and Theo, it transpired, watch their favourite football team there.

Laura arrived like a highly charged battery of anthropological discovery and osteoarchaeological frustration. By her own admission, she doesn’t like ruins, tombs or bones that refuse to give up their secrets. She greeted me warmly, but with more than a glance of forensic curiosity and suspicion as we jumped in her compact four-by-four.

‘Hammond used to stay there,’ she told me, pointing at the modest and nowempty hotel at the southern end of the harbour. I looked across the bay where flamingos were stealing themselves against the breeze and the whitecaps, and to the faded pink building beyond, whose walls appeared void of their former romance. I knew, as did any historian of the era of Alexander the Great, that it was the British scholar, Professor Nicholas Hammond, the Professor Emeritus of Greek at Bristol and later the University of Cambridge, who voiced the ‘heretical’ idea that Vergina was, in fact, the ancient city of Aegae, the long-lost first capital of Macedon.2 That was at the First International Symposium of Ancient Macedonia held in 1968, and time proved Hammond correct.

The evening commenced besides a blazing hearth at the home of Theo and Laura, with thick slabs of semi-soft cheese from the Peloponnese and a rapid fire of questions. I handed her one of the first off-the-press copies of my technical treatise on Alexander, which opened and closed, not by coincidence, with the Vergina excavations. She began to read, while Theo and I took a more meandering path through the subject that first drew us together by correspondence nine years before. I noted Laura’s enthusiastic head nodding and some occas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Day of Archangels
• Chapter 2: A Meeting of Controversies
• Chapter 3: How a Kingdom May Rise and Fall and Vanish
• Chapter 4: A Phoenix Rises from the Ashes
• Chapter 5: The Scientist’s Elation and the Desecrator’s Guilt
• Chapter 6: Of Scythians and Amazons
• Chapter 7: The First War of Women
• Chapter 8: The Battle of the Bones
• Chapter 9: Bones Don’t Lie!
• Chapter 10: Orphic Masks and Burial Rituals
• Chapter 11: Entering the Chthonic Debate
• Chapter 12: Finding Material Witnesses
• Chapter 13: Afterlife in Amphipolis
• Chapter 14: The Queen’s Gold and the King’s Craftsmen
• Chapter 15: Warrior Father, Warrior Daughter and the Bactrian
• Chapter 16: Preparing to Gene-Tag the Royals
• Chapter 17: The Little Summer of Saint Demetrius
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate section