Golden Burial
During the recent Diggings tour of Greece and Italy we visited the tomb of Philip of Macedon at Vergina, the site of ancient Aigai. The impressive mound that covered the tomb was even more impressive as we approached, for there was a door in the side. When we had paid our admission fee and filed through the door we were astonished to realise that the mound was completely hollow!
During excavations the archaeologists completely demolished the original mound as they uncovered one tomb after another. When the work was finished they built a concrete dome over the tombs and replaced a thin covering of earth to restore the mound to its original appearance.
Inside the hollow mound we wandered around a series of display cases and information boards. In the cases were some of the fantasic golden objects found in the tombs - huge wreaths made of tiny gold leaves, each individually attached to gold wires and woven into the wreath, crowns and other forms of jewellery. Scattered apparently at random among the cases and boards were staircases leading down to four - or was it five? - large stone chambers which formed the tombs for members of the Macedonian royal family.
There was the tomb of Phillip, a tomb with beautiful frescoes, another tomb which left no distinct impression and one that had me positively hopping with excitement - it was the tomb of Alexander's son by the Afghan princess Roxana! We had already visited Amphipolis where the boy and his mother had been seized as they arrived in Greece and then murdered by one of Alexander's ambitious generals. Now here was the tomb!
Unfortunately we were in the hands of a Greek guide who had worked at Vergina and was intimately acquainted with the tombs and the finds. He lectured interminably in front of each case and information board and when I finally managed to get a word in edgeways and point out that we had to leave in five minutes if we were to catch our plane he was most taken aback - afronted, almost. The group had to literally jog past the tomb of Roxana's son, past the last half dozen display cases with their magnificent jewellery, and jog down the street to where our bus waited for us. (We made the airport with ten minutes to spare!)
The following year (2008) the archaeologists uncovered a bronze urn inside which was a gold funerary urn containing ashes and bones. Buried with them were another of the fantastic golden wreaths. For reasons that are not very clear - probably the lack of an acceptable alternative - they concluded that the bones might be those of Heracles, an illegitimate son of Alexander the Great, who was also murdered around 309 BC. "This is just a hypothesis, based on archaeological data, as there is no inscription to prove it," said Chrysoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli, the archaeologist who uncovered the burial.
What puzzled the archaeologists was the fact that the urn was buried beneath the stone paving of the ancient agora of Aigai. This was not the normal custom of Greek or Macedonian burial, but it might be explained by the secrecy with which poor Heracles was both murdered and buried.
However as the archaeologists continued to dig they made a second discovery, this time of two large silver urns only a few yards from the gold urn. One of the silver urns contained another set of bones. Saatsoglou-Paliadeli, who is the professor of classical archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, declined to speculate on who this latest discovery might be. As she points out, they don't even know the sex or age of the person yet and tests were currently being made to find out as much as possible from the bones.
What makes the find particularly puzzling is that the archaeologists believe that the bones were first buried somewhere else, then dug up a short time later and re-interred in the agora. Either someone was seeking revenge on the dead or was engaged in some secret and probably illegal act. The first appears to be ruled out by the presence of the wreath and, indeed, of the gold and silver urns; the second alternative is difficult to explain in the light of present knowledge.
Unfortunately the history of the kings of Macedon is replete with incidents of treachery, murder, revenge and downright nastiness, so when looking for an explanation the field is wide - too wide, perhaps, to ever find a solution to the mystery.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
