An extremely interesting study of the Vergina tombs

[kirispupis]

Recently, I came across this paper that was published in December 2023 and I found some fascinating tidbits.

I'd previously read about the tombs both from Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia, where she devoted an appendix to her opinions, and two books by Kottaridi and Angeliki containing photos and findings from the tombs. However, Bartsiokas' new review contains some facets that appear to significantly change things. 

 

Alexander IV was not 14 when he died, but was instead closer to 18

Since there's strong documentation for Alexander IV's birth as being a few months after Alexander's death, this means he must have been killed not in 309 BCE, but much closer to 305 BCE, when Kassander and the others declared themselves king and announced his death. To me, that makes his assassination even more deliberate. At 18, he should have been king. Therefore, Kassander's (and the others') decision must have been to either fully install him as king and give him their allegiance, or kill him and keep the status quo. They obviously chose the latter.

 

Philip III was buried by Olympias, but Adea Eurydike was not

Clearly, this indicates Olympias had complete contempt for Adea Eurydike. Immediately after they were killed, Olympias did bury Philip III, but she left Adea unburied - which was an extreme sign of disrespect. Clearly Olympias had major issues with her. Six months later, Kassander buried both bodies in Tomb II and furnished it with many lavish pieces. As the paper mentions, this probably wasn't out of the goodness of his heart. It was expected protocol for assuming the throne.

 

The items in Tomb II belong to Adea Eurydike, not to Philip II

The authors mention that one of the greaves matches up with a wound Adea received during her life. There is also strong evidence in her remains of regular horse riding. Carney believed the same and Bartsiokas agrees that all of the weapons and martial artifacts found in Tomb II belonged to her. Her martial behaviors may have been the impetus for Olympias' hatred.

 

Adea Eurydike was older than earlier supposed

Most earlier material placed her at an age between 20-24. However, evidence from her skeletal remains put her between 25-29. Since we know she died in 317 BCE, that would place her birth between 342 and 346 BCE. Amyntas IV, Adea's father, was killed by Alexander in 336 BCE in order to "simplify" the dynastic succession. I'd have to go back through Carney to see if she looks into Adea's birth, but it would seem logical that Kynane (her mother) was likely to have been born before 357 BCE then.

 

Kleopatra (Philip II's last wife) had just given birth when she died

The remains of the baby were found in Tomb I with Philip. Evidence shows the baby died after delivery (Kleopatra did not die in pregnancy) and she was about 18 when she died. To me, this has the potential to be the biggest bombshell of the findings, though the authors did not speculate the sex of the child because there is controversy in the current methods. However, Pausanias, who - based on this paper - got it right that Kleopatra and her child were killed very soon after Philip's death, believed it was a boy.

In my opinion, it is far too convenient for Philip to be assassinated only days after his wife gave birth to a boy. This would have been an extreme danger to Alexander's succession because Kleopatra was fully Macedonian, whereas Oympias was not. Therefore, the child would have been more "pure". Add in that Philip was clearly infatuated with his new wife - evidenced by being buried with her - and it was only a matter of time before the child upstaged Alexander. Therefore, the motivation for Olympias and/or Alexander to arrange for his assassination would have been extreme.

 

So, those are some of the nuggets I pulled from this fascinating paper. Now for some coins.

This type is usually attributed to Polyperchon, but I believe that's a mistake. Polyperchon was not even in Macedon at the time. However, it was under effective control of Adea Eurydike - in the name of her disabled husband Philip III.

Philip III
AR 1/5 Tetradrachm 2.57g
Minted under Eurydike (Adea), Amphipolis, 318-317 BCE
Le Rider Taf. 46, 29; SNG ANS 731–735
Vs.: Kopf des Apollon mit Tänie n. r.
Rs.: Jüngling reitet n. r., unten seitlich gesehener Schild

 

I have a number of lifetime coins of Alexander the Great, but I often show this one because it's less commonly seen.

Alexander III 'the Great' AR Diobol
'Amphipolis', circa 336-323 BCE
Young head of Herakles to right, wearing lion skin headdress / ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ, two eagles standing facing one another on thunderbolt.
Price 155; HGC 3.1, 906. 1.32g, 11mm, 3h.

 

Macedonian Kingdom, Philip II AR Tetradrachm.
Pella mint, ca 354-349 BCE
22-24 mm., 13.68g.
Laureate head of Zeus right / ΦIΛΛIΠOY, Philip II, diademed & in kausia, on horseback left, raising right hand

 

This was minted under Alexander IV, who was buried in Tomb III.

Kingdom of Macedon, Philip III Arrhidaios AR Tetradrachm
In the name and types of Alexander III
Struck under Menes, with Perdikkas as regent
Tyre, dated RY 29 of Azemilkos = 321/0 BC
 Head of Herakles to right, wearing lion skin headdress / Zeus Aëtophoros seated to left, holding sceptre; ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ to right, -|O (Phoenician 'K = 'Ozmilk [king of Tyre]) above ||| ||| =/||| (Phoenician date [29]) in left field.
Price 3275 (Ake); Newell, Dated 32 (same); DCA 737; HGC 3.1, 941 (Alexander IV). 17.03g, 26mm, 6h. 

 

Philip III is buried in Tomb II with Adea Eurydike. His remains are in excellent condition and show no signs of any injuries, consistent with the ancient sources.

Philip III Arrhidaios
AR Tetradrachm 319/318 BCE
16.95g, 26mm, 12h
Struck under Laomedon, in the types of Alexander III. Sidon, dated RY 15 of Abdalonymos = 319/8 BC. Head of Herakles to right, wearing lion skin headdress / Zeus Aëtophoros seated to left, holding sceptre; ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΥ to right, O (date) in left field, ΣI below throne.
Price P175; Newell, Dated 45; DCA 878

 

Kassander didn't have the best of reputations, but in this story Olympias appears to have upstaged him in cruelty.

Kassander
AE 18 mm, 6.09 g, 11 h
Amphipolis (?)
Laureate head of Apollo to right. Rev. ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ - ΚΑΣΣΑΝΔΡΟΥ Tripod; to left, monogram; to right, kerykeion.
McClean 3553. SNG München 1030

 

There are no coins during her lifetime that I can attribute to Olympias, but this was minted of her roughly 600 years later.

Macedon, Koinon of Macedon
Pseudo-autonomous issue, time of Gordian III, 238-244 CE
AE 27 mm, 14.13 g, 6 h
Beroea
ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ Head of Alexander the Great to right, wearing lion's skin headdress.
Rev. ΚΟΙΝΟΝ ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΩΝ ΔΙC ΝΕΩ Olympias, as Hygieia, seated left, feeding serpent from patera held in right hand, and resting left elbow on back of throne.
AMNG 721a. RPC VII.2, 239

 

BTW, yes I did watch Netflix's new series on Alexander. It was interesting, but I had difficulties with all the inaccuracies, the simplifications, and extremely important sections missing (his destruction of Thebes and the Siege of Tyre especially noteworthy).

Please post your relevant coins!

[Ryro]

Thanks for sharing this excellent article and post! Great coins and research as always, my friend😀

Here's what we thought was Philip ll's shield, but if I'm reading this correctly was Adea Eurydike (?)*not my shield:

and then Philip...twice over:

Olympias playing with the snake😉:

Lifetime Alexander tet with Macedonian shield and other fun Alexanders:

Philip III Arrhidaios:

And Arrhidaios over stamped by that POS Kassander:

[kirispupis]

33 minutes ago, Ryro said:

Thanks for sharing this excellent article and post! Great coins and research as always, my friend😀

Here's what we thought was Philip ll's shield, but if I'm reading this correctly was Adea Eurydike (?)*not my shield:

Based on my reading of the paper and a scan through Carney and my book with a photo of the shield, I think the logical conclusion is it wasn't Philip's.

Philip's tomb was looted, most likely by gallic soldiers under Pyrrhos. The only thing we have from him are some nicely painted walls and his bones, which were scattered with those of Kleopatra and their son/daughter.

However, Carney speculates that many of the weapons found in Tomb II may not have been Eurydike's. She states that Adea's body was left unburied and therefore would have been stripped of anything valuable, but I recall the ancient sources state that she was imprisoned first by Olympias and then killed. I assume her armor and weapons would have been taken before imprisonment. 

From Bartsiokas, the greaves certainly match since they line up with a leg fracture she had. He speculates that the rest of the weapons were hers too, but I think it's entirely possible that there were substitutes, since it seems doubtful that everything would have been collected six months later.

To me, the most exciting part here is that this validates key parts of the ancient narratives. There's always speculation that ancient writers significantly skewed events, but this evidence confirms that much of what they said did actually happen.

[Kaleun96]

Thanks for sharing! This is/was right up my alley as back in university my honours thesis was on using statistical methods to determine sex from incomplete skeletal remains, though I've since forgotten most of what I had learnt. After a quick skim through the paper, I would say that the historical context for these tombs is doing a lot of heavy lifting in verifying the age and sex of the remains. Even with complete skeletons it can be difficult to say with a good degree of certainty whether a given person is male or female and in this case we're dealing with some scattered fragmentary remains or partially cremated remains. The leg wound for the skeleton in Tomb I definitely seems significant though, as it aligns so well with historical sources.

That's not to say we shouldn't use the historical context to help form conclusions, only that we should be a bit wary about relying on them too heavily and be clear in the inherent problems of doing so. It seems that in the past this has happened with these tombs (e.g. the supposed eye wound in the cranial bones of Tomb II). It's also easy to get caught in a tautological trap where you say the bones are believed to belong to individual X because the historical sources support it and the historical sources are accurate and reliable because the bones of individual X support them.

So rather than the evidence from the tombs providing strong support for the historical narratives or vice versa, I think the reliability of both exist instead on a bit of a shaky middle ground. Though out of the two, I think it's clear the historical sources are doing more to influence the analysis of the tomb than vice versa, which leaves open the possibility that if the historical material is inaccurate then the conclusions about the tomb could change significantly too. Throw in the issues with the confusion over which material belonged to which tomb (as well as some missing material) and I get the feeling this is far from the last we'll hear of studies on the identities of the remains in these tombs.

On another note, I wonder if any of the teeth are in sufficient condition to derive age estimates from. Teeth sort of have growth lines like rings in a tree and you can count them to help determine how long the tooth had been growing and estimate age at death. I know traditionally that it has required some destructive testing (taking histological slices) but back when I was still at uni work was being done to correlate that with perikymata, which are the surface representations of these growth lines, so an age determination could be made non-destructively.

Either way, will dig into some more later. Super exciting to see more and more research being done on these tombs and the conclusions as presented in the paper sound pretty reasonable so far.

[Curtis JJ]

That is really interesting stuff! So is this a different broken leg from the one attributed to Philip II's limp, or a reinterpretation of those bones as belonging to Adea?

It's always interesting to read about and ponder all the killing that went on among the royals in antiquity. Sometimes I wonder, "Who would want the top job," but then I remember everyone else would be murdered, too, and even if you weren't one of the royals, you were probably going to experience some other horrible fate before old age. May as well fight it out, I guess, with whatever tools are at your disposal.

My Philip II struck temp Kassander, I guess:

I really like the little Tetrobols or "Fifth Tetradrachms" or whatever they were...even if they're harder to photograph!

 

My favorite examples of Alexander III Tetradrachm (photo by Kirk Davis), Drachm, and Hemidrachm:

 

Drachm (Stack's/NGC, ex Salton & SNG Lockett 1501):

 

Hemidrachm (photo by Zeus, who had it as Drachm). These are a LOT harder to find than a Drachm, I got lucky here. If you collect the Tetradrachms you can probably recognize this engraver's work, very distinctive head of Herakles:

Edited February 6 by Curtis JJ

[kirispupis]

1 hour ago, Curtis JJ said:

That is really interesting stuff! So is this a different broken leg from the one attributed to Philip II's limp, or a reinterpretation of those bones as belonging to Adea?

Per my understanding of the paper:

• The bones of Philip II, his wife Kleopatra, and their newborn child are in Tomb I
• The bones of Philip III and Adea Eurydike are in Tomb II. In that tomb were also found a lot of weapons and two ossuaries.
• The bones of Alexander IV are in Tomb III
• Tomb I was looted in antiquity. We have no weapons or interesting artifacts from there.
• The logic therefore is that the weapons belonged to (or were assigned to) Adea, since historical sources and skeletal remains indicate she was more warlike. There are no blemishes on the skeleton of Philip III, which aligns with historical sources. However, Adea's skeleton shows evidence she was a regular horse rider and she had a contusion from a fracture on her left leg that matched her left greave.

There has been debate on whether the bones in Tomb II were Philip II or Philip III. This paper provides a very strong argument they were Philip III.

[kirispupis]

7 hours ago, Kaleun96 said:

That's not to say we shouldn't use the historical context to help form conclusions, only that we should be a bit wary about relying on them too heavily and be clear in the inherent problems of doing so. It seems that in the past this has happened with these tombs (e.g. the supposed eye wound in the cranial bones of Tomb II). It's also easy to get caught in a tautological trap where you say the bones are believed to belong to individual X because the historical sources support it and the historical sources are accurate and reliable because the bones of individual X support them.

I agree with your main point, but I should also caution that it's impossible to identify any skeletal remains with any historical person without heavily relying on the history involving that person. In this case, they used skeletal evidence to determine the sex, age at death, and skeletal wounds of the remains, then referred to history for an opinion on who matched these parameters best.

Note that the second half of the paper goes into depth on all of the competing claims.

One interesting tidbit I recall from Carney's paper that I didn't see in this one was that what tipped Carney off to Philip II being assigned to Tomb I was that the tomb was of an earlier style consistent with mid-4th century tombs, while Tomb II was a later style. She therefore concluded that Tomb I was built before Tombs II and III and that Tombs II and III did not exist at the time of Philip II's death. She raised the possibility that Philip II could have been moved to Tomb II, but she felt that was inconsistent with burial practices and highly unlikely.

[Kaleun96]

On 2/6/2024 at 7:22 PM, kirispupis said:

In this case, they used skeletal evidence to determine the sex, age at death, and skeletal wounds of the remains, then referred to history for an opinion on who matched these parameters best.

I think they relied on both the historical context and the skeletal remains for parts of this. They don't have enough to make conclusive determinations as they do for some of their claims IMO. Their paper is laid out as "we determined this from the skeleton and found that it supports these individuals based on the history" but that doesn't mean their research occurred in that fashion. Almost certainly it didn't - they were aware of the historical context when assessing the characteristics of the remains.

As I've mentioned I've largely forgotten what I studied but I can try and provide some more context around what the study says:

"[Individual 2] Sex determination was based on facial remains. The supraorbital region of the frontal bone is smooth with no signs of any supraorbital ridge, and the orbital edge is thin, indicating that it likely belonged to a female individual"

The supraorbital region is a useful indicator but it's one of about five indicators used from the skull, others being the eye sockets, the chin, the jaw, and the mastoid process. Here they only have two characteristics to evaluate and (again IIRC), the mastoid is the preferred trait from the skull for sex determination. 

"[Individual 1] The eruption of M3 is about twelve years later than that of M1 so that the male is expected to be a middle age adult. These observations are consistent with a Philip II and Cleopatra identification of Tomb I"

Touching on age briefly, I think their logic here sounds reasonable but I don't think there's enough evidence to say it's definitively a mid-40s individual (Philip II) vs a 39 year old individual (Philip III). It probably leans towards slightly older, and their other paper said the age estimate is wide but centres on ~45yo but it's difficult to age a skeleton with high precision at this point in its life (i.e. well past the onset of adulthood). I think it's consistent with being either Philip II or III, probably more likely II but to say "the Philip II/Tomb I hypothesis is confirmed" is a stretch.

Their older paper goes into a lot more detail on the sexing and ageing and I think the sexing for Individual 1 seems fairly robust, less so for Individual 2. As mentioned the ageing for Individual 1 is helpful but not conclusive and they hand-wave away it being Philip III or Amyntas III. They say Amyntas was in "advanced age" but some estimates I've found suggest he may have only been around 50 when he died. The authors cite their 2008 paper in regards to the "advanced age" claim but it also goes uncited in that paper, they just say Amyntas was too old to be the Individual in Tomb 1.

So what I mean by them relying on the historical context when making determinations about age and sex is that I think they're possibly letting the history bias their interpretations of the skeletal remains. I'm not saying it necessarily a conscious bias, it could be subconscious, but when it comes to assessing these various traits and signs from skeletal remains, you have to be as objective as possible to not see what you want to see. It's tough to do properly because anyone who knows anything about the tomb is going to come in with some ideas about who is thought to have been in each tomb. Would they have made the same conclusions if we had no idea who the occupants were? We'll never know. But it is entirely possible that the individuals in Tomb 1 aren't even the ones who were originally interred in it. In the best case scenario where these determinations are done blind of any additional context and with complete remains, they're still far from perfect and can be subject to significant observer error.

I'm sure you also picked up on the academic "fighting" between the authors and those of another paper. The authors don't try and hide their animosity, there's a lot of snark from both sides. That's never good and it also left me with the impression that there's a possibility they're letting the historical context and their previous research guide their interpretations beyond what can be supported by the physical evidence. But just to be clear, I'm not making any accusations or statements of fact. I just think it's a very touchy subject, ripe for bias to creep into interpretations, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone rebuts with an equally convincing sounding argument in another paper.

Edited February 7 by Kaleun96