11 ms·

Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece

218 points by diodorus 5y ago

rpmisms 5y ago
That's amazing. Gold is a non-bio-reactive metal, and apparently they figured that out too.
- senortumnus 5y ago
  Agreed - very sophisticated treatment.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  There are a quite a few assumptions in the article regarding this being gold thread, you can of course pile on even more assumptions assuming those first ones are true but it becomes quite a house of cards like that.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  They would have observed that gold doesn't rust, for example, and it was known for its enduring purity.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  They knew that wearing silver or copper rings corrode, and gold didn't.
zetalyrae 5y ago
2017 paper: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/download/8928/18270 https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/do... New paper: http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2).pdf http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2...
wolverine876 5y ago
Let's not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine. And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it's apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity's existence. So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I'm simplifying a very great deal.)
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine. Humans had larger brains in hunter & gatherer times. Similar to domesticated animals, it got smaller once we settled down and started agriculture.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    I don’t think the correlation between brain size and general intelligence is that strong. Maybe the hunter gatherer used a bigger part of his brain to quickly and accurately interpret impressions, to find the food and not become food himself. The domestic man might have been better at tasks like figuring out how much of his seeds he could eat and how much he must save to plant next spring, even with a slightly smaller brain.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- david927 5y ago
  > Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically proved it. That's pretty fast, really.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    They were too busy not dying of starvation to think about gravity.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > That's pretty fast, really. Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.
peatmoss 5y ago
Article mentions this—he clearly must have been a person of importance to get this kind of treatment. Reading this kind of story makes me immensely grateful to be a nobody alive at this time and place. Hopefully future generations will similarly look back at us with pity for the relative barbarism and deprivation we endure.
jacquesm 5y ago
"The wire is long gone, but Agelarakis suspects it was gold. There was no evidence of a silver alloy, which would have left grayish discoloration, nor were there traces of a patina or greenish cupric acid stains that would have been left by copper or bronze wires, he found. "It must have been some kind of gold thread, a gold wire or something like that, as is recommended in the Hippocratic corpus that was compiled in the fifth century B.C.," Agelarakis said. Gold is soft and pliable but strong and nontoxic, he added, making it a good choice for this type of medical treatment." That's pretty thin evidence, it may just as easily have been sheepguts (used for violin strings, for instance, in spite of being called catgut!).
- cobbzilla 5y ago
  Wouldn’t using dead flesh increase the risk of infection? In the article, it’s also mentioned that Hippocrates recommended using gold, and many of his teachings were still followed in Byzantine times. So what’s your next theory? Gold sounds fairly plausible to me.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    I was kind of skeptical too, but then I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History: > Gut strings were being used as medical sutures as early as the 3rd century AD as Galen, a prominent Greek physician from the Roman Empire, is known to have used them.[4]
    - gnramires 5y ago
      > Catgut suture is a type of surgical suture that is naturally degraded by the body's own proteolytic enzymes It couldn't be an organic suture, unless it was supposed to last very little (on wiki it says 90 days). Also only something study like a metal could hold a bone in place reliably, I imagine.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        90 days would probably be enough for a bone to set. But given that the wiring was threaded between the teeth, the sutures would be subject to the digestive enzymes of the mouth, which are significantly more aggressive than anything outside of the digestive system.
jrsdav 5y ago
This is really fascinating. Seeing the grave of human remains is one thing, but standing out in the photos is this fragment of pottery (likely a jug or a pitcher), where you can see the throwing rings of the person who crafted it, along with marks where they smoothed out the handle it was after attached. I feel pretty desensitized to skeletal remains (especially apropos in the month of October, Halloween and all), but for some reason seeing that vessel with its clear characteristics of being wrought with hands like mine, really brings home the humanity of this situation. It has me imagining hundreds of possible stories explaining what happened here and how these people might have lived.
- ridgeguy 5y ago
  I'm with you. In the Israel Museum, there are ceramic pots from ~ 5K - 7K years ago with the makers' fingerprints easily visible. I couldn't help wondering who they were, how they lived their lives, etc.
- mattlondon 5y ago
  For me the fact that this guy's head was buried in the grave of a 5 year old child (that is not chance - someone did that deliberately) says a lot about humanity. Someone took his head and put it with what I am assuming is his kid. Daddy and his child together at the end. As I sit here watching my 2 year old play, I find this story quite touching in that regard.
HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
The site kept scrolling up / refocusing to the video playing above as I was trying to read the article. Never mind then...
dimator 5y ago
This was probably done without any kind of pain killing anything, besides (just guessing) alcohol. It must have been absolutely excruciating for weeks, before the jaw healed. Unbelievable.
- elihu 5y ago
  Googling "Byzantine era anesthetics" brings up a whole long list of research papers and articles. Apparently (from the summary of one of the articles) opium has been used as a pain killer for a very long time, and the Byzantines used laudanum. https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html Maybe they knocked the guy out with laudanum before the procedure, which would have made the whole thing much easier and far less unpleasant for the patient.
optimalsolver 5y ago
I highly recommend John Romer's Byzantium: The Lost Empire. It's available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI
tyingq 5y ago
Looks similar to the jaw break Stefan Struve (MMA fighter) got from Mark Hunt. https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_crop_fill/q_86%2Cf_auto/252ccb9b72f94ceb5e5e30d65f73a800e5be16e1 https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_cro...
panick21 5y ago
Eastern Rome (wrongly called Byzantine, something most people then wouldn't even have known what Byzantium is) went on and was fully the Rome Empire. It never actually fell. All the learning and information was continued for the most part. Sadly even they had a lot of problems in the 'dark age' (not a good name either). First their was the Justinian Plague and then they had a lot of civil war and conflict over Iconoclasm. In general because of how Europe developed, and how the Renaissance happened in terms of intellectual history a lot of this history is only remember by very few people. By 1000AD the Roman Empire was still going strong, being the most powerful state in along the Mediterranean. Edit: Check 'The History of Byzantium' Podcast, a follow on from the 'History of Rome' Podcast but by a different person. Thersites the Historian has lot of good content on yt, for example https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEQru6POYgetKOdzDYaLyjBkymSN9XeyY https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEQru6POYgetKOdzDYaLy...
- johnnycerberus 5y ago
  It never actually fell. I've heard that the continuity of the Byzantine Empire was assured by the Cantacuzino branch [1] that emigrated north to what we call today Romania and they played a role in the creation of the country along freemasonry. Actually, Romania is an invention of the freemasonry and one of the Cantacuzinos descendants was an official member, Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino.[2] Sounds like an Assasins's Creed saga but it is true. Exctract from Wikipedia: "In advance of the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, a Freemason-inspired secret society known as Frăţia ("The Brotherhood") was set up. Ion Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, Christian Tell, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Cezar Bolliac, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, C. A. Rosetti, Dimitrie and Ion Brătianu, Alexandru G. Golescu and others belonged to Frăţia and were at the forefront of the revolution." The elite of what was soon-to-become-Romania consisted entirely of people following Masonic principles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantacuzino_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantacuzino_family [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_in_Romania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_in_Romania
redwood 5y ago
People who enjoy this will like https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
DoreenMichele 5y ago
In every generation, you have talented people doing things no one else can do. Knowledge and skill are routinely lost and rediscovered. I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!" We routinely act like everything we do is the most special and smartest thing ever and I've seen far too many articles and TV shows drawing this exact same conclusion that "Holy cow! They knew how to do things we would have never guessed!" (And sometimes we can't figure out how in heck they did it.) I think the assumption that it was gold wiring is questionable. That should be framed more like "One possible explanation is gold for thus and such reasons." It shouldn't be framed like "We are such smarty pants and they are so amazingly stupid that this one explanation is the only real possibility." That general trend is amazingly annoying given how common this type of "revelation" about historic peoples is.
- nyolfen 5y ago
  > I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!" nothing in the article suggests this, and nobody who knows who the byzantines were think they were primitive uneducated people; in fact, the piece makes reference to medical techniques that were passed down in writing for centuries. the entire tone of this comment is seriously bizarre
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    The fact that it emphasizes that they had knowledge passed down for centuries is part of the problem. You never see articles about current surgeries framed that way though it's equally true. No one needs to say "Modern surgeons use knowledge gained over centuries -- millennia even! -- to do their job!" We all know that, so it literally goes without saying. Needing to document that this culture had hundreds of years of such teachings to draw upon implicitly signals that we generally do think they are primitive, uneducated, etc regardless of your opinion about what people knowledgeable about the culture likely think of them. The title asserts it was gold threaded. Why assert that? Combination of click bait and we think we are so smart that there couldn't be another explanation. We just flat out refuse to say "We don't really know and it's possible they had medical techniques we have absolutely no knowledge of that could potentially improve modern day surgical techniques if we learned them."
robotresearcher 5y ago
"He was the military leader, most probably of the fort," Agelarakis said. "Therefore, he was decapitated ... by the Ottomans when they took over the fort." They just... make this up.
- momirlan 5y ago
  Maybe he was decapitated by his own family then...
steelframe 5y ago
I love how the computer geek community here is so vigorously second-guessing the domain experts on this. (It's fun to do that, I guess.)
- swader999 5y ago
  It's rather tedious. I find it impressive they could fix the jaw. Who cares what material they used.
ekianjo 5y ago
The headline makes it seem like they found the gold thread together with the jaw but none of this happened. its just supposition. Another case of bad science reporting based on pure assumptions.
cwojno 5y ago
From the title, I thought this was a new consensus algorithm...
Vaderv 5y ago
How do we know he was decapitated ? Maybe he lost his head while making hats
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
How would gold simply disappear from the jaw? Surely there would be some traces of it left? Was there a source of arenic laden water flowing over it perhaps? Doubtful otherwise the bones would probably be gone too.

218 points by diodorus 5y ago

rpmisms 5y ago

That's amazing. Gold is a non-bio-reactive metal, and apparently they figured that out too.

senortumnus 5y ago
Agreed - very sophisticated treatment.
jacquesm 5y ago
There are a quite a few assumptions in the article regarding this being gold thread, you can of course pile on even more assumptions assuming those first ones are true but it becomes quite a house of cards like that.
wolverine876 5y ago
They would have observed that gold doesn't rust, for example, and it was known for its enduring purity.
redis_mlc 5y ago
They knew that wearing silver or copper rings corrode, and gold didn't.

zetalyrae 5y ago

2017 paper: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/download/8928/18270 https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/bz/article/do... New paper: http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2).pdf http://maajournal.com/Issues/2021/Vol21-2/16_Agelarakis_21(2...

wolverine876 5y ago

Let's not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine. And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it's apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity's existence. So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I'm simplifying a very great deal.)

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
> Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine. Humans had larger brains in hunter & gatherer times. Similar to domesticated animals, it got smaller once we settled down and started agriculture.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  I don’t think the correlation between brain size and general intelligence is that strong. Maybe the hunter gatherer used a bigger part of his brain to quickly and accurately interpret impressions, to find the food and not become food himself. The domestic man might have been better at tasks like figuring out how much of his seeds he could eat and how much he must save to plant next spring, even with a slightly smaller brain.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
david927 5y ago
> Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically proved it. That's pretty fast, really.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  They were too busy not dying of starvation to think about gravity.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > That's pretty fast, really. Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

peatmoss 5y ago

Article mentions this—he clearly must have been a person of importance to get this kind of treatment. Reading this kind of story makes me immensely grateful to be a nobody alive at this time and place. Hopefully future generations will similarly look back at us with pity for the relative barbarism and deprivation we endure.

jacquesm 5y ago

"The wire is long gone, but Agelarakis suspects it was gold. There was no evidence of a silver alloy, which would have left grayish discoloration, nor were there traces of a patina or greenish cupric acid stains that would have been left by copper or bronze wires, he found. "It must have been some kind of gold thread, a gold wire or something like that, as is recommended in the Hippocratic corpus that was compiled in the fifth century B.C.," Agelarakis said. Gold is soft and pliable but strong and nontoxic, he added, making it a good choice for this type of medical treatment." That's pretty thin evidence, it may just as easily have been sheepguts (used for violin strings, for instance, in spite of being called catgut!).

cobbzilla 5y ago
Wouldn’t using dead flesh increase the risk of infection? In the article, it’s also mentioned that Hippocrates recommended using gold, and many of his teachings were still followed in Byzantine times. So what’s your next theory? Gold sounds fairly plausible to me.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  I was kind of skeptical too, but then I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgut_suture#History: > Gut strings were being used as medical sutures as early as the 3rd century AD as Galen, a prominent Greek physician from the Roman Empire, is known to have used them.[4]
  - gnramires 5y ago
    > Catgut suture is a type of surgical suture that is naturally degraded by the body's own proteolytic enzymes It couldn't be an organic suture, unless it was supposed to last very little (on wiki it says 90 days). Also only something study like a metal could hold a bone in place reliably, I imagine.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      90 days would probably be enough for a bone to set. But given that the wiring was threaded between the teeth, the sutures would be subject to the digestive enzymes of the mouth, which are significantly more aggressive than anything outside of the digestive system.

jrsdav 5y ago

This is really fascinating. Seeing the grave of human remains is one thing, but standing out in the photos is this fragment of pottery (likely a jug or a pitcher), where you can see the throwing rings of the person who crafted it, along with marks where they smoothed out the handle it was after attached. I feel pretty desensitized to skeletal remains (especially apropos in the month of October, Halloween and all), but for some reason seeing that vessel with its clear characteristics of being wrought with hands like mine, really brings home the humanity of this situation. It has me imagining hundreds of possible stories explaining what happened here and how these people might have lived.

ridgeguy 5y ago
I'm with you. In the Israel Museum, there are ceramic pots from ~ 5K - 7K years ago with the makers' fingerprints easily visible. I couldn't help wondering who they were, how they lived their lives, etc.
mattlondon 5y ago
For me the fact that this guy's head was buried in the grave of a 5 year old child (that is not chance - someone did that deliberately) says a lot about humanity. Someone took his head and put it with what I am assuming is his kid. Daddy and his child together at the end. As I sit here watching my 2 year old play, I find this story quite touching in that regard.

HomeDeLaPot 5y ago

The site kept scrolling up / refocusing to the video playing above as I was trying to read the article. Never mind then...

dimator 5y ago

This was probably done without any kind of pain killing anything, besides (just guessing) alcohol. It must have been absolutely excruciating for weeks, before the jaw healed. Unbelievable.

elihu 5y ago
Googling "Byzantine era anesthetics" brings up a whole long list of research papers and articles. Apparently (from the summary of one of the articles) opium has been used as a pain killer for a very long time, and the Byzantines used laudanum. https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html https://rhm.sums.ac.ir/article_45640.html Maybe they knocked the guy out with laudanum before the procedure, which would have made the whole thing much easier and far less unpleasant for the patient.

optimalsolver 5y ago

I highly recommend John Romer's Byzantium: The Lost Empire. It's available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkhUix6PNI

tyingq 5y ago

Looks similar to the jaw break Stefan Struve (MMA fighter) got from Mark Hunt. https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_crop_fill/q_86%2Cf_auto/252ccb9b72f94ceb5e5e30d65f73a800e5be16e1 https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_1024%2C$height_576/t_cro...

panick21 5y ago

Eastern Rome (wrongly called Byzantine, something most people then wouldn't even have known what Byzantium is) went on and was fully the Rome Empire. It never actually fell. All the learning and information was continued for the most part. Sadly even they had a lot of problems in the 'dark age' (not a good name either). First their was the Justinian Plague and then they had a lot of civil war and conflict over Iconoclasm. In general because of how Europe developed, and how the Renaissance happened in terms of intellectual history a lot of this history is only remember by very few people. By 1000AD the Roman Empire was still going strong, being the most powerful state in along the Mediterranean. Edit: Check 'The History of Byzantium' Podcast, a follow on from the 'History of Rome' Podcast but by a different person. Thersites the Historian has lot of good content on yt, for example https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEQru6POYgetKOdzDYaLyjBkymSN9XeyY https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEQru6POYgetKOdzDYaLy...

johnnycerberus 5y ago
It never actually fell. I've heard that the continuity of the Byzantine Empire was assured by the Cantacuzino branch [1] that emigrated north to what we call today Romania and they played a role in the creation of the country along freemasonry. Actually, Romania is an invention of the freemasonry and one of the Cantacuzinos descendants was an official member, Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino.[2] Sounds like an Assasins's Creed saga but it is true. Exctract from Wikipedia: "In advance of the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, a Freemason-inspired secret society known as Frăţia ("The Brotherhood") was set up. Ion Ghica, Nicolae Bălcescu, Christian Tell, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Cezar Bolliac, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, C. A. Rosetti, Dimitrie and Ion Brătianu, Alexandru G. Golescu and others belonged to Frăţia and were at the forefront of the revolution." The elite of what was soon-to-become-Romania consisted entirely of people following Masonic principles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantacuzino_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantacuzino_family [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_in_Romania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry_in_Romania

redwood 5y ago

People who enjoy this will like https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

DoreenMichele 5y ago

In every generation, you have talented people doing things no one else can do. Knowledge and skill are routinely lost and rediscovered. I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!" We routinely act like everything we do is the most special and smartest thing ever and I've seen far too many articles and TV shows drawing this exact same conclusion that "Holy cow! They knew how to do things we would have never guessed!" (And sometimes we can't figure out how in heck they did it.) I think the assumption that it was gold wiring is questionable. That should be framed more like "One possible explanation is gold for thus and such reasons." It shouldn't be framed like "We are such smarty pants and they are so amazingly stupid that this one explanation is the only real possibility." That general trend is amazingly annoying given how common this type of "revelation" about historic peoples is.

nyolfen 5y ago
> I wish we would stop framing such articles like "Le gasp! These primitive, uneducated people actually had impressive medical techniques!" nothing in the article suggests this, and nobody who knows who the byzantines were think they were primitive uneducated people; in fact, the piece makes reference to medical techniques that were passed down in writing for centuries. the entire tone of this comment is seriously bizarre
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  The fact that it emphasizes that they had knowledge passed down for centuries is part of the problem. You never see articles about current surgeries framed that way though it's equally true. No one needs to say "Modern surgeons use knowledge gained over centuries -- millennia even! -- to do their job!" We all know that, so it literally goes without saying. Needing to document that this culture had hundreds of years of such teachings to draw upon implicitly signals that we generally do think they are primitive, uneducated, etc regardless of your opinion about what people knowledgeable about the culture likely think of them. The title asserts it was gold threaded. Why assert that? Combination of click bait and we think we are so smart that there couldn't be another explanation. We just flat out refuse to say "We don't really know and it's possible they had medical techniques we have absolutely no knowledge of that could potentially improve modern day surgical techniques if we learned them."

robotresearcher 5y ago

"He was the military leader, most probably of the fort," Agelarakis said. "Therefore, he was decapitated ... by the Ottomans when they took over the fort." They just... make this up.

momirlan 5y ago
Maybe he was decapitated by his own family then...

steelframe 5y ago

I love how the computer geek community here is so vigorously second-guessing the domain experts on this. (It's fun to do that, I guess.)

swader999 5y ago
It's rather tedious. I find it impressive they could fix the jaw. Who cares what material they used.

ekianjo 5y ago

The headline makes it seem like they found the gold thread together with the jaw but none of this happened. its just supposition. Another case of bad science reporting based on pure assumptions.

cwojno 5y ago

From the title, I thought this was a new consensus algorithm...

Vaderv 5y ago

How do we know he was decapitated ? Maybe he lost his head while making hats

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

How would gold simply disappear from the jaw? Surely there would be some traces of it left? Was there a source of arenic laden water flowing over it perhaps? Doubtful otherwise the bones would probably be gone too.