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Alexander the Great's tunic identified in royal tomb at Vergina?

318 points by fork-bomber 2y ago

bhouston 2y ago
Time to do the Jurassic Park thing and bring him back! (Well at least a genetic clone.)
- relistan 2y ago
  Not sure about Alexander, but I’m here for Lincoln.
- thom 2y ago
  Just his stuff, not actually his tomb (which is presumably still somewhere in Egypt, but who knows).
  - tokai 2y ago
    In Alexandria, destroyed in the ~5th century. Its was a holy site for centuries and we have many sources on it. But we don't know what happen to his mummy during the destruction.
    - saas_sam 2y ago
      There's a compelling theory that Alexander's body was moved to the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice, Italy!
    - thom 2y ago
      Or indeed its nose!
- kasey_junk 2y ago
  Wasn’t that the plot of “GI Joe: The Movie”?
  - squiffsquiff 2y ago
    The did an episode of star trek next generation with this https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kahless_(clone) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kahless_(clone)
    - nayroclade 2y ago
      That episode presents quite a plausible scenario for why notable historical figures might be cloned, in my opinion: Participants in a contemporary power struggle wanting to use their talismanic status for political ends.
- derektank 2y ago
  New Great Filter just dropped: Once a technological civilization develops cloning and ancient DNA analysis they decide to revive all the greatest warlords and conquerors in their history and, to everyone's surprise, all the Will to Power types cause a global thermonuclear conflict
  - hshshshshsh 2y ago
    But they can't fetch the memories and psychological traumas right? The person would just look like the old person then and no personality resembling the old one.
    - fluoridation 2y ago
      They also won't be in the same political position. There aren't that many historically important men that started out as true nobodies.
      - kijin 2y ago
        They just as well might be, if they are treated as Alexander Reincarnate by everyone around them from a very young age. Not all clones will survive the pressure of all the expectations upon them, but we only need one of them to accept his destiny as Kwisatz Haderach.
        taneliv 2y ago
        What now does this all have to do with shortening the distance? Or do you mean something else than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefitzat_haderech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefitzat_haderech ?
        foolswisdom 2y ago
        Appears to be a reference to https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  Is there a program that can generate 3D view of a human by reading DNA?
  - uptown 2y ago
    Yep: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-faces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-fac... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy-or-cool-portraits-derived-from-the-dna-in-hair-and-gum-found-in-public-places-50266864/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy-or-cool...
    - 331c8c71 2y ago
      Would love to see representative pairs of predicted vs real faces.
    - kadoban 2y ago
      > There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—since the samples are from anonymous individuals From the second one. So who knows, it is fairly likely to just be a guess? If it were real, I'd expect better uses of it than just by bored artists. Edit: I should have checked the first one, they at least show an experiment (if a sloppy one). The results are...not great it seems if the goal is it being recognizable as the person in question.
- Eumenes 2y ago
  The world could use another Alexander the Great about now
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    To destroy every existing country from Egypt to Pakistan, replacing them with a one-man-rule empire? And killing a large number of people to get there? And leaving behind a number of feuding generals when he dies, who create their own one-man-rule sub-empires? No thanks. What we have now isn't great, but I'm not sure that's an improvement.
    - Eumenes 2y ago
      Ironically, the United State's foreign policy is pretty similar to that, if the nations weren't conquered, they're controlled via friendly proxies.
      - ywvcbk 2y ago
        It’s not even remotely close to what Alexander did, almost the complete opposite in every conceivable way.
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    The world has changed. How good would he really be at drone warfare?
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  And use Chatgpt to fill his mind, what could go wrong?
- karaterobot 2y ago
  I bet you could clone 1000 Alexanders, and none of them would be The Great. You'd need Aristotle as a tutor, and to inherit one of the best armies in the world from your dad, the king, and probably a million other little things would have to align in order to give you that combination of ambition and ability. If you can arrange all that, my intuition is that the genetic factors are probably of secondary importance.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Not to mention that the entire opportunity gradient is gone now.
  - pennomi 2y ago
    Best I can do is raise him on a steady diet of memes and Vtubers.
  - PepperdineG 2y ago
    You might end up with Khan Noonien Singh who will try and steal your ship then stick a bug in your ear
asimpletune 2y ago
Wow, this is huge. There are so many other things described in ancient texts that have yet to be discovered. Herodotus for example is filled with references to places and things that were later discovered. However there are still many examples of pretty credible places and objects that remain undiscovered. Also, fwiw, people for some reason think it’s ok or cool to criticize Herodotus’ history. It’s actually very good and he always says when he observed something for himself, or it’s something that is said by others and he felt it was important to document. However his assumptions and methods are always stated. I think honestly the main problem is it’s just a really long book so few ever read it. Thucydides is even better. It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. His entire rise is foreshadowed all throughout Thucydides, which is amazing considering that it predates him considerably.
- gavindean90 2y ago
  I like the way Bob Briar describes Herodotus as an ancient tourist/journalist.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. To me it's also just incredible how short his life was, and I imagine that contributes to how scarce first-hand accounts are. He started taking part in military campaigns at 16, became king at 20, and was dead by 32. The Wikipedia article about him mentions he had a historian (or more than one); it's a shame none of those accounts survived to today. Sure, life expectancy back then was not what it was today, but he was still fairly young, and did a remarkable amount of conquering and expansion in a decade.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  > It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. Did you forget the guy who's texts were the foundation of our civilization? Most of Aristotle's works are lost, but there is still much to read from Alexander's tutor.
  - 2y ago
mattlondon 2y ago
Is anyone qualified to weigh in on the academic robustness of this? I only scanned a few bits but I was surprised to see statements like "the male skeleton had a knee injury, thus conclusively proving it was Philip" and "the female skeleton was 18 therefore proving it was Cleopatra since sources say she was young". (Paraphrasing) Etc etc. Is that all it takes to "prove" something? Could it not just be coincidence and it was someone else with a knee injury and some other ~18 year old? Or is that as far as we need to go in archeology to prove something? Put 2 and 2 together and come up with Cleopatra? There also seems to be some sort of almost personal/ad hominem type stuff later on about other researchers who apparently criticised the author's work which surprised me ("Prag, Musgrave, and Neave continue to argue that I remain silent about Cyna ... as if it is an important issue"...) Is this legit research?
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Not an academic, not an expert, but... The history of the elites in this period is quite well documented from multiple sources. There are some minor royals - third and fourth sons - where little is known other than some titles and lands granted, but the historical record is both comprehensive and considered accurate, particularly for those whose stories were quite shocking like the 7th wife of Philip II (Cleopatra Eurydice, the young woman whose remains are being discussed), whose death may have been suicide, or a murder made to look like suicide... The thread they're pulling on seems to start here, from the paper: > There is a unanimous agreement that Tomb III belongs to King Alexander IV, the son of the Great Alexander. This is important because it shows that the Great Tumulus belongs mainly to the Kings of the Argead dynasty, and this contributes significantly to the identification of Tombs I and II as belonging to either Philip II or Arrhidaeus If accept that unanimous agreement is well-founded, and it is beyond any reasonable doubt that Tomb III belongs to the son of the Great Alexander, then it seems very likely that Tombs I and II must belong to Philip II or Arrhidaeus. The paper seems to then try and work out which one belongs to who. Now you look through the historical record of each, and you identify that there are multiple sources indicating that Philip had a young wife (Cleopatra Eurydice), who had a young son who was murdered [1]. Then you find a tomb that along with a male, has a younger female with an infant son interred. There is no other known tomb that contains similar remains. That matches Philip II, but does not match Arrhidaeus. You then look at the other tomb, and realise those remains better matches Arrhidaeus. This is not proof in a scientific sense, it's not irrefutable, but you have to ask if the young woman and infant are not Cleopatra Eurydice and her son Caranus, who exactly are they? Which other persons match the known historical records? If they're people from outside of the known record, just how likely is it that they would be buried in this specific context of a tomb neighboring Alexander IV? Unless you then want to unpick that assumption of Alexander IV of course, which you're entitled to do, but you're now pushing back against a collective assumption with some significant weight (and I presume, evidence), behind it. The rest of the paper starts to pull at the logic of other papers published over the last 60 years or so to help develop the case further, but in reality without some better science that seems absent (radio carbon dating, DNA analysis to show familial relationships of remains, and so on), it might be hard to get it over the line from "seems very likely to be the best explanation given what we know today" into "almost impossible to be explained any other way". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_Eurydice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_Eurydice
empath75 2y ago
This is a controversial claim, FWIW. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/alexander-the-great-tunic-cloth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/alexander-th...
istultus 2y ago
As usual, "Conjecture Presented as Fact in Headline" They found a fabric in a royal tomb in Greece that fits the description of Alexander's famous sarapis. What is more likely - that this is Alexander's sarapis itself or that a very rich guy had one made just like it?
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  Alexander looks over crowd..hmm, that guy has a sarapis just like mine! Guards, have that man disembowelled!
  - bertil 2y ago
    That would explain the presence in a tomb…
    - timdiggerm 2y ago
      I doubt a man wearing a counterfeit version of a garment reserved only for kings would be given a nice tomb
      - kadoban 2y ago
        Or be allowed to be buried in the garment.
- ericmay 2y ago
  > What is more likely - that this is Alexander's sarapis itself or that a very rich guy had one made just like it? I read through the original article though not very closely, and the authors wrote that the construction of the sarapis was unique in that nobody would have been allowed to construct one, and that the physical construction of the sarapis would have been profoundly expensive. It could be the case that another rich guy went and had one made, sure, but given the above two priors you'd have to answer: Who else at the time could afford to have such a sarapis constructed? Is there a record of anyone with a similarly designed and constructed sarapis? Historians seem to have a good idea of who was rich and/or noble in the area at the time. If someone at the time constructed a similarly designed sarapis in the region, who would have built it and why wouldn't have someone basically told on them for trying to copy the God King? I don't think your point is invalid, but it would raise more questions that as far as I'm aware there seems to be little evidence for and introduce impractical logistics for the time period.
troymc 2y ago
My summary: they claim (with evidence) that they found the sacred purple sarapis (tunic) of Alexander the Great, and possibly some of his other things.
- pluc 2y ago
  I'll go a bit further and say that they don't claim it's Alexander's tomb, but someone that was buried with Alexander's artifacts (namely, his brother)
  - armitron 2y ago
    This is correct. Alexander is burried in Alexandria, Egypt. This discovery means that some of his artifacts were inherited by one of his siblings, moved back to Greece and burried with them.
    - troymc 2y ago
      AFAIK, the current location of Alexander's tomb is not known.
      - armitron 2y ago
        The exact location is not known but there is strong consensus amongst historians that he's burried in Alexandria.
    - billbrown 2y ago
      Not Venice? Heh https://www.thecollector.com/alexander-saint-marks-tomb-venice/ https://www.thecollector.com/alexander-saint-marks-tomb-veni...
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      That’s the most likely place of his tomb, but we don’t really know for sure, his remains were moved around quite a bit.
anshumankmr 2y ago
Pics ?
- kylecazar 2y ago
  You can see images on other sites, but it just looks like a bunch of purple shredded paper in a box to my untrained eye. https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/sacred-tunic-alexander-great-0021609 https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/sac...
deleted 2y ago
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a12k 2y ago
This is awesome and very historic. I’m hoping it ends up in a glass case at Meta HQ though so many people can appreciate it rather than in a closet in Palo Alto.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
gargalatas 2y ago
I would never expect such a Greek matter would become headline in here. Turns out that Alexander the Great was globally accepted. But let me clarify from what I have read that it's just a conjecture and not a very strong one.
- lolinder 2y ago
  It would never have occurred to me that a Greek would assume that Alexander the Great was just a local hero! In the US, anyone who remembers any ancient history will remember Alexander the Great. He's a part of every single world history curriculum, and for good reason. Whether by his own skill or luck, he reshaped most of Eurasia in his lifetime.
  - romanhn 2y ago
    Not just the US. As a kid growing up in Russia, I was very aware of Alexander's prominence (known to us as Alexander the Macedonian).
    - markdown 2y ago
      I mean, it was in the curriculum in Fiji where I studied. Stupid of course, because we had to learn the histories of far away places (literally on the other side of the world) more than our own history.
  - stavros 2y ago
    As a Greek, it's very weird to me that someone would think Alexander the Great isn't well-known worldwide. Interesting that someone is surprised.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
    Whatever late corner of earth that didn't yet know who Alexander the great was, that history was forever changed, once personal computers & the golden age of PC computing came to be.
- HEmanZ 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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rwl4 2y ago
Just in case anybody is interested in a bit more of a casual format, I had NotebookLM create a podcast from the paper. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/0bef03c4-3ed5-4b13-90ab-ea48a7d70fec/audio https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/0bef03c4-3ed5-4b13-90...
- anoncow 2y ago
  That was enjoyable. I have doubts as to how close this was to the article (but I have no patience to verify).
- guerrilla 2y ago
  Hey, can you explain how you did that and can you do the same for the sleep article? I tried but it wouldn't produce audio for me. https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad253/7280269 https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad253/7280269
ourmandave 2y ago
Makes me want to re-watch The Man Who Would Be King again.
permo-w 2y ago
that is a truly terribly written abstract
mmooss 2y ago
> the sacred Persian mesoleucon sarapis which belonged to Pharaoh and King Alexander the Great [italicizing added] sacred means something religious or divine. While Alexander the Great is very famous, does or did anyone who came after consider Alexander to be divine? For example, while people very much admire Abraham Lincoln, nobody would associate Lincoln with divinity. Another comment says that English may not be the first language of the author, so perhaps 'sacred' wasn't meant precisely. And it could be used, even by an English speaker, imprecisely (hopefully not in published research) or in an exaggerated fashion (also probably doesn't belong in published research). Still, I find it interesting how a little overenthusiasm and subtle shift in terminology can change perceptions of someone. EDIT: Better stated: Here is a modern historian calling the sarapis sacred. Why? Sacred to whom?
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  It was not uncommon for rulers in the ancient Near East to claim to be divine, or descended from the gods. When Alexander conquered Egypt, he took on the role of Pharaoh, and claimed to be the son of Ra. He also began calling himself the son of Zeus. Abraham Lincoln isn't considered a deity, but American political culture is very different from 4th-Century BC Hellenistic political culture.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    But here is a modern historian calling Alexander's clothes 'sacred'. Why?
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      Because in the historical context, they were considered sacred.
      - mmooss 2y ago
        Thanks. It's not that I'm ignorant of that. I'm trying to explore which historical contexts - and possibly modern ones - consider Alexander to be 'sacred' and why.
Morizero 2y ago
Picture of the remains of the tunic, since I didn't see one in the article: https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1tgABI.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1t... > The revered tunic is is in fragmentary state and many small pieces less than 6cm (2.3 inches). It's pictured here in a shot from its discovery at Vergina in 1977 Source: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/alexander-the-great-s-lost-tunic-is-found-after-2-300-years/ar-AA1tgvKs https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/alexander-the-great-s-l...
- readyplayernull 2y ago
  The box alone is a very interesting object. I guess it's made of gold? And the modular hinge. Hope they do a 3D scan.
- stainablesteel 2y ago
  serious question, what am i even looking at here. is it so badly degraded that it's just not recognizable?
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    As a side note, purple dye was a Veblen good. Anything purple instantly signified wealth because they made purple dye by collecting 10k snails per gram of dye https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple Just like rich people buy fancy watches that serve no purpose other than signifying wealth, imagine walking down the road in clothing that took thousands of laborers (slaves) thousands of hours to produce. Epic level of flexing on the peasants
    - myroon5 2y ago
      Fashion's still quite an animal-intensive production: https://genv.org/vegan-fashion-looking-at-leather-wool-fur-and-silk/ https://genv.org/vegan-fashion-looking-at-leather-wool-fur-a... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9drbh8sKzzykaX38P/the-scale-of-direct-human-impact-on-invertebrates https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9drbh8sKzzykaX38P/...
vondur 2y ago
Pompey the Great supposedly wore a cloak that he claimed belonged to Alexander the Great.
Daub 2y ago
Are there any images of this tunic anywhere? These articles/papers seem always shy of sharing the money shot with their readers.
- rogerrogerr 2y ago
  Probably they’re afraid of a place like HN picking up on some small detail that invalidates the claim. Can’t think of any other reason to withhold an image, especially since they obviously are capable of adding images to this format.
mixxit 2y ago
'any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no. ' - Betteridge's law
pfdietz 2y ago
I learned there's a mineral named huntite.

318 points by fork-bomber 2y ago

bhouston 2y ago

Time to do the Jurassic Park thing and bring him back! (Well at least a genetic clone.)

relistan 2y ago
Not sure about Alexander, but I’m here for Lincoln.
thom 2y ago
Just his stuff, not actually his tomb (which is presumably still somewhere in Egypt, but who knows).
- tokai 2y ago
  In Alexandria, destroyed in the ~5th century. Its was a holy site for centuries and we have many sources on it. But we don't know what happen to his mummy during the destruction.
  - saas_sam 2y ago
    There's a compelling theory that Alexander's body was moved to the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice, Italy!
  - thom 2y ago
    Or indeed its nose!
kasey_junk 2y ago
Wasn’t that the plot of “GI Joe: The Movie”?
- squiffsquiff 2y ago
  The did an episode of star trek next generation with this https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kahless_(clone) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kahless_(clone)
  - nayroclade 2y ago
    That episode presents quite a plausible scenario for why notable historical figures might be cloned, in my opinion: Participants in a contemporary power struggle wanting to use their talismanic status for political ends.
derektank 2y ago
New Great Filter just dropped: Once a technological civilization develops cloning and ancient DNA analysis they decide to revive all the greatest warlords and conquerors in their history and, to everyone's surprise, all the Will to Power types cause a global thermonuclear conflict
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  But they can't fetch the memories and psychological traumas right? The person would just look like the old person then and no personality resembling the old one.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    They also won't be in the same political position. There aren't that many historically important men that started out as true nobodies.
    - kijin 2y ago
      They just as well might be, if they are treated as Alexander Reincarnate by everyone around them from a very young age. Not all clones will survive the pressure of all the expectations upon them, but we only need one of them to accept his destiny as Kwisatz Haderach.
      - taneliv 2y ago
        What now does this all have to do with shortening the distance? Or do you mean something else than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefitzat_haderech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefitzat_haderech ?
        foolswisdom 2y ago
        Appears to be a reference to https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Kwisatz_Haderach
hshshshshsh 2y ago
Is there a program that can generate 3D view of a human by reading DNA?
- uptown 2y ago
  Yep: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-faces.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-fac... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy-or-cool-portraits-derived-from-the-dna-in-hair-and-gum-found-in-public-places-50266864/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy-or-cool...
  - 331c8c71 2y ago
    Would love to see representative pairs of predicted vs real faces.
  - kadoban 2y ago
    > There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—since the samples are from anonymous individuals From the second one. So who knows, it is fairly likely to just be a guess? If it were real, I'd expect better uses of it than just by bored artists. Edit: I should have checked the first one, they at least show an experiment (if a sloppy one). The results are...not great it seems if the goal is it being recognizable as the person in question.
Eumenes 2y ago
The world could use another Alexander the Great about now
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  To destroy every existing country from Egypt to Pakistan, replacing them with a one-man-rule empire? And killing a large number of people to get there? And leaving behind a number of feuding generals when he dies, who create their own one-man-rule sub-empires? No thanks. What we have now isn't great, but I'm not sure that's an improvement.
  - Eumenes 2y ago
    Ironically, the United State's foreign policy is pretty similar to that, if the nations weren't conquered, they're controlled via friendly proxies.
    - ywvcbk 2y ago
      It’s not even remotely close to what Alexander did, almost the complete opposite in every conceivable way.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  The world has changed. How good would he really be at drone warfare?
Hikikomori 2y ago
And use Chatgpt to fill his mind, what could go wrong?
karaterobot 2y ago
I bet you could clone 1000 Alexanders, and none of them would be The Great. You'd need Aristotle as a tutor, and to inherit one of the best armies in the world from your dad, the king, and probably a million other little things would have to align in order to give you that combination of ambition and ability. If you can arrange all that, my intuition is that the genetic factors are probably of secondary importance.
- echelon 2y ago
  Not to mention that the entire opportunity gradient is gone now.
- pennomi 2y ago
  Best I can do is raise him on a steady diet of memes and Vtubers.
- PepperdineG 2y ago
  You might end up with Khan Noonien Singh who will try and steal your ship then stick a bug in your ear

asimpletune 2y ago

Wow, this is huge. There are so many other things described in ancient texts that have yet to be discovered. Herodotus for example is filled with references to places and things that were later discovered. However there are still many examples of pretty credible places and objects that remain undiscovered. Also, fwiw, people for some reason think it’s ok or cool to criticize Herodotus’ history. It’s actually very good and he always says when he observed something for himself, or it’s something that is said by others and he felt it was important to document. However his assumptions and methods are always stated. I think honestly the main problem is it’s just a really long book so few ever read it. Thucydides is even better. It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. His entire rise is foreshadowed all throughout Thucydides, which is amazing considering that it predates him considerably.

gavindean90 2y ago
I like the way Bob Briar describes Herodotus as an ancient tourist/journalist.
kelnos 2y ago
> It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. To me it's also just incredible how short his life was, and I imagine that contributes to how scarce first-hand accounts are. He started taking part in military campaigns at 16, became king at 20, and was dead by 32. The Wikipedia article about him mentions he had a historian (or more than one); it's a shame none of those accounts survived to today. Sure, life expectancy back then was not what it was today, but he was still fairly young, and did a remarkable amount of conquering and expansion in a decade.
guerrilla 2y ago
> It’s such a shame there is virtually nothing surviving from people who personally knew Alexander. Did you forget the guy who's texts were the foundation of our civilization? Most of Aristotle's works are lost, but there is still much to read from Alexander's tutor.
- 2y ago

mattlondon 2y ago

Is anyone qualified to weigh in on the academic robustness of this? I only scanned a few bits but I was surprised to see statements like "the male skeleton had a knee injury, thus conclusively proving it was Philip" and "the female skeleton was 18 therefore proving it was Cleopatra since sources say she was young". (Paraphrasing) Etc etc. Is that all it takes to "prove" something? Could it not just be coincidence and it was someone else with a knee injury and some other ~18 year old? Or is that as far as we need to go in archeology to prove something? Put 2 and 2 together and come up with Cleopatra? There also seems to be some sort of almost personal/ad hominem type stuff later on about other researchers who apparently criticised the author's work which surprised me ("Prag, Musgrave, and Neave continue to argue that I remain silent about Cyna ... as if it is an important issue"...) Is this legit research?

PaulRobinson 2y ago
Not an academic, not an expert, but... The history of the elites in this period is quite well documented from multiple sources. There are some minor royals - third and fourth sons - where little is known other than some titles and lands granted, but the historical record is both comprehensive and considered accurate, particularly for those whose stories were quite shocking like the 7th wife of Philip II (Cleopatra Eurydice, the young woman whose remains are being discussed), whose death may have been suicide, or a murder made to look like suicide... The thread they're pulling on seems to start here, from the paper: > There is a unanimous agreement that Tomb III belongs to King Alexander IV, the son of the Great Alexander. This is important because it shows that the Great Tumulus belongs mainly to the Kings of the Argead dynasty, and this contributes significantly to the identification of Tombs I and II as belonging to either Philip II or Arrhidaeus If accept that unanimous agreement is well-founded, and it is beyond any reasonable doubt that Tomb III belongs to the son of the Great Alexander, then it seems very likely that Tombs I and II must belong to Philip II or Arrhidaeus. The paper seems to then try and work out which one belongs to who. Now you look through the historical record of each, and you identify that there are multiple sources indicating that Philip had a young wife (Cleopatra Eurydice), who had a young son who was murdered [1]. Then you find a tomb that along with a male, has a younger female with an infant son interred. There is no other known tomb that contains similar remains. That matches Philip II, but does not match Arrhidaeus. You then look at the other tomb, and realise those remains better matches Arrhidaeus. This is not proof in a scientific sense, it's not irrefutable, but you have to ask if the young woman and infant are not Cleopatra Eurydice and her son Caranus, who exactly are they? Which other persons match the known historical records? If they're people from outside of the known record, just how likely is it that they would be buried in this specific context of a tomb neighboring Alexander IV? Unless you then want to unpick that assumption of Alexander IV of course, which you're entitled to do, but you're now pushing back against a collective assumption with some significant weight (and I presume, evidence), behind it. The rest of the paper starts to pull at the logic of other papers published over the last 60 years or so to help develop the case further, but in reality without some better science that seems absent (radio carbon dating, DNA analysis to show familial relationships of remains, and so on), it might be hard to get it over the line from "seems very likely to be the best explanation given what we know today" into "almost impossible to be explained any other way". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_Eurydice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_Eurydice

empath75 2y ago

This is a controversial claim, FWIW. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/alexander-the-great-tunic-cloth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/alexander-th...

istultus 2y ago

As usual, "Conjecture Presented as Fact in Headline" They found a fabric in a royal tomb in Greece that fits the description of Alexander's famous sarapis. What is more likely - that this is Alexander's sarapis itself or that a very rich guy had one made just like it?

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
Alexander looks over crowd..hmm, that guy has a sarapis just like mine! Guards, have that man disembowelled!
- bertil 2y ago
  That would explain the presence in a tomb…
  - timdiggerm 2y ago
    I doubt a man wearing a counterfeit version of a garment reserved only for kings would be given a nice tomb
    - kadoban 2y ago
      Or be allowed to be buried in the garment.
ericmay 2y ago
> What is more likely - that this is Alexander's sarapis itself or that a very rich guy had one made just like it? I read through the original article though not very closely, and the authors wrote that the construction of the sarapis was unique in that nobody would have been allowed to construct one, and that the physical construction of the sarapis would have been profoundly expensive. It could be the case that another rich guy went and had one made, sure, but given the above two priors you'd have to answer: Who else at the time could afford to have such a sarapis constructed? Is there a record of anyone with a similarly designed and constructed sarapis? Historians seem to have a good idea of who was rich and/or noble in the area at the time. If someone at the time constructed a similarly designed sarapis in the region, who would have built it and why wouldn't have someone basically told on them for trying to copy the God King? I don't think your point is invalid, but it would raise more questions that as far as I'm aware there seems to be little evidence for and introduce impractical logistics for the time period.

troymc 2y ago

My summary: they claim (with evidence) that they found the sacred purple sarapis (tunic) of Alexander the Great, and possibly some of his other things.

pluc 2y ago
I'll go a bit further and say that they don't claim it's Alexander's tomb, but someone that was buried with Alexander's artifacts (namely, his brother)
- armitron 2y ago
  This is correct. Alexander is burried in Alexandria, Egypt. This discovery means that some of his artifacts were inherited by one of his siblings, moved back to Greece and burried with them.
  - troymc 2y ago
    AFAIK, the current location of Alexander's tomb is not known.
    - armitron 2y ago
      The exact location is not known but there is strong consensus amongst historians that he's burried in Alexandria.
  - billbrown 2y ago
    Not Venice? Heh https://www.thecollector.com/alexander-saint-marks-tomb-venice/ https://www.thecollector.com/alexander-saint-marks-tomb-veni...
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    That’s the most likely place of his tomb, but we don’t really know for sure, his remains were moved around quite a bit.

anshumankmr 2y ago

Pics ?

kylecazar 2y ago
You can see images on other sites, but it just looks like a bunch of purple shredded paper in a box to my untrained eye. https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/sacred-tunic-alexander-great-0021609 https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/sac...

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a12k 2y ago

This is awesome and very historic. I’m hoping it ends up in a glass case at Meta HQ though so many people can appreciate it rather than in a closet in Palo Alto.

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gargalatas 2y ago

I would never expect such a Greek matter would become headline in here. Turns out that Alexander the Great was globally accepted. But let me clarify from what I have read that it's just a conjecture and not a very strong one.

lolinder 2y ago
It would never have occurred to me that a Greek would assume that Alexander the Great was just a local hero! In the US, anyone who remembers any ancient history will remember Alexander the Great. He's a part of every single world history curriculum, and for good reason. Whether by his own skill or luck, he reshaped most of Eurasia in his lifetime.
- romanhn 2y ago
  Not just the US. As a kid growing up in Russia, I was very aware of Alexander's prominence (known to us as Alexander the Macedonian).
  - markdown 2y ago
    I mean, it was in the curriculum in Fiji where I studied. Stupid of course, because we had to learn the histories of far away places (literally on the other side of the world) more than our own history.
- stavros 2y ago
  As a Greek, it's very weird to me that someone would think Alexander the Great isn't well-known worldwide. Interesting that someone is surprised.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
  Whatever late corner of earth that didn't yet know who Alexander the great was, that history was forever changed, once personal computers & the golden age of PC computing came to be.
HEmanZ 2y ago

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rwl4 2y ago

Just in case anybody is interested in a bit more of a casual format, I had NotebookLM create a podcast from the paper. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/0bef03c4-3ed5-4b13-90ab-ea48a7d70fec/audio https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/0bef03c4-3ed5-4b13-90...

anoncow 2y ago
That was enjoyable. I have doubts as to how close this was to the article (but I have no patience to verify).
guerrilla 2y ago
Hey, can you explain how you did that and can you do the same for the sleep article? I tried but it wouldn't produce audio for me. https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad253/7280269 https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad253/7280269

ourmandave 2y ago

Makes me want to re-watch The Man Who Would Be King again.

permo-w 2y ago

that is a truly terribly written abstract

mmooss 2y ago

> the sacred Persian mesoleucon sarapis which belonged to Pharaoh and King Alexander the Great [italicizing added] sacred means something religious or divine. While Alexander the Great is very famous, does or did anyone who came after consider Alexander to be divine? For example, while people very much admire Abraham Lincoln, nobody would associate Lincoln with divinity. Another comment says that English may not be the first language of the author, so perhaps 'sacred' wasn't meant precisely. And it could be used, even by an English speaker, imprecisely (hopefully not in published research) or in an exaggerated fashion (also probably doesn't belong in published research). Still, I find it interesting how a little overenthusiasm and subtle shift in terminology can change perceptions of someone. EDIT: Better stated: Here is a modern historian calling the sarapis sacred. Why? Sacred to whom?

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
It was not uncommon for rulers in the ancient Near East to claim to be divine, or descended from the gods. When Alexander conquered Egypt, he took on the role of Pharaoh, and claimed to be the son of Ra. He also began calling himself the son of Zeus. Abraham Lincoln isn't considered a deity, but American political culture is very different from 4th-Century BC Hellenistic political culture.
- mmooss 2y ago
  But here is a modern historian calling Alexander's clothes 'sacred'. Why?
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    Because in the historical context, they were considered sacred.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      Thanks. It's not that I'm ignorant of that. I'm trying to explore which historical contexts - and possibly modern ones - consider Alexander to be 'sacred' and why.

Morizero 2y ago

Picture of the remains of the tunic, since I didn't see one in the article: https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1tgABI.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA1t... > The revered tunic is is in fragmentary state and many small pieces less than 6cm (2.3 inches). It's pictured here in a shot from its discovery at Vergina in 1977 Source: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/alexander-the-great-s-lost-tunic-is-found-after-2-300-years/ar-AA1tgvKs https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/alexander-the-great-s-l...

readyplayernull 2y ago
The box alone is a very interesting object. I guess it's made of gold? And the modular hinge. Hope they do a 3D scan.
stainablesteel 2y ago
serious question, what am i even looking at here. is it so badly degraded that it's just not recognizable?
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  As a side note, purple dye was a Veblen good. Anything purple instantly signified wealth because they made purple dye by collecting 10k snails per gram of dye https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple Just like rich people buy fancy watches that serve no purpose other than signifying wealth, imagine walking down the road in clothing that took thousands of laborers (slaves) thousands of hours to produce. Epic level of flexing on the peasants
  - myroon5 2y ago
    Fashion's still quite an animal-intensive production: https://genv.org/vegan-fashion-looking-at-leather-wool-fur-and-silk/ https://genv.org/vegan-fashion-looking-at-leather-wool-fur-a... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9drbh8sKzzykaX38P/the-scale-of-direct-human-impact-on-invertebrates https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9drbh8sKzzykaX38P/...

vondur 2y ago

Pompey the Great supposedly wore a cloak that he claimed belonged to Alexander the Great.

Daub 2y ago

Are there any images of this tunic anywhere? These articles/papers seem always shy of sharing the money shot with their readers.

rogerrogerr 2y ago
Probably they’re afraid of a place like HN picking up on some small detail that invalidates the claim. Can’t think of any other reason to withhold an image, especially since they obviously are capable of adding images to this format.

mixxit 2y ago

'any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no. ' - Betteridge's law

pfdietz 2y ago

I learned there's a mineral named huntite.