A warrior and a diplomat, Philip II ruled the kingdom of Macedon from 359-336 BC. He was assassinated during a visit to the town of Aegae, now called Vergina, by a member of his bodyguard, but both ancient and modern historians are at odds as to why. With his assassination, his son Alexander ascended the throne at just 20 years old, earning the title of Great by becoming one of history's best military commanders and empire builders.
When a spectacular tomb full of artifacts was found buried under a mound of dirt at Vergina in the 1970s, archaeologists began their quest to discover the identity of the tomb's occupants. In the 1980s, Jonathan Musgrave, John Prag, and Richard Naeve posited that the male occupant of that tomb was Philip II based on an injury to the skeleton's right eye socket consistent with a wound Philip II was known to have suffered in battle. Fast forward to 2000, when Antonis Bartsiokas writing in Science showed that the eye socket damage was related to cracking during cremation and reconstruction after excavation. Is this or is this not Philip of Macedon?
In an article published this week in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, researchers Theodore Antikas and Laura Wynn-Antikas attempt to settle the longstanding question. Their new analysis is based in part on computed tomography (CT) and x-ray fluorescence (XRF) techniques and identifies two of the Vergina tomb occupants as Philip II and a Scythian princess.
The skeletal evidence that Antikas and Wynn-Antikas spell out for their identification of Philip includes basic demographics: the skeleton in question was male and around 40-50 years old based on traits of the skull and the pelvis. But the pathological issues are more interesting, as they give bioarchaeologists information about injuries suffered during a person's life. Evidence for horseback riding comes from herniated disks in his lower back and bone markers of attachment sites for muscles heavily used in riding. Bone growth was evident in the facial sinuses; this could relate to an old injury to the face, which Philip is known to have endured, or it could relate to an upper respiratory disease. Additional bony changes on the ribs suggest a disease that targeted the lungs, but the researchers cannot pinpoint an origin. As a king, Philip's life and appearance are well-recorded in histories. Philip is said by Demosthenes to have suffered injuries during his lifetime to his eye, hand, clavicle, and leg. Sharp trauma to one of the bones of his palm is actually the only injury the researchers found that lines up with historical accounts, but they point out that soft tissue injuries, such as to the eye, may not show up on bone.
More evidence may still point to an identification of the skeleton as Philip's, including one of the other skeletons in the tomb. The second skeleton is not as complete as the first, but based on features of the skull and long bones, the researchers think they have a female in her early 30s. She also suffered from herniated disks in her mid-back, suggestive of a life riding horses, as well as a fracture of her lower leg that had healed before her death. The fracture was so severe, however, that it ended up shortening one leg. In excavating the Vergina tomb originally, archaeologists found greaves (shin armour) that were two different lengths; Antikas and Wynn-Antikas speculate that these were made specifically for this woman with the injured leg. Because of her age, the warrior weaponry, and her propensity for horseback riding, it is suggested that the woman was Philip's seventh wife, the daughter of King Atheas of Scythia.
he admitted it was a rough comparison). In other words, the Telegraph and Telephone were the start of a kind of primitive social nervous system--the internet is the formation of a far more advanced one, complete with a kind of brain, and the smartest humans acting as parts of that brain.
