According to the study, a skeleton found in an adjacent tomb shows evidence of a leg wound which is consistent with the one sustained by Philip II, as reported by some historical accounts.
The claim is in stark contrast to other research published two months ago which maintains Alexander the Great’s father was indeed buried in the famous “Tomb of Philip.”
Scholars have argued over Philip II’s tomb ever since Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos discovered the site of his likely burial in 1977-78. He excavated a large mound — the Great Tumulus — at Vergina on the advice of the English classicist Nicholas Hammond.
Among the monuments found within the tumulus were three tombs. One, called Tomb I, had been looted, but contained a stunning wall painting of the Rape of Persephone, along with fragmentary human remains.
Tomb II remained undisturbed and contained the almost complete cremated remains of a male skeleton in the main chamber and the cremated remains of a female in the antechamber. Grave goods included silver and bronze vessels, gold wreaths, weapons, armor and two gold larnakes.
Tomb III was also found undisturbed, with a silver funerary urn that contained the bones of a young male, and a number of silver vessels and ivory reliefs.
“There is an unanimous agreement that Tomb III, which has a façade strikingly similar to that of Tomb II, belongs to Alexander the Great’s son, Alexander IV,” Antonis Bartsiokas of the Democritus University of Thrace and Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Centro Mixto Universidad Complutense de Madrid and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
In fact, most of the scholarly debate concentrates on the occupants of Tomb II.
“Despite anthropological and archaeological evidence that the tomb belongs to King Arrhidaeus and his wife Eurydice, the archaeological establishment still maintains that Tomb II belongs to Philip II,” the researchers wrote.
A powerful 4th century B.C. military ruler from the Greek kingdom of Macedon, King Philip II gained control of Greece and the Balkan peninsula through tactful use of warfare, diplomacy, and marriage alliances (the Macedonians practiced polygamy).
His efforts — he reformed the Macedonian army and proposed the invasion of Persia — later provided the basis for the achievements of his son and successor Alexander the Great, who went on to conquer most of the known world.
The overlord of an empire stretching from Greece and Egypt eastward across Asia to India, Alexander died in Babylon, now in central Iraq, in June of 323 B.C. — just before his 33rd birthday.
His elusive tomb is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the ancient world.
Using scanning and radiography, Bartsiokas and colleagues analyzed a partial skeleton of a middle-aged male that had been long disinterred from Tomb I at Vergina.
The researchers judged the individual to be around 45 when he died, matching the age at which Philip was killed, and estimated he was 5.9 feet tall.
They noticed the individual had a knee joint showing signs of fusion (ankylosis), and a hole through the overgrowth of the knee, likely produced by a penetrating instrument, such as a fast-moving projectile, like a spear.
The wound “would have affected locomotion and rendered the person lame, with an uneven gait,” the researchers concluded.
According to some historical reports, a lance impaled Philip’s leg three years before his assassination in 336 BC, leaving him lame.
The injury “is conclusive evidence for the identification of one tomb occupant as Philip,” the researchers said.
Bartsiokas and colleagues also stated that Tomb I contains the remains of a 18-year-old female and a 42-week-old infant of unknown gender.
The researchers believe the individuals are Philip’s wife Cleopatra, and their newborn child, both killed shortly after Philip’s death. He was killed by his bodyguard Pausanias as he walked into a theater in the Macedonian capital of Aegae.
“As a consequence, Tomb II could only belong to King Arrhidaeus and Eurydice and may well contain some of the armor of Alexander the Great,” Bartsiokas and colleagues concluded.
However, according to Theodore Antikas, author of another study which concluded the bones found in Tomb II are those of Philip II and a Scythian princess, Bartsiokas and colleagues are missing a point—or more precisely, some bones.
In a letter to the editor of PNAS, Antikas, head of the anthropological research team of Vergina Excavation at Aristotle University, maintains Bartsiokas’s research has been done on a small part of the bones found in Tomb I in 1977-78.
According to the researcher, the bones from Tomb I took different routes ever since their discovery. Some were first kept at Vergina, and some were sent to the Archaeological Museum in Thessaloniki (AMT).
To add to the mystery, in July 2014 Antikas's team found in an old storage place two wooden boxes containing artifacts and two bags of human and animal bones from Tomb I. The bones had been stored at the Vergina Museum since their discovery in 1977 and were not known or seen by anyone.
"It is evident that some bones from Tomb I were kept at the University of Thrace--at some unknown period in the past--and some remained at Vergina's storage area," Antikas wrote.
From the plastic bags containing over one hundred bone fragments of inhumed individuals, Antikas's analyzed and identified 70 bones.
Surprisingly, it emerged that the looted Tomb I contained the remains of at least seven individuals: one male, one female, one adolescent (sex unknown), one fetus and three infants.
"Some human bones may belong to the same individuals reported in the PNAS paper, or to three different occupants of the tomb," Antikas said.
He added it is also possible that some of them may belong to looters, or "dumped" humans and animals for convenience.
Read more at Discovery News
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