Mysterious shackled skeletons found in ancient Greek mass grave
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Typical. In most of Greece one cannot dig to plant a turnip without striking some relic of the ancient times.
It's not a joke. A friend's father who is a civil engineer has told me how the law requires anyone who digs for a house's foundations to report any archeological discovery to the authorities. Then all building work must cease until the archeologists come in, do what the do best, and finally give the OK.
Unfortunately this may take a very, very long time (20 years in one case known to my friend's father). This is because of the impossible bureaucracy in Greece, but also because there is very little money to carry out the necessary work.
As a result it is ...common that when something like this happens the person who has the house built will pay the builders something extra to cover up the finds and keep hush-hush about it.
I don't even want to think what treasures may be hidden under condos and summer houses.
It might not be such a bad thing. In the past, people might have unearthed the treasures and dispersed them on the open market and then built their hous.
Now they just build the house over the things, which stay put where some future archeologists can give it a layer number.
do you know for a fact that a shitty law didn't incentivize it back then? we're talking about ancient greece here.
etymonline link for bureaucracy:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...
1818, from French bureaucratie, coined by French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759) on model of democratie, aristocratie, from bureau "office," literally "desk" (see bureau) + Greek suffix -kratia denoting "power of" (see -cracy).
Fortunately modern condos and summer houses are not built to last, so future generations will have new opportunities to dig up the good stuff once we've stopped littering the world with shoddy hunks of concrete.
You can see it under the road, open and everything. I'll try to find a photo.
It sounds terrible that people would mess with artifacts like that (moving them out of their property), but what can you do when your perfectly good plot of land just turned into a decades-long liability because there's some ancient stuff under it? It's not like archeology is the best funded of fields, either, so archeologists don't have the resources to be quick about taking the artifacts.
Reminds me of what my mother, who had a lot of archeology subjects at university, said about Egypt - that they have a shit ton of archeologically significant findings there, but because of the policy of not exporting artifacts outside the country combined with museums being already overflowed, people end up routinely destroying artifacts they find because there's nothing else to do with them.
It's a problem of geology and ecosystems. The past civilization in Greece built with stone. Stone never really goes away. I live in the pacific northwest, which had a massive native population for thousands of years covering the same periods. It was (/is) a thriving culture with all the trappings. But they built out of wood. Their relics didn't last.
I'd be interested to hear from a geologist as to whether this may have been because the granite of the pacific northwest was harder. Was it that the Greeks and Romans lived atop rock that was a little easier to quarry?
I would really like to know the details of how DNA tests could determine that.
I found a couple articles on this (the Phaleron mass grave site has been in the news for a while): http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2016/03/24/arc... , http://www.livescience.com/54432-mass-grave-unearthed-in-gre...
But none are specific about what it is that DNA studies would hope to confirm/deny or inform, or how exactly they'd do it.
But - I dunno. People don't often get buried these days, and those who do, often are dug up and burned once the lease on the grave site is up.
Yeah, but it's infinitely more replicate-able.
> than parent's idea of burying the information with the body.
Why not do both?
I think my original point may be, "Who gets buried these days"? There's >6 billion people, I would assume most people are cremated. Plots o' land are rented out, ya know. Fail to renew your lease, you get dug up.
Eyeballs? Do it in a couple different languages and your hip might be the next Rosetta stone.
There was a 70s movie, and I assume a novel, about a spy with amnesia who had a swiss account number engraved onto such a plate. But I cannot seem to google it atm.
Bourne takes from so many spy stories that i doubt it possible to mention one without seeing it somehow mirrored in Bourne.
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For below (as I've hit the 3posts/hour limit) maybe I was thinking of bourne, but only if he had a plate with the number on a bone. The thing I remember was that the number only became apparent at the hospital during an x-ray, after the accident that caused the amnesia.
Are you sure it wasn't that one?
Or our pets, many of whom are injected with passive RFID chips. Assuming the vaccination database is still live somewhere, you could someday look up the name, owner, vaccination and vet history of long-deceased cats and dogs.
Prisoners are just worthless people that you want to get rid of. Not only would the shackles get removed before burial; so would their shoes etc. They would be stripped and dumped.
> Prisoners are just worthless people that you want to get rid of.
That's not always true. Sometimes prisoners are important people you want to set an example of. These aren't the first ancient skeletons with iron shackles archeologists have found and the other ones (China, Rome, etc.) certainly aren't all human sacrifices.
You're quite right that people in the time period in question wouldn't have thrown away anything made of iron without a good reason. For example, the Iliad describes a lump of iron being awarded as a prize in a major athletic contest.
It was also common to take hostages (relatives from royal family and nobles) from conquered states. Those were executed if conquered state rebelled.
For example, Megacles, who was archon eponymous during the attempt coup, lead the reprisals that killed Cylon's supporters, after promising them safe passage from the temple to stand trial. For this action, Megacles and the Alcmaeonids (his noble family) were exiled from Athens for some time. (Later on they returned to Athenian politics)
Perhaps the most interesting character from the Alcmaeonids was a fellow named Alcibiades, who lived during the Peloponnesian War, which was mainly between Athens and Sparta. (This is after the Persian wars, the events fancifully depicted in the movie 300) Coming from a rich family, he had an aristocratic upbringing, counting Socrates among his teachers; Pericles also helped raise him after his father was killed in battle.
Perhaps the best way to describe him is as a blend of JFK's womanzing, Bill Clinton's charm and Donald Trump's flamboyance. (He supposedly had a lisp, but curiously, this made him even more charming, but his "lisp" turned "R" into "L"[0])
He became popular in Athens but obviously made some powerful enemies along the way, and was forced to flee/defect to their rival city, Sparta, after being accused of desecrating religious statues of Hermes in the city. (Could you imagine if a prominent politician was accused of vandalizing churches or destroying flags hung from people's houses after a night of drinking? Such was the supposed outrage in Athens after this act.)
After some time in Sparta, he was accused of having an affair with the Spartan King's wife and fled again, this time to Persia.
He eventually made it back to Athens, after some negotiations where he promised that he could bring Persian support to Athens in their continuing war against Sparta and her allies. (This support didn't materialize) Nevertheless, he was given a military command and did manage to secure some victories for Athens, but after one particular defeat, his enemies in Athens took this opportunity to get him removed from command. After that, he went into self-imposed exile, and not too long afterward, was assassinated, probably by Sparta.
Some other interesting words with roots in Ancient Greek politics:
- Anarchy: Athens was ruled by several Archons, who were leaders each with specific duties. So the word "anarchy" means something like "an absence of leadership".
- Ostracism: Once a year, Athenians would be given the chance to exile someone. If they decided on this, they took a vote, by writing the name of the person they wanted to exile. The names were written on discarded pieces of broken pottery known as ostraka or ostrakon in the singular. After successful vote, the person was exiled for 10 years; attempting to return before this carried the death penalty. Interestingly, after the 10 years there seems to have been no residual sanction against the individual, and furthermore their property was returned to them.
0. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/L...