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The 8th November is celebrated as Archangels Day in Greece, but on that November day in 1977 CE something remarkable happened: an excavation team led by Professor Manolis Andronikos were roped down into the eerie gloom of an unlooted Macedonian-styled tomb at Vergina in northern Greece. Dignitaries, police, priests, and swelling ranks of archaeologists watched on in anticipation as the first shafts of light in 2,300 years penetrated its interior.

What emerged from beneath the great tumulus of soil was the ‘archaeological find of the century’ rivalling Howards Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings and Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at what he claimed to be ‘Troy.’ Inside the main chamber of the barrel-vaulted structure known as Tomb II lay gold and silver artefacts, exquisitely worked weapons and armour accompanied by invaluable grave goods which suggested the presence of royalty. Within a stone sarcophagus sat a never-before-seen gold chest containing carefully cremated bones wrapped in remnants of purple fabric. Andronikos proposed this was nothing less than Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, who was stabbed to death in 336 BCE at Aegae, the nation’s spiritual capital and burial ground of its kings.

Scythian Quiver & Armour of a Woman, VerginaDavid Grant (Public Domain)

Battle of the Bones

“Weapons were for men what jewels were for women,” reads a plaque in the Vergina Museum erected above the tombs in 1997 CE. Indeed, many commentators believed that the antechamber weapons belonged to the man next door, as their upright position against the door dividing the two chambers might indicate.

There soon began a bitter “battle of the bones” waged through academic papers designed to shoot one another down.

After a cluster of structures was uncovered under the same tumulus – named Tombs I to IV - there followed 35 years of controversy as historians and commentators argued the identifications of the Tomb II pair: Philip II and a wife, claimed one partisan camp; according to the opposition faction, they were Philip’s half-witted son, crowned Philip III Arrhidaeus, and his young wife Adea-Eurydice. This tragic royal pair were executed together by Alexander’s mother, Olympias, and thus they fitted the double burial scenario. Arguments became intricate, caustic, and divided the academic community, and there soon began a bitter “battle of the bones” waged through academic papers designed to shoot one another down (Grant 2020, 93).

What was arguably a case of archaeological gender bias attached to the antechamber weapons has since proved to be wrong. In 2013, an anthropological team studying the skeletal remains, led by anthropologists Professor Theo Antikas and Laura Wynn-Antikas, found a major shinbone fracture which had shortened the woman’s left leg. This conclusively united the female with the armour, because the left shin guard or greave of a gilded pair, which had always looked rather feminine in proportion, was 3.5 cm shorter and also narrower than the right. That, in turn, linked the female to the weapons around her. Historians now had the conundrum of a limping warrioress with a precious artefact from the Scythian world. Moreover, closer analysis of her pubic bone aged her at 30-34 years at death, and that ruled out both the earliest and the most prominent of Philip’s wives who were too old at his death, and also his final teenage bride, Cleopatra, as well as the equally young Queen Adea-Eurydice, the wife of his half-witted son.

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The high proportion of females & the weapons in their graves suggest 25 per cent of all Scythian fighters were women.

In a series of recent excavations at burial mounds known as ‘kurgans,’ more than 112 graves of women buried with weapons were unearthed between the Don and the Danube rivers, 70 per cent of them between the ages of 16 and 30 at death. Many had bones scarred with arrow wounds while markers on their spines betrayed their lives on horseback. The high proportion of females and the weapons in their graves suggest 25 per cent of all Scythian fighters were women, a figure that appears to be rising with new DNA sexing of skeletal remains thought to be men. Some had unusually muscular right arms suggesting frequent use of a bow, while the single earring commonly accompanying them might have differentiated female fighters from the tribe’s domestic women.

Legend claimed Scythians were descended from one of the three grandsons of Zeus; propitious golden gifts fell from heaven and signified which of them - the son of Heracles named Scythes - should rule the ‘youngest of all the nations’, forged just 1,000 years before Darius I crossed to Greece on the way to Marathon in 490 BCE. In Herodotus’ day, the Scythians still wore belts with little cups attached commemorating their hero-ancestor; they were possibly used to carry the snake venom their arrows were dipped in, or for the swearing of blood-oaths in the saddle (Herodotus 4.3ff).

Scythians in the Greek World

As they left no written records, we neither know their language nor whether Scythians had a written script, but their tribal regions stretched from the Danube around the northern reaches of the Black Sea to the borders of the Caspian. From there, the migratory lands swept east into modern Kazakhstan and the states to its south. ‘Scythian’ was therefore a loose appellation the Greeks provided to all Eurasian nomads sharing a common lifestyle in the swathe of land to the north of the Persian Empire; the Persians called them ‘Saka’ and the barren deserts they inhabited were apparently ridiculed in Greek proverbs.

Traditional Scythian-Occupied Region East of UkraineDavid Grant (Public Domain)

Scythians had certainly entered the Greek cultural milieu long before Philip and Alexander. A Graeco-Scythian philosopher named Anacharsis is said to have travelled to Athens in the early 6th century BCE. Known for his candour and direct talk, he became acquainted with the great law-giver Solon and gained the rare privilege of Athenian citizenship. Another tradition cites Anacharsis as one of the Seven Sages of Greece who left a legacy of wise epithets behind.

Herodotus confirmed that Greeks and Scythians had coexisted around the region we associate with the eastern Crimea today. By 480 BCE, Greek settlers had established the federation of the Kingdom of Bosporus, driven by commerce and favourable trading conditions. Stonework in Scythian tombs suggests the Bosporan Greeks had built them, along with the conclusion that “the Scythian elite was highly Hellenised” (Tsetskhladze, 66). One thriving destination was the well-known metalworking centre of Panticapaeum, identified with modern Kerch on the Crimean Peninsula.

The Vergina Tomb

The Vergina tomb conundrum remained unsolved. One early hypothesis favoured a presumed daughter of King Atheas of the Danubian Scythians, who at one stage planned an alliance with the Macedonian king by adopting Philip as his heir, despite having a son. The once-friendly relationship with Atheas broke down, but scholars conjectured that a daughter, given freely or taken with the 20,000 captive women in the wake of the briefly-enjoyed Macedonian victory, could then have become Philip’s concubine or possibly his seventh wife of what would then be eight in total. But, as elegant as the hypothesis sounds, no daughter is ever mentioned in the ancient texts. Adopting Philip was rather a strange move if Atheas had a daughter, as the established method of forging an alliance with Macedon was to marry a young daughter to Philip at his polygamous court.

The Scythian daughter theory encounters more hurdles: Herodotus’ colourful description (4.71ff.) of the Scythian pre-burial practice involved slitting open the belly of the deceased, cleaning it out and filling it with aromatic substances, after which the corpse was covered in wax before carting around for display to the tribe. In contrast, the Tomb II woman was cremated soon after death with no feminine adornments, where Scythian female burials were usually accompanied by jewellery: glass beads, earrings and necklaces of pearls, topaz, agate and amber, as well bronze mirrors and distinctive ornate bracelets. The Vergina mystery deepened.

Scythian Gold CombMaqs (Public Domain)

More troublesome still for the all the proffered female identifications remained the unvoiced ’elephant in the room’: ancient sources fail to mention the presence of any woman being cremated, prepared for ritual suicide, or entombed at Philip’s funeral. And this suggests her burial in the second chamber took place after his, a hypothesis which correlated with what Andronikos observed when unearthing Tomb II: the main chamber and antechamber, with their different heights and roof-vault angles, looked to have been built in distinctly different stages.

Undocumented precious goods may have been sent to Alexander’s mother, sister & half-sisters, including Scythian gifts or booty.

We have more sober fragments from other Roman-era historians who recorded the presence of embassies from various Scythian tribes as Alexander journeyed through the provinces of the Persian Empire and the diplomacy between them. But we have scant record of the treasures Alexander sent back as campaign trophies, so undocumented precious goods may well have been sent to his mother, sister and half-sisters, including Scythian gifts or booty.

What is clear, however, is that Alexander took no Scythian wife, nor did he return a Scythian mistress to Macedon. Ultimately, Scythian tribes were hostile to the Macedonian advance and allegedly told Alexander that their unpretentious existence was epitomized by “a yoke of oxen, a plough, an arrow, a spear and a cup” (Curtius 7.8.17). After giving him a dressing-down for trying to “subjugate the whole human race” and “coveting things beyond his reach,” they joined forces with the local rebels to oppose the Macedonians until their chieftains were all but wiped out (Curtius 7.9.9 and 7.8.12). Another explanation was needed to explain the presence of the Vergina Scythian bow-and-arrow quiver.

It had already been pointed out that one of Philip’s wives was a daughter of King Cothelas of the Getae tribe of the region of Thrace just south of the Danube. Both the Getae and Scythian women, it was argued, had a custom of ritual suicide to honour the death of their king. Herodotus (5.5) reported that in the case of Thracians, a favourite wife would have her throat slit after being praised by funeral onlookers, while those not chosen to die lived in great shame thereafter. Thracian and Scythian lands bordered one another at the Danube, where their customs, language, and even a mutual love of tattooing themselves appears to have emerged. The ritual death of a Thracian spouse, therefore, could explain the double burial in Tomb II.

This newly re-presented theory also rested upon questionable foundations. Philip’s Getae wife was obscure with no martial associations, so she was unlikely to have been honoured by such a grandiose ‘weaponised’ burial. Additionally, at age 30-34, the Tomb II female was probably too old to have been one of Philip’s later conquests, judging by the tender ages of his earlier brides. Nowhere in texts is the existence of Getae female cavalry units mentioned nor women horseback archers in Thrace, so Meda was not an obvious fit for the golden Scythian quiver.

A New Candidate

The worlds of Scythia and Macedon had clearly forged diplomatic relations with varying degrees of success and for commentators to have proposed the Tomb II female was Scythian on the basis of the quiver was a logical deductive leap. But it is the only Scythian artefact in her chamber; the other weapons and armour are not. What may have been overlooked is that in Philip’s day there was a well-developed metalworking industry in Macedon itself which would have attracted the finest craftsmen. It is quite possible that a locally based artisan in the Macedonian capital at Pella was fabricating Scythian-styled goods for export to wealthy Scythian chieftains in these days of expanded diplomacy that stretched north of the Danube.

As an example, a gold scabbard now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It has a description which reads: “Although the scabbard is of Scythian type, the decoration is Greek in style and undoubtedly of Greek workmanship. Similar sheet-metal goldwork from the royal cemetery at Vergina in northern Greece and from kurgans… of Scythian rulers in the North Pontic region have been linked to the same workshop.” The same workshop is a statement born of another rare gold quiver unearthed in Russia with exactly the same pattern beaten into the precious metal as the Vergina example.

Scythian-style Scabbard DecorationMetropolitan Museum of Art (Copyright)

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