A mass grave containing 80 skeletons may just be tied to a 2,600-year-old failed coup in ancient Athens.
The coup in question is that of the ancient Greek Olympic athlete and aristocrat Cylon, which happened around 672 BCE. While ancient sources differed in all their details, it apparently went something like this: Cylon received an oracle advising him to seize Athens during a festival of Zeus—an event which he interpreted as the Olympics. And so, during the Olympics, he and his followers seized the Acropolis—but then found themselves besieged. Cylon and his brother may or may not have slipped out around this time and escaped.
Finding themselves in dire straits, the conspirators sought sanctuary inside the temple of Athena on top of the Acropolis—which, in ancient times, meant they were under the goddesses’ protection, and that harming them would be an enormous crime.
Eventually, the conspirators were persuaded to leave the temple and stand trial with promises that they would not be killed—but just to be sure, the conspirators tied a rope to the statue of Athena inside and dragged the other end along with them, thereby bringing the protection of her sanctuary with them.
The hitch came when the rope broke.
Taking this either as a sign of Athena’s denunciation of the conspirators or as a chance to take out their enemies, all of Cylon’s conspirators were killed on the spot.
Are these Cylon’s men?
The remains, meanwhile, were discovered in a coastal part of southern Athens known as the Faliron Delta—an area which served as the original main port of Athens before the Piraeus was developed in the fifth century BCE. They were uncovered more than eight feet (2.5 m) below the surface, in an ancient necropolis.
The bones all appear to be male, well-built, and with excellent teeth—signifying they were young and of good health before they perished. None appear to have bone fractures, and the careful arrangement of the bodies in a line may indicate they were members of the aristocracy—like many of Cylon’s followers would have been.
36 of the men found were bound in iron hand shackles, and one had an arrowhead stuck in his shoulder—which may be a sign of a possible capture, like that of the conspirators. Moreover, two trefoil jugs (which look similar in shape to this one) found at the site allowed the researchers to safely date the age of the artifacts involved. The results indicated the bones dated to between 650 and 625 BCE, or right around the time of the Cylonian coup.
Or in short: The physical traits of the bodies found, how they were buried, and when they were buried match up correlate with what you would expect to find for Cylon’s conspirators.
However, it is by no means a definitive (or even strongly indicative) connection. Several archaeologists have questioned the identification with Cylon, such as Kristina Killgrove, PhD, in a Forbes article. As she pointed out, finding mass graves with shackled skeletons isn’t the rarest thing in Athens. And, when paired with the spotty historical documentation of the era, what we know for certain about the coup doesn’t give us much to work with by way of identifying information.
Regardless of whether the grave is tied to Cylon, though, archaeologists can still glean a lot of valuable information from the site which will only continue to build our knowledge of the time period.
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Image credit: ZUMA W/REX
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