Tomb of Olympias?
Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2021 8:28 am
From my news feed comes this from The Greek City Times relating the conclusions of Emeritus Professor Athanasios Bidas:
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
This would cohere with the views of the "intrepid epigrapher" Charles Edson who argued that the tomb of Olympias was in the region of Ancient Pydna in a paper (The Tomb of Olympias) back in 1948. It also, if correct, does not bode well for those fully invested in the notion that the Kasta monument was the tomb of Olympias.Following archeological excavations carried out at the Tomb of Korinos in northern Greece, Emeritus Professor Athanasios Bidas confirmed that the tomb of the wife of King Philip and mother of Alexander the Great, Olympias, has been found ....
"The most important tomb of the area, the Tomb of Korinos, is located in the wider archeological site of ancient Pydna and is the largest Macedonian tomb found to date. Its size alone forces us to accept that it belonged to some very important people at the end of the 4th century BC. Olympias was assassinated in the spring of 316 BC.
"An important feature that confirms our final conclusions is that it is a female burial. It is known that women were buried with their heads to the East. In the burial chamber of Olympias, the marble case on which the ossuary vessel was placed is located to the east. On the tomb, in a flat area of the plain, was built a huge earthworks with an excessive amount of soil that was transported for this purpose, which still exists to this day.
"Tombs of such dimensions were erected only for the burial of kings, prominent members of the royal family, or polyandry. The size of the Korinos Tomb reinforces the view that the occupant of the tomb was an extremely important figure.The length of the burial complex under the tomb is 22 meters (for comparison we note that the tomb of Philip in Aigai is 9.5 meters long). For what person could such a huge idiosyncratic monument be built other than for the mother of Alexander the Great?
"An additional element that reinforces the view that the deceased was an important person with qualities and the institutional role of a non-ordinary person is the rare structural construction of the tomb with three chambers."
It will be interesting to see where this goes.