Place Your Bets- Whose Is Burried in Large Northern Greece Tomb

Yes, the headlines (mine and the National Geographic piece cited) should be leading you to think that is Alexander the Great. But, the smart money is not betting on that outcome, thinking the Alexander's body lay somewhere in Egypt, and the tomb being excavated is a royal tomb and probably one of Alexander's family members. Still an exciting find.



From NG and more after the jump

After nearly two years of digging at the site (known as the Kasta tumulus after the name of the hill it lies beneath), archaeologists are now exploring its inner chambers.

This past weekend the excavation team, led by Greek archaeologist Katerina Peristeri, announced the discovery of two elegant caryatids—large marble columns sculpted in the shape of women with outstretched arms—that may have been intended to bar intruders from entering the tomb's main room.

"I don't know of anything quite like them," says Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

The curly-haired caryatids are just part of the tomb's remarkable furnishings. Guarding the door as sentinels were a pair of carved stone sphinxes, mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head of a human. And when archaeologists finally entered the antechamber, they discovered faded remnants of frescoes as well as a mosaic floor made of white marble pieces inlaid in a red background.

The finely crafted floor, says Ian Worthington, a classical scholar at the University of Missouri in Columbia and the author of two books on Alexander the Great, "is a clear sign of wealth. The palace of Pella [where Alexander the Great was born] yielded a number of mosaics, and they were all very costly."

A big question now is: Who was interred in the inner chamber? Peristeri and her colleagues have yet to break the seal over the entrance, so archaeologists can only make educated guesses. Most agree, however, that the tumulus is unlikely to hold the remains of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who defeated the Persian army, invaded Asia and Egypt, and created one of the ancient world's largest empires.