Mass burial of 12 individuals with their hands tied at their backs, from 8th-5th c BC Phaleron, Greece. (Image used with kind permission of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.)
Posted on 03/28/2016 8:12:53 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Not even four miles south of Athens lies Phaleron — a site unknown to most tourists. A port of Athens in classical times, Phaleron also boasts one of the largest cemeteries ever excavated in Greece, containing more than 1,500 skeletons. Dating to the 8th-5th centuries BC, Phaleron is significant for our understanding of the rise of the Greek city-state. And, in particular, for understanding the violence and subjugation that went with it. Two mass burials at Phaleron include people who were tossed face-down into a pit, their hands shackled behind their backs. To learn more about these deviant burials and their relationship to Greek state formation, an international team of archaeologists is cleaning, recording, and analyzing the Phaleron skeletons.
Excavation at the site began nearly a century ago, with a mass grave – often referred to as containing the “captives of Phaleron” because of the presence of metal handcuffs – excavated by the Greek Archaeological Service. But large-scale excavation of almost an acre of Phaleron was carried out between 2012-2016 by the Department of Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, led by archaeologist Stella Chrysoulaki. The modern excavation garnered massive publicity in Greece because of its scale and funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, but little news has trickled out in the English-language media...
There is significant variation in how people were buried at Phaleron. Most were interred in simple pit graves, but nearly one-third are infants and children in large jars, about 5% are cremations complete with funeral pyres, and there are a few stone-lined cist graves. One individual was even buried in a wooden boat used as a coffin – the fact that this lasted nearly three millennia shows that preservation at the site is remarkably good.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Mass burial of 12 individuals with their hands tied at their backs, from 8th-5th c BC Phaleron, Greece. (Image used with kind permission of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.)
Got on the wrong side of the wrong people.
Who was running Athens at that time, the Gambinos?
8th Century BC Fort Marcy Park? :)
We might be reaching peak archaeology. One hundred years from now quantum computer equipped robots might not care at all, or be embarrassed by their heathen creators.
And citizens learned very early to be quiet and don’t upset the “Hillary” of the day.
LOL, only if they find a lot more skeletal remains at Fort Marcy Park. But then they would all probably be deemed suicides, even if shackles were found.
Children in pots. Child sacrifice?
There's more to this story, I suspect.
Great, something else to worry about...
I doubt it, probably just how they buried the infants at that time.
Athens overthrew a tyranny within that time period. Homer is alleged to have live at the beginning of it. The Peloponnesian Wars at the end. In between Persian invasions, civil wars and lots of other mayhem.
“Unhappy Greeks, barbarians to each other.” — Euripides
These guys are still voting for the Democratos Party.
Hey, if they had an annual ostracism to toss one of their prominent politicians out of the US for ten years, I’d be all for it.
my thoughts too. Buried alive?
No. The feet would have been in cement blocks.
Children in pots. Child sacrifice?
Probably leftovers that went bad.
I did a paper on sacrifice in the Med. area once and my research of documents, art, and pottery showed that sacrifice—including child sacrifice—was much more widely practiced in Western culture than is comfortable for Western historians to accept.
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