An ancient skull discovered in Türkiye nearly 100 years ago does not belong to Cleopatra’s rebellious sister after all.
A new analysis of ancient bones shows they don’t even belong to a 20-year-old woman. Instead, the skull belongs to a male who died between the ages of 11 and 14 and was “severely developmentally impaired.”
“What we can now say with certainty is that the person buried in the Octagon was not Arsinoe IV and the search for her remains must continue.” write Researchers at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Modern analysis breaks down the following. controversial A hypothesis based on numerous assumptions.
In 41 BC, Roman statesman Mark Antony ordered the murder of Cleopatra’s half-sister. Arsinoe IVAt the request of his lover Cleopatra herself.
Arsinoe resisted her sister’s rule for a long time, and in her later years she was exiled to a temple in the city of Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, and eventually executed.
Back in 1929, a skull was discovered in the monumental Octagon in the city center at the ruins of Ephesus.
The Austrian archaeologist who excavated the remains estimated that the remains belonged to a special woman around 20 years old, put the remains in a bag and took them home.
Decades later, in the 1990s, another Austrian archaeologist named Hilke Thür proposed a controversial hypothesis based on his analysis of the Ephesian octagon.
Thür claimed that the site was Arsinoë’s final resting place and that these were her bones. But where did her skull go? No reliable DNA was produced from the rest of her skeleton.
Scientists at the University of Graz in Austria finally rediscovery The piece, which disappeared in 2022, is hidden in the anthropological archives of the University of Vienna.
Researchers studying the skull in the 1950s determined that it belonged to a 16- to 17-year-old female.
and in 2009Researchers who studied the skeleton found that the person was about 154 cm (5 feet) tall and that he died sometime between 210 and 20 BC.
However, modern analyzes have drawn different conclusions.
The DNA in the skull is do While matching and carbon dating the femur bone found in the Ephesus monument. do The researchers said the skeleton was definitely male, consistent with the reported life of Arsinoe. In their new paper they call He is “Octagon Boy.”
His skull was marked by serious defects and functional problems, according to a team led by paleoanthropologist Gerhard Weber.
It is impossible to say what causes these problems, but they may be related to conditions such as rickets or rickets. Treacher Collins SyndromeIt is a rare genetic disease characterized by facial deformities.
Who this young man was and why he was buried in such a special way remains a mystery. Unfortunately, his skull can’t tell us anything about Cleopatra’s family genetics. Cleopatra’s family genetics may have been of great help in the famous hunt for her tomb.
“The hypothesis that the Octagon was built in honor of Arsinoe IV is no longer a parsimonious hypothesis.” finish Weber and his team.
“Through our work we have found that our view of Arsinoë IV [becomes] “Rather than getting caught up in anecdotes and speculation, the fate of her and Octagon Boy will be able to be resolved without prejudice in the future,” he said.
This study scientific report.
