The skull from Tomb II at Vergina: King Philip II of Macedon

Abstract

Because the techniques and the approach described in this paper are perhaps unfamiliar to readers of this Journal, we offer a short introduction on the background to the project. In 1979, after working on the Egyptian mummies in Manchester as part of the Manchester Museum Mummy Research Project, one of us (R. A. H. N.) felt it would be interesting to attempt the reconstruction of some Greek skulls. It seemed that the technique offered interesting new possibilities in the study of Greek portraiture, quite apart from the fascination of an objective method of tackling the appearance of the ancient Greeks. That the very first skull on which we were able to work proved to be such an intriguing one was a stroke of good fortune arising out of the Society's centenary celebrations, when I had the opportunity of discussing the project first with Dr N. Yalouris, and then at his suggestion with Professor M. Andronicos. It is to the latter's great generosity that we owe the privilege of working with a skull that proved much more exciting than even we had anticipated: from the detailed study of the bones that the reconstruction entailed, set against the historical and archaeological evidence, we found that we could not merely reconstruct the dead man's appearance, but provide evidence for his medical history and his military career which identified him (in our view conclusively) as Philip II: we could in fact answer for Professor Andronicos the question that has hung over these tombs at Vergina since he first discovered them in 1977, and identify for him the occupant of the main chamber of Tomb II, the most important of them.

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