Palace of Aigai, Re-Opened

[billd89]

The Palace of Aegae was where Alexander was proclaimed King:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... ng-reopens

Tombs of rels:
https://www.newsweek.com/alexander-grea ... bs-1864302

[billd89]

This story is just in the news (Dec. 2023 paper).
https://www.newsweek.com/alexander-grea ... bs-1864302

At this point, "skeletal elements with the aid of macrophotography, radiographs and anatomic dissection" is the extent of the examination. I don't know why they wouldn't try to extract DNA to conclusively determine who these royals were ... unless they might find a Semitic lineage?

Because I am following-up on the very strange myth that Alexander was descended from 'Zeus Ammon' (Baal Hammon: a Semitic deity at Siwa Egypt), I am startled to learn that a purported representation of Sabazios was found in the Tomb of Alexander IV:


Judeo-Hellenic Sabazios is especially intriguing, althrough controversial. One ancient reference is problematic; that leaves Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 4.6: "... ἣ κατέχει τοὺς βακχεύοντας. αὐτοὶ δὲ τῷ λόγῳ μαρτυροῦσιν, ὅταν σάββατον* ..." (*τὸν Σάββάσιον R. Malim Σαβάζιον vel Σάβον). For a reactionary Jewish repulsion to the very concept, see The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 3 [1925], p.224; also, see this long Forum Thread. I have highlighted the bits of Albright's article which I find relevant to the Alexander Siwa Myth, below.

W.F. Albright, The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 36 [July 1920], pp.263-4:

Bisexual plants, which bore their own seed, were regarded as androgynous or parthenogenetic. Hence the divinities of vegetation were similarly fancied; both Tammuz and Ištar were often androgynous; the bearded Ištar (= masculine Aštar) is well known; the planet Venus was male in the morning, and female at night. Similarly, several of the names of Tammuz are feminine -- in short, these gods of fertility are practically interchangeable when considered in the light of their entire history and not in too narrow a scope. The stalk of grain might be a virgin, who produced her grain-child without direct fecundation (Kore, daughter of Demeter, mother-earth; Jephthah's daughter), or it might be a youth, in which case reaping became castration. We must remember that the stalk was severed with a short sickle just below the ear, and that the latter was associated with the male member.2 Hence vegetation always springs from the severed members of Attis and his congeners. The idea of hermaphroditism was too abnormal to prevail, and so remained very rare, being replaced by the conception of intimately related individuals of opposite sex, usually brother and sister, especially since the god of fertility and his spouse were also often thought to be the progenitors of the race. But with a primitive naïveté of logic, which was, none the less, rigorous, the virgin sister had to become the brother's mother, and so the brother becomes his own father. We need not assume, as has often been done, that these conceptions go back to a period of sexual promiscuity; they may naturally be referred to the observation of the apparent phenomena of plant (and animal) life, whose reproductive processes were of vital economic significance, and were accordingly the center of elaborate religio-magical rites and beliefs. Now we can see how Bitis and Sabazios can become their own fathers, why Amôn and Min are {p.264} called by the remarkable title, 'bull of his mother,' and Joseph {Deuteronomy 33:17} 'first-born of his bull' (i.e., bull, born of himself),' and why Tammuz receives the liturgic appellation 'brother of (his) mother, Mutin-anna (litanic form of Geštin-anna)." The most drastic, and at the same time instructive, form of the myth is found in Phrygia. Zeus-Sabazios, the ram-god of fertility, consorts with mother-earth in the form of a bull. After ten months she bears Kore, whom her father later approaches as a serpent, causing her to become pregnant with a bull-like son (Sabazios himself). This process was liturgically expressed by the formula ταῦρος πατὴρ δράκοντος καὶ πατὴρ ταύρου δράκων (Roscher, s.v. "Sabazios," IV, 252 f.).