ALL-CONSUMING DEATH
Among the uncommonfinds that are on display in the museum con-
structed over the royal tombs under the‘Megale Toumba’(Great Tumu-
lus) at Vergina are the conserved and reconstituted remains of the funeral
pyre which was raised over Tomb II. Preliminary analysis of the faunal
material includes cattle, dog, goat, sheep, bird, andfish bones. More than
3,000 mammalian bone fragments were recovered, mixed with those of
birds andfish. They had all been exposed to high temperatures.^17 Archae-
ologists managed to retrieve some of the burnt horse bones, belonging to
four riding horses, together with parts of their bridles, and the partial
remains of two dogs, some of the birds, andfishes. This residual material
gives at least a partial idea of the kinds of sacrificial offerings considered
appropriate for accompanying the remains of a king to the afterlife.
Complete horse skeletons have been recovered from dozens of Thracian
tombs belonging to the landed élite, whether cavalrymen from the armies
of Odrysian and other Thracian principalities, or simply country land-
owners. Dogs are also known; birds andfish are rather more surprising, if
only because we lack comparable evidence.^18
The ritualized burial of horses with their owners is comparatively
unusual in Greece, perhaps because horse owners were rather uncom-
mon. In the northern Aegean the practice of horse burial is especially
marked in the fourth and third centuriesbc, but examples such as those
recently recovered near Lithochori, where a multi-period cemetery has
been found on the west bank of the River Nestos, north of the new
Egnatia Odos motorway, show that the tradition of horse burial, whether
as single steeds, as pairs, or horses yoked to carts, was deeply embedded
in the region, even if some periods happen not to be represented here.^19
The implication of these particular types of burial is that horses were
(^17) Antikas 2006, 206, 207fig. 13 (goat, dog, bird, and ?marinefish). The faunal evidence
has not been published in a full scientific report; it is included as a very useful contextual
component to Antikas’s report on the horse bones. See above, Ch. 4,‘Horse power’, for
horse burials.
(^18) Ph. Columeau provides an interesting recent report on the small faunal assemblage
(c.200 bone fragments) from the Franco-Bulgarian excavations at Apollonia Pontika, where
bones of at least one young goat, a minimum of two adult sheep and two lambs, parts of a
pig and a very young piglet, domestic chicken, and somefish bones, were recovered from a
funerary pyre excavated in 2004. All had been heavily burned and are assumed to have been
consumed in a meal at the tomb (Hermary 2010, 173; the editor favours a different
interpretation:‘un sacrifice non consommé’: ibid. 165).
(^19) Poulios et al. 2007 (with a range of burials from thefifth centurybcto the fourth
centuryad, although there is a gap between the third centurybcand thefirst centuryad);
Archibald 1998, 296–7, and Kouzmanov 2005 on horse burials from inland Thrace. See also
306 Continuity and commemoration