Lost City of Alexander the Great Unearthed in Kurdish Iraq

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.livescience.com/60545-lost-city-alexander-the-great-uncovered.html?utm_source=notification

enjoy....

[Duncan Head]

The grave bore the inscription "King of kings, beneficent, the just, the manifest, friend of the Greeks, this is the king who fought against the Roman army led by Crassus at Carrhae in 54/53 BC."

Nice to see an inscription so precisely dated - presumably with a crystal ball. I think the "inscription" quoted is from the coin, not the grave - Orodes II's coins bear legends like "ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΝ ΑΡΣΑΚΟΥ ΦΙΛΟΠΑΤΟΡΟΣ ΔΙΚΑΙΟΥ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥΣ ΦΙΛΕΛΛΗΝΟΣ" - see http://www.parthia.com/parthia_inscriptions.htm#Orodes2

So read:

The coin bore the inscription "King of kings, beneficent, the just, the manifest, friend of the Greeks". This is the king who fought against the Roman army led by Crassus at Carrhae in 54/53 BC.

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/lost-city-of-alexander-great-found-in.html#dHzXdISRtFf3yRYm.97 shows a nice little reconstruction drawing of the city.

[Patrick Waterson]

Thanks, Dave and Duncan.

[Tim]

Ditto

[RichT]

Nice, thanks for sharing.

It's an interesting case in the garbling of a story by media/internet, though. "Lost City of Alexander the Great Unearthed in Kurdish Iraq" says the livescience story. Really - a lost Alexandria discovered? That would be big news. Though the first sentence "A lost city that was overrun by Alexander the Great on his conquest of Persia" appears a little contradictory. Overrun or founded?

'A lost city of Alexander' is how most internet outlets are running the story, as a Google search for 'Qalatga Darband' shows. But the British Museum site - http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/museum_activity/middle_east/iraq_scheme/darband-i_rania_project.aspx - says nothing about Alexander, and the only dating is "the site was primarily occupied in the early Parthian period (1st century BC - 1st century AD)", but with Greco-Roman elements. Most of the other internet noise (including livescience and archaeologynewsnetwork) seem to be quoting from an interview with Lead Archaeologist John MacGinnis in the Times - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/lost-city-of-alexander-the-great-found-in-iraq-pw6g2dtvj - this is paywalled so I can't read it - judging by the opening sentences I'm not missing much - but this seems to be the origin of the 'founded by Alexander' angle. I can't tell what MacGinnis actually said, but judging by the livescience story, he didn't say Alexander founded it - "The ceramics found at the site suggest that at least one area of Qalatga Darband was founded during the second and first centuries B.C. by the Seleucids, or the Hellenistic people who ruled after Alexander the Great, according to a statement."

So nice - a late Seleucid/Parthian settlement. But not an Alexandria.