“It was one of the ancient world’s greatest battles, pitting a Carthaginian army commanded by the general Hamilcar against a Greek alliance for control of the island of Sicily. After a fierce struggle in 480 B.C. on a coastal plain outside the Sicilian city of Himera, with heavy losses on both sides, the Greeks eventually won the day. As the years passed, the Battle of Himera assumed legendary proportions. Some Greeks would even claim it had occurred on the same day as one of the famous battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, crucial contests that led to the defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece, also in 480 B.C., and two of the most celebrated events in Greek history.
Nonetheless, for such a momentous battle, Himera has long been something of a mystery. The ancient accounts of the battle, by the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus and the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus (“the Sicilian”), are biased, confusing, and incomplete. Archaeology, however, is beginning to change things. For the past decade, Stefano Vassallo of the Archaeological Superintendency of Palermo has been working at the site of ancient Himera. His discoveries have helped pinpoint the battle’s precise location, clarified the ancient historians’ accounts, and unearth new evidence of how classical Greek soldiers fought and died…
Scholars have long questioned Diodorus’ description of these events, but in 2008 Vassallo’s team began to excavate part of Himera’s western necropolis, just outside the city wall, in preparation for a new rail line connecting Palermo and Messina. The excavations revealed 18 very rare horse burials dating to the early fifth century B.C. These burials remind us of Diodorus’ account of the cavalry stratagem the Greeks used against Hamilcar…
In the summer of 2009, Vassallo and his team continued excavating in Himera’s western necropolis. By the end of the field season, they had uncovered more than 2,000 graves dating from the mid-sixth to the late fifth centuries B.C. What most attracted Vassallo’s attention were seven communal graves, dating to the early fifth century B.C., containing at least 65 skeletons in total. The dead, who were interred in a respectful and orderly manner, were all males over the age of 18…
At first Vassallo thought he might have found victims of an epidemic, but seeing that the bodies were all male and that many displayed signs of violent trauma convinced him otherwise. Given the date of the graves, Vassallo realized that these could be the remains of men killed in the battle of 480 B.C., which would be highly significant for reconstructing the Battle of Himera. Their placement in the western necropolis strongly suggests that the main clash between the Greek and Carthaginian armies took place near the western walls of the city. Since bodies are heavy to move, it’s likely they were buried in the cemetery closest to the battlefield, especially if there were many dead to dispose of. (In contrast, Himera’s eastern necropolis on the far side of the city, which Vassallo had previously excavated, contains no communal graves.) Vassallo also has a hypothesis about the soldiers’ origins. They were probably not Carthaginians, for the defeated enemy would have received little respect. Dead Himeran soldiers would likely have been collected by their families for burial. Instead, Vassallo believes many or all of the dead were allied Greeks from Syracuse or Akragas. These warriors, who died far from home, could not be taken back to their native soil for burial. Instead, they were honored in Himera’s cemetery for their role in defending the city.
The bones of Himera have more stories to tell. For all that has been written about Greek warfare by poets and historians from Homer to Herodotus and Diodorus, ancient literature tends to focus on generals and rulers rather than on how ordinary soldiers fought and died. Until Vassallo’s excavations, only a handful of mass graves from Greek battles—such as those at Chaeronea, where Philip of Macedon defeated the Greeks in 338 B.C.—had been found. These graves were explored before the development of modern archaeological and forensic techniques.
In contrast, Vassallo’s team worked with an on-site group of anthropologists, architects, and conservators to document, process, and study their discoveries. Thanks to their careful methods, the Himera graves may represent the best archaeological source yet found for classical Greek warfare.” (Archaeology Magazine full story)
“In the 480 B.C. Battle of Himera, Greek forces defeated the invading Carthaginians in a victory that ushered in a period of peace and prosperity across their world. But while historians such as Herodotus hailed the victory as a triumph of Greek heroism and fortitude, studies of recently discovered mass graves have revealed that the combatants included substantial numbers of non-Greek fighters. A new study found that the men who died violently likely hailed from as far away as the Baltic region and the Eurasian steppe, giving insights into the nature of these wars and movements of people over extraordinarily long distances in the Classical world.
The new paper, “The diverse genetic origins of a Classical period Greek army,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a genomic look at those foreign fighters. A previous study used isotopes to identify three-quarters of those in the mass graves as “non-local.” Now, the archaeologists from that study — including Professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology David Reich, co-first authors Laurie Rietsema (University of Georgia) and Britney Kyle (University of Northern Colorado), were able to carry out an in-depth dive into genome-wide data from 16 individuals from these mass graves (as well as 38 other ancient people from Sicily). Their analysis revealed that individuals from the mass graves, assumed to be largely mercenaries, hailed from places as far-flung as Ukraine, the Baltic region (modern-day Latvia), and Thrace (modern-day Bulgaria), said Reich.
Going into the study, “We already had an idea that people from lots of regions must have participated in this battle, but there was no clue yet as to where they came from,” said Alissa Mittnik, the postdoc in Reich’s lab who led the genetic analysis and another co-first author.
History was no help. “Much was written about this event from the historical records, but all historical information has biases,” said Reich. Documenting the apparent heroism of the Greeks at this battle, as well as at battles with invading Persians around the same time at Salamis and Thermopylae, the other end of the Greek world, “was important to Greek identity in this period.”
One aspect of these accounts has been the makeup of the armies. “While it is known that in this period in time mercenaries were widely used, Greek historians didn’t mention the participation of mercenaries at Himera,” said Mittnik. “They would have been people that would have been considered by the Greeks as foreign barbarians.”
Using DNA mined from bones and teeth, the team provides surprising information about the origins of these non-Greek fighters. “We have data from tens of thousands, and sometimes even more than a million positions in the genome,” explained Reich. “Such data is similar in quality data to what one gets from sending your DNA to a personal ancestry testing company.” The data allowed the team to compare the ancestry of the people from ancient Sicily with the ancestry of others with “exquisite accuracy,” said Reich.
“Combining the genetic and the isotopic results tells us about the genetic ancestry of people and gives powerful clues about where they grew up.” For example, he said, “Two individuals have ancestry typical of the Baltic region at the time, two have ancestry typical of the Northern Balkans, and two have ancestry typical of the steppes north of the Black Sea.”
These findings shed light on patterns of movement through the ancient world. “This provides direct evidence of people traveling long distances in their lifetime and shows that a motivation for such travel would have been not just trade but participation in warfare,” said Mittnik.
“War,” added Reich, “seems to have drawn people from particularly far-flung places.”
For Mittnik, who has started her own research group in Germany, this work fits well within a larger program. “I’m interested in using ancient DNA to gain insight into the dynamics of communities,” she said.” “I also work on reconstructing family trees and studying patterns in these pedigrees to learn what they can show about social organization.”
Reich said the possibilities are global. “Genetic data complement isotopic and archaeological data, and by combining them, we obtain a richer and more nuanced understanding of the past.” (Legendary Battle of Himera was triumph of Greek heroism, kind of — Harvard Gazette)
‘Royal Scythia, Greece, Kyiv Rus‘ book describes what was going on in the area of present-day Ukraine at the time of the Battle of Himera. Including the eyewitness account of Scythia-Ukraine by Herodotus who visited it. Could the ‘very rare horse burials’ mentioned in the first article be those of the ‘Ukrainian’ Scythians? The ‘Royal Scythia’ book provides some examles of horse burials from the kurgans in Ukraine.
