A 2,400-year-old tomb opened in southern Turkey held a skeleton, a stack of silver coins showing two wrestlers locked up, and enough of a hint for the country’s culture ministry to float the idea that the person buried inside was an athlete.
The stone box tomb, a type known as a cist grave, turned up in the Eastern Necropolis at the ancient city of Aspendos. The excavation team says that burial ground had never been identified within the city before. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced the find on Monday, August 10.
Ersoy said the coins and other objects in the grave suggest the person “may have been involved in sports, perhaps even a wrestler.” The burial dates to between roughly 475 and 300 BC, inside the city’s Classical period.
One clarification for anyone picturing a Deadman. This was a competitive athlete, far closer to Olympic grappling than to anything airing on WWE, AEW or NJPW.
Wrestling was stamped on the city’s money
Aspendos minted its own silver staters, and one face carried two naked wrestlers grappling, with a slinger on the reverse. The city kept striking that design for well over a century.
O?uz Tekin, an archaeologist at Koç University, argued in a 2000 study that the long run of wrestler coinage points to the sport carrying real civic weight in Aspendos. The city had a Greek gymnasium too, and a stadium built in the second century AD could seat around 8,000 people for footraces, javelin contests and wrestling.
Aspendos sat about 10 miles inland from the Mediterranean in what is now Antalya province, and it grew wealthy trading salt, olive oil, wood and horses.
The wrestler theory is not confirmed
Sarah E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa who was not part of the dig, told Live Science that a positive identification will take much more analysis. Her objection is simple enough. The staters circulated as ordinary money across the whole population, not as some athlete’s badge.
“Coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical era Greek wrestler,” Bond said.
The skeleton is the better evidence. Bond noted that markers such as a broken and healed nose would support a career in a contact sport, and that analysis is still ahead of the team.
This is the second Aspendos headline in a week. On August 6, the ministry announced a 2.2-meter marble sculpture group of the healing god Asklepios and his son Telesphoros, dated to the final quarter of the second century AD.
For now, the closest modern relatives of whoever is in that grave sit on the amateur side of the sport. That’s the pipeline that produced Kurt Angle and Chad Gable, and lately it has been pulling talent the other way, toward Real American Freestyle and, in Gable Steveson’s case, on to the UFC.
