A burial of 79 adult men with shackled wrists, discovered in 2016 in the Phaleron necropolis near Athens
A burial of 79 adult men with shackled wrists, discovered in 2016 in the Phaleron necropolis near Athens. The burial has been named the Esplanade.
To this day there is no unambiguous answer to who they were and why they died together. The burial is dated to the turn of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, the time when the first written laws appeared in Athens. Around 621 BC Draco removed homicide from the jurisdiction of the clan and handed it to the polis, establishing a court and limiting blood vengeance by means of procedure, so that execution became a public matter for the community. According to one version, those interred in the Esplanade were victims of a mass execution. According to another, they were victims of a political reprisal like the one that followed Cylon's attempt to seize power around 632 BC, when the conspirators were cut down despite the guarantees given to them.
Recent work by the Center for Bioarchaeological Research at Arizona State University has shown that 97% of the shackled men were of local origin, even more than the dead in the rest of the necropolis.
