Aflatoon and the Avars: How modern science helped solve two historical mysteries

History is full of mysteries and facts that have not yet come to light as humanity has lacked the wherewithal to uncover them. But revolutionary scientific technologies are now helping us learn more about our own pasts. This week, science has helped reveal information about two different periods of history that would not have been possible otherwise.

In the first instance, scientists in Italy have used modern imaging techniques such as infrared and ultraviolet optical imaging, molecular and elemental imaging, thermal imaging, tomography and digital optical microscopy to reveal the exact location where Plato, the philosopher of Greek Antiquity, lies buried.

Meanwhile, a scientific team has used genomics to tell the true story of the Avars, nomads from the Asian steppe who migrated and reached Central Europe and founded a powerful polity there, one of the major powers of its time.

The grave of ‘Aflatoon’

Plato (427-348 BCE) was a prominent philosopher from Classical Greece. He was the student of Socrates (470-399 BCE) and teacher to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who in turn tutored Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE).

The troika of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are known for having laid the foundations of Western philosophical thought. The three are known as ‘Sukraat’, ‘Aflatoon’ and ‘Arastu’ respectively in North India and Pakistan.

Graziano Ranocchia of the University of Pisa, coordinated a project lasting five years and eight months that finally revealed Plato’s final resting place.

The key to this were a bunch of papyrus scrolls from the famous Roman town of Herculaneum. Located in the present-day comune of Ercolano in southwest Italy’s Campania region, Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii were destroyed when Mt Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. Both towns were buried under mounds of volcanic ash formed by the cooling of lava.

The more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls were discovered in the 18th century in the Villa of the Papyri, a Roman estate in Herculaneum. They were not destroyed during the eruption but instead were preserved.

The researchers have been able to decipher over 1,000 words, corresponding to 30 per cent of the text.

“Among the most important novelties, we read that Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academia in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacred shrine to the Muses (of Greek myth). Until now, it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy,” a statement by the National research Council, the largest public research institution in Italy known by its Italian initials CNR, read.

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The ‘Academy’ refers to the Platonic Academy, the school that Plato founded in Athens in 387 BCE.

The papyrus also revealed the exact period of the enslavement of Plato. He had been involved in the political goings-on in Syracuse, a historic city of the Hellenic World located on the island of Sicily (Today part of Italy) in the Mediterranean.

“Still with regard to the same philosopher it emerges that he was sold as a slave on the island of Aegina as early as 404 BCE, when the Spartans conquered the island or, alternatively, in 399 BCE, immediately after the death of Socrates. Until now, it was believed that Plato had been sold into slavery in 387 BCE during his stay in Sicily at the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse,” the statement added.

Along the Steppe

The other big historical finding — about the Avars — was published as a study in Nature on April 24, 2024.

Network of large pedigrees reveals social practices of Avar communities noted:

From the late sixth century CE to the early ninth century, the Avars were the dominant power in eastern central Europe. Originating from eastern central Asia, probably from the Rouran khaganate destroyed by the Turks, the Avars’ core group of mounted steppe warriors and their families arrived north of the Caucasus in 557-558 CE, where further groups joined the march into the Carpathian Basin in 567-568. This region became the centre of the Avar empire, where they settled among a diverse population derived from the previous Roman period followed by the Gepid and Longobard kingdoms.

The Avars challenged the might of the Byzantines (Eastern Roman Empire) with extensive raids into the Byzantine-ruled Balkans. These ended in 626 CE.

According to the researchers, the Avars (different from the present-day Avars of the North Caucasus in Russia) then became sedentary farmers.

The Avar Khaganate persisted till the armies of Charlemagne, king of the Franks and one of the greatest figures in European history, overcame it 800 CE.

The researchers wrote that the Turkic nature of the Avar Khaganate — titles of rank such as khagan, iugurrus, tudun and tarkhan — and their patrilineal social structure has been well-known to historians. “…but we were unable to investigate the social practices of the Avars until now owing to a lack of historical sources.”

The team set out to find just that. They collected DNA from four cemeteries in Hungary that were once at the heart of the Avar Khaganate.

They also used a computational method called ancIBD, which can connect even distant family members on the basis of their shared chromosomal sequences.

An article on the Nature website quoted co-lead author Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at Max Planck Institute in Germany, as saying that “scientists have generally struggled to reassemble DNA-based family trees that extend past third-degree relatives, such as first cousins or great-grandparents”.

But ancIBD enabled Krause and his colleagues “to chart much more convoluted Avar family trees, including a massive nine-generation pedigree comprising 146 family members”.

The research revealed several hitherto unknown insights into the Avars’ social practices.

The Avars never married their cousins or relatives even after migrating from Asia to Europe. This was surprising given that marriage between first cousins was not unusual in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Avars also never intermarried with non-Avars. The researchers found that only about 20 per cent of the genomic sequences in the sampled Avar DNA could be traced to central European ancestry.

There were also so-called ‘Levirate unions’ where a widow married a male from the family of her deceased spouse, such as a brother (The Niyoga tradition of ancient India is something similar). Levirate unions were not common in Europe. However, they were an established feature of steppe peoples from Asia, the researchers noted.

And of course, the Avars were strictly patrilineal. A man was the head of the family and daughters left their natal families upon marriage to join their husbands’ households. 

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