Silver coins imprinted with depictions of wrestlers were called staters. Many were minted at Aspendos. Credit: Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey.
Some 2,400 years ago, in a once prosperous Greek city on the southern coast of Asia Minor, someone was laid inside a stone-lined grave. Whatever name he had carried vanished, along with any intimate details about his life, such as his profession. Yet beside his bones, archaeologists have now found an intriguing clue: silver coins stamped with naked men wrestling.
The grave, discovered in a previously unknown cemetery on the eastern side of ancient Aspendos in modern Turkey, dates to roughly 475 to 300 BCE. Turkish officials now believe its occupant may have been an athlete — perhaps even one of the wrestlers for whom Aspendos appears to have been famous.
“Coins with depictions of wrestlers and other artifacts found in the tomb indicate that the person buried here may have been involved in sports, perhaps even a wrestler,” Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Turkey’s minister of culture and tourism, said in a translated statement.
A City That Put Wrestlers on Its Money
Aspendos had been a flourishing city for centuries in Antiquity by the time the occupant of the grave died. Ancient traditions attributed its foundation to Greeks, but archaeology suggests settlement there may go back considerably further. By the sixth century BCE, the city had fallen within the Persian sphere; even so, it continued minting its own silver currency. Its position beside the navigable Eurymedon River helped make it an important commercial center.
The ampitheater of Aspendos is one of the best-preserved monuments of its kind from the era. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Later generations would transform Aspendos spectacularly. Roman builders raised the enormous theater that still dominates the site and constructed an extraordinary aqueduct system stretching from springs in the mountains. The theater, built under Marcus Aurelius, could accommodate roughly 7,300 to 7,600 people — perhaps 8,500 when packed tightly. By ancient world standards, this arena was simply enormous.
But the newly discovered grave belongs to an older Aspendos, and its coins offer a glimpse of what that city valued at the moment of minting.
For much of the Classical period, Aspendos struck silver staters showing two wrestlers grappling on one face and a slinger preparing to fire on the other. In a 2000 study of Aspendos’ wrestler coins, archaeologist Oğuz Tekin found that engravers depicted no fewer than 16 different wrestling positions — gripping arms, necks, waists and legs. The design persisted through generations of coinage.
The coins were common and in wide circulation in the area. One known hoard alone contained 450 wrestler staters; another, studied in 2009, contained 270.
And that abundance is now a problem for the Turkish archaeologists’ main interpretation of the newly reported Aspendos tomb.
Was He Really a Wrestler?
Archaeologists with the newly reported grave from Aspendos. Credit: Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey.
Finding wrestling coins in a grave is not the same as finding a wrestler.
“Coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical era Greek wrestler,” Sarah E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa who was not involved in the excavation, told Live Science, because “these coins were numerous and used as payment by the entire populace, not by wrestlers alone.”
The human remains themselves may actually prove more revealing. Researchers can look for patterns of trauma — a broken nose that healed, damaged joints, repeated injuries or unusually developed attachment points where powerful muscles once pulled against bone. An ancient wrestler must surely have some of these signs present in his remains. None has yet been reported, though.
Silver coins from Aspendos, depicting a slinger (left) and wrestlers (right). Credit: Ancientcointraders via Wikimedia Commons
Even the phrase “professional athlete” should raise an eyebrow.
An Aspendos Mystery
Greek competitors did not fit neatly into our modern divide between amateur and professional. Professional sports clubs and “sports” as we know it today were barely invented during the mid-to-late 19th century, driven by industrialization. At the most famous ancient “crown games,” including the Olympics, victors officially received symbolic prizes such as wreaths rather than prize money.
But it’s also true successful athletes could compete at other festivals for substantial cash or valuable goods. And their home cities often rewarded victories with money, public honors and other privileges. Some elite competitors could therefore spend years training and traveling from contest to contest. This would make athletics a serious occupation even if they were not “professionals” in the modern salaried sense. Cambridge historian Edmund Stewart argues that Greek athletes were neither straightforward amateurs nor professionals
Aspendos is famous today for its magnificent Roman remains. The UNESCO account of the city is dominated by its theater and aqueducts. Yet this newly uncovered necropolis reaches into an earlier city whose inhabitants remain much harder to see.
Whether the dead man once wrestled before cheering crowds or merely carried the same coins as his neighbors, his grave has opened another door to that forgotten Aspendos.