J. Hall published an article in the latest volume of the Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia. In this article he also writes about Kasta.
At p. 311, he makes irony on the search for ‘the occupant of the tomb: (…) Roxane, (…) Alexander IV, (…) Olympias, (…) Hephaistion (…) even Alexander’.
By putting together a serious attribution and purely popular ones, this scholar is very unfair and discredits a very serious study, which has been conducted throughout several years.
In fact, he fails to specify that the name of Hephaestion is based on sound epigraphical evidence from the tumulus. Perhaps he does not know it, although the inscriptions ad hoc have been shown in power points of several lectures on the issue. Perhaps he does not know these details, but in this case he should shut up, he is not obliged to write about something he ignores.
At note 2, he asserts that ‘the “lion monument” (…) was initially thought to have surmounted the tomb’. He clearly ignores that three parts of the lion have been found ON the tumulus, thus the original setting of the lion on the tumulus is certain.
At p. 312, he gives emphasis to the ‘doubts concerning the geology and chronology of the monument’. Again he fails to report that the tumulus is associated to a coin struck by Alexander the Great and to pottery of the late 4th century BC, that the cramps used at Kasta to join the blocks are of a type which desappears in the late 4th c. BC, finally that the surviving elements of the kline of room 4 allow the reconstruction of a type of couch which does not exists after the early 3rd c. BC, as Dr. Ignatiadou rightly asserted. Again he may not know these data, but in that case he should shut up, I believe he is not obliged to write about Kasta even if he knows nothing about it.
Finally at p. 312, he writes that ‘the interpretation of the Kasta burials (…) are enmeshed within a (…) political discourse, etc.’ It is exactly the opposite. It is the hypercritics, who forget basic data, in order to please the globalistic rulers of the western world, by asserting false primitivistic and minimalistic notions which are in keeping with the program of stripping populations of their own cultures and of their own history.
Needless to say, this scholar ignores my own 3 publications about Kasta and the excellent publications of Mavrogiannis.
The writer of these notes holds an important chair in the western world. This fact reveals the extent of the moral, scientific and mental decay of at least a part of the western academia about ancient Greece.
