For the past 230 years or so, the story that was sculpted into the frieze of the Parthenon, the most influential building in the western world, has seemed fairly straight-forward, depicting a civic parade that honored — as did the Parthenon itself — the Greek goddess Athena.

But a shocking discovery involving mummies has called this meaning into question, archaeologist and NYU professor Joan Breton Connelly argues in her new book “The Parthenon Enigma” (Knopf).

From what Connelly calls “a great detective story,” we’ve learned that the frieze tells a far more tragic tale.

In ancient Egypt, while the King Tuts of the world were buried in gold sarcophagi when they died, mere mortals were mummified with cheaper materials — recycled papyrus that held early drafts of written works, including transcribed texts from ancient Greece.

When a Greek scholar examined scraps from one of these mummies, he made an astounding discovery — about 250 lines of a lost play, “Erechtheus,” by the great Greek playwright Euripides.

“These coffins end up being our best source of lost Greek texts,” says Connelly, who notes that while the sarcophagus containing the play was excavated in 1901, the technology to remove the papyrus without destroying it did not exist until the 1960s.

“Nobody knew how to separate these little papier-mâché strips without damaging the writing on them until then,” she says, “when someone devised a method by which they steamed the mummy case in a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid and glycerin and give it a steam bath so they could pull off these layers.”

Papyrus fragments like this one found on a mummy helped crack the story behind the Parthenon.
The play tells the tale of an early king of Athens, and how, “when the first Barbarian invasion was surrounding the city, he was told by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his youngest daughter” in order to win the battle.

Connelly first learned of the play — especially challenging to read because it was in “fragmentary Greek,” and “the papyrus strips were cut into the shapes of falcon’s wings” — in the 1990s and, over time, had a revelation.

“[I realized that] Euripides was talking about what you see in the middle of the Parthenon frieze,” she says. “It’s a family group — a mother, father and three girls — and they’re preparing to sacrifice the littlest girl. It was a virgin sacrifice, a dark tale.”

Greek tragedy
Still, Connelly’s interpretation of this scene ultimately held a lighter, even positive message, one that speaks to the influence of the Parthenon in the fields of architecture, government and the very nature of civilized society.

“It’s a beautiful message that I connect with democracy and how the Athenians were different from everyone else of their time,” she says.

“The message they chose to put above the door of their finest temple, their core belief, was that no family, not even the royals, can put themselves above the common good. It was a great embodiment of the notion of self-sacrifice. It’s the spiritual backbone of Athenian democracy.”

In helping us understand the significance of the Parthenon, Connelly uses a metaphor we can deeply relate to, in that the building was a “replacement building” created after a monumental tragedy that occurred around 480 BC — what she considers an ancient Greek version of 9/11.

“The Persian Army did the unthinkable. They marched into Greece, went to the Acropolis and burned it — the most iconic building in the city — to the ground,” says Connelly.

“The Athenians were in shock, because the Greeks had an unwritten rule of warfare that you always left the religious spaces of your enemies sacred. You did not burn down temples or any holy precincts. But the Persians lived by different rules, and they came in and burned down what we call the father of the Parthenon, the old Athenian temple.”

Given that the Persians invaded on foot, the Greeks had ample warning and had evacuated to neighboring Salamis Island before the onslaught.

There, they watched smoke engulf the city as their mᴀssive temple burned.

That event, Connelly contends, had a remarkable impact on civilization moving forward.

“What’s amazing about this story,” she says, “is that the kids that were 15 or 16 at the time were the people who went on to build the Golden Age of Greece — Pericles, Sophocles, all these big names that come down to us from politics, theater, philosophy. They were all teenagers, and this made a giant impression on them.”