Archaeologists excavating near the ancient town of Aspendos in Turkey have discovered the grave of a person who may have been a pro athlete over two millennia ago.
"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 Monday (Aug. 10).
The archaeologists found the skeleton and artifacts in a box-style sarcophagus made of stone slabs while digging in one of the cemeteries outside Aspendos. The tomb likely dates to between 475 and 300 B.C., during the city's Classical period, according to the statement.
Aspendos was a Greco-Roman city in southwest Turkey, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) inland from the Mediterranean Sea. The city was fou...
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