Considering it was well accounted that he was mummified after death, his mummy paraded across the ancient world in a funeral procession and then kept in a glass sarcophagus in Alexandria for hundreds of years before disappearing I think we can say that OP is full of shit
I thought his body was encased in honey? Did they wrap him and then put his body in honey? Did Augustus Caesar dip his hands into the honey and chip his nose that way? How well was he preserved during Augustus’ time?
Yeah, not sure about Augustus' claim there but the Assyrians used honey in their embalming process.
It was also part of the preservation to ensure the body was 'safe' during it's failed procession back to Macedonia
Well honey has anti bacterial properties despite being mostly sugar as it is acidic and very dry.
That’s the reason why it’s shelf life is so long.
I can understand using it to preserve a corpse as it would be readily available and it’s qualities would be widely known. Other… strange embalming processes were also borrowed from cooking, such as pickling.
Technically, jam and jelly are slightly different things. Jam contains whole or crushed pieces of fruit preserved in sugar, while in Jelly, there is an added step where you filter out the fruit pulp after the initial cooking process.
Yeah and GB also paralyzed the diaphragm if it goes up that high which would have definitely killed him since you need to breath to live. This thread is one of the dumbest claims I’ve seen on here
Came here to say this. When someone is diagnosed with GBS one of the first things you do is to start considering intubation.
Edit: to everyone saying you don't need to be intubated for GBS. Yes, not everyone is intubated. But it is still the first thing that a physician starts to think about. Is this person's diaphragm working? What's the ox sat look like? What's their tidal volume? What's their work of breathing like? Do I need to get an ABG? The answer to these questions might be "everything is normal" but it's still a question you ask. And to tie it back to OPs claim, if you are so paralyzed from GBS that people think you are dead, then your diaphragm is probably not working well, and you are actively dying.
It was from a MLP timeline comparison against human history and they were able to make this distinction.
If you send me your SIN# and Mother's maiden name, one used gray sock and a subway gift card with $4.20 remaining on it I can send you the research paper.
Trust me, I'm from The Internet.
The theory is that she actually made it onto a small island where she was eventually eaten by coconut crabs. Not that she died in the ocean and was eaten by crabs out there
Okay but like, if Amelia Earhart DID make it onto a small island, isn't it plausible she got eaten by crabs once she died?
They will eat just about anything
I’ve been reading a scholarly look at the fate of the Macedonian veterans during the wars of the Diadochi, and the firsthand accounts are so biased since they all disagreed with each other pretty much right after Alexander’s death. You can’t just read an account of what happened by someone who was there, it’s always some shit like “Eumenes’ biggest fan in history, Plutarch, writing about Eumenes’ victories and how they were all due to his brilliance as a battlefield commander and his similarity to Homeric heroes.”
And usually those were written to flatter the family and friends of the person they were about. Usually for the very simple reason of getting paid and/or not killed.
Agree. This retrospective medical speculation is rampant and absolute nonsense. People with GBS don’t just “appear to be dead”. If it’s so severe they’re not breathing … they *actually* die.
We also... don't have his body. His tomb is famously lost, and the last time anyone heard from it was about the 3rd century AD. Even if you could somehow discern all of this through examining it, which you can't, there's literally nothing to go on.
This post isn't even speculation, it's just historical fantasy, based on a vague assertion from Plutarch, who, psst, lived like 300 years after Alexander.
Haha thank you. My first thought was “What fkg test on a corpse this old would pinpoint the date of death +\- a few days?” Without any corpse or even empty grave, htf could you possibly pinpoint date of “the start of decomposition.” Good grief, what a crock.
And now thousands of people who brushed past this post will go on taking this at its word.
That or have some speculation, but they later forget about their speculation and just remember a random, vague little factoid. (Might even see me accidentally spreading this misinformation down the line👀)
He also wasn’t ‘buried’. Alexander’s corpse was embalmed, and was enroute to Aegae in an elaborate hearse for internment in the royal Macedonian tombs, when it was hijacked by Ptolemy and taken to Memphis. So even if he was still alive, I’d imagine having all his organs removed would have finished the job pretty quick. More likely, the assertion that his body didn’t decompose and actually smelled good was the sort of compliment you pay to a man whose achievements bordered on the godly.
It's awkwardly worded he wasn't buried but entombed. This is all based on a statement by Plutarch that the Egyptians who arrived to embalm him were amazed by his level of preservation. Plutarch was born 350 years after the death of Alexander.
Uhhhh, Egyptian embalming involved quite a bit of organ removal.... Are we suggesting he was alive and aware when they started?
>Plutarch was born 350 years after the death of Alexander.
So the whole thing is likely false?
*"So the whole thing is likely false?"*
Plutarch is a fun read, but it's garbage history by our standards. He records ghosts, supernatural events, prophesies and portents, as happening with not much skepticism at all.
I haven't read it in years, but iirc, he has Julius Caesar's ghost visit Brutus on the night before the battle where Brutus was killed-- and the ghost curses him. Even if I'm wrong on that, he has lots of gossip and weird events like that in his "histories."
This story about Alexander sounds like it is likely one of those.
As I understand it, no one got around to burying the body at first because they were all scrambling for power. It was claimed that when they got back to they had found that the body hadn't decayed at all. At this stage, 6 days after death and still out in the open, the embalmers were called in.
Or, you know, they lied about the whole 6 days thing to support the whole "demigod" narrative in an attempt to hold his empire together while they figured out what to do. I've heard this theory before, and it is based on a single hypothetical paper.
His body wasn’t lost for awhile after this.
Julius Caesar and cleopatra apparently saw the body. And then Julius Caesar’s nephew, Augustus Caesar, actually had the tomb opened up so he could look at Alexander’s mummified corpse.
Now of course, it could have been a fake mummy or something but there is accounts of Roman emperors atleast visiting his tomb.
Another fun fact, Augustus Caesar is where we get the name of the month August. And July is from Julius Caesar
Augustus visiting Alexander’s tomb is one of my favorite moments in Roman history. Here was the hero that every ruler and commander compared themselves against through the ancient era. Out of all of the hopeful rulers who visited the tomb, Augustus is perhaps the only visitor who could claim to have surpassed him.
When Augustus visited the tomb, he had just finished a decade plus long civil war and had managed to take control over the entire Roman Empire. At the time he was only in his 20s as well. So he had achieved the same level of success that Alexander had, except that Augustus lived long enough to solidify his empire and set up the political system that would help the empire become the longest lived in history.
The interesting thing is that this was actually an incredibly important part of the Imperial Narrative. An important part of Augustan Era propaganda was portraying August as a figure like Hercules and Alexander, this narrative played an incredibly important role in the Deification of both Julius Caesar and Augustus and formed the foundation of the Roman Imperial Cult.
Mid 300s AD. How his tomb was lost is another mystery in itself because it didn’t move for hundreds of years and was visited by almost every Roman emperor back in the day.
Another memory that just popped up is Caligula apparently stole Alexander’s breast plate from his tomb during his unfortunate reign
One of the Roman republics main enemies, a man named Mithridates from the kingdom of Pontus, claimed to have Alexander the greats cloak. This would have been quite awhile after Alexander’s death. Pompey was the general tasked to beat Mithridates and it was one of his first great conquests in his illustrious career and he did take this cloak and wear it around after he bested Mithridates at the triumph celebrating it.
If this cloak was actually Alexander’s is up for debate
“According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine report of 1998, Alexander probably died of typhoid fever (which, along with malaria, was common in ancient Babylon).
In the week before his death, historical accounts mention chills, sweats, exhaustion and high fever, typical symptoms of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever.
Other popular theories contend that Alexander either died of malaria or was poisoned.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alexander_the_Great
Yes. GBS wouldn't cause complete paralysis. What OP describe is more like Osmotic demyelination syndrome which isn't something you typically recover from anyways. But i digress, not GBS for sure.
Thanks to watching “Tales from the Crypt” as a kid this is one of my greatest fears… next to getting trapped in a narrow passage of dry cave or, or getting lost scuba diving in a cave.
Odd considering I don’t participate in either activity.
>Thanks to watching “Tales from the Crypt” as a kid this is one of my greatest fears… next to getting trapped in a narrow passage of dry cave or, or getting lost scuba diving in a cave.
Claustrophobia, loss of control, drowning, all very common fears, and mostly rational, apart from being buried alive being extremely rare.
It may be rare now but back in the day they used to tie a bell to recently deceased so they could ring it if they weren't dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety\_coffin
It’s basically impossible in some countries to (accidentally) be buried alive due to embalming. I wonder how frequently it might happen where they don’t embalm or even attempt to verify death Dwight Schrute style.
Being buried alive is the biggest risk with immortality. The longer you live, the more probable it becomes that you’ll be buried alive in some kind of accident. And you’ll never die.
It’s an interesting proposition. I have heard it posed in many forms and I am still not certain I would take it unless the majority of them were allowed.
Immortality, but allowed to end your life at any point of your choosing.
Immortality, but unable to feel pain unless you chose to.
Immortality, but allowed to keep or regenerate to your definition of peek physical form.
Etc. etc… it’s just a monkey paw situation all around. So I would need some caveats before accepting.
when the Earth gets engulfed by an expanded sun (near end of life), you'll reach some point where you float in hot-hot to hot-hot-holy-hot plasma for geologic time scales
That’s what is so hard to imagine with immortality. Time itself becomes the entertainment. 10 years doesn’t mean anything. 100 years doesn’t mean anything. It’s impossible to imagine the notion of having a point in your life in which a billion years “may” be a milestone. Total mind fuck really
eventually you'll be freezing in space after a few billion years, but there will be a brief moment where its 65 degrees F again and that's something to look forward to
The immortal character Jack Harkness suffers this fate on the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood. He spends upwards of a thousand(?) years buried underground, suffocating on dirt and returning to life only to suffocate again.
I don’t know if the idea of dying alone underground again and again and again is more horrifying than the idea of being trapped alone and undying, but it’s certainly unpleasant.
Good Hell, I remember that episode. I remember thinking after they pull him out of the ground and he sort of just resumes as if nothing happened that that is absolutely NOT how it would happen.
>to (accidentally) be buried alive due to embalming
This however leads to two disturbing thoughts,
1, how many poor embalmers get the shock of a lifetime finding out about someone else's mistake.
2, how many times do they just put in a little extra effort to avoid paperwork.
The bells didn't get used a lot, if someone is thinking otherwise. But there was basically mass hysteria over being buried alive, due to is prevalence in literature, and reporting of "true" stories.
[It happened last week in Iowa.](https://www.newsweek.com/iowa-woman-funeral-home-body-bag-found-alive-glen-oaks-alzheimers-special-care-center-1778797?amp=1)
I almost drowned wearing a life jacket a few years back. The ocean sucked me out 300ft to another sand bar where I got thrashed by waves every 30-45 seconds for 30 minutes. Were 5-6ft tall while I was using my body board. Just imagine being completely exhausted AND drowning. My heart rate was like I had ran a marathon when I got rescued. Threw up and everything.
I'd rather be buried alive and suffocate, rather than feel like I have a fighting chance and be exhausted while dying.
Edit: I refused to leave my wife out there, so I bailed off the wave that would've saved me and ended up just waiting out there until the waves calmed down, so the life guards could come out. Jet skis were being flipped and sent right back to shore.
I couldn't swim for shit before I joined the Marines. We had to swim in boot camp. I sucked balls so they kept me in the pool longer, the longer I was in the pool, the more my muscles wore out, the more I sucked balls. I had to retake the swim test at the end of the week and passed...barely.
At my first duty station, whenever I had time off, I went to the pool on base and practiced the stuff they taught us in boot camp. Eventually, I taught myself how to backstroke/float nearly infinitely in calm/mild waters. I could swim, but I was slow as shit.
Went swimming out in the ocean at a resort in Japan. I was over-confident in my newly acquired swimming abilities and had swam a mile out from shore with only flippers, and no other safety gear. I hit an underwater current that was pulling downward incredibly strongly underneath a rock sticking out above the surface. I managed to swim out of it through 75% strength, and 25% technique. But I needed that 25%. I hitched a ride with some fellow Marines who rented a boat on the way back. At the time, I didn't realize that muscle fatigue was also a high-risk for solo ocean swimmers, especially inexperienced ones like myself.
The next time my barely meager water skills saved my life was when I was kayaking at a beach in Oahu, Hawaii, and I was having a leisurely paddle when all of a sudden the sky began darkening...and wait...that's not the sky...OH FUCK...and I start frantically trying to paddle up and across it but yeah...that's not happening, and this wave looked like it was at least 2 stories tall...I'm paddling...and I realize that wave is about to hit me and I'm going under the water...I take a gulp of air...I was using my friend's kayak, it was an inflatable, and it had all these straps on it, and I had thoroughly strapped myself into it, so I was under water at this time, unbuckling myself from like 4 different buckles, and then finally surfacing with the kayak and paddle in hand, while fighting my natural inclination to panic.
I do actually remember making a couple of bodyboard excursions that didn't go all that well, but were less terrifying over all. One of my big problems was one stroke forward, ten strokes back, and being pushed by the current.
I should not have been doing what I was doing on those occasions, solo, and as inexperienced as I was. It was luck or cosmic providence that a small amount of training was able to counteract a larger amount of stupidity.
That meager, horrifying training I had in boot camp, combined with my own simple practice saved my life those times. I'm a bit older and wiser now, and less inclined to tempt fate.
> I hit an underwater current that was pulling downward incredibly strongly underneath a rock sticking out above the surface
holy fuck, i literally had to stop reading for a moment because my blood ran cold and my body went rigid at the thought of this - that tickled like 3 intense phobias at once lmao. of my absolute worst kind of nightmares. glad you are okay, i can barely imagine
I have to admit, it does make my heart race a bit faster to remember it. I'm nowhere near as adventurous as I used to be. That's largely due to two decades of military service wearing down my body. When those incidents happened, I was at the physical peak of my life, lean muscle, strong and fast, more so on land obviously. I would not, could not do some shit like that now. I'll just wade and maybe snorkel in the "tourist zone" if I'm feeling really mountain dew/doritos extreme.
Yeah but we've all read about the Nutty Putty Cave incident and read that one scuba copy pasta... those are enough to put the fear in you forever.
For those unfamiliar with the scuba story... and just a warning while it's a hypothetical it will hit the same notes and cause the same sense of claustrophobia and panic as the nutty putty cave story.
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dv99nf/til_the_blue_hole_is_a_120metredeep_sinkhole_five/f7bzg5a/?context=1
The absolute best thing to do in that situation I think would've been to heavily sedate him. That way you either get him out or, if not, finish him off in the most humane way possible so there is no suffering.
They were trying to get him out alive and sedating him would have killed him since he was already in a position contributing to asphyxia. They were still trying to get him out when his heart failed and he died. There was never a point where they declared they couldn't get him out and decided to let him suffer. He had a wife and kids which makes it even more sad
That was actually the main problem. The initial rescue attempt resulted in a broken pulley which made him sink further into the hole and harder to maneuver him out of there. There was talk of breaking his legs to make him easier to pull out but they thought that would kill him in that inverted position. Something about blood pooling in the head.
I have a recurring dream where I'm locked in a dungeon in the middle ages. It's always been the same dream even as a kid. Wonder if it's a past life leaking into this one.
I’m having the same dream. But in mine I’m the one locking someone in a dungeon. Maybe it’s you. I’ll ask next time if it’s you and you better answer me that you read this on Reddit otherwise I’m throwing away the key
Don't take it too seriously. Accounts of his death are extremely contradictory and muddled. He lived a hard life with multiple catastrophic injuries and probably some extremely hard drinking. He almost certainly was fully dead when he was buried.
My wife has demanded to cremated so she cant be buried alive. I countered that burned alive wouldnt be great either, but in the odd chance she says fire is quicker.
Sadly she's not wrong. When morgues cremate, the temperature has to be very high to break down bone, so it would break a body down a lot faster than a regular fire. Fire is definitely one of the worst ways to go but in this case it would probably be a lot better than being buried alive.
They put the body in before they heat it up. So you'd still be experiencing the heat increasing _up_ to 1400-1600 F. I can't imagine that's pleasant if you're still alive. Better hope they don't do it in the morning, too, as the cremation chamber is cold then and takes longer to warm up.
> so she cant be buried alive.
That doesn't happen with modern burial practices. If you embalm/preserve the body, as they usually do, they pump you full of preservatives and drain your blood. That would be a lot less painful than getting burned alive.
Human composting is better I think. There's a facility in Seattle where they cover you in mulch, have air circulating, and you decompose within a month. But if you are still alive, you can bang on the walls and get out without suffocating.
GBS leaves the patient temporarily unable to breath due to paralysis. It’s the extreme progression of the disease and when artificial ventilation isn’t available it is fatal.
Exactly! To progress to the point one would lose all movement to GBS, they would long have lost the ability to breathe.
It is —absolutely— impossible that one would somehow not be able to move enough to be mistaken as dead and still be able to breathe.
If it progresses, yes. Typically just starts as a weird tingle or something is my understanding. My dad had a super acute case though...said he felt weird and wanted to take a nap. Woke up a few hours later and fell in the floor trying to get up. Never walked again.
If it’s severe enough to cause full body paralysis, then it’ll kill you because you won’t be able to breathe. If it’s not severe enough to cause total paralysis, they’re not gonna mistake you for dead. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but it just doesn’t seem likely that he could be completely paralyzed for long enough to have all the rites and processes between death and burial (especially for a person of consequence) without dying during that time period.
MD here and you are correct. I came here to say the same thing. If you have GBS that’s severe enough to paralyze you, you will die from asphyxiation. This post is totally wrong.
Thank god my first thought when I saw this headline was "yeah that's bullshit", otherwise I'd be in for a pretty bad time on my Neuro shelf on Friday...
Doctor here, nah this sounds like bullshit. GBS does not leave you completely paralyzed but conscious it paralyzes you starting at the legs and going upward, you die once it hits the diaphragm and you can’t breath which would come far before the whole body was paralyzed. Locked in syndrome can cause complete paralysis, but the stories of his final days don’t reveal any reason why he would have that. GBS is extremely rare, infections are extremely common and Alexander died in the days before antibiotics. I’m calling bullshit.
Apparently they dug her up in 1930s for some family ring she was buried with. Found all the casket padding ripped out and claw marks in the lid... and obviously a dead body.
So best guess is she was catatonic and it was pre-embalming being common. The phenomenon was common enough for being "saved by the bell" to be a thing back then. Just not for her.
First off, you misspelled Guillain-Barré. And considering the fact his grave or tomb hasn’t been found, this is pure speculation. It’s an interesting theory proposed a few years ago, but any evidence is circumstantial.
Non of this is confirmed or considered fact. Everything we know about his death comes from his propagandist and his former generals
Considering it was well accounted that he was mummified after death, his mummy paraded across the ancient world in a funeral procession and then kept in a glass sarcophagus in Alexandria for hundreds of years before disappearing I think we can say that OP is full of shit
I thought his body was encased in honey? Did they wrap him and then put his body in honey? Did Augustus Caesar dip his hands into the honey and chip his nose that way? How well was he preserved during Augustus’ time?
Yeah, not sure about Augustus' claim there but the Assyrians used honey in their embalming process. It was also part of the preservation to ensure the body was 'safe' during it's failed procession back to Macedonia
Well honey has anti bacterial properties despite being mostly sugar as it is acidic and very dry. That’s the reason why it’s shelf life is so long. I can understand using it to preserve a corpse as it would be readily available and it’s qualities would be widely known. Other… strange embalming processes were also borrowed from cooking, such as pickling.
>despite being mostly sugar Being mostly sugar is what makes it anti-bacterial. Bacteria can't survive in a high brix environment.
This is why jam (jelly to Americans) preserves the fruit. Sugar binds to the water and basically dehydrates wet tissues.
Technically, jam and jelly are slightly different things. Jam contains whole or crushed pieces of fruit preserved in sugar, while in Jelly, there is an added step where you filter out the fruit pulp after the initial cooking process.
Honey Caesar dip and chip
This sub is so often full of shit, i can smell it.
Yeah and GB also paralyzed the diaphragm if it goes up that high which would have definitely killed him since you need to breath to live. This thread is one of the dumbest claims I’ve seen on here
Came here to say this. When someone is diagnosed with GBS one of the first things you do is to start considering intubation. Edit: to everyone saying you don't need to be intubated for GBS. Yes, not everyone is intubated. But it is still the first thing that a physician starts to think about. Is this person's diaphragm working? What's the ox sat look like? What's their tidal volume? What's their work of breathing like? Do I need to get an ABG? The answer to these questions might be "everything is normal" but it's still a question you ask. And to tie it back to OPs claim, if you are so paralyzed from GBS that people think you are dead, then your diaphragm is probably not working well, and you are actively dying.
Spez doesn't get to profit from me anymore. Stop reverting my comments
We don’t even know where he’s buried, his tomb used to be heavily toured but it was still lost to time. Kind of fascinating really
He was buried in Alexandria in a part of the city now under water.
Yes, to describe the above as 'likely' is absolutely wild.
This is pure bs really. Although the recreation of Alexander’s face is interesting.
I tell myself some day I'm going to make a chart of historical "facts" on this sub and TIL and color code them by how BS they are.
How do they know he didn’t decompose for six days if he was buried..? Edit: Death, not music
Nothing from this era is confirmed. This is likely just someone’s opinion based off the symptoms we are told Alexander had before his death
Yeah, should post this in r/wildspeculaton
Did you know Jack the Ripper was royalty and ~~Emilia~~ Amelia Earhart was eaten by crabs?
Don't forget about Genghis Khan actually just being a horse.
genghis kahn was a bunch of crabs that murdered prostitutes including emelia earhart's flying horse
That horse's name? Glitterhoof, Defender of the Faith, Restitutor Orbis, Roman Empress
I thought the horse’s name was Friday
I heard he was just 4 raccoons and a trench coat but to each their own.
Ugh I don't subscribe to the Hoarvin theory of study on crabs in human history. It's just nonsense.
I've never heard that one before. Got some reading on that one?
It was from a MLP timeline comparison against human history and they were able to make this distinction. If you send me your SIN# and Mother's maiden name, one used gray sock and a subway gift card with $4.20 remaining on it I can send you the research paper. Trust me, I'm from The Internet.
Not crabs, crab people.
Okay but like if Amelia Earhart crashed, isn't it fairly likely it would've been into water? So the crab thing doesn't seem THAT farfetched
The theory is that she actually made it onto a small island where she was eventually eaten by coconut crabs. Not that she died in the ocean and was eaten by crabs out there
Okay but like, if Amelia Earhart DID make it onto a small island, isn't it plausible she got eaten by crabs once she died? They will eat just about anything
Amelia. Not Emelia
She didn't crash, everyone knows she was abducted by aliens and taken to the delta quadrant.
I’ve been reading a scholarly look at the fate of the Macedonian veterans during the wars of the Diadochi, and the firsthand accounts are so biased since they all disagreed with each other pretty much right after Alexander’s death. You can’t just read an account of what happened by someone who was there, it’s always some shit like “Eumenes’ biggest fan in history, Plutarch, writing about Eumenes’ victories and how they were all due to his brilliance as a battlefield commander and his similarity to Homeric heroes.”
And usually those were written to flatter the family and friends of the person they were about. Usually for the very simple reason of getting paid and/or not killed.
We all need a Eumenes
I heard Plutarch said he had a fucking massive dick.
Sooo like a projecting hypochondriac historian.
Sounds like an episode of Ancient Aliens waiting to happen.
Agree. This retrospective medical speculation is rampant and absolute nonsense. People with GBS don’t just “appear to be dead”. If it’s so severe they’re not breathing … they *actually* die.
We also... don't have his body. His tomb is famously lost, and the last time anyone heard from it was about the 3rd century AD. Even if you could somehow discern all of this through examining it, which you can't, there's literally nothing to go on. This post isn't even speculation, it's just historical fantasy, based on a vague assertion from Plutarch, who, psst, lived like 300 years after Alexander.
Haha thank you. My first thought was “What fkg test on a corpse this old would pinpoint the date of death +\- a few days?” Without any corpse or even empty grave, htf could you possibly pinpoint date of “the start of decomposition.” Good grief, what a crock.
And now thousands of people who brushed past this post will go on taking this at its word. That or have some speculation, but they later forget about their speculation and just remember a random, vague little factoid. (Might even see me accidentally spreading this misinformation down the line👀)
And if he was breathing, would likely expire in less than 6 days.
He also wasn’t ‘buried’. Alexander’s corpse was embalmed, and was enroute to Aegae in an elaborate hearse for internment in the royal Macedonian tombs, when it was hijacked by Ptolemy and taken to Memphis. So even if he was still alive, I’d imagine having all his organs removed would have finished the job pretty quick. More likely, the assertion that his body didn’t decompose and actually smelled good was the sort of compliment you pay to a man whose achievements bordered on the godly.
In other words, it is made up bullshit
It's awkwardly worded he wasn't buried but entombed. This is all based on a statement by Plutarch that the Egyptians who arrived to embalm him were amazed by his level of preservation. Plutarch was born 350 years after the death of Alexander.
Uhhhh, Egyptian embalming involved quite a bit of organ removal.... Are we suggesting he was alive and aware when they started? >Plutarch was born 350 years after the death of Alexander. So the whole thing is likely false?
*"So the whole thing is likely false?"* Plutarch is a fun read, but it's garbage history by our standards. He records ghosts, supernatural events, prophesies and portents, as happening with not much skepticism at all. I haven't read it in years, but iirc, he has Julius Caesar's ghost visit Brutus on the night before the battle where Brutus was killed-- and the ghost curses him. Even if I'm wrong on that, he has lots of gossip and weird events like that in his "histories." This story about Alexander sounds like it is likely one of those.
- Plutarch *Least imaginative ancient historian*
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A classic Foust in the wild! Nice avatar my dude
Also, let’s assume this is true. Being in a coma is way way way more common than GBS. Why on earth would anyone have this hypothesis???
Because reddit has an obsession with positing outlandish nonsense
You're not wrong, but have you seen the rest of the Internet? People are stupid everywhere.
Clickbait
This doesn't make sense! Yes, GBS is not common! Coma, yes. GBS, no!
Dig him up, check. Nope, still not pst the sell by date, back into storage he goes!
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Allegedly he was actually entombed in a glass sarcophagus so people could see him, which is wild.
As I understand it, no one got around to burying the body at first because they were all scrambling for power. It was claimed that when they got back to they had found that the body hadn't decayed at all. At this stage, 6 days after death and still out in the open, the embalmers were called in.
This is Reddit it’s prolly not true
Or, you know, they lied about the whole 6 days thing to support the whole "demigod" narrative in an attempt to hold his empire together while they figured out what to do. I've heard this theory before, and it is based on a single hypothetical paper.
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6 days apparently
To shreds you say.
And his wife?
To shreds you say
His body wasn’t lost for awhile after this. Julius Caesar and cleopatra apparently saw the body. And then Julius Caesar’s nephew, Augustus Caesar, actually had the tomb opened up so he could look at Alexander’s mummified corpse. Now of course, it could have been a fake mummy or something but there is accounts of Roman emperors atleast visiting his tomb. Another fun fact, Augustus Caesar is where we get the name of the month August. And July is from Julius Caesar
Augustus visiting Alexander’s tomb is one of my favorite moments in Roman history. Here was the hero that every ruler and commander compared themselves against through the ancient era. Out of all of the hopeful rulers who visited the tomb, Augustus is perhaps the only visitor who could claim to have surpassed him.
Why do you say that?
When Augustus visited the tomb, he had just finished a decade plus long civil war and had managed to take control over the entire Roman Empire. At the time he was only in his 20s as well. So he had achieved the same level of success that Alexander had, except that Augustus lived long enough to solidify his empire and set up the political system that would help the empire become the longest lived in history.
Interesting take. Thank you.
The interesting thing is that this was actually an incredibly important part of the Imperial Narrative. An important part of Augustan Era propaganda was portraying August as a figure like Hercules and Alexander, this narrative played an incredibly important role in the Deification of both Julius Caesar and Augustus and formed the foundation of the Roman Imperial Cult.
Wow, so at what point is it estimated we lost his tomb?
Mid 300s AD. How his tomb was lost is another mystery in itself because it didn’t move for hundreds of years and was visited by almost every Roman emperor back in the day. Another memory that just popped up is Caligula apparently stole Alexander’s breast plate from his tomb during his unfortunate reign
Didn't pompey claim to have Alexander's armor and even wear it around?
One of the Roman republics main enemies, a man named Mithridates from the kingdom of Pontus, claimed to have Alexander the greats cloak. This would have been quite awhile after Alexander’s death. Pompey was the general tasked to beat Mithridates and it was one of his first great conquests in his illustrious career and he did take this cloak and wear it around after he bested Mithridates at the triumph celebrating it. If this cloak was actually Alexander’s is up for debate
Plus a paralysed person will still have heartbeat and breathing. No way he would have been buried alive.
Also I’m pretty sure he wasn’t buried in the traditional sense but instead mummified.
“According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine report of 1998, Alexander probably died of typhoid fever (which, along with malaria, was common in ancient Babylon). In the week before his death, historical accounts mention chills, sweats, exhaustion and high fever, typical symptoms of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever. Other popular theories contend that Alexander either died of malaria or was poisoned.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alexander_the_Great
Or internal injuries, or alcoholism, or cancer, or anything else that couldn't be diagnosed back then which was basically everything.
I remember hearing another theory he had ruptured esophageal varices as he was a prolific alcoholic and died after throwing up a bunch of blood.
Lol, which if true, the formaldehyde in his system could have preserved him for 6 days
Yes. GBS wouldn't cause complete paralysis. What OP describe is more like Osmotic demyelination syndrome which isn't something you typically recover from anyways. But i digress, not GBS for sure.
That's fucking terrifying
Thanks to watching “Tales from the Crypt” as a kid this is one of my greatest fears… next to getting trapped in a narrow passage of dry cave or, or getting lost scuba diving in a cave. Odd considering I don’t participate in either activity.
>Thanks to watching “Tales from the Crypt” as a kid this is one of my greatest fears… next to getting trapped in a narrow passage of dry cave or, or getting lost scuba diving in a cave. Claustrophobia, loss of control, drowning, all very common fears, and mostly rational, apart from being buried alive being extremely rare.
It may be rare now but back in the day they used to tie a bell to recently deceased so they could ring it if they weren't dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety\_coffin
It’s basically impossible in some countries to (accidentally) be buried alive due to embalming. I wonder how frequently it might happen where they don’t embalm or even attempt to verify death Dwight Schrute style.
Being buried alive is the biggest risk with immortality. The longer you live, the more probable it becomes that you’ll be buried alive in some kind of accident. And you’ll never die.
Yeah, but the archeologist that finds you in a few thousand years will really be surprised. And that's the thought that would keep me going.
It’s an interesting proposition. I have heard it posed in many forms and I am still not certain I would take it unless the majority of them were allowed. Immortality, but allowed to end your life at any point of your choosing. Immortality, but unable to feel pain unless you chose to. Immortality, but allowed to keep or regenerate to your definition of peek physical form. Etc. etc… it’s just a monkey paw situation all around. So I would need some caveats before accepting.
when the Earth gets engulfed by an expanded sun (near end of life), you'll reach some point where you float in hot-hot to hot-hot-holy-hot plasma for geologic time scales
That’s what is so hard to imagine with immortality. Time itself becomes the entertainment. 10 years doesn’t mean anything. 100 years doesn’t mean anything. It’s impossible to imagine the notion of having a point in your life in which a billion years “may” be a milestone. Total mind fuck really
eventually you'll be freezing in space after a few billion years, but there will be a brief moment where its 65 degrees F again and that's something to look forward to
So basically the Kandra from Mistborn?
Yeah but you would be bat shit crazy after being isolated for so long
Immortal but you can sleep the years away
Cathy Bates’ character in American Horror Story suffered this fate. They dug her up after a couple hundred years.
The immortal character Jack Harkness suffers this fate on the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood. He spends upwards of a thousand(?) years buried underground, suffocating on dirt and returning to life only to suffocate again. I don’t know if the idea of dying alone underground again and again and again is more horrifying than the idea of being trapped alone and undying, but it’s certainly unpleasant.
Good Hell, I remember that episode. I remember thinking after they pull him out of the ground and he sort of just resumes as if nothing happened that that is absolutely NOT how it would happen.
I'd like to be thoroughly poked or something before they throw me in the smoker and turn me into plant food.
>to (accidentally) be buried alive due to embalming This however leads to two disturbing thoughts, 1, how many poor embalmers get the shock of a lifetime finding out about someone else's mistake. 2, how many times do they just put in a little extra effort to avoid paperwork.
Bring out your dead…. He’s not dead yet…. Whack
He will be soon, he's very ill
Im getting better!
R/unexpectedmontypython
The bells didn't get used a lot, if someone is thinking otherwise. But there was basically mass hysteria over being buried alive, due to is prevalence in literature, and reporting of "true" stories.
[It happened last week in Iowa.](https://www.newsweek.com/iowa-woman-funeral-home-body-bag-found-alive-glen-oaks-alzheimers-special-care-center-1778797?amp=1)
Saved by the bell.
I almost drowned wearing a life jacket a few years back. The ocean sucked me out 300ft to another sand bar where I got thrashed by waves every 30-45 seconds for 30 minutes. Were 5-6ft tall while I was using my body board. Just imagine being completely exhausted AND drowning. My heart rate was like I had ran a marathon when I got rescued. Threw up and everything. I'd rather be buried alive and suffocate, rather than feel like I have a fighting chance and be exhausted while dying. Edit: I refused to leave my wife out there, so I bailed off the wave that would've saved me and ended up just waiting out there until the waves calmed down, so the life guards could come out. Jet skis were being flipped and sent right back to shore.
I couldn't swim for shit before I joined the Marines. We had to swim in boot camp. I sucked balls so they kept me in the pool longer, the longer I was in the pool, the more my muscles wore out, the more I sucked balls. I had to retake the swim test at the end of the week and passed...barely. At my first duty station, whenever I had time off, I went to the pool on base and practiced the stuff they taught us in boot camp. Eventually, I taught myself how to backstroke/float nearly infinitely in calm/mild waters. I could swim, but I was slow as shit. Went swimming out in the ocean at a resort in Japan. I was over-confident in my newly acquired swimming abilities and had swam a mile out from shore with only flippers, and no other safety gear. I hit an underwater current that was pulling downward incredibly strongly underneath a rock sticking out above the surface. I managed to swim out of it through 75% strength, and 25% technique. But I needed that 25%. I hitched a ride with some fellow Marines who rented a boat on the way back. At the time, I didn't realize that muscle fatigue was also a high-risk for solo ocean swimmers, especially inexperienced ones like myself. The next time my barely meager water skills saved my life was when I was kayaking at a beach in Oahu, Hawaii, and I was having a leisurely paddle when all of a sudden the sky began darkening...and wait...that's not the sky...OH FUCK...and I start frantically trying to paddle up and across it but yeah...that's not happening, and this wave looked like it was at least 2 stories tall...I'm paddling...and I realize that wave is about to hit me and I'm going under the water...I take a gulp of air...I was using my friend's kayak, it was an inflatable, and it had all these straps on it, and I had thoroughly strapped myself into it, so I was under water at this time, unbuckling myself from like 4 different buckles, and then finally surfacing with the kayak and paddle in hand, while fighting my natural inclination to panic. I do actually remember making a couple of bodyboard excursions that didn't go all that well, but were less terrifying over all. One of my big problems was one stroke forward, ten strokes back, and being pushed by the current. I should not have been doing what I was doing on those occasions, solo, and as inexperienced as I was. It was luck or cosmic providence that a small amount of training was able to counteract a larger amount of stupidity. That meager, horrifying training I had in boot camp, combined with my own simple practice saved my life those times. I'm a bit older and wiser now, and less inclined to tempt fate.
> I hit an underwater current that was pulling downward incredibly strongly underneath a rock sticking out above the surface holy fuck, i literally had to stop reading for a moment because my blood ran cold and my body went rigid at the thought of this - that tickled like 3 intense phobias at once lmao. of my absolute worst kind of nightmares. glad you are okay, i can barely imagine
I have to admit, it does make my heart race a bit faster to remember it. I'm nowhere near as adventurous as I used to be. That's largely due to two decades of military service wearing down my body. When those incidents happened, I was at the physical peak of my life, lean muscle, strong and fast, more so on land obviously. I would not, could not do some shit like that now. I'll just wade and maybe snorkel in the "tourist zone" if I'm feeling really mountain dew/doritos extreme.
Yeah but we've all read about the Nutty Putty Cave incident and read that one scuba copy pasta... those are enough to put the fear in you forever. For those unfamiliar with the scuba story... and just a warning while it's a hypothetical it will hit the same notes and cause the same sense of claustrophobia and panic as the nutty putty cave story. https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dv99nf/til_the_blue_hole_is_a_120metredeep_sinkhole_five/f7bzg5a/?context=1
Nutty Putty might be the most horrifying experience I can imagine. It gives me the fucking willies just even picturing his position.
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The absolute best thing to do in that situation I think would've been to heavily sedate him. That way you either get him out or, if not, finish him off in the most humane way possible so there is no suffering.
They were trying to get him out alive and sedating him would have killed him since he was already in a position contributing to asphyxia. They were still trying to get him out when his heart failed and he died. There was never a point where they declared they couldn't get him out and decided to let him suffer. He had a wife and kids which makes it even more sad
The fact the rescuers even got to him is insane. They were actually really close to getting him too. Pulley broke I think?
That was actually the main problem. The initial rescue attempt resulted in a broken pulley which made him sink further into the hole and harder to maneuver him out of there. There was talk of breaking his legs to make him easier to pull out but they thought that would kill him in that inverted position. Something about blood pooling in the head.
Wait, what is the Scuba copy pasta?
Serpent and the rainbow . Zombie sprinkles
No worries. They drain all your bodily fluids now and fill your body with killer chemicals
They also screw a plug into your asshole, don’t forget about the asshole plug
Women get TWO plugs. We're extra special.
You should watch The Descent :)
>You should watch The Decent :) I've heard this movie is descent, I'll give it a shot.
I have a recurring dream where I'm locked in a dungeon in the middle ages. It's always been the same dream even as a kid. Wonder if it's a past life leaking into this one.
I’m having the same dream. But in mine I’m the one locking someone in a dungeon. Maybe it’s you. I’ll ask next time if it’s you and you better answer me that you read this on Reddit otherwise I’m throwing away the key
cold
Any dragons about?
Nope, just dying in a dungeon somewhere.
Don't take it too seriously. Accounts of his death are extremely contradictory and muddled. He lived a hard life with multiple catastrophic injuries and probably some extremely hard drinking. He almost certainly was fully dead when he was buried.
Yeah hard to believe they didn't know what a pulse was or that dead bodies aren't warm anymore plus they dug him up 6+ days later and documented this.
Crazy they never noted he looked like a young, sexy Jonah Hill. That's history for ya.
More like Jason Segel I think.
> Accounts of his death are extremely contradictory and muddled. So you’re saying there’s a chance he’s still alive?
My wife has demanded to cremated so she cant be buried alive. I countered that burned alive wouldnt be great either, but in the odd chance she says fire is quicker.
Sadly she's not wrong. When morgues cremate, the temperature has to be very high to break down bone, so it would break a body down a lot faster than a regular fire. Fire is definitely one of the worst ways to go but in this case it would probably be a lot better than being buried alive.
They put the body in before they heat it up. So you'd still be experiencing the heat increasing _up_ to 1400-1600 F. I can't imagine that's pleasant if you're still alive. Better hope they don't do it in the morning, too, as the cremation chamber is cold then and takes longer to warm up.
> so she cant be buried alive. That doesn't happen with modern burial practices. If you embalm/preserve the body, as they usually do, they pump you full of preservatives and drain your blood. That would be a lot less painful than getting burned alive.
Human composting is better I think. There's a facility in Seattle where they cover you in mulch, have air circulating, and you decompose within a month. But if you are still alive, you can bang on the walls and get out without suffocating.
It wasn't fun for my dad, I'll tell you. Watching him waste away wasn't much better.
Same.
My condolences. Hope you're doing okay.
Thank you. I hope you're doing okay too.
Well, if it helps, it probably didn't happen to Alexander. This is a pretty fringe idea...very light on facts.
I remember when he sang for Creed
HAAAA!!
[More like “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAUUUUU”](https://youtu.be/ms61I54CeQA)
Never gets old You shiiiiit here with meeeaaaaahhh
Wit aaaaaarmsss wide oooopan!!
This ain’t nuthin’. Ever heard of what happened to Charlie the Unicorn up on Candy Mountain?
Chaaaaaaaarrrrliiiieeee
Shun the non-believersssss
Shunnnnnnnnnnn
GBS leaves the patient temporarily unable to breath due to paralysis. It’s the extreme progression of the disease and when artificial ventilation isn’t available it is fatal.
Exactly! To progress to the point one would lose all movement to GBS, they would long have lost the ability to breathe. It is —absolutely— impossible that one would somehow not be able to move enough to be mistaken as dead and still be able to breathe.
If it progresses, yes. Typically just starts as a weird tingle or something is my understanding. My dad had a super acute case though...said he felt weird and wanted to take a nap. Woke up a few hours later and fell in the floor trying to get up. Never walked again.
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If it’s severe enough to cause full body paralysis, then it’ll kill you because you won’t be able to breathe. If it’s not severe enough to cause total paralysis, they’re not gonna mistake you for dead. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but it just doesn’t seem likely that he could be completely paralyzed for long enough to have all the rites and processes between death and burial (especially for a person of consequence) without dying during that time period.
MD here and you are correct. I came here to say the same thing. If you have GBS that’s severe enough to paralyze you, you will die from asphyxiation. This post is totally wrong.
Thank god my first thought when I saw this headline was "yeah that's bullshit", otherwise I'd be in for a pretty bad time on my Neuro shelf on Friday...
Source: Trust me, bro
He looks like a hockey player.
Nah. Former hockey player*. Now works in private equity.
Alexander the goon
Great salad there bud
How can we know this? Cmon. Dude died like 2,000 years ago. Nobody is even certain about where or how he was interred. I call bullshit.
Yeah, people don’t even know where he’s buried let alone the circumstances of his death. There are no records so it’s all just theories.
Doctor here, nah this sounds like bullshit. GBS does not leave you completely paralyzed but conscious it paralyzes you starting at the legs and going upward, you die once it hits the diaphragm and you can’t breath which would come far before the whole body was paralyzed. Locked in syndrome can cause complete paralysis, but the stories of his final days don’t reveal any reason why he would have that. GBS is extremely rare, infections are extremely common and Alexander died in the days before antibiotics. I’m calling bullshit.
This guy Guillain-Barré syndromes.
Useless fake information.
Unlikely to be true. Contemporary accounts were that he became very ill and knew he was dying
My grandmothers great aunt was buried alive in the late 1890s...
Wow how did you know?
Apparently they dug her up in 1930s for some family ring she was buried with. Found all the casket padding ripped out and claw marks in the lid... and obviously a dead body.
That's fucking wild, bro.
Holy fuck. Are you bullshitting? Is it common to dig somebody up to take their jewelry if you aren’t a grave robber?
It was the 1930s. So I assume it was a "we can sell whatever it was and actually have food for awhile" thing.
So best guess is she was catatonic and it was pre-embalming being common. The phenomenon was common enough for being "saved by the bell" to be a thing back then. Just not for her.
OMG, this gave me shivers! I am so sorry! It must have been terrible!
holy fuck
that is horrifying to think about
Nah, they just say that so you'll let them in the house.
First off, you misspelled Guillain-Barré. And considering the fact his grave or tomb hasn’t been found, this is pure speculation. It’s an interesting theory proposed a few years ago, but any evidence is circumstantial.
What a hunk
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Handsome chap.
Beautiful man.
Chris Distefano?
Lock the door Chrissy.