The mosaic floor found at the ancient tomb at Amphipolis will be fully unearthed by the end of the week, says a statement by the Ministry of Culture. The same announcement calls for archaeologists and Amphipolis enthusiasts to stop from making assumptions.

The mosaic – 3m (10ft) wide and 4.5m (15ft) long – depicts a man with a laurel wreath driving a chariot drawn by horses and led by the messenger god Hermes.

The prominent Macedonian charioteer – possibly one of Alexander the Great’s delegation or even a member of the Temenid or Argead dynasty – appears to be coming to Amphipolis, triumphantly, as a victor, wearing a wreath. The left-to-right movement of the mosaic may also have been created to illustrate the movement from East to West. The expression of the charioteer is that of a warrior that is plunging to the underworld as though he were charging to battle.

The identity of one of the horse’s is just as intriguing to archaeologists as the charioteer. The eyes of the stallion are particularly vivid causing people to speculate whether it could indeed be Bucephalus, the steed of Alexander the Great and one of the most famous horses of antiquity.

Culture Ministry Lina Mendoni said that the mosaic has a link to the Temenid dynasty that could be a key to decoding the meaning. At the moment there are two camps of thought that believe that the charioteer is Pluto abducting Persephone whereas the other camp believes that a mortal is rushing to Hades. The idea has suggested that the charioteer could be Philip, Alexander’s father, without this meaning that the tomb is his, especially bearing in mind that his bones were recently found at a well-known burial just 100 miles away from the Amphipolis site.

A practice at the time was the transposition of murals to mosaics and the work depicted as a mosaic on the floor of Amphipolis may have been inspired by an artwork. For instance, if the mosaic was based on a work by Apelles of Kos then the artistic freedom of the creator of the mosaic would have been limited and according to the demands of the person who commissioned it.

A visual retrospective of the findings so far –