Hawass granted her permission to visit sites in Alexandria, Giza, and Cairo. Martinez returned to Egypt in March , calling on Hawass with the news that she had been appointed an ambassador of culture by the Dominican Republic. He laughed and said she was too young to be an ambassador.
She told him she'd visited Taposiris Magna the previous year and wanted to go back. There were remnants of a Coptic church on the site, and Dominicans were interested in the history of Christianity. Hawass again said yes. After she had photographed and walked the site, she again called on Hawass. The time had come to drop the veil. Martinez explained to him that she wanted to excavate at Taposiris. A group of Hungarian archaeologists had just concluded excavations at the site, and French archaeologists had excavated Roman baths just outside the walls of the temple.
Plans were pending to turn Taposiris Magna into a tourist attraction. Cleopatra VII was born in Egypt, but she was descended from a lineage of Greek kings and queens who had ruled Egypt for nearly years.
The Ptolemies of Macedonia are one of history's most flamboyant dynasties, famous not only for wealth and wisdom but also for bloody rivalries and the sort of "family values" that modern-day exponents of the phrase would surely disavow, seeing as they included incest and fratricide.
The Ptolemies came to power after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, who in a caffeinated burst of activity beginning in B. He was recognized as pharaoh in the capital, Memphis. Along a strip of land between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotis he laid out a blueprint for Alexandria, which would serve as Egypt's capital for nearly a thousand years.
After Alexander's death in B. Ptolemy was crowned pharaoh in B. He made offerings to the Egyptian gods, took an Egyptian throne name, and portrayed himself in pharaonic garb. The dynasty's greatest legacy was Alexandria itself, with its hundred-foot-wide main avenue, its gleaming limestone colonnades, its harborside palaces and temples overseen by a towering lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on the island of Pharos.
Alexandria soon became the largest, most sophisticated city on the planet. The best and brightest of the Mediterranean world came to study at the Mouseion, the world's first academy, and at the great Alexandria library. It was there, 18 centuries before the Copernican revolution, that Aristarchus posited a heliocentric solar system and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth. Alexandria was where the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek and where the poet Sotades the Obscene discovered the limits of artistic freedom when he unwisely scribbled some scurrilous verse about Ptolemy II's incestuous marriage to his sister.
He was deep-sixed in a lead-lined chest. The Ptolemies' talent for intrigue was exceeded only by their flair for pageantry. If descriptions of the first dynastic festival of the Ptolemies around B.
The parade was a phantasmagoria of music, incense, blizzards of doves, camels laden with cinnamon, elephants in golden slippers, bulls with gilded horns. Among the floats was a foot Dionysus pouring a libation from a golden goblet. Where could they go from there but down? The lands of Cyprus, Cyrene eastern Libya , and parts of Syria had been lost; Roman troops were soon to be garrisoned in Alexandria itself.
Still, despite drought and famine and the eventual outbreak of civil war, Alexandria was a glittering city compared to provincial Rome. Cleopatra was intent on reviving her empire, not by thwarting the growing power of the Romans but by making herself useful to them, supplying them with ships and grain, and sealing her alliance with the Roman general Julius Caesar with a son, Caesarion.
Lest her subjects resent her Roman overtures, Cleopatra embraced Egypt's traditions. She is said to have been the first Ptolemaic pharaoh to bother to learn the Egyptian language. While it was politic for foreign overlords to adopt local deities and appease the powerful religious class, the Ptolemies were genuinely intrigued by the Egyptian idea of an afterlife. Out of that fascination emerged a hybrid Greek and Egyptian religion that found its ultimate expression in the cult of Serapis—a Greek gloss on the Egyptian legend of Osiris and Isis.
One of the foundational myths of Egyptian religion, the legend tells how Osiris, murdered by his brother Seth, was chopped into pieces and scattered all over Egypt.
With power gained by tricking the sun god, Re, into revealing his secret name, Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, was able to resurrect her brother-husband long enough to conceive a son, Horus, who eventually avenged his father's death by slaughtering uncle Seth.
By Cleopatra's time a cult around the goddess Isis had been spreading across the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. To fortify her position, and like other queens before her, Cleopatra sought to link her identity with the great Isis and Mark Antony's with Osiris , and to be venerated as a goddess. She had herself depicted in portraits and statues as the universal mother divinity. Beginning in 37 B. She appeared in the holy dress of Isis at a festival staged in Alexandria to celebrate Antony's victory over Armenia in 34 B.
It was Cleopatra's intense identification with Isis, and her royal role as the manifestation of the great goddess of motherhood, fertility, and magic, that ultimately led Kathleen Martinez to Taposiris Magna. Using Strabo's ancient descriptions of Egypt, Martinez sketched a map of candidate burial sites, zeroing in on 21 places associated with the legend of Isis and Osiris and visiting each one she could find. Martinez's team has been digging for 14 years.
She's unearthed exciting artifacts linked to Cleopatra at Taposiris Magna, an ancient temple outside of Alexandria, Egypt. Cleopatra may be resting there. And if Martinez finds her, the journey will have only just begun. A discovery means a massive archaeological undertaking of cataloguing the tomb and its treasures, excavation and restoration, moving artifacts safely and interpreting the historical meaning behind its contents.
Martinez imagines her first words if she actually found the lost ruler. It has been more than 2, years since the queen "outsmarted everyone" in hiding her eternal resting place. Cleopatra died by suicide after a military defeat, following Antony's own suicide. Although the triumphant Romans plundered her legacy and life story, Martinez says Cleopatra was determined they would never find her tomb. She made sure that her human remains and Mark Antony's were hidden from the Romans and their descendants forever.
A variety of newsletters you'll love, delivered straight to you. Pseudonyms will no longer be permitted. They also generally agreed that the odds of finding her tomb are slim. Many of the scholars believe that Cleopatra would have been buried within Alexandria, possibly in an area that is now underwater. Hawass said that he worked with Martinez for more than 10 years at the site and found no evidence that Cleopatra and Antony were buried there. Over the past 2 millennia, coastal erosion has meant that parts of Alexandria, including a section that holds Cleopatra's palace, are now underwater.
Even if the tomb is not underwater, there is a good chance that it was destroyed at some point in antiquity or that it is buried beneath modern-day development in Alexandria, scholars said.
There is also a good chance that it was robbed in ancient times, a number of scholars added. At present no projects are searching for Cleopatra's tomb underwater although past projects have looked at Cleopatra's palace. Maybe her mausoleum, too. Cleopatra was the last of the "Ptolemies," a line of rulers descended from Ptolemy Soter, one of Alexander the Great's generals. What is known, is that Cleopatra and Marc Antony were said to be buried together at her request. The exact location of their tomb has remained a mystery.
According to a recent report in the Sun, that may be about to change. South view of the Osiris Temple in Taposiris Magna. Photo by Koantao CC by 3.
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