Dan Snow's History Hit - The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

In his lifetime King Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, forged one of the largest empires in ancient history. But it was what happened to Alexander following his demise – his ‘life after death’ - which resulted in one of the great archaeological mysteries of the ancient Mediterranean. Following his death, aged just 32, his corpse became of prime importance for his former subordinates – a talismanic symbol of legitimacy during the tumultuous period that was the Wars of the Successors. Later still, the body and tomb of this great conqueror – placed right in the centre of ancient Alexandria – retained its importance. From Ptolemaic pharaohs to Roman emperors, Alexander’s tomb became a place of holy pilgrimage for many seeking power and prestige. For several centuries the tomb of this Macedonian ruler was one of the great attractions of the ancient Mediterranean. That was, however, until the end of the 4th century when all mention of this building, and the precious corpse housed within, disappeared. So what happened to Alexander’s tomb? And where might Alexander’s body be buried today? To talk through several theories surrounding one of ancient history’s great archaeological mysteries, Tristan from The Ancients chatted to Dr Chris Naunton.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, every so often, as you know, we play an episode of Tristan Hughes' excellent podcast The Ancients, the sibling podcast of History Hit, and we couldn't not play this one because Tristan, as you'll know, for the true ancient fans out there, you'll know that he's got an obsession with the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death. He's been on this podcast talking about it. He has gone and done a podcast with Chris Naunton. This is like an all-star cast. Chris Naunton is everyone's favourite Egyptologist. And Chris and Tris are talking about Alexander the Great. It's where the Venn diagrams of their two great passions overlap.

Egyptian tombs and Alexander the Great. And I tell you, fireworks result. This is an episode all about what happened to Alexander the Great's body. Where is it? Where might it be? Are we going to find Alexander the Great's body in in a lifetime because let me tell you i was kind of jealous of my great-grandparents generation they got the whole tootin carmen excitement but let me say something tootin carmen minor minor royalty okay we're talking uh let me like

in 18th century we're talking like middle ranking small german principate in part of the Holy Roman Empire. That's Tutankhamen. If we find Alexander the Great, that's like finding Frederick the Great. Boom. Frederick II of Prussia. Bang. I don't know if that parallel works, but I'm going to go with it. So the idea that Alexander the Great might be found in our lifetime, mind blowing. Tristan and Chris, get into it. You're going to gonna love it i want to bring this one over to my feed and just share it because it's proper proper egyptology and alexander the great fandom it's good stuff and you're gonna love it if you want to watch documentaries about alexander the great we've got plenty on history at tv because tristan is in the office he gets his little hands on the

commissioning tiller when we're not watching and before you know it we've got documentaries on alexander the great and his successors all over the shop and fair play tristan that's what i like to see he's fighting his corner he has agency as we say so there's loads and loads of that on history hit tv you just go to history hit.tv history hit.tv you sign up take it 30 days free and you can watch everything watch as you can't watch everything because there's too much to watch there's hundreds of documentaries on there there's thousands of, you can't watch everything because there's too much to watch. There's hundreds of documentaries on there. There's thousands of podcasts. You're going to absolutely love it. It's a place for true history fans.

Historyhit.tv. That is the website address. Head over there and sign up. But in the meantime, here's Chris Naunton and Tristan just going for it. Chris, always a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. We've saved the biggest, perhaps the best, to last. They're all incredible, but we both love this topic. We do. The lost tomb, the lost body of Alexander the Great. This is one of the great mysteries that people have been looking for, not just for decades, for centuries. It's a huge topic. Yeah, it really is. It's difficult, isn't it, to think of a sort of bigger character from the

ancient world. I mean, he sort of dominates the story, doesn't he, Alexander, in terms of the reach of his empire. I guess no figure from the ancient world had the audacity and ambition to take on such a vast territory. And his story is therefore a part of the story for so many different cultures. And he was the pharaoh of Egypt. So therefore he's an important chapter for Egyptology. But I mean, that is just one part of his story. And he crops up in so many different parts of the world. The idea that wherever his tomb would be, his tomb, his body, such an important part of the story for any great ruler like that. Therefore, because we believe it was in Egypt,

there's a big part of, or should be a big part of Egyptian archaeology. The problem is just we don't know where it was. Absolutely. Mysteries abound indeed. So first of all, with the background, Chris, I'm listening in closely. Let's quickly give a rundown of how Alexander's body ends up in Alexandria. Well, I hope you're not listening in too closely to pick me up on my mistakes. But anyway, I'll give it a go. So Alexander dies in Babylon in 323 BC after a few days in some agony, so we're told, possibly as the result of having been poisoned, although we can't be absolutely sure about that. And it appears then that no preparations have been made, or at least

there's no clear agreement on how he should be buried and where he should be buried, which leads to pretty much a couple of years worth of arguing. And this is an argument partly about what should happen to the body and where there should be a tomb and who should take care of this. But by extension, that is really all part of the much wider discussion about what happens to the empire. And also there's some sense, I think, I'm right in saying that whichever of Alexander's potential successors is the one to take charge of the burial of the body would put themselves in a very strong position to be the great successor to Alexander. So there's an amount of to-ing and fro-ing. Alexander's body, we are led to believe, was not cremated, as might have been expected according to Macedonian tradition, but was mummified according to the Egyptian tradition, which is interesting in itself. That might have

been just for practical reasons, perhaps just to sort of postpone any great decision making. Some sort of catafalque or some kind of transport is constructed to both house and move the body and at a certain point two of the potential successors play perhaps the most prominent roles in the story from this point. One of them is one of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, one of Alexander's most favoured soldiers, who seems to have been interested, we certainly subsequently realise, in taking control of Egypt and surrounding territories, but not so much the whole of the empire. The other key player is another one of Alexander's most trusted right-hand men,

Perdiccas, who at a certain crucial point around two years after Alexander's death is away, not in Babylon, not where the body is, seeing to, I think, a revolt somewhere else in what remains of the empire. The body at this point is entrusted to a man called Aridaeus and leaves Babylon. Nothing apparently to do with Ptolemy, except that not very long after it leaves the city, the procession, wherever it is headed at this point, is intercepted by Ptolemy, who happens to have with him an army and at this point the body in the catafalque, the procession, Ptolemy and his army all begins to head in the direction of Egypt which as we know is the territory that Ptolemy himself hopes to rule. Perticast gets wind of this, is clearly

concerned and gives chase but not with sufficient speed that he's able to intercept Ptolemy before he arrives in Egypt. Ptolemy heads it seems straight for Memphis which was the sort of on-off capital city of Egypt for much of its history. It's located at the junction of the Nile River and the Nile Delta at the so-called balance of the two lands. Probably most importantly, along with being the capital city, it is fortified, which means that Ptolemy can install himself there along with the body, shut the gates and hopefully repel any attack from Perdiccas and his forces. And here's where you know the details much better than I do, Tristan. So I'm going to hand back to you to flesh this out. But essentially,

Perdiccas gives chase. He's unsuccessful in defeating Ptolemy. And there comes a point, I think, where his own soldiers get a bit frustrated with him and they bump him off. It's a bit more than a bit frustrated, my friend. They're attempting to cross the river near Memphis. He knows he wants to get to Memphis. That's where the body of alexander is that's the fortified capital but basically long story short the current of the river gets stronger because all of the feet underneath the water is displacing all of the soil underneath so the crossing that they try to cross at just opposite memphis it no longer becomes crossable. Perdiccas' army is divided. He tries to get his troops back from the island from nearer that side of the river where those

about 2,000, 3,000 soldiers are. They swim back across but of course the current is really fast flowing. Many of them drown. Some of them are eaten alive by crocodiles. They go further down river. Not sure if they were also eaten by hippopotami. I think that's still open to debate whether they would do that or not. But basically, long story short, after all of those nightmares, Perdiccas is assassinated by his own generals. Ptolemy now has possession of Alexander's body in Memphis. And now we're going back to you to continue the story because I'd like to ask you about Saqqara. At this time, Saqqara seems to have a bit more interest, maybe because of a link to Alexander's body. Yeah, it does. So Saqqara, in some senses, is a sort of separate place from Memphis, but it's not. One of the problems we have with ancient Memphis is that

it hasn't survived very well. And we don't exactly know where the city limits were, where the major buildings were. We know the rough, you know, approximate location of Memphis. We know that it probably moved a bit. So even if we have good evidence of the remains of, as we do, the Temple of Tar of the time of Ramesses II, we can't be exactly sure to what extent that would be the same location. But in any case, Saqqara is a little way away beyond the edge of the cultivable Nile Valley, the lush agricultural Nile Valley, up on the dry desert, essentially next door to Memphis. And it is the very, very long established cemetery of the capital city. It's one of them, but it's the one to which the kings of Egypt and other high-ranking officials return more than

any other and it seems that it was the major cemetery for Memphis at this time. It had also come to have more of a kind of day-to-day cult function by the time of the death of Alexander, in that various cults had developed around a particular series of gods in the area, including the deified Imhotep, who was associated with other Egyptian gods, including Thoth, who by this point has come to be associated with the Greek god Asclepius. This made it a place of pilgrimage. So Saqqara is probably a rather busier place, busy with people visiting the gods and petitioning them and making prayers and requests and that sort of thing. One of the major gods in Memphis at this point is the Apis bull, an actual living bull that the Egyptians believed was the earthly manifestation of a certain aspect of the god Osiris. So it's slightly complicated.

But it was a real bull that lived in a dedicated sanctuary within Memphis, but those bulls get buried in a series of vaults in Saqqara called the Serapium. And the Serapium is reached from the city of Memphis by a processional route, which itself came to be furnished with temple buildings, statuary etc. So all of this means that actually although we think of Saqqara as being a cemetery site it's also a very busy place of religious activity of all kinds and very clearly connected with the city by this processional route. So we have good reason to think that having seen off the threat of Perdiccas, Ptolemy, even if he might have wanted to bury Alexander's body in what is going to become the new capital city of ancient Egypt at Alexandria, he's got a problem there in that there is no such thing as the capital city

of Alexandria because he hasn't built it yet. So he must have, we think, sought somewhere else to, even if bury is not quite the right word, to house the body in a sort of temporary or semi-permanent fashion. And if he did that, then Saqqara would be a really obvious place to do this. There is a myth, it seems it is indeed a work of fiction, a text which is sometimes called the Alexander Romance, which the author of this text is not entirely clear. It's attributed to a writer called Callisthenes, I think, but we're not sure it really was written by this person called Callisthenes. And so sometimes it's referred to as pseudo-Callisthenes. And this appears to have propagandist value for Ptolemy. Whether it was written deliberately for that

purpose or not isn't quite clear, but it certainly has that value. And it begins with the story of Alexander's birth. And according to this version of the story, Alexander's father was not the great king Philip of Macedon. What in fact happened was that the last native king of Egypt, a man called Nectanebo, the second king of that name, Nectanebo II, the last king of the 30th dynasty, who was defeated by the Persian Empire, and so we are told, fled Egypt, probably for what is now Sudan, to the south. But the Alexander romance has a different version of the story in which Nectanebo instead goes to Macedon but in disguise I think initially as a kind of magician and he somehow makes his way to the court of Philip and his wife and in talking to Philip's wife persuades her that she will have a dream, I think,

or she does have a dream, in which she is going to be visited by the Egyptian god Amun, the most important of the Egyptians, pantheon of gods, the god Amun. And hey presto, this somehow comes about. So the story tells us Olympias is visited by the god Ammon, in fact Nectanebo in disguise. So clever and wily was Nectanebo, so we are told. And hey presto, she has a child and that child is Alexander. So Alexander, according to this version of the story, is not the son of Philip of Macedon, but in fact the son of, at once, Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt, and also the Egyptians' preeminent god, Ammon, which is all rather convenient for Ptolemy, who wants there to be a strong connection between not the Persians, of course, Alexander's great

enemies, but the last native rulers of the country. The reason for mentioning all of this following a discussion of the importance of Saqqara is that it seems that Nexon Ebo II was active in building at Saqqara and he built some kind of temple in the vicinity of the Serapion. We also have his sarcophagus. It didn't turn up in Saqqara, it turned up elsewhere. In fact, it turned up in Alexandria. But in any case, we have that sarcophagus and it has led one or two people, a scholar in particular called Andrew Chugg, to suggest that because Nectar Nebo was chased out of Egypt, the more reliable story is probably that he left and went to Cush rather than that he went to Macedon. It's very probable that his sarcophagus had already been manufactured

for him with the full intention that he would use it, but he never did because he was defeated by the Persians and chased away. So this sarcophagus perhaps, which certainly does exist, there's no question this is a sarcophagus made for Nectar Nebo II. The possibility is that that was kind of lying around and if it was lying around anywhere it was probably lying around in Memphis which was Nectar Nebo's capital quite possibly being prepared for his burial which would have been not in the city itself but in the cemetery Saqqara quite possibly in the building that Nectar Nebo himself built in the vicinity of the Serapium. We can't know this but the suggestion of Andrew Chugg followed up by others as well is that Ptolemy looking for a suitable semi-permanent home for Alexander's body

noticed that the sarcophagus of his mythical father is lying around and available at Saqqara. Why not use that for the burial of Alexander himself? The fact that that sarcophagus then turns up in Alexandria later on is perhaps explained by what subsequently happens. The other thing perhaps to say on this is that in that particular part of Saqqara, it's that building is at the end of the processional route that leads up to the Serapium, the burial place of the sacred Apis bull balls. There's not only a building of Nectanebo there, but there are a number of extraordinary sculptures. Some of them depicting legendary poets and philosophers of the Hellenistic world, people like Homer and Plato. They were arranged in a sort of semicircle, hemicycle,

and Plato. They were arranged in a sort of semicircle, hemicycle, again, right by this temple of Nectanebo. And then there are very entirely classical style sculptures of, there's a dog, there's a lion. Intriguingly, there's at least one peacock sculpture. This is absolutely alien to Egypt. And Egypt at this time is an international place. Memphis would have been an international kind of multicultural city, Saqqara a great place of pilgrimage for people from around the ancient world. Nonetheless it's very striking that these are absolutely Hellenistic sculptures and there is apparently a connection between Alexander the Great and peacocks he is believed to have been very fond of them. So again it's Andrew Chugg's work here the suggestion he makes is that these sculptures

were produced very very early on in the period after Alexander's time in Egypt as part of some very very early Ptolemaic perhaps building program in exactly the area where we could suggest this sarcophagus would have been, this building of Nectanebo's would have been, and perhaps the place where Alexander's body was given temporary rest. Could that explain all of these Hellenistic sculptures? This is essentially the memphite burial place of Alexander the Great. It's so interesting, all those things to speculate about. And I love that mythical connection between Alexander and Nectanebo that springs up later with the Alexander romance.

And to think that perhaps the roots for that eventual connection was by Ptolemy placing Alexander's body in this sarcophagus of Nectanebo and then that being taken on later to try and align the Ptolemaic dynasty with Alexander and Alexander with the native Egyptian rulers. So it's really interesting that power politics play of the body of Alexander, of the sarcophagus. You mentioned that it's only temporarily at Saqqara if it is there, because we soon hear of it moving to Alexandria when it's no longer a building site. Yes, most of the sources that we have that tell

us anything about where Alexander's body was buried say that it was in Alexandria. There are sources that say that it was given temporary rest in Memphis and in any case it is impossible that it went to Alexandria straight away because as we've said it simply didn't exist. We can't know the time scale, we don't really have a very clear idea of the time scale of the construction of Alexandria. But it seems likely that even if the ground plan and the basic limits of the city were established more or less in Alexander's time, in Alexander's lifetime, his time in Egypt, that it would still have been sort of open as to exactly which buildings were going to be erected. And it could well have been that Ptolemy made it a central feature of the construction of the new city, that there would be a tomb for Alexandria as one of the major monuments there. But he can't

have achieved this. He can't have buried Alexander immediately. It must have been somewhere else. Memphis is the obvious place. So the Saqqara story, the Nectar-Nebo connection does perhaps explain that. Skipping ahead slightly, one of these sources tells us that in the time of Ptolemy IV, so we're skipping ahead a few reigns here, and a century or so from the time of Ptolemy I, Ptolemy IV built a mausoleum to house his own burial and that of Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies. So if that is correct, then Alexander's body eventually came to rest in this mausoleum, but it's not built until the time of Ptolemy IV. So either his body was at rest, for example, at Saqqara for a much longer time than we think. Or, and I think this is the most sort of reasonable hypothesis, it was in Memphis temporarily until a burial was

ready in Alexandria. It moved to that burial in Alexandria and then when Ptolemy IV built the mausoleum it was moved again. So we've dealt with the kind of Saqqara tomb, but we now need to think about possibly two tombs in Alexandria. One, this mausoleum, a group burial, one, a dedicated monument for Alexander. I think you're completely right there as well in regards to the chronology of it, because we do, I think it's in the time of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II in Alexandria, we hear I think the first one around the 290s of priests of Alexander in Alexandria, which suggests that there's worship with him. And then you hear in 275 BC this massive procession of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and I can't

remember unfortunately, I'm not an expert, you need someone like the legendary Andrew Chugg or whoever, but at that time there was a huge grand procession in Alexandria. And among the statues, among the things that were shown there was a statue of Alexander, was a statue of Ptolemy. So once again, it does seem to affirm your point that he is buried in Alexandria, number two, and then he's moved further on to number three. And then if we go to Ptolemy IV, what do our literary sources tell us about this new mausoleum? I believe it's called the Sema. Yes, it's referred to, and I don't read Greek as a matter of course.

If these were sources written in Egyptian, I would be wanting to go and see the originals and look at the language. My understanding is that the word in the Greek is variously either somar or semar, and that it's not clear what the meaning of either is. And again, I don't read Greek, but I understand that the word may derive from or have the meaning of the body or something to do possibly with sleep. So eternal rest, I suppose, in the context of a funerary monument. And that term is used for this mausoleum over and over and over again. So it seems as though that is the accepted name

for this monument. We are told, I think, that it is within the palace's district, but again, thinking of another tomb of a famous individual of this sort of era, the tomb of Cleopatra, which we've discussed before, saying that it's in that area isn't very helpful because it's quite a large area and one that is inaccessible to archaeologists now. So we can't be very sort of sure about where on the ground

we might even start to look for it, even if it were possible to do any archaeological prospection in Alexandria. But there are accounts of people going to visit the body of Alexander and being able to see the body as well. So it isn't as though, as you would expect in a more traditional Egyptian context, that the body itself would be hidden away from view. You might be able to, in a typical earlier Egyptian tomb, you might be able to go and visit the funerary chapel and to make offerings to the image of the deceased. But you wouldn't go and see the body, even if you were able to get as far as the sarcophagus, you wouldn't see the body itself. It would be concealed within a complicated nest of coffins and bandages and everything else. Whereas the implication of the texts, which describe visits of a number of important people, mostly from the Roman world, is that they were able to

actually go and look upon the very body of Alexander the Great. And this description suggests that to do so was to enter a subterranean crypt, which the way the texts describe it sort of suggests that it is the centerpiece of the mausoleum but you have to go down underground to find this thing but then the body is apparently exposed there are stories of hands being laid upon the face of Alexander there's a story that the nose is knocked off at a certain point there's a story that a breastplate so suggesting that he's buried in ceremonial armour, if not his own personal armour, was removed at a certain point. There are references to the architecture

as being, again I don't read the Greek, I don't know the original Greek language, but as though the architecture is rather sort of gaudy. And then the other thing is that, as we're told, this is a mausoleum for the Ptolemies. Cleopatra, we are told, built her own mausoleum. But otherwise, I think we assume that all the other members of the Ptolemaic royal family are in there. And is it Octavian who is offered the opportunity to go and see the bodies of the Ptolemies who says, my wish was to see a king, not corpses. So there's a clear insult to the Ptolemies. Put down of the century.

Absolutely. So there's a clear insult to the Ptolemies. Put down on the central. Absolutely. But at the same time, it gives us the sense that had he wanted to, he could have gone to look at those bodies as well. So we don't get much of a sense of how this worked, but there were chambers perhaps that it was possible to enter where you could go and look at the mummified remains of the Ptolemies.

So this must have been quite a substantial monument involving, it seems at least as far as Alexander's body is concerned, a subterranean element of some kind. And that's typical of Egyptian burials, both of earlier periods and in Hellenistic times. And Chris, we have a recreation of this, even in modern times, in gaming. Assassin's Creed, got to bring it up because they do have in that game, I believe there's a scene where it does show the body, the tomb, the sema of Alexander the Great. Yeah, they do. I was very excited by this.

I'm not a gamer at all. I'm much too old and stuffy to do anything like gaming. But Assassin's Creed Origins, I have come to know quite a lot about this, recreates late Ptolemaic Alexandria and you know games are so incredible now in creating a sort of full immersive 360 degree landscape and they've really done the research as well so Ptolemaic Alexandria as far as it's possible for us to know what it looked like is reconstructed on the basis of good

archaeological and textual evidence to the point actually where I was involved in a kind of live exploration of this for an online audience not long ago and I said that I'd thought that the Hippodrome was in the wrong place and that oh no that was terrible and I suppose it doesn't matter because it's just a video game and somebody piped up and said no I think you'll find actually that does follow Strabo's description and it's quite right it does so it is very good and it is possible they've created a kind of non-gameplaying version of the game where you can just walk around you don't have to fight anybody or do any quests or anything like that which is perfect for me because I just really want to walk around Ptolemaic

Alexandria and they have built into this a version of the same one, the mausoleum of the Ptolemies in Alexander. And you enter this from, it's in the centre of Alexandria, it's in the Palatius district, as we're led to believe. It would have been quite a little way inland from the coast. You enter a sort of area of gardens and then you descend a staircase and eventually you come to a vault which is you know portrayed as being sort of dark and dusty and in the center is a transparent sarcophagus a

monumental sarcophagus but it's transparent and inside that you can see if I remember rightly a golden colored coffin I think with inscriptions in hieroglyphs and various sort of items of burial equipment around. And with the very heavy caveat that we just don't know what it would have looked like, you can see that the game designers have drawn on various different bits and pieces of evidence, the classical descriptions of the mausoleum, the crystal sarcophagus I think comes if not from earlier than from claims made in the 19th century that somebody had seen his body inside a crystal transparent sarcophagus. So yeah I mean obviously it's all very fantastical but it's the closest thing you can get to being able to visit it and to visualize it like this is incredible. No absolutely I think the power of video games in the modern age for ancient history is actually going to be increasingly

significant listen to dan snow's history i've got an episode of the ancients on now in which tristan is talking to chris naunton who we all love more coming up Coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You mentioned late Ptolemaic Alexandria there, so let's move on to the body, the tomb in Roman times. We've already talked about Octavian and his put down of the century. But Chris, I mean, I know it's a huge period, but what do we know about the body, the tomb of Alexander? And I'm sure you don't get continuous references throughout. Do

we hear of the body in the tomb intermittently during the Roman period of Alexandria? We do intermittently. It's intermittent references, usually to leading Roman figures visiting the body. That in itself, I think, is interesting because it's clear that Alexander the Great remains a great figure, particularly in the Roman world, for centuries and centuries after his death. I mean, there are a lot of great figures from Egyptian history whose tombs could have been visited by the Romans but of course it's Alexander the Great over and over again. So Caligula visited carry off the breastplate, we are told Septimius Severus visited, his son Caracalla visited, the historian Herodian tells us that he went to the tomb where he took off and laid upon the grave

the purple cloak that he was wearing and the rings of precious stones in his belts and anything else that he was carrying. But there comes a point when the Semar seems to have disappeared. And certainly by the third century in the current era, current era, Alexandria comes to be subjected to waves of violence, invasion, rebellion, and it's very possible that some of the major buildings of Ptolemaic and Roman Alexandria, the state buildings, which would have been in the centre of the city, may have suffered at the hands of these marauding soldiers. And we don't have clear information about that. But, you know, this is where, again, an important cemetery building being in the centre of a city, which is at the heart of conflict like this, is a bit of a worry. You know, if we're sort of trying to remain hopeful about a monument like that surviving, it certainly would have been

threatened, whether it was a target of deliberate violence or just caught up in the melee. And there comes a point where these references stop. We don't hear of people visiting anymore. The sources are silent. We just don't know what happened. We do know that in around the fourth century, there is this great environmental catastrophe that results in a large portion of the most important buildings in Alexandria being submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean. We just don't know enough about the precise location of the seminar to say that it would have been caught up in that or it would not have been caught up in that. But it's possible and it was certainly vulnerable. I think that or it would not have been caught up in that. But it's possible. And it was certainly vulnerable. I think that's the thing that I find unsettling is it would have been vulnerable. It is so interesting. You said like the late fourth century, it seems to be that's

the cutoff point. That's when we don't really hear of it anymore. And of course, you also remember that time you have the rise of Christianity. Theodosius II, I believe it is, who outlaws the pagan sites. Alexander's site, place of pagan pilgrimage, Serapion is destroyed, maybe Alexander's tomb was also destroyed or converted into a church. There are many, many theories around it. But we'll really delve into your areas now, the search, this hunt for the lost tomb of Alexander. I mean, Chris, this search, as we mentioned right at the beginning, it's been going on for centuries. It has been, yes. I mean, you know, not only was Alexander a great figure for the Romans,

but he's never disappeared from view, you know, and never ceased to be a very great heroic figure. And, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about the extent to which classical accounts are of use in helping us to reconstruct more ancient Egyptian history. And often what we find ourselves saying, people like me, when we're talking about this is that the classical sources, Greek and Roman writers, Herodotus onwards, tell us such and such, but really how does that marry up with the archaeological evidence? But in this case, we are talking about sources, textual sources for a monument and events that I think we can rely upon rather more. And those sources will continue to have been read by scholars down the centuries.

And so Alexander's story, his legend is never forgotten. And the idea that there is a tomb of his that could be visited in Alexandria and will never have gone away either. be visited in Alexandria and will never have gone away either. So it survives, I think, in the minds of scholars. And there comes a point, certainly by the 19th century, but it's growing in the 17th and 18th centuries of the current era, that there was an interest in ancient Egypt, archaeological sites in Egypt, and Alexander's tomb will have been one of the most prominent among those. Egypt and Alexander's tomb will have been one of the most prominent among those. It also very intriguingly seems that Alexander's name survives in local sort of folk tales and traditions as well. You know quite naturally the name of the city to this day although for the locals it has a slightly different form they would know it as Iskandaria rather than the sort of anglicized Alexandria but still the name of this great figure Iskander

Alexander survives. So when as early as the 15 and 1600s travellers start to penetrate Egypt at least as far as Alexandria if not much much further beyond. One of the first apparently ancient monuments they come across is what they are given to believe is the tomb of Alexander. This is a curious monument which appeared to have been used as some kind of a bath or a sort of facility for washing within an octagonal building which is in the grounds of a mosque, the mosque of Saint Athanasius built on the site of an even earlier church, Saint Athanasius. The mosque sometimes goes by the name of the district of Alexandria in which it is to be found which is El Atarine. So this is the Atarine Mosque.

And this supposed tomb of Alexander turns out to be a sarcophagus. It's clearly ancient, and it's clearly pagan as well. It's decorated with strange inscriptions in hieroglyphs, which of course couldn't be read at that point, and images of pagan Egyptian deities. So it is an Egyptian sarcophagus. But we're told by the locals, these travellers are told it's the tomb of Alexander. When, towards the end of the 18th century, Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt, which involved a core of artists and scientists who were there to make a record of what they encountered that's specifically the natural environment the more modern sort of muslim buildings but also the ancient buildings they were also made aware of the supposed tomb of alexander realized again that

this is an ancient pagan sarcophagus they had had no reason to believe, well they were certainly taken in by this story, and believed this was the tomb of Alexander. And so naturally, being acquisitive as they were, as lots of Europeans were visiting Egypt at this time, they decided the best thing to do would be to take it away. So it was acquired by the French for the national collection and was destined to go to the Louvre in Paris. However, the French were defeated by the British eventually, defeated at sea by a fleet under the command of Nelson and eventually by a coalition of British and Ottoman forces on land and ejected after actually a few years and a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and signing of a couple of treaties.

And as part of all of this, the antiquities that had been collected by the French were seized by the British. The most famous of those objects is the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to decipher hieroglyphs a couple of decades later, but it also included the so-called Tomb of Alexander. And this, along with the Rosetta Stone, went to the British Museum. And until the Rosetta Stone provides scholars with the ability, thanks to the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion and others, but mostly Champollion, until the Rosetta Stone provides them with the ability to read the language, there was no way of knowing really what this sarcophagus was, if not the tomb of Alexander. But once that point was reached, it was a pretty easy business to read

the name of the king for whom this had been made, for it was a royal sarcophagus. Drumroll, please. Yeah, it is the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II. So this brings us neatly back to where we left the story in Saqqara so on the one hand no it is not the tomb of Alexander it's the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II nothing to do with Alexander except that as we've already seen there is even if it's a sort of propagandist fictional connection, there is a connection between Alexander and Nectaneba II. And in fact, it is not at all unreasonable to think that the sarcophagus might have been used for Alexander's temporary burial in Memphis. And the reason that it turns up all this time later in Alexandria is that it was moved there along with Alexander's body at the time Ptolemy I or one of his successors had prepared a monumental tomb in Alexandria and moved the body. So this idea, this sort of local

legend that this is the tomb of Alexander and let's bear in mind as well that in Alexandria anything ancient often tends to become attached to the name of, if not Alexander, then Cleopatra, one or the other. You know, the idea that this old sarcophagus must have been the tomb of Alexander seems all too obvious, but actually there might really be a connection. We can't know, and if you visit the British Museum and go to the Sculpture Gallery and look at that sarcophagus, which you can, it's a very fine object. And after all, it was, we have no reason to doubt this, it really was produced for the burial of a king. It's a very fine object. You'll find, I think I'm right in saying, no mention of Alexander at all, because the internal evidence suggests no connection.

But putting all these other pieces of the jigsaw together, it is possible that there's a connection. connection. But putting all these other pieces of the jigsaw together, it is possible that there's a connection. So that is a very interesting story. Whether that in any way allows us to bring into the story the Semar or the postulated earlier Alexandrian tomb of Alexander, we can't really know. What I'm trying to say is, is it possible that the mosque of El Atarine, where that sarcophagus was found, which itself was built on an earlier church, the church of Athanasius, is it possible that that is also the location of one of those earlier tombs? Who knows? It is clearly a historic spot. It was, as we know from there are some excellent late 18th century paintings of Alexandria before any parts of the Ptolemaic ancient city were built over, it is right in the middle of the area of the central

streets of Alexandria. and it has been suggested that well you know maybe that was the obvious place to build the monumental tomb of Alexander why not put it right in the middle of the city where everybody could see it and celebrate it as the central monument of this new city that is perhaps approximately where the Atterin mosque was so again we can't, and I don't suppose the authorities of the mosque are about to let anybody do any digging underneath, but that's an interesting possible dimension to the story. Could that be the first tomb, the one before the Sema, or could it be the Sema? That's interesting. If it is, it's one of those questions which we

can't know the answer for, but it is interesting to speculate about so the search for alexander's body and alexander's tomb continues i'd like to ask you about one particular event from the 20th century which is about your old friend the alabaster tomb and the story of adriani Yeah. So there were a succession of three Italian, this is interesting in itself, archaeologists who from the late 19th century onwards were given the position of sort of superintendent in charge of monuments in Alexandria. And that also gave them a license to excavate. Unfortunately for all three of them by the time this process started first of all Alexandria had been bombarded by the British. A significant number or quantity of the surviving standing monuments of ancient Alexandria had been removed. The two obelisks of Cleopatra most

famously had been removed to New York and London respectively and modern Alexandria had begun to be built so they were already very very severely restricted in what digging they could do but there comes a point where in the area of what is now and what was already by that time I think the so-called Latin cemetery of of Alexandria, a Christian cemetery, Alexandria's majority Muslim, and there's still a substantial Christian population, but it would have been much greater a century or so ago when there were very substantial populations of Europeans, particularly Greeks, particularly Italians in the area. And in the area of what is now the Latin Cemetery, Adriani, or rather I think one of his predecessors actually discovered the stones

initially, came across these huge blocks of Egyptian alabaster, monumental blocks of this very, very beautiful stone, which can only have been produced for some very spectacular monument. This kind of alabaster is not truly alabaster, I'm not a geologist but I understand that we more properly should call it travertine but in Egypt it's called alabaster so Egyptian alabaster is as good a name for it. It's very abundant, it's very beautiful and it had been used for monuments throughout Egyptian history but these are really very very big pieces of this stone and Adriani reassembled them into a single chamber monument which has come to be known as the Alabaster tomb and there is no way of knowing there are no as far as I'm aware no inscriptions attached certainly not to the blocks but even to

the anything else discovered in the area no other evidence to help us to identify even what the monument is let alone whether or not it's a tomb and certainly whether or not it's the very tomb of alexander the great but that is the suggestion is that this incredibly grand single monument which was discovered its location is a little way off the center of alexandria i think that weighs against the identification of the alabaster tomb as being the first tomb of Alexander the Great it's a little bit too far away but it is clearly something very important and so in the absence of much better evidence it has come to be one of the main contenders for the tomb and it a little bit like some of the main contenders for the tomb.

And a little bit like some of the other monuments that you and I have talked about in the past in Alexandria, even though it's assembled in such a way that there's an element of sort of speculation or even fantasy involved, it's still something very spectacular. But it's almost completely inaccessible now. It's within a functioning modern cemetery, which is locked most of the time.

And I understand, actually, that in recent years, the Alabaster tomb itself, the monument that was erected by Adriani, has come to be thought to be unsafe, and therefore it's not possible to see it. The result of this, though, is that, again, it's really under the radar for a lot of archaeologists, but also for the wider public as well. It's well known about if you really know your tomb of Alexander, the great story. But otherwise, it's not on the map. It's not on the tourist trail. People don't see it, and therefore, it gets forgotten about. And I have a slight concern that, again, it might disappear from view physically, but also in terms of what we know.

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are new episodes every week i must admit before doing research for this i had no idea about this tomb at all so it's interesting to learn more about that one but keeping on other contenders we're getting near the end now but we're getting to near modern day because more recently there have been more contenders, there have been more discoveries, there have been more theories, places around Alexandria where the tomb, where the sarcophagus might be. Yeah, so as we've said, one of the problems in Alexandria itself is that so much of the city is built over. Perhaps with the right specialists and the right specialist equipment, you could do some non-invasive survey work that might allow us, as it were, to look kind of beneath the streets to see what was there. But those kinds of non-invasive surveys can only ever show us shapes.

And we don't know enough about the building we're looking for in this case, the tomb of Alexander the Great, either the first or the second in Alexandria. We don't know enough about it to know if it had a distinctive shape or any other distinctive markers that might allow us to see it if any of it survives underneath the road. So even if we were in what we felt was the right place and we saw a rectangle, you know, it could be anything. And we can't ground truth it. Excavation is certainly very difficult. Having said that, every so often a kind of window opens up in the ground. So a couple of years ago in 2018, in the summer, a building was being demolished down to the foundation level and underneath the ground there what was very obviously straight off a monumental hard stone sarcophagus of the late dynastic or

early Ptolemaic period was discovered apparently intact and sealed underneath this block of flats in a tiny gap in between two high-rise apartment blocks in the centre of Alexandria, causing a lot of interest. The Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt is very, very good at letting the press and the media know about these things now, so we get information very quickly. It's great. I thought straight away, even if I don't think it is myself, I'd be amazed if somebody doesn't say oh goodness is this the tomb of Alexander and sure enough that story did start circulating they lifted the sarcophagus I can't remember they lifted the whole thing or they lifted just the lid first anyway it was opened

and tragically it was found to be full of sewage so somehow a sewage pipe had burst or leaked and some of that had made its way into the sarcophagus in any case though once that was cleared i'm glad that wasn't me having to do that it was found to contain the human remains of three different individuals not very much by way of cultural material but some little gold plaques which included images of a coiled serpent kind of demon and a gato diamond which is something that you see quite commonly represented in Hellenistic era tombs in Alexandria and around nothing whatsoever to identify whoever was in there or who this might have been made for nothing to suggest any kind of connection with Alexander except that it's in the right place and it's of the right period so that was really sort of more just instructive in that

when these windows do open up and every time a building is demolished down to that level there's a possibility. But there is an area of approximately the centre of the city which is occupied by some gardens, the Shalalat Gardens. And because these are gardens, there are no substantial buildings in the area. And that means that it's possible to do a bit of remote sensing work and also a bit of digging. And a Greek project has been working in that area recently. What's really intriguing about this is that we know that ancient alexandria was laid out in a grid plan and there were these two main arteries thoroughfares running through the city one approximately north south running we think from roughly the base of the cape lochias where the peninsula meets

the main part of the coastline running approximately north south it's on more of a diagonal, in the direction of Lake Marietas, and then there's an east-west street intersecting that. We can be pretty clear about exactly where that east-west street runs because it appears that the modern, it's now called Sharia El Horea, Freedom Street, it was previously Fuad Street, named after modern day King of Egypt, 20th century king. That appears to follow that line. We're not exactly sure where the North South Street was, but depending on where you put it on the map, the intersection of those two streets is in approximately the area of the Shalalat Gardens, which would be incredibly fortunate if that's right, and if that turns out to be where the tomb of Alexander is because there is the opportunity to dig and the team have been finding ancient archaeology and buildings of

probably the Ptolemaic period so buildings of the right period but nothing yet that is clearly the tomb of Alexander. My thought on this, I was watching a documentary about it actually not long ago is that of course even if they were to find it we can't be certain that there would be any evidence that would clinch it again when we think about Egyptian cemeteries and tombs we are incredibly fortunate that it was the Egyptian practice to leave with the deceased a whole ton of inscribed material bearing the name of the deceased and that material very often survives which means that when we find a tomb or a mummy we can very often say well that is the name of that person which is you know astonishing that doesn't happen everywhere in the ancient world

we shouldn't necessarily expect it to have happened with the burials of the Ptolemaic rulers or Alexander the Great the Ptolemies because because the practice was different. And, you know, the kinds of things that were left behind were not the same. So if a building survives, would it be decorated with a ton of inscriptions giving Alexander's name? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it would be more anonymous, in which case there's a possibility that we might find it and still not be sure of what it is. That's the problem with the Alabaster tomb too. Maybe it was the tomb of Alexander, but unless it's actually got his name on, you know, we can't be sure. But is this why of all the tombs people want to search for in Alexandria, why there is so much allure to finding the tomb of Alexander? Yes, there's a long history of the search for it,

but also because it feels as if it must be there somewhere and we just need to find it. And that one day we may very well find it. Is it, of all projects to go after in Alexandria, it feels like this is the one which just attracts so many people to it because you have these tantalizing bits of evidence there right now. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, I think it's the mystery and the fact we haven't got it. That's where the allure is. Not long ago, I was writing about the possibility, as it seemed at the time, this is a few years ago now, that we might be about to discover the tomb of Nefertiti. And I was suddenly struck by the thought at the end of what I was

writing that if we found it there would of course be a sensation a big bang moment even in the best case scenario you know the tomb is intact the body is intact the grave goods were all there everything's got Nefertiti all over it it's stuffed full of historic inscriptions that shed new light on the period etc etc there will be a point at which we know that and the excitement dies down. And quite honestly, that allure and the excitement is then gone. So I was struck by this thought at the end of a piece that I was writing that actually, maybe it would be better if we don't find that tomb. Because then, you know, we will be potentially or perpetually, I mean, on the edge of our seats.

And I think that certainly is the case with Alexander the Great. And actually, we haven't gone into the details, but over the last two centuries, there are lots of almost kind of urban legends about people who have looked for the tomb and stories of people making a hole in a wall of a crypt, seeing the body in the crystal sarcophagus and that sort of thing. And this is something that really has captured people's imagination

and it will continue to do so. And any time anybody is excavating in Alexandria, you can be sure that that is going to be in the headlines. You know, will that be the tomb? I mean, there might be people out there who would be desperate to find the tomb of Ptolemy VIII. You know, and that might be terribly exciting, but it's never going to be out there with Alexander the Great.

I think even the tomb of Cleopatra might not quite hit the heights in terms of the excitement that the tomb of Alexander potentially generates and the fact that his story and his name lived on to the extent that it did for such a long time and never really went away I think is a big part of that too. I mean you're absolutely right we need to wait for the intrepid archaeologist going to find the lost tomb of ptolemy the first second third and all of those tombs in due course see we need to think about these figures too we do yeah no we do we do yeah there's maybe more podcasts for us to do absolutely lost tombs of xx there are many many ptolemies as we know for sure chris this has been awesome it's wonderful to have you back on the show we've done Cleopatra and now Alexander the Great your book on this topic

is called it is Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt Chris only goes to say thank you so much for taking the time

to come back on the pod thanks so much for having me I feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history

our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished well thanks for listening, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Well, thanks for listening to that episode of The Ancients on Dan Snow's history. I'm so proud of what Tristan has managed to achieve over at The Ancients.

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