The Ancients - The Lost Baths of Cleopatra

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

Cleopatra. Hers is one of the most famous names that endures from antiquity. The victor of a civil war. The mistress of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. The last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt. The protagonist of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. A fearsome leader and brilliantly astute politician. The whereabouts of her tomb remains one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. But what about the baths? Over the past year Dr Chris Naunton has been looking into old references to ‘Baths of Cleopatra’, a building supposedly somewhere under modern Alexandria. Where in the city could its remains be today? And could this building really have links to Cleopatra? In this podcast, Chris talks Tristan through his research into this lost building of ancient Alexandria

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, well, it's everyone's favourite Egyptologist, Dr Chris Naunton. He is back on the podcast. You might remember we had him on a few months ago to talk about ancient Egypt in the later period of Egypt's history, from the Libyans to the Assyrians to the Persians to Alexander the Great. It's proved one of our most popular podcasts ever and recently I went over to Chris's house to interview him for a few more podcast episodes on some aspects of his most recent work on lost monuments, lost tombs, lost buildings in and around the ancient and modern city of Alexandria. In this podcast, we really go into a pet passion

project of Chris's over the past year or so. And this is his search, his quest for a certain monumental building, which antiquarians had labelled the Baths of Cleopatra. This is a great detective story, as Chris looked through the records to see what he could learn about these references to this ancient monument associated with one of the most famous figures from ancient Mediterranean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Hellenistic history. And without further ado, here's Chris. Chris, great to have you back on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me back. It's a great pleasure. No problem at all. Always good to have you on the show. And now we're going to be focusing in on ancient Alexandria. I mean, of all cities in Egypt Alexandria Chris it really does feel like the city where we tantalizingly know that there must be so much monumental Hellenistic Roman archaeology beneath the streets that we're yet to uncover. Yes I think so I mean this was after Rome the great city of the ancient world in many ways for several centuries. It certainly was the capital city of Egypt. It was where the focus of all of the building activity at sort of royal level was for centuries and centuries.

It's now Egypt's second biggest city. It's a city of five million people. It's not relative to other centres for archaeological interest in Egypt. It's visited relatively rarely by visitors from outside the country. And relative to what there must have been, there is relatively little to see now. And that makes it kind of a difficult place to get your head around in some ways. It is a very big and bustling place. We know it has the same name that it was given by Alexander the Great himself, even today, and yet there's very little to see of that ancient city. And yet, you know, we know how well archaeological remains

survive in Egypt in very general terms. There must be, or have been up until relatively recently more and the temptation is to think that it is there, it's just that the modern city was built in all the places that we want to look in and that stops us now from getting at that stuff. And we do know in regards to monumental architecture that there is monumental architecture relating to some of the biggest names in late ancient Egyptian history and first of all Cleopatra, the famous Cle to some of the biggest names in late ancient Egyptian history. And first of all, Cleopatra, the famous Cleopatra of the late first century BC. Chris, we do know that there was monumental architecture named after her or in her honour. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Cleopatra was on the throne. She was the pharaoh of Egypt, of course, for a couple of decades.

was the pharaoh of Egypt, of course, for a couple of decades. She, as every good pharaoh would, built on a grand scale, if anything, if ancient textual sources are anything to go by, was rather more inclined not to fall into line with her predecessors in, for example, that they were all buried, so we are told, in a kind of group mausoleum, whereas Cleopatra took the decision to have a mausoleum of her own, built for herself and latterly for Mark Antony. But we know that she was a builder of temples, of a palace, part of the palace's district. So, yeah, I mean, absolutely, I think there's no question that in her time she left a mark on monumental Alexandria.

And subsequent to that that in much more modern times a number of monuments have come to take on her name. Some of those monuments may genuinely have been related to her own activities. In other cases it may just be that when you have something very old and very grand the easy thing to do is to call it the whatever of Cleopatra. There's no doubt that that's happened too but in fact you know here we are in the 21st century with an Alexandria where much of the archaeology is obscured as we've already said. Some of that archaeology actually has only become obscured in the last couple of centuries and we're left either with sites or monuments or the traces of those things in the literature and

archives of those things and a bit of a puzzle as to what really is there what's still there what used to be there but isn't anymore what might have been there in ancient times what might have been there in more modern times but still vanished vanished since then. And Alexandria, and this takes a bit of explaining too, I think it's fair to say is a bit of a blind spot for many Egyptologists. And this has led to a bit of confusion and misunderstanding about what there still is and what might still remain and what might be yet out there awaiting discovery. So there's a mystery here. There is a mystery, we love that word, we love the mystery word. We'll be out to Alexandria one day Chris to look beneath the sun. We have to do this, I'm going to hold you to this. It will happen. Got to do it. Especially

for Alexander the Great who will come to very soon, surely indeed. So of all these monuments, some related to Cleopatra, some maybe not related to Cleopatra, but have got Cleopatra's name. Let's focus in on your pet project, first of all, quite recently. And these are the lost baths of Cleopatra. I mean, Chris, how did you stumble upon there being the baths of Cleopatra? Well I'm glad you asked. So for much of 2019 and a little bit of 2020 I spent a lot of time looking in the archives of early Egyptologists. Much of this material actually rates to a time before Egyptology was even a word. So these are travellers of a sort of

scholarly inclination who set out to record what they found in Egypt and that in some cases meant anything and everything but there was naturally a focus on the built environment and in particular on ancient monuments. And what I was interested in was the records of these things, what state they showed monuments, which are well known to us now, to have been in, say, two centuries ago, which is interesting because I think we tend to assume that the job of archaeology, if you like, is to just reveal things. Stuff gets buried, so we remove sand or mud or whatever it is, and then those things are just sort of waiting for us, and we reveal them, and there they are. That's the end of the story, when actually it's far more complicated than that. And in Egypt over the

last couple of centuries, things have been revealed, yes, but then for one reason or another, that's not the end of the story, and things come to be rebuilt, or in some cases, strange and unexpected as it might sound things are dismantled or demolished so a lot of these records are hugely interesting and important and valuable because they're not only a record of things at a particular moment in time a couple of centuries ago typically they're also in some cases records of monuments which have disappeared completely one of the challenges for somebody like me looking at these things is that much as today Egyptology is a well-established discipline and people like me who know a bit about it know standardized names for sites and monuments,

there's no such standardization a couple of centuries ago and so monuments tend to be called different things given different names by different people. So the challenge is to be able to recognise something visually and say, oh, okay, so that's not the name we know it by now, but I can see that that is actually the Temple of Ramesses II or whatever. And in almost all cases, I found that even if it took a bit of research, I was able to identify what I was looking at and get around that issue of strange and unfamiliar names being used or things even sort of looking a little bit different having changed in the last couple of centuries but there was one monument which came up in several of the archives I was looking at which really intrigued me first of all because of the name Baths of Cleopatra I had never come across

any such thing before and Alexandria is a bit of a blind spot for Egyptologists like me as I said but actually for one reason or another my research has taken me to Alexandria quite a lot in the last few years and I felt as though I knew what there was to be found in Alexandria and yet it was clear that the baths of Cleopatra so-called were in Alexandria. I have never heard of them. And moreover, the drawings showed a very clearly very spectacular monument. And I just could not think what this was. I thought it must be that this is a name that has fallen out of use.

And we know it by something else. But I was looking at these drawings and just thinking I just have no idea what this is cue a year's worth of research trying to get to the bottom of what this is so I don't know to what extent you want the full story of a year's worth of go for the full story absolutely Chris we want to hear it this is gripping stuff right now okay so the second thing that was in my mind was that this spectacular monument that we could see in the drawings looked to me like it was probably a tomb and the research that had taken me to Alexandria was the research I was doing for a book searching for the lost tombs of Egypt which devoted quite a lot of time to the still missing tombs of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra, both of which must have been in Alexandria.

So here I am looking at drawings of what looked to me like a monumental tomb attached to the name Cleopatra, which seems to me, based on my arrogant position that I know everything there is to know about archaeology in Alexandria, to now be missing itself. everything there is to know about archaeology in Alexandria, to now be missing itself. So of course my first thought is, could this in some way be something that is missing from the story of the lost tombs of Alexandra, Alexander the Great and Cleopatra? I thought not, because there's too much of attention has already been devoted to those things. So I thought probably not, but still, what is this huge monument and has it really vanished or not? Anyway so I initially wasn't really focusing on this I was just making a point of checking every bit of literature every archive

as I was going along looking at other things to see if there were references and most of the time particularly in more modern published literature I was turning up nothing which of course only encouraged me in this search and in the idea that whatever this was these so-called baths of Cleopatra they had disappeared in some sense whether that meant physically they do not exist anymore for whatever reason even though they were visited by and by this point I'm gathering more and more instances of people having gone which by the way of course gives me the impression that at a certain point in the first half of the 19th century it was absolutely on the standard itinerary this is what you did you went to the Serpium and you went to the obelisks which at that point hadn't yet gone

to New York and London so you know you could still go and see those things in Alexandria and you went to various other sites and monuments in Alexandria and you went to the Baths of Cleopatra. to various other sites and monuments in Alexandria, and you went to the Baths of Cleopatra. Curiously enough, I found myself in a second-hand bookshop in Inverness at the end of a holiday in February 2020, just before the dreaded pandemic arrived. And I came across E.M. Forster's guide to Alexandria, which is actually a well-known, well-established guide, not written by an archaeologist, but by somebody who lived in Alexandria, a very well-known writer, of course. And I picked this up in the second-hand bookshop, thumbed through the index and sure enough to my surprise actually there's a reference to the baths of Cleopatra and his book was published in the middle of the 20th century so he knew about them and in fact to my amazement

there was a couple of pages of description and a map and the map seemed to show that the baths were a little way in from the coast in the region of Abu Qiyam at the very western extent of Abu Qiyam Bay which if you know your Alexandria and surrounds is something like 30 kilometers east of Alexandria proper. So first of all I thought well that's unexpected because it's not really Alexandria. It's in the region of Alexandria, but it's not quite where I thought they were going to be. I'm also thinking of my research into these lost tombs and thinking that one of the criteria for establishing where those tombs might have been is where the Ptolemaic city walls were. So in other words, where the limits of the city were at the time Alexander was buried and Cleopatra was alive and then subsequently being buried. The assumption

being that those tombs in fact were within the city walls and the city walls don't go anywhere near Abukir. So whatever this was, if it is a tomb, it's a long, long way outside the city. But I just had to assume that maybe this, for our travellers making their drawings, this counts as wider Alexandria. But then I got in touch with a friend of mine, Dr. Daniele Salvoldi, who used to teach in Alexandria. He's an Italian archaeologist and Egyptologist. He's married to an Egyptian Egyptologist. They live in Egypt. He used to teach in Alexandria, now in Cairo. I knew that he'd created a map of the location of monuments, ancient monuments in Alexandria, whether they still exist or not. And I dropped him a line

and just said, do you know anything about this? He'd never come across them either, which gave me further encouragement. He suggested I should try a couple of local Ministry of Antiquities inspectors, which I did. And one of them came back to me very confidently saying, oh yes, I know what this is but I was absolutely sure that he was wrong. The other one didn't know so even the Alexandrian archaeologists that I was talking to had no knowledge of this but Daniele went away and did a bit of research on my behalf and eventually managed to match the drawings to a plan in a fairly obscure but fairly recent volume, I hope the author will forgive me, on the monumental tombs of Alexandria and it turns

out that the so-called Baths of Cleopatra are in fact, well the tomb is now known in the literature when it gets mentioned at all as the Grand Catacomb at Wardian. Wardian is a district to the west of Alexandria proper, a little bit outside the ancient city walls in an area which is called by Strabo and others, because this is the name it had in ancient times, Necropolis. It's the cemetery area. And so this thing apparently exists, or at least it is remembered in the literature. This book was published in about 2003. The author of this book, by the way, sadly, she was already a senior academic at the time she wrote the book and she's since passed away. So I haven't had the opportunity to talk to her about it, unfortunately. And according to the 2003 volume,

it is still extant. So it still exists still exists and yet i'm still yet really to find anybody who has even come across if not the baths of cleopatra then even the grand catacomb at wadian so the question now is really still and until we can go to alexandria tristan i can't answer this question do they really exist or does the grand Catacomb exist? If not, how can it be that this incredibly spectacular ancient monument of Marjorie Venet, the author of the book on monumental tombs of Alexandria, believes probably an early first century, so Roman era, catacomb, a little bit too late for Cleopatra, but not so late, and the dating isn't so secure either that it couldn't be. I don't think it's the tomb of Cleopatra, and indeed, by the way, I don't think

it's anything to do with Cleopatra. I'm pretty sure that that name has just come to be attached to it in more recent times, but still it's a very intriguing and interesting thing. I would love to visit it, but I need to find out first if it even still exists. It became a pet project, so you're right in referring to it as that. I sort of got to the end of all of this and thought oh it's not the lost royal tomb of either Alexander the Great or Cleopatra. It might exist or it might not. Does anyone care? Maybe not because you know it seems to have disappeared, if not physically, it seems to have disappeared from memory and even from the literature and so actually by the time I came to be writing a very long-winded and self-indulgent blog post about the whole thing I think I was sort of okay with the idea that there is a significance

in all of this which is that even when archaeologists visit, document, excavate, reveal an ancient monument and even publish it doesn't mean to say that it's then sort of safe and it will never ever disappear ever again you know we've reached the end of history and so we now have the monuments we have and we'll never lose them even a monument as apparently large and grand and spectacular and potentially important as this can still disappear and I think there's just something interesting rather unsettling about it but interesting about that and like I say I suppose the next part of the mission is to go and see if I can find it and maybe make sure that it doesn't disappear from memory by, I don't know, photographing it. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603?

Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely

also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking about photographs and the ability, obviously you can't go there yet, but like in the meantime having things such as Google Earth, Google Maps, you did have a quick look didn't you to see if you could possibly locate the area of this monument? Yeah thank you for asking, I did, I left this project for a bit and then I came back to it and then I left it again for a bit and then I came back to it and this is the pandemic of course, this is last year, it's in in lockdown at least for some of that time we weren't even really supposed to be leaving our houses let alone able to go to libraries so Daniele Salvoldi was able to get to the AUC American University in Cairo library just before lockdown hit in Egypt and he was able to take some snapshots on his phone of the relevant pages from Marjorie Venet's book but I really wanted to get a hold of

this book. He also photographed the pages that had a short summary of information available about it which was really really very brief and a bit of bibliography and it seemed that the information Venet was using it wasn't clear to me whether she'd been at all to the tomb which was interesting in itself. Her information came from an Italian archaeologist who had published a volume also on monumental tombs which he had excavated and in fact he had excavated this particular tomb and I subsequently found out actually he had cleared it and he'd also done a bit of restoration in it and he'd photographed it. And over the course of the lockdown I got more and more and more fidgety and anxious about wanting to be able to consult these publications, both of which are difficult to come by. Marjorie

Bennett's book is not in the libraries that I would normally consult for Egyptology, again because I think Alexandrian archaeology sits slightly outside what Egyptologists are mostly interested in, so it had slipped the net. I'd never even heard of this book. I used to be the librarian of the Egypt Exploration Society. I like to think that I knew about everything there is in the literature in Egyptology. I'd never come across this book before. And the book that she refers to for her own information is another one that wasn't represented. It's not in the EES. Fiendishly difficult to get hold of. But eventually I, forgive me, this in itself is a silly tangent,

but I took myself on a cycling trip to another secondhand bookshop in North London, which seems to be the only place in the UK where you could buy a copy of the Italian publication. And I shelled out rather more money than I normally would for books. Because by this point, I've got to have this book. You're so committed. I'm so committed to the project and unable to go. So yes, I have these books now, having remortgaged my house and everything i have these books on my desk and i'm able to pour over them despite leaving the project for a bit coming back to it so one saturday

round lunch time i'm idly looking again at the map in venice book which actually very very very helpfully provides only in the very basic details the plan of Alexandria showing the position of the modern streets and she locates the Grand Catacomb in the context of the modern streets. Most plans that are available don't show that, they show the ancient city, where the Ptolemaic city walls were, where Wadien was in relation to the Palasis district or to the Serapion or something like that, but they didn't allow me to position where this monument might be on a modern map. Having realized that this one did, I then go to Google Earth to see if I can see the shapes of the streets as they appear in Venet's sketch map and to my amazement there's a sequence of streets I think which are on an odd sort of diagonal relative to the coastline and the Grand

Catacomb is positioned in between two of those diagonal streets and those diagonal streets are recognisable in Google Earth. So we're going to Google Earth, zoom in as much as I can on the spot where Venet locates the tomb. And all you can see is what looks like a fenced off area with some foliage in it. This is a very, very industrial area of Alexandria. So in modern times, as in ancient times, there are two main harbours. One to the east, which is the Great Harbour. This is the area of the Palaces District. It's the area of all the main buildings of state, constructions of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, etc., etc., etc. It's most probably where the tombs of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra were to be located.

where the tombs of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra were to be located. That's divided from another port to the west called the Old Port by what was originally just a causeway connecting the mainland with the island of Pharos, but which is now a very, very heavily built up area. And the necropolis area of ancient times is a little inland from the old port and the great harbour now in Alexandria is where you'll find hotels, cafes, shops, civic monuments, that kind of thing along with an extremely busy road. The old port to the west is very very very industrial as I say so what you could see in Google Earth is the industrial harbour and lots of containers and what looked like kind of industrial wasteland for lorries and that sort of thing. And then

there's this fenced off area with green in it. And my bet is that the only reason you would find greenery in that area, which otherwise would be absolutely in demand for heavy industry in that area which otherwise would be absolutely in demand for heavy industry in that area is that it's protected for some reason and I suspect that it's protected because that is the location of the so-called Baths of Cleopatra the Grand Catacomb of Wadien so all there is left to do now is to persuade somebody or maybe just do it myself jump in a taxi next time I'm in Alexandria all we've got to do is jump in the back of a car and persuade the driver that they want to take us to this precise place which we might have to just use a kind of Google Earth to navigate our way there you know left here right here and then maybe even I don't know how easy it will be to get onto that land which is

probably owned by heavy industry and see what we can see best thing maybe to do would be to take a ministry of antiquities inspector along with us and maybe somebody even has a key who knows I will be trying for sure I will be trying I'm just imagining this quite yes this is heavy industrial area trying to get to this one place in the centre that might be an archaeological site from 2000 years ago but you've got lorries you've got trucks going all around the place you'll figure a way you'll figure a way my friend when it happens when you get back to Alexandria indeed it'll be well worth it no doubt. I really hope so and quite honestly it wouldn't be the first time that I had gone somewhere

with the help of friends from nearby to tell them that there is something very interesting archaeologically even though you can't see it either underneath the ground or there was in this particular spot and it wouldn't be the first time I'd done that with rather exhausted looking people who think I'm insane. So you know from that point of view yeah I'm ready ready to do it we're all insane in the ancient history world maybe yeah maybe but I think it's just a great story because in my opinion it serves almost like a microcosm for what there could still be incredible monumental architecture okay maybe it's not the lost baths of Cleopatra but it's still

monumental architecture a microcosm for how much there must just still be under the streets of Alexandria it must be wonderful but also frustrating to think about how much there still is yeah absolutely when you look at drawings of Alexandria from the first half of the 19th century up to the sort of middle of the 19th century, it's really quite unsettling how much of the ancient city appears to have been preserved up until that point, and how much is still, if not quite standing, then at least lying around. We know that the basic layout of the city was sketched out on Alexander's instructions, and even though construction didn't begin until some time after he had died, some part of the city, meeting in a crossroads in the center so there's a roughly east-west road, there's a roughly a north-south road at strategic positions and they were lined with columns and a lot of those columns were still visible 200 years ago. There is one or two places, one in particular I

can think of, in the center of the city now where, I don't know quite how this has come about in this case, but in between two buildings, a mosque and the building next door, the ground in between has been not built on and you look from the street level down some several metres and there is Column standing as I remember and presumably still standing at the level of the ancient ground. And as I say, I mean, the early drawings suggest that there was a lot of that, not just sort of waiting to be dug up underneath the ground, but there standing. And what happens is that I guess, you know, the attentions of Egyptologists and archaeologists were very much elsewhere in Egypt on hieroglyphic

inscriptions and dynastic Egypt, and not so much on Ptolemaic and Hellenistic Egypt which I think kind of falls between classics and Egyptology somehow. It's not enough classics for the classicist and it's not enough Egyptology for the Egyptologist. So Alexandria doesn't really become the focus of much archaeology until the end of the 19th century by which time the modern city is under construction. The two obelisks of Cleopatra, and in that case they really are of Cleopatra, they're actually New Kingdom obelisks, so they were already approximately a thousand years old, a little bit older than a thousand years old by the time they were moved to Alexandria from Heliopolis under Cleopatra's

orders. But still, in the sense that she ordered that they be moved and sit at the front of a temple dedicated to Julius Caesar that they are truly obelisks of Cleopatra they were still in place they were still in situ one moved quite a long time before the other the New York one went first and the London one in the 1870s but they in fact are think, part of a wider story of there having been an Alexandria, which was there waiting for us until the modern city comes to be constructed. It didn't help that the British bombarded Alexandria in the early 1880s, and that won't have helped any of the archaeology to survive. But I think it's probably fair to say that, as you've already said yourself,

there was and there probably still is a lot of the ancient city underneath now the modern city. It's just that by building a city of five million people we now can't get at that. Chris, lastly, your book all about these tombs which do focus partly on Alexandria, the book is called? It's called Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt. There we go. Thanks, Chris. Thanks Chris. Thank you.