The Ancients - The Lost Tomb of Cleopatra

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

Among the rulers of Ancient Egypt, Cleopatra VII has long held a place in legend, her story having been told in folklore, by Shakespeare and in Hollywood movies. In reality, however, her story remains unfinished. The location of her final resting place remains lost to us. Dr Chris Naunton is back with us to explore the possible answers to this mystery, from Alexandria to Taposiris Magna, join us on this trawl through the evidence of Cleopatra’s final days.

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 a big one. We are talking about the famous figure, the famous Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Cleopatra from Shakespeare, the Cleopatra who had a relationship with Julius Caesar, with Mark Antony, and was also a pretty extraordinary ruler of ancient Egypt in her own right. And today we're focusing in on her tomb, her lost tomb, because we still don't know where exactly she was buried. There are many theories. There are excavations ongoing trying to find her tomb. But as of yet, we still don't have that concrete evidence to confirm whereabouts she was buried.

To talk through the whole mystery surrounding the tomb of Cleopatra, I was delighted to get back on the podcast, the legendary Dr. Chris Naunton. Chris and I, we recorded a few podcasts not too long ago. Stay tuned for a future episode with us about another famous lost tomb. But this was a great chat. You're going to absolutely love this one. Here's Chris talking about the lost tomb of Cleopatra. Chris, always good to have you on the podcast. Always good to be here, Tristan. Thanks very much for having me back.

No problem at all. Now, we've talked about the lost baths of Cleopatra, your pet project on that. We are keeping on Cleopatra now, but the lost tomb of Cleopatra, this is one of the big mysteries. There's been a lot of speculation about it particularly in recent years. This is one of the great tombs of ancient Egypt that people have been searching for. Yes absolutely it's a safe assumption I think that for pretty much everybody who ever sat on the throne of Egypt as pharaoh there would have been a monumental tomb and a lot of goodies to go with the burial itself. Cleopatra is the pharaoh of Egypt. She was part of a sort of successional struggle that meant that there were rivals and co-regents, if you like, at the same time, but she was the preeminent ruler among them. She also rules

Egypt at a time when the royal family has access to a great deal of wealth and we know that she and her successors, her predecessors, were building on a monumental scale. There's no question, I think, whatever we make of textual sources telling us the story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony and others involved, it seems very likely that she would have had a monumental tomb. It would have been in Alexandria and it would have been lavishly appointed. To add to that we have a certain amount of textual information about this. So we have I guess two main kinds of source. We have accounts like that of Strabo which tell us of Alexandria, the city, the place, what it was like, how it was laid out, sort of hints in his descriptions of the relative positions of things which we archaeologists have

had to seize on because we have so little by way of genuine archaeological remains on the ground in Alexandria and at the same time such a fervent interest in finding things like the tomb of Cleopatra. That's probably the main prize. So there's a little bit of information about the whereabouts of the tomb of Cleopatra that we get from an account like that of Strabo and then there are the accounts giving us the history of Cleopatra and her life and her story with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and her eventual death and if not very clear sort of descriptions and details about her burial then hints, clear hints. So all together as I say even without any textual information we'd assume that she would have a lavish monument

and she would be buried with a considerable quantity of grave goods and also that this would be in Alexandria. It's the capital city throughout Egyptian history. It is a fairly safe assumption and the archaeology consistently backs this up that the kings were buried in close proximity to the seat of their power and Alexandria has been the capital city for a good couple of centuries by this point. We also know from similar sources, it has to be admitted, but still, we have no reason not to think that Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, Cleopatra's predecessors, are buried in Alexandria. In fact, we are told they were buried in a kind of mausoleum to house the members of that family, Alexander and then the Ptolemies. So one interesting thing that the sources tell us about Cleopatra's tomb is that she was building a monument for herself.

So that's a departure straight away. We're looking for a building of Cleopatra's in which she intended to be buried herself along with Mark Antony. Strabo gives us a little bit of information about where this might have been. He makes reference to the mausoleum as being in the palaces district and we can tell from the sources like Strabo that this was on the coast a little way east of the Hector Stadium, the artificial causeway connecting the mainland with the Ireland of Pharos and along the sort of edge of the coast that stretches out onto a natural peninsula, the Lochias Peninsula, sometimes called Cape Lochias or Acra Lochias.

So it's somewhere there. And to add to that, Strabo tells us it is in the vicinity of the Temple of Isis or a Temple of Isis. That sounds like it might be useful. But unfortunately, of course, we don't have the Temple of Isis. And more than that, there was probably more than one. But we but we're looking at you know that sort of general area along the coastline and incidentally in the last few decades underwater archaeology has confirmed that that is the area of the monumental state royal building program in alexandria So it does make sense that it would be somewhere in there. The story of Cleopatra's life, the end of her life, partly plays out within the mausoleum.

So the accounts don't all agree entirely in the details of the way the events unfolded, but there seems to have been a point at which Cleopatra holed herself up in her mausoleum, which clearly was a substantial large building and secured as well and by the end of her life she and Mark Antony had been pursued to Alexandria by Octavian who is in the process of comprehensively defeating them both conquering Egypt himself and creating the Roman empire pretty momentous stuff going on here in the ancient world. So Cleopatra in fear holds herself up with her maidservants in the mausoleum. There's then a sort of slightly complicated backwards and forwards situation where she believes Mark Antony has killed himself

or has died and then attempts to take her own life and then finds out that actually he's wounded but not dead and so he visits the tomb to try to let her know and in the course of those events being described we learn that the mausoleum is on more than one level. It's sealed on the ground level by a very very large and sturdy pair of doors but there is a window or some kind of opening on an upper level at which Cleopatra can appear and communicate with Mark Antony and various other characters who come to visit at various different times on the ground. So we're looking at some kind of level with at least two floors and a very large pair of doors. Again when it comes to guiding archaeological research this isn't great information, very solid, but it's something to go on.

There are cemeteries in Alexandria of the Ptolemaic period. And we could look, if we're trying to sort of imagine what a tomb like this might have been like, we might think of the necropolis at Shatby or the monumental tombs at Mustafa Pasha Cemetery or even some of the tombs at Khamis Shugafa, or those are mostly later. Even the Grand Catacomb at Wadiun which had come to

confusingly enough have the name Baths of Cleopatra at a certain point. It's not the tomb of Cleopatra, it's not the Baths of Cleopatra, nothing to do with her in fact. But still these might help us to visualize what a Hellenistic era kind of fusion Greek and Egyptian tomb might have looked like but it doesn't really help us to find the tomb itself. Underwater archaeology would seem to offer us our best chance and the harbour, the great harbour, has been divided between three archaeologists. A Frenchman called Jean-Yves Empereur has the area out towards the Pharos island and he has identified a number of blocks which it seems at one point came from the famous lighthouse of Pharos, one of the great ancient wonders of the world. So he's discovered a whole

lot more besides but that in itself would be a pretty knockout sensational discovery, the actual blocks of the lighthouse. Another archaeologist called Franck Goddio, Frenchman also, has the area of the palaceaces district and his work sensationally has provided us with pretty good information to show the ground plan of the palaces and those buildings that were built right at the water's edge so the great palace the Timonium built by Mark Antony there's a Poseidon a theater building again it's really sort of fragments but there's enough to confirm that that

really is the area those buildings really were there and they survived to some extent. They're under the water now by the way because in the 4th century AD there was an earthquake and a tidal wave which had the effect of lowering the level of the sea floor off the coast by several meters inviting a whole mass of water to come into Alexandria and causing basically the most important part of the city from the ancient monument's point of view to be submerged. Finally, of the three archaeologists, there's a guy called Harit Salas, who's a Greek underwater archaeologist who has the smallest concession, but it's the concession in the area of Cape Lochias, and actually a little bit to the east as well. He discovered a few years ago what appears to be a sort of miniature pylon,

the kind of thing you would expect to find at the front of an Egyptian temple, which he suggests may have been a part of a temple of Isis. And you'll remember that Strabo tells us that Cleopatra's mausoleum is in the vicinity of a temple of Isis. He also discovered a very large stone which appears to be part of a monumental threshold which also features an emplacement for a monumental door. Could this be, he suggests, the threshold of the very mausoleum of Cleopatra which we know had these huge doors if the sources are to be believed. So it's tantalizing but it's not enough

for us to be absolutely clear that this is the location of the tomb of Cleopatra and that this is certainly one stone but still what remains of the tomb of Cleopatra or even that you know a bit more work might reveal more underneath the water. In any case it does seem likely unfortunately that the tomb was in this part of Alexandria that was affected by the earthquake and the tidal wave and is now flooded. However, there is a counter theory to this, which is that Cleopatra would never have been allowed the burial that she wished for by her enemy Octavian who eventually is successful and gains the upper hand. Octavian we are led to believe wanted to be able to kind of capture Cleopatra alive,

the implication being that he would then sort of parade her perhaps you know around the streets of Alexandria or maybe even Rome to show his great triumph. So that all makes sense and again although the sources don't entirely align on this the idea that Cleopatra might have committed suicide makes sense in that context. She's trying to avoid that typically Roman humiliation. So the sources, even though they don't really provide the sort of definitive confirmation, they don't give us any information that says that she wasn't buried in the mausoleum as she wanted. But there is an archeologist, Kathleen Martinez of the Dominican Republic, who believes that actually

she wasn't going to be allowed this burial as she wished. And therefore she and those around her had to take decisive and dramatic action. They had to spirit her body away and bury it somewhere else. That somewhere else is a site a few dozen kilometers west of Alexandria, along the coast, at the site of Tapu Ziris Magna. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast.

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that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion dollar wars, or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. I mean, Chris, I've got the name Taposiris Magna in my notes, and I was wondering how we would get this far.

You've just explained the link there, so what's the next part in this alternate new theory? So Tappan Zairus Magna is this temple town west of Alexandria. And this was a town, fairly sizable town, from the Ptolemaic period onwards. The town and a cemetery and a quite spectacular temple are built on a natural ridge with the Mediterranean on one side. The ridge runs along the line of the coast. So you've got the Mediterranean in front of you. Behind you, you have Lake Mariotis.

We don't know a lot about it. We know a lot more about it thanks to the excavations of Kathleen Martinez, which have been going for more than 10 years now. But the name itself is the ancient name. And Tap Osiris means something like the place of Osiris. So the temple is undecorated, which is unhelpful for us. We normally rely on temple decoration to understand the purpose of a temple, the god to which it's dedicated, etc. It's undecorated, so it's not entirely clear.

But the name strongly suggests a connection with Osiris. Osiris' consort is Isis and throughout her lifetime, certainly throughout her time as pharaoh, Cleopatra had gone to great lengths to associate herself with the goddess Isis and this wasn't the first time anybody had done this in Egyptian history but Cleopatra is associated with that goddess perhaps more than any other female pharaoh and she in some places built monuments and had them decorated in such a way as to emphasize this association and it extends to her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarian as well. So Isis as the mother of Horus, the embodiment of the living king, but also the embodiment of the kind of new king, the newborn king, the child who will become king. Horus is the sort of perfect god as a match for Caesarian, who Cleopatra is determined

to line up as her successor, the person who will continue her work and her line as pharaoh of Egypt. So by associating herself with Isis, she's helping to appeal to the Egyptian population, but she's also putting herself in this position as the mother goddess par excellence, mother to the future king, her son, Caesarean. So Tapasiris is a clear association with Osiris. There is the possibility that within the temple complex there is also a temple of Isis. So could it be that at her death, when her retinue were searching for a suitable place to bury Cleopatra, far enough away from Alexandria that Octavian couldn't stop it and desecrate the burial in any

way but in a spot that in some way was still suitable for a queen who wished to associate herself with Isis. Could it be that the nearby temple of Isis perhaps if there is one was such a place? There is a temple at the site and the temple features a number of intriguing shafts and that includes high-status female members of the royal family were buried within the temple complex that hadn't been the case up until that point but it was in the first millennium so you could construct an argument to say that maybe that's a good reason to think that these shafts within the temple complex or close to it just outside might be something to do with this. Unfortunately for people hoping that this was going to lead to the discovery of the tomb of

Cleopatra, Kathleen Martinez's excavations haven't yet revealed that, not in the temple and not in those shafts. However there is an extensive cemetery which has never really been excavated attached to the temple naturally it's a populous town people had to be buried somewhere there were elite level wealthy people in the town and Kathleen Martínez is now excavating those tombs they are typical Hellenistic and Roman era kind of hybrid Egyptian classical tombs they clearly feature in some cases the burial of mummified remains as per the Egyptian tradition, also cremated remains as per the Hellenistic tradition, the Macedonian tradition. So they're the right sort of period. They appear in some cases to

have been high status burials. There is also a very curious monument along this ridge at the far end of the site from the temple which appears to be a sort of miniature version of what we understand the Pharos lighthouse to have been like but it's in completely the wrong position to have functioned as a lighthouse. It's too far inland, it would have been useless and dangerous actually as a lighthouse. So what is it if it's not a lighthouse? People have suggested that it marks a funerary monument and indeed there is a rock, a substantial rock cut monument of some kind underneath this miniature Faros lighthouse. There's nothing to suggest it's the tomb of Cleopatra but there's nothing to tell us what it is either. So those excavations are ongoing and in the

absence of much much better hard archaeological evidence from Alexandria the possibility will still remain for some people that Cleopatra could be found somewhere else and there is a project ongoing at Tabaziris. It is very exciting and I think just Chris do you think it's important to remember particularly for these high profile figures from antiquity who were at the end of the day enemies of Rome? As you say committing suicide to avoid becoming a Roman prisoner of war, we know the Romans were harsh on those high level prisoners who were taken to Roman chains and then did normally almost always meet an infamous end. If we consider that way could it very much still be possible that as you say we're excavating the cemetery even if there was a monumental tomb constructed for Cleopatra in her lifetime that because she was an enemy of Rome

because perhaps Augustus wanted to make a clear point that this was the end of the Ptolemies you're going to forget about the Ptolemies he has this disdain for the Ptolemies as we'll get on to of Alexander the Great's tomb, that maybe she was just hushed away and buried in an insignificant, a non-monumental tomb and that maybe as you say she's just in a rock cuts grave somewhere in one of these Macedonian Egyptian cemeteries. Well I have to say that you know approaching this from the point of view of what evidence we have, which is thin on the ground and what that tells us, it all points to her having been buried in Alexandria. I think we have to say that. Having said that, I think, you know, if we are looking for a reason to think that she might have been buried somewhere else, then the line that she needed to avoid this humiliation at the hands of Octavian is exactly the right line to take. It does require us to think, because there are a good number of sources describing events at the end of her life, and we do have to take those with a pinch of salt, they're mostly written by writers who were heavily biased in favour of Rome, but nonetheless they don't say

anything about her having been spirited away perhaps this is the whole point they didn't know you know and so we have I suppose to fall back on that notion that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence or something like that you know the fact that they don't say that she was spirited away doesn't mean it didn't happen but we don't have the evidence that it did so So I think it's possible. I do think it's possible. If it's possible, Tapasiris is perhaps a candidate location. But I have to say, you know, without wishing to be unnecessarily sceptical about it,

we still don't have a lot of evidence that there was any substantial monument of Isis at Tapasiris. In which case, that sort of idea that it was a suitable place for her to be buried because of her great association with Isis at Tapasiris, in which case that sort of idea that it was a suitable place for her to be buried because of her great association with Isis, it sort of disappears. And if that disappears, then really I think we can almost imagine that she could be buried anywhere. And I suppose it's just very counterintuitive. We're so used as Egyptologists, those of us who spend our days thinking about archaeology in Egypt, we're very fortunate and so used to tombs, particularly elite tombs, belonging to individuals who we can identify because they leave behind those traces and so

the idea that somebody could be buried, somebody as important as that could be buried anonymously, which would mean that you know we could never know, is just very counterintuitive and I think we can only really speculate I mean I suppose it also raises the possibility that the very body and the burial and the coffin and all the grave goods and the tomb of Cleopatra could be discovered without us knowing you know if it was really a sort of secret burial and I can think of other instances in which it is actually possible that the tomb of somebody very, very important or, you know, high ranking, the tomb which has been sought by

archaeologists might actually have been found without them realising it because it's anonymous, but for different reasons in those cases. So a very long-winded answer to your question, if possible, but we can only really sort of speculate. Your view in particular on where the lost tomb of Cleopatra may well be it's sounding as you say Alexandria seems very much possible Lochias Peninsula way. Yeah I think so I think even something about the sort of basic geography of the harbour and what we know and we do have even if it's limited we do have good hard archaeological evidence particularly from Goddio's underwater excavations of the basic layout of the palace's district and it does look as though the main royal

palace is on the Lochias peninsula and I think it does make sense that it would be there and that Cleopatra's mausoleum would be in that vicinity so I do think that that is the area, in which case Harry Tallas, who's found these things which he has suggested may actually come from either that temple of Isis that Strypo mentions, or the mausoleum itself, I suspect that he was in the right area. But this tidal wave which trashed the royal buildings, not to say nothing of numerous conflagrations and invasions in Alexandria in between the time of Cleopatra and that tidal wave it's not at all beyond the realms of possibility that it just didn't survive from that point of view being buried within the center of that city certainly

with the benefit of hindsight won't have seemed like a great idea because it's such an unsafe location somewhere like the valley of the kings where nobody's got any reason to go other than to bury a king or rob a tomb is a great location you know there's no wars over there there's no battles no burning of things over there that's a great place who do thoughts maybe cleopatra's tomb is in the valley of the kings maybe that's very much a fake history thing to end this podcast chris to wrap it all up there's been another great little chat about the lost tomb of Cleopatra your book on the lost tombs is called Searching for the Lost Tombs

of Egypt Chris thanks for coming on the podcast thank you very much Thank you.