Could This Be Cleopatra? Bust Discovered At Ancient Egyptian Temple With Secret Tunnel That Leads To The Sea

For 20 years, National Geographic explorer and archaeologist Kathleen Martínez has been on a mission to find Cleopatra. It’s the sort of thing someone might tell you, only for you to roll your eyes and think “you and every other archaeologist,” but Martínez has been piecing together some very curious finds discovered in places that other archaeologists had written off.

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Like all Egyptian kings and queens, Cleopatra VII was thought to be the embodiment of a divine being. Isis, specifically, the goddess of healing and magic. She was the last monarch of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, ruling Egypt from 51 BCE to 30 BCE in a reign that makes for very interesting reading. 

Cleopatra inherited the throne at 18, sharing it with her younger brother who later cast her out, causing her to seek an alliance with Roman emperor Julius Caesar. Following the assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE, she shifted her alliance to Roman general Mark Antony. Their alliance became a great love, but things quickly turned sour. 

She was a smart strategist and a female leader, something that the Romans really didn’t appreciate. They dubbed her a deadly monster and temptress, and as war broke out and their defeat looked imminent, the lovers fled to Egypt, which was invaded the following year.

Mark Antony is alleged to have died after stabbing himself, after which Cleopatra would have known her days were numbered. Typically, once seized, an enemy of Rome would’ve been dragged through the streets upon their defeat, but when Cleopatra was brought before the people it was in the form of a statue.

One theory is that, knowing what fate awaited her remains if she died in the custody of the Romans, Cleopatra made some secret arrangements to have her body transported somewhere else. Somewhere safe, where she could join the afterlife alongside Mark Antony. Where? Well, that’s the big question.

There are only seven images of Cleopatra all over the world.

Kathleen Martínez

Seeking the answer to that question has led Martínez to a temple in Egypt that, though having been investigated in the past, nobody was convinced held much of interest. This lack of interest was part of what drew Martínez to Taposiris Magna in the first place, and after the discovery of a glass plaque in the foundation deposits that revealed it to be a temple of Isis, things got rather exciting for the excavation team.

Several returns to Taposiris Magna have unveiled some other big secrets lurking beneath the sand and soil. There was a stela etched with historical details that established it as one of the most important temples worshiping Isis in Egypt, hundreds of coins depicting Cleopatra’s image, and a bust thought to be that of her father. Then, the team found something else.

A small head in the sand, easily missed were it not for the scanning technologies that showed up an anomaly in the ground. The person it depicts has a distinctive nose and hair held up beneath a diadem-like headdress. To Martínez, it looked like someone she had come to know very well: Cleopatra. According to Martínez, if confirmed, the bust would mark the eighth of its kind ever discovered, offering a rare opportunity to see Cleopatra as she chose to be depicted.

“We're still working on that confirmation,” said Martínez to IFLScience. “We are requesting experts all over the world, in the United States, in England and Germany."

“There are only seven images of Cleopatra all over the world, so there's not really a singular image that’s considered in confirming that it's her. In this case, we depend on the specialists to see if it's it has all the conditions needed to be her, but we are very optimistic because of the context in which it was discovered.”

“We also have 336 coins portraying Queen Cleopatra, and there was pottery that was hidden in that trench. It's from the time of the change of era. So, we know for sure that whoever hid all these objects in this place did it during the time of Cleopatra.”

A secret passageway and a sunken port

The story, however, doesn’t end there. There was another secret hidden beneath the sand at Taposiris Magna: a huge underground tunnel. One that leads out to sea where human-made structures have been found beneath the water, which the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have confirmed to be a sunken port.

According to ancient maps, this area was once a peninsula with islands off the shore, but when Alexandria was hit by an earthquake and tsunami, much of the landscape collapsed into the sea. Could this tunnel have led out to one such island? And if so, was it the secret passage through which Cleopatra was carried to her final resting place? 

What we were doing the last two years with Dr Robert Ballard and Dr Larry Mayer was mapping the structures to have as locations where we can dive.

Kathleen Martínez

There's still plenty of work ahead in piecing together the next part of the mystery, but Martínez's team hope to start again soon.

“What we were doing the last two years with Dr Robert Ballard and Dr Larry Mayer was mapping the structures to have as locations where we can dive, because today it's open sea and it's very hard to dive,” said Martínez. “Also, it's black flag conditions, so it’s dangerous, and on top of that it’s a military zone.”

“This is why I desperately asked [Ballard] to help me to locate places where we can send divers and visually survey, but we cannot know how many years will take for us to visually start trying to locate the underwater structures. Plus, they've been in in the sea for at least 1,500 years and everything is covered by sediment and coral.

“The magnificent work that Dr Ballard and Dr Mayer did was to prepare a map, and from there we now have the coordinates. This season that we are planning to start next week is to go with the team and dive and actually start the excavation.”

Find out more in Cleopatra's Final Secret, which premieres September 25 on National Geographic and the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. You can also find further coverage of the expedition's findings at natgeo.com.