What Happened to Alexander the Great’s Body?

By age 29, Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt, dismantled the Persian Empire and extended his rule from the eastern Mediterranean into India. But while savoring victory at the lavish silver palace at Ecbatana, his world shattered.

There, Hephaestion—his closest companion and rumored lover—fell ill and died unexpectedly. Alexander plunged into mourning. He also had Hephaestion embalmed, an unusual practice in Macedonian tradition. That decision unwittingly established a precedent for Alexander’s own mummification, suggests Nicholas Saunders in Alexander’s Tomb: The Two Thousand Year Obsession to Find the Lost Conqueror, setting in motion one of the ancient world’s most enduring mysteries.

Alexander’s own end came soon. Within months, he developed a fever, suffered agonizing abdominal pain for 12 days and was declared dead in June 323 B.C., at age 32. Historians have debated the cause, variously suggesting malaria, typhoid or poisoning. What followed was even more unsettling. When embalmers examined his body six days after his death, they reportedly found no signs of decay. In the brutal summer heat of Babylon, it was nothing short of alarming. 

One modern theory proposes Guillain-Barré syndrome as a possible explanation, a neurological disorder that can cause progressive paralysis and near-imperceptible breathing. Because Babylonian physicians measured life by breath rather than pulse, Alexander may have been declared dead prematurely. 

Whatever killed him, and whenever death truly came, the political consequence was immediate: The man who held the empire together was gone. Andrew Erskine, professor of ancient history at the University of Edinburgh, describes what followed as a power struggle that crystallized around two principal contenders: Perdiccas, who as regent served as the acting ruler of the empire until Alexander’s infant son, Alexander IV, came of age, and Ptolemy who was confirmed as satrap or governor of Egypt shortly after Alexander’s death.

Meanwhile, Alexander's preserved body lay in a golden sarcophagus filled with spices, while craftsmen labored for a staggering two years on the ornate funeral carriage meant to transport him. The intricate work alone would have taken time. The catafalque—a raised platform used to support a coffin during funerary rites—featured Ionic columns shaped to resemble a temple and was adorned with Nike victory statues and golden lions, as described by the contemporary historian Hieronymus of Cardia, preserved in an abridged account by Diodorus in his Library of History.

The delay, however, may have been as much political as logistical. Saunders suggests that only once Alexander’s senior commanders reached a workable compromise on the body’s final resting place did word go out that the hearse was ready. Pulled by 64 mules decked in precious stones, the funeral procession must have been an extraordinary sight. Yet its intended destination remains fiercely debated.

While on his deathbed, the conqueror had directed his body be taken to the desert oracle of Zeus Ammon in the dunes of Siwa, Egypt, according to Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus in History of Alexander. Erskine argues, however, that Egypt was a dubious choice.

“It is unlikely that Perdiccas, who had power over Alexander’s body, would have wanted to go to Egypt and effectively hand it to his rival Ptolemy, so I think Perdiccas was aiming to take the body to the royal tombs in Macedon,” says Erskine. “Arriving as possessor of the body and regent, he expected to become the master of Macedon and by extension Alexander’s entire empire.”

Regardless of where the funeral procession was headed, things went spectacularly awry along the route. “Rulers, especially uncertain not-yet-established rulers, like to use the corpse of a predecessor as a talisman,” explains Paul Cartledge, author of Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past. “Ptolemy, who was a satrap, not yet a king, snatched Alexander's corpse to use it that way.”

Because the surviving narratives were written hundreds of years later and were often biased and full of gaps, the precise details of how the gold-encased corpse was snatched and what happened directly afterwards, are difficult to pin down. What's clear is that by capturing Alexander’s embalmed body, Ptolemy turned it into the ultimate badge of sovereignty. “Ptolemy wanted the body because he used Alexander to legitimize his own rule,” says Erskine. 

Erskine notes that Memphis, the longstanding Egyptian capital and Ptolemy’s initial base of power, was the most practical first stop for Alexander’s remains. “But then Ptolemy moved the administrative center and his residence to Alexandria, so it would have made sense to move the body, too,” he says. “But there is another reason. Alexander was the founder of Alexandria, and it was common practice for a founder to be buried within the city walls.”

Historians generally agree that Alexander’s body was moved from Memphis to Alexandria sometime between 298 and 283 B.C. As to where exactly within the city walls the sarcophagus lay, a valuable clue comes from the Greek geographer Strabo, who lived in the city in the 20s B.C. “The city has extremely beautiful public precincts and also the royal palaces, which cover a fourth or even a third of the whole city. Part of the royal palaces is the so-called Soma, which was an enclosure containing the tombs of the kings and that of Alexander,” he wrote.

“Ptolemy carried off the body of Alexander and laid it to rest in Alexandria, where it still lies, but not in the same sarcophagus. The present one is made of glass, whereas Ptolemy placed it in one made of gold.”

While Strabo used the word Soma, the ancient Greek term for “body,” Zenobius—a writer who lived roughly a century later—describes Ptolemy’s great-grandson, Ptolemy IV Philopater, reburying Alexander and the earlier royal Ptolemies in a grand burial complex “built in the middle of the city” called the Sema, a word that can mean either a single tomb or a collective burial site.

While a precise location for the Soma (or Sema) can’t be gleaned from Strabo or Zenobius’ ancient writings, Saunders hypothesizes in Alexander’s Tomb that their seemingly differing accounts may actually be one and the same. After Rome conquered Egypt in 30 B.C., Alexandria became a city in transition, swelling in population as new construction rose over Ptolemaic streets and buildings, and the urban footprint spread beyond its earlier limits. What Strabo describes as the northeastern Palaces District could, in a larger city, plausibly align with Zenobius’ vaguer “middle of the city.”

Wherever Alexander’s tomb in the Soma actually lay within the city, it was visited by several Roman powerbrokers. Julius Caesar, who reportedly burst into tears after reflecting on how little he had achieved compared to Alexander, visited in 48 B.C. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, visited in 30 B.C. He placed a golden crown on the body in one account and broke off part of Alexander's nose in another. Roman emperor Septimius Severus sealed the tomb in A.D. 199, while it's said his son Caracalla opened it back up to remove some items in 215. According to Cartledge, Caracalla’s appearance at the tomb was “the last authenticated visit.” And then the trail seemingly goes cold. 

This silence in the historical record coincides with a seismic shift in the Roman world: the rise of Christianity. Saunders argues that the discovery of Christ’s tomb provided a "propaganda coup" for Emperor Constantine the Great, who used the new faith to cement his imperial authority. “The uniqueness of Alexander’s mausoleum was destroyed in one stroke,” Saunders wrote. A new gravitational center for pilgrimage had been created, one that over time might have pushed Alexander’s tomb out of public memory.

Religious change may not have been the only force that diminished Alexander’s tomb from view. In A.D. 365, a catastrophic earthquake triggered a tsunami that slammed into Alexandria, with reports of ships tossed onto rooftops, though the Soma’s fate is unclear. Even if the complex survived intact, the event marked the start of about two centuries of seismic unrest and rising seas that radically transformed Alexandria’s coastline. 

“There's only one sensible explanation,” argues Cartledge. “A combination of sea-level rise and earth movements has put the old royal quarter of Alexandria, where Alexander’s tomb was, under water gradually since 215.”

The hunt for Alexander’s tomb has been relentless, with more than 140 officially sanctioned excavations. Increasingly, those searches have extended offshore to the seabed where parts of ancient Alexandria now lie.

In recent years, researchers have discovered obelisks, stone sphinxes and even a colossal statue, believed to be of Ptolemy and his wife Berenice, on the seafloor. Using sonar surveys and GPS mapping, scientists have traced the contours of the ancient harbor and identified submerged foundations from the Ptolemaic royal quarter, the district associated with the Soma, even if Alexander’s tomb itself remains elusive.

Some researchers have suggested the body might lie in the Siwa Oasis in Egypt’s western desert, where Alexander reportedly wished to be buried, or, more intriguingly, that it was taken by Venetian merchants in the ninth century and now rests beneath the altar of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice.

In the end, the likeliest reason Alexander remains “missing” may be brutally simple. The city that once displayed him has been rebuilt, reshaped and in places swallowed by the sea, leaving his body somewhere beneath layers of Alexandria’s own afterlife.