Why Cleopatra’s Tomb Has Never Been Found

Cleopatra is one of the most recognizable figures from the ancient world—the brilliant, kohl-eyed Egyptian queen who bore sons to two of the most famous men in Roman history: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Yet for all that’s known about Cleopatra’s singular life and tragic death, no one has been able to find her final resting place.

Cleopatra reportedly died by her own hand after she and her Roman partner Mark Antony were defeated by Octavian in the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. Mark Antony fell on his own sword when he believed his beloved Cleopatra was killed. Cleopatra, in turn, chose death over the humiliation of being paraded through Rome as a spoil of war.

According to ancient Roman writers, Cleopatra and Mark Antony were buried together in Cleopatra’s mausoleum in Alexandria, which was still under construction at the time of their deaths. The challenge for archaeologists is that the ancient city was struck by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in A.D. 365, which buried its ruins under the sea.

“After that, there were various invasions and occupations of Alexandria that led to further destruction of historic buildings, so a lot of stuff has happened in Alexandria over the centuries,” says Jane Draycott, a professor of ancient history at the University of Glasgow. “It’s not really surprising that it’s so hard to find the ancient city under the modern city.”

In the 1990s, underwater archaeologists rediscovered the sunken royal quarter of Alexandria, where Cleopatra and the rest of the Ptolemaic Dynasty built their palaces and temples. But after decades of excavations, there’s still no sign of Cleopatra’s mausoleum. Despite ongoing archaeological excavations, the famous queen’s burial place remains undiscovered.

Cleopatra was born in 69 B.C. and ascended to the throne of Egypt at 18 as Queen Cleopatra VII. She was the final ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which controlled Egypt following Alexander the Great’s conquest. While little is known about Cleopatra from ancient Egyptian sources, she was a subject of fascination and scorn in Rome, where she was defamed as a plotting seductress who lured both Julius Caesar and his general Mark Antony into her political traps.

“The reason Cleopatra is so interesting is because she’s very well documented from a Roman historical perspective, given the time she was living and reigning, and her involvement with Caesar and Antony,” says Draycott, author of Cleopatra’s Daughter. “We know far less about earlier Ptolemaic rulers, but we know quite a bit about her.”

Plutarch, who chronicled the last days of Cleopatra and Mark Antony roughly 150 years after their deaths, is considered the best surviving source about Cleopatra. However, Draycott believes that any ancient Roman writer needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

“None of the Roman literature is fully trustworthy in the sense that they all hated Cleopatra’s guts for various reasons,” Draycott says. “She is a woman. She is a queen. She is an Egyptian. There’s a lot of xenophobia and prejudice against Egyptian religion.”

In Life of Antony, Plutarch didn’t indicate the exact location where Cleopatra and Mark Antony are buried, but he did give some clues. Referring to Cleopatra’s mausoleum, Plutarch wrote that the queen “had a tomb and monument built surpassingly lofty and beauti­ful, which she had erected near the temple of Isis” and filled with her most valuable royal treasures.

After Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s naval forces were crushed in the Battle of Actium, the queen “fled for refuge into her tomb and let fall the drop-doors, which were made strong with bolts and bars,” wrote Plutarch, “then she sent messengers to tell Antony that she was dead.”

Distraught, Mark Antony stabbed himself with his sword, but the wound did not kill him right away. Learning that Cleopatra was still alive, he ordered his servants to carry him to the mausoleum. There, Cleopatra and her handmaidens used ropes to raise Mark Antony’s body through a second-floor window as he bled to death.

Octavian honored Cleopatra’s wish to cremate and bury Mark Antony in her mausoleum but planned to take her to Rome alive. According to legend, Cleopatra then deceived her guards with a basket of figs that concealed a venomous asp. Plutarch, however, proposed that she hid a vial of poison in her hair.

As for Cleopatra’s burial, Plutarch wrote that “Caesar, although vexed at the death of the woman, admired her lofty spirit; and he gave orders that her body should be buried with that of Antony in splendid and regal fashion.”

Similarly, the Roman writer Cassius Dio—who lived a century after Plutarch—wrote, “Thus Antony and Cleopatra, who had caused many evils to the Egyptians and many to the Romans, made war and met their death in the manner I have described; and they were both embalmed in the same fashion and buried in the same tomb.”

Draycott thinks there’s good reason to trust the ancient Roman authors that Cleopatra and Mark Antony were indeed buried together in her mausoleum, located somewhere in the royal quarters of Alexandria near a temple to Isis, Cleopatra’s patron goddess.

“The deaths of famous people are a significant part of ancient Roman historiography, because they’re meant to teach lessons about how you should and shouldn’t behave and how you should and shouldn’t die,” Draycott says. “Sometimes in ancient literature, they don’t give you the specific information that you want,” like the exact location of the mausoleum, “because everybody reading it would have known.”

If Plutarch was right, then Cleopatra and Mark Antony died in Alexandria in 31 B.C. and were buried together in Cleopatra’s royal mausoleum. Yet, there are no additional descriptions of Cleopatra’s tomb in Alexandria or reports of people visiting it, Draycott says.

Then came the massive earthquake and tsunami of A.D. 365 that killed an estimated 5,000 people in Alexandria and completely wiped out Portus Magna, the city’s bustling port. Over the centuries, the encroaching sea buried the ruins of ancient Alexandria under a thick layer of sand and 20 feet of water.

In 1992, underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio led an expedition to map the sunken port of Alexandria using electronic surveys and magnetic scans. Goddio was able to identify the locations of ancient Alexandrian military ports and commercial docks, as well as the “Royal Harbor,” home to Ptolemaic palaces and temples. One of those temples, excavated in 1996, was dedicated to Isis and located near a palace.

Goddio believes Cleopatra used the temple to Isis as a sanctuary for her personal cult, Nea Isis-Aphrodite, the “new Isis.” In the ruins of the temple, Goddio discovered 21 silver and bronze coins bearing images of Cleopatra and her father Ptolemy XII, plus 25-foot granite columns, statues and fragments of mosaics.

Since Plutarch wrote that Cleopatra’s mausoleum was close to a temple dedicated to Isis, could her tomb be close by? Reached by email, Goddio said that, unfortunately, “I have no evidence to date of that mausoleum.” He still believes that Cleopatra’s tomb is somewhere in the sunken city of Alexandria, though. “I think that Plutarch’s account is accurate and fits with the historical facts.”

Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist and lawyer from the Dominican Republic, has an alternative theory about Cleopatra’s missing tomb. She suggests Cleopatra feared Octavian’s forces would steal her body and carry it back to Rome, prompting her to conceal the real tomb in a secret location outside Alexandria.

For 20 years, Martinez has been excavating a site called Taposiris Magna, an ancient Egyptian port located 30 miles west of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. The site was dismissed by archaeologists as a minor outpost built by Ptolemy II Philadelphus around 280 B.C., but Martinez thinks that she’s uncovered clues that it’s the final resting place of Cleopatra.

Martinez and her team unearthed a foundation plate at Taposiris Magna written in Greek and hieroglyphics indicating that there was a temple there dedicated to Isis. They also found hundreds of coins, including many bearing Cleopatra’s image. Given Cleopatra’s connection to the goddess Isis, does that make Taposiris Magna a likely site for her secret tomb?

“There are temples to Isis everywhere,” says Draycott, who is unconvinced Cleopatra needed to hide her corpse from the Romans. “One of the things that’s quite prominent in ancient sources is that when you defeat somebody, you treat their body with respect.”

Martinez has since announced further discoveries at Taposiris Magna, including underground chambers, mummified corpses, thousands of ancient objects and a 4,300-foot tunnel that connects the site to the sea, where there’s evidence of a sunken port. Her team has yet to publish their findings, says Draycott, so it’s unclear if these discoveries relate to Cleopatra.

Cleopatra’s tomb is far from the only “missing” tomb from antiquity. None of the tombs of the Ptolemaic kings and queens have been found in Egypt, and there are only two surviving imperial tombs from ancient Rome: the mausoleums of Augustus (Octavian) and Hadrian.

“That’s two emperors out of quite a few,” Draycott says, “so it’s not surprising that we don’t have Cleopatra’s either.”