♪
Tonight, a 2,000-year-old mystery
that's confounded top archaeologists.
The world's most famous queen lost without a trace.
Cleopatra is a giant in Egyptian history,
renowned for her cunning across a 21-year rule.
But no one knows what happens to her
after she dies or where she's buried.
This kicks off an incredible mystery
that lasts to this day.
Now we reveal the top theories
surrounding the final resting place
of Egypt's last pharaoh.
The last place we know where Cleopatra was
when she was alive was her palace.
HUGO: If we can find Mark Antony,
we could potentially find Cleopatra.
Octavian has her killed and either he dumped her body,
or he left her where she lay in her mausoleum.
LAURENCE: Can new evidence finally uncover
Cleopatra's missing tomb?
♪
LAURENCE: November, 2022.
In the ancient Egyptian city of Taposiris Magna,
Kathleen Martínez has been excavating
a ruined temple for the past 17 years.
Martínez is actually a really formidable woman,
and she's a lawyer by training.
She's not an archaeologist of any kind,
but she has this passion.
And so, in 2002,
using her own funds, she decides to take herself
out to Egypt to explore what's there
in Taposiris Magna.
PATRICIA COLETTO: She collaborates with Egypt's
most famous archaeologist,
Dr. Zahi Hawass, because Kathleen
believes that at the site of Taposiris Magna
is the lost tomb
of the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra.
LAURENCE: It could be a major new lead
in a cold case that goes back thousands of years.
Cleopatra is one of the most powerful women
ever to come out of the ancient Mediterranean world.
She ruled Egypt for 21 years,
from 51 to 30 B.C.
NICOLA: When Cleopatra is 18 years old,
her father, King Ptolemy XII Auletes, dies.
And Cleopatra then sort of ascends to the throne.
But because she's a woman, she can't do it alone.
So her brother is made co-regent.
The thing about her brother, however,
is that he's only ten years old.
Before long, a rivalry ensues,
and those aligned with Cleopatra's younger brother
seek to dethrone her.
LAURENCE: But Cleopatra devises
a clever way to stay in power.
She allies herself with Rome.
HUGO: Cleopatra has two significant
relationships in her life, both of which are
strategic partnerships to keep her on the throne.
PATRICIA: One is a partnership with the great Julius Caesar.
He helps her shore up her power,
and with him, she supposedly has
a son named Caesarion.
LAURENCE: The second?
Caesar's top general, Mark Antony.
In 43 B.C., he becomes part
of a new Roman power structure created
after Caesar's assassination.
Rome comes to be ruled by what's called a triumvirate.
This is actually a group of three men:
Mark Antony, Marcus Lepidis,
and Octavian.
Wisely, she begins a strategic relationship
with Mark Antony,
who promises to support her rule.
Their romance becomes the stuff of movie lore.
Eventually, Mark Antony is
so smitten with Cleopatra
that he leaves his wife,
moves to Alexandria, and stays with Cleopatra.
Unfortunately for Cleopatra, this ends up having
the opposite effect of what she intended,
because, instead of really getting the support of Rome,
she's got Mark Antony earning the enmity
of everybody back in Rome
for leaving his wife, Octavia,
who was actually Octavian's sister.
So Octavian is furious and declares war against
Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
LAURENCE: After nearly three years of fighting,
in 31 B.C., Octavian's forces
defeat Antony and Cleopatra's armies
and march on Alexandria.
HUGO: As the fighting grows ever closer,
Cleopatra retreats into a mausoleum in her palace.
The rest is the stuff of Shakespearean lore.
PATRICIA: Mark Antony, who's out fighting on the front,
gets a message from one of Cleopatra's servants.
When he opens it, he's horrified to find out
that Cleopatra is dead, that she's killed herself.
Upon hearing the news, Mark Antony attempts
to kill himself by falling on his own sword,
but he fails to take his life.
LAURENCE: Instead, a mortally wounded Antony
is brought to Cleopatra's chambers.
It turns out she hasn't killed herself at all.
At this time, Antony had become
more of a liability than an asset to Cleopatra.
He had no more power in Rome.
NICOLA: She actually asked one of her servants
to go to Mark Antony
and give this message to try to scare him
into surrendering in the hopes that
maybe that would help keep him alive.
Tragically, Antony dies shortly after this.
Cleopatra leaves her tomb,
goes back to the palace, meets with Octavian
with negotiations about her future.
Cleopatra's aspirations is for Caesarion, her son,
to become the king or the ruler of Egypt.
Rome doesn't have kings, but at least he could
be the legitimate heir
of Julius Caesar and the ruler of Rome as well.
Octavian says he will spare her and her children,
but he will never allow the succession.
Cleopatra takes herself back to her palace,
to her mausoleum, considers this deal,
and ultimately decides that she has
nothing left to live for,
and she takes her own life.
LAURENCE: Octavian goes on to become
Rome's first emperor,
and Cleopatra will die
as the last active ruler of the kingdom of Egypt.
HUGO: Early historians tell us
the method of Cleopatra's death is poison.
But in those histories, her story ends there.
NICOLA: This was a time of civil war.
This is a time of occupation of Egypt,
and a lot of stuff has been lost over time.
HUGO: This kicks off an incredible mystery
that lasts to this day.
No one knows what happens to her
after she dies or where she's buried.
LAURENCE: With such limited information,
where should the search for Cleopatra's remains begin?
Cleopatra has a mausoleum and tomb under construction
in her palace when she dies.
So it makes sense that the tomb should be
the first place that we look.
LAURENCE: The challenge is, the tomb is missing.
But in 1996,
a French archaeologist makes a breakthrough.
NICOLA: Frank Goddio is one of the fathers
of underwater archaeology.
He primarily focuses on finding
ancient shipwrecks and also sunken cities.
Goddio comes up with a theory as to the location
of Cleopatra's palace.
He believes that it lies due east
of the modern city of Alexandria.
And the reason why we haven't found it
is because it's underwater.
LAURENCE: According to Goddio's research,
the landscape of this region
has changed dramatically since Cleopatra's time.
NICOLA: Frank Goddio reads the ancient sources,
and he learns from them that, in 365 A.D.--
so, about 400 years after Cleopatra--
there was a massive earthquake that hit Alexandria,
followed by a tsunami that did a tremendous amount of damage.
Most of the ancient city at that point was destroyed.
ANDREW: This tidal wave is so massive
that it flings ships over houses
and kills over 50,000 people.
And Goddio thinks that might be
what ultimately covers Alexandria
and hides Cleopatra's palace.
LAURENCE: To prove this,
Goddio begins his search in the waters
of modern-day Alexandria's eastern seaport.
ANDREW: Goddio and his team start
by doing high tech scans,
ultimately wanting to create
a master map of the seafloor surface.
NICOLA: They start to see the outlines of columns,
porticos, buildings, even statues.
The team is able to compare
the written sources
with the archaeological mapping,
and they start to see correlations.
So, they know from this that they're on the right track.
It takes years to complete the first initial map.
They are doing this underwater,
and it is so much more difficult
than doing archaeology on the land.
But once they have this master map,
things start to go much quicker.
LAURENCE: In 1998, Goddio strikes paydirt.
He finds the sunken remains of Cleopatra's palace.
NICOLA: The palace has been missing for 2,000 years.
This makes big international headlines.
ANDREW: The thing is, the palace is
entirely covered and filled with mud.
It is very difficult to excavate and explore.
They're confident that Cleopatra is there,
but finding her is going to be extremely difficult.
LAURENCE: After nearly a decade of searching,
Goddio finds no trace of the tomb.
In 2008, Goddio discovers something new.
It's an enormous structure,
as large as a football field.
ANDREW: Goddio has radiocarbon dates
that he's taken from organic pieces of the structure.
And these dates show that it could have been built
during the time of Cleopatra.
LAURENCE: Though the team remains hopeful,
they have not yet discovered the tomb.
To this day, Goddio and his team are
still searching, but they have
barely scratched the surface
of this enormous complex.
LAURENCE: When Cleopatra's palace is found underwater
by archaeologist Frank Goddio,
he believes her tomb should be
somewhere inside.
The last place we know Cleopatra was
when she was alive is her palace,
and that was just discovered underwater
in 1998.
LAURENCE: However, not everyone's convinced
Goddio will find the tomb.
HUGO: First of all, underwater exploration
is incredibly difficult.
Secondly, we believe her tomb was
unfinished when she died.
So the artifacts, relics,
statues, and other signs that would lead us there,
they weren't put in place yet.
LAURENCE: But there might be another way
to find Cleopatra's tomb.
HUGO: Even though he dies a traitor,
many Romans are interested in what becomes of Mark Antony.
He was at one point a national hero,
and so there's a chance he'd be easier to track down.
And if we can find Mrk Antony,
we could potentially find Cleopatra.
LAURENCE: Within a few years of Mark Antony's death,
several ancient historians share more details.
HUGO: The Roman custom at the time is
to cremate great leaders.
Mark Antony is cremated, Julius Caesar is cremated,
and, after his death, Octavian will be cremated.
A few decades afterward,
the Greek historian Plutarch
fills in even more details.
Plutarch writes that, after Mark Antony's death,
Octavian has Cleopatra as his prisoner.
But he does allow her, out of clemency,
to go and visit Mark Antony's tomb.
And when she's there, she holds the urn
that has his ashes in it, and she pours out a libation,
as a kind of act of love and piety.
HUGO: So apparently Mark Antony
has been given a tomb for his ashes.
According to Plutarch, after Cleopatra commits suicide,
Octavian is similarly generous with her remains
and allows her to be buried with Mark Antony.
Mark Antony's final resting place
hasn't been found either, so there's a chance
that he and the missing Cleopatra are
out there together somewhere.
NICOLA: Plutarch is actually the only source
that we have that says that Cleopatra, after her death,
was placed together with Antony.
We do have other ancient sources
which talk about Octavian's clemency,
his mercy and compassion towards his enemies.
HUGO: Despite all the stories of Octavian's kindness,
many historians believe he didn't treat
Cleopatra's body with respect at all.
There's a saying that history is written by the victors.
That means that authors in Octavian's time are
generally going to write great things about him.
Otherwise they might suffer punishment if they upset him.
NICOLA: As for the accounts of Plutarch, they were
probably just embellished over time.
LAURENCE: Octavian himself also doctors the historical record.
ANDREW: He comes up with a smear campaign
against Cleopatra, labeling her
an evil seductress and traitor,
someone who used their feminine wiles
to brainwash Mark Antony.
HUGO: To me, this suggests that he wouldn't have
given Cleopatra a royal burial
beside Mark Antony.
LAURENCE: Octavian's actions after Cleopatra's death
also speak volumes.
One of the last acts that Cleopatra does
before she dies is she sends her son Caesarion away
away in order to protect him, but after her death,
Octavian sends people to go and find him
and have him killed.
He actually does this by tricking Caesarion
once he's been found. So he tells Caesarion that,
if he returns to Alexandria, he'll be made king of Egypt.
But as soon as Caesarion returns home, he's killed.
The most commonly-told account says
that one of Octavian's bodyguards
strangles him to death.
Keep in mind, this is by the same historians
who say that Octavian was generous
with Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
This is the cleaned-up version of the story.
LAURENCE: Octavian's actions don't stop
with Caesarion's murder.
Antony's oldest son Antyllus is executed...
and Antony's children with Cleopatra--
he has three of them-- are actually captured,
and they're taken back to Rome,
where they're paraded in chains
as part of Octavian's military triumph.
All of this shows considerable hatred
and contempt for Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
To the new emperor, Antony is the man
who left the Triumvirate,
who left his wife, Octavian's sister,
for another woman,
who left Rome to go and flee to Egypt.
Cleopatra was the foul temptress
who made it all happen.
I think the prevailing opinion among today's scholars
is that if you're going to go digging around Alexandria,
trying to find a carefully-preserved urn
of Cleopatra's ashes beside those of Mark Antony,
you're probably wasting your time.
Once Cleopatra was of no further value as a trophy,
Octavian probably didn't care about her or Antony.
LAURENCE: For more than 2,000 years,
the story of Cleopatra's dramatic suicide
remains mostly unchallenged.
The most famous version of this suicide
comes from Virgil in "The Aeneid,"
where he suggests that Cleopatra gets a snake to bite her,
and that's how she dies.
The story then gets elaborated on
over the years, where some authors suggesting
that the snake is actually an asp.
NICOLA: Plutarch also supports this idea.
And what he says is that Cleopatra has the asp
smuggled into the palace in a basket,
and it was covered over with figs and leaves
so that nobody could see it coming in.
LAURENCE: Today, many historians doubt the snake bite story.
The reason people have a problem with it
is that, at this point, Cleopatra is Octavian's prisoner
and under close guard.
Asps are large. They wriggle and hiss.
So for someone to have brought in a tray of food
with a snake and for it to have gone unnoticed,
well, those would have been the worst guards in history.
NICOLA: Cleopatra is also no fool.
She knows her science and her medicine,
and she is smart enough to figure out
all the things that could go wrong
with this particular plan.
HUGO: She wouldn't have chosen a plan with so many variables.
Those who believe the suicide story think
it's much more likely Cleopatra simply had
a bottle of poison with her
from the moment the Romans arrived at her gates.
LAURENCE: In 2013, bestselling author
and criminal profiler Pat Brown
upends the suicide theory.
ANDREW: Brown looks at Cleopatra's death
like she would any other cold case,
as she's been trained to do throughout her career.
KEVIN: Pat Brown looks at the evidence,
the wounds, the placement of the body,
and she wonders if some of the evidence
was staged or just completely fabricated.
LAURENCE: Brown's conclusion?
Cleopatra's death isn't suicide.
It's cold-blooded murder.
ANDREW: Brown starts by taking
the suicide theory at face value.
She consults with medical examiners,
with herpetologists, to understand
all of the in's and out's of snake poison.
HUGO: According to the historical accounts,
Cleopatra's two maidservants
also die from poisoning shortly after she does.
So how exactly does one snake kill three people?
Is it trained to bite on command?
Does it even have enough venom to kill three women?
ANDREW: The most likely poisonous snakes
that were around during this time in Egypt
were the cobra and the asp.
Although both snakes have enough venom in them
to kill multiple people,
most of the venom is actually discharged
in their very first bite.
And after that, it takes a little while
for them to sort of recharge and reload.
LAURENCE: Fully replenishing their venom
can take a snake days.
HUGO: They don't need a full tank to kill someone,
but it would need to be at least an hour
before someone else could be killed.
There's another timing issue as well.
The amount of time it takes
for the snake bite to kill someone.
ANDREW: Brown points out that in the hours
before Cleopatra's death,
she's exchanging messages with Octavian.
Guards and messengers are going in and out,
and dying from a snake bite takes hours, and it's agonizing.
So, we're saying that
nobody noticed this agonizing death
over several hours?
LAURENCE: According to Brown, the outcome would be the same
even if poison was smuggled in via a bottle.
HUGO: Once again, you're left with the same issue.
In fact, it would take slightly longer
for the venom to take effect because it has to get
absorbed into the bloodstream first.
LAURENCE: Once Brown rules out suicide,
she turns her attention to murder.
ANDREW: As Brown and any good criminal profiler knows,
murder requires motive.
And who had the most to gain from Cleopatra's death?
Octavian.
KEVIN: Some people believe that Octavian
would want to keep Cleopatra alive
to display her as a conquered trophy
through the streets of Rome.
He displays the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony
exactly in this way.
LAURENCE: But according to Brown,
Octavian has a stronger motive to kill Cleopatra
than to keep her alive.
NICOLA: If Cleopatra is still alive,
then Octavian would have somebody
who could stand in the way of his control over Egypt.
Cleopatra is the rightful queen.
HUGO: Octavian already has several non-threatening trophies
to parade around-- her younger children.
They're too young to raise an army
or seize the throne.
LAURENCE: One year after Brown's book, in 2014,
two Greek historians write an article
that reaches the same conclusion.
ANDREW: Gregory Tsoucalas and Markos Sgantzos publish
"The Death of Cleopatra:
Suicide by Snakebite or Poisoned by Her Enemies?"
In it, they propose that Egypt's last queen
was, in fact, murdered by Octavian.
HUGO: Tsoucalas and Sgantzos say
that all the circumstances point to Cleopatra
being killed by a Roman poison,
and that means murder.
Like all military leaders of the time,
Octavian actually travels with physicians,
and physicians are trained in poisons.
HUGO: The Romans specialize
in a poison that's a mixture
of hemlock, opium, and aconite.
LAURENCE: This poison induces a deep sleep,
resulting in coma, then death.
According to Tsoucalas and Sgantzos,
Octavian has Cleopatra and her servants injected
with this Roman poison,
possibly even using a needle that makes it look like
they've been bitten by a snake.
LAURENCE: Then what happened to Cleopatra's body?
NICOLA: If this is the case, there is no tomb.
Octavian is just kind of trying to move on
from the whole Cleopatra situation.
So, according to their theory,
he has her killed and plants the story
of suicide in order to be able
to kind of tell a nice story
and then move on as quickly as possible.
ANDREW: If he's smart enough to do that,
then he's smart enough to not build her a tomb.
The last thing he needs is a permanent marker
of a once-beloved queen
for people to pilgrimage to
and make offerings to.
HUGO: So, unfortunately, if you subscribe to this theory,
the search for Cleopatra's lost tomb is pointless.
Because Octavian covered his tracks.
Egypt's last pharaoh never gets a tomb.
Her body was destroyed,
dumped, and forgotten.
For thousands of years, Cleopatra's story has been
entwined with her relationship
with Rome's most powerful men.
But in 2010,
an American archaeologist finds evidence
that upends that notion
and offers a new theory about her final days.
In 2010, Ohio State University Professor Duane Roller
publishes "Cleopatra: A Biography."
The real Cleopatra is
notoriously difficult to grasp.
HUGO: Roller's book is one of the best-researched accounts
of Cleopatra around.
In addition to being an archaeologist,
Roller is a classicist.
He can read all of the original accounts
in their original Greek and Latin.
Based on an exhaustive search through the historical record,
he believes that a great deal about Cleopatra
has been misunderstood, and perhaps this can explain
what happens to her after she dies.
First of all, Roller is convinced that
Cleopatra is not subservient
to her Roman lovers or even to Rome at all.
LAURENCE: According to Roller, she carefully manipulates them
to keep her kingdom intact.
DUANE ROLLER: When Cleopatra came to the throne,
she had three surviving siblings who did not get along.
There's all kind of sibling rivalry.
PATRICIA: Cleopatra's Egypt is probably
about to be split in three parts
until she convinces Julius Caesar to help.
ANDREW: She does this in a rather ingenious way.
Roman sources tell us that she has herself
wrapped in a carpet and smuggled
into Caesar's quarters.
When he unrolls this mysterious gift,
there she is in all her regal finery,
ready to negotiate a deal to save Egypt.
After Caesar's death, Cleopatra carefully researches
his successors.
DUANE: When Antony comes to the east,
she very quickly realizes
he is a person to be cultivated.
HUGO: She learns that Mark Antony believes himself
to be the embodiment of the Greek god Dionysus.
And so she hatches a clever plan to earn his favor.
LAURENCE: Dionysus is the god of wine and pleasure,
a fact Cleopatra uses to her advantage
when she first meets Antony in 41 B.C.
Knowing his Dionysus fetish,
she arrives dressed up as the Greek goddess Aphrodite,
being fanned by attendants dressed as Cupids.
Almost immediately, Antony is willing to do
just about anything Cleopatra asks of him.
While these stories show cunning on Cleopatra's part,
they suggest that her main tool for manipulation was sex.
But Roller believes that that was not the case.
LAURENCE: Instead, Roller believes Cleopatra uses
her negotiation skills to survive.
ANDREW: Despite being a smaller kingdom
with a less powerful military,
Egypt had a lot more money than Rome.
Cleopatra, as it turns out, was phenomenally wealthy.
I believe it's her wealth
and not her sexual prowess
that ultimately dictates how Cleopatra lived
and how she died.
HUGO: Roller examines the work
of the Roman historian Cassius Dio.
In it, he discovers that
Mark Antony initially comes to Cleopatra
because he needs her financial support
to pay off Rome's armies and debts.
DUANE: According to Dio, Cleopatra and Antony had
a financial relationship,
and who knows whether it was all that he needed?
But it certainly helped to sustain him financially,
especially as sources began to dry up in Rome.
LAURENCE: When Octavian defeats Antony in 30 B.C.,
he intends to seize Cleopatra's treasure.
But she has other plans.
HUGO: Roller finds evidence that,
in those final days, Cleopatra takes action.
She isn't about to let Octavian get the upper hand.
She still has one final play to make.
ANDREW: Cleopatra has her servants
gather up her wealth, everything they can grab,
and she has them amass it
in the safest place she knows: her own mausoleum.
The rest she orders hidden.
When Octavian's forces arrive inside,
she dramatically holds up a torch
and threatens to kill herself
and take all the treasure with her.
HUGO: If this is true, this is an ingenious move.
Cleopatra knows the only thing
Octavian needs from her is her money,
and she can use that as a bargaining tool.
LAURENCE: According to Roller's research,
Cleopatra begins
an extended negotiation with Octavian.
She offers to support him and give over her treasure,
if he agrees to meet certain conditions.
ANDREW: Here, she is holding her wealth hostage
and giving herself time to make other plans.
Among those plans, she finds a way
to smuggle her son out of town.
Next, she has to make plans for herself.
Roller cites the account
of the Roman historian Titus Livius.
In one of Cleopatra's final exchanges
with Octavian, she writes,
"I will not be led in triumph."
This is one of the few times any historian
bothers to write her specific words down,
and it gives us a clue as to what she intended next.
LAURENCE: Roller writes that Cleopatra then
orchestrates her own death by poisoning,
which takes place in August of 30 B.C.
NICOLA: If she's planned this out
down to the last detail,
many historians believe
that she made
one final arrangement.
And that explains why her tomb
has yet to be found.
HUGO: Upon her death, Cleopatra orders her body
smuggled out of the palace and buried in an unmarked grave.
This way, her enemies will never find her.
Is it possible she pulled this off to have her body
smuggled out of a palace swarming with Roman soldiers?
I think the answer is yes.
PATRICIA: Cleopatra had so much wealth,
she could have bribed every Roman in the palace.
This is how she could have made arrangements
for her secret burial.
LAURENCE: If Cleopatra was successful, where is her tomb?
NICOLA: So if this is the case,
and Cleopatra made her own funeral arrangements,
that means that we would have to stop looking
for any kind of evidence of a Roman-style burial
in ash urns
and start thinking like an Egyptian.
HUGO: This would mean Cleopatra didn't end up
in Alexandria at all.
Now, we have a whole new world
of possibilities to explore.
LAURENCE: In 2002, Dominican attorney
Kathleen Martínez sets out to find
Cleopatra's lost tomb.
HUGO: Ever since she was a young child,
Martínez has been fascinated with Egypt.
Her family encouraged the law career.
But eventually, she gives it all up
to become an archaeologist in Egypt.
NICOLA: The one mystery that she wants to solve
beyond anything else is the mystery of Cleopatra's tomb.
Like many modern day historians,
she respects and admires Cleopatra
as a brilliant queen.
And she can't imagine that a queen would have
allowed herself to be desecrated after death.
ANDREW: Martínez believes that Cleopatra is way too smart
not to have seen her own death coming.
She knows that Octavian is either
going to have her executed or use her as a puppet
by parading her around.
So she plans for her death
and has her handmaidens
smuggle her body out of Alexandria.
But where do you look?
Martínez believes that she has the answer.
LAURENCE: Like many pharaohs, Cleopatra shapes her image
around one of the Egyptian gods.
During her reign, Cleopatra considers herself
a living representation of Isis,
a goddess of fertility and motherhood
and wife to the god-king Osiris.
If Cleopatra was able to choose her own resting place,
Martínez is confident it would have been
a temple of Isis or Osiris.
ANDREW: The problem is, there are a lot of temples
dedicated to both Isis and Osiris.
To locate the right one, Dr. Martínez relies
on Greek geographer Strabo's descriptions
of ancient Egypt.
PATRICIA: Based on Strabo's writing,
Martínez locates 21 temples
associated with Osiris and Isis.
She looks at these 21 locations
and realizes that almost all of them
have already been thoroughly explored.
All except one: the temple
at the ancient ruins of Taposiris Magna.
Looking at the scant historical records,
Martínez believes it's only been lightly surveyed,
and it's only 30 miles from Alexandria.
This must be the place.
NICOLA: Martínez gets in touch with Egypt's
chief archaeologist, a man called Zahi Hawass,
who agrees to show her around Taposiris Magna.
PATRICIA: From the moment she arrives,
she feels certain that the great Queen Cleopatra is here.
LAURENCE: In order to excavate the site,
Dr. Martínez needs permission from the Egyptian government.
Initially, the Egyptians kind of make fun of her.
They blow her off because, after all,
what would a lawyer by trade
know about ancient Egyptian archaeology?
ANDREW: But Martínez persists,
and she agrees to fund the venture entirely on her own.
Finally, they do grant her a license,
the first ever given to a Latin American expedition.
There's just one catch:
the license is only good for eight weeks.
HUGO: Anyone who knows anything about archaeological digs
knows that this is an impossible challenge.
Excavations are a slow and tedious process.
It can take eight months to find a single artifact,
and once you find it, it can take a long time
to excavate it safely.
So an eight week deadline
to excavate an entire site
really limits what you're able to do.
LAURENCE: Undeterred, Martínez and her team
start digging at Taposiris Magna in 2004.
The clock is ticking down. For seven whole weeks,
Martínez finds absolutely nothing.
And then, almost like something out of a movie,
on the last day of the dig,
Martínez discovers what looks to be
a hidden shaft
by the north gate of the temple.
LAURENCE: Inside the shaft,
she discovers two secret chambers.
And in those chambers, Martínez finds something important.
These are small gray tablets with Greek inscriptions.
The tablets Martínez finds are called foundation deposits.
During constructions of the time,
tablets like that were left behind to give information
on the construction of the building.
KEVIN: When Martínez cleans the tablets
and reads the Greek, she learns that
the Taposiris Magna complex
was built by Ptolemy IV,
Cleopatra's great-great- great grandfather.
HUGO: Initially, people thought Martínez's theory
was far-fetched. They believed that
no one was digging at Taposiris Magna
because there was nothing to find.
Now, Martínez has found something.
LAURENCE: The Egyptian government allows Martínez
to extend the dig.
Energized by their find,
the team brings in new technology.
NICOLA: In 2008, Martínez and her team
bring in ground-penetrating radar.
And they're quickly able to ascertain
that there are a whole series of tunnels
underneath Taposiris Magna,
about 68 feet beneath the surface.
And just below these corridors,
they find something that just makes their jaws drop.
LAURENCE: In 2008, archaeologist Kathleen Martínez
and her team are exploring the ruins
of the Egyptian temple of Taposiris Magna.
They're looking for Cleopatra's tomb.
ANDREW: As they sweep the area with ground-penetrating radar,
they suddenly see what appears to be
a network of underground corridors.
And these corridors lead to multiple chambers.
Martínez believes that these are burial chambers.
Martínez is not about to miss this discovery.
She's going in herself.
She has her team lower her down
into the tunnels themselves.
HUGO: From there, she enters into one of the chambers,
and she finds the head of a statue.
And can you believe it? It's Cleopatra.
She also finds a mask that resembles Mark Antony.
PATRICIA: It's extraordinary to think
that other archaeological teams
have explored this site
and declared that there was nothing to find,
when all these wonderful artifacts have been discovered.
LAURENCE: Next, Martínez and her team
uncover hundreds of bronze coins.
ANDREW: These coins bear the image of Cleopatra,
so obviously they're from the time of Cleopatra.
They also suggest that this is a place of pilgrimage
for Egyptians who left those coins.
KEVIN: With each of these discoveries,
the team becomes increasingly convinced
that they're going to find
the tomb of Cleopatra.
LAURENCE: But just as Martínez believes she's on the verge
of a major breakthrough,
unrest in North Africa
brings her progress to a halt.
Democracy, democracy, let us live in liberty.
ANDREW: It's complete chaos in the Arab world.
You have Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi,
who is deposed and also murdered.
And then, in 2011, Egyptian president
Hosni Mubarak is overthrown.
LAURENCE: With all of Egypt in turmoil,
Dr. Martínez has no choice but to suspend her dig.
ANDREW: This is a worst case scenario for Martínez,
because once an expedition is suspended,
there is no guarantee that
it will ever start up again.
LAURENCE: Fortunately, in 2014,
stability returns.
KEVIN: The project is able to start again,
and they discover new artifacts,
more links to Cleopatra herself,
but no tomb.
PATRICIA: Martínez doesn't give up.
In 2021, she finds
16 more burial chambers
with many skeletons and mummies.
Two of these mummies are
incredibly special, because they appear
to be royalty and buried side by side, like lovers.
One of them is adorned with a crown
that's decorated with horns.
The other has gilded decorations
that look like a wide necklace.
Most importantly, the two mummies have
golden tongues nestled in their jawbones.
Golden tongues are a very important part
of ancient Egyptian culture.
In the Book of the Dead, gold tongues ensure
that the deceased will be able to speak,
eat and drink in the afterlife.
NICOLA: A crown, golden tongues,
gilded decorations.
This was obviously the tomb
of no ordinary couple.
LAURENCE: Could these possibly be
the mummified bodies of Antony and Cleopatra?
ANDREW: The mummies are eventually X-rayed,
and while it is found that they are male and female,
no further identification can be made.
Martínez concludes that, while the mummies
are promising, if this really was
the tomb of Cleopatra, it would probably be
much grander-- but who knows?
If Cleopatra and Antony had to be smuggled out
at the last minute, maybe the tomb wouldn't be so grand.
LAURENCE: A year later, Dr. Martínez's team makes
an even more exciting discovery.
PATRICIA: Recently, in 2022, Martínez's team
found a long tunnel, 60 feet underground.
ANDREW: The tunnel is attached
to a newly-found temple of Isis
that's part of the complex.
This is where Martínez believes that
Cleopatra and possibly Antony
are both buried.
KEVIN: If Cleopatra does in fact have a tomb,
I think Martínez really is looking in the right direction.
And what she has produced so far
only strengthens her theory
that she is looking in the right place.
I think that this is a possibility,
although there are a lot of possibilities out there.
No matter what,
the investigations at Taposiris Magna
will give us more information than we had before.
And it looks like it'll give us
more information on the time of Cleopatra
and hopefully Cleopatra herself.
In the hunt for Cleopatra,
Kathleen Martínez may have
her work cut out for her.
The new section she's exploring
at Taposiris Magna
is mostly underwater.
Undeterred, Martínez calls
this phase of her dig, quote,
the beginning of a new journey.
Only time will tell
if she's on the right track.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."