(intense music)
- A century's old mystery
surrounding the most celebrated warrior king in history,
Alexander the Great.
- Alexander set off on an audacious campaign
to conquer what is the known world.
His army stormed east through Turkey,
Iran, Iraq, and down into India.
- Alexander dies at the age of 32,
presumably buried in Alexandria,
the city that bears his name.
- His mummy is visited by a virtual who's who
of ancient history.
- But then his remains suddenly disappear without a trace.
- We don't know where he went,
and he's lost to time forever.
- It's as if one of the greatest treasures
of the ancient world vanished into thin air.
- Now, we explore the top theories
surrounding the disappearance of the conqueror's remains.
- Boats topple over on their sides
and fish are kind of flopping around,
and then all of a sudden this huge wave
wipes everything out.
- [Hugo] Alexandria is a hotbed of religious upheaval,
change, violence.
- Now the Christians are gonna do to the pagans
what the pagans have been doing to them.
- These Venetian merchants,
they literally hijack this sarcophagus.
- It's like something out of a thriller.
- What happened to the mummy of Alexander the Great?
(suspenseful music)
(dramatic music)
Ancient Babylon, modern-day Iraq.
The year is 323 BCE, and Alexander the Great is sick.
Wracked by pain and barely able to speak,
he lingers for two weeks.
As his generals wonder who will inherit his empire,
he utters his final words, "To the strongest."
On June 11th, 323 BCE, Alexander takes his last breath.
The greatest conqueror the world has ever known is gone.
- Alexander the Great dies
and his death is going to send
shockwaves around the world.
In life, he had been this
invincible military conqueror
who had taken over
so much of the world.
He was also viewed by so many people of the time
as a literal deity.
- [Laurence] Alexander is born in Macedonia,
a small kingdom in today's northern Greece.
He is the son of King Philip II.
- Alexander's father is a formidable general,
who manages to conquer
a great deal of territories.
So Alexander already has a great deal of power there.
- Alexander becomes king at 20 years old.
Two years later, he has ridden off into battle
with the ambition of conquering the entire world.
His armies topple the Persian Empire
that had been the bane of the Greek states for so long.
He conquers Egypt.
He marches his armies all the way to India.
- And he's gained many titles along the way.
He became the grand
pharaoh of Egypt.
He became the emperor of Greece.
He became the king of Persia.
And he did it all in 10 years.
(horse whinnies)
- Alexander never loses a major battle.
Suddenly though, he dies
when he's visiting Babylonia of some mysterious ailment.
It might be typhoid,
it might have been a neurological disease.
We don't know.
- [Laurence] In keeping with Egyptian tradition,
Alexander's body is then mummified.
- As ruler of ancient Egypt,
he is a deity in
the ancient Egyptian pantheon.
So they dry him out with salt,
they remove his internal organs,
they add spices and aromatic resins,
and they make him smell like a god.
He is placed in a golden sarcophagus
and then he's put inside a funerary bier.
This bier, or this funerary cart,
is designed like an ostentatious temple.
- The entire structure is so heavy
it has to be pulled by a fleet of mules
who are also beautifully adorned
in precious cloths and jewelry.
- [Laurence] Two years after his death,
Alexander the Great's funeral procession
finally leaves through the famous gates of Babylon.
- This carriage is taken
on an amazing procession
all the way westward, presumably
to Greece, to Macedon,
where he'd be interred with
the rest of the royal family,
including his father, Philip II.
And as it goes westward,
it's going through the cities
of Alexander's new empire
and crowds are coming out to see it, we are told,
lining up, wishing it well.
It must have been amazing.
- Of course, when Alexander passes,
he's not really counting on dying so early,
so there's a power vacuum
and all of his generals want to grab as much land
and as much legitimacy as possible.
- At some point, as it is passing through Syria,
one of the generals, Ptolemy I, hijacks Alexander's body
and takes it back
with him to Egypt
where he sets it up in a royal city called Memphis.
(dramatic music)
Ptolemy wants Alexander's body
because he feels it shores up his own power in Egypt,
which he's now kind of have taken over for himself
since Alexander's now dead.
(intense music)
- Alexander's mummy remains at Memphis
for an unknown amount of time,
perhaps several decades.
Finally, it's moved to Alexandria,
which was the city that Alexander himself founded
precisely as a city on the Nile River,
right where it meets the Mediterranean Sea.
- We know about the
Library of Alexandria,
essentially the world's first university.
It wasn't just a collection of books,
this is where all the scholars came.
So this became the intellectual center of the world.
And how do you really drive that idea home?
You bring Alexander's body
and you put it in this beautiful mausoleum.
And now Ptolemy can claim,
"I am the true successor to Alexander the Great.
Here's his shrine.
Here's the library.
Alexandria, the new center of the world."
- Historical accounts will say that Alexander's body
remains in Alexandria's Royal Quarter for hundreds of years.
The Greek historian, Strabo,
who's writing 300 years after Alexander's death
will speak about visiting the tomb.
- In the ancient world,
anybody who is anybody goes to visit Alexander's tomb.
They want to really pay homage to this great man
and they want to link their own power bases to him.
- We have eyewitness evidence from Cleopatra,
Julius Caesar, Mark Antony.
Seems the whole world traveled
to go visit Alexander the Great's tomb there.
It was like a festival every time.
- [Laurence] But late in the fourth century,
all the historical writings about Alexander's tomb
stop abruptly.
- The last known reference to Alexander's body
being in Alexandria comes from about 700 years
after Alexander's death.
The tomb is mentioned in a letter
by the Roman teacher and traveler, Libanius,
who will speak of Alexandria,
where the tomb of Alexander is to be seen.
- But then just 20 years later,
one of the early leaders of the Christian Church,
John Chrysostom, was
specifically going to Alexandria
to go visit Alexander to Great's tomb.
He wrote, "And I was met with blank stares."
- So from Libanius' letter to John Chrysostom's visit,
we go from having the tomb of Alexander the Great
to nothing.
It's like one of the Wonders of the Ancient World
just vanishes from the face of the earth.
- [Laurence] But what could have happened
to destroy all traces of Alexander's tomb
and his remains?
- We have a record in history from about the year 365 AD
of a massive earthquake that hit the island of Crete,
which is about a couple of hundred miles
away north of Alexandria.
Scholars believed that that earthquake was so damaging
that it could have reached 8.5 on the Richter scale.
8.5 is nearly five times the power
of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
If an earthquake like that
could have taken place in the Mediterranean,
it could have raised a tsunami on Alexandria's shores.
(intense music)
As a matter of fact,
we have one piece of eyewitness evidence
from a nobleman who lived in Egypt.
- Ammianus Marcellinus, who's a historian and a soldier,
and what Ammianus says is
that there was a earthquake
and that the seas receded.
Boats topple over on their sides,
and fish are kind of flopping around,
and everybody is running out and gathering fish up
with their hands out on the shore
and then all of a sudden this huge wave,
the tsunami, right, kind of recoils back
and wipes everything out.
(crashing surf)
- And it inundates the entire harbor,
if not the entire city of Alexandria.
You can see ships ending up on the tops of buildings.
- [Laurence] Ancient writers describe
widespread death and destruction.
- So this tsunami would've absolutely devastated
the quarter that contained Alexander's tomb.
And if it wasn't destroyed
by the initial flooding and the tsunami,
it would've certainly been destroyed by the after effects,
by the receding of the water,
by the collapse of the building,
by the mud that would've buried it.
I mean, this is a devastating event
that destroyed pretty much everything there.
- [Laurence] In the 1990s, archeologists discover
what could be the remains of the Royal Quarter
just off Alexandria's coast
- Because of earthquakes over the centuries
and shifting coastlines,
at least part of the ancient city of Alexandria
now lies underwater.
They went down there with scuba gear
and discovered incredible remains
attesting to at least part of a royal palace.
They find statues of gods, of pharaohs,
and it's possible, therefore, that the tomb of Alexander
might today still exist, but underwater.
- You are going to find hundreds of thousands of relics
off the shore of Alexandria.
For one, it's a city built on a shoreline next to a delta.
These cities tend to flood and sink a lot.
We should expect to find all kinds of artifacts
off the shore of Alexandria.
The question is, did a tsunami come in and flood the city
and destroy the tomb of Alexander The Great?
- [Laurence] Throughout history, cities have come and gone
due to the forces of mother nature.
But was ancient Alexandria really devastated by a tsunami?
- Marcellinus' eyewitness evidence
is not historically the most accurate.
He copied the material from other eyewitnesses
that have actually visited the place.
And Marcellinus was strongly religious
and his religious bias could have played a massive role
in exaggerating what that God's wrath of a tsunami
would've hit Alexandria with.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] In the late fourth century AD,
historical records show a tsunami engulfed Alexandria.
In addition to this natural disaster,
the city is in political and social turmoil.
- Christianity spreads throughout the Roman Empire
at the end of the first century AD,
but it's met with repression.
The Romans don't
like new religions,
so they're basically turning the Christians into martyrs.
- [Laurence] An early and prominent Christian,
the apostle Mark, is martyred here.
- Mark was an evangelist who moves
into the city of Alexandria and begins missionizing,
begins converting people.
And it's in that city where he is martyred
and he's buried in the church
that he himself founds.
It was called the
Coptic Cathedral of St. Mark.
- Christianity continued to spread
because as the saying goes,
the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
And because of gospels like that of St. Mark,
and because of his martyrdom,
the tables have completely turned.
And by the end of the third century,
the Christians are in control.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] As Christianity gains strength,
conflict between the pagans
and the followers of this new religion intensifies,
turning pagan landmarks, like Alexander the Great's tomb,
into targets.
- In the fourth century, Alexandria is a hotbed
of religious upheaval, change, violence.
The reality is that the
rise of Christianity
and its movement into power
is threatening any trace
of the old pagan past.
- Alexander was a very religious man.
He venerated Greek gods,
but also venerated the gods of Egypt.
Particularly after his death,
he came to be venerated as a kind of demigod
or even a god himself.
- Alexander believes he's
a descendant of the gods.
His mother, Olympias, claimed
that he actually was not the son of Philip,
but he's the son of Zeus himself.
(dramatic music)
- Alexandria had been a very pagan city for a long time,
where the Greek gods and Egyptian gods
were honored side by side.
But by the fourth century AD,
the Christians are beginning to really
kind of take over the city.
What the Christians don't really like
is how pagan the city's past really is,
and they set out to kind of purge Alexandria
from its pagan trappings,
to turn it into a new Christian city as much as possible.
- [Laurence] In 380 AD,
Emperor Theodosius mandates Christianity
as the official religion of the Roman Empire.
- Rome is now a Christian empire,
and now the Christians are gonna do to the pagans
what the pagans had been doing to them.
(dramatic music)
- We know that in certain areas, Christians rioted,
they laid waste to pagan temples,
tombs, other signs of the old ways.
- So, you can imagine an old pagan temple,
or an old pagan shrine, even pagan tombs,
these things were ripe for destruction.
(intense music)
- In 391, the emperor at the time, Theodosius,
starts to enact a series of decrees
to really stamp out any kind of pagan behavior.
So he bans sacrifices.
He also orders the closure or destruction of pagan temples.
- It's interesting how this is the year 391,
which is right in the period when we last hear
of Alexander's body being in Alexandria.
- It's that time that also we think
that the Great Library of Alexandria is also burned.
Rampant destruction across the city.
Could it be that if Alexander's tomb
still was established in the city,
it's still visible in the city at that time,
that that was when it was destroyed?
That would seem to make good sense of the timing
because it was really only nine years later
that Chrysostom enters into the city
and looks for Alexander's tomb and no one knows where it is.
(dramatic music)
- In Alexandria, there was probably few greater reminders
of the old ways than the tomb of Alexander,
and he might have been the target
of any Christian attempt to erase traces of other religions.
- There are no explicit records out there
of Alexander's tomb or the area being destroyed.
So, if you wanna look at what the historical record says,
we can't definitively say
that the tomb was destroyed at that time.
Perhaps it was already gone.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] Ancient historians tell us
that Alexander the Great was buried
in his namesake city of Alexandria, Egypt.
References to Alexander's tomb
stop after a series of natural disasters
and riots devastate the city.
But some believe his remains could still be hidden
in Alexandria today.
- In 1850, a tour guide by the name of Ambroise Schilizzi
takes this group of tourists down into a mosque
in the old part of Alexandria.
The mosque is called the Nabi Daniel Mosque.
When Schilizzi goes down into the substructures
underneath the mosque,
he sees something that really piques his curiosity.
He sees at the end of one corridor,
an old, worn wooden door.
- The story goes that when he
came upon this wooden door,
he looked through the
cracks of the door
and that's when he sees this mummified corpse
with a golden crown on it.
- Schilizzi is absolutely convinced that he has seen
none other than the mummy of Alexander the Great.
(intense music)
- The officials at the mosque hear what's going on
and he is immediately removed
and nobody believes him
'cause he is a tour guide.
So everyone thinks that he is just doing this for money.
He's actually completely shut down.
He's not allowed to go back into the crypts.
- [Laurence] But 15 years later,
a second witness brings Schilizzi's story
back into the public eye.
- 15 years later, somebody else goes down into the mosque.
This is a very different character.
This is an esteemed,
very highly respected,
Arab engineer by the name of Mahmoud Al-Falaki.
- He is in charge of mapping the ancient district
of Alexandria and the Royal Quarter,
and he's doing so for the Viceroy of Egypt,
so he gets special permissions that nobody else gets.
- And as part of this mapping effort,
he gets to go down and look to see
what's part of these substructures
under the Nabi Daniel Mosque.
When he goes under there,
he sees very finely crafted corridors
that are leading off into four directions.
- Al-Falaki finds tunnels, passageways, large open areas
that appear to be important tombs,
structurally made of good, quality stone.
(soft creepy music)
- But he finds that the tunnels are too dangerous
and he can't fully explore the area
and answer the questions that people have had for ages.
- Al-Falaki notices that a lot of the farther parts
of the corridors are really kind of dilapidated.
They're starting to cave in,
and it's very dangerous to press on any farther.
- He wants to go back and see it again
and do further investigation,
but he's denied and is never able to get access again,
as these passageways are walled up.
- Even Al-Falaki, who has the best permissions
in Egypt at the time,
is forbidden from going any farther.
So the question is, is there some sort of a coverup?
Why can't he go any further?
Why aren't people allowing the excavation of this territory?
- [Laurence] Though there's no hard proof
that Alexander's mummy is under the mosque,
speculation grows.
- Strabo tells us that Alexander was entombed
in the Royal Quarter of Alexandria.
The Nabi Daniel Mosque is in that same general vicinity
that we think is where the Royal Quarter was.
- Nabi Daniel in Arabic is the prophet Daniel,
and Daniel is sacred in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
and he's famous for surviving the night in the lion's den,
among other great miracles of being a devout man of God.
(intense music)
- However, Muslim accounts of the Daniel
entombed in the Nabi Daniel Mosque is one of a conquerer.
- This tradition also said that the prophet Daniel
comes victorious against his enemies
and founds the city of Alexandria.
This doesn't match Daniel of the Bible at all.
Who does it sound like?
Hmm, who do we know who goes into Babylon
and who's victorious over his enemies?
Who do we know founds the city of Alexandria?
Alexander.
So some strange thing has happened, it seems to be here,
and conflating the figure of Daniel the prophet
with the figure of Alexander the Great.
- Also, in local Arabic tradition,
the crypts underneath the mosque of Nabi Daniel
are called the shrine of the double-horned.
The double horn is a reference to Alexander the Great
because he worshiped Amun
and Amun had rams horns.
(suspenseful music)
- Alexander is often depicted,
for example in later coins struck by his successors,
with horns, rams horns on his head.
- So if this is the shrine of the double horned,
it leads one to believe that this is perhaps
a resting place of Alexander.
- [Laurence] But the question remains
whether Alexander the Great really lies
under the Nabi Daniel Mosque.
- Other people request to investigate
the subterranean crypts,
including the famous Heinrich Schliemann,
who discovered, we think,
the remains of
ancient Troy and Mycenae,
but he too is denied by the authorities there.
- Since the end of the 19th century,
nobody has actually really been able to get down there
and explore to see what further they might find
under this mosque.
- But even if Alexander the Great's remains
are under that mosque,
there is no way that permission is ever going to be granted,
nor should it be,
for anyone to go digging in that area to look for this.
- While it seems suspicious
that they won't let anybody excavate under this,
it is actually not very strange
that they would refuse to allow excavations
under a mosque which contains sacred land.
So it's not a grand conspiracy
saying we don't want to discover Alexander's tomb.
It's just that in their minds the people there
are protecting something which to them is more sacred
than Alexander's remains
- After Alexander the Great's body disappears
from the historical record in 391 AD,
many wonder if the remains of the warrior
are not in Egypt at all, but somewhere else entirely,
someplace like Italy.
Located 1,300 miles from Alexandria
and founded 750 years
after his death,
Venice may seem an unlikely
place to look for Alexander,
but some believe the search should begin here.
- The Basilica of St. Mark in Venice
is said to hold the remains of St. Mark the apostle.
One researcher
thinks it might hold
the remains of
Alexander instead.
(dramatic music)
The theory goes all the way back to the early years
after Alexander the Great died.
- Writer Andrew Chugg has a theory
that the remains of Alexander the Great
and not of St. Mark
were actually moved
from Alexandria to Venice in a mix-up of epic proportions.
- Before Alexander took rule of Egypt,
it was ruled by the Persians, and before the Persians,
the last native ruler of
Egypt was Nectanebo II.
- According to this theory,
when Alexander's body is brought to Memphis by Ptolemy,
he reuses a sarcophagus that was intended for Nectanebo II.
- Chugg believes that Alexander's body is interred
in Nectanebo II's sarcophagus.
And at this time period,
there were Christians rioting in the streets.
So, Chugg believes that to protect Alexander,
his coffin and mummy were absconded to a safer place
where there was less upheaval.
- If you're going to hide something from the Christians
so that they don't destroy it,
what better place to hide it
than literally in plain sight?
So Chugg believes that the sarcophagus
was taken to the Cathedral of St. Mark,
where the Christians would never dream of looking for it
because that's where the remains
of their precious evangelist actually lay.
- There the remains of the two men
would have lain together for centuries,
but it's at the time that Islam comes to Egypt
that potentially Christians viewed
this particular site as especially threatened
and would've been very interested in evacuating
the very important relics there.
- [Laurence] According to an 11th century manuscript,
two Venetian merchants launch a daring operation
to rescue what they believe to be St. Mark's remains.
- It's like something out of a thriller.
You have a group of merchants who sneak their way
into Alexandria precisely to snatch the body of Mark
and protect it and bring it back to Italy.
- In 828 AD, these Venetian merchants sail to Alexandria,
they go into where the Cathedral of St. Mark is,
and they literally hijack this sarcophagus
and they take it back to Venice with them for safekeeping.
- The Basilica of St. Mark in Venice holds
the remains of the Apostle Mark,
but there's something that potentially doesn't quite fit
with the idea that Mark is the body there.
- People notice something really unusual
issuing forth from this sarcophagus.
It has a beautiful smell.
- It is noted that the body
actually has this really powerful aroma,
an aroma that smells like all of the spices in the world.
And the idea is that St. Mark wouldn't have been mummified,
but Alexander would have been.
- Mark was martyred in the first century.
The custom at the time would've been cremation.
And so what they would have
would not have that same beautiful scent.
It would just be bone and ash.
- [Laurence] In addition to the unexpected scent,
Chugg points to clues in the sarcophagus itself.
- Within the basilica in Venice,
Chugg recognizes that there is an eight-pointed star
carved into the rock.
Now, an eight-pointed star is this ancient Greek symbol
that's associated with Macedonia
and with Alexander's family.
- Chugg believes that that stone
came from Nectanebo's repurposed sarcophagus.
- [Laurence] But this theory may remain a mystery
for the foreseeable future.
- This is a very creative theory
and I fully believe that strange things happen
over the course of history.
The only way that this could actually really be
conclusively solved is if the Catholic Church
were to allow any carbon dating of Mark's remains
underneath the cathedral.
Will they do that?
No.
They have no interest in doing
that kind of carbon dating of relics.
It serves them in no way to do so.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] The search for Alexander the Great's remains
has been guided by the king's ancient biographers.
Most point to Alexander being buried in the city he founded,
but they also suggest he had his own ideas
of where he wanted to be laid to rest.
One Greek archaeologist thinks that's where he is today.
- Liana Souvaltzi believes that the Oasis of Siwa
in northwest Egypt held the most important place
in Alexander's heart.
It's also the place
that Souvaltzi thinks
he is most likely to be buried.
(intense music)
- In 331 BC, when he's about 25 years old,
Alexander the Great embarks on a treacherous journey
across the desert to Siwa
and he's looking for the Oracle of Amun.
In antiquity, people put great stock in oracles,
essentially people who know about your future.
And Alexander wanted to know about his future,
and so he went in search of this oracle.
- It's very, very far away.
It covers about 1,100
miles that he goes
just to go and
consult this oracle.
- This particular oracle was understood
to be the oracle of a hybrid deity,
two of the most powerful deities of the two cultures,
Zeus, chief deity of the Greeks,
and Amun, one of the chief Egyptian deities.
- When Alexander actually arrives at the temple,
his trek turns out to be quite worth it.
He finds the oracle who tells him
that, in fact, Philip, his biological father,
is not his real father,
it is in fact Zeus-Ammon who is his father.
That would make Alexander divine.
(bright music)
- From that point, Alexander is changed.
He sees himself and his mission in a different way.
He adopts the double horns of Zeus-Ammon,
puts it on his coins,
and that seems to really indicate that
the oracle told him,
"Yes, you are the son of a god."
- So this is a watershed moment.
Now, he has the power of divine rule
and he values Siwa
throughout his life.
- [Laurence] In 1989, Egyptian authorities
grant Souvaltzi permission to start digging
for Alexander's tomb in the Siwa Oasis.
- The temple ruins at the Oasis of Siwa
are still standing today.
And Liana Souvaltzi maintains that the oasis
was always very close to Alexander's heart
and it makes complete sense
that he would want to be buried there.
- Most other pieces of historical evidence we have
completely disagrees with
Liana Souvaltzi's theory here,
except for one.
One piece of writing that she leans on
from a Roman historian named Curtius.
He wrote that in Alexander's heart
he wanted to be buried in one place and nowhere else.
It's the place where he received the oracle.
- After unbelievably only one week of excavations,
Souvaltzi says she's made this discovery.
She's found a large chamber under the temple
that actually has the remains of lion statues
that are guarding something.
- This underground chamber has statues of lions,
which are linked to Alexander,
which are linked to royalty,
and which are also in Egyptian ideology
linked to the underworld.
They're the guardians of the liminal space
between this world and the next.
- Up to this point, it was believed
that all we had at the Siwa Oasis
was the remains of a temple.
So this was a new discovery, if what she had really hit upon
was a set of monumental tombs.
- And the digging keeps going on for years,
and she finally discovered a full 5,000-square-foot room,
which she believes could be nothing else but a royal tomb.
- [Laurence] Souvaltzi is convinced she's found the tomb
of Alexander the Great.
- She sees carvings of oak leaves
that really resemble the sort of oak leaves that are used
in the crowns of the Greek kings.
She finds an eight-pointed star,
which looks very similar to the eight-pointed star
of Vergina that's associated with a Macedonian royal family.
Nine feet down, she finds a limestone tablet
which has a long inscription in Greek.
How she translates it is that somebody has brought
his master's body to Siwa in order to be buried.
- The tablet states that the body was moved to Siwa,
and the body was actually really light.
So this would give a hint that the body was mummified.
- The text itself is anonymous. We don't know who wrote it,
but she's absolutely sure that this was about Ptolemy
and he was writing it to talk about
moving Alexander's body to Siwa,
the place where Alexander himself had wished to be buried.
- [Laurence] After several years of digging,
Souvaltzi's convinced she's on the edge of a breakthrough,
but when archeologists from the Egyptian
Antiquities Organization come to Siwa,
they spot a flaw in her work.
- Archaeologists examined the inscription written in Greek
and they conclude that it's not about a king.
They also note that the style of the chamber
is not actually Greek at all, but it appears to be Roman.
So the more that they learn and the more that they excavate,
the more skeptical they become.
- [Laurence] The experts found
that Souvaltzi's translation was in error
and that the tablets don't refer to Ptolemy at all.
Partly due to this, the Egyptian government
distances itself from Souvaltzi's work
and pulls her permit to dig.
- Souvaltzi spends the next two decades
trying to seek the government of Egypt's permission
to keep digging.
They turn down her requests.
But even if Souvaltzi is wrong
about where Alexander was truly buried,
many scholars are intrigued by the idea
that perhaps where Alexander wanted to be buried
mattered ultimately.
And if we rule out Siwa, there was one other site
that would have been very important to him.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] Alexander the Great came from ancient Macedonia
in today's northern Greece and the Balkans.
Historians say that his father was buried under the ruins
of a town known as Vergina.
And tradition holds that Alexander
should also have been buried there.
- In the 1970s, a Greek archaeologist
named Manolis Andronikos excavated a tumulus,
a large burial mound there.
And he discovered a tomb which had not been looted,
miraculously enough,
and which he identified for various reasons
as the tomb of Philip II.
- There were other bones buried in this tomb.
So hopes run high that what
they found is Alexander's tomb.
However, they find no additional evidence
that can really support this.
And so they move to a different site,
this time they go excavate at an ancient city
called Amphipolis.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] Amphipolis is located in northern Greece
about 100 miles from the tomb of Alexander's father, Philip.
- Amphipolis was a city that was conquered by Philip II
in 357 BC and Amphipolis was also the place
where Alexander the Great prepared
for his most important battle in Asia.
In 2012, while archaeologists were digging,
they found another tomb.
(pulsating music)
- When they go down the staircase,
they find a series of tomb chambers, very ornate.
The first chamber contains two large
and headless figures of sphinxes.
The second tomb chamber contains an elaborate mosaic
and it depicts a scene from Greek mythology.
- [Laurence] The mosaic depicts the arrival of death,
and the elaborate style of the tomb
would be typical of monuments to royalty.
- When they go further in, they find a third tomb chamber,
and they go into that and they find
more evidence of human bones.
They discover the body of a 60-year-old woman,
the body of an infant,
the body of a 30-year-old man,
the body of a man in his forties,
and the body of another individual
whose bones are so badly degraded
that they can't actually tell very much
about how old this person would've been.
- The woman's bones are the same age
as Alexander's mother when she died at the age of 59,
and the mid-thirties bones are obviously the same age
as Alexander the Great was when he died.
- [Laurence] Greek researchers plan to submit the bones
for DNA testing to see if these people were related.
- So it's possible that they
could be Alexander's bones.
However, there are still some issues with that.
- The 30-year-old man's bones show cut marks to the chest,
and we know this is not how Alexander the Great died.
And also, these bones were found
in a cheaply constructed box,
and these are not the kinds of vessels
that we would expect to find the remains
of one of the greatest kings
to ever walk the face of the earth.
- It is also possible that the tomb was built for Alexander,
but he was never entombed there,
having been taken down to Egypt by Ptolemy.
- The tomb appears to have been looted
at some point in antiquity, which is really a shame,
because we've lost any other pieces of information
that might be able to solve the mystery
of who was actually buried in this tomb.
- Optimistically, the fact that we haven't found
Alexander's body means that
there's hope that one day
it may yet be found,
that it's somewhere out there.
And there are going to be more theories,
more suggestions of where that could be,
which we can bring to bear in archaeological research.
- To find this tomb with this
enormous figure from history
who's super important in uniting
the ancient world for a period of time.
It's kind of every Egyptologist's dream
to find the tomb of Alexander the Great.
(intense music)
- Today, the search
for Alexander's mummy
continues to make
headlines around the world.
Whether Alexander's body lies silently under a great city
or has been obliterated by
the forces of man or nature,
one thing is certain.
The story of his life still stirs fascination
more than 2,000 years after his death.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."