Ptolemy
12-02-2005, 03:23 PM
Alexander's Final Resting Place
Andrew Chugg pinpoints the Emperor’s long-lost tomb.
The 120-foot Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was ostensibly a representation of the sun god Helios. It is now believed to have been modelled on the features of Alexander the Great, whose conquests had irrevocably altered the course of history mere decades before its creation. The image of the Colossus towering over the harbour of Rhodes provides an apt metaphor for the way Alexander’s achievements loom over the history of the ancient world. Partly for reasons of his historical importance and partly for the romance of his glamorous career, the hunt for Alexander’s mysteriously vanished tomb has come to be regarded as the archaeologist’s analogue for the Arthurian quest for the Sangrail. At its crudest there are elements of the excitement and drama of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I myself got some sense of this from the violent reverberations of a dilapidated taxi during a 90mph ride along the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria in my search for his tomb. On arrival among the recently rain-drenched streets of the great port city, it transpired that the wiper blades of our vehicle existed for ornamental purposes only. As the traffic dodging around us disappeared behind a veil of fine spray, I too began to feel a certain affinity with the perilous life of Indiana Jones.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century a succession of more or less dubious characters have been associated with the hunt for Alexander’s tomb, and in the process have lent a faint air of disrepute to the enterprise. In around 1850 a part-time tourist guide called Ambrose Schilizzi introduced a persistent red-herring into the mystery by claiming actually to have seen Alexander’s corpse at the end of a passage beneath the Nabi Daniel mosque in central Alexandria. Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy and Mycenae, was taken in by this tale and sought permission to excavate beneath the mosque, but was thwarted by the local religious authorities. However, Evaristo Breccia, the Director of the Greco-Roman Museum of Alexandria, conducted thorough investigations beneath the mosque between 1925-31 and found nothing of interest.
Another famous hoax was perpetrated in 1893 by a M. Joannides, who claimed to have found the tombs of both Alexander and Cleopatra in the Chatby necropolis in the north-east district of the ancient city. More recently, in the 1960s, Stelios Komoutsos, a Greek waiter in Alexandria, used his tips to invest in the finance of a fruitless series of arbitrary excavations in the streets of the modern city. More recently still, in the mid-1990s, Liana Souvaltzis claimed to have found Alexander’s tomb at the Siwa oasis in the desert to the south-west of Alexandria; but her evidence collapsed when subjected to serious scrutiny and the Egyptian authorities withdrew her licence.
Only one twentieth-century theory concerning the tomb retains any serious academic credibility and even this is highly tenuous. In 1907 Breccia discovered what appears to be the alabaster antechamber of a Macedonian-style tumulus tomb in pieces in the modern Latin Cemeteries, which lie within the western districts of the ancient city. Achille Adriani subsequently reconstructed the chamber and proposed that this ‘Alabaster Tomb’ might have been part of Alexander’s sepulchre. However, there is no evidence specifically connecting it with Alexander and, despite recent re-excavation, no more of the structure has been found.
A plethora of ancient accounts survive concerning Alexander’s tomb, which enable us to reconstruct its story with reasonable confidence. Following Alexander’s death in Babylon in June 323 BC steps were taken to preserve the corpse and a team of artists and engineers spent around eighteen months preparing a magnificent catafalque. A cavalcade escorting the catafalque set out late in 322 bc, supposedly heading for Aegae, the ancient burial place of Macedonian royalty. However, according to several sources, Alexander had asked for his body to be taken to Ammon in Egypt, and Arrhidaeus, the commander of the escort, conspired with Ptolemy, then governor of Egypt, to bring this about. When it reached Syria, Arrhidaeus diverted the catafalque south through Damascus and Ptolemy came north with an army to meet it. Perdiccas, the regent of the Empire, sent his lieutenants Attalus and Polemon with a contingent of cavalry in hot pursuit. They may have clashed with Ptolemy’s troops, but failed to recapture the body. Consequently, Perdiccas took the Grand Army into Egypt in the spring of 321 BC aiming to punish Ptolemy, but his own officers assassinated him after he failed to force the crossing of the Nile, with disastrous loss of life.
Ptolemy proceeded to entomb Alexander at Memphis, where the corpse remained for about four decades until Ptolemy’s son Philadelphus transferred it to the new capital at Alexandria. The fourth Ptolemy, called Philopator, built a magnificent new mausoleum in the centre of Alexandria in which he placed the remains of Alexander and his own ancestors in about 215 bc. In 89 bc Ptolemy X stole Alexander’s original coffin of ‘hammered gold fitted to the body’ in order to pay his troops, replacing it with a glass substitute. In 48 bc Julius Caesar marched through Alexandria with the full pomp of a Roman consul to visit the tomb and honour his hero Alexander. Similarly, Augustus viewed Alexander’s corpse in 30 bc, strewing it with flowers and placing a crown upon it, but inadvertently breaking off a piece of the nose in the process.
The next visitor we know of was Emperor Septimius Severus in AD 200, and Severus’ son Caracalla made the final recorded visit in AD 215, when he left his rings and his belt as tokens of his esteem. The mausoleum may have been destroyed in one of several episodes of warfare in the later part of the third century ad, but Ammianus Marcellinus refers to a splendid temple and tomb of the Genius of Alexandria in AD 361. The tomb may have been demolished by the earthquake and tidal wave that struck the city in AD 365, since John Chrysostom asserted that the tomb was ‘unknown to Alexander’s own people’ in about AD 400. Theodoret, writing in the early fifth century, also listed Alexander among famous men with unknown tombs.
Around 1517 Leo Africanus visited Alexandria and later wrote that he had seen a ‘Tomb of the Prophet and King Alexander in a small house in the form of a chapel’. The sixteenth-century Braun & Hogenberg plan of Alexandria also marks a Domus Alexandri Magni (House of Alexander the Great) at its exact centre. The location and the adjacent minaret suggest that this was what became the Attarine Mosque, in the courtyard of which scholars accompanying Napoleon’s invasion of 1798 found a chapel containing an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. When the English defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, Edward Daniel Clarke recovered the sarcophagus and shipped it to the British Museum, having been told that it was the tomb of Alexander.
In 1822 Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics, and it was realised that the sarcophagus bore the cartouches of Nectanebo II, the last native pharaoh of Egypt, for whom it must have been made. However, Nectanebo had fled from a Persian invasion into Ethiopia in 341 bc, so his sarcophagus was probably still vacant when Ptolemy buried Alexander at Memphis in 321 BC. If Ptolemy did use this splendid relic to accommodate Alexander’s remains, then it would explain how the sarcophagus subsequently found its way to Alexandria, a city not founded in Nectanebo’s day.
In 1851 Auguste Mariette excavated a temple built by Nectanebo II at the Serapeum in the Memphite necropolis at North Saqqara. Its entrance was guarded by a semi-circle of statues of Greek poets and philosophers presided over by Homer, Alexander’s favourite author, and its side entrance was guarded by a group of four Greek-style lions. These sculptures appear to date from the reign of the first Ptolemy and are therefore contemporary with Alexander’s Memphite tomb. Was the first tomb located within the Nectanebo temple? The connections between the Attarine sarcophagus and a possible site for Alexander’s first tomb at Memphis are certainly intriguing. It is virtually impossible for any forger to have known about these links. The issue could be pursued through re-excavation of the Nectanebo temple.
Several ancient writers refer to Alexander’s tomb as existing within a memorial building, and Zenobius, who wrote in the first half of the second century AD, specified that it lay at the centre of Alexandria, had been built by Philopator c.215 bc and incorporated the tombs of the earlier Ptolemies. What did this building look like and where was the tomb located within it? The most important clues on its form come from the Pharsalia, a Latin poem by Lucan, composed during the reign of Nero. This recounts Julius Caesar’s victory over his rival Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus and Caesar’s ensuing pursuit of his opponent to Egypt. In two crucial passages Lucan describes Alexander’s body ‘preserved within a consecrated grotto’, which had been ‘hewn out for a tomb’ and into which Caesar ‘descended’. The ‘remains of the kings’ were ‘resting within a loftily constructed crag/edifice’ and were ‘covered by indignant pyramids and Mausoleums’.
These remarks tend to focus consideration on two possibilities: either a simple Giza-style pyramid or a splendid mausoleum-temple in imitation of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (another of the Seven Wonders). Alexander is said to have planned a tomb comparable with the Great Pyramid for his father and there is a small pyramidal tomb in Rome dating from the Augustan age. However, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus fits Lucan’s words with remarkable accuracy, for it is known to have been an impressively tall structure with a pyramidal roof and a subterranean burial chamber. Furthermore, Halicarnassus was part of the Ptolemaic empire in 215 BC and numerous surviving monumental tombs of the period followed the Mausoleum model, including several funerary monuments in a Ptolemaic cemetery within ancient Alexandria.
Strabo, who saw Alexandria in 25 BC, describes Alexander’s tomb as a walled enclosure within the city and called it the Soma. Diodorus also spoke of a sacred enclosure and added that it was of a size and construction worthy of the glory of Alexander. The enclosure of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was 100m x 250m, but Alexander’s enclosure should have been bigger, since Alexandria was far larger and Alexander a much greater king. The sacred enclosures of Memphis, which was the capital of Egypt before Alexandria superseded it, were the most immediate inspiration available to Alexandria’s architects, and they stood half a kilometre square.
Achilles Tatius, who probably wrote in the third century ad, mentioned a district around the central crossroads of Alexandria which was named after Alexander. He described it as a second city and implied it was enclosed by walls. The Alexander Romance, compiled around the same time, stated that Alexandria comprised five quarters, which was confirmed by Philo, but the Romance also named the first quarter after Alexander. The location of this district of Alexander at the centre of the city concurs with the location of the tomb at the centre described by Zenobius. Its size is consistent with Diodorus’ emphasis of the enormity of the tomb enclosure. Furthermore, it shows how Strabo’s assertion that the Royal District amounted to around a quarter to a third of the entire city can be true, for he incorporated the Soma within it. Everything suggests that the district of Alexander and the tomb enclosure of the Soma were one and the same.
In 1865, before the modern city spread to seal over the ancient ruins, Mahmoud Bey, a French-trained engineer, was commissioned by the Khedive to excavate the site in order to draw up a plan of the ancient city. The map he produced remains the key reconstruction of ancient Alexandria. In particular, it defines the location of the central crossroads mentioned by Achilles Tatius and Strabo.
For the Soma to agree with all the ancient accounts, we must seek an enclosure on a scale of half a kilometre, which encompasses the crossroads and abuts the royal palaces on the coast to the west of the Lochias promontory. A black line on Mahmoud’s map indicates the medieval walls of Alexandria, which can be seen more clearly in a map of 1798 from the Description de l’Egypte. The eastern section of these walls forms three sides of an enclosure of about 600m x 800m with Mahmoud’s central crossroads just within its eastern end.
Arab accounts and inscriptions attribute the finalisation of the medieval walls to Sultan Ahmed Ibn Tulun in the late ninth century, but existing walls may have been incorporated into his fortifications. In most places the medieval defences were a double circuit with interior and exterior walls, which had evidently been constructed in different periods. There are many reasons to believe that the outer curtain in the eastern sector was much older than the inner and that it had its origins in the ancient city. For example, the Reverend Richard Pococke, who paced around the walls in 1737, stated that the outer circuit appeared ancient and of very high-quality workmanship, but the inner was obviously medieval and of a lower standard. The French artist Louis-François Cassas visited Alexandria in 1785 and noted the disparity in the epochs of the two walls in his map published in 1799. The stylistic differences to which they refer can be glimpsed in plates from the Description de l’Egypte, which show sometimes perfectly round arches and huge immaculate blocks of masonry and elsewhere pointed arches and smaller stones in less regular arrays.
The medieval walls were substantially remodelled in 1826 and largely destroyed in the 1880s during the spread of the modern city. However, a magnificent aquatinted engraving by Luigi Mayer depicting the Rosetta Gate in the late eighteenth century shows an apparently ancient portal flanked by columns with Corinthian capitals, seemingly made of the polished pink granite used extensively for the public architecture of ancient Alexandria. A statue niche in the wall beside it would make a date after the Arab conquest most unlikely, because of the Islamic ban on graven images. The same gate is shown from the outside in an engraving made from a drawing by Cassas. Furthermore, a small section of a tower in the outer wall survives today a couple of hundred metres north of the site of the Rosetta Gate. Some of its blocks are more than a metre wide and it is generally considered to be of ancient construction.
Further indications that the outer circuit was ancient come from the observations of D. G. Hogarth for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1895. Though the walls themselves had largely vanished, the ditch that ran in front of them was still apparent over a stretch from the harbour to south of the Rosetta Gate. Yet Hogarth found scarcely any traces of ancient masonry in the banks of this ditch, which should have cut through ancient foundations, had it been excavated in a new line in the ninth century. Finally, the 1798 map appears to show vestiges of a gateway in the outer wall at a short oblique section where it was cut by the ancient street labelled R3 by Mahmoud. All this evidence suggests that the eastern section of the medieval walls had previously formed a huge enclosure at the heart of ancient Alexandria. This explains why the medieval city incorporated these eastern districts, though they seem to protrude oddly from its overall plan.
If we accept the evidence of an ancient enclosure around the central crossroads, then it is extremely likely that this was the Soma of Alexander. The entire area is now heavily built-up, but Mahmoud Bey stated that the number of columns and the size of the foundations he found in this vicinity indicated that the grandest buildings of the ancient city had once stood there. Only small-scale excavations are feasible in the area at present, so any new dig would have to be carefully focused.
The ultimate question in this enigma must be the fate of Alexander’s actual body. The evidence suggests that we should pursue any ancient mummified corpses that appeared within the immediate vicinity of Mahmoud Bey’s central crossroads in the late fourth-century ad. This seems a fairly tall order, yet a single set of human remains seems to fill the criteria.
According to various Christian sources, the church in Alexandria was founded by St Mark the Evangelist in the mid-first century ad. In the Late Roman period a church and tomb of St Mark became one of the key religious sites in the city. The oldest reliable historical reference is found in The Lausiac History of Palladius, who wrote in the early fifth century ad of a pilgrimage ‘to the Martyrion of Mark at Alexandria’, which took place at the end of the fourth century. There is also a legendary account of the martyrdom and entombment of St Mark in an apocryphal document known as The Acts of St Mark, which may well have been composed in Alexandria in the late fourth century. According to the Acts, the pagans attempted to burn St Mark’s body, but a miraculous storm intervened and doused the flames, allowing the Christians to snatch back the corpse and convey it to their church beside the sea in a district of Alexandria called Boukolia. The oldest versions of the Acts mention that the Christians entombed the body in an eminent location in the east of the city. Although later writers have often assumed that the location of St Mark’s tomb (and the associated church) was at the site of the church in Boukolia, the Acts did not actually state this. An alternative Christian tradition in Dorotheus, Eutychius and the Chronicon Paschale states that St Mark’s body actually was burnt, so perhaps the miracle in the Acts was contrived to explain a fabricated tomb.
In AD 828 a pair of merchant-adventurers from Venice stole the saint’s supposed remains from beneath the noses of the Arab authorities in Alexandria and returned with them to their native city. The event is recorded in numerous chronicles as well as in mosaics within the basilica which the Venetians erected to accommodate St Mark’s relics. The chroniclers speak of a corpse sealed in linen, which exuded a pungent perfume when disturbed. However, the evidence of special interest for our story is a short legend in the Braun & Hogenberg map of Alexandria, which identifies the location of a stone just inside the Cairo Gate (later known as the Rosetta Gate) of Alexandria beneath which the Venetians are stated to have discovered St Mark’s body. An account of a pilgrimage to Alexandria by a certain Arculfus in about ad 680 seems to locate the church of St Mark just inside this gate. A medieval poem recounting the capture of Alexandria by the King of Cyprus in ad 1365 indicates that the Gate of St Mark was then an alternative name for the Cairo Gate. Yet Bernard, a French monk who visited Alexandria in about ad 870, wrote that the church of St Mark lay close by a monastery of St Mark, which was located just outside the Eastern/Cairo Gate. The earliest surviving map of Alexandria was drawn by Ugo Comminelli in ad 1472 and this also shows some kind of religious establishment dedicated to St Mark outside the eastern gate. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility that the church lay just within the gate, while the later monastery lay just outside it, so the location specified by the Braun & Hogenberg map may well be correct.
If so, then the tomb of St Mark was located very close to Mahmoud Bey’s central crossroads of ancient Alexandria, which was also the likely location of Alexander’s mausoleum. Is it possible that some fourth-century patriarch of the Alexandrian church recognised an opportunity, through a small act of duplicity, both to preserve the corpse of the city’s founder from the most fanatical of his own followers and to furnish Christianity with a potent relic to encourage the devotion of the faithful?
The evidence that the body of St Mark in Venice is actually that of Alexander himself is essentially circumstantial: it simply defines a close coincidence in time and place between the disappearance of Alexander’s corpse in the late fourth century and the appearance of St Mark’s remains on the historical stage. It does no more than establish a possibility that the two mummified bodies are one and the same. But this need not be the end of the story, for the corpse of St Mark survives beneath the high altar of the Basilica of St Mark’s in Venice, whither it was transferred from the crypt in 1811 to preserve it from the threat posed by the city’s continual floods. The science of forensic archaeology has recently achieved such a degree of proficiency that a detailed investigation of the remains could reveal their true provenance. ‘’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished’, for the story of Alexander’s tomb without the body is like Hamlet without the Prince… ‘The rest is silence’.
For Further Reading:
Andrew Chugg ‘The Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria’ American Journal of Ancient History, New Series 1.2 (2002) [2003] (Rutgers University Press); Andrew Chugg, ‘The Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?’ Greece & Rome, Vol. 49, April 2002 (Oxford University Press); Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria Rediscovered (British Museum Press, 1998); Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander (Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 1975).
Andrew Chugg pinpoints the Emperor’s long-lost tomb.
The 120-foot Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was ostensibly a representation of the sun god Helios. It is now believed to have been modelled on the features of Alexander the Great, whose conquests had irrevocably altered the course of history mere decades before its creation. The image of the Colossus towering over the harbour of Rhodes provides an apt metaphor for the way Alexander’s achievements loom over the history of the ancient world. Partly for reasons of his historical importance and partly for the romance of his glamorous career, the hunt for Alexander’s mysteriously vanished tomb has come to be regarded as the archaeologist’s analogue for the Arthurian quest for the Sangrail. At its crudest there are elements of the excitement and drama of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I myself got some sense of this from the violent reverberations of a dilapidated taxi during a 90mph ride along the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria in my search for his tomb. On arrival among the recently rain-drenched streets of the great port city, it transpired that the wiper blades of our vehicle existed for ornamental purposes only. As the traffic dodging around us disappeared behind a veil of fine spray, I too began to feel a certain affinity with the perilous life of Indiana Jones.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century a succession of more or less dubious characters have been associated with the hunt for Alexander’s tomb, and in the process have lent a faint air of disrepute to the enterprise. In around 1850 a part-time tourist guide called Ambrose Schilizzi introduced a persistent red-herring into the mystery by claiming actually to have seen Alexander’s corpse at the end of a passage beneath the Nabi Daniel mosque in central Alexandria. Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy and Mycenae, was taken in by this tale and sought permission to excavate beneath the mosque, but was thwarted by the local religious authorities. However, Evaristo Breccia, the Director of the Greco-Roman Museum of Alexandria, conducted thorough investigations beneath the mosque between 1925-31 and found nothing of interest.
Another famous hoax was perpetrated in 1893 by a M. Joannides, who claimed to have found the tombs of both Alexander and Cleopatra in the Chatby necropolis in the north-east district of the ancient city. More recently, in the 1960s, Stelios Komoutsos, a Greek waiter in Alexandria, used his tips to invest in the finance of a fruitless series of arbitrary excavations in the streets of the modern city. More recently still, in the mid-1990s, Liana Souvaltzis claimed to have found Alexander’s tomb at the Siwa oasis in the desert to the south-west of Alexandria; but her evidence collapsed when subjected to serious scrutiny and the Egyptian authorities withdrew her licence.
Only one twentieth-century theory concerning the tomb retains any serious academic credibility and even this is highly tenuous. In 1907 Breccia discovered what appears to be the alabaster antechamber of a Macedonian-style tumulus tomb in pieces in the modern Latin Cemeteries, which lie within the western districts of the ancient city. Achille Adriani subsequently reconstructed the chamber and proposed that this ‘Alabaster Tomb’ might have been part of Alexander’s sepulchre. However, there is no evidence specifically connecting it with Alexander and, despite recent re-excavation, no more of the structure has been found.
A plethora of ancient accounts survive concerning Alexander’s tomb, which enable us to reconstruct its story with reasonable confidence. Following Alexander’s death in Babylon in June 323 BC steps were taken to preserve the corpse and a team of artists and engineers spent around eighteen months preparing a magnificent catafalque. A cavalcade escorting the catafalque set out late in 322 bc, supposedly heading for Aegae, the ancient burial place of Macedonian royalty. However, according to several sources, Alexander had asked for his body to be taken to Ammon in Egypt, and Arrhidaeus, the commander of the escort, conspired with Ptolemy, then governor of Egypt, to bring this about. When it reached Syria, Arrhidaeus diverted the catafalque south through Damascus and Ptolemy came north with an army to meet it. Perdiccas, the regent of the Empire, sent his lieutenants Attalus and Polemon with a contingent of cavalry in hot pursuit. They may have clashed with Ptolemy’s troops, but failed to recapture the body. Consequently, Perdiccas took the Grand Army into Egypt in the spring of 321 BC aiming to punish Ptolemy, but his own officers assassinated him after he failed to force the crossing of the Nile, with disastrous loss of life.
Ptolemy proceeded to entomb Alexander at Memphis, where the corpse remained for about four decades until Ptolemy’s son Philadelphus transferred it to the new capital at Alexandria. The fourth Ptolemy, called Philopator, built a magnificent new mausoleum in the centre of Alexandria in which he placed the remains of Alexander and his own ancestors in about 215 bc. In 89 bc Ptolemy X stole Alexander’s original coffin of ‘hammered gold fitted to the body’ in order to pay his troops, replacing it with a glass substitute. In 48 bc Julius Caesar marched through Alexandria with the full pomp of a Roman consul to visit the tomb and honour his hero Alexander. Similarly, Augustus viewed Alexander’s corpse in 30 bc, strewing it with flowers and placing a crown upon it, but inadvertently breaking off a piece of the nose in the process.
The next visitor we know of was Emperor Septimius Severus in AD 200, and Severus’ son Caracalla made the final recorded visit in AD 215, when he left his rings and his belt as tokens of his esteem. The mausoleum may have been destroyed in one of several episodes of warfare in the later part of the third century ad, but Ammianus Marcellinus refers to a splendid temple and tomb of the Genius of Alexandria in AD 361. The tomb may have been demolished by the earthquake and tidal wave that struck the city in AD 365, since John Chrysostom asserted that the tomb was ‘unknown to Alexander’s own people’ in about AD 400. Theodoret, writing in the early fifth century, also listed Alexander among famous men with unknown tombs.
Around 1517 Leo Africanus visited Alexandria and later wrote that he had seen a ‘Tomb of the Prophet and King Alexander in a small house in the form of a chapel’. The sixteenth-century Braun & Hogenberg plan of Alexandria also marks a Domus Alexandri Magni (House of Alexander the Great) at its exact centre. The location and the adjacent minaret suggest that this was what became the Attarine Mosque, in the courtyard of which scholars accompanying Napoleon’s invasion of 1798 found a chapel containing an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. When the English defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, Edward Daniel Clarke recovered the sarcophagus and shipped it to the British Museum, having been told that it was the tomb of Alexander.
In 1822 Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics, and it was realised that the sarcophagus bore the cartouches of Nectanebo II, the last native pharaoh of Egypt, for whom it must have been made. However, Nectanebo had fled from a Persian invasion into Ethiopia in 341 bc, so his sarcophagus was probably still vacant when Ptolemy buried Alexander at Memphis in 321 BC. If Ptolemy did use this splendid relic to accommodate Alexander’s remains, then it would explain how the sarcophagus subsequently found its way to Alexandria, a city not founded in Nectanebo’s day.
In 1851 Auguste Mariette excavated a temple built by Nectanebo II at the Serapeum in the Memphite necropolis at North Saqqara. Its entrance was guarded by a semi-circle of statues of Greek poets and philosophers presided over by Homer, Alexander’s favourite author, and its side entrance was guarded by a group of four Greek-style lions. These sculptures appear to date from the reign of the first Ptolemy and are therefore contemporary with Alexander’s Memphite tomb. Was the first tomb located within the Nectanebo temple? The connections between the Attarine sarcophagus and a possible site for Alexander’s first tomb at Memphis are certainly intriguing. It is virtually impossible for any forger to have known about these links. The issue could be pursued through re-excavation of the Nectanebo temple.
Several ancient writers refer to Alexander’s tomb as existing within a memorial building, and Zenobius, who wrote in the first half of the second century AD, specified that it lay at the centre of Alexandria, had been built by Philopator c.215 bc and incorporated the tombs of the earlier Ptolemies. What did this building look like and where was the tomb located within it? The most important clues on its form come from the Pharsalia, a Latin poem by Lucan, composed during the reign of Nero. This recounts Julius Caesar’s victory over his rival Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus and Caesar’s ensuing pursuit of his opponent to Egypt. In two crucial passages Lucan describes Alexander’s body ‘preserved within a consecrated grotto’, which had been ‘hewn out for a tomb’ and into which Caesar ‘descended’. The ‘remains of the kings’ were ‘resting within a loftily constructed crag/edifice’ and were ‘covered by indignant pyramids and Mausoleums’.
These remarks tend to focus consideration on two possibilities: either a simple Giza-style pyramid or a splendid mausoleum-temple in imitation of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (another of the Seven Wonders). Alexander is said to have planned a tomb comparable with the Great Pyramid for his father and there is a small pyramidal tomb in Rome dating from the Augustan age. However, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus fits Lucan’s words with remarkable accuracy, for it is known to have been an impressively tall structure with a pyramidal roof and a subterranean burial chamber. Furthermore, Halicarnassus was part of the Ptolemaic empire in 215 BC and numerous surviving monumental tombs of the period followed the Mausoleum model, including several funerary monuments in a Ptolemaic cemetery within ancient Alexandria.
Strabo, who saw Alexandria in 25 BC, describes Alexander’s tomb as a walled enclosure within the city and called it the Soma. Diodorus also spoke of a sacred enclosure and added that it was of a size and construction worthy of the glory of Alexander. The enclosure of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was 100m x 250m, but Alexander’s enclosure should have been bigger, since Alexandria was far larger and Alexander a much greater king. The sacred enclosures of Memphis, which was the capital of Egypt before Alexandria superseded it, were the most immediate inspiration available to Alexandria’s architects, and they stood half a kilometre square.
Achilles Tatius, who probably wrote in the third century ad, mentioned a district around the central crossroads of Alexandria which was named after Alexander. He described it as a second city and implied it was enclosed by walls. The Alexander Romance, compiled around the same time, stated that Alexandria comprised five quarters, which was confirmed by Philo, but the Romance also named the first quarter after Alexander. The location of this district of Alexander at the centre of the city concurs with the location of the tomb at the centre described by Zenobius. Its size is consistent with Diodorus’ emphasis of the enormity of the tomb enclosure. Furthermore, it shows how Strabo’s assertion that the Royal District amounted to around a quarter to a third of the entire city can be true, for he incorporated the Soma within it. Everything suggests that the district of Alexander and the tomb enclosure of the Soma were one and the same.
In 1865, before the modern city spread to seal over the ancient ruins, Mahmoud Bey, a French-trained engineer, was commissioned by the Khedive to excavate the site in order to draw up a plan of the ancient city. The map he produced remains the key reconstruction of ancient Alexandria. In particular, it defines the location of the central crossroads mentioned by Achilles Tatius and Strabo.
For the Soma to agree with all the ancient accounts, we must seek an enclosure on a scale of half a kilometre, which encompasses the crossroads and abuts the royal palaces on the coast to the west of the Lochias promontory. A black line on Mahmoud’s map indicates the medieval walls of Alexandria, which can be seen more clearly in a map of 1798 from the Description de l’Egypte. The eastern section of these walls forms three sides of an enclosure of about 600m x 800m with Mahmoud’s central crossroads just within its eastern end.
Arab accounts and inscriptions attribute the finalisation of the medieval walls to Sultan Ahmed Ibn Tulun in the late ninth century, but existing walls may have been incorporated into his fortifications. In most places the medieval defences were a double circuit with interior and exterior walls, which had evidently been constructed in different periods. There are many reasons to believe that the outer curtain in the eastern sector was much older than the inner and that it had its origins in the ancient city. For example, the Reverend Richard Pococke, who paced around the walls in 1737, stated that the outer circuit appeared ancient and of very high-quality workmanship, but the inner was obviously medieval and of a lower standard. The French artist Louis-François Cassas visited Alexandria in 1785 and noted the disparity in the epochs of the two walls in his map published in 1799. The stylistic differences to which they refer can be glimpsed in plates from the Description de l’Egypte, which show sometimes perfectly round arches and huge immaculate blocks of masonry and elsewhere pointed arches and smaller stones in less regular arrays.
The medieval walls were substantially remodelled in 1826 and largely destroyed in the 1880s during the spread of the modern city. However, a magnificent aquatinted engraving by Luigi Mayer depicting the Rosetta Gate in the late eighteenth century shows an apparently ancient portal flanked by columns with Corinthian capitals, seemingly made of the polished pink granite used extensively for the public architecture of ancient Alexandria. A statue niche in the wall beside it would make a date after the Arab conquest most unlikely, because of the Islamic ban on graven images. The same gate is shown from the outside in an engraving made from a drawing by Cassas. Furthermore, a small section of a tower in the outer wall survives today a couple of hundred metres north of the site of the Rosetta Gate. Some of its blocks are more than a metre wide and it is generally considered to be of ancient construction.
Further indications that the outer circuit was ancient come from the observations of D. G. Hogarth for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1895. Though the walls themselves had largely vanished, the ditch that ran in front of them was still apparent over a stretch from the harbour to south of the Rosetta Gate. Yet Hogarth found scarcely any traces of ancient masonry in the banks of this ditch, which should have cut through ancient foundations, had it been excavated in a new line in the ninth century. Finally, the 1798 map appears to show vestiges of a gateway in the outer wall at a short oblique section where it was cut by the ancient street labelled R3 by Mahmoud. All this evidence suggests that the eastern section of the medieval walls had previously formed a huge enclosure at the heart of ancient Alexandria. This explains why the medieval city incorporated these eastern districts, though they seem to protrude oddly from its overall plan.
If we accept the evidence of an ancient enclosure around the central crossroads, then it is extremely likely that this was the Soma of Alexander. The entire area is now heavily built-up, but Mahmoud Bey stated that the number of columns and the size of the foundations he found in this vicinity indicated that the grandest buildings of the ancient city had once stood there. Only small-scale excavations are feasible in the area at present, so any new dig would have to be carefully focused.
The ultimate question in this enigma must be the fate of Alexander’s actual body. The evidence suggests that we should pursue any ancient mummified corpses that appeared within the immediate vicinity of Mahmoud Bey’s central crossroads in the late fourth-century ad. This seems a fairly tall order, yet a single set of human remains seems to fill the criteria.
According to various Christian sources, the church in Alexandria was founded by St Mark the Evangelist in the mid-first century ad. In the Late Roman period a church and tomb of St Mark became one of the key religious sites in the city. The oldest reliable historical reference is found in The Lausiac History of Palladius, who wrote in the early fifth century ad of a pilgrimage ‘to the Martyrion of Mark at Alexandria’, which took place at the end of the fourth century. There is also a legendary account of the martyrdom and entombment of St Mark in an apocryphal document known as The Acts of St Mark, which may well have been composed in Alexandria in the late fourth century. According to the Acts, the pagans attempted to burn St Mark’s body, but a miraculous storm intervened and doused the flames, allowing the Christians to snatch back the corpse and convey it to their church beside the sea in a district of Alexandria called Boukolia. The oldest versions of the Acts mention that the Christians entombed the body in an eminent location in the east of the city. Although later writers have often assumed that the location of St Mark’s tomb (and the associated church) was at the site of the church in Boukolia, the Acts did not actually state this. An alternative Christian tradition in Dorotheus, Eutychius and the Chronicon Paschale states that St Mark’s body actually was burnt, so perhaps the miracle in the Acts was contrived to explain a fabricated tomb.
In AD 828 a pair of merchant-adventurers from Venice stole the saint’s supposed remains from beneath the noses of the Arab authorities in Alexandria and returned with them to their native city. The event is recorded in numerous chronicles as well as in mosaics within the basilica which the Venetians erected to accommodate St Mark’s relics. The chroniclers speak of a corpse sealed in linen, which exuded a pungent perfume when disturbed. However, the evidence of special interest for our story is a short legend in the Braun & Hogenberg map of Alexandria, which identifies the location of a stone just inside the Cairo Gate (later known as the Rosetta Gate) of Alexandria beneath which the Venetians are stated to have discovered St Mark’s body. An account of a pilgrimage to Alexandria by a certain Arculfus in about ad 680 seems to locate the church of St Mark just inside this gate. A medieval poem recounting the capture of Alexandria by the King of Cyprus in ad 1365 indicates that the Gate of St Mark was then an alternative name for the Cairo Gate. Yet Bernard, a French monk who visited Alexandria in about ad 870, wrote that the church of St Mark lay close by a monastery of St Mark, which was located just outside the Eastern/Cairo Gate. The earliest surviving map of Alexandria was drawn by Ugo Comminelli in ad 1472 and this also shows some kind of religious establishment dedicated to St Mark outside the eastern gate. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility that the church lay just within the gate, while the later monastery lay just outside it, so the location specified by the Braun & Hogenberg map may well be correct.
If so, then the tomb of St Mark was located very close to Mahmoud Bey’s central crossroads of ancient Alexandria, which was also the likely location of Alexander’s mausoleum. Is it possible that some fourth-century patriarch of the Alexandrian church recognised an opportunity, through a small act of duplicity, both to preserve the corpse of the city’s founder from the most fanatical of his own followers and to furnish Christianity with a potent relic to encourage the devotion of the faithful?
The evidence that the body of St Mark in Venice is actually that of Alexander himself is essentially circumstantial: it simply defines a close coincidence in time and place between the disappearance of Alexander’s corpse in the late fourth century and the appearance of St Mark’s remains on the historical stage. It does no more than establish a possibility that the two mummified bodies are one and the same. But this need not be the end of the story, for the corpse of St Mark survives beneath the high altar of the Basilica of St Mark’s in Venice, whither it was transferred from the crypt in 1811 to preserve it from the threat posed by the city’s continual floods. The science of forensic archaeology has recently achieved such a degree of proficiency that a detailed investigation of the remains could reveal their true provenance. ‘’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished’, for the story of Alexander’s tomb without the body is like Hamlet without the Prince… ‘The rest is silence’.
For Further Reading:
Andrew Chugg ‘The Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria’ American Journal of Ancient History, New Series 1.2 (2002) [2003] (Rutgers University Press); Andrew Chugg, ‘The Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?’ Greece & Rome, Vol. 49, April 2002 (Oxford University Press); Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria Rediscovered (British Museum Press, 1998); Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander (Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 1975).