Footprints found leading to Cleopatra’s tomb in Egypt

Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist at the University of Santo Domingo, has been searching for the lost tomb of Cleopatra for almost 20 years. Now she believes she has made a decisive breakthrough.

Martinez and her team discovered a 1,305-meter long tunnel located 13 meters underground. This was recently announced by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. It has been called an “engineering marvel” by architectural design experts.

“During the excavations, a huge religious center was discovered with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, gold coins, a huge collection of coins depicting Alexander the Great, Queen Cleopatra and the Ptolemies,” Martinez told CNN.

“The most interesting discovery is a complex of tunnels leading to the Mediterranean Sea and sunken structures,” she added. Exploring these underwater structures will be the next step in her search for the lost tomb of an Egyptian queen, a journey that began in 2005.

“My tenacity cannot be confused with obsession. I admire Cleopatra as a historical figure. She became a victim of propaganda by the Romans, who sought to distort her image, ”said Martinez.

“She was an educated woman, probably the first to formally study at a museum in Alexandria, a center of culture in her day,” said Martinez, who said she admired Cleopatra as a student, linguist, mother and philosopher.

When her husband, the Roman general Mark Antony, died in her arms in 30 B.C. Cleopatra committed suicide shortly thereafter by allowing an aspin to bite her, according to popular belief. The moment has been immortalized in art and literature, but more than two millennia later, little is known about where their remains lie.

A number of clues led Martinez to believe that Cleopatra’s tomb might be in the temple of Osiris in the ruined city of Taposiris Magna on the northern coast of Egypt, where the Nile flows into the Mediterranean.

The main one was the name itself. According to Martinez, Cleopatra was at one time considered “the human incarnation of the goddess Isis”, while Antony was considered the incarnation of the god Orisis, husband of Isis.

Martinez believes that Cleopatra may have chosen to bury her husband in the temple to reflect this myth. Of all the 20 temples around Alexandria that she studied, Martinez says, “no other site, building or temple combines as many conditions as the temple of Taposiris Magna.”

In 2004, Martinez presented her theory to Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist who was Egypt’s minister of antiquities at the time. Her project was approved a year later.

And after years of searching, Martinez feels like he’s getting closer.

Excavations have revealed that “the temple was dedicated to Isis”, which Martinez believes is another sign that a lost tomb is nearby, as well as tunnels underwater.

Now, according to Martinez, she is “at the beginning of a new path” – underwater excavations.

According to a statement released by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Egyptian coast has been hit by earthquakes for centuries, causing parts of the Taposiris Magna river to collapse and sink under the waves.

That’s where Martinez and her team are looking next. While “it’s too early to tell where these tunnels lead,” she hopes if the tunnels lead to Cleopatra, “it will be the most important discovery of the century.”