Cleopatra's curse hung over the ancient city of Taposiris Magna, 50km west of Alexandria, where excavators combed the sand last Saturday looking for her resting place with her beloved Mark Anthony. Nevine El-Aref witnessed the search Last Saturday was a very strange day. At Taposiris Magna, where the ruins of the Osiris Temple and few Graeco-Roman tombs emerge from the sand, a dozen journalists, photographers and TV cameramen gathered to witness the revelations of the latest search there carried by an Egyptian-Dominican team. At first everything seemed as normal as usual. Excavators were busy digging while workmen with their black buckets removing the sand out of the temple. At 9:30am sharp Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), who is supervising the excavations, came to the site to make the announcement and to explore a newly-discovered three- metre-deep shaft. Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, who heads the excavation mission, was also on the site. There was a sense of great excitement and anxiety as we waited to see what lay inside the shaft. By this time Hawass, in his Indiana Jones hat, was enclosed inside a red iron cage hung on an anchor which suspended him on a thick wire from an electronic engine. Hawass went downwards, and when he had almost reached the bottom he gave the order for the engine to stop as he had found subterranean water covering the bottom of the shaft. After a few moments of thought, and under the spell of his passion for archaeology, Hawass decided to take the plunge because, he said, he believed that underneath the water there would most probably be a monument or a collection of artefacts. However, when the team on top resumed their drilling, the engine refused to operate and Hawass was trapped inside the cage which swung bashing Hawass against the rough sides of the stony shaft. This went on for 20 minutes until, following several failed attempts, workmen pulled the cage out manually. "It's Cleopatra curse!" one of the workers cried out. Hawass laughed, and said that it was not the first time he had been in such a position. "I always face circumstances like this when I am up to something special," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "When I was digging inside the Valley of the Golden Mummies I got an electric shock from a lamp I was holding. The shock threw me two metres away and I hit the floor of the tomb. And an hour before my lecture at the opening of the Tutankhamun exhibition in the United States, the light of the gallery went out and the computer didn't work. "I think this wasn't the Pharaohs' curse but Hawass's curse," he said with a huge grin. He went on to say that the ancient temple site might hide the tomb of the legendary lovers Queen Cleopatra VII and Mark Anthony as it was a perfect place to hide their corpses, especially since Egypt was in a very bad political situation at the time of the war with Octavian -- later the Roman Emperor Augustine. "Searching for the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony is very exciting," Hawass said. He pointed out that his fondness for Cleopatra blossomed in his early youth, when at 16 years old he began to study Graeco-Roman archaeology in the Faculty of Art's Greek and Roman Department at the University of Alexandria. He once asked Fawzi El-Fakharani, professor of Greek and Roman archaeology, about the place that he thought might be the location of the tomb of Cleopatra. Fakharani told him at the time: "To our knowledge and information Cleopatra was buried in a tomb beside her palace, which is now submerged under the Mediterranean Sea." Hawass relates that he forgot about the issue until four years ago, when Dominican archaeologist Martinez came to pay him a visit and tried to convince him of a theory that Cleopatra and Anthony were buried in Taposiris Magna, near Alexandria. "When actually you look at such a temple and remember the Osiris myth, you will be convinced by such a theory," Hawass said. He explained that the temple was dedicated to the worship of the god Osiris, who according to ancient Egyptian myth was killed by his brother, the god Seth, who cut his corpse into 14 pieces which he spread over the Earth. Egypt has 14 temples dedicated to Osiris. Each temple is known in hieroglyphics as Per Oser, or the place of Osiris, and each contains one of these pieces. And that, according to Hawass, is why such a temple could be a perfect resting place for the legendary lovers. We know from the Greek historian Plutarch, he says, that the pair were buried together. Over the five-year-long excavations of the site, excavators have stumbled upon several objects. The most recent is a huge, headless granite statue of an as yet unidentified Ptolemaic king. The mission has also located the original gate of the temple as well as evidence revealing that the temple was built along the traditional ancient Egyptian design. The statue is very well preserved, and is was one of the most beautiful statues ever found carved according to the ancient Egyptian style as it bore the traditional shape of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh wearing a collar and kilt. "I believe that the statue may have been an image of King Ptolemy IV, the founder of the temple," Hawass suggested. Inside the temple, Hawass continued, the mission found a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis, mythical sister and wife of Osiris. The mission also located the temple's original gate on the west side of the complex along with a number of limestone foundations that once outlined the entrance. One of these foundations, Hawass says, bears traces suggesting that the entrance was outlined by a series of sphinx-shaped statues similar to those fashioned in the dynastic era. The mission began excavating at Abusir five years ago with the goal of discovering the tomb of the famous lovers Cleopatra and Anthony. According to Hawass, there is evidence to prove that Cleopatra was not buried in the tomb built for her beside the royal palace -- which now lies under the waves in the Eastern Harbour on the Mediterranean coast of Alexandria. Hawass pointed out that over its years of excavations the mission had unearthed a number of headless royal statues, which might have been destroyed during the Christian Byzantine era. A number of heads featuring Cleopatra VII were also uncovered, along with 24 metal coins bearing an image of the queen's face and one of Alexander the Great. All these objects suggest that Queen Cleopatra once built a religious chapel for her cult inside the temple of Osiris at Taposiris Magna. Outside the temple, at its back courtyard, a necropolis containing mummies from the Greek and Roman eras has been discovered. Hawass describes it as the largest ever Graeco-Roman cemetery to be found, stretching for more than half a kilometre. "Up to now the mission has succeeded in uncovering 22 rock- hewn tombs with stairs inside the necropolis," Hawass told the Weekly. He went on to explain that skulls and mummies were also unearthed inside, two of which were gilded. On the west side of the temple another cemetery was located. "Early investigations show that the mummies were buried with their heads turned towards the temple, which indicated that the temple housed the tomb of a significant royal personality," Hawass said, pointing out that if this were not so nobles would not have dug their tombs near the temple because, according to ancient Egyptian traditions, nobles always built their tomb near their kings and queens as demonstrated in the Valley of the Kings and Queens on Luxor's west bank. A radar survey carried out in the area revealed three anomalies or locations inside the temple, and it is possible that one of them could be the entrance of a tomb that goes down 20 metres below ground. "We are hoping that it could be of Queen Cleopatra and Mark Anthony," Hawass said. "But as I always say, archaeology is based on theories and here we are experiencing one of them. If we succeed in discovering such a tomb it will be the discovery of the 21st century, and if not we still unearth major objects and monuments inside and outside the temple which shed more light on the history of the era and this mythical queen." For Martinez, finding Cleopatra's tomb is a dream. She told the Weekly that her theory that Cleopatra was buried in Taposiris Magna and not inside a tomb built for her beside her temple, which is now submerged under the Mediterranean Sea, was a result of 10 years of study of Cleopatra's historical character. "I believe that it is impossible that Cleopatra was buried in her palace because of Egypt's political situation. It was not only the end of the Ptolemaic era but the end of Egypt as a free country," Martinez says. "Cleopatra could never be buried in a very obvious place [i.e. her original tomb] as she needed to be hidden in a very special place in order to preserve her corpse. To prove my theory, I first travelled to Egypt to inspect the site and then, after three months, I realised that Taposiris Magna was definitely the place of Cleopatra's lost tomb." Martinez went on to say that no one had ever come up with this idea: "If there is one per cent of a chance that the last queen of Egypt could be buried there, it is my duty to search for her," she says. "I submitted my project to the SCA Permanent Committee and I thought it would never see the light, but few months later the project was approved and I was given two months to prove my theory. But in archaeology two months is nothing," she said. "What can I do? This was my only hope," Martinez told the Weekly. "I took it and almost as the two months were about to end I found the first chamber, so the committee extended the mission's work to the next season. And from now on excavation work is continuing, and revealing more of the mystery of this place." Hawass promises that next week he will travel to Alexandria in an attempt to explore the shaft. But first the water must be pumped out of it. As for now, searching for the lost tomb of Cleopatra and her beloved Mark Anthony is still in full swing, but can the mission find the tomb of the legendary lovers who, according to Plutarch, took their lives in 30 BC after losing a power struggle between Mark Anthony and his rival Octavian, who later, as Emperor Augustus of Rome, ordered that Cleopatra be buried in a splendid and regal fashion along with Anthony? The question is, where? Could the gilded mummies recently found of a man and a woman have been the two lovers? Or perhaps the three shafts found inside the temple will reveal their tomb; or does it house more anonymous skulls and bones? Nothing is in hand, and we must wait and see what the days hold.
