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Tonight, a 2,000-year-old mystery

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that's confounded top archaeologists,

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the world's most famous queen lost without a trace.

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Cleopatra is a giant in Egyptian history,

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renowned for her cunning across a 21-year rule,

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but no one knows what happens to her after she dies

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or where she's buried.

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This kicks off an incredible mystery

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that lasts to this day.

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Now, we reveal the top theories

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surrounding the final resting place of Egypt's last pharaoh.

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The last place we know where Cleopatra was

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when she was alive was her palace.

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If we can find Mark Antony,

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we could potentially find Cleopatra.

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Octavian has her killed,

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and either he dumped her body

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or he left her where she lay in her mausoleum.

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Can new evidence finally uncover Cleopatra's missing tomb?

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November 2022.

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In the ancient Egyptian city of Tapasiris Magna,

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Kathleen Martinez has been excavating a ruined temple

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for the past 17 years.

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Martinez is actually a really formidable woman,

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and she's a lawyer by training.

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She's not an archaeologist of any kind,

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but she has this passion,

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and so in 2002, using her own funds,

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she decides to take herself out to Egypt

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to explore what's there in Tapasiris Magna.

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She collaborates with Egypt's most famous archaeologist,

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Dr. Zahi Hawass,

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because Kathleen believes that at the site of Tapasiris Magna

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is the lost tomb of the famous Egyptian queen, Cleopatra.

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It could be a major new lead in a cold case

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that goes back thousands of years.

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Cleopatra is one of the most powerful women

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ever to come out of the ancient Mediterranean world.

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She ruled Egypt for 21 years,

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from 51 to 30 BC.

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When Cleopatra's 18 years old,

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her father, King Ptolemy XII, Alatez, dies.

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And Cleopatra then sort of ascends to the throne,

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but because she's a woman, she can't do it alone.

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So her brother is made co-region.

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The thing about her brother, however, is that he's only 10 years old.

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Before long, a rivalry ensues,

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and those aligned with Cleopatra's younger brother

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seek to dethrone her.

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But Cleopatra devises a clever way to stay in power.

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She allies herself with Rome.

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Cleopatra has two significant relationships in her life,

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both of which are strategic partnerships to keep her on the throne.

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One is a partnership with the great Julius Caesar.

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He helps her shore up her power,

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and with him, she supposedly has a son named Caesarean.

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The second, Caesar's top general, Mark Antony.

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In 43 BC, he becomes part of a new Roman power structure

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created after Caesar's assassination.

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Rome comes to be ruled by what's called a triumvirate.

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This is actually a group of three men,

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Mark Antony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian.

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Wisely, she begins a strategic relationship with Mark Antony,

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who promises to support her rule.

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Their romance becomes the stuff of movie lore.

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Eventually, Mark Antony is so smitten with Cleopatra

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that he leaves his wife, moves to Alexandria,

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and stays with Cleopatra.

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Unfortunately for Cleopatra,

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this ends up having the opposite effect of what she intended,

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because instead of really getting the support of Rome,

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she's got Mark Antony earning the enmity of everybody back in Rome

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for leaving his wife, Octavia,

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who was actually Octavian's sister.

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So Octavian is furious and declares war

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against Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

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After nearly three years of fighting in 31 BC,

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Octavian's forces defeat Antony and Cleopatra's armies

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and march on Alexandria.

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As the fighting grows ever closer,

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Cleopatra retreats into a mausoleum in her palace.

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The rest is the stuff of Shakespearean lore.

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Mark Antony, who's out fighting on the front,

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gets a message from one of Cleopatra's servants.

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When he opens it, he's horrified to find out that Cleopatra is dead,

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that she's killed herself.

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Upon hearing the news,

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Mark Antony attempts to kill himself by falling on his own sword,

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but he fails to take his life.

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Instead, a mortally wounded Antony is brought to Cleopatra's chambers.

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It turns out she hasn't killed herself at all.

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At this time, Antony had become more of a liability than an asset to Cleopatra.

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He had no more power in Rome.

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She actually asked one of her servants to go to Mark Antony

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and give this message to try to scare him into surrendering

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in the hopes that maybe that would help keep him alive.

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Tragically, Antony dies shortly after this.

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Cleopatra leaves her tomb, goes back to the palace,

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meets with Octavian with negotiations about her future.

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Cleopatra's aspirations is for Caesarean her son to become the king or the ruler of Egypt.

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Rome doesn't have kings, but at least he could be the legitimate heir of Julius Caesar

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and the ruler of Rome as well.

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Octavian says he will spare her and her children,

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but he will never allow the succession.

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Cleopatra takes herself back to her palace, to her mausoleum,

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considers this deal, and ultimately decides that she has nothing left to live for,

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and she takes her own life.

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Octavian goes on to become Rome's first emperor,

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and Cleopatra will die as the last active ruler of the Kingdom of Egypt.

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Early historians tell us the method of Cleopatra's death is poison,

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but in those histories, her story ends there.

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This was a time of civil war, this is a time of occupation of Egypt,

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and a lot of stuff has been lost over time.

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This kicks off an incredible mystery that lasts to this day.

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No one knows what happens to her after she dies or where she's buried.

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With such limited information, where should the search for Cleopatra's remains begin?

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Cleopatra has a mausoleum and tomb under construction in her palace when she dies,

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so it makes sense that the tomb should be the first place that we look.

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The challenge is, the tomb is missing.

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But in 1996, a French archaeologist makes a breakthrough.

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Frank Godio is one of the fathers of underwater archaeology.

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He primarily focuses on finding ancient shipwrecks and also sunken cities.

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Godio comes up with a theory as to the location of Cleopatra's palace.

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He believes that it lies due east of the modern city of Alexandria,

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and the reason why we haven't found it is because it's underwater.

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According to Godio's research, the landscape of this region has changed dramatically since Cleopatra's time.

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Frank Godio reads the ancient sources, and he learns from them that in 365 AD,

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so about 400 years after Cleopatra, there was a massive earthquake that hit Alexandria,

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followed by a tsunami.

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It did a tremendous amount of damage.

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Most of the ancient city at that point was destroyed.

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This tidal wave is so massive that it flings ships over houses and kills over 50,000 people.

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And Godio thinks that might be what ultimately covers Alexandria and hides Cleopatra's palace.

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To prove this, Godio begins his search in the waters of modern-day Alexandria's eastern seaport.

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Godio and his team start by doing high-tech scans, ultimately wanting to create a master map of the seafloor surface.

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They start to see the outlines of columns, porticoes, buildings, even statues.

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The team is able to compare the written sources with the archaeological mapping,

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and they start to see correlations. So they know from this that they're on the right track.

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It takes years to complete the first initial map.

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They are doing this underwater, and it is so much more difficult than doing archaeology on the land.

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But once they have this master map, things start to go much quicker.

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In 1998, Godio strikes Pater. He finds the sunken remains of Cleopatra's palace.

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The palace has been missing for 2,000 years. This makes big international headlines.

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The thing is, the palace is entirely covered and filled with mud.

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It is very difficult to excavate and explore. They're confident that Cleopatra is there,

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but finding her is going to be extremely difficult.

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After nearly a decade of searching, Godio finds no trace of the tomb.

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In 2008, Godio discovers something new. It's an enormous structure as large as a football field.

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Godio has radiocarbon dates that he's taken from organic pieces of the structure,

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and these dates show that it could have been built during the time of Cleopatra.

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Though the team remains hopeful, they have not yet discovered the tomb.

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To this day, Godio and his team are still searching, but they have barely scratched the surface of this enormous complex.

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When Cleopatra's palace is bound underwater by archaeologist Frank Gario,

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he believes her tomb should be somewhere inside.

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The last place we know Cleopatra was when she was alive is her palace.

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And that was just discovered underwater in 1998.

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However, not everyone's convinced Godio will find the tomb.

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First of all, underwater exploration is incredibly difficult.

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Secondly, we believe her tomb wasn't finished when she died,

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so the artifacts, relics, statues, and other signs that would lead us there, they weren't put in place yet.

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But there might be another way to find Cleopatra's tomb.

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Even though he dies a traitor, many Romans are interested in what becomes of Mark Antony.

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He was, at one point, a national hero.

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And so there's a chance he'd be easier to track down.

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And if we can find Mark Antony, we could potentially find Cleopatra.

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Within a few years of Mark Antony's death, several ancient historians share more details.

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The Roman custom at the time is to cremate great leaders.

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Mark Antony is cremated, Julius Caesar is cremated, and after his death, Octavian will be cremated.

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A few decades afterward, the Greek historian Plutarch fills in even more details.

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Plutarch writes that after Mark Antony's death, Octavian has Cleopatra as his prisoner.

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But he does allow her out of clemency to go and visit Mark Antony's tomb.

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And when she's there, she holds the urn that has his ashes in it,

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and she pours out a libation as a kind of act of love and piety.

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So apparently, Mark Antony has been given a tomb for his ashes.

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According to Plutarch, after Cleopatra commits suicide,

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Octavian is similarly generous with her remains and allows her to be buried with Mark Antony.

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Mark Antony's final resting place hasn't been found either.

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So there's a chance that he and the missing Cleopatra are out there together somewhere.

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Plutarch is actually the only source that we have that says that Cleopatra after her death was placed together with Antony.

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We do have other ancient sources which talk about Octavian's clemency, his mercy and compassion towards his enemies.

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Despite all the stories of Octavian's kindness, many historians believe he didn't treat Cleopatra's body with respect at all.

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There's a saying that history is written by the victors.

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That means that authors in Octavian's time are generally going to write great things about him,

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otherwise they might suffer punishment if they upset him.

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As for the accounts of Plutarch, they were probably just embellished over time.

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Octavian himself also doctors the historical record.

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He comes up with a smear campaign against Cleopatra, labeling her an evil seductress and traitor,

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someone who used their feminine wiles to brainwash Mark Antony.

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To me, this suggests that he wouldn't have given Cleopatra a royal burial beside Mark Antony.

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Octavian's actions after Cleopatra's death also speak volumes.

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One of the last acts that Cleopatra does before she dies is she sends her son, Caesarean, away in order to protect him.

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But after her death, Octavian sends people to go and find him and have him killed.

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He actually does this by tricking Caesarean once he's been found.

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So he tells Caesarean that if he returns to Alexandra, he'll be made king of Egypt.

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But as soon as Caesarean returns home, he's killed.

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The most commonly told account says that one of Octavian's bodyguards strangles him to death.

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Keep in mind, this is by the same historians who say that Octavian was generous with Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

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This is the cleaned up version of the story.

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Octavian's actions don't stop with Caesarean's murder.

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Antony's oldest son, Antelus, is executed.

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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.

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All of this shows considerable hatred and contempt for Mark Antony in Cleopatra.

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To the new emperor, Antony is the man who left the triumvirate, who left his wife, Octavian's sister, for another woman,

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who left Rome to go and flee to Egypt.

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And Cleopatra was the foul temptress who made it all happen.

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I think the prevailing opinion among today's scholars is that if you're going to go digging around Alexandria,

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trying to find a carefully preserved urn of Cleopatra's ashes beside those of Mark Antony, you're probably wasting your time.

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Once Cleopatra was of no further value as a trophy, Octavian probably didn't care about her or Antony.

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For more than 2,000 years, the story of Cleopatra's dramatic suicide remains mostly unchallenged.

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The most famous version of this suicide comes from Virgil in the Aeneid, where he suggests that Cleopatra gets a snake to bite her.

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And that's how she dies.

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The story then gets elaborated on over the years, where some authors suggesting that the snake is actually an asp.

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Plutarch also supports this idea, and what he says is that Cleopatra has the asp smuggled into the palace in a basket,

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and it was covered over with figs and leaves so that nobody could see it coming in.

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Today, many historians doubt the snake bite story.

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The reason people have a problem with it is that at this point, Cleopatra is Octavian's prisoner and under close guard.

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Asps are large, they wriggle and hiss.

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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.

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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.

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She wouldn't have chosen a plan with so many variables.

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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 dates.

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In 2013, bestselling author and criminal profiler, Pat Brown, upends the suicide theory.

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Brown looks at Cleopatra's death like she would any other cold case, as she's been trained to do throughout her career.

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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.

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Brown's conclusion? Cleopatra's death isn't suicide, it's cold-blooded murder.

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Brown starts by taking the suicide theory at face value.

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She consults with medical examiners, with herpetologists, to understand all of the ins and outs of snake poison.

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According to the historical accounts, Cleopatra's two maid servants also die from poisoning shortly after she dies.

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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?

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The most likely poisonous snakes that were around during this time in Egypt were the cobra and the asp.

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Although both snakes have enough venom in them to kill multiple people, most of the venom is actually discharged in their very first bite.

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And after that, it takes a little while for them to sort of recharge and reload.

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Fully replenishing their venom can take a snake days.

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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.

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There's another timing issue as well. The amount of time it takes for the snake bite to kill someone.

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Brown points out that in the hours before Cleopatra's death, she's exchanging messages with Octavian.

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Guards and messengers are going in and out, and dying from a snake bite takes hours, and it's agonizing.

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So we're saying that nobody noticed this agonizing death over several hours?

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According to Brown, the outcome would be the same even if poison was smuggled in via a bottle.

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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.

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Once Brown rules out suicide, she turns her attention to murder.

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As Brown in any good criminal profiler knows, murder requires motive. And who had the most to gain from Cleopatra's death?

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Octavian. Some people believe that Octavian would want to keep Cleopatra alive, to display her as a conquer trophy through the streets of Rome.

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He displays the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony exactly in this way.

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But according to Brown, Octavian has a stronger motive to kill Cleopatra than to keep her alive.

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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.

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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.

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One year after Brown's book in 2014, two Greek historians write an article that reaches the same conclusion.

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Gregory Sucalus and Marcos Scansos publish The Death of Cleopatra, Suicide by Snakebite, or Poisoned by Her Enemies.

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In it, they propose that Egypt's last queen was in fact murdered by Octavian.

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Sucalus and Scantos say that all the circumstances point to Cleopatra being killed by a Roman poison. And that means murder.

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Like all military leaders of the time, Octavian actually travels with physicians, and physicians are trained in poisons.

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The Romans specialize in a poison that's a mixture of hemlock, opium, and akinite.

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This poison induces a deep sleep, resulting in coma, then death.

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According to Sucalus and Scantos, 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.

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Then what happened to Cleopatra's body?

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If this is the case, there is no two.

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Octavian is just kind of trying to move on from the whole Cleopatra situation.

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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.

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If he's smart enough to do that, then he's smart enough to not build her a tomb.

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The last thing he needs is a permanent marker of a once-beloved queen for people to pilgrimage to and make offerings to.

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So unfortunately, if you subscribe to this theory, the search for Cleopatra's lost tomb is pointless.

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Because Octavian covered his tracks.

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Egypt's last pharaoh never gets a tomb.

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Her body was destroyed, dumped, and forgotten.

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For thousands of years, Cleopatra's story has been entwined with her relationship with Rome's most powerful men.

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But in 2010, an American archaeologist finds evidence that upends that notion and offers a new theory about her final days.

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In 2010, Ohio State University professor Dwayne Roller publishes Cleopatra, a biography.

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The real Cleopatra is notoriously difficult to grasp.

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Roller's book is one of the best researched accounts of Cleopatra around.

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In addition to being an archaeologist, Roller is a classicist.

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He can read all of the original accounts in their original Greek and Latin.

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Based on an exhaustive search through the historical record, he believes that a great deal about Cleopatra has been misunderstood.

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And perhaps this can explain what happens to her after she dies.

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First of all, Roller is convinced that Cleopatra is not subservient to her Roman lovers or even to Rome at all.

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According to Roller, she carefully manipulates them to keep her kingdom intact.

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When Cleopatra came to the throne, she had three surviving siblings who did not get along.

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There's all kind of sibling rivalry.

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Cleopatra's agent is probably about to be split in three parts until she convinces Julius Caesar to help.

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She does this in a rather ingenious way.

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Roman sources tell us that she has herself wrapped in a carpet and smuggled in to Caesar's quarters.

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When he unrolls this mysterious gift, there she is in all her regal finery, ready to negotiate a deal to save Egypt.

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After Caesar's death, Cleopatra carefully researches his successors.

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When Anthony comes to the east, she very quickly realizes he is a person to be cultivated.

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She learns that Mark Anthony believes himself to be the embodiment of the Greek god Dionysus.

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And so she hatches a clever plan to earn his favor.

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Dionysus is the god of wine and pleasure.

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A fact Cleopatra uses to her advantage when she first meets Anthony in 41 BC.

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Knowing his Dionysus fetish, she arrives dressed up as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, being fan by attendance dressed as cupids.

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Almost immediately, Anthony is willing to do just about anything Cleopatra asks of him.

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While these stories show cunning on Cleopatra's part, they suggest that her main tool for manipulation was sex.

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But Roller believes that that was not the case.

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Instead, Roller believes Cleopatra uses her negotiation skills to survive.

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Despite being a smaller kingdom with a less powerful military, Egypt had a lot more money than Rome.

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Cleopatra, as it turns out, was phenomenally wealthy.

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I believe it's her wealth and not her sexual prowess that ultimately dictates how Cleopatra lived and how she died.

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Roller examines the work of the Roman historian Cassius Dio.

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In it, he discovers that Mark Anthony initially comes to Cleopatra because he needs her financial support to pay off Rome's armies and debts.

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According to Dio, Cleopatra and Anthony had a financial relationship and who knows whether it was all that he needed,

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but it certainly helped to sustain him financially, especially as sources began to dry up in Rome.

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When Octavian defeats Anthony in 30 BC, he intends to seize Cleopatra's treasure, but she has other plans.

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Roller finds evidence that in those final days, Cleopatra takes action.

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She isn't about to let Octavian get the upper hand. She still has one final play to make.

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Cleopatra has her servants gather up her wealth, everything they can grab,

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and she has them amass it in the safest place she knows, her own mausoleum.

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The rest she orders hidden.

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When Octavian's forces arrive inside, she dramatically holds up a torch and threatens to kill herself and take all the treasure with her.

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If this is true, this is an ingenious move.

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Cleopatra knows the only thing Octavia needs from her is her money, and she can use that as a bargaining tool.

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According to Roller's research, Cleopatra begins an extended negotiation with Octavian.

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She offers to support him and give over her treasure if he agrees to meet certain conditions.

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Here, she is holding her wealth hostage and giving herself time to make other plans.

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Among those plans, she finds a way to smuggle her son out of town.

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Next, she has to make plans for herself.

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Roller cites the account of the Roman historian Titus Livius.

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In one of Cleopatra's final exchanges with Octavian, she writes,

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I will not be led in triumph.

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This is one of the few times any historian bothers to write her specific words down,

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and it gives us a clue as to what she intended next.

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Roller writes that Cleopatra then orchestrates her own death by poisoning,

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which takes place in August of 30 BC.

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If she's planned this out down to the last detail, many historians believe that she made one final arrangement.

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And that explains why her tomb has yet to be found.

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Upon her death, Cleopatra orders her body smuggled out of the palace and buried in an unmarked grave.

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This way, her enemies will never find her.

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Is it possible she pulled this off to have her body smuggled out of a palace swarming with Roman soldiers?

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I think the answer is yes.

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Cleopatra had so much wealth, she could have bribed every Roman in the palace.

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This is how she could have made arrangements for her secret burial.

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If Cleopatra was successful, where is her tomb?

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So if this is the case, and Cleopatra made her own funeral arrangements,

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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.

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This would mean Cleopatra didn't end up in Alexandria at all.

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Now we have a whole new world of possibilities to explore.

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In 2002, Dominican attorney Kathleen Martinez sets out to find Cleopatra's lost tomb.

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Ever since she was a young child, Martinez has been fascinated with Egypt.

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Her family encouraged the law career, but eventually she gives it all up to become an archaeologist in Egypt.

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The one mystery that she wants to solve beyond anything else is the mystery of Cleopatra's tomb.

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Like many modern-day historians, she respects and admires Cleopatra as a brilliant queen,

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and she can't imagine that a queen would have allowed herself to be desecrated after death.

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Martinez believes that Cleopatra is way too smart not to have seen her own death coming.

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She knows that Octavian is either going to have her executed or use her as a puppet by parading her around.

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So she plans for her death and has her handmaidens smuggle her body out of Alexandria.

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But where do you look? Martinez believes that she has the answer.

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Like many pharaohs, Cleopatra shapes her image around one of the Egyptian gods.

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During her reign, Cleopatra considers herself a living representation of Isis,

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a goddess of fertility and motherhood and wife to the god-king Osiris.

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If Cleopatra was able to choose her own resting place, Martinez is confident it would have been a temple of Isis or Osiris.

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The problem is, there are a lot of temples dedicated to both Isis and Osiris.

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To locate the right one, Dr. Martinez relies on Greek geographer Strabo's descriptions of ancient Egypt.

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Based on Strabo's writing, Martinez locates 21 temples associated with Osiris and Isis.

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She looks at these 21 locations and realizes that almost all of them have already been thoroughly explored.

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All except one, the temple at the ancient ruins of Tapasiris magna.

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Looking at the scant historical records, Martinez believes it's only been lightly surveyed and it's only 30 miles from Alexandria.

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This must be the place.

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Martinez gets in touch with Egypt's chief archaeologist and called Zahi Hawas, who agrees to show her around Tapasiris magna.

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From the moment she arrives, she feels certain that the great queen Cleopatra is here.

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In order to excavate the site, Dr. Martinez needs permission from the Egyptian government.

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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?

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But Martinez persists and she agrees to fund the venture entirely on her own.

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Finally, they do grant her a license, the first ever given to a Latin American expedition.

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There's just one catch. The license is only good for eight weeks.

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Anyone who knows anything about archaeological digs knows that this is an impossible challenge.

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Excavations are a slow and tedious process.

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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.

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So an eight-week deadline to excavate an entire site really limits what you're able to do.

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Undeterred, Martinez and her team start digging at Tapasiris magna in 2004.

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The clock is ticking down. For seven whole weeks, Martinez finds absolutely nothing.

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And then, almost like something out of a movie, on the last day of the dig, Martinez discovers what looks to be a hidden shaft by the north gate of the temple.

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Inside the shaft, she discovers two secret chambers.

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And in those chambers, Martinez finds something important.

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These are small gray tablets with Greek inscriptions.

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The tablets Martinez finds are called foundation deposits.

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During constructions of the time, tablets like that were left behind to give information on the construction of the building.

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When Martinez cleans the tablets and reads the Greek, she learns that the Tapasiris magna complex was built by Ptolemy IV.

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Cleopatra's great, great, great grandfather.

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Initially, people thought Martinez's theory was far-fetched.

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They believed that no one was digging at Tapasiris magna because there was nothing to find.

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Now, Martinez has found something.

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The Egyptian government allows Martinez to extend the dig.

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Energized by their find, the team brings in new technology.

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In 2008, Martinez and her team bring in ground-penetrating radar, and they're quickly able to ascertain that there are a whole series of tunnels underneath Tapasiris magna, about 68 feet beneath the surface.

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And just below these corridors, they find something that just makes their jaws drop.

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In 2008, archaeologist Kathleen Martinez and her team are exploring the ruins of the Egyptian temple of Tapasiris magna.

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They're looking for Cleopatra's tomb.

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As they sweep the area with ground-penetrating radar, they suddenly see what appears to be a network of underground corridors.

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And these corridors lead to multiple chambers.

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Martinez believes that these are burial chambers.

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Martinez is not about to miss this discovery.

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She's going in herself.

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She has her team lower her down into the tunnels themselves.

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From there, she enters into one of the chambers, and she finds the head of a statue.

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And can you believe it? It's Cleopatra.

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She also finds a mask that resembles Mark Antony.

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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.

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Next, Martinez and her team uncover hundreds of bronze coins.

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These coins bear the image of Cleopatra. So obviously, they're from the time of Cleopatra.

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They also suggest that this is a place of pilgrimage for Egyptians who left those coins.

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With each of these discoveries, the team becomes increasingly convinced that they're going to find the tomb of Cleopatra.

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But just as Martinez believes she's on the verge of a major breakthrough, unrest in North Africa brings her progress to a halt.

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Democracy, democracy, not a slave in liberty!

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It's complete chaos in the Arab world. You have Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi, who is deposed and also murdered.

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And then in 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is overthrown.

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With all of Egypt in turmoil, Dr. Martinez has no choice but to suspend her dig.

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This is a worst-case scenario for Martinez because once an expedition is suspended, there is no guarantee that it will ever start up again.

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Fortunately, in 2014, stability returns.

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The project is able to start again and they discover new artifacts, more of a link to Cleopatra herself, but no tomb.

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Martinez doesn't give up. In 2021, she finds 16 more burial chambers with many skeletons and mummies.

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Two of these mummies are incredibly special because they appear to be royalty and buried side by side like lovers.

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One of them is adorned with a crown that's decorated with horns.

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The other has gilded decorations that look like a wide necklace.

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Most importantly, the two mummies have golden tongues nestled in their jawbones.

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Golden tongues are a very important part of ancient Egyptian culture.

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In the Book of the Dead, gold tongues ensure that the deceased will be able to speak, eat, and drink in the afterlife.

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A crown, golden tongues, gilded decorations, this was obviously the tomb of no ordinary couple.

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Could these possibly be the mummified bodies of Anthony and Cleopatra?

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The mummies are eventually x-rayed and while it is found that they are male and female, no further identification can be made.

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Martinez concludes that while the mummies are promising, if this really was the tomb of Cleopatra, it would probably be much grander.

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But who knows, if Cleopatra and Anthony had to be smuggled out at the last minute, maybe the tomb wouldn't be so grand.

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A year later, Dr. Martinez's team makes an even more exciting discovery.

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Recently in 2022, Martinez's team found a long tunnel 60 feet underground.

422
00:39:34,000 --> 00:39:40,000
The tunnel is attached to a newly found temple of Isis that's part of the complex.

423
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:46,000
This is where Martinez believes that Cleopatra and possibly Anthony are both buried.

424
00:39:46,000 --> 00:39:57,000
If Cleopatra does in fact have a tomb, I think Martinez really is looking in the right direction and what she has produced so far only strengthens her theory

425
00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:00,000
that she is looking in the right place.

426
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:05,000
I think that this is a possibility, although there are a lot of possibilities out there.

427
00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:14,000
No matter what, the investigations at Tapasiris Magna will give us more information than we had before.

428
00:40:14,000 --> 00:40:21,000
And it looks like it'll give us more information on the time of Cleopatra and hopefully Cleopatra herself.

429
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:30,000
In the hunt for Cleopatra, Kathleen Martinez may have her work cut out for her.

430
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:36,000
The new section she's exploring at Tapasiris Magna is mostly underwater.

431
00:40:36,000 --> 00:40:43,000
Undeterred, Martinez calls this phase of her day, quote, the beginning of a new journey.

432
00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:47,000
Only time will tell if she's on the right track.

433
00:40:47,000 --> 00:40:52,000
I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.