It has been nearly 100 years since Howard Carter found King Tutankhamun’s
tomb, hidden beneath the dust and detritus of past centuries in Egypt’s Valley of
the Kings.
Today, explorers around the world
continue their quests for the greatest
discoveries since the boy king, digging
for hidden tombs and the remains of lost
civilizations—underground and underwater. For years, the marine archaeologist Franck Goddio has worked with Zahi
Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s
Supreme Council of Antiquities, to excavate the remains of the life and times of
Cleopatra, one of the most mystifying
rulers who ever lived, and whose 21-year
reign was destroyed by Roman conquerors who drove her to suicide. More
than 250 of their findings make up the
exhibit, “Cleopatra: The Search for the
Last Queen of Egypt,” on display at the
Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Included in this exhibit are some
remarkable treasures, such as colos-
suses, a sphinx depicting Cleopatra’s
father and a bust of her son with Julius
Caeser, as well as perhaps the most
incredible relic of all—aside from
her body, which has yet to be found.
It’s a court order written on papyrus,
and on which Cleopatra herself wrote
“genethoi,” a Greek word meaning,
“make it happen.”
The man responsible for many of
these finds has had to contend with
murky visibility and shifting sea floors
along with disasters that occurred thou-
sands of years ago.
“Everything was destroyed by man
or catastrophe,” says Goddio, a Frenchman who for years has searched the
underwater wreckage of Alexandria,
once the capital of Egypt, in the city’s
Eastern Harbor. Earthquakes buried the
old city in the sea, and Roman invaders
destroyed every remnant of Cleopatra
they could find. Goddio’s excavations
also include the ruins of the nearby
ancient cities Canopus and Heracleion,
which turned up a trove of artifacts—
many included in the exhibit—and help
provide the most-complete portrait of
the last days of the Egyptian empire than
has ever before existed.
“We’ve all found amazing, wonderful
things,” says Eric Smith, a diver on Goddio’s crew who found the sphinx thought
to be Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII,
and helped painstakingly excavate the
colossuses that once stood at a temple
in Heracleion, believed to be the site of
Cleopatra’s coronation. Giant cranes
lifted the enormous fragments from the
Mediterranean Sea, and Goddio pieced
together perhaps the best-preserved
examples of colossuses ever found.
Underwater, individual parts were scattered on the sea floor and covered in
centuries’ worth of debris. While divers
began to locate and clean the giant red
granite stones, “you could see a picture
Left to right: A diver plunges
into Eastern Harbor with a
waterproof map in hand;
face to face with a Sphinx
thought to represent
Cleopatra’s father; and
the head of a statue of a
pharaoh being raised from
the sea.
The man
responsible for
many of these
finds has had to
contend with
murky visibility
and shifting
sea floors along
with disasters
that occurred
thousands of
years ago.
