Divers explore sunken ruins of Cleopatra's palace.

[Ponce]

Divers explore sunken ruins of Cleopatra's palace.

Tue May 25, 2:01 pm ET
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt – Plunging into the waters off Alexandria Tuesday, divers explored the submerged ruins of a palace and temple complex from which Cleopatra ruled, swimming over heaps of limestone blocks hammered into the sea by earthquakes and tsunamis more than 1,600 years ago.

The international team is painstakingly excavating one of the richest underwater archaeological sites in the world and retrieving stunning artifacts from the last dynasty to rule over ancient Egypt before the Roman Empire annexed it in 30 B.C.

Using advanced technology, the team is surveying ancient Alexandria's Royal Quarters, encased deep below the harbor sediment, and confirming the accuracy of descriptions of the city left by Greek geographers and historians more than 2,000 years ago.

Since the early 1990s, the topographical surveys have allowed the team, led by French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, to conquer the harbor's extremely poor visibility and excavate below the seabed. They are discovering everything from coins and everyday objects to colossal granite statues of Egypt's rulers and sunken temples dedicated to their gods.

"It's a unique site in the world," said Goddio, who has spent two decades searching for shipwrecks and lost cities below the seas.

Click the image to see photos of the excavation of Cleopatra's sunken temple

AP

The finds from along the Egyptian coast will go on display at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute from June 5 to Jan. 2 in an exhibition titled "Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt." The exhibition will tour several other North American cities.

Many archaeological sites have been destroyed by man, with statues cut or smashed to pieces. Alexandria's Royal Quarters — ports, a cape and islands full of temples, palaces and military outposts — simply slid into the sea after cataclysmic earthquakes in the fourth and eighth centuries. Goddio's team found it in 1996. Many of its treasures are completely intact, wrapped in sediment protecting them from the saltwater.

"It's as it was when it sank," said Ashraf Abdel-Raouf of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who is part of the team.

Tuesday's dive explored the sprawling palace and temple complex where Cleopatra, the last of Egypt's Greek-speaking Ptolemaic rulers, seduced the Roman general Mark Antony before they committed suicide upon their defeat by Octavian, the future Roman Emperor Augustus.

Dives have taken Goddio and his team to some of the key scenes in the dramatic lives of the couple, including the Timonium, commissioned by Antony after his defeat as a place where he could retreat from the world, though he killed himself before it was completed.

They also found a colossal stone head believed to be of Caesarion, son of Cleopatra and previous lover Julius Caesar, and two sphinxes, one of them probably representing Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII.

Divers photographed a section of the seabed cleared of sediment with a powerful suction device. Their flashlights glowing in the green murk, the divers photographed ruins from a temple to Isis near Cleopatra's palace on the submerged island of Antirhodos.

Among the massive limestone blocks toppled in the fourth century was a huge quartzite block with an engraving of a pharaoh. An inscription indicates it depicts Seti I, father of Ramses II.

"We've found many pharaonic objects that were brought from Heliopolis, in what is now Cairo," said Abdel-Raouf. "So, the Ptolemaic rulers re-used pharonic objects to construct their buildings."

On the boat's deck, researchers displayed some small recent finds: imported ceramics and local copies, a statuette of a pharaoh, bronze ritual vessels, amulets barely bigger than a fingernail, and small lead vessels tossed by the poor into the water or buried in the ground as devotions to gods.

Alexandria's Eastern Harbor was abandoned after another earthquake, in the eighth century, and was left untouched as an open bay — apart from two 20th century breakwaters — while modern port construction went ahead in the Western Harbor. That has left the ancient Portus Magnus undisturbed below.

"We have this as an open field for archaeology," Goddio said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100525/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_egypt_sunken_treasures_2

[keehah]

A less Disney way to explain history... ;D

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/cleopatra/rixens.html

Cassius Dio relates that, after the defeat at Actium (31 BC), Cleopatra hurriedly returned to Egypt to forestall any revolt. Once safely there, she had those who now rejoiced at her disaster killed and "proceeded to gather vast wealth from their estates and from various other sources both profane and sacred, sparing not even the most holy shrines" (LI.5.5ff). Her son Caesarion, with a portion of the royal treasury, was sent up the Nile, with the intention that he cross overland by way of Ethiopia and sail on to India. But he was captured while deliberating whether to return and was executed (LI.15.5; Cleopatra, hereself, was to have followed but her ships were burned at the instigation of the Romans). To gain time, emissaries were sent with entreaties that her children be allowed to succeed to the throne, and from Antony that he was willing to retire to private life or even prepared to kill himself if it would save the queen. The accompanying bribes were retained but the replies evasive. (The lives of Cleopatra's three children by Antony were spared, however; and Cleopatra Selene even allowed to marry the son of Juba, king of Numidia.)

Even so, Octavian was concerned that, despairing of being pardoned, they both "might destroy their wealth, which he kept hearing was of vast extent; for Cleopatra had collected it all in her tomb which she was constructing in the royal grounds, and she threatened to burn it all up with her in case she should fail of even the slightest of her demands" (LI.8.5-6). Without this treasure, his soldiers could not be paid. Privately, therefore, he intimated to Cleopatra of pardon and even of love, so that "by this means at least...she would make away with Antony and keep herself and her money unharmed" (LI.8.7).

On August 1, 30 BC, Antony confronted Octavian, but his fleet and cavalry surrendered without a fight, and the infantry was defeated. Cleopatra fled to her mausoleum and sealed herself and her treasure inside, accompanied only by her maidservants Iras and Charmion (and, says Dio, a eunuch). A message then was sent to Antony that she had committed suicide, perhaps to prompt him to do the same (and so curry favor with Octavian). This he did, but the wound was not immediately fatal and, hearing that Cleopatra was alive, he was taken to her, being hoisted through an upper-story window and dying there in her chamber on August 10.

Soon, Octavian sent a member of his staff to the queen, "bidding him, if possible, above all things to get Cleopatra into his power alive; for he was fearful about the treasures in her funeral pyre, and he thought it would add greatly to the glory of his triumph if she were led in the procession" (Plutarch, Antony, LXXVIII.3; also Dio, LI.11.3). By a ruse, Cleopatra was taken but, dispirited at the death of Antony and her own capture, she fell ill (says Plutarch) and was moved to the palace.

Octavian now confronted a problem. Although said to have wanted to parade Cleopatra at his triumph (Dio, LI.13.1; Plutarch, LXXVIII.3), he may have remembered that the appearance of her younger half-sister Arsinoë in chains at the triumph of Caesar had "aroused very great pity" (Dio, XLIII.19). Too, such a display might not reflect well on Caesar, himself, who had placed a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix (Dio, LI.22.3; Appian, II.102). Nor could she be allowed to live or Octavian be seen as responsible for her death. Some dissembling, therefore, must have taken place on both sides: Octavian inviting Cleopatra to return to Rome and Cleopatra pretending that she would go (cf. Dio, LI.13). Instead, the queen may have been given an opportunity simply to die by her own hand, and this she did on August 12, wearing her most beautiful garments, her body arrayed on a golden couch and the emblems of royalty in her hands.

Although Cleopatra poisoned herself, no-one knew quite how. Dio says that the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm (LI.14.1). Some thought that they might be the bite of an asp, which had been hidden in a basket of figs or a water jar (although no snake was found), or a scratch to which poison was applied from a pin used to fasten her hair or hidden in a hollow comb. The bite of a snake would seem more likely (how else to account for the deaths of the two handmaidens) and was the version favored by Octavian. That, at least, is how Cleopatra was depicted in his triumphal procession, with an asp clinging to her image (Plutarch, LXXXVI.3; cf. Dio, LI.21.8, "an effigy of the dead Cleopatra upon a couch was carried by, so that in a way she, too,...was a part of the spectacle and a trophy in the procession")...

It is only the Greeks who posit an alternative explanation for the death of Cleopatra. Strabo is the earliest source for her suicide and even may have been in Alexandria at the time. (Plutarch wrote more than a century after the events he describes, Dio, a century later still, although his source probably was a history by Olympus, Cleopatra's personal physician, whom he mentions, LXXXII.2; also Plutarch, LXXXII.2.) He is of two minds: whether it was "by the bite of an asp or (for two accounts are given) by applying a poisonous ointment "(XVII.10). Galen, writing in the second century, says in De Theriaca ad Pisonem (CCXXXVII) that she broke the skin by deeply biting her own arm. Roman authors continued to insist that the death of the queen was by snake bite. Suetonius, a contemporary of Plutarch, indicates in his Life of Augustus that she died from the bite of an asp, the poison of which Octavian had tried to have sucked from the wound by the Psylli, snake charmers from North Africa famous for that ability (XVII.4). Florus, a younger contemporary, has Cleopatra, dressed in her finest raiment, apply two serpents (II.21.11).

Shakespeare, too, has the queen bitten by two snakes, once on the breast: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,/That sucks the nurse asleep?" (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.), a tradition in popular culture that has replaced her being bitten on the arm, assuming that she was bitten at all and by how many snakes.

"The truth of the matter no one knows" (Plutarch, LXXXVI.2).