Original subtitles

Egypt,

a land of ancient treasures and hidden secrets.

Of all it's kings and queens, one is still cloaked in mystery -

Cleopatra.

Lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony

and, at one time, the most powerful woman in the world.

But evidence of Egypt's last queen has all but vanished from history.

Now, that's about to change.

A maverick archaeologist has discovered a long lost temple

that played a crucial role in her reign.

Are you ready to risk your life for Cleopatra?

She's unearthed stunning artefacts...

Don't tell me where the snakes are!

..mysterious underground tunnels...

..and even a vast city of the dead.

It's a wonderful necropolis.

Look at that! They're fabulous.

Finds that are helping to transform our understanding of this enigmatic queen.

She was a mother, she was a wife, she was a queen, she was a goddess.

Even more exciting, she's discovered hidden subterranean chambers.

I can confirm to you something, that somebody's hiding something.

And in the biggest breakthrough in the search for Cleopatra,

she may even have found the final resting place of Egypt's last queen.

It's a huge opening cut into the bedrock.

When you do see them, they are the shafts that lead to tombs.

You are a goddess, Cleopatra.

Everything is permitted to a goddess.

2,000 years after her death,

the legendary Queen of Egypt still fascinates us.

Cleopatra's a pivotal figure in Egyptian history.

She comes from a background of the most turbulent,

dramatic, soap operatic royal family there's ever been.

Suns go down and may return, but once put out our own brief light...

The Cleopatra we think we know is the Hollywood version.

An intruder! A man!

And arch seductress, memorably portrayed by Liz Taylor,

seen here seducing the mighty Julius Caesar.

I summoned to you yesterday to an audience in my throne room.

I was told I was not permitted to go there.

But after her alliance with the Roman Empire went sour,

she famously committed suicide.

But the real Cleopatra remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Inevitably, you end up with more myth than history.

Today, barely any traces of Cleopatra survive

and the greatest mystery of all is still unsolved...

..where she's buried.

The truth is, we don't exactly know what happened,

either around the time of her death,

or what happened to her body afterwards.

But now there's a new twist in the story of Cleopatra

and it comes from a surprising source.

Kathleen Martinez is a criminal lawyer from the Dominican Republic.

But for the last 20 years,

she's used her courtroom experience to turn Cleopatra detective.

I don't think 100% as an archaeologist

because my first training is as a criminal lawyer,

so I took Cleopatra as a case.

Kathleen has had a lifelong fascination with Egypt's last queen.

She believes that there's more to Cleopatra's life,

and what happened after her death, than the legend lets on.

Her obsession took to Alexandria in northern Egypt.

It was believed to be the site of Cleopatra's ancient capital...

..but that city sank beneath the waves more than 1,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have found her palace here

and many believe her tomb must lie here, too.

But Kathleen has a radical new theory

about where the queen was laid to rest.

In 31 BC, the Roman Navy defeated Cleopatra and her lover, Mark Antony,

at the Battle of Actium.

Fleeing to Egypt, they both committed suicide.

Kathleen believes that Cleopatra's suicide was

part of a premeditated plan,

designed to prevent her body falling into the hands of the vengeful Romans.

When I study carefully the last days of Cleopatra,

I realised it was the beginning of a religious act...

..that might end up with her being buried in a temple

and her lost tomb could be found there.

Kathleen believes that Cleopatra was a strategist, who devised a plan

for her body to be buried in secret, far from Roman eyes,

beneath a sacred temple.

After studying ancient texts,

she investigated 21 possible burial sites...

..but only one of them jumped out at her -

Taposiris Magna.

A ruined temple complex 40km west of Alexandria.

Kathleen suspected that this pile of ancient rubble dated back

to the time of Cleopatra's family, the Ptolemys,

but no-one had been able to prove it.

This is not a site that would have piqued the interest

of the archaeological community particularly.

Any connection between the site Cleopatra, this was news to me.

Over the last century, several archaeological teams have dug here

and found little of interest.

But could Kathleen's hunch be right?

Could this be the site of the lost tomb?

My first reaction when I entered the temple was to laugh

because I knew I was in the right place.

Unusually, the walls enclosing the site bear no inscriptions...

..nothing to link it to any specific time or dynasty in Egyptian history.

The most accepted idea about this temple, it was never finished.

All the scholars believe it never functioned as a temple

and I believe they were wrong.

Experts have written off Taposiris Magna as unfinished and unimportant.

Kathleen was determined to prove that it was more

than just an ancient building site.

Nobody ever came to this site with a clear idea of what

they were searching for.

Most archaeologists were dismissive of the theories

of this self-trained novice.

I think Kathleen's ideas come across as very

sensationalist in the absence of anything really scientific.

There was a lot of scepticism about her work.

It's as though she'd ghosted in from nowhere.

But the sheer scale of the site, and its proximity to Cleopatra's

ancient capital, convinced Kathleen she was on the right track.

If she could find the tomb of Cleopatra, there's no telling

what secrets would be revealed of the Queen's life and eventual death.

What people know about Cleopatra is what we have seen in the movies.

She was a musician, she studied medicine, she wrote about law.

There's so many qualities

and she did so much in a time when women were so restricted.

While Roman poets dismissed Cleopatra as a manipulative temptress,

medieval Arab writers paint her in a very different light,

as a philosopher, scientist and astute political leader.

It's a view that's gained ground amongst scholars in recent years

and Kathleen is not the only one on Cleopatra's tail.

Historian Dorothy Thompson has unearthed fresh insights

about her reign from a handful of surviving ancient documents.

My interest is in the queen actually in Egypt...

..not the queen who's constructed for us by others,

not the mirage of the queen

but the queen we can tell from the texts.

In the Berlin Museum, fragile scraps of 2,000-year-old papyri give

a glimpse of the political control Cleopatra wielded during her reign.

This dates from 50 BC, it's from within a year

and a half of her coming to the throne,

and it says at the top, "The queen, Basileses", that's Cleopatra...

..made this royal order. "Prostac santone."

Cleopatra is concerned that the people of the capital city

should have enough to eat.

Cleopatra made the proclamation

when Egypt was under severe threat of famine,

well aware that hunger could lead to dangerous unrest.

She's making a decree,

saying that no-one who purchases corn may

take it either to the north or to the south.

Everybody must bring it to the capital city.

And anyone who disobeys this...

..is to be punished by death.

This is Cleopatra far removed from the Hollywood glitz and glamour.

This is a real politician, somebody who is aware of problems

and prepared to do something about them.

This isn't Cleopatra the seductress.

This is Cleopatra the working queen.

Before Kathleen Martinez could start her investigation at Taposiris Magna,

she had to apply to the Egyptian authorities for permission to dig.

She put her theory about Cleopatra's tomb to the

Minister of Antiquities himself.

What made me to decide actually the excavation,

because she is a very stubborn woman.

She's sure that the tomb is there.

Kathleen was given just two months to prove she was on to something.

She mounted a site survey and started her dig.

Eight weeks later, with the permit about to expire,

her team had drawn a blank.

Everybody here at the site was disappointed we didn't find anything.

We didn't even find pottery or nothing.

On the final day of the dig, in a last desperate throw of the dice,

Kathleen spread her team out across the whole site.

Not far from the north gate,

she stumbled on a mysterious depression in the ground.

We start cleaning and then, suddenly, a small hole opened

and we start removing the sand, and we found it was a shaft.

Kathleen had unearthed a hidden shaft leading deep underground.

It has holes to go down, like in ancient times.

They'd never used a ladder.

And we also studied the shape of this chamber because it's unique.

The shaft descended five metres underground

to two hidden chambers.

But what could they be for?

You can see traces of colour. It was painted.

It was an astonishing find.

A subterranean level that previous digs by professionals had overlooked.

It's possible the chambers were used for priestly rituals.

But whatever their purpose,

the find persuaded the authorities to extend Kathleen's permit.

It was the happiest day of my life.

Because of this shaft, we continue our search for Cleopatra.

Kathleen had proved there was much more to Taposiris Magna

than meets the eye.

But could it also conceal the long lost tomb of Cleopatra?

The final days and untimely death of Cleopatra, last Queen of Egypt,

are shrouded in mystery.

We don't have a clear account of what happened

when Cleopatra died because nobody at the time wrote it down.

After losing a decisive sea battle against Rome,

the rebel general Mark Antony took his own life, and his lover,

Cleopatra, prepared to follow him.

In the classic telling of the story,

she then committed suicide by

clasping a poisonous snake, an asp, to her bosom.

But what happened next is a mystery.

We simply don't know what happened to Cleopatra's body.

The events around her death are quite confused and conflicting and

they don't really give us any clear pointers as to where she was buried.

Kathleen Martinez believes she knows.

She thinks the lost tomb lies somewhere

in the sprawling ruins of Taposiris Magna.

I think if Kathleen Martinez were to find

the tomb of Cleopatra intact,

it would be a discovery on a par

with Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen.

During her second season on-site, Kathleen turned

her attention to traces of a building discovered by a previous dig.

It was thought to be a temple dedicated

to Osiris, god of the dead.

But nobody knows who built it.

There's very little left of the structure itself,

but, digging down, Kathleen made a major breakthrough.

She discovered a set of extremely rare and fragile tablets.

This is the magical moment.

I have to be very careful.

They are made of clay and semiprecious stones

like lapis lazuli and turquoise and glass.

These rare artefacts are examples of foundation deposits.

It's incredibly important,

if you can, to find that foundation deposit because that's what

gives you your information about when the temple was first built.

The inscriptions were faint, but legible.

We can see the inscriptions are not clear.

They are written in Greek,

and it refers to Vasilias Ptolemaios,

which means King Ptolemy.

The tablets mark the temple's inauguration.

Kathleen believes they were laid around 2,200 years ago

by Ptolemy IV, Cleopatra's great, great, great grandfather.

Kathleen's find stunned the world of archaeology.

She had proved a direct link between the temple site

and Cleopatra's family line.

It strengthened her conviction that

Cleopatra herself would have worshipped here.

We were already proving with archaeological evidence that

everything that was written about this temple was wrong.

But dating the Osiris temple was just the start.

A few weeks later, extending her excavation north,

Kathleen made another major find.

I continued in this direction and I found this block.

We continued cleaning, and we found the remains of a wall,

and then we opened to the north

and we found the sides of the building and it had a door.

It was a second temple, and one which appears to bear

the hallmarks of the cult of the goddess Isis.

Isis temples can have three separate rooms,

with one acting as the inner sanctuary.

It's a perfect match,

which suggests another tantalising link to Cleopatra.

To ancient Egyptians, Isis was the supreme female deity.

Isis was a really important goddess to the Egyptians.

She seemed to really resonate with ordinary people.

And Cleopatra portrayed herself as the personification of Isis on Earth.

So for Cleopatra to ally herself with this goddess,

to the point of declaring herself to be the living Isis, was a really

important matter, and I think it was something she took really seriously.

To present herself as Isis is clearly a very canny move.

It's an obvious thing for somebody

who wishes to be accepted by her people.

Where else would the living Isis choose to be buried

than beneath an Isis Temple?

Digging within the temple walls,

Kathleen unearthed what looked like a holy shrine,

and hit the jackpot.

We cleaned it inside, and inside the shrine it has around 200 coins,

some of them were in very good condition,

and we could see immediately it has Cleopatra's face.

You cannot imagine the happiness when I discovered

inside the sanctuary of Isis the face of Cleopatra in a coin.

It was beautiful Cleopatra.

At last, Kathleen was face-to-face with her heroine.

The coins suggested the temple was still in active use

at the time of Cleopatra's reign.

We believe the coins were there as an offering to the goddess Isis.

Bronze coins from Cleopatra's reign reveal a canny ruler,

keenly aware of the importance of her brand management.

Cleopatra's ancestors had only put their faces

on high value silver coins used by the rich.

But Cleopatra wanted her face seen and adored by all her subjects.

What Cleopatra did that was new was introduce her own portrait

onto this bronze, low value coinage.

And that's an important step

because it made sure her image

reached a much broader public.

Anybody conducting a day-to-day transaction with

a coin like this would be confronted with Cleopatra's image.

Cleopatra wanted to remind her whole country, rich and poor,

who was in charge.

And it wasn't just her own people she needed to keep in check,

she was also a player on the international stage.

At the Berlin Museum,

historian Dr Dorothy Thompson has studied a second ancient text,

which reveals Cleopatra trying to gain allies in Rome.

It's an agreement by the Queen that a Roman,

and this is the real interest of the text,

that a Roman is being given very significant tax concessions.

Right down at the bottom of the text is the one word, "Ginesthoi."

In English that means, "So be it." "Let it happen."

Cleopatra's seal of approval for the decree that's recorded above.

The instruction is written differently to the rest of the

document, prompting speculation as to who might have written it.

The exciting question is

is this Cleopatra's own hand that's used here?

It would be nice, wouldn't it? If she'd written that.

But we can't really be sure.

In the fourth year of Kathleen's dig, and spurred on by the discovery

of the Isis Temple, she continued the search for Cleopatra's lost tomb.

Poking around outside the temple enclosure,

she spotted some strange indentations in the ground.

When we saw the first steps going down we knew it was a shaft.

Kathleen had uncovered a shaft leading 25 metres underground.

Who would like to go inside the shaft with me?

Are you ready to risk your life for Cleopatra?

SHE LAUGHS

After clearing many tonnes of rubble from the shaft,

Kathleen prepares to venture underground.

Put your hands on the rope. OK, fine.

OK.

At the bottom she finds two secret passageways.

Her hope - that one might lead to a hidden tomb.

The tunnels had been expertly chiselled out of the bedrock -

clearly a monumental task.

Can I have the light here?

It has the steps going down.

Along the passageway she finds more vertical shafts

leading down from the surface.

So please do it carefully.

But there's no sign of a tomb.

But, amid the debris, she stumbles on more clues.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

The stone bed.

After 60 metres the passageway narrows and the team hits a dead end.

Bye!

We found marble that belongs probably to the Isis chapel.

And the pottery will help us to date

exactly when the tunnels were dug.

Even more exciting, Kathleen has also recovered some human remains.

We found... Bits of skull.

..the skulls of skeletons.

But who they were and what they were doing here is a mystery.

Skeletons.

Kathleen's excavation has so far revealed passageways

and shafts beneath Taposiris Magna stretching for 300 metres.

It all helps to reinforce her original hunch

That Cleopatra's tomb could be hidden somewhere underground.

Over the course of Cleopatra's 22-year reign, Egypt and Rome were enemies.

But, also, bedfellows.

In 48 BC, just three years after Cleopatra came to the throne,

Julius Caesar conquered Egypt.

He and the 20-year-old queen became lovers.

The young Cleopatra would go on to prove herself a clever

and talented politician...

..able to forge strong political alliances, even with her enemies.

When we think about the relationship between Julius Caesar

and Cleopatra, on the one hand we talk about seduction,

on the other hand we talk about political manoeuvring.

We can actually have both.

Rome is the biggest power in the Mediterranean,

Egypt needs someone like that to ensure that its power remains.

At the same time, Julius Caesar wants to have Egypt

in his back pocket,

because it's the bread basket of the Mediterranean.

The love affair would last four years, and even produced a son.

Caesar brought Cleopatra to Rome and showered her with gifts...

..building a temple in her honour.

But the Queen had something to give in return,

a wealth of scientific knowledge...

..including the secrets of time.

In Caesar's day, the Roman calendar was based on the phases of the moon.

But the 28-day lunar cycle meant the months and seasons drifted each year.

You didn't have a fixed number of days per year,

sometimes the whole system can get out of whack.

But Cleopatra came from a seat of great learning and knowledge.

The Egyptian calendar was based on earth's journey around the sun.

Now, Caesar embraced this idea.

By adopting the practices of the astronomers under

Cleopatra in Egypt, Julius Caesar finally had a solar cycle

system based upon the movement of the sun.

It gave Romans stability, 365 days a year,

and every fourth year, you have a leap year.

This is the modern calendar cycle.

Julius Caesar brought it to Rome, the Empire and the world.

In 44 BC Caesar's reign came to an abrupt end,

with his murder...

..and Cleopatra fled back to Egypt.

Kathleen Martinez thinks the Queen may have found solace in her temple,

at Taposiris Magna.

By 2014, after almost ten seasons' digging,

Kathleen had amassed a stunning collection of artefacts,

all dating from the time of Cleopatra's royal line.

This is one of my favourite artefacts,

the bust of this Ptolemaic queen.

So, this is a liner, to do the make-up in the eyes.

You can see it's a weight, they were selling something.

This is the bust of Alexander the Great.

This is a penis. It belonged to an Egyptian god of fertility.

The artefacts were building up a picture of an important temple site.

Then, excavating near the north door of the temple complex...

..she unearthed something intriguing,

a row of 14 curiously shaped stone plinths.

What is important about this is that all of them

has a different geometrical shape, this is unique.

So far we have uncovered 14 bases, so maybe, it could be

related to the columns itself, because they were 14 rulers of Egypt.

The Ptolemys were Cleopatra's family line.

Kathleen believes the plinths once bore statues

of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, creating a grand avenue to the temple enclosure.

That would make Taposiris Magna a highly important site,

and a fitting spot for the tomb of a queen.

And Kathleen's theory that Cleopatra is buried here

was about to get another significant boost.

In February 2015, digging in the rubble behind the plinths,

she stumbled upon something extraordinary...

a large inscribed limestone tablet or stele.

In an echo of the world-famous Rosetta Stone,

the inscription appears in both hieroglyphic and demotic,

the everyday written language of ancient Egypt.

Can you believe that this piece of block has changed

the history of Taposiris Magna?

I already named it Stele Magna.

The stele dates from seven years into the reign of Ptolemy V.

So, it predates the Rosetta Stone by two years.

The inscription proved the site was linked to the goddess Isis,

who Cleopatra claimed to embody on earth.

The decree by Ptolemy V

is the declaration of Taposiris Magna as a religious centre

for Isis, for worshipping Isis, and the land, it was considered

a sacred land and everything around the temple was used to worship Isis.

This is an important text. It shows us that this is a temple

which is very much part of the royal institution at that time.

Very much an important place, so this is not a temple which is a backwater.

This is an important spot.

The stele that Kathleen found rewrites the history books,

revealing Taposiris Magna to be the most important Ptolemaic

temple site in northern Egypt.

It's so important for the Ptolemys.

It was the most important centre of adoration of Isis in the north.

The evidence was mounting that Cleopatra herself could have

been a frequent visitor.

But is she buried here?

Kathleen decided to extend her search beyond the temple walls.

500 metres east, close to an ancient monument in the shape of a

lighthouse, she spotted unexplained sunken areas in the desert floor.

Well, we started excavating here, close between the lighthouse

and the temple.

And we uncovered the first steps.

At the foot of the steps, she discovered a set of chambers

cut deep into the bedrock.

They could be only one thing...

tombs.

We need to check these blocks, but please...

wear your mask and gloves when you go down.

Kathleen believes that if there are dead bodies down here,

it could present a biohazard.

THEY CHATTER

Let's see now.

The tombs are the first evidence of ritual burials here.

All within sight of the temple complex.

Further excavation revealed a labyrinth of ancient catacombs.

Some containing skeletons.

Others housing mummies.

We didn't know how big it was

but now we have more than 800 skeletons.

Kathleen has unearthed a huge necropolis covering

hundreds of square metres.

An ancient Egyptian city of the dead.

But who exactly is buried here?

For years,

Kathleen endured scepticism from the archaeological community.

Now the professionals were keen to see her discoveries.

Well, this looks fantastic.

Doctor Salima Ikram is an expert in ancient Egyptian burials.

Oh, my God.

Look at that, they're fabulous.

The skulls of some of the mummies Kathleen unearthed had been

encrusted with gold.

Here you've got all this gilding on them.

What you do is you coat the face with this sort of oil,

resin mixture, sometimes even with beeswax.

And that gives you a very tacky substance

and then you have these small squares of gold leaf

which you can just attach and sometimes they overlap.

The people buried here were clearly wealthy.

But gold-plating the skulls wasn't just about decoration.

During the later Ptolemaic and early Roman period,

we notice that mummification is not so well done.

So, lots of oils and unguents are poured over the body.

You have fancy wrapping, you have glittery, you know,

gold and this and that to sort of make up for the fact that

you're not quite sure as to what you're supposed to do.

Everything about the site, including the poor-quality mummification,

suggests the burials date directly from the time of Cleopatra.

It's a wonderful necropolis which is still filled with all

kinds of goodies and bodies to be found.

Being so close to the temples of Isis

and Osiris would have made it a highly auspicious burial spot.

It's a holy place, it's a sacred place, it's a

significant place, so, people wanted to be buried here.

Anyone who was buried here was definitely having a straight

shot to eternity.

The importance of the burial site convinces Kathleen that she's

Closing in on her ultimate goal, the tomb of Cleopatra herself.

Self-trained archaeologist,

Kathleen Martinez,

believes she's close to the archaeological find of the century -

the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra.

'I think, if Kathleen found the tomb of Cleopatra intact,'

she would be elevated to the status of

the most famous archaeologist in the world.

Kathleen had already discovered

a series of unexplained shafts and tunnels

underneath Taposiris Magna

and she's still convinced that it's here

that she'll find the tomb of Egypt's last queen.

But is there any evidence

that ancient Egyptians

buried their rulers beneath temple sites?

In 2014,

archaeologists at the Ramesseum,

an ancient temple complex in Southern Egypt,

found something intriguing -

a shaft leading underground

containing ritual burial items from a royal tomb.

This sensational discovery

was of a princess,

Karomama,

who was an extremely high-ranking priestess.

Karomama's tomb predates Cleopatra's reign by 900 years.

But did Cleopatra revive an ancient royal tradition -

to be buried beneath Taposiris Magna?

It's very possible Cleopatra could have been buried

in a similar shaft underneath a temple.

There are actually quite a lot of examples of high status,

royal even, individuals -

royal women, in particular -

being buried in shaft tombs

within temple complexes.

I will go down.

Close by the west gate,

Kathleen discovered a chamber

not far beneath the surface.

Inside it, the remains of a woman.

We found the skeleton of this woman

who was carrying a baby.

Analysis of the bones reveals the pregnant woman

is too young to be Cleopatra.

This woman is still a puzzle for us

because we won't know what happened to her.

The skeleton is a breakthrough.

It's the first indication that burials

did take place inside the temple.

And Kathleen's hunt was about to take a thrilling turn.

In the northwest corner of the site,

the team unearthed some steps.

They led down to a wide opening cut out of the bedrock.

We're still cleaning around

but it's ten metres by ten metres,

by nine metres.

It was very deep

and it was a big cut.

Like the tombs of the Valley of the Kings.

So we thought...

We were thrilled. "This is it."

Digging down to its base, they find a narrow shaft going deep underground.

We start cleaning the shaft.

At the depth of 23 metres,

we found two skeletons...

..and that make us feel more excited.

Kathleen dug down 35 metres

and found nothing...

..but according to Egyptologist, Chris Naunton,

a deep, wide opening like this

with a shaft at its base

usually means one thing.

The most striking feature is just its massive size.

It's a huge opening

cut into the bedrock.

You don't see those very often.

When you do see them,

they are the shafts that lead to tombs.

It's a huge breakthrough.

But with this year's digging season nearly over,

Kathleen is running out of time.

She brings in ground-penetrating radar

to probe the ground around the shaft.

Her aim -

to see if there are any chambers

hidden behind its walls.

We're trying to use Geophysical lessons

to help the people who work in archaeology

to find where is the mummy of Cleopatra.

The results are exciting.

They show two possible cavities.

The chip here reveals important cavities.

Big enough to be the final resting place of a Pharaoh.

I can confirm to you something.

That somebody is hiding something.

What is it? We don't know.

Maybe it's the mummy of Cleopatra, maybe.

Kathleen's time at Taposiris Magna is up for the year.

Further investigation of the shaft will have to wait.

But her hunch that there is more to the site than the experts suspected

has been vindicated.

She's proved the Taposiris Magna

was a temple complex of huge significance in Cleopatra's day

and found compelling evidence

there could be a burial chamber concealed deep underground.

I think Kathleen has taken us closer

to finding the tomb of Cleopatra

than we've ever been before.

An archaeologist in Egypt claimed today

to be on the verge of finding

the burial place of Cleopatra.

And now the whole world is taking notice of her quest.

He displayed artefacts found in an ancient temple near Alexandria.

It's the beginning of a journey

that will end

with a big discovery.

So far, they've uncovered a variety

of likenesses of Cleopatra.

I will never stop until I find the tomb of Cleopatra.

I feel, in my heart,

the tomb of Cleopatra

is under my feet at Taposiris Magna.

Subtitles by Ericsson