Alexander the Great

Whatever the aim, it was another of Alexander's generals who determined the direction of the next leg of the long journey. Ptolemy, who had been made governor of Egypt, arrived with a sizable army to meet the funeral procession. In what biographer Mary Renault called "a reverent hijack," he forced it to take the overland route south toward Egypt. And though he may have appeared to be acting to fulfill Alexander's personal wish, Ptolemy had no intention of burying Alexander at Siwa. He wanted the body for his own capital of Alexandria in Egypt, the better to bring honor to his own domain. But as these events took place before a suitable mausoleum—prominently located in the center of the city—could be constructed in Alexandria, Ptolemy brought the body first to the old pharaonic capital of Memphis, where it was to remain for some years.

In Babylon, the reaction of Perdiccas was predictable: When he learned of Ptolemy's coup, he set out for Egypt with an army to punish the hijacker and recover the body. But on the way, some of his officers, bribed by Ptolemy, stabbed him to death. No other attempt was made by any of the other generals to remove Alexander's body from Egypt, and eventually it was transported to the site in Alexandria that Ptolemy had designated as the location of the future royal cemetery of the Ptolemaic line. Within a few years Ptolemy, like each of Alexander's successors, had declared himself king in his own right, and over the next three centuries Ptolemy's descendants succeeded each other. As each died he was buried in the royal cemetery in an opulent mausoleum, near the central tomb of Alexander. Local residents and travelers to Alexandria visited the site, and Alexander's tomb, especially, was treated as a shrine. But it was not to be left untouched.

One of the kings, Ptolemy X Alexander I, who ruled from 107 to 88 BC, was an extremely unpopular monarch whose people revolted and forced him to flee into Syria. Organizing a mercenary army there, he reentered Egypt to regain his throne. But to help pay for these forces, he ordered the gold sheathing to be stripped from the body of Alexander the Great and melted down. The embalmed body itself was not otherwise harmed, and remained in its tomb, but public outrage was great.

Alexander's body had been, in A.


 B. Bosworth's phrase, "the talisman of the Ptolemaic house." As Rome's imperial power grew, its leaders too had not hesitated to invoke Alexander's name and legend for their own purposes, and their admiration of his greatest accomplishment: empire from the Danube to the Ganges. While most of this immense territory remained in the control of Alexander's successors and their descendants for three centuries or so, parts were gradually lost to belligerents to the east. The Romans had taken possession of some areas of western Asia Minor beginning in 133 BC, but their only eastward success came with the annexation of Armenia by the East Roman ruler, Mark Antony, who was subverted by, and finally married, the last of the Ptolemies, Queen Cleopatra VII. In 30 BC, facing defeat by the West Roman emperor, Octavian, the two lovers committed western history's most famous double suicide, Egypt became a Roman province, and Octavian entered Alexandria.

On his first tour the newly won capital, Octavian, who now carried the title of Augustus, visited the tomb of Alexander and left an imperial standard in tribute. Julius Caesar and, very probably, Marc Antony had paid homage there before him. Alexander's body must not have been covered, for Dio Cassius, in his 80-book history of Rome, reports that during his close inspection, Augustus touched or bumped the nose of the mummified corpse and broke off part of it. The tale, however, is somewhat hard to believe. It may have been after this that the coffin was said to have been covered by a kind of crystal—possibly fine, translucent alabaster—to protect it.

In subsequent times, successive Roman emperors likewise traveled to Alexandria, and a visit to the tomb to pay homage to the great conqueror and pagan god became virtually a sacred duty.


 Though Caligula, who ruled from AD 37 to 41, did not visit Egypt himself, his officers went to the tomb, and as they departed they removed a breast-plate from Alexander's armor. This was brought to Caligula, who wore it on ceremonial occasions. Finally, near the turn of the third century, Septimus Severus ordered the mausoleum of Alexander sealed to prevent further damage to the famous tomb and corpse. Even so, his son and successor, Caracalla, had it opened again for a look at the remains. In admiration and respect, Caracalla is said to have removed his own purple imperial robe from his shoulders and spread it over the body, and he also left many other precious gifts.

Reverence for the dead Alexander and the safekeeping of his remains might have survived the fourth century if he had been looked upon not as a god, but only as the great mortal leader he had been. By this time paganism was giving way to rising Christianity, which the East Roman emperor Theodosius I (379-395) finally declared the state religion in 392, banning public pagan rites throughout the empire. Alexandria was fast becoming a key Christian center, and though the many pagan temples and shrines in the city were not at first affected, zealots among both groups clashed with increasing frequency. The patriarch of Alexandria at the time was Theophilus, a hierarch of great faith, energy and anti-pagan passion. He enthusiastically directed the conversion of pagan institutions into churches, was instrumental in the destruction, in 391, of Alexandria's great Temple of Sarapis, a pagan shrine which dated back to early Ptolemaic times, and took other steps to speed the conversion of the city to an entirely Christian metropolis.

A number of historians hypothesize that that the anti-pagan forces had demolished the tomb of Alexander and destroyed his corpse by 397. There are no direct accounts, and the tomb of Alexander is not mentioned in any of the sources of the time, which are otherwise often quite detailed. Yet we may draw inferences from such documents as the writings of John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople from 398 to 404. Drawing a contrast with the veneration paid the sepulchers of the Christian martyrs, he challenges, "Where is now the tomb of Alexander? Show me! Tell me the day of his death!"

The tombs of the Ptolemies that had surrounded Alexander's were destroyed as well, for they too had been regarded as "gods." On the site, a large church was built dedicated to St. Athanasius, an earlier Alexandrian bishop; in 640, when the Muslim Arabs captured Alexandria, they converted the church into a mosque. In modern times, the building, in a ruinous condition, was demolished, and the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel was constructed in its place, which still stands today. Under it is a series of catacombs which are said to have been thoroughly and officially explored early in the 20th century, and which were probably even more thoroughly and quite unofficially explored over many earlier centuries. The monuments themselves having been pulled down, it is possible—but far from certain—that these catacombs include parts of the foundations of the Ptolemaic and Alexander tombs.

A more recent episode associated with the mysterious fate of Alexander's remains took place in 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte's armies invaded Egypt through Alexandria. In the courtyard of the mosque that had once been the church of St. Athanasius, standing inside a small open building, was a handsome, heavy sarcophagus carved from a single block of rare, beautiful, dark green breccia. It was decorated, inside and out, with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although it was being used as a cistern for worshipers' ablutions before prayers, locals referred to it as "the tomb of Alexander." French troops removed it and transported it to the hold of a French hospital ship. It was said that they intended to bring it to Paris, where a monument to Napoleon would be built around it, thus associating the latter with Alexander the Great in much the same way rulers had done since Ptolemy first hijacked the funeral cortege in southern Turkey.

But in 1801, the British invaded Egypt and expelled the French. Antiquaries attached to the British forces knew about the so-called "Alexander sarcophagus" from travelers' writings. They searched for it specifically, removed it from the French ship, and today the sarcophagus is not in Paris, but in London, on display in the British Museum. At first, British scholars rationalized that the hieroglyphic text covering its inner and outer surfaces was attributable to Alexander's role as an Egyptian god, but the decipherment of hieroglyphics a few decades later—thanks to the Rosetta Stone, which had been carried off by the British at the same time as the sarcophagus—made it obvious that it had been carved for the last native Egyptian pharaoh, Nectanebo II, who had ruled from 360 to 343 BC.


 Historians and archeologists concluded that this sarcophagus had never contained the body of Alexander; that it came to be called "Alexander's tomb" is an example of the great flourishing of legend and false attribution about the conqueror that began even during his lifetime.

One branch of this thicket of association connects the breccia sarcophagus, Nectanebo II and Alexander himself. Alexander's mother, Queen Olympias, had been devoted to the rites of Orpheus and Dionysus, which sometimes featured the presence of large snakes that were believed to represent or embody the gods. It is known that Olympias kept one such snake in her chamber, and after Alexander's birth Olympias was said to have declared that her son had not been sired by his mortal father, King Philip, but by the Egyptian god Ammon, who had taken the form of the snake. For his part, Philip apparently believed this tale and considered his wife an adulteress.

Beginning shortly after Alexander's death, a more fantastic tale began to circulate. According to this story, when Nectanebo II, now said to be an adept of the magic arts, fled the Persian occupation of his country in 343 BC, he went not to southern Egypt but to Macedonia, there to beget an avenger of his country's defeat. Olympias gave him refuge in Philip's court, and, casting her horoscope, Nectanebo predicted that she would give birth to a son, a hero, fathered by Ammon. The pharaoh, who could indeed claim to represent Ammon, fulfilled his own prophesy by seducing the then childless Olympias, and the offspring of their union was none other than Alexander! This is, of course, largely pharaonic propaganda, designed after the fact to bolster the Egyptian spiritual claim to Alexander, for in reality it is not only well documented that Nectanebo never set foot in Macedonia, or anywhere else in Greece, but in 343, when he supposedly went there, Alexander was already 13 years old. Nonetheless, the story may have inspired the connection of the breccia sarcophagus of Nectanebo II with the memory of Alexander.

There exists yet another "Alexander Sarcophagus," a magnificent, monumental work of marble discovered by accident in 1887, in what turned out to be a royal necropolis in Sidon, a city on the Mediterranean in what is today Lebanon. This extraordinary monument, still in nearly perfect condition and now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, is the work of an unknown Greek master sculptor, carved in the classic Hellenic style from a pure white marble quarried in the Pentelic mountains northeast of Athens—the same material used to build the Parthenon and other famous works of the classical period. Around its perimeter are animated scenes of Alexander himself hunting, and battling the Persians. It has been estimated to date from the last quarter of the fourth century BC, and its intended purpose is unknown. Is it possible it was made to receive Alexander's remains? As a work of art, it is certainly worthy to have been used for this purpose.

But as tempting it is to make the connection, archeologists and historians have concluded that this sarcophagus was more than likely carved for the body of a king of Sidon, Abdalonymos, a few years after Alexander's death. Abdalonymos was a Phoenecian who ordered it made to commemorate his close friendship with Alexander, who had had him appointed ruler of the region. In fact, historians now believe that the use of any sarcophagus to carry Alexander's body on that long last trip was unlikely. As the remains were originally to be sent to Siwa, Alexander's body was prepared in the Egyptian manner by Egyptian embalmers. Also, the close-fitted gold sheathing surrounding the body was a style used for royalty, and designed to be seen, not hidden by stone, however beautifully carved.

Few figures in history have been studied more, written about more, or spoken of more than Alexander the Great, whether seriously by scholars, fantastically by unknown compilers of legends, or personally by tribesmen who, even today, claim descent from his Macedonian troops. Some still dream and hope that, somewhere in the catacombs under the Mosque of Prophet Daniel, his remains might yet be discovered. But extensive explorations and excavations have been made in Alexandria, under the mosque and elsewhere, and no trace has been found either of the royal Ptolemaic necropolis or of Alexander's tomb.

   The story of what happened to Alexander's remains remains a mystery

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