![]() “But for sure, I am in the center of Alexandria in the royal quarter, and all these possibilities are in my favor.I knew immediately that the entry for 42A was the 1986 event Hands Across America, but I only had room to write HANDS AMERICA. “For sure, it’s not easy to find it,” she says. She tempers her optimism, though, with a healthy dose of realism. Over the years, Papakosta has become increasingly convinced that she’s closing in on Alexander’s lost tomb. ![]() “It's rare in my experience to find someone who's stayed at a single site for 21 years.” He compares Papakosta to a boxer who falls down, then dusts herself off and goes back into the ring. That persistence over many years of slow, muddy work sets Papakosta apart, says Hiebert. “I’m happy that I did not give up when I first arrived at the water table,” says Papakosta, who had to engineer an elaborate system of pumps and hoses to keep the site dry enough to excavate. Using these and other methods, Papakosta is uncovering more and more of the city’s ancient royal quarter-including a Roman road and the remains of a massive public building that could point to Alexander’s tomb.īut each discovery is hard-won. So far, her team has identified 14 anomalies that may be structures far beneath the ground. ![]() ERT passes an electrical current into the soil to measure resistance and detect subsurface objects. She also uses modern technology, such as electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), to determine where to dig. Hope of a historic find keeps Papakosta digging, guided by ancient accounts and a 19 th-century map of Alexandria before its boom. But the tomb’s elusiveness has only increased its cachet: To find Alexander’s tomb would be on par with discovering Tuthankhamun’s. Records exist of more than 140 officially sanctioned excavations, all of which failed. The tomb’s murky location hasn’t kept archaeologists from searching for it. Though ancient authors such as Strabo, Leo Africanus, and others described the tomb, its location relative to the modern city remains a mystery. Over time the city’s foundations were buried and forgotten, along with the location of Alexander’s tomb. The city survived, building over its ancient portions and ballooning to a population of more than five million. (Sea level rise still threatens Alexandria today.)Īs the sea encroached to the north, the waters of the Nile Delta on which Alexandria is situated caused the ancient part of the city to slowly sink at a rate of up to 0.25 centimeters a year-as much as 12 feet since Alexander’s time. The disaster marked the start of a long era of earthquakes and rising sea levels. In 356 A.D., a tsunami inundated the city. There, his tomb was visited and venerated like the temple of a god.īut Alexandria and its founder’s tomb were under threat-not from invading forces, but from nature. His remains did not rest easy.Īfter being argued over by his advisers, Alexander’s body was buried first in Memphis, Egypt, then in the city that bears his name. ![]() Over the next 12 years the brilliant, ambitious Alexander toppled every rival empire in his path, including Persia and Egypt, where he declared himself pharaoh. Once the world’s most powerful leader, Alexander was just 20 years old when he became king of Macedonia following the assassination of his father, Philip II, in 336 B.C.
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