Cleopatra's Palace Explored

Throughout history, people have had a fascination with anything Egyptian (especially yours truly). There have been movies, books, specials on all the smarty-folks channels, hell I even saw King Tut bookends in Barnes and Noble the other day. But no Egyptian woman has captured human imagination like Cleopatra. One of the best movies of all time had the illustrious Elizabeth Taylor playing her and Richard Burton as Mark Antony (hence the pic above).

We have always wanted to know more about Cleopatra. How did she die for real? Shakespeare's version with the suicide by asp doesn't necessarily ring true does it? The hardest part about finding info on Cleo is the fact that #1- she lived such a long time ago and #2- her kingdom was destroyed by the Romans. We know where her palace was but the site in Alexandria is completely under water, too difficult to explore. Until now (don't you love those two little words!)

Archaeologists are using the newest diving technology to allow them to explore the sunken ruins of Cleopatra's palace. The entire site sank into the Mediterranean over 1600 years ago when the area was rocked by a series of strong earthquakes and tsunamis.

The first thing the archaeologists/divers had to do was to rig up some sort of vacuum system to Hooverize the silt away from the ruins. Then all the silt had to be examined for small artifacts and shards of pottery. And believe me, they found all sorts of that.

Now that they have it cleaned out and visibility is much better, the joint French/Egyptian team has determined that the palace is very much like all of the descriptions that have been handed down. This was surprising because people have always believed that Cleopatra's power, riches and palace were sort of blown out of proportion (think about how fishermen describe the "one that got away").

In addition to the small statues, the scientists have found several statues of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra's father Ptolemy XII and some of Caesarion, Cleopatra's son with Caesar. More discoveries are found every day. One of the cornerstones that they found this week was a huge piece of pink limestone with an inscription dating it to the time of Seti II, centuries before Cleopatra reigned.

What makes this even cooler (as if it needed to be puh-leeze) is the fact that all of these artifacts are being put on display at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute from June 2010 through January 2011. How cool that they are only a few hours away! Fingers crossed that I can swing it to go see them!