History Hunters International

Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?

William Shakespear

Hamlet (Act V, Scene I)

Dead kings are hard to find. It is strange that this should be an immutable law of modern archeology. After all, when you consider all the generations of dead kings out there, whole dynasties waiting to be dug up, you would think it virtually impossible to put a shovel in the ground without hitting a royal grave. Since the earliest lugals of Babylon and the first pharaohs of Egypt, they lived and died by the thousands, each one burying his predecessor in a millennial procession of mounds and pyramids, crypts and coffins. Even in Egypt, the burial ground of more than 30 dynasties across 30 centuries, a dead king is downright hard to find: Fewer than one percent of all pharaonic burials have been found intact. As if by a writ of non-habeas corpus, they all seem to have disappeared.

To find any dead king is an archeologist's dream. Think not only of Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of King Tut, but also of Heinrich Schliemann and his find in 1876 of the so-called grave of King Agamemnon. And think, too, of Manolis Andronikos, who found the royal tombs of Macedonia in northern Greece in 1977. One of these extraordinary tombs may actually be the grave of King Philip II, the mighty unifier of Greece in the fourth century BC?and yet this discovery served only to remind us of the search for the tomb of Philip's son, the vastly more famous Alexander the Great.

Everyone from William Shakespeare to a self-professed psychic archeologist named Stephen Schwartz has wondered where Alexander is, or was. In the 20th century alone there were some 150 officially sanctioned archeological expeditions that searched for his tomb. Since 1805, there have been at least seven announcements of the grave's discovery, two of them in the 1990's. But dead kings, as ever, are hard to find.

One of the seven "finds" occurred in 1850, when an interpreter for the Russian Consulate in Alexandria, one Ambrose Schilizzi, explored the subterranean chambers of the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel. He claimed to have found a regal body with a diadem, surrounded by a papyrus library; unfortunately, no one else ever saw it.

In 1888, Heinrich Schliemann received permission from the Egyptian prime minister to try his luck in the search for Alexander. Local Muslims, however, refused to let Schliemann dig beneath the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel, so the great archeologist had to leave empty-handed.

In 1960, a Polish archeological team excavated to a depth of about 15 meters (48') alongside the mosque, but found no tomb. Another expedition dug beneath the mosque in 1991, but rival archeologists persuaded religious authorities that every millimeter of the area had already been investigated.

One legend from the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia maintains that Alexander's body never even made it to Egypt. Three time zones east of Alexandria lies the ancient Silk Road town of Marghilon, where locals claim Alexander was in fact buried, all other evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. There are also persistent rumors that Alexander's body actually lies hidden in a secret cave somewhere in the southern Illinois heartland.

At the risk of losing count of Alexander's supposed coffins, crypts, and corpses, I must add one allegedly found in Egypt by a Greek in 1893, another by a Canadian in 1966, a third by a respectable Italian scholar, and of course the "psychic discovery" of 1979. This last was the achievement of a hapless group led by Stephen Schwartz. In the desert monastery of Saint Makarios they were shown a bag of old bones, and since the skeletons seemed to be short one skull, they concluded that one of the dead must be John the Baptist. They then concluded that Alexander "might" be in the bag, too.

Others have simply claimed special knowledge of Alexander's whereabouts. One such person was Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tut's tomb. As an old man, in 1936, Carter gave the future King Farouk a personal tour of the Valley of the Kings. Carter concluded with an odd reference to the long-sought tomb of Alexander, whose precise location he insisted that he knew, but he vowed never to tell a soul. "The secret will die with me," he said. Three years later, it apparently did.

Professor Achille Adriani, for many years the head of the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, died before he could publish his conclusion that the tomb was "right under our noses all the time" in the city's Latin Cemetery.

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After working on Adriani's notes for two decades, a colleague this year published his theory.

Equally strange is the story of Stelios Comoutsos, a Greek waiter who has spent his life?when not at work at the??lite Caf??in Alexandria?searching for Alexander's tomb in Egypt. Comoutsos gained notoriety for his clandestine excavations, inspired by a treasure map inherited from his ancestors. He persisted in his obsession for more than 30 years before retiring to Athens, but he too never found Alexander.

Others have found him more than once. Archeologist Liani Souvaltze and her husband announced her second discovery of Alexander's tomb at the oasis of Siwa in January 1995. The news hit networks and the Internet like a Saharan sandstorm, with television reports and front-page coverage in newspapers the next day. The Souvaltzes won the immediate support of the chairman of the Egyptian antiquities organization, who visited the site and deemed it the true tomb of Alexander.

Within days, however, he began to have his doubts. The Souvaltzes, after all, had already cried "wolf" in 1991 when they announced their first discovery of Alexander's tomb at an international archeological congress. That turned out to be a Greco-Roman temple already known to other archeologists. In 1995, a team of Greek archeologists journeyed to Siwa to review Souvaltze's evidence. The archeologist refused to show the scholars all her finds, and what she did show them was clearly Roman, not Ptolemaic. So far, there is no reliable information to confirm her claims.

Dead kings are still hard to find.

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Dr. Frank Holt, professor of history at the University of Houston, has published numerous books and articles on the life and legacy of Alexander the Great.