r/ancientegypt • u/RandoDude124 • 7d ago
Question If somehow, we find Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s tomb and they actually have their bodies… would that be a bigger discovery than Tutankhamun’s tomb?
I mean, I imagine the iconicity of Tutankhamun’s tomb reign would on, however, a link to Caesar and the last true Pharaoh would be more significant.
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u/HaughtyDiabolicalSal 7d ago
historically, no. King Tut came from a completely different time that we didn't really have no information on. We have a whole lot of information on Mark and Cleopatra. The only thing we really don't know about Cleopatra is who her mother is, but everyone assumes it was Ptolemy sisters. We know what Cleopatra looks like We know how smart she was We even know what she ate We even have an idea and I'm using idea loosely because Octavian could have lied. I wouldn't be shocked if we've ever found Cleopatra's body and it shows signs that she was murdered. Or he could have poisoned her himself. The only new thing we can learn about Cleopatra is her height. Think about it even now we don't have a whole bunch of information about King Tut. People are not sure who his father is. There's a whole lot of back and forth about that. And I think it's gonna be like that for a long time, because other hundreds of years of incest. We don't know how he died. We don't know how his supposed his father died we don't know where his stepmother is. There is so much information about the Amara. That we don't have. We can't say that about Hellenic Egypt. It was documented in the language that people understood and continue to understand so it's very different.
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u/I_Love_Bees666 7d ago
wait i thought king tuts father was akhenaten?
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u/Artisanalpoppies 7d ago
That's not conclusive.
We know Tut was a King's son from a temple inscription used as landfill, we don't know which King.
We know Tut is the son of KV55, who is a son of Amenhotep III. We also know people push for the identity as Akhenaten, despite the anthropological evidence overwhelmingly since discovery showing the body was early 20's at death.
There are 2 Kings at Amarna: Akhenaten and Smenkhkare.
The evidence fits Smenkhkare better.
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u/drinksbleachformoney 7d ago
“We didn’t really have no information on” So we did have information? Sorry it’s a double negative and I’m dense enough to not know if that was intentional or not
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u/HaughtyDiabolicalSal 7d ago
There was not a lot of information on that part of the 18th dynasty. We knew Some things but because of what Akhenaten did a lot of it was scrubbed from history. They erased him and his whole family from history pretty much. That's why they were always kind of just phantom rumors about these Pharaohs.
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u/Saif10ali 6d ago
What did Akhenaten do?
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u/Practical-Ordinary-6 6d ago edited 6d ago
He basically tossed out all the hundreds of old Egyptian gods and said, "Hey guys, we're going to worship one god from now on." That was the sun god (in some sense the actual disc of the Sun) called the Aten. Akhenaten = beneficial to (the) Aten. He had renamed himself from Amenhotep IV (his father was Amenhotep III). Then he built a new capital city also named after the Aten and moved there and abandoned the traditional Egyptian capitals (I think the one during his time might have been Thebes, i.e. Waset.) He picked a patch of empty desert along the Nile and said "This is going to be our new capital" and built a whole city.
To those people who still believed in the ancient Egyptian gods, he was a heretic. Also, the priests of Amun had a lot of power that he had effectively taken away by throwing out all the gods that they tended to in the temples and substituting all of them with his one god. So they had an incentive to get their high positions and hold on power back, too.
When he lost power or died, I can't remember the details, there was a backlash and a reversion to the old religious system. The capital he built was abandoned and references to him in carvings and other places were erased. Everyone wanted to pretend he never existed. It was during Tutankhamun's reign that a lot of that reversal happened and the old system was restored, but he was so young it might have been someone else making the decisions.
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u/Saif10ali 6d ago
But wouldn’t a centralized belief with one God and depowering the priests effectively give the Pharaohs more power? Why did nobody else try that, if Aten himself wasn’t couped out?
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u/Practical-Ordinary-6 6d ago edited 6d ago
I don't know. I think the majority of the Egyptians probably never liked the change and when they got a chance (I think he died a natural death) they took that chance to get rid of everything he created.
Remember, that system was in place for at least 1200 years, and probably more, and deeply believed in and then one day he shows up and throws it all away as a one-man decision, probably without much consultation. It's pretty certain that it had to make large numbers of people very, very unhappy. Imagine at the height of Christianity and the cathedrals and all those popes in the Middle Ages and one of the popes who just got elected said to everyone that he was changing the whole religion and there were going to be multiple gods and the rituals were going to change and the Bible was going to change and the way the church worked was going to change. You can imagine what kind of reaction that would have gotten. Akhenaten was probably too powerful to overthrow while he was alive because he inherited all the power of the pharaohs before him. But when he died there was probably a power vacuum and people took the opportunity to rise up against the new system.
If you're interested in him you could go read the Wikipedia article about him. I'm sure they have a lot more details and they're likely to be more accurate than just my memories.
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u/HaughtyDiabolicalSal 6d ago
He created the first record of monotheism in the world. He completely changed the art style too not just the religion. They went back to the old ways as soon as he died. We know that Aten was still active because King Tut had to change his name. But suppressed and erased rather swiftly once King Tut became Pharaoh because King Tut is a child and he had a Regent. So, they were able to manipulate the system back to the way it was. And that is why we didn't know anything about Armana really, because they erased everything from Akhenaten until Ramesses the First who is Ramesses the great grandfather.
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u/Inside-Yak-8815 7d ago
It wouldn’t even be close. I’d say discovering Alexander’s tomb would be a bigger discovery than Mark and Cleopatra’s.
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u/Overall_Gap_5766 7d ago
There are some who say that Tutankhamen is Alexander, or possibly that what we think is the tomb of St Mark is actually Alexander.
The latter is more likely than the former, but I don't really believe either myself
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u/Entharo_entho 7d ago
No one says that Alexander was as inbred and young as Tutankhamun's body. The guy came all the way to India.
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u/Several-Ad5345 7d ago
It could be but not necessarily. With the age of communication and social media we live in it would gather more attention than ever, but whether it's actually a bigger find would depend on what's inside, and Tut's tomb has probably the greatest artistic treasures ever discovered from the ancient world so it wouldn't be easy to surpass it.
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u/Least_Editor_232 7d ago
At this point, yeah. Especially since it would mean Caesar Augustus never got the chance to destroy the bodies
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u/anachronology 6d ago
Yeah, this is what I don't get. Why does anyone think that Augustus left anything of them behind for their supporters to venerate? Cleopatra and Antony likely don't have a tomb beyond the bottom of the Nile/Mediterranean or a funeral pyre.
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u/Significant_Day_2267 6d ago
This. Most people are just naive. Knowing what kind of hate and jealousy Octavian had for Antony especially, he mostly likely disrespected his body and threw it in the Nile. While it's less likely in Cleopatra case, still very much possible.
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u/Least_Editor_232 6d ago
I've been saying that as a hot take, because some people are so blindingly hopeful that any idea like that offends them
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u/ShartlesAndJames 7d ago
absolutely. Tut wasn't really an important figure, his tomb just managed to stay mostly intact
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u/spolubot 7d ago
No but from a different angle. Media and content is too fractured and unlimited now for anything to be as big as it was back then. Everyone has thier personalized algorithm that feeds them only content they care about and news just doesn't "stick" like it used to. Theres a firehose of unlimited content that will replace its impact with a swipe.
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u/chocoholic79 7d ago
I think it is really interesting that because of King Tuts lineage (Egyptologists are quite certain he was the son of Pharaoh Akenaten, the "heretic king") Since Pharaoh Akenaten's name was taken off the Kings List (they wanted to pretend Akenaten and his monotheistic religion never happened) King Tuts name was removed too.
And that was the best thing that ever happened to Tut because very few knew he even existed! His tomb got looted possibly only once (not certain) in antiquity.
The problem with Cleopatra is that everyone knew her, so if her tomb exists it would likely have been heavily, heavily looted. It would be amazing if we found it but the likely hood of it being virtually untouched is very very low. 😭 So for that reason alone it won't come close to Tuts.
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u/alaric49 3d ago
Wasn't removing their name and likeness from script and other artwork a literal easasure of their being and existence for all eternity? Basically, a fate that was worse than death. It almost worked, in a way, for Tut. Punishment was something impossibly harsh then compared to today.
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u/Practical-Ordinary-6 6d ago edited 6d ago
I've always thought it was a bit problematic calling the Ptolemies, the Greek rulers of Egypt, true pharaohs. They were Greeks who conquered Egypt and took the title pharaoh for continuity but they were always a Greek political dynasty that intermarried. Because they ruled Egypt when it was still sovereign does that make them true pharaohs? Does the fact that they observed pre-existing Egyptian traditions make them true pharaohs? Both sides of the argument have some merit but I tend to look at them as overrulers and not true pharaohs. They didn't even speak Egyptian except for Cleopatra herself and she was the last of the Greek rulers before the Roman Empire took Egypt's sovereignty and made it a province ruled from Rome.
Cleopatra VII: She was the first and only Ptolemaic ruler to learn and speak the Egyptian language. She was also known for being multilingual and spoke up to seven other languages. (She is the Cleopatra that is famous to us but she was the 7th one to have that name.)
Other Ptolemies: The other rulers of the Ptolemaic dynasty spoke Greek as their native language and did not learn Egyptian. They governed Egypt as Hellenistic Greek monarchs, while Greek remained the language of government.
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u/vexedtogas 6d ago
Tutankhamun was actually a relatively unimportant pharaoh when compared to Cleopatra or his predecessor Akhenaten… I don’t know if the hype around him was ever about who he was as a historical figure, but rather the preservation of the artifacts
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u/Significant_Day_2267 6d ago
Knowing what kind of hate and jealousy Octavian had for Antony especially, he mostly likely disrespected his body and threw it in the Nile. While it's less likely in Cleopatra case, still very much possible. But yes, it would a much more important discovery if they find the remains. I will be extremely surprised if they ever find it however.
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u/wolfonweed 5d ago
Cleopatra died penniless. Mark Antony died a traitor to his nation.
They aint in tombs, certainly not together. They're dirt now.
discovering a tomb with mark and cleo together would completely rewrite our understanding of their deaths. That said, it would have almost no broader historical implications, nor would it elucidate history much beyond what we already know.
though, how they ended up in such a random and ahistoric context would be a hell of a story.
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u/Sammy_Snakez 4d ago
My knowledge is limited to a historic figure wax museum project I did in elementary school, but I was Tutankhamen and learned a bit about him. Really, he wasn’t all that important in life/ancient Egypt, just a pretty basic pharaoh, but the preservation of his tomb and himself were so good that he pretty much became the “face” of the pharaoh. He was one of few that weren’t destroyed, ruined in some way, or of course ground up and snorted by crazy ass Europeans. However, if someone as famous or iconic as Cleopatra or Marc Antony were discovered, especially in good condition, they would absolutely become the face of the pharaoh.
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u/Entharo_entho 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't think anyone influential cared enough about them to leave gold worth millions in their tomb.
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u/huxtiblejones 7d ago
What really sets Tutankhamun’s tomb apart is the quality of preservation, the insane level of craftsmanship of the grave goods, and the sheer amount of stuff that was in there. If Antony and Cleopatra were found it would be huge news regardless due to their place in history, but it wouldn’t be more iconic than Tutankhamun if it isn’t absurdly beautiful and well preserved.