Archaeologists find 4281-foot-long secret tunnel beneath ancient Egyptian temple

For more than two decades, criminal lawyer-turned-archaeologist Kathleen Martinez was on a quest to find Cleopatra’s tomb. The quest took her to a temple known as Taposiris Magna, located 25 miles west of Alexandria, Egypt. Her initial excavations revealed mummies with golden tongues, a cemetery of Greco-Roman style mummies, a mysterious bust, 22 coins that were believed to belong to Cleopatra’s visage, two Ptolemaic-era alabaster statues, and ceramic pots, and vessels. But in November 2022, Martinez and her team stumbled upon a colossal rock-cut tunnel beneath the temple, that they dubbed as a “geometric miracle,” reported Artnet.

Since the time Martinez came to Egypt to search for Cleopatra’s tomb, she believed that it was hidden somewhere on the outskirts of Alexandria. Once in Cairo, she contacted archaeologist Zahi Hawass, then the country’s minister of Egypt’s antiquities affairs. She rolled out her project details and requested support. Her project was approved.

Cleopatra was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt from 51 to 30 BC. According to Artnet, Cleopatra died by suicide after her husband, the Roman general Mark Antony died in her arms. The two were buried together. Through her excavation project, Martinez aspired to discover both tombs. While the tomb itself was not discovered, the discovery of the tunnel was significant as it could give some clues to the tomb.

Among other artifacts, “The most interesting discovery is the complex of tunnels leading to the Mediterranean Sea and sunken structures,” Martinez told CNN. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities also announced the find in a Facebook post. As per the translated post by Artnet, the ministry described the find as a 4,281-foot tunnel, located 43 feet underground. According to The Smithsonian, a part of the tunnel is submerged underwater, probably due to several earthquakes that impacted the region between 320 AD and 1303 AD. Archaeologists believe that these massive seismic tremors caused the temple to collapse.

The tunnel is quite alike the Eupalinos Tunnel in Greece, which is considered as one of the most important engineering achievements of antiquity, Martinez told Live Science. The Tunnel of Eupalinos, located on the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, was an aqueduct that carried water for more than 1,000 years.

 As for Cleopatra and Antony’s tombs, Martinez kept working to locate them. "If we discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, it will be the most important discovery of the 21st century. If we did not discover the tomb of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, we made major discoveries here, inside the temple and outside the temple,” Hawass said in 2009 to Heritage Key in a YouTube video.

In March 2024, Martinez shared an important update stating that the clue to Cleopatra’s mummy might be hidden in the Mediterranean waters of the submerged Alexandria, per Discover Magazine. “If there’s one percent of a chance that the last queen of Egypt could be buried there, it is my duty to search for her,” she told the Heritage Key blog in 2009.