05x11 - The Search for Alexander the Great

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A century's old mystery

surrounding the most celebrated

warrior king in history,

Alexander the Great.

Alexander set off on

an audacious campaign

to conquer what

is the known world.

His army stormed

east through Turkey,

Iran, Iraq, and down into India.

Alexander dies at the age of 32,

presumably buried in Alexandria,

the city that bears his name.

His mummy is visited

by a virtual who's who

of ancient history.

But then his remains suddenly

disappear without a trace.

We don't know where he went,

and he's lost to time forever.

It's as if one of

the greatest treasures

of the ancient world

vanished into thin air.

Now, we explore the top theories

surrounding the disappearance

of the conqueror's remains.

Boats topple over on their sides

and fish are kind

of flopping around,

and then all of a

sudden this huge wave

wipes everything out.

Alexandria is a

hotbed of religious upheaval,

change, violence.

Now the Christians are

gonna do to the pagans

what the pagans have

been doing to them.

These Venetian merchants,

they literally hijack

this sarcophagus.

It's like something

out of a thriller.

What happened to the mummy

of Alexander the Great?

Ancient Babylon,

modern-day Iraq.

The year is 323 BCE, and

Alexander the Great is sick.

Wracked by pain and

barely able to speak,

he lingers for two weeks.

As his generals wonder who

will inherit his empire,

he utters his final

words, "To the strongest."

On June 11th, 323 BCE,

Alexander takes his last breath.

The greatest conqueror the

world has ever known is gone.

Alexander the Great dies

and his death is going to send

shockwaves around the world.

In life, he had been this

invincible military conqueror

who had taken over

so much of the world.

He was also viewed by so

many people of the time

as a literal deity.

Alexander is born in Macedonia,

a small kingdom in

today's northern Greece.

He is the son of King Philip II.

Alexander's father is

a formidable general,

who manages to conquer

a great deal of territories.

So Alexander already has a

great deal of power there.

Alexander becomes

king at 20 years old.

Two years later, he has

ridden off into battle

with the ambition of

conquering the entire world.

His armies topple

the Persian Empire

that had been the bane of

the Greek states for so long.

He conquers Egypt.

He marches his armies

all the way to India.

And he's gained many

titles along the way.

He became the grand

pharaoh of Egypt.

He became the emperor of Greece.

He became the king of Persia.

And he did it all in 10 years.

Alexander never

loses a major battle.

Suddenly though, he dies

when he's visiting Babylonia

of some mysterious ailment.

It might be typhoid,

it might have been a

neurological disease.

We don't know.

In keeping

with Egyptian tradition,

Alexander's body

is then mummified.

As ruler of ancient Egypt,

he is a deity in

the ancient Egyptian pantheon.

So they dry him out with salt,

they remove his internal organs,

they add spices and

aromatic resins,

and they make him

smell like a god.

He is placed in a

golden sarcophagus

and then he's put

inside a funerary bier.

This bier, or this

funerary cart,

is designed like an

ostentatious temple.

The entire structure is so heavy

it has to be pulled

by a fleet of mules

who are also beautifully adorned

in precious cloths and jewelry.

Two years after his death,

Alexander the Great's

funeral procession

finally leaves through the

famous gates of Babylon.

This carriage is taken

on an amazing procession

all the way westward, presumably

to Greece, to Macedon,

where he'd be interred with

the rest of the royal family,

including his father, Philip II.

And as it goes westward,

it's going through the cities

of Alexander's new empire

and crowds are coming out

to see it, we are told,

lining up, wishing it well.

It must have been amazing.

Of course, when

Alexander passes,

he's not really counting

on dying so early,

so there's a power vacuum

and all of his generals

want to grab as much land

and as much

legitimacy as possible.

At some point, as it

is passing through Syria,

one of the generals, Ptolemy

I, hijacks Alexander's body

and takes it back

with him to Egypt

where he sets it up in a

royal city called Memphis.

Ptolemy wants Alexander's body

because he feels it shores

up his own power in Egypt,

which he's now kind of

have taken over for himself

since Alexander's now dead.

Alexander's mummy

remains at Memphis

for an unknown amount of time,

perhaps several decades.

Finally, it's moved

to Alexandria,

which was the city that

Alexander himself founded

precisely as a city

on the Nile River,

right where it meets

the Mediterranean Sea.

We know about the

Library of Alexandria,

essentially the world's

first university.

It wasn't just a

collection of books,

this is where all

the scholars came.

So this became the intellectual

center of the world.

And how do you really

drive that idea home?

You bring Alexander's body

and you put it in this

beautiful mausoleum.

And now Ptolemy can claim,

"I am the true successor

to Alexander the Great.

Here's his shrine.

Here's the library.

Alexandria, the new

center of the world."

Historical accounts will

say that Alexander's body

remains in Alexandria's Royal

Quarter for hundreds of years.

The Greek historian, Strabo,

who's writing 300 years

after Alexander's death

will speak about

visiting the tomb.

In the ancient world,

anybody who is anybody goes

to visit Alexander's tomb.

They want to really pay

homage to this great man

and they want to link their

own power bases to him.

We have eyewitness

evidence from Cleopatra,

Julius Caesar, Mark Antony.

Seems the whole world traveled

to go visit Alexander

the Great's tomb there.

It was like a

festival every time.

But late in the fourth century,

all the historical writings

about Alexander's tomb

stop abruptly.

The last known reference

to Alexander's body

being in Alexandria comes

from about 700 years

after Alexander's death.

The tomb is

mentioned in a letter

by the Roman teacher

and traveler, Libanius,

who will speak of Alexandria,

where the tomb of

Alexander is to be seen.

But then just 20 years later,

one of the early leaders

of the Christian Church,

John Chrysostom, was

specifically going to Alexandria

to go visit Alexander

to Great's tomb.

He wrote, "And I was

met with blank stares."

So from Libanius' letter

to John Chrysostom's visit,

we go from having the tomb

of Alexander the Great

to nothing.

It's like one of the

Wonders of the Ancient World

just vanishes from

the face of the earth.

But what could have happened

to destroy all traces

of Alexander's tomb

and his remains?

We have a record in history

from about the year 365 AD

of a massive earthquake that

hit the island of Crete,

which is about a

couple of hundred miles

away north of Alexandria.

Scholars believed that that

earthquake was so damaging

that it could have reached



times the power

of the 1906 San

Francisco earthquake.

If an earthquake like that

could have taken place

in the Mediterranean,

it could have raised a tsunami

on Alexandria's shores.

As a matter of fact,

we have one piece of

eyewitness evidence

from a nobleman

who lived in Egypt.

Ammianus Marcellinus, who's

a historian and a soldier,

and what Ammianus says is

that there was a earthquake

and that the seas receded.

Boats topple over

on their sides,

and fish are kind

of flopping around,

and everybody is running

out and gathering fish up

with their hands

out on the shore

and then all of a

sudden this huge wave,

the tsunami, right,

kind of recoils back

and wipes everything out.

And it inundates

the entire harbor,

if not the entire

city of Alexandria.

You can see ships ending up

on the tops of buildings.

Ancient writers describe

widespread death

and destruction.

So this tsunami would've

absolutely devastated

the quarter that contained

Alexander's tomb.

And if it wasn't destroyed

by the initial flooding

and the tsunami,

it would've certainly been

destroyed by the after effects,

by the receding of the water,

by the collapse of the building,

by the mud that

would've buried it.

I mean, this is a

devastating event

that destroyed pretty

much everything there.

In the 1990s,

archeologists discover

what could be the remains

of the Royal Quarter

just off Alexandria's coast

Because of earthquakes

over the centuries

and shifting coastlines,

at least part of the

ancient city of Alexandria

now lies underwater.

They went down there

with scuba gear

and discovered

incredible remains

attesting to at least

part of a royal palace.

They find statues of

gods, of pharaohs,

and it's possible, therefore,

that the tomb of Alexander

might today still

exist, but underwater.

You are going to find

hundreds of thousands of relics

off the shore of Alexandria.

For one, it's a city built on

a shoreline next to a delta.

These cities tend to

flood and sink a lot.

We should expect to find

all kinds of artifacts

off the shore of Alexandria.

The question is, did a tsunami

come in and flood the city

and destroy the tomb

of Alexander The Great?

Throughout history,

cities have come and gone

due to the forces

of mother nature.

But was ancient Alexandria

really devastated by a tsunami?

Marcellinus' eyewitness evidence

is not historically

the most accurate.

He copied the material

from other eyewitnesses

that have actually

visited the place.

And Marcellinus was

strongly religious

and his religious bias could

have played a massive role

in exaggerating what that

God's wrath of a tsunami

would've hit Alexandria with.

In the late fourth century AD,

historical records show a

tsunami engulfed Alexandria.

In addition to this

natural disaster,

the city is in political

and social turmoil.

Christianity spreads

throughout the Roman Empire

at the end of the

first century AD,

but it's met with repression.

The Romans don't

like new religions,

so they're basically turning

the Christians into martyrs.

An early

and prominent Christian,

the apostle Mark,

is martyred here.

Mark was an evangelist who moves

into the city of Alexandria

and begins missionizing,

begins converting people.

And it's in that city

where he is martyred

and he's buried in the church

that he himself founds.

It was called the

Coptic Cathedral of St. Mark.

Christianity continued to spread

because as the saying goes,

the blood of the martyrs

is the seed of the Church.

And because of gospels

like that of St. Mark,

and because of his martyrdom,

the tables have

completely turned.

And by the end of

the third century,

the Christians are in control.

As Christianity gains strength,

conflict between the pagans

and the followers of this

new religion intensifies,

turning pagan landmarks, like

Alexander the Great's tomb,

into targets.

In the fourth century,

Alexandria is a hotbed

of religious upheaval,

change, violence.

The reality is that the

rise of Christianity

and its movement into power

is threatening any trace

of the old pagan past.

Alexander was a

very religious man.

He venerated Greek gods,

but also venerated

the gods of Egypt.

Particularly after his death,

he came to be venerated

as a kind of demigod

or even a god himself.

Alexander believes he's

a descendant of the gods.

His mother, Olympias, claimed

that he actually was

not the son of Philip,

but he's the son

of Zeus himself.

Alexandria had been a very

pagan city for a long time,

where the Greek gods

and Egyptian gods

were honored side by side.

But by the fourth century AD,

the Christians are

beginning to really

kind of take over the city.

What the Christians

don't really like

is how pagan the

city's past really is,

and they set out to

kind of purge Alexandria

from its pagan trappings,

to turn it into a new Christian

city as much as possible.

In 380 AD,

Emperor Theodosius

mandates Christianity

as the official religion

of the Roman Empire.

Rome is now a Christian empire,

and now the Christians

are gonna do to the pagans

what the pagans had

been doing to them.

We know that in certain

areas, Christians rioted,

they laid waste

to pagan temples,

tombs, other signs

of the old ways.

So, you can imagine

an old pagan temple,

or an old pagan shrine,

even pagan tombs,

these things were

ripe for destruction.

In 391, the emperor

at the time, Theodosius,

starts to enact a

series of decrees

to really stamp out any

kind of pagan behavior.

So he bans sacrifices.

He also orders the closure or

destruction of pagan temples.

It's interesting how

this is the year 391,

which is right in the

period when we last hear

of Alexander's body

being in Alexandria.

It's that time

that also we think

that the Great Library of

Alexandria is also burned.

Rampant destruction

across the city.

Could it be that

if Alexander's tomb

still was established

in the city,

it's still visible in

the city at that time,

that that was when

it was destroyed?

That would seem to make

good sense of the timing

because it was really

only nine years later

that Chrysostom

enters into the city

and looks for Alexander's tomb

and no one knows where it is.

In Alexandria, there was

probably few greater reminders

of the old ways than

the tomb of Alexander,

and he might have

been the target

of any Christian attempt to

erase traces of other religions.

There are no explicit

records out there

of Alexander's tomb or

the area being destroyed.

So, if you wanna look at what

the historical record says,

we can't definitively say

that the tomb was

destroyed at that time.

Perhaps it was already gone.

Ancient historians tell us

that Alexander the

Great was buried

in his namesake city

of Alexandria, Egypt.

References to Alexander's tomb

stop after a series

of natural disasters

and riots devastate the city.

But some believe his remains

could still be hidden

in Alexandria today.

In 1850, a tour guide by

the name of Ambroise Schilizzi

takes this group of

tourists down into a mosque

in the old part of Alexandria.

The mosque is called

the Nabi Daniel Mosque.

When Schilizzi goes down

into the substructures

underneath the mosque,

he sees something that

really piques his curiosity.

He sees at the

end of one corridor,

an old, worn wooden door.

The story goes that when he

came upon this wooden door,

he looked through the

cracks of the door

and that's when he sees

this mummified corpse

with a golden crown on it.

Schilizzi is absolutely

convinced that he has seen

none other than the mummy

of Alexander the Great.

The officials at the

mosque hear what's going on

and he is immediately removed

and nobody believes him

'cause he is a tour guide.

So everyone thinks that he

is just doing this for money.

He's actually

completely shut down.

He's not allowed to go

back into the crypts.

But 15 years later,

a second witness brings

Schilizzi's story

back into the public eye.



else goes down into the mosque.

This is a very

different character.

This is an esteemed,

very highly respected,

Arab engineer by the name

of Mahmoud Al-Falaki.

He is in charge of

mapping the ancient district

of Alexandria and

the Royal Quarter,

and he's doing so for

the Viceroy of Egypt,

so he gets special permissions

that nobody else gets.

And as part of

this mapping effort,

he gets to go down

and look to see

what's part of

these substructures

under the Nabi Daniel Mosque.

When he goes under there,

he sees very finely

crafted corridors

that are leading off

into four directions.

Al-Falaki finds tunnels,

passageways, large open areas

that appear to be

important tombs,

structurally made of

good, quality stone.

But he finds that the

tunnels are too dangerous

and he can't fully

explore the area

and answer the questions that

people have had for ages.

Al-Falaki notices that

a lot of the farther parts

of the corridors are

really kind of dilapidated.

They're starting to cave in,

and it's very dangerous

to press on any farther.

He wants to go

back and see it again

and do further investigation,

but he's denied and is never

able to get access again,

as these passageways

are walled up.

Even Al-Falaki, who

has the best permissions

in Egypt at the time,

is forbidden from

going any farther.

So the question is, is there

some sort of a coverup?

Why can't he go any further?

Why aren't people allowing the

excavation of this territory?

Though there's no hard proof

that Alexander's mummy

is under the mosque,

speculation grows.

Strabo tells us that

Alexander was entombed

in the Royal Quarter

of Alexandria.

The Nabi Daniel Mosque is in

that same general vicinity

that we think is where

the Royal Quarter was.

Nabi Daniel in Arabic

is the prophet Daniel,

and Daniel is sacred in Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam,

and he's famous for surviving

the night in the lion's den,

among other great miracles

of being a devout man of God.

However, Muslim

accounts of the Daniel

entombed in the Nabi Daniel

Mosque is one of a conquerer.

This tradition also said

that the prophet Daniel

comes victorious

against his enemies

and founds the

city of Alexandria.

This doesn't match Daniel

of the Bible at all.

Who does it sound like?

Hmm, who do we know

who goes into Babylon

and who's victorious

over his enemies?

Who do we know founds

the city of Alexandria?

Alexander.

So some strange thing has

happened, it seems to be here,

and conflating the figure

of Daniel the prophet

with the figure of

Alexander the Great.

Also, in local Arabic tradition,

the crypts underneath

the mosque of Nabi Daniel

are called the shrine

of the double-horned.

The double horn is a reference

to Alexander the Great

because he worshiped Amun

and Amun had rams horns.

Alexander is often depicted,

for example in later coins

struck by his successors,

with horns, rams

horns on his head.

So if this is the shrine

of the double horned,

it leads one to believe

that this is perhaps

a resting place of Alexander.

But the question remains

whether Alexander

the Great really lies

under the Nabi Daniel Mosque.

Other people

request to investigate

the subterranean crypts,

including the famous

Heinrich Schliemann,

who discovered, we think,

the remains of

ancient Troy and Mycenae,

but he too is denied by

the authorities there.

Since the end of

the 19th century,

nobody has actually really

been able to get down there

and explore to see what

further they might find

under this mosque.

But even if Alexander

the Great's remains

are under that mosque,

there is no way that permission

is ever going to be granted,

nor should it be,

for anyone to go digging in

that area to look for this.

While it seems suspicious

that they won't let anybody

excavate under this,

it is actually not very strange

that they would refuse

to allow excavations

under a mosque which

contains sacred land.

So it's not a grand conspiracy

saying we don't want to

discover Alexander's tomb.

It's just that in their

minds the people there

are protecting something

which to them is more sacred

than Alexander's remains.

After Alexander the

Great's body disappears

from the historical

record in 391 AD,

many wonder if the

remains of the warrior

are not in Egypt at all,

but somewhere else entirely,

someplace like Italy.

Located 1,300 miles

from Alexandria

and founded 750 years

after his death,

Venice may seem an unlikely

place to look for Alexander,

but some believe the

search should begin here.

The Basilica of

St. Mark in Venice

is said to hold the remains

of St. Mark the apostle.

One researcher

thinks it might hold

the remains of

Alexander instead.

The theory goes all the

way back to the early years

after Alexander the Great died.

Writer Andrew Chugg has a theory

that the remains of

Alexander the Great

and not of St. Mark

were actually moved

from Alexandria to Venice in

a mix-up of epic proportions.

Before Alexander

took rule of Egypt,

it was ruled by the Persians,

and before the Persians,

the last native ruler of

Egypt was Nectanebo II.

According to this theory,

when Alexander's body is

brought to Memphis by Ptolemy,

he reuses a sarcophagus that

was intended for Nectanebo II.

Chugg believes that

Alexander's body is interred

in Nectanebo II's sarcophagus.

And at this time period,

there were Christians

rioting in the streets.

So, Chugg believes that

to protect Alexander,

his coffin and mummy were

absconded to a safer place

where there was less upheaval.

If you're going to hide

something from the Christians

so that they don't destroy it,

what better place to hide it

than literally in plain sight?

So Chugg believes

that the sarcophagus

was taken to the

Cathedral of St. Mark,

where the Christians would

never dream of looking for it

because that's where the remains

of their precious

evangelist actually lay.

There the remains of the two men

would have lain

together for centuries,

but it's at the time

that Islam comes to Egypt

that potentially

Christians viewed

this particular site as

especially threatened

and would've been very

interested in evacuating

the very important relics there.

According to

an 11th century manuscript,

two Venetian merchants

launch a daring operation

to rescue what they believe

to be St. Mark's remains.

It's like something

out of a thriller.

You have a group of

merchants who sneak their way

into Alexandria precisely

to snatch the body of Mark

and protect it and

bring it back to Italy.

In 828 AD, these Venetian

merchants sail to Alexandria,

they go into where the

Cathedral of St. Mark is,

and they literally

hijack this sarcophagus

and they take it back to Venice

with them for safekeeping.

- The Basilica of St.

- Mark in Venice holds

the remains of the Apostle Mark,

but there's something that

potentially doesn't quite fit

with the idea that

Mark is the body there.

People notice

something really unusual

issuing forth from

this sarcophagus.

It has a beautiful smell.

It is noted that the body

actually has this

really powerful aroma,

an aroma that smells like all

of the spices in the world.

And the idea is that St. Mark

wouldn't have been mummified,

but Alexander would have been.

Mark was martyred

in the first century.

The custom at the time

would've been cremation.

And so what they would have

would not have that

same beautiful scent.

It would just be bone and ash.

In addition

to the unexpected scent,

Chugg points to clues in

the sarcophagus itself.

Within the basilica in Venice,

Chugg recognizes that there

is an eight-pointed star

carved into the rock.

Now, an eight-pointed star

is this ancient Greek symbol

that's associated with Macedonia

and with Alexander's family.

Chugg believes that that stone

came from Nectanebo's

repurposed sarcophagus.

But this

theory may remain a mystery

for the foreseeable future.

This is a very creative theory

and I fully believe that

strange things happen

over the course of history.

The only way that this

could actually really be

conclusively solved is

if the Catholic Church

were to allow any carbon

dating of Mark's remains

underneath the cathedral.

Will they do that?

No.

They have no interest in doing

that kind of carbon

dating of relics.

It serves them in

no way to do so.

The search for

Alexander the Great's remains

has been guided by the

king's ancient biographers.

Most point to Alexander being

buried in the city he founded,

but they also suggest

he had his own ideas

of where he wanted

to be laid to rest.

One Greek archaeologist thinks

that's where he is today.

Liana Souvaltzi believes

that the Oasis of Siwa

in northwest Egypt held

the most important place

in Alexander's heart.

It's also the place

that Souvaltzi thinks

he is most likely to be buried.

In 331 BC, when he's

about 25 years old,

Alexander the Great embarks

on a treacherous journey

across the desert to Siwa

and he's looking for

the Oracle of Amun.

In antiquity, people put

great stock in oracles,

essentially people who

know about your future.

And Alexander wanted to

know about his future,

and so he went in

search of this oracle.

It's very, very far away.

It covers about 1,100

miles that he goes

just to go and

consult this oracle.

This particular

oracle was understood

to be the oracle

of a hybrid deity,

two of the most powerful

deities of the two cultures,

Zeus, chief deity of the Greeks,

and Amun, one of the

chief Egyptian deities.

When Alexander actually

arrives at the temple,

his trek turns out

to be quite worth it.

He finds the oracle

who tells him

that, in fact, Philip,

his biological father,

is not his real father,

it is in fact Zeus-Ammon

who is his father.

That would make

Alexander divine.

From that point,

Alexander is changed.

He sees himself and his

mission in a different way.

He adopts the double

horns of Zeus-Ammon,

puts it on his coins,

and that seems to

really indicate that

the oracle told him,

"Yes, you are the son of a god."

So this is a watershed moment.

Now, he has the

power of divine rule

and he values Siwa

throughout his life.

In 1989, Egyptian authorities

grant Souvaltzi permission

to start digging

for Alexander's tomb

in the Siwa Oasis.

The temple ruins

at the Oasis of Siwa

are still standing today.

And Liana Souvaltzi

maintains that the oasis

was always very close

to Alexander's heart

and it makes complete sense

that he would want

to be buried there.

Most other pieces of

historical evidence we have

completely disagrees with

Liana Souvaltzi's theory here,

except for one.

One piece of writing

that she leans on

from a Roman historian

named Curtius.

He wrote that in

Alexander's heart

he wanted to be buried in

one place and nowhere else.

It's the place where

he received the oracle.

After unbelievably only

one week of excavations,

Souvaltzi says she's

made this discovery.

She's found a large

chamber under the temple

that actually has the

remains of lion statues

that are guarding something.

This underground chamber

has statues of lions,

which are linked to Alexander,

which are linked to royalty,

and which are also

in Egyptian ideology

linked to the underworld.

They're the guardians

of the liminal space

between this world and the next.

Up to this point,

it was believed

that all we had

at the Siwa Oasis

was the remains of a temple.

So this was a new discovery,

if what she had really hit upon

was a set of monumental tombs.

And the digging keeps

going on for years,

and she finally discovered a

full 5,000-square-foot room,

which she believes could be

nothing else but a royal tomb.

Souvaltzi is

convinced she's found the tomb

of Alexander the Great.

She sees carvings of oak leaves

that really resemble the sort

of oak leaves that are used

in the crowns of

the Greek kings.

She finds an eight-pointed star,

which looks very similar

to the eight-pointed star

of Vergina that's associated

with a Macedonian royal family.

Nine feet down, she

finds a limestone tablet

which has a long

inscription in Greek.

How she translates it is

that somebody has brought

his master's body to Siwa

in order to be buried.

The tablet states that

the body was moved to Siwa,

and the body was

actually really light.

So this would give a hint

that the body was mummified.

- The text itself is anonymous.

- We don't know who wrote it,

but she's absolutely sure

that this was about Ptolemy

and he was writing

it to talk about

moving Alexander's body to Siwa,

the place where Alexander

himself had wished to be buried.

After several years of digging,

Souvaltzi's convinced she's

on the edge of a breakthrough,

but when archeologists

from the Egyptian

Antiquities Organization

come to Siwa,

they spot a flaw in her work.

Archaeologists examined the

inscription written in Greek

and they conclude that

it's not about a king.

They also note that the

style of the chamber

is not actually Greek at all,

but it appears to be Roman.

So the more that they learn and

the more that they excavate,

the more skeptical they become.

The experts found

that Souvaltzi's

translation was in error

and that the tablets don't

refer to Ptolemy at all.

Partly due to this,

the Egyptian government

distances itself

from Souvaltzi's work

and pulls her permit to dig.

Souvaltzi spends

the next two decades

trying to seek the government

of Egypt's permission

to keep digging.

They turn down her requests.

But even if Souvaltzi is wrong

about where Alexander

was truly buried,

many scholars are

intrigued by the idea

that perhaps where Alexander

wanted to be buried

mattered ultimately.

And if we rule out Siwa,

there was one other site

that would have been

very important to him.

Alexander the Great

came from ancient Macedonia

in today's northern

Greece and the Balkans.

Historians say that his father

was buried under the ruins

of a town known as Vergina.

And tradition holds

that Alexander

should also have

been buried there.

In the 1970s, a

Greek archaeologist

named Manolis Andronikos

excavated a tumulus,

a large burial mound there.

And he discovered a tomb

which had not been looted,

miraculously enough,

and which he identified

for various reasons

as the tomb of Philip II.

There were other bones

buried in this tomb.

So hopes run high that what

they found is Alexander's tomb.

However, they find no

additional evidence

that can really support this.

And so they move to

a different site,

this time they go excavate

at an ancient city

called Amphipolis.

Amphipolis is

located in northern Greece

about 100 miles from the tomb

of Alexander's father, Philip.

Amphipolis was a city that

was conquered by Philip II

in 357 BC and Amphipolis

was also the place

where Alexander

the Great prepared

for his most important

battle in Asia.

In 2012, while

archaeologists were digging,

they found another tomb.

When they go down the staircase,

they find a series of tomb

chambers, very ornate.

The first chamber

contains two large

and headless

figures of sphinxes.

The second tomb chamber

contains an elaborate mosaic

and it depicts a scene

from Greek mythology.

The mosaic

depicts the arrival of death,

and the elaborate

style of the tomb

would be typical of

monuments to royalty.

When they go further in,

they find a third tomb chamber,

and they go into

that and they find

more evidence of human bones.

They discover the body

of a 60-year-old woman,

the body of an infant,

the body of a 30-year-old man,

the body of a man

in his forties,

and the body of

another individual

whose bones are

so badly degraded

that they can't

actually tell very much

about how old this

person would've been.

The woman's bones

are the same age

as Alexander's mother when

she died at the age of 59,

and the mid-thirties bones

are obviously the same age

as Alexander the Great

was when he died.

Greek researchers

plan to submit the bones

for DNA testing to see if

these people were related.

So it's possible that they

could be Alexander's bones.

However, there are still

some issues with that.

The 30-year-old man's bones

show cut marks to the chest,

and we know this is not how

Alexander the Great died.

And also, these bones were found

in a cheaply constructed box,

and these are not

the kinds of vessels

that we would expect

to find the remains

of one of the greatest kings

to ever walk the

face of the earth.

It is also possible that the

tomb was built for Alexander,

but he was never entombed there,

having been taken down

to Egypt by Ptolemy.

The tomb appears

to have been looted

at some point in antiquity,

which is really a shame,

because we've lost any

other pieces of information

that might be able

to solve the mystery

of who was actually

buried in this tomb.

Optimistically, the

fact that we haven't found

Alexander's body means that

there's hope that one day

it may yet be found,

that it's somewhere out there.

And there are going

to be more theories,

more suggestions of

where that could be,

which we can bring to bear

in archaeological research.

To find this tomb with this

enormous figure from history

who's super important in uniting

the ancient world

for a period of time.

It's kind of every

Egyptologist's dream

to find the tomb of

Alexander the Great.

Today, the search

for Alexander's mummy

continues to make

headlines around the world.

Whether Alexander's body lies

silently under a great city

or has been obliterated by

the forces of man or nature,

one thing is certain.

The story of his life

still stirs fascination

more than 2,000 years

after his death.

I'm Laurence Fishburne,

thank you for watching

"History's Greatest Mysteries."