Tea at Trianon: The Hunt: Cleopatra’s Long-Lost Tomb

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 14, 2024

The Hunt: Cleopatra’s Long-Lost Tomb

From Cleopatra (1963)

From ArtNet:

She has one of the most captivating and enduring mythologies of any leader in history, yet the true end of Queen Cleopatra’s story remains an enigma. Archaeologists might be able to offer some clarity, if they could only find her final resting place.
The location of the Queen of the Nile’s tomb has eluded experts for centuries. Napoleon famously led an expedition searching for the crypt in the early 19th century. Egyptologists widely believe it is hidden somewhere in Alexandria, where the missing tombs of all 14 of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs, the final dynasty of ancient Egypt, are expected to be. Alas, much of ancient Alexandria now lies at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
Greek historian Plutarch indicated that when Emperor Octavian ended a civil war by defeating Cleopatra and her beloved husband, the great Roman general Mark Antony, he allowed for them to be buried together. Though the prospect of finding both of their physical remains is thrilling, Plutarch wrote of their death and burial several decades after their occurrence, which casts his words into doubt.
Many Egyptologists accept that both the Queen and her royal consort died dramatically by suicide, she by snakebite and he by his own sword. Others speculate that she died by intentional drug overdose, or by stinging herself with a poison-tipped hairpin. A growing number of experts suspect the suicide is a cover-up—that perhaps the queen was murdered. Much of the contemporary understanding of Cleopatra is based on the accounts of ancient Roman and Greek historians who undoubtedly held a bias towards her. An autopsy of her mummy might reveal different truths. (Read more.)