For 20 years, National Geographic explorer and archaeologist Kathleen Martínez has been on a mission to find Cleopatra . It’s the sort of thing someone might tell you, only for you to roll your eyes and think “you and every other archaeologist,” but Martínez has been piecing together some very curious finds discovered in places that other archaeologists had written off. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Like all Egyptian kings and queens, Cleopatra VII was thought to be the embodiment of a divine being. Isis, specifically, the goddess of healing and magic. She was the last monarch of the Ptolemaic Kingdom, ruling Egypt from 51 BCE to 30 BCE in a reign that makes for very interesting reading.

Cleopatra inherited the thr

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