{"id":485331,"date":"2025-10-02T19:08:31","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T23:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.net\/en\/uncategorized\/a-dominican-woman-is-about-to-find-cleopatras-tomb\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T19:08:31","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T23:08:31","slug":"a-dominican-woman-is-about-to-find-cleopatras-tomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/international\/a-dominican-woman-is-about-to-find-cleopatras-tomb\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dominican woman is about to find Cleopatra’s tomb"},"content":{"rendered":"The Dominican lawyer and archaeologist Kathleen Mart\u00ednez <\/strong>is convinced of one thing: she will find the tomb<\/a> of Cleopatra, a mystery that has not been solved in 2,000 years.\n\nIn an interview<\/a> with content creator Harini Bhat, Mart\u00ednez, born in 1966 in Santo Domingo, spoke about the 20 years of exploration and excavation at the place where the last queen of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Ancient Egypt is supposed to be located.\n\nYou might be interested in:<\/strong> http:\/\/Arajet and Casarr\u00e9 team up to promote Dominican gastronomy at NY Fashion Week<\/a>\n\nHer jump from criminal law to archeology was due to her interest in Egyptology and, mainly, in the life of Cleopatra. Thanks to her profession, she was assigned as a diplomat of her country to Egypt, which allowed her to begin to study closely what she had only been able to know through books.\n\n“I think I made a great discovery<\/strong>, I was able to locate the place where I believe Cleopatra’s tomb is, in an abandoned temple west of Alexandria”, one of the largest cities in the country located in the northeast of Africa and the western part of Asia.\n\n\n

For the Latin American Achievement<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\nThe 57-year-old woman has been studying and excavating in Egypt for two decades with her own savings. Now she doesn’t want the merit to be foreign, she wants to leave it as a Latin American legacy, she indicated<\/a> to the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds.\n\n“We Latinos have a lot to offer<\/strong>, but we haven’t had the opportunity,” she declared. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t give up to be the one who opens the door for those who come behind. I will not tire until we place ourselves on the map of world archeology,” she highlighted.\n\nFurthermore, Mart\u00ednez revealed that he has turned down several offers from archaeologists at Harvard and Oxford. “I didn’t accept because it would have been a foreign achievement. And I want it to be Latin American<\/strong>, to carry our flag,” he added.\n\n\n

The Secret of Taposiris Magna Temple<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\nMart\u00ednez believes that the tomb of the Egyptian queen is located in the temple of Taposiris Magna, 45 km west of Alexandria, despite the fact that the researchers who have preceded her maintain that it would be in other royal palaces.\n\n“I firmly believe that Cleopatra’s tomb cannot be anywhere other than Taposiris Magna<\/strong>. Because in Alexandria, the city itself, it would not have served her because she was too hated by the Romans and they would never have let her rest in peace next to Mark Antony.”\n\nThe Dominican archaeologist used the study of ancient writings to lean towards Taposiris Magna. “It is the only temple in Egypt where there was no information about who built it, which gods it was dedicated to, and if it ever worked,” she explains.\n\n“At first, no one agreed, not even my own family. I had to face criticism from the beginning, but that wasn’t important; I had a goal and I had to focus on my work. This happens when you try to change things that have been established as history,” he says.\n\n\n

The chosen place<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\nMart\u00ednez received a two-month license to conduct excavations. “I didn’t have much time to lose, because in archaeology, the first four weeks you have to document the site, so I only had four weeks to make my first find. And I did it on the last day,” he recalls.\n\nThe researcher believes that Cleopatra prepared to rest in a tomb that was difficult for her enemies, the Romans, to find. She knew that if she were captured or her mummy found, she would be exhibited as a “war trophy” in Rome and her honor would be shattered.\n\n“Even though she was a prisoner, she found a way to die with dignity and then disappeared in front of the most powerful army of antiquity. It’s incredible,” she says.\n\n\n

A “big surprise”<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n


In his work at Taposiris Magna, Mart\u00ednez found that it was connected to the sea, through a tunnel that goes 25 meters underground and passes under a modern highway and a tourist complex towards the Mediterranean. “It was a big surprise that I did not expect”.<\/p>\n\nFaced with the challenge of conducting explorations at sea, of which he had no experience, his team suggested that he contact Bob Ballard, the oceanographer who revealed the location of the Titanic.\n\n“To my surprise, when I explained the project to him, he said: ‘I’m already part of it.’ And from that moment on, everything changed because it would have been impossible for me to do what he has done. Because I didn’t have the experience and we needed to map the ocean.”\n\nAccording to him, it is the first time the Egyptian government has knowledge of underwater structures under a temple.\n\nAll the archaeological information they have will be used to carry out the excavation. So far, they only have elements that suggest there was human activity at the site: ceramic vessels, coins with the face of Cleopatra, and a figurine of a woman who could be the pharaoh’s.\n\n\n

The Isis’s footprint<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\nMart\u00ednez dared to seek the new in the known. She was determined to find the foundation plates of the temple in the same places that had been explored for a century.\n\n“Those famous Egyptologists, Italians, French, Germans, Hungarians, Americans, English, Egyptians, and many more have searched before me and failed: when I said that I would discover the place of the foundations, everyone laughed thinking it was impossible.”\n\n\n

After a dedicated cleaning of the area with brushes, the hidden discovery for so many others occurred: a foundation plate where the name of Isis, one of the main goddesses of Ancient Egypt, was written. Therefore, it was immediately linked to Cleopatra, who identified herself as ‘The new Isis’ in her reign.<\/p>\n\n\n“When we saw it, I can’t explain it, it was one of the greatest moments of my life. Only the birth of my children has been more important than that,”<\/strong> the archaeologist expressed.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dominican lawyer and archaeologist Kathleen Mart\u00ednez is convinced of one thing: she will find the tomb of Cleopatra, a mystery that has not been solved in 2,000 years. In an interview with content creator Harini Bhat, Mart\u00ednez, born in 1966 in Santo Domingo, spoke about the 20 years of exploration and excavation at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":485332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/phj1q1-22fV","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/10\/68deac2159bf5b22451dbc15.jpg","dum_api":{"author_name":"Redacci\u00f3n De \u00daltimo Minuto","author_image":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/cropped-logo-de-ultimo-minuto-96x96.png","categories_name":["International"],"featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/10\/68deac2159bf5b22451dbc15.jpg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deultimominuto.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}