The Dimensions and the Fabric of the Nectanebo II Sarcophagus

The Nectanebo II sarcophagus came to historical prominence at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Vivant Denon, the leading scholar orsavant among fifty or so who accompanied the expedition, mentioned finding it in an octagonal chapel in the courtyard of the Attarine Mosque at the heart of Alexandria in his travelogue (Vivant Denon (translated into English by E. A. Kendal), Travels in Egypt, Vol 1, London 1802, pp. 28-29). Furthermore,les savants subsequently recorded it with elaborate care and completeness in four of the elephant folio engravings in the Description de l’Egypte including a view of it ensconced in its chapel within the mosque (Figure 1) (Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités, Vol V, Planches 38-41).

The French were defeated by the British Army in the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Edward Daniel Clarke, a scholar from the University of Cambridge, was appointed to track down and seize the antiquities garnered by the French. Upon entering within the walls of the city, he was approached by local merchants who told him that the French had taken “the Tomb of Alexander” from the Attarine Mosque, and they described the sarcophagus to him (Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, Part 2: Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land, Vol 5 of the 4th Edition, London, 1817, Chapter VII on Alexandria, pp. 332-340). Clarke subsequently found it hidden beneath filthy rags in the hold of the French hospital ship La Cause in the inner harbour, apparently on the brink of being shipped back to France. Instead, it was shipped on the Madras to England where it was donated to the British Museum by the Crown in 1802 (London, British Museum EA 10).

Edward Daniel Clarke published a book in 1805 making a case that the sarcophagus actually had been used to entomb Alexander’s corpse (Edward Daniel Clarke, The Tomb of Alexander: A Dissertation on the Sarcophagus Brought from Alexandria and Now in the British Museum, Cambridge, 1805). This incorporated an important engraved perspective view of the sarcophagus drawn by W. Alexander (Figure 2). The book met with some scepticism especially regarding whether it would have been considered appropriate to entomb a Greek king in an Egyptian sarcophagus. This scepticism emanated particularly from the authorities at the British Museum, to whom Clarke therefore addressed a public letter with some additional arguments in 1807. By 1826, as hieroglyphics began to be read again, Yorke & Leake were deciphering the cartouches on the sarcophagus as “A. K. Hor.” or “U. K. Hor.” (the modern transliteration being Nakhthorheb), so it was becoming evident that the sarcophagus had not been made for Alexander (C. Yorke & W. Martin Leake, On Some Egyptian Monuments in the British Museum and Other Collections (read June 7, 1826), Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Series 1, Vol 1, Pt. 1-2, 1829, pp. 205-207). The British Museum persisted in an error of assigning the sarcophagus to Nectanebo I (Nakhtnebef) for a long time as Wace explains, regarding this as sufficient proof that it had never been used for Alexander, despite the fact that sarcophagi were very frequently re-used in the ancient world (A. J. B. Wace, The Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, Farouk I University Alexandria, Vol IV, 1948, pp. 1-11 (the misidentification is recounted on p.6). Even now, knowing that it was made for Nectanebo II and would consequently have been available in a vacant and pristine condition when Alexander was entombed at Memphis, the British Museum still does not even mention the possibility of its use for Alexander on its label and states only that “This object was incorrectly believed to be associated with Alexander the Great when it entered the collection in 1803” on its website (https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=111535&partId=1).

However, in twenty years of research on the matter I have never found any evidence that refutes the use of the sarcophagus for Alexander’s corpse.

The stone of the sarcophagus is usually described as a breccia or conglomerate, meaning a rock in which many fragments of older rocks are embedded. The matrix rock is a deep olive green (epidote-chlorite-sercite) and the sarcophagus has acquired a dulling patina over the twenty-four centuries of its existence, so it is not easy to appreciate how spectacular it must have appeared when new. It is likely that the hieroglyphic characters and images with which its exterior is almost entirely covered were originally inlaid, possibly with gold. The bare surface would have been polished to a glassy finish and this would have made the lovely range of colours of the angular fragments (Figure 3) far more prominent.

Ruth Siddall has provided full details of the geology (Ruth Siddall, Geology in the British Museum: The monumental stones of the Eastern Desert, Museum Geology No. 1, UCL Earth Sciences, 2013, Section 7): She states that the Nectanebo II sarcophagus is made of the sediments of the Wadi Hammamat Series, in this case theLapis Hecatonlithos (stone of a hundred stones), known geologically as the Um Had Conglomerate Member (Abd El-Rahmen, Y., Polat, A., Fryer, B. J., Dilek, Y., El-Sharkawy& Sakran, S., 2010, The provenance and tectonic setting of the Neoproterozoic Um Hassa Greywacke Member, Wadi Hammamat area, Egypt: Evidence from petrography and geochemistry,Journal of African Earth Sciences, 58, 185–196)