See the Haunting Stone Face of a Ptolemaic Statue Unearthed Near the Ancient Egyptian City of Alexandria

As a team of French archaeologists excavated a seventh-century C.E. dwelling at Taposiris Magna, an ancient city located around 30 miles west of Alexandria along Egypt’s northern coast, they found two cold marble eyes staring back up at them from the sandy ruins.

Although its nose had been broken off, the statue of a man’s head still showed remarkable detail. His forehead bore wrinkles. Crow’s feet marked the corners of his wide eyes. His veins bulged at the temples. His eyebrows arched up sternly.

Led by Joachim le Bomin, an archaeologist at the University of Lyon and the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, the team determined that the marble head dates back to the Egyptian Ptolemaic period, which lasted between 305 and 30 B.C.E., according to a statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

That means the head dates back at least seven centuries earlier than the ruins of the medieval house it was found in—a “captivating enigma” that’s left the team puzzled, as La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal writes.

At about 15 inches tall—double the size of a normal human skull—the marble head was likely part of a larger-than-life statue that loomed over a public space or building, rather than a private residence, as Mohamed Ismail Khaled, the secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, says in the statement. Its body has not been recovered.

Mohamed Abdel-Badie, an official at Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, adds that the statue’s model may have been a prominent public figure or member of the elite, but he likely wasn’t a king, underscoring the importance of Taposiris Magna during the Ptolemaic period.

The name Taposiris Magna comes from the Egyptian “Per Wsir,” which translates to “house of Osiris,” the Egyptian god of both fertility and death. The city and temple were established by the pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus between 280 and 270 B.C.E. in honor of the god.

In more recent years, the site has also generated suspicions that the ill-fated lovers Mark Antony, a Roman politician and general, and Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, were entombed nearby after their suicides in 30 B.C.E.

Earlier this month, Kathleen Martinez, a criminal lawyer turned archaeologist who has been digging for Cleopatra’s tomb at the site since 2005, unearthed a small white marble bust that she thinks depicts the last Egyptian queen, infamous for her “romantic and strategic relationships” with Roman leaders Julius Caesar and Antony, as Smithsonian magazine’s Julia Binswanger wrote.

But not all archaeologists agreed with Martinez’s claim that the bust depicted Cleopatra.

Zahi Hawass, a former Egyptian minister of tourism and antiquities who wasn’t involved with the dig, told Live Science’s Owen Jarus that the statue may date to a period after the queen’s death. “I looked at the bust carefully. It is not Cleopatra at all; it is Roman,” he said.

Although Martinez hasn’t found Cleopatra’s tomb yet, her other incidental discoveries attest to the richness of the ancient city and temple. In 2022, for instance, Martinez and her team at the University of Santo Domingo discovered a 6.5-foot-tall, 4,300-foot-long tunnel some 40 feet beneath the temple while searching for the tomb.

“If there’s a one percent chance that the last queen of Egypt could be buried there, it is my duty to search for her,” she told the blog Heritage Key in 2009.

But even if those odds fall to zero, discoveries like the recently unearthed stern marble head show that Taposiris Magna still has many secrets to reveal.