The Murder of Cleopatra (32 page)

Ancient Egypt
, created by George Long and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1831 and published in
Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl-edge
, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1844).
Image courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection,
www.davidrumsey.com
.

A cobra of the sort that Cleopatra supposedly smuggled into her tomb. ©
Atlantic Productions Ltd
.

The immense desert across which Cleopatra would attempt to drag her ships on rollers.
Photo by Pat Brown
.

Pat at the Step Pyramid.
Photo by Jennifer Walker
.

Unknown author,
Ancient Alexandria
(1888), from Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA),
http://hdl.handle.net/1911/9433
.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara.
Photo by Jennifer Walker.

The Great Pyramid through the window of the nearby Pizza Hut.
Photo by Jennifer Walker.

The Bent Pyramid of Sneferu at Dashur.
Photo by Jennifer Walker
.

The Red Pyramid at Dashur.
Photo by Jennifer Walker.

At the Red Pyramid, the Great Pyramid, and many tombs in the Valley of the Kings, one often walks up to the tomb and then down into the tomb via a long passageway. There are no windows and there is no roof one can ascend to and stand on.
Photo by Pat Brown.

Descending into a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Photo by Pat Brown.

More than two thousand years later, the architecture of the Temple of Isis at Dendera shows solid construction, which I found to be consistent in all the temple structures and tombs I visited; there are no gaps in the walls or where the floors meet the walls that would permit a snake to slither its way out of any sealed room.
Photo by Jennifer Walker.

Even this passageway down into a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, which is far older than the temples and tombs of Cleopatra's time, shows how solid the construction was and how there are no holes or gaps anywhere for asps to escape from the interior of a burial vault.
Photo by Pat Brown.