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 or savant 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 the Lapis 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). The surface of the sarcophagus is covered with tiny, beautifully carved hieroglyphics, but when you look closely the reason the Romans named this the stone of a hundred stones becomes clear. Pebbles of sedimentary rocks of various colours are present along with clasts of volcanic and granitic rocks and the bedding can be clearly seen with strata of conglomerate alternating with sandstones.

In their 1909 guide the British Museum stated that the weight of the Nectanebo II sarcophagus was 6 tons and 17cwt which is 6.85 imperial tons or about 6950 kg (A Guide to the Egyptian Galleries (Sculpture) with a Preface by E. A. Wallis Budge, British Museum 1909, p.249). The same guide also gives length, width and height measurements for the sarcophagus, which I have reproduced in Table 1.

Detailed diagrams of the sarcophagus were published by Clarke (Figure 4) in 1805 and in the Description de l’Egypte (Figures 5 & 6) in 1822 and these also provide early values for its dimensions, which have been transcribed into Table 1. Furthermore, George Long, who wrongly attributes this sarcophagus to Pharaoh Amyrtaeus (404-399BCE), appears to have made independent measurements of it and published them in his book of 1836 (again added to Table 1) (George Long, The British Museum: Egyptian Antiquities, Vol II, Charles Knight, London 1836, pp.134-140 (the dimensions are given on pp.135-136); Long’s measurements are exactly reproduced by Samuel Sharpe, Egyptian Antiquities in the British Museum, John Russell Smith, London 1862, p.108-109). There is an early diagram in Yorke & Leake’s paper, reproduced here as Figure 7, but unfortunately devoid of explicit dimensions. Nevertheless, the ratio of length to height is measurable as 2.61:1 and by using the mean length dimension in Table 1, the height is derivable as approximately 120cm, which is reasonably consistent with the other early height measurements.

B. Sly made a sketch of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery in or before 1844, which was subsequently engraved by Radclyffe and is shown in Figure 8. The Nectanebo II sarcophagus appears to be the object resembling a bathtub to the right in the middle distance, but there is nothing in this view to attest to its exact dimensions.

With reference to the antique dimensional measurements thus far adduced, it is evident that the height in particular is significantly variable (a sample standard deviation of 1.79cm), although there is rather less variation between the various authorities regarding the length and width. A possible explanation is the damage in the vicinity of the base of the sarcophagus that is apparent in Figure 2, which would clearly have complicated this particular measurement. It also needs to be appreciated that this is a hand-crafted artefact, so some non-negligible variation in the height is to be expected between different points on its circumference (There are indications of asymmetry in the end elevations on Planche 41 in Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités, Vol V). On account of its rounded head-end and slight tapering towards the foot-end, the maximum width and length can only be measured at specific points, so these dimensions are inherently less liable to vary between our authorities.

In a determined bid to resolve the measurement uncertainty concerning the height, I visited the British Museum on 14th August 2019 and used a tape measure as well as taking orthogonal photographs of the long side with an upright leaflet of known dimensions incorporated to provide a scale length (Figure 9). Surprisingly, the result was that the sarcophagus now stands just 107.5cm high (with a measurement error of about ±0.5cm), despite the fact that the British Museum’s own website pages simultaneously proclaimed a height of 118.5cm (max) (https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=111535&partId=1).

This actual in-person measurement is more than five standard deviations below the mean of the antique measurements, so there is no possibility that it is attributable to measurement error. Instead, the clear implication is that the British Museum truncated the base...