Is Alexander the Great's Body in St. Mark's Basilica in Venice?

​Recently, Expedition Unknown sent Josh Gates to follow radiation expert Andrew Chugg as he retraced his research into the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. Chugg has published many articles and books over the past twenty years arguing that Alexander’s corpse is current in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. His speculative conclusions are intriguing, and possible, but I keep getting hung up on the details. 

​Chugg’s argument is rooted in ancient texts, archaeology, and the absence of clear evidence. The Ptolemies set up a tomb for Alexander, called the Soma, in Alexandria the late fourth century BCE. It’s exact location is unknown, and various ancient authors differ on the contents of the tomb, writing variously that Alexander’s body lay in a sarcophagus of marble, gold, or crystal. The last clear report of the intact tomb occurs around 390 CE. An earthquake had likely damaged the Soma in 375 CE, and by 391 CE rampaging Christian extremists had ransacked most of what was left of pagan Alexandria, including the Serapeum. But Libanius, writing in 390, says the body itself was on display.
 
It is at this time that a new monument appears, the tomb of the Gospel writer St. Mark the Evangelist in which his body was displayed. On the one hand, this was logical since Mark founded the Alexandrian church, but on the other, this was quite strange since Mark was believed to have been cremated after his martyrdom in Alexandria in 68 CE, though an Egyptian tradition claimed his body had been rescued from the flames. Theodosius I, who ordered the destruction of all pagan monuments in 391, reportedly discovered Alexander’s treasure in the chaos, suggesting the Soma was looted and destroyed at that time. Chugg hypothesizes that fans of Alexander disguised the body as that of St. Mark and installed it in the new tomb in 391 CE to keep it safe from rampaging Christians, and there it sat in plain sight until two Venetians stole it in the ninth century and took it to Venice, where it now sits in St. Mark’s Basilica. Proof, he says, comes in the form of a segment of marble found near “St. Mark’s” relics in Venice which is the exact size to have covered part of the granite sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, the last native pharaoh, which Islamic tradition holds had once held Alexander’s remains.

Sarcophagus of Nectanebo II.

This, though, is where things start to get squirrely. Chugg argues that Alexandrian Christian moderates were able to remove Alexander’s elaborate marble sarcophagus casing from the Soma along with his body, while leaving the granite inner sarcophagus behind, and move both to the tomb of St. Mark, where they were able to re-erect them as “Mark’s” tomb—all without the Alexandrians noticing, having completely forgotten about Alexander’s tomb. The evidence for this is St. John Chrysostom’s Homily 26 on 2 Corinthians of c. 400 CE, in which he asks after Alexander’s lost tomb:

For, tell me, where is the tomb of Alexander? Show it me and tell me the day on which he died. But of the servants of Christ the very tombs are glorious, seeing they have taken possession of the most loyal city; and their days are well known, making festivals for the world. And his tomb even his own people know not, but this man's the very barbarians know.

​Chugg takes this as proof that Alexander’s tomb had been forgotten between 391 and 400, utterly erased from the popular mind. But that simply isn’t what Chrysostom meant. He is very clearly implying that Alexander’s own people, i.e. the Greco-Roman pagans of the Roman Empire, not citizens of Alexandria, did not treat his tomb with the same reverence that Christians worldwide afforded to the tomb of Christ and the tombs of the saints. Chrysostom lived in Constantinople, not Alexandria, and was writing in that context. His claim is parallel to Theodoret of Cyrus’s which made the same comparison to the tombs of Persian emperors in the 420s, though the tombs he cited, belonging to Xerxes and Darius, were on full display carved into the rocks near Persepolis, and those of the Roman emperors, which still may be seen in Rome today (A Cure for Pagan Maladies, 8.60-61). At any rate, we know Chrysostom didn’t really believe Alexander had been forgotten among his people, for he also warned against the cult of Alexander and the magical enchantments pagans performed in his name (Ad illuminados cat.).
 
In short, Chrysostom and Theodoret are not proof of the loss of Alexander’s tomb and body, though it’s likely the original edifice had been desecrated when they wrote.
 
A bigger problem for Chugg is a logical inconsistency in his ideas. To my mind, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Christians simply moved Alexander’s body and sarcophagus casing, which everyone had seen for centuries, and set it up with a new name and everyone just accepted it as Mark’s. But Chugg argues that Alexander’s tomb had been utterly forgotten so that he can have “Mark” take over. But he also told me via X that the Venetians (known only, by the way, from an eleventh-century account of their ninth-century exploits) needed to bring Alexander’s sarcophagus casing to prove the body they brought back was Mark’s. But he compounds the incredulity by asking us to believe that while Alexander’s tomb had been forgotten and destroyed and the inner sarcophagus abandoned, the Arab conquerors of Egypt correctly identified the inner sarcophagus and set it up in a mosque built on the ruins of the church of St. Athanasius as Alexander’s grave. Early Muslim historians, such as Al-Mas’udi, writing in Meadows of Gold (1.253) in the early 900s, speak of a still-extant marble burial place—which must have been sealed, by the way, since it was not described as empty—and said it was Alexander’s. Leo Africanus, who visited five hundred years later also saw it and affirmed that the locals believed it held the body of Alexander—which means it had to have been sealed. He writes in his Description of Africa in the section on Alexandria:

Neither ought it to be omitted, that in the midst of the ruins of Alexandria, there still remains a small edifice, built like a chapel, worthy of notice on account of a remarkable tomb, held in high honour by the mahometans; in which sepulchre, they assert, is preserved the body of Alexander the Great, an eminent prophet and king, as they read in their koran. An immense crowd of strangers comes thither, even from distant countries, for the sake of worshipping and doing homage to the tomb; on which, like wise, they frequently bestow considerable donations.

The chapel (left) of the Attarine Mosque around the time of the removal of Nectanebo II's sarcophagus.

​This was the Attarine Mosque, built in the eleventh century atop the ruins of the Church of St. Athanasius. Within an octagonal chapel stood the cenotaph, which Chugg, following French and British scholars of the colonial period, assumed to be Nectanebo’s sarcophagus. (The hypothesis was first propoed by Edward Clarke in 1805, and heavily criticized shortly thereafter for inconsistencies and lack of evidence.) The French found it in the crumbling mosque in 1798, and the British took it to London in 1802. But there is a problem with that because Nectanebo’s sarcophagus was being used as a ritual bathtub in the mosque when the French found it (it had drainage holes drilled into the base) and was not the venerated cenotaph of Alexander described as late as the 1600s by George Sandys (likely copying from Leo). At any rate, Nectanebo’s sarcophagus is not made of marble, the material both ancient authors (beginning with Plutarch) and Muslim observers said Alexander’s sarcophagus had been made from.
 
Chugg gets around this by positing a limestone casing for Nectanebo’s sarcophagus, though this casing could not be what al-Mas’udi referred to if the Venetians had carried off the casing that had been already been moved to Mark’s tomb. He also believes Nectanebo’s box was Alexander’s first coffin in Memphis before he was moved to Alexandria, though this raises more questions than answers about why the Ptolemies, so rich and powerful, would have kept Alexander in a recycled box each time they moved his tomb. One might more parsimoniously assume that the locals remembered the former shrine to Alexander and attributed his name to the grandest piece of rock in there.
 
The piece of limestone in St. Mark’s, bearing a shield with “Macedonian” symbols, is, perhaps Chugg’s best piece of evidence, though the art is not the kind of quality you would expect the grandest empire in the Hellenistic world to apply to the tomb of the ruling dynasty’s divine hero. The piece of limestone features a shield with a Macedonian-style sunburst shield emblem. I’m no expert in Ptolemaic armaments, but it is my understanding that the same shield was used by the Ptolemies. At any rate, Chugg claims an exact match between limestone and sarcophagus. Nectanebo’s sarcophagus has a maximum height is 118.50 cm, while the casing stone is 118 cm tall. This is interesting but not conclusive; the Rosetta stone and some Ptolemaic orthostats are also the same height, and at any rate, if the casing and the sarcophagus were of the same height, then it does not account for either box’s lids. The casing wouldn’t hide the sarcophagus lid, and the casing’s lid wouldn’t fit. Of course, the ancient sources say the body was on display, so perhaps there were no lids, but why then were the sarcophaguses necessary to hide the crystal coffin that was on open display?
 
(An alternative hypothesis, put forward with reservations by Vassilios Christides in 1999—years before Chugg—in an academic volume too rare and expensive for me to consult on short notice, suggested that Nectanebo’s sarcophagus wasn’t Alexander’s first resting place but his last, in which the marble coffin rested, either for Ptolemaic propaganda or to hide it in Late Antiquity.)
 
At the end of the day, I can’t quite get over the idea that the body and outer casing were spirited off to St. Mark’s Tomb unnoticed, while Alexander’s tomb was forgotten yet simultaneously remembered only for the previously unsee inner sarcophagus, which went unmentioned for five or six hundred years. Does that mean Chugg is wrong? No. He might be right. His train of logic is intriguing, but too many little details don’t quite add up to say Chugg has proved his case beyond a reasonable doubt.