ALEXANDER THE GREAT'S TOMB

______By 331 B.C. Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world: Greece, Phoenicia, Egypt and the vast Persian Empire. His soldiers even reached what is now India. Alexander was only 33 years old.
______Too bad Alexander wasn't as big on medical science as he was on the military art. He died while enroute from Egypt to Babylon, probably of malaria.
______What happened next is a subject for conjecture. Philip Arrhidaeus was chosen by Alexander's army to make the funeral arrangements. However, Alex's generals had begun to fight amongst themselves after their leaders death, each intent on carving up a sizable chunk of Alexander's conquests for themselves. Ptolemy, another ex-general, supposedly had the magnificent funerary cart seized as it traveled on its way to Macedonia. The body was then redirected to Egypt.
______Ptolemy had picked out Egypt for himself and wanted Alexander's body buried there because of a prophesy that proclaimed that the country where Alexander was interred would be the most prosperous on Earth. Initially the body was placed in a traditional Egyptian tomb but later was reinterred by Ptolemy II in a mausoleum in Alexandria, an Egyptian city originally built by the conquerer a generation before.
______With his body resting in a golden sarcophogus, Alexander became one of the world's earliest tourist attractions. Visitors came from all over the ancient world to see him and spend their tourist drachmas in Alexandria, which kinda fulfilled the prophecy. Later the body was moved into a glass sarcophogus (so the gold one could be melted down into coins) and the tourists REALLY got their money's worth! Instead of seeing a gold container and being told "that's Alexander the Great in there" they could see the preserved body for themselves.
______Roman emperors conquered Egypt and the tomb became a kind of pilgrimage. Their trips there help to further document the tombs existence at Alexandria.
______The tomb was placed off-limits to the public in the 3rd Century A.D. and records of the tomb are sketchy after that. Then again, the city of Alexandria was sacked several times during this period and was also subject to some major natural disasters. By the time Moslem armies conquered the city it was well into decline.
______Today some archeologists are determined to find the tomb... assuming it still exists somewhere in the ancient city, buried or incorporated into some ancient mosque. Alexander's glass sarcophogus may yet turn up.

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