Review: Cleopatra’s Final Secret

“She deserved to be remembered in another way,” Kathleen Martinez, the subject of National Geographic’s new documentary Cleopatra’s Final Secret, said to me in an interview.

The last queen of Egypt has been shrouded in myth and mystery for the past 2,000 years: the greatest being the location of her tomb. Little is known about the great queen’s death. Kathleen Martinez and her team, including the discoverer of the Titanic, Bob Ballard, sought to rectify this in Cleopatra’s Final Secret as they excavated through Taposiris Magna to a submerged port off the coast of Egypt. Martinez hypothesizes that the queen had her body moved to Taposiris Magna through now-submerged tunnels, evidence confirmed by the creation of maps by Ballard. 

Excavation led to the discovery of coins, with what is believed to be Cleopatra’s image, outside the temple as an offering to the goddess Isis. Among the nearly 3,000 items found, Martinez is confident these coins signal Taposiris Magna as significant to the queen, and further support the theory that the temple is her final resting place. 

However, this documentary is about more than finding Cleopatra’s tomb. It tells the story of two women who went after what they wanted: Cleopatra and Kathleen Martinez. 

As the team digs through Taposiris Magna, the documentary tells the story of Egypt’s last queen. Cleopatra is often given a bad reputation in the popular imagination. Considered a seductress, Cleopatra was more than just a beautiful face but a woman with a purpose. 

Martinez recounted her story about growing up in the Dominican Republic to me: “When I was a kid, I used to tell my parents that I wanted to be an archaeologist, and one day I would go to Egypt and make great discoveries. And at the beginning, they laughed. And later they started telling me that they would not, they don’t agree that I study archaeology… And for a while, I changed my path and I studied law. But I always had this passion inside me.” 

“In reality, she was a scholar,” said Martinez. “She was a philosopher. She was a doctor in medicine. She spoke nine languages, all the languages of her time. She was a leader. She was a queen. She was a warrior.” At the time, women were not allowed to have a formal education, yet Cleopatra’s father Ptolemy XII allowed her to study from an early age at the library of Alexandria. This led to her being not just one of the most powerful women alive, but one of the strongest rulers. 

Cleopatra’s Final Secret bonds together the lives of two intelligent women, who despite being 2,000 years apart, walk through the same temple with a dream. “One day I realized that you have to pursue your dream,” Martinez said to me. “And you cannot put your dreams in the hands of anybody to destroy them. You have to believe in yourself.” 

Cleopatra’s Final Secret premieres on Friday, September 26, on Disney+ and Hulu.  Watch the trailer here.

Author: Abby Kirby

Abby Kirby is an English teacher and fan studies scholar. She holds an M.A. in Media and Cinema Communications from DePaul University.

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