• We’ve reached the end of the adventurous antics of Alexander the Great in his mellified state—I hope my posts have amazed and amused you. As for the sticky process at the heart of the story, perhaps you’re thinking: oh, those fascinating, misguided ancients and their quaint beliefs.
• Think again. Modern chemistry has confirmed that honey is an effective antibiotic, killing bacteria in a different way than drugs like penicillin do. Regarding its other qualities, (and by merest coincidence a quote from an entry in my new book, How to Mellify a Corpse) “Although honey has been used for millennia to preserve fruit and meat, the length of time it can preserve a human body has long been the subject of debate.”
• In 1991, on a university campus in Baghdad, a city better known 2,000 years ago as Babylon, a pair of distinguished Iraqi scientists put honey to the test. They began a 6-year study of honey as a tissue preservative. For their experiment, they used mice, rabbits, and two small human fetuses that had miscarried at 16 and 20 weeks (the latter used with parental consent plus permission from the ethics committee of the Baghdad College of Medicine.)
• Immersed in honey for varying periods, kept at room temperature in glass jars for one to three years, all subjects shrank in size and weight. Decay: none. They also retained their shape and hair, turning darker (not, however, as dark as Egyptian mummies, which blackened due to natron). The scientists also kept a number of skin biopsies in honey; on being transferred to a saline solution they regained the consistency, texure, and color of fresh skin. The success of this longterm study offered new hope
for burn victims and others needing tissue.
• And it proved that the ancient art of mellification or honey embalming really did work.
• Judging by the paucity of references online, the final report of doctors Khalifa E. Sharquie and Rafid A. Nijim (published in the 2004 Saudi Medical Journal and available online as well)  got little fanfare. But physicians and medical researchers around the globe are making good use of their powerful findings.
• Will honey embalming ever catch on as the elite green way to go? Not likely. Why? Just ask the overworked, pesticide-hammered honeybees. Honey is a more critical commodity in today’s world than you might imagine. The sweet stuff we dribble on toast or yogurt? Only a minor portion of honeybee output goes in that direction. Most honey ends up in the food industry, flavoring cereals, breads, and products like barbecue sauce.
• The real elephant in the room, however, is the tobacco industry, which uses copious amounts of honey to make cigarettes  (and pipe tobacco, etc) taste and smell better. USDA honey expert Vaughn  Bryant is also quoted as saying that honey also enhances the body’s ability to absorb nicotine.  Oh boy.
• How about we set aside the world’s diminishing amount of honey for medical needs and table use? Better yet, how about first we save our bees to do the job we most depend on them to do: pollination. This industrious insect is directly responsible for the survival of a vast number of plants we need to live: from grasses for livestock, to fruits, nuts, and vegetables.  Time to appreciate them more, as the ancients did.
“SI SAPIS, SIS APIS.”
As the ancient Romans used to say, “If you would be wise, be a bee.”

For more sources and details, see the “Dig deeper” link with this blog, plus the bibliography in the Mellify book. Also forthcoming: a full bibliography of the Alex saga.

• Ever wonder what it would be like to appear dead yet still hear what people said? It’s possible that the celebrated figure known as Alexander the Great experienced that very phenomenon.
• Despite the 2,333 years that have passed since his passing, the enigma of Alexander the Great’s sudden death at 32  remains a lively subject of debate. Even more mysterious was the uncanny state of preservation that his body was said to retain.
• Moreover, eyewitnesses over the centuries have testified to the remarkable hardiness of Alex’s corpse after being mellified (embalmed in honey). Not many cadavers endure the vicissitudes of corpse-napping, thousand of miles of road travel, and multiple changes of address. After death, he was parked for long stretches of time in Babylon. And Memphis.  And Alexandria. Furthermore, his body (while an object of veneration) was subjected to various indignities, including the loss of a nose to a too-nosy Roman emperor.
• But the cause-of-death conundrum remains an enduring fascination.
Historians, scientists, and writers have devoted years to solving it. Today, with more science to aid them, medical experts have suggested various culprits, from the West Nile virus to poisoning.
• Two theories have won the most serious attention, both closely matching the symptoms and rapid decline of Alexander. In addition, they address the bizarre “rosy fresh corpse” issue.
• Theory one: Alexander was felled by late-stage typhoid fever that led to ascending paralysis and coma. At the end of May, Alex’s inner circle and drinking companions were witnesses to his sharp abdominal pains that made their leader cry out. Two weeks of successively higher fevers, sweats, chills, and exhaustion followed. In his last days, Alexander was speechless, then delirious.
• Theory two: Alexander died of complications of cerebral malaria. The smoking gun? The time Alex spent in a mosquito-infested marsh about a month before his death. From Mesopotamia to Rome, many regions of the ancient world had swampy bits, their inhabitants seasonally subject  to malaria. The Plasmodium falciparum parasite, nastiest and most fatal of the four, can cause attacks of fever that peak every 24 hours—a pattern observed and documented in Alex’s case. The parasite attacks the internal organs, often involving the brain or lungs, and leading to cerebral malaria.
• Whichever theory you fancy, the end result would have have been similar: someone who looked dead, did not appear to be breathing, could not speak, and could not move. Always a man who longed to see what was around the next corner, Alexander may have had the ultimate in-body, out-of-body experience, being alive while being mourned as dead.
• A wonderful mass of resource material (some invaluable, some fairytales) exists. On the links page of my companion website  you’ll find a fuller bibliography on the entire Alexander saga. If you don’t find it, nag me.
Alexander’s last days were observed and written about by Macedonians, Greeks, and high-ranking Babylonians.  Although Alexander’s own Royal Journal and other primary sources are not extant, they were consulted by men like Ptolemy I, who rerouted Alex’s corpse to Egypt. Those who compare extant sources and study Alexander in depth (Andrew Chugg for one) say that their adherence to the originals was often faithful.

• Alexander the Great wasn’t the only person to get a honey of an afterlife. Various personages, famous and not-so-very, went for mellification.
• Certain Spartan kings in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, including Agesilaus, chose that method of interment. One of several prominent Greeks named Aristobolus went the same route. Columella, a writer from Roman Spain, gave honey embalming several mentions in his book On Agriculture.
• Well-known women  also got the honey treatment. Mariamne, the favorite wife of Herod the Great, was honey embalmed (although it’s doubtful it was at her request, since Herod murdered her.) In a similarly grisly scenario, Emperor Nero’s trophy wife Poppaea may have been mellified. After kicking her to death when she nagged him for coming home late after the chariot races, Nero got the guilts. To make amends, he ordered up a splendiferous funeral in what historian Tacitus called “the foreign style, her body filled with fragrant spices and embalmed,” and later put into the sepulchre of the Julii.
• At times mellification involved a topcoat of wax with the honey. First, however, the brain, lungs, and the contents of the dearly departed’s abdomen were removed, and aromatic spices plus honey and cedar oil packed into the body cavity. The corpse of Alexander the Great apparently rested in white honey, but other customers might have gotten wrapped with honey-soaked bandages, mummy style.
• Does the whole process sound messy and a bit far-fetched? Read on. In the early decades of the 20th century, famed Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge saw some sweet evidence himself. At an ancient Egyptian necropolis, a couple of his workers got the munchies and it so happened that they came across an old jar of honey. A very old jar. One dipped his bread in; the bread emerged with some hair on it. (I really hope they stopped eating at that point.) Inside the jar, Budge found the well-preserved, centuries-old body of a small child, adorned with high-quality grave ornaments indicating her status.
• In ancient times and among many long-ago cultures, honey had a sacred role in life. And in death. Jars of it were placed in Egyptian tombs; honey was poured over Greek graves to honor the dead. Long-ago folklore even hinted that embalming someone in honey allowed that soul to reincarnate. Maybe Alexander the Great knew he was onto a good thing. After all, his afterlife proved to have the same kind of excitement and mystery as his mortal life.

Wife Poppy before murder and mellification

Nero, blue over that other murder—Mom.

• As a legend, Alexander the Great had real staying power. At 20, he began to lead armies and changed his world completely. Cutting a wide swath across Europe, he swept through the Middle East, across Asia, and deep into India’s midsection.
• A thinker, a reader, a brilliant strategist, a farsighted leader, he did more than conquer by force. He made it desirable to speak Greek, to copy Greek ideas and ways of life, to marry Greeks. Centuries before the
Romans ever dreamed of it, Alexander captivated the eastern half of the Mediterranean world  by transplanting Greek culture everywhere. He founded over a dozen cities, all immodestly named Alexandria—many still in existence today.
• Once Alex died in Babylon, his companions in conquest fought for decades, finally divvying up their leader’s vast geography into four pieces. They weren’t evil or incompetent–just smaller men.
But the mystique of Alex lived on. Even in death, he was different, his body miraculously remaining uncorrupted. Embalmed in honey, swathed in layers of gold like an ancient pharoah, Alexander the Great became a world wonder, a holy object of veneration.
• Some, jealous of his post-mortem power, came to purloin his magic. Emperor Caligula visited Alexander and stole his cuirass, the chest armor worn by the man who’d led his troops everywhere.
• Emperors, philosophers, Roman senators, tyrants hoping to keep a grip—they all came to his place of eternal rest to pay homage to the young man who’d raced through the world and set it afire in such a new way.

wearing a seashell crown and Alex’s stolen breastplate,the delusional Caligula “defeated” the god Neptune

• Emperor Septimius Severus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 193 until his death in 211 AD, worried about the ease with which Alexander’s magnificent tomb could be accessed. To keep it from being ransacked, he securely sealed it. Four years later, his own wayward son and murderous heir Caracalla broke open the tomb, then sealed it again—the last person known to have seen Alex’s body within.
• After that date, no one knows exactly what happened to Alex or the gleaming mausoleum under which he was snugly hidden. What we do know is that by the middle of the 3rd century AD, the city of Alexandria began to suffer greatly, torn by political strife, war, and religious turmoil. As if that weren’t enough, in 365 AD a massive earthquake and tidal wave hit, savagely battering the city.
• Perhaps the body of Alexander (in his precious glass coffin or more likely, a sturdier vessel) was spirited away to safety before that happened. The newest evidence (in Andrew Chugg’s most recent book on the lost tomb of Alexander) suggests there may be a link between the simultaneous disappearance of Alex and the appearance of a body labeled as Saint Mark, which showed up about the same time and place in Alexandria.
• The quixotic search for Alexander lives on today, as imperishable as our mental image of that bright-haired boy—the one who tamed a wild stallion with insightful psychology; who conquered three continents with intelligence and sheer grit; the gifted one, who had a grand plan for uniting people, not merely ruling them. Maybe I’m being naïve here. But Alexander, a hero with human faults, worshipped as a god, still speaks to us. Even when depicted in stone, he still quivers with life.

The Great one’s life is carved onto this sarcophagus, but it is not his. Alex and his coffin (or coffins) remain MIA.

Dateline: Rome, Italy,  and Alexandria, Egypt, 215 AD

• At their Rome convention, soothsayers and other political pundits did a survey of Mediterranean movers and shakers. The results showed that Alexander the Great garnered 75 percent of the vote as the world’s most admired conqueror, while fully one-quarter of the respondents believed that Alexander was still alive.
• The survey, accompanied by the freshly removed liver of a large white ox, was presented to Roman Emperor Caracalla, a big Alex fan, who announced that he would sail to Alexandria to honor the iconic action figure.
• At the Soma mausoleum complex, the emperor and entourage, consisting of his entire army, were met by Imperial well-wishers. After entering the precinct, Emperor Caracalla sacrificed a large herd of ungulates and laid several boatloads of frankincense and myrrh upon the altars. When the smoke from animal fat and incense cleared sufficiently to allow access, it was discovered that the tomb had been sealed shut by Emperor Caracalla’s father, the late Emperor Severus.

• During the tedious interval required to break into the tomb, several unlucky attendants met with bodily harm as Rome’s top executive impatiently lashed out at underlings.

• Overcome with emotion at viewing the honeyed cadaver of his lifelong hero, the emperor removed his own purple cloak, belt, and armloads of gem-studded jewelry, which he placed upon Alexander’s 538-year-old remains.
• Members of his inner circle of toadies immediately pointed out the uncanny resemblance between Alexander and Emperor Caracalla, noting that the latter had the same ferocious brow and neck tilt as the former.
• Beaming, the emperor left the tomb, later telling reporters, “No wonder my old man didn’t want me, or anyone, to visit the tomb. I bet nobody ever went to my dad and said, hey dude, you and Alexander could be like, twins!”

Another delusional Alex wannabe

Caracalla’s gifts: bling plus new birthday suit

Dateline: Alexandria, Egypt, 30 BC

• In the tumultuous aftermath and mop-up of the defeat and suicides of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, the brand-new ruler of Rome and Egypt (soon to be referred to as Imperator Caesar Divi filius Augustus) made a state visit to the Soma super-crypt to pay his respects to one of his role models, Alexander the Great.
• At his request, the mellified body of Alexander was reverently removed from the burial chamber. After having the centuries-old conquerer lifted from his glass sarcophagus, the world’s highest-ranking Roman placed a gold diadem on the corpse’s cranium, then scattered flowers over him.
• Although eyewitness reports disagree, it appears that in a misguided effort to better scrutinize the body, the 33-year-old Roman leader broke off a sizeable piece of Alexander’s nose.
• Hoping to smooth over the de-beaking, the Alexandrian delegation urged him to continue his tour, moving on to view the bodies of the entire Ptolemy dynasty. Instead, the Augustus-to-be gave an audible sniff, saying, “I wished to see a king, not corpses.”
• An appalled silence fell, according to witnesses. Fearing the city’s now-traditional mob violence reaction, Alexandrian officials heartily encouraged Rome’s new head of state to set sail for Italy as soon as possible.

Alex before nose job

Wonder what he smells like, up close...

Dateline: Rome, Italy, and Alexandria, Egypt,  48 BC

• Gaius Julius Caesar, soon to be Rome’s new dictator for life, arrived on Egypt’s shores to pay homage to Alexander the Great and wrap up a little unfinished business after defeating his military rival Pompey at Pharsalus.
• Dressed in the regalia of a Roman consul, Caesar led a procession to the Alex tomb as his vanquished (and recently decapitated) rival had done.
• The mellified body of Alex, now into his third century, is showcased within the landmark called “Soma” (Greek for “the body”). Nearby is a rock grotto, the underground chamber where Alexander rests.
• At his arrival, rumors swept the city that Queen Cleopatra VII planned to give Caesar a personal tour of the Soma and possibly her other desirable holdings as well.
Soon after the tour, the bright-eyed dictator strode from the grotto where Alexander the Great’s iconic remains remain on round-the-sundial display. “Alex may be 277 years old but he doesn’t look a day over XXXII,” Caesar declared. “I don’t plan to go the honey route myself, but I can only hope to appear that well-preserved after death.”

You’re getting the private tour, big guy. No paparazzi!

Why do dictators always show up when I don’t have a thing to wear.

Dateline: Alexandria, Egypt, circa  89 BC

• Another shameful breach of decorum regarding Alexander the Great, now widely worshipped as the god Amon-Re in Egypt and elsewhere, has shaken the Mediterranean world.
• Last year, Egypt’s morbidly obese ruler Ptolemy X executed
a military coup to regain his throne. Then, unable to pay his mercenaries, he extricated the revered Alexander from his gilded crypt and trappings of beaten gold. Long noted for his dedication to alcoholism, the tenth Ptolemy had the precious metal melted down and turned into coinage, little realizing that he was sowing the seeds of his own demise.
• Although reaction was slow to build, Ptolemy’s money-grubbing perfidy was finally rewarded this year. Chased by irate troops from Egypt onto the sea, the rotund rascal was drowned as he sought refuge on the island of Cyprus.
• As Alexandrian citizens grieve over the desecration of their long-ago founder and namesake, artisans are frantically working around the waterclock, fashioning a transparent coffin for the honeyed corpse of Alexander.
• “It’s beyond state of the art. This coffin will provide better viewing for all, with far less chance of another degrading episode like this one,” commented a top bureaucrat at the elegant Soma complex in downtown Alexandria, which contains the bodies of all the Ptolemies plus Alexander.
The work, shrouded in secrecy until the unveiling, has led to conflicting reports as to whether Alexander the Great’s new containment vessel  is made of translucent alabaster, or that  cutting-edge substance favored by early adopters, referred to as glass.

Ptolemy dynasty, chubbier over time

Coffin recycled into coinage

cutting-edge technology

Dateline: Alexandria, Egypt,  215 BC

• This month, the gold-clad body of well-mellified world conquerer Alexander the Great reached what is hoped to be his final destination.
• Presiding over the ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the grandiose edifice complex dubbed “the Soma” or possibly “the Sema” was the current Egyptian ruler: Ptolemy IV Philopater, the great-grandson of Ptolemy I, the dynasty’s founder.
• “I won’t bore you with the details, but let me say that I’m relieved to finish the job that my great-granddaddy began over a century ago,” Ptolemy IV said to an avid crowd outside Alexandria’s most prestigious dead-celebrity highrise.
• “Great-granddady, being the close personal friend of Alex, and member of the inner circle, and all,  I don’t think he realized what a chore it would be to fulfill Alex’s last wishes. But he did it. He rerouted Alex, made sure that cadaver sped south to Egypt.”
• As he cut the ribbon to the Soma entrance, Ptolemy IV rattled off a litany of excuses, saying: “The first three Ptolemies got so busy, what with dynasties to build, and heirs to procreate, to say nothing of lighthouses and libraries and other stuff that had to get erected—small wonder there were delays. OK, a few gigantic delays.”
• As the crowd began to drift away, Ptolemy brought the ceremony to a close with a brief tour. The press corps was excluded from the area housing Alexander in his golden trappings, officials citing the usual “security concerns.”
• The Soma skyscraper and its sculpture-laden levels are said to be modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, one of the seven Wonders of the world. Officials in Alexandria are hopeful that their architectural homage will gain traction, becoming an official Wonder itself. That would give Alexandria the prestige of twin Wonders, the other being the Pharos lighthouse.
• As one city booster said, off the record, “Hey, the Colossus of Rhodes fell down awhile ago. We should be able to claim that spot!”

The first mausoleum—was the Soma similar?

One of Alexandria’s wonders, the Pharos lighthouse