Austrian archaeologists found an ancient skull inside an elaborate octagonal tomb in Turkey in the 1920s. The tomb's design and location, as well as the skull's age, led some experts to suspect it might belong to Cleopatra's murdered sister.
The debate swirled for a century, yet the skull itself "sank into oblivion" -- until now.
Josef Keil, an Austrian archaeologist, and his colleagues were excavating the ruins of an "Octagon" tomb in Ephesos, Turkey, in 1929 when they opened a sarcophagus and found "a complete skeleton" inside, the Austrian Academy of Sciences said in a Jan. 10 news release.
Keil described the Octagon tomb as containing "a very distinguished person," likely a young woman, the academy said. He took the skull to Germany and then later to Austria where it has remained ever since.
Other archaeologists studied the Octagon skull and agreed with Keil's interpretation. They linked the tomb's architecture to ancient Egypt and put forward a new theory: This could be the skull of Cleopatra VII's half-sister, Arsinoë IV, who was "murdered in Ephesos around 41 (B.C.) at the instigation of Mark Antony, Cleopatra's lover."
The theory sparked a century-long debate, but the Octagon skull itself sat unnoticed in an Austrian archive until being rediscovered in 2022, according to a study published Jan. 10 in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports.
But was this the skull of Cleopatra's sister? A team of specialists decided to investigate using "state-of-the-art" scans, DNA analysis and radiocarbon dating.
Their first breakthrough confirmed that the Octagon skull and a head-less skeleton found at the tomb in 1982 "actually belonged to the same person," the academy said.
"But then came the big surprise," the study's lead co-author Gerhard Weber said in the release. "In repeated tests, the skull and femur both clearly showed the presence of a Y chromosome -- in other words, a male."
Researchers identified the skull as "an 11-14-year-old boy who suffered from significant developmental disturbances" who lived between 205 and 36 B.C. and was likely Roman with "recent ancestry in the Italian Peninsula or Sardinia."
"What we can now say with certainty is that the person buried in the Octagon was not Arsinoë IV," researchers wrote in the study. "The search for her remains should continue."
Their findings solved one mystery yet opened several more. Where was Cleopatra's sister buried? Have her remains been found? And why was this boy buried in the Octagon tomb?
Researchers don't know -- at least, not yet.
The research team included Gerhard Weber, Petra Šimková, Daniel Fernandes, Olivia Cheronet, Előd Úry, Harald Wilfing, Katarina Matiasek, Alejandro Llano-Lizcano, Pere Gelabert, Immo Trinks, Katerina Douka, Sabine Ladstätter, Tom Higham, Martin Steskal and Ron Pinhasi.