Kathleen Teresa Martínez Berry (born 1966) is a Dominican lawyer, archaeologist, and diplomat, best known for her work since 2005 in the search for the tomb of Cleopatra in the Taposiris Magna temple in Egypt. She heads the Egyptian-Dominican mission in Alexandria, and is currently minister counselor in charge of cultural affairs at the Dominican embassy in Egypt.
Early life
Kathleen Martínez was born in Santo Domingo in 1966. Her father, professor and legal scholar Fausto Martínez, owned an extensive private library, which she drew on to research the subject which would become her great passion – Egypt and the last days of Cleopatra. Her mother is of Franco-English descent.
Studies
Despite her childhood passion for Egypt, Martínez focused her early studies on a legal career. "My parents had convinced me that it was not worthwhile for me to be an archaeologist because I would never have a serious job and could not make a living from that profession. They convinced me," she explained in some of her interviews. Like her father, she studied law, attending the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, as well as going to study English at Brown University in the United States. She graduated at 19, and began working as a lawyer. She also holds master's degrees in finance and archaeology.
Investigating the person Cleopatra
Her obsession with Cleopatra – she has explained repeatedly in the press – was born out of an argument with her father in 1990, and a group of friends who considered that her biography was not very significant. Studying the history of Cleopatra, regardless of Roman propaganda and centuries of prejudice against women – Martínez asserts – allowed her to discover a woman ahead of her time, who studied at the university, who had to suffer the denigration of the Romans. "She knew medicine, laws; she was a philosopher, a poet," Martínez explains. After advancing in her research, she discovered the difference between oriental texts and ones written by the Romans. She studied – she explains – the canonical texts in detail, in particular Plutarch's account of Mark Antony's alliance with Cleopatra. She also found that modern researchers had quite possibly missed important clues about where she was buried.
In search of the tomb
Her initial hypothesis was that since Cleopatra was considered the representation of Isis, if she had had to search for a place to be buried in her last days, she would have chosen a temple dedicated to the goddess. From Strabo's descriptions of ancient Egypt, Martínez sketched a map of potential burial sites and identified 21 localities associated with the legend of Isis and Osiris. After ruling out some temples, she located one on the outskirts of Alexandria that met all her criteria to be the one that sheltered the tomb: the temple of Taposiris Magna (the great house of Osiris). This was at odds with another hypothesis, developed by French explorer Franck Goddio and the European Institute of Underwater Archaeology, seeking the tomb in a palace of Alexandria which had been buried underwater by an earthquake, whose excavations were resumed in 1992.
Martínez made her first trip to Egypt in 2002. She managed to contact Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist and director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and visit some temples. When she arrived at Taposiris Magna she understood, she explains, that it was the place she was looking for. She returned to her country, made the decision to upend her life, and prepared a project with the support of the Universidad Católica Santo Domingo to begin excavating. It was the first time that Egypt had granted a license to excavate to a country in Latin America. Kathleen Martínez herself financed the first expedition and many others. Work began in 2004. In 2005, she decided to leave her law practice to move to Egypt and dedicate herself to archaeology.
Martinez returned to the Dominican Republic, met with the Dominican Republic Minister of Foreign Affairs, was appointed as the first Minister of Culture to Egypt, and was issued a diplomatic passport.
Excavations at Taposiris Magna
Taposiris Magna, a semi-destroyed temple located on the edge of Lake Mariout in Borg El Arab, about 50 kilometers west of Alexandria, was the site Martínez selected. It was not the first time it had been excavated; the first expedition had been sent by Napoleon. The Egyptian authorities considered it an unimportant, unfinished temple. The reality, Martínez asserts, is that it had been destroyed and forgotten in the sand.