CAIRO, May 26: An alabaster head of Cleopatra and a mask thought to belong to her lover Mark Antony have been found near Egypt’s Mediterranean city of Alexandria, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Monday.

The two treasures, a bronze statue of goddess Aphrodite and a headless royal statue from the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt between 323 and 30BC, were discovered by a joint Egyptian-Dominican Republic team of archaeologists in the Tapsiris Magna temple, Hawass said.

Some 20 bronze coins stamped with Cleopatra’s face were found in underground tunnels 50 metres deep in the archaeological site, Hawass said. The teams had originally been searching for Cleopatra’s tomb, but Hawass “categorically denied” that they were any closer to finding the queen’s burial place.

“We have found nothing that indicates the presence of the tomb,” he said, adding that the search for the tombs will restart in November.

The discovery of Cleopatra’s tomb would be the biggest archaeological discovery in Egypt since Britain’s Howard Carter found the tomb of boy king Tutankhamen in 1922.—AFP