Isadora, an 18-year-old Egyptian girl of great beauty, lived in Egypt in the second century AD, specifically to the year 120 AD in the era of Emperor Hadrian (117 AD-138 AD). The cemetery is built of burnt mud bricks, and its colour is dark, and in most parts, it is painted white from the outside and the inside, and in front of the entrance, there is an altar topped by a pyramidal crown at the four corners, so who is the owner of the tomb? Her mummy lay on a luxurious funerary bed consisting of a tall building of mud and topped with a model in the form of a shell covered with plaster. This mummy belonged to a beautiful girl nicknamed the martyr of love or the lover Isadora.. her name means “the gift of Isis”, as it confirms that true love does not even die. If it ends in a tragic end, like most stories
Isadora, the daughter of a Greek family, lived in Antiniopolis (now Sheikh Ubadah) on the eastern side of the Nile. (Thoth) is the symbol of wisdom and the pen, and the god of the moon in ancient Egypt, and the moon was casting its silver shadows on the Nile page when she was passing by boat to the west side, so she was struck by the magic of love and beauty, as she is in the first steps of young femininity after she crossed the age of sixteen, and as soon as she put her feet on the ground and joined the party
She met love for the first and last time in her life when Cupid’s arrows hit her. Her eyes fell on the Egyptian officer Habi, who was living on the western side of the Nile in the city of Khemnu (currently Ashmounin) and were one of the guard forces in the city and then considered an ordinary person of the Egyptian people and did not It was not from the people. He was not from an aristocratic family like hers, for the heart and love did not know social differences. Hence, they met, she crosses the river to the west where the city of (Khmenu) to spend a happy time with her lover, and on other days he creates conditions to meet her beside the wide gardens surrounding the palace of the prince and her father.
And this tender love between the two lovers continued for about three years until her father discovered this relationship, prevented her from meeting Habi, and ordered his guards to watch her so that she would not meet her lover. She deceived the guards and crossed to the west where the lover was waiting for her. She spent hours with him of soliloquy and happiness of the heart. Upon her return, she imagined that this was the last meeting with her lover and that the happy world had leaked from her. She found that she threw herself in the middle of the holy river to be her last moments in life is to meet the beloved, And she dived into it to be the first martyr of love in Pharaonic history.
Her father deeply regretted what he had done to his daughter, so he grieved and agonized over her death after depriving her of the right to love and life and decided to build her a grave worthy of her as the daughter of an emir. From the inside, she has a funeral bed for her to sleep on. The artist had engraved on its two front sides two long elegies in the Greek language, the likes of which we have not been familiar with before in any other funerary building without Greek on the walls of a cemetery, which he started by saying: .. and the fresh flower… that withered in the spring of life… my pure angel who left… without saying goodbye…)
There is a dispute between the archaeologists about who put the two epitaphs, her father or her lover. Her lover used to visit her every night, and release incense to her and light a candle inside her tomb so that her soul would not remain alone, and so is his love for her, and the people confirm seeing shadows of two people sitting next to each other on lunar nights.
Dr Taha Hussein, the dean of Arabic literature, took care of the place and had a special break there for three months in the winter, away from the hustle and bustle of life. The secret of his love for this place was “Isadora.” She was the focus of characters in his stories, and the story of Doaa Al-Karwan was the main character, and he used to release incense in her grave and called her “the martyr of love” for holding on to her lover and committing suicide by drowning, in the Nile River, in protest of her father’s refusal to marry her lover
Isadora was in the eighties on her bed without the glass and the shroud, but the Germans wrapped her in a white shroud and put her inside a glass tomb to preserve her more. There is a possibility that the girl was suffering from gigantism, where the organs grow, the heart muscle fails, and water forms on the lungs, but it is impossible to detect this, as hormone testing is done only with liquid blood and the cause of death has changed. Her heart could not swim and sink in the waters of the Nile.