The Entire History Of Ancient Egyptian Civilization With Joann Fletcher

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0:25 [Music] Camel, get out.

0:33 [Laughter] This is brilliant.

0:39 This is obviously an iconic image.

0:42 Taking a camel ride by the pyramids.

0:44 Surely it encapsulates the spirit of Egypt.

0:48 But such an image is completely misleading because there

0:52 weren't any camels here when the pyramids were built.

0:55 4 and a half thousand years ago.

0:58 And that's the thing.

1:00 Ancient Egypt is instantly recognizable,

1:04 but all too often completely misunderstood.

1:09 So, I'm going to try and change that.

1:12 Good luck.

1:13 Shakras.

1:17 The Great Pyramid of Giza, final resting place of King Kufu.

1:22 over 140 meters from bottom to top.

1:28 No wonder it still pulls in the crowds and the occasional Egyptologist.

1:41 here.

1:44 It's hard to really get it into words, but we are now entering into the depths

1:49 of this iconic monument of ancient Egypt.

1:54 It's a very busy iconic monument though.

2:00 Thank you.

2:01 And as we set foot on this journey upwards,

2:04 it's a brilliant metaphor for the way that the ancient Egyptian

2:07 civilization literally rose up from the earth to a real zenith.

2:13 So come with me and I'll show you something really brilliant

2:17 because the pyramids are really only the tip of the iceberg.

2:22 [Music] Oh.

2:26 Oh, flipping out.

2:31 So all this was a a big city overwhelming in size.

2:36 That is absolutely superb.

2:39 In this series, I'm going to explore the story

2:42 of what I consider to be the world's greatest civilization.

2:47 More than 4,000 years of history that has shaped our world

2:51 and left unmistakable marks that can still be read today.

2:57 I'll be looking into every nook and cranny from little known tombs.

3:03 It's staggering.

3:04 I've never ever been into a tomb quite like this before.

3:07 To the hidden corners of vast monuments.

3:10 It's like being on top of the world, isn't it?

3:12 Yeah.

3:12 We are in the top of Car.

3:18 So, it's really no surprise that weird and wonderful

3:21 theories about ancient Egypt crop up all the time.

3:26 But what I find so amazing is that this most intriguing civilization

3:31 was actually created by people not so very different from you and me.

3:36 And that's the story I want to tell.

3:40 A story full of secret treasures,

3:44 dark deeds, and sometimes controversial theories.

3:50 This mask was originally made for someone else.

3:55 And for the first time, I'll be piecing it all together.

3:59 From the earliest Egyptians to the last of the pharaohs.

4:04 Wow, look at that.

4:05 Look at that.

4:06 Oh, that is Oh, that is so beautiful.

4:11 Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt.

4:15 [Music] The big question is how did ancient Egypt begin?

4:37 Where did the first Egyptians and their extraordinary culture come from?

4:42 [Music] This immortal civilization was thousands of years in the making.

4:49 So to pull it all together is a daunting task.

4:53 But bear with me as it's utterly fascinating.

5:03 But we won't begin with massive monuments,

5:06 but with some enigmatic clues you could easily miss.

5:11 [Music] This is Curt around 100 kilometers south of Luxor.

5:23 Unless you're an archaeologist,

5:25 you almost certainly won't have heard of it because

5:29 there aren't any great temples or royal tombs to admire.

5:34 But high in the cliffs, you can see real signs of ancient life here.

5:43 thousands of years before the pyramids.

5:46 And this is where our story begins.

5:49 Welcome to Ka, Joan.

5:51 Thank you so much for letting me come here.

5:53 It's incredibly exciting.

5:57 It's the first time you're here.

5:58 I suppose nothing escapes the sharp eye of Dr.

6:01 Dirk Hoyer, and he's got something very special to show me.

6:05 Not many people have been here before

6:07 you because it's it's a quite recent discovery.

6:14 These carvings in the rock reveal an amazing

6:17 story about the beginnings of Egyptian life.

6:23 It's a 19,000year-old picture gallery [Music] complete with its own hippo.

6:35 back line, very short tail, hind legs, belly line,

6:40 front legs, and uh the mouth is shown.

6:43 Hippo is smiling, but then again, a nippo is always smiling.

6:48 But another type of animal is by far the most common here.

6:53 That's That's cattle.

6:54 Ah, it's not not just cattle.

6:57 There's the mighty Orox, the wild buffet, wild cattle.

7:02 and the extremely powerful images that seem to be in movement.

7:06 They are.

7:06 They're charging down towards us, aren't they?

7:11 These wild oroxs were ancestors of the domestic cow.

7:16 And nearly 20,000 years ago, beef was the main thing on the menu.

7:23 About maybe 50% of their diet was composed of orox.

7:30 So they were experts and masters in representing this animal.

7:35 [Music] It's always high on the cliff.

7:40 Very prominent positions that give an excellent panorama over what must

7:45 have been in the paleolytic the hunting grounds of the people.

7:54 It's easy to picture these early hunters here as they tracked their prey.

7:59 [Music] But the landscape would have looked very different

8:03 from today because back then this was savannah grassland,

8:08 a green and fertile region.

8:12 [Music] Do we have any idea why

8:17 these creatures were engraved on these rocks here?

8:22 We can guess, Joan, but we don't know.

8:24 Maybe they wanted to influence the hunting.

8:29 Maybe this is some sort of hunting magic.

8:40 It really is magical to sit here

8:42 and imagine Egypt's earliest nomadic people passing right through

8:46 this spot and portraying on these very rocks

8:49 the animals that they saw all around them.

8:55 Human figures and boats joined the animals

8:58 as the carvings became stranger and stranger.

9:02 But these carvings are also the earliest glimpse of the amazing things to come.

9:14 These are the first signs of what makes ancient Egypt well ancient Egypt.

9:26 As for its ancient landscape, this evolved under dramatic circumstances.

9:34 10,000 years ago, gravity tilted the entire Earth

9:37 off its axis by about half a degree.

9:40 And this had a profound effect on climate.

9:43 And as the world began to change, Egypt would never be the same again.

9:49 Now these early people were nomads,

9:52 seasonally mobile pastoralists who moved around following the summer rains.

10:02 And these rains really were the vital lifebringing force

10:06 which created the greenery on which wild animals depended.

10:10 But of course with climate change, these rains began to dry up.

10:15 Okay, you can cut the rain.

10:23 The diminishing rainfall forced both animals and people

10:27 towards large lakes which formed during the rainy season.

10:33 One such area is Nabta Plier, 100 kilometers southwest of a swan.

10:38 And here these nomadic hunters began to settle into communities.

10:43 But still reliant on the annual summer rains,

10:45 they needed to predict exactly when these would return.

10:49 And so they turned to the night sky.

10:52 Welcome to the beginning of time.

10:56 quite literally because this is Egypt's oldest calendar.

11:01 At around 7,000 years old, this stone circle from Nabapta player is the earliest

11:07 evidence of how Egyptian weather forecasters became astronomers.

11:13 They aligned its central stones to the circumpolar

11:17 stars visible in the night sky all year round.

11:22 When the sun appeared directly overhead, the stones cast no shadow.

11:28 The midsummer rains were approaching.

11:34 This meant that the animals would drink, the plants would grow,

11:38 and the world would survive for another year.

11:41 So, in many ways, this circle represents

11:44 the solution to the very real problem of survival.

11:48 But the Egyptians would take this a step further.

11:52 I think the really great thing about these many monumental

11:55 markers is that this is the earliest example we have

11:59 of the way in which the Egyptians are aligning their monuments

12:03 to various things to the sky to the cardinal points.

12:06 And from now on, every tomb, every temple,

12:10 every monument will be aligned to the heavens, to the very gods themselves.

12:16 [Music] If the stars and the rain were this closely linked,

12:24 then this world and the next must be one and the same.

12:29 [Music] And this has been described as Egypt's earliest

12:33 sculpted stone monument and dates from around 5,000 BC.

12:38 [Music] This chunk of sandstone was quarried over

12:42 a mile away from where it was eventually discovered.

12:46 This certainly suggests a kind of sense of community where

12:50 people were already working together to achieve a desired aim.

12:55 In this case, the stone was hauled into place and then

12:59 there are clear signs that it's been sculpted into a specific shape.

13:04 Now, you might have to go with me on this, but some believe

13:08 that this is in fact a cow with its large hind quarters and this sculpted head.

13:19 Now, the cow was a vital part of everyday life for these people.

13:23 It was a source of meat, of milk, and of blood.

13:26 Key sources of protein they needed to keep them healthy.

13:29 And yet so important was the cow,

13:31 they chose to take it through into the afterlife

13:34 with them to sustain them on a spiritual level.

13:38 And this is the very beginnings of the great cow goddess Hatheror.

13:47 Hatheror may have started off as a source of milk and meat,

13:51 but eventually she would be loved and idolized

13:54 by millions of Egyptians since she represented love,

13:58 joy, beauty, and motherhood.

14:04 And although her image develops from a lifelike

14:07 animal to a female face with cow's ears,

14:11 this may be Hatheror's very earliest incarnation.

14:16 [Music] Yet Hatheror is only one of a multitude of gods and goddesses.

14:23 The Egyptians just couldn't get enough of them.

14:27 Over the centuries emerged hundreds, if not thousands of deities,

14:31 each with a specific purpose and appearance.

14:36 Some came in human form.

14:39 Some had animal heads.

14:42 They could be male, female, even androgynous.

14:48 It seems that there were few aspects of life that didn't have their own gods.

14:56 We know that in the very earliest times their gods resembled familiar things,

15:01 the world around them, elements of nature and certainly animals.

15:05 And over time, the animals, their forms, their shapes,

15:09 their characteristics were distilled down into this sort of divine figure.

15:14 Each one woripped for a different quality.

15:17 In the case of the ram, they were woripped for their procreative powers.

15:22 in the case of the cow for their nurturing motherly instincts.

15:28 Then of course you've got rather different creatures, the dangerous creatures,

15:32 the ones that lived on the edges of the Egyptian world.

15:35 The lions, the crocodiles, the jackals.

15:38 [Music] But it wasn't just about finding the appropriate divinity.

15:45 It was about gaining power over them.

15:48 The goddess Seekmet was a ferocious lioness and the bringer of death to humans.

15:56 So the Egyptians transformed her into a deity

15:59 as a way of controlling her destructive powers by worshiping segment.

16:04 It was believed that she could be

16:06 placated and transformed into a more benign deity.

16:12 On so many levels, the Egyptians were trying to tap into nature

16:16 to affect the way that nature then in turn affected them.

16:21 [Music] In many ways,

16:26 Egypt's unique religion was the glue that held society together,

16:31 uniting the population and underpinning almost every aspect of life.

16:36 It's everywhere, in tombs, in temples, in everyday life.

16:41 And yet there is another even more fundamental element

16:46 without which ancient Egypt would never have existed at all.

16:57 [Music] Later Greek historians famously observed that Egypt was

17:06 the gift of the Nile and how right they were.

17:10 Because as the climate continued to change,

17:12 the desert lakes eventually dried up,

17:15 leaving the Egyptians with just one source of water.

17:33 This is an incredibly special place located in modern Sudan.

17:38 It nonetheless forms the very source of Egypt.

17:42 For it's the place where two great rivers meet,

17:45 the White Nile and the Blue Nile,

17:48 which combine here to form the world's longest river,

17:51 flowing from the heart of Africa and out into the Mediterranean Sea.

18:00 For much of the year, the wide lazy white Nile is the main source of water until

18:05 annual rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands swells the faster flowing blue Nile.

18:12 Today, the modern Aswan dams hold back these flood waters.

18:16 But until the 20th century, huge volumes of water and fertile silt surged

18:23 down river to flood the entire Nile Valley,

18:28 bringing life and fertility to the desert that is Egypt.

18:34 [Music] This annual Nile flood was the single most important

18:45 event in the lives of every ancient Egyptian for its

18:48 life-giving waters brought the nutrients and minerals which enrich the soil

18:53 all along its banks and this allowed agriculture to flourish.

19:01 Egypt is blessed with some of the most fertile land in the world

19:06 where farmers can grow everything from sweet corn and garlic to bananas,

19:10 sugar cane and cotton.

19:19 Voy, it's quite intensive farming, isn't it?

19:22 The land gives the people a lot, doesn't it?

19:26 Yes, but we need to give the land also rest.

19:29 We grow one time and we leave it for 1 month.

19:33 Then after we use the land again to grow again.

19:37 That's amazing that it only needs one month

19:39 rest time and then it can be planted again.

19:42 Yeah.

19:42 Sometime 15 days, sometime one month.

19:44 Yeah.

19:45 But it really does emphasize that this land of Egypt

19:48 has always been so rich and so giving to the people.

19:52 It's always given the people everything they need.

20:01 And it's the Nile that turned this desert land into a paradise.

20:10 [Music] And 7,000 years ago,

20:15 the people who could no longer survive in an increasingly desert landscape

20:19 were forced to migrate towards it as their only source of water.

20:24 So ancient Egypt took shape as these people

20:27 came together along the banks of the Nile.

20:32 In the north, settlements clustered around the delta and the Fume.

20:38 And in the south, around the Kenna Bend.

20:42 This was the beginning of Egypt's socalled two lands,

20:46 Upper and Lower Egypt, which developed into two distinct cultures.

20:57 But what they both had in common was the astonishing

21:00 fertility replenished every year by the miracle of the Nile.

21:09 Elcab, located to the south of the Kennabend,

21:12 is one of Upper Egypt's earliest settlements.

21:16 [Music] And while it may lack the wow factor of the pyramids,

21:21 it's actually far more revealing to see traces of this amazing evolution.

21:28 Because here we can see how a nomadic

21:30 lifestyle was soon replaced by a settled social structure.

21:37 And although it was a slow and gradual process,

21:40 archaeologist Elizabeth Hart can identify each stage of this transformation.

21:48 sending land into small pits.

21:50 Wow.

21:50 You do work in an enclosed space, don't you?

21:53 But it's much cooler down here.

21:54 It's lovely, actually.

21:58 So, down at this level, we have sterile soil where nobody lived.

22:02 And then starting around 4200 BC are layers of silt from the Nile flood,

22:07 followed by wind accumulated sand,

22:10 and then another layer of silt, and then more sand.

22:12 And here you can see it really well.

22:14 A thin silt layer from the Nile coming up and flooding and then the sand.

22:18 And over here we have a hearth feature.

22:22 So this tells us that humans were actually living

22:25 on these and coming into the Nile Valley and then moving back out.

22:28 And we also found lots of potshards and stone tools in these layers.

22:33 You know, it might be a small space,

22:34 but you've got people's real lives unfolding within it, haven't you?

22:37 And we have thousands of years of it here.

22:40 When we started, people were just moving into the Nile Valley.

22:43 They were just starting to farm.

22:44 And by the end here, we have pharaohs and a whole united Egypt.

22:49 It's really impressive when you think about all

22:51 the change that happened over this chunk of sand.

22:58 Although we are still centuries away from the grand Veronic monuments,

23:02 you can still find traces of the lives

23:04 these ancient people lived if you look hard enough.

23:08 for very little has survived except for tons of pottery.

23:14 Yeah, this one is uh Yeah.

23:16 So, it's 5,000 years old.

23:17 Oh, it's 5,000 years old.

23:19 They're all so tactile, these things, aren't they?

23:23 These pots help us to identify when

23:25 this early society began to produce a food surplus.

23:29 A pivotal transition which required robust pottery

23:33 for the storage of largecale food and drink production.

23:39 These bread molds from slightly later are one of the most common finds.

23:44 So you heat the mold then the dog gets into into it and by the heat

23:48 of the mold the this the bake the bread will be will be baked.

23:53 But this comes in massive amounts.

23:56 These are the beer jars.

23:57 Ah bread and beer and the Egyptian staples.

24:01 Oh nice size of a beer jar.

24:03 This is the nuts and bolts of how Egyptian

24:06 chronology all came together in the early days, isn't it?

24:08 Yes.

24:08 The pottery is especially fundamental to understand how people were living.

24:15 [Music] Yet in Egypt, living was only half the story.

24:26 Because what really sets the ancient Egyptians apart is their view of death.

24:36 To them, death wasn't the end of life, but a new beginning,

24:42 a transformation from the world of the living into an everlasting afterlife.

24:49 And such a belief would shape Egypt's

24:52 most mysterious practice and my favorite subject, mummification.

25:03 Although the origins of this enigmatic tradition are only now becoming clearer,

25:09 the burial of their dead had a strong significance from the very earliest times.

25:18 This is a typical burial from around 3,400 BC.

25:23 The body is curled into the fetal

25:25 position and here placed within a reconstructed pit

25:29 grave surrounded by the belongings he might

25:31 have had in his earthly life like pottery,

25:35 jewelry and a pallet for preparing cosmetics.

25:40 Everything that was important to him in life accompanied him into death.

25:45 And I think that's quite significant because it shows

25:48 that already 5 and a half thousand years ago,

25:51 the Egyptians wanted to take it all with them.

25:54 They clearly believed that something happened beyond death.

25:58 Death was simply a transition into another

26:01 state of existence when you continued to live

26:04 and it was assumed you would need everything you'd needed in your life on Earth.

26:09 His body was naturally mummified in the hot desert sand,

26:14 but its placement here may not have been accidental because even when dead,

26:21 the body had to be preserved in order to house the soul for eternity.

26:29 A skeleton simply wasn't good enough.

26:32 Skeletons, bones, they are very, very anonymous.

26:35 And yet when the soft tissue, the skin,

26:38 the hair is all present, we are ourselves.

26:41 And that's exactly what this individual represents.

26:46 Being face to face with one of the very earliest Egyptians

26:49 gives us insight into the development of their ideas about the afterlife.

26:55 It started off as a practical thing burying the dead in a relatively small space

27:00 bundled up and then it developed these layers

27:04 of kind of like the symbolism fetal position.

27:07 This idea in rebirth into the next world.

27:11 It's almost like the seed from which the Egyptian belief system evolved.

27:17 This is the very beginning of a process

27:19 which would be repeated a millionfold throughout Egyptian history.

27:24 It's this combination of the esoteric underpinned by the practical

27:30 which really does sum up the Egyptians in a nutshell.

27:37 From the very beginning,

27:38 the Egyptians were masters of making sense of their world,

27:42 no matter how complex and mystifying it might seem to us.

27:50 And this same ability to bring order is also

27:53 found in the way they structured their early society,

27:56 adopting levels of bureaucracy that border on the obsessive.

28:02 In the ancient city of Abidos, the site of Egypt's first royal burial ground,

28:08 archaeologists found the origins of a system

28:11 that we still have to put up with today.

28:15 It's most fitting that this city of death was the fine

28:19 spot of the earliest means of calculating that other great certainty, taxes.

28:30 The evidence comes from small bone and ivory labels

28:33 like these which have been dated to around 3250 BC.

28:39 The originals are probably the size of of a postage stamp.

28:43 And you can see that each one is engraved with images of animals,

28:47 of birds, of plants, and so forth.

28:50 And each one is pierced for suspension to a chest or pottery vessel,

28:55 which would have contained oil, linen, grain.

28:58 And it's thought that these symbols

29:00 represent the regions that produce these commodities,

29:02 which were then brought here to Abidos.

29:06 Thought to have been sent as tax payments,

29:08 these tiny labels show how these early people were

29:12 already capable of collecting duties from a vast geographical area.

29:17 Some experts even believe these symbols can be vocalized.

29:21 By turning the simple drawings into sounds

29:24 makes this the world's earliest known writing.

29:35 Now, isn't it interesting that the world's earliest writing wasn't developed

29:39 to express some great outpouring of emotion or express grand passion.

29:44 It was simply a means of calculating taxes.

29:50 These symbols soon became a sophisticated writing

29:54 system of elegant signs we call hieroglyphs, which means sacred carvings.

30:02 And these signs represented every aspect of the Egyptian world which

30:06 were only translated in 1822 with the discovery of the Rosetta

30:11 Stone [Music] and a common language was needed as goods

30:19 were transported between the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt.

30:24 The people of Lower Egypt had also developed

30:26 trade links with the rest of the ancient world.

30:29 But as more warlike regions began to emerge in upper Egypt,

30:33 it soon became clear that the Nile

30:35 had spawned two very different and distinctive cultures.

30:42 And in many ways, the only thing they really had in common was this great river.

30:49 [Music] The inevitable clash between these cultures is recorded

30:58 on what many considered to be ancient Egypt's founding document.

31:06 Taking the form of a giant ceremonial cosmetic palette,

31:10 this is an exact copy of the original Nama pallet.

31:14 And however idealized and embellished, it depicts the pivotal moment when

31:19 the southern king Nama defeated his northern enemy.

31:23 A split second after this mace comes down

31:26 onto this northern enemy's head and he's executed.

31:29 He's killed.

31:29 He is no more.

31:31 Nama himself remains the first king of a united Egypt.

31:36 And what this means is that the whole

31:39 of the country is now united under one man's rule.

31:44 He is setting himself up quite literally

31:47 as the god king as the one central figure

31:50 at the very pinnacle of the pyramid that forms

31:53 Egyptian society and from him everything else flows.

31:59 Egypt is now the world's first nation state.

32:05 [Music] What made ancient Egypt ancient Egypt is all here?

32:16 The art forms, the forms of religion,

32:19 and even the world's first writing hieroglyphic script.

32:24 This is the name of Nama, the catfish, Na, and the chisel.

32:30 Mr.

32:31 N striking catfish.

32:34 As the first king of Egypt,

32:36 Nama is protected by the cow goddess Hatheror, stands beside Horus,

32:40 the falcon god of kingship,

32:42 and is dressed in all the same paraphernalia as every king who succeeds him.

32:48 He has the tie-on false beard to emphasize his verility and his strength.

32:54 And this is matched, of course, by the tie on bull's tail.

32:56 It's a wonderful feature, this idea.

32:58 You could just tie a little tail onto the back

33:01 of the belt and then take into yourself the power of a bull.

33:06 This pallet is Egypt's earliest historical document.

33:12 It's the blueprint of how every future pharaoh

33:16 will be portrayed in the company of the gods.

33:21 Yet perhaps most significant is Nama's smiting pose.

33:26 This powerful image with the mace held high

33:29 will be endlessly repeated throughout Egypt's long history.

33:35 This is a horrible way to die to have your brains bludgeoned out.

33:40 And yet even this the Egyptian artist can show in an almost balletike pose.

33:46 It's been sanitized.

33:47 It's been elevated to a piece of art.

33:50 And yet the message still gets through.

34:02 For the next 3,000 years, every one of Egypt's subsequent rulers would

34:07 try and link themselves to Egypt's first pharaoh.

34:11 To rule legitimately and successfully,

34:14 they had to be absorbed into the complexities of the Egyptian hierarchy,

34:18 both in this world and the next.

34:21 So their names were recorded on a series of king lists,

34:24 a kind of royal family tree.

34:27 And the best preserved of these is here

34:30 in the temple of Seti the first at Abidos.

34:33 It lists himself and 75 of his royal predecessors going right back to the very

34:39 dawn of Egyptian history with the very first king up there, King Nama.

34:43 And the other important detail about this is

34:45 that it's essentially emphasizing that royal continuity because Seti has

34:51 his own young son Ramsy's the crown prince actually

34:55 reading out these names on a piece of papyrus paper.

34:59 So it's as if Seti is saying to the gods, look,

35:02 I'm now Pharaoh and this is my son who will

35:05 succeed me to become yet another name on this remarkable list.

35:12 In all, Egypt had over 300 pharaohs organized into 30 dynasties.

35:20 But in the case of Egypt's earliest kings, being merely immortal was not enough.

35:26 They needed to prove their divinity

35:28 by exercising absolute control over their subjects.

35:42 And the evidence for this was found

35:44 in the desolate desert surrounding the ancient city of Abidos.

35:48 [Music] This was Egypt's first royal burial ground,

35:59 the original version of the Valley of the Kings.

36:10 Now being here, you get a real sense

36:13 of the importance of this place for the ancient Egyptians.

36:16 For as the wind funnels down this valley and swirls around the sand,

36:20 if you listen very carefully, you can hear a whispering sound.

36:32 A whispering once thought to be the voices of the very dead themselves.

36:44 And here Egypt's earliest kings were laid

36:47 to rest within huge subterranean burial chambers like this.

36:52 The location of the final resting place of Egypt's third pharaoh, King Jur.

36:59 one of the largest and most complex tombs of the first dynasty.

37:03 And although it's been recovered in sand,

37:06 it clearly demonstrates the power that Jur still wielded even in death.

37:15 Jur himself was buried here in the central chamber,

37:19 but all around the 318 subsidiary graves of his courtiers.

37:24 Not only that, a little way beyond, many others were also buried.

37:29 In total, 587 individuals accompanied this man into the next world,

37:36 which is incredible enough, but there is evidence of a more sinister twist.

37:41 The fact that this tomb was all sealed over at the same

37:44 time suggests these people may have been victims of ritual sacrifice,

37:49 perhaps even ritual stabbing as portrayed in art of the time.

37:54 And certainly that power over life and death

37:56 would give any king a god-like status.

38:12 Now, later kings seem to have realized that killing all their courtiers in one

38:16 go was not the best use of people who were a precious state resource.

38:20 After all, who'd be around to make the next king his cup of tea?

38:27 Although this cruel and short-sighted practice of ritual killing soon died out,

38:31 it had nonetheless demonstrated that Egypt's

38:34 rulers had complete control over their subjects.

38:38 an essential step along the route towards

38:40 building the pyramids and indeed Egypt itself.

38:48 Welcome, welcome.

38:51 Yet the Egyptian people were not slaves.

38:54 By this time, Egypt was a land of plenty where all could enjoy its bounty,

39:00 both in life and in death.

39:09 This is the later tomb of an official called Iru Cartar.

39:13 And here he is greeting as he's coming to the door of his own tomb,

39:17 emerging from the walls, captured in all his splendor with his finery

39:21 on, his jeweled belt and his white linen kilt.

39:24 Even details down to his little sort of pencil mustache.

39:28 Looks a little bit like Clark Gable, to be honest.

39:33 The scenes in his colorful tomb depict a refined

39:37 life that's a world away from Egypt's earliest farmers.

39:45 We have Iukatar seated in front of a table of food offerings.

39:50 There's fruit, vegetables, wine, and so forth.

39:53 The bearers are coming forward with offerings to sustain his soul.

40:02 Iruatar was the royal butcher, an important member of court.

40:07 And with royal courtiers no longer sacrificed for burial with their king,

40:11 they could now make their own elaborate preparations for the afterlife.

40:15 There are a couple of scenes up here of the household

40:19 servants making the beds of Irukart and his family.

40:22 They're stretching out the linen sheets.

40:25 They're bringing even a little fly whisk

40:27 and the ancient Egyptian pillow, the headrest there.

40:31 So even in the afterlife, Iukatar will be comfortable.

40:39 IQatar's tomb is in Sakara,

40:42 a sprawling city of the dead for Egypt's first capital, Memphis.

40:50 Yet, Sakara wasn't just the burial site of courtiers,

40:54 but of kings and the sight of a revolution in royal tomb building.

41:00 [Music] And whereas previously the dead had

41:05 tended to be buried away in the desert,

41:07 hidden away almost, here at Sakara, high on the desert escarment,

41:12 the dead were literally placed on display.

41:18 Up to this point, the Egyptians had tended to build

41:21 their tombs and temples like their houses from organic materials.

41:26 From the mudbrick, wood and reeds, which rarely survive.

41:32 But in the third dynasty,

41:34 the great innovator King Joser built his legacy in something far more permanent.

41:42 for he built in stone which could potentially last forever.

41:48 Joseph built this huge stone wall to surround his tomb complex.

41:53 Although his architects and workmen still

41:55 drew their inspiration from the natural world.

41:59 You can see that the masons are just trying to get

42:01 their head around how to actually work with this stuff, what forms to put it in.

42:05 So we have Egypt's first hyperstyle hall of columns, sure,

42:09 but it's taking the form of reads bound together to make the kind

42:13 of columns that would have been in Joseph's palace down by the Nile.

42:21 But this, of course, is a house for death.

42:23 This is a palace of eternity and must be built in something as solid as stone.

42:35 [Music] At the rear of his complex is an intriguing stone

42:40 shrine where I can come face to face with King Joseph himself.

42:49 The shrine looks like it's suffering a severe case of substance

42:52 and yet the Egyptians purposefully built it on this very definite tilt.

43:02 It has these two holes here where modern tourists can see Joseph.

43:08 But Joseph can see them.

43:10 They can actually see beyond them cuz this faces true north.

43:14 It faces the northern stars which the Egyptians call the imperishable ones.

43:19 And so at death, Joseph's soul could rise up and merge with these stars.

43:25 So he too would be imperishable and he too would never die.

43:33 In order to ensure that his soul could live on, Joseph's body

43:37 needed somewhere safe to rest within a tomb truly fit for a king.

43:44 Most burials were topped by a simple

43:46 singlestory building called a star, meaning bench.

43:51 But Jose did something radical.

43:55 Joseph really wanted to impress with hiserary monument.

43:58 So another step was built on top and I think Jose must have

44:04 quite liked the effect that this gave and so built a third step,

44:10 a fourth step, a fifth step, sixth step.

44:16 When they stood back and looked,

44:18 they realized they'd built Egypt's first pyramid.

44:22 Pretty impressive.

44:27 The step pyramid stands over 60 m tall and still dominates the Sakara landscape.

44:34 At the time, it was the largest building on earth,

44:37 reinforcing Joseph's status as a living god in the grandest of ways.

44:47 It certainly secured his place in Egyptian history

44:50 with ancient visitors flocking here to marvel at his achievements.

44:56 Now, Joseph had created a true landmark,

44:58 but he'd also created Egypt's first tourist attraction.

45:02 If you come with me, I'll show you the evidence because in here

45:08 we have what many tourists still leave today, appreciative graffiti.

45:13 And this is the original handwriting of a couple of ancient visitors

45:17 from around 1300 BC who were so impressed by what they saw.

45:22 They described Joseph's pyramid as if heaven were in it.

45:26 And they credit Jose with being the inventor of stone.

45:42 [Music] But why did Joseph build this?

45:47 Was it just an ego trip or an exercise in personal vanity?

45:51 Or was it designed to show the world just how far Egypt had come?

45:56 Because in only a few centuries, these desperate people had come together

46:00 to create the world's first nation state.

46:06 [Music] Egypt was now an unstoppable powerhouse,

46:13 a nation unified both politically and culturally

46:17 under a single ruler whose authority was limitless.

46:21 Yet, it wasn't just the king who could achieve immortality.

46:25 For the man who designed and built Joseph's pyramid was destined

46:28 to become even more famous than the pharaoh he had served.

46:36 [Music] This statue base once held a full-sized figure of King Joseph,

46:43 but carved into its base is also the name of his architect.

46:48 And here we can see it with this reed, the owl,

46:52 and then the little mat with a little bread loaf on which reads imoteep.

47:00 And here he is, the man himself.

47:05 Although most likely a commoner by birth,

47:07 Immoteep rose through the ranks to become

47:10 one of Egypt's most powerful officials.

47:13 He was made the royal chancellor, the prime minister.

47:17 He was even made high priest of the sun god.

47:20 He was the ultimate local boy made good because he then gained a reputation

47:24 as an academic as a great healer and he

47:27 was famous the length and breadth of Egypt.

47:30 He was ultimately woripped as a god.

47:34 Imoteep represents the ultimate in social mobility a kind

47:39 which was certainly possible within Egypt's unique society.

47:44 [Music] This was a society in which ideas were often taken to extremes.

47:54 With 1 and a half million people united by an absolute belief

47:58 in the power of their king and in the certainty of the afterlife,

48:02 Egypt enters its most ambitious era so far, the pyramid age.

48:12 Over [Music] 130 pyramids would be built across Egypt

48:20 and they represent the zenith in royal tomb building.

48:25 Huge state sponsored civil engineering projects that used

48:29 vast resources of materials, manpower and time.

48:36 [Music] The largest of all, the Great Pyramid of King Kufu,

48:44 which took over 20 years to build.

48:53 And in order to build something so ambitious,

48:56 an entire city was created specifically to house

49:00 the construction workers just beyond this monumental wall.

49:05 It's known as the wall of the crow and it separated the silent

49:09 sacred space of the dead from the busy bustling city of the pyramid builders.

49:23 [Music] This five hectare site once housed workshops, bakeries,

49:32 a tool making facility, and a fish processing area.

49:36 For this was an integrated, self-sufficient community of over 8,000 people

49:41 who even had their own medical care.

49:48 [Music] Anthropological archaeologist Dr.

49:55 Richard Reading has been excavating the site since 1991.

50:00 Where we are now, this is kind of a big workshop,

50:02 a big industrial park where there's lots of activity going on out here.

50:07 They were probably producing granite statues, maybe granite columns.

50:10 We find tools out here for polishing the uh granite.

50:14 We find tools out here for uh chipping at the granite.

50:18 It's very well planned.

50:19 We have three streets.

50:20 We have North Street, Main Street we're on, and we have South Street down there.

50:24 So, we're walking down Main Street.

50:26 You're walking down Main Street.

50:28 The pyramid workers live cheek by jowl in twostory barracks.

50:35 You would have walked in.

50:36 You would have been in a very quiet, dark, long, narrow room.

50:40 Um, this is where they would have slept.

50:43 Um, there would have been a uh a higher bed for the overseer at each end.

50:47 And then everybody would have laid down probably

50:50 with their head in this direction or the other direction.

50:54 Exactly like this.

50:55 You would be lying here like this.

50:56 And this would be your your nighttime position.

50:59 Very comfortable.

50:59 Can I can I try out the overseer bed?

51:01 Sure.

51:01 You want to try out the overseer's bed there?

51:03 Delusions of grandeur.

51:04 Is it this one or that one?

51:06 Yeah, it's that's the that's the wall the where right where you are.

51:08 Is that Oh, so this is all right.

51:09 So if I if I sat down here Yeah.

51:11 the overseers bed is actually buried under a few centimeters of sand

51:14 and the floor here was probably under about a half a meter of sand.

51:18 So Oh, this is nice.

51:19 Yeah, I'm keeping my eye on you now.

51:21 That's right.

51:21 You can see me.

51:22 If I got up in the night and I tried

51:23 to sneak out to go someplace, you would see me.

51:26 Everything the workers needed was here on site.

51:30 The team have recovered data that shows that workers

51:33 consumed 74 cattle and 257 sheep and goats each week.

51:38 This corral area could hold a week's supply

51:41 of cattle before more were shipped in from Egypt's grasslands.

51:45 You could have almost just in time delivery coming down.

51:47 Another small herd coming down from Komaan or the delta coming down and in.

51:53 It's a really well old machine.

51:54 You can see now how efficient the Egyptians were at obtaining their food,

51:59 bringing it to the right place at the right time for the right people.

52:02 It's brilliant.

52:03 It's absolutely brilliant.

52:04 It wasn't just simply the food.

52:05 It was everything.

52:06 There was the copper to make tools.

52:09 There was the stone being brought in here from Asan and other areas.

52:13 So a lot of things were coming into here.

52:14 These were government workers.

52:16 They got everything from the government.

52:21 In many ways, this settlement is Egypt in microcosm,

52:25 a highly ordered social structure with job specialization and mass cooperation.

52:32 It's hard to believe that in a relatively short period of time,

52:37 Egypt had been transformed from simple subsistence into a united

52:43 state which could provide for everyone who worked on its behalf.

52:52 What we're seeing here is the final building block in Egyptian culture,

52:56 but not just for the pyramid age.

52:59 For once this infrastructure was in place, it would never change.

53:03 So whether they're building a pyramid or setting up a colossal statue,

53:07 the level of organization and cooperation would remain the same.

53:12 But this was the foundation stone of Egypt.

53:17 [Music] The pyramids are eternal testament

53:24 to just how powerful Egypt had now become.

53:27 And in many ways they are Egypt at this time

53:31 dominating everything around them on a gigantic scale.

53:40 And towering above the Giza landscape is the Great Pyramid.

53:50 [Music] It took around 20,000 people to set

53:55 in place the 2.3 million blocks of limestone.

53:59 It remained the tallest structure anywhere in the world for 3,800

54:03 years until the building of Lincoln Cathedral Spire in 1300 AD.

54:07 It's a phenomenal achievement for any civilization at any time.

54:13 But for me, its exterior can't compare

54:17 to the sense of wonder once you venture inside.

54:23 The roof of the Grand Gallery passageway is built of multiple

54:27 layers of enormous limestone slabs rising over 8 m high.

54:33 Massive, massive blocks of masonry built on a godlike scale.

54:38 That's surely what Kufu wanted.

54:43 I sincerely hope Kung Fu's eternal resting place

54:46 was rather less congested than it is today,

54:49 but it still gives a real atmosphere of the busyiness

54:52 that must have been here on a daily basis.

55:00 These guys were hauling massive, massive blocks,

55:03 hundreds of feet up, literally into the air.

55:05 These guys were magicians.

55:11 Just look how brilliantly these courses have been laid.

55:15 These are perfect.

55:17 And if I any modern architect to be able to replicate

55:20 this using the tools that the ancients had at their disposal.

55:31 [Music] Wow.

55:36 Here we are at the zenith.

55:38 We're at the heart of the pyramid now, King Kufu's burial chamber.

55:42 And we've hit it at exactly the right

55:43 moment because the pyramid is closed for lunch.

55:47 So, we've got the whole place to ourselves.

55:49 And you really get a sense of the sanctity of this divine mausoleum.

56:00 The walls and roof of the burial chamber are lined entirely in granite.

56:06 And it was within here that the body of the great king Kufu was sealed,

56:10 ready for his final journey into the afterlife.

56:17 We're at the heart of the pyramid in terms of its architecture,

56:21 but we're literally in the heart of ancient Egypt.

56:27 I feel like I should be speaking

56:28 in a whisper because the acoustics are so extraordinary.

56:33 It's a a sterile, plain, stark room.

56:39 It's pretty much like a bank vault.

56:42 And when you think about it,

56:43 that's exactly what it is because it once contained Egypt's greatest treasure,

56:48 the mummified body of the god king, which contained the soul not only of Kufu,

56:55 but of all the generations of pharaohs, stretching way back to King Nama.

57:05 Forget the jewels, forget the gold.

57:07 Egypt's real treasure was in here.

57:11 And it's the first time I've ever been

57:12 in here without crowds and crowds of other people.

57:17 and speaking now.

57:18 The sound of the voice reverberating around immediately takes you

57:23 back 4 and a half thousand years to the day

57:25 of the funeral to the sacred words the priest would

57:28 have chanted to revive the soul of the god king.

57:34 It's miraculous.

57:35 It's a wonderful spectacular place that affects every sense visually,

57:41 audibly in every sense.

57:45 It it's it's beyond words really.

57:48 I think I probably better stop talking now.

57:59 So now all the elements that made up of ancient Egypt were in place.

58:04 A well-fed, highly organized population

58:07 that unswervingly followed their god king.

58:10 and all of whom shared this fervent belief in an afterlife.

58:15 Life in Egypt was good.

58:26 With its mighty pharaohs, multiple gods, and magnificent art,

58:32 it's easy to think that ancient Egypt was always powerful and successful.

58:39 But there were also darker times.

58:41 Conflict, civil war, famine, and an overall feeling of catastrophe.

58:49 And the only way it could survive was

58:50 through its own resilience and the strongest of leadership.

58:56 Now, this is Cesostrus III, who ruled Egypt almost 4,000 years ago.

59:04 He's strong and he's muscular, everything a pharaoh should be.

59:08 And yet look at his face.

59:12 His scowlling features have been interpreted to suggest

59:17 his harsh rule and his large ears, his ability to hear any plots against him.

59:24 Cesostrus embodies the way Egypt's monarchs ruled during its turbulent times.

59:31 This king controlled his enemies through a series

59:34 of military fortresses and through magical curses.

59:40 But this is a new era in Egypt's history,

59:44 not only ruled by military power, but by fear and suspicion.

59:50 And Egypt's darkest times threatened to destroy its entire civilization.

1:00:03 I've already explored how Egypt's ancient

1:00:05 culture began thousands of years earlier,

1:00:09 blessed by the river Nile and a rich natural

1:00:12 environment and a society united by a complex ideology.

1:00:24 But in this episode,

1:00:26 we'll see how the massive self-confidence of the pyramid age was not to last,

1:00:31 as a dark age brought this civilization to the brink of annihilation.

1:00:38 Make no mistake, this is the home of the dead, and we're in amongst them.

1:00:44 These were times of famine, civil war, and anarchy.

1:00:49 Kings have been reduced to something on a minuscule level.

1:00:54 But this collapse triggered one of the greatest revivals of ancient

1:00:59 times with Egypt reemerging more powerful and wealthy than ever before.

1:01:09 Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt.

1:01:26 Sakara, where Egypt's great pyramid age began.

1:01:32 But among its glories,

1:01:34 there's also evidence of a far less well-known side to Egypt's story,

1:01:46 its descent into a dark age.

1:01:51 The zenith of Egypt's old kingdom was the great pyramid at Giza.

1:01:55 And only 200 years later, King Unas Causeway was created.

1:02:04 It might not look much today, but it's the highlight of Unas Pyramid Complex,

1:02:09 a 750 m long causeway which symbolically connected life and death.

1:02:16 [Music] It goes right from the Nile Valley all the way up onto

1:02:25 the high desert plateau right to the foot of the pyramid of Unas.

1:02:30 So it would have been used for his funeral procession,

1:02:32 but it would also have drawn up that life-giving force from the valley

1:02:35 below up to the city of the dead here at Sakara.

1:02:40 A narrow slit in the roof once allowed enough lighting.

1:02:43 But the extraordinary thing is that this causeway

1:02:46 was designed for a sole purpose, the king's funeral procession.

1:02:57 Carved upon its walls are scenes revealing both sides of life,

1:03:01 the forces of order and of chaos.

1:03:05 It first portrays an idealized version of Egypt, a time of plenty.

1:03:11 Here we can see typical scenes within an Egyptian temple orary context.

1:03:18 Scenes of the rich bounty of Egypt.

1:03:20 All the fruit, the vegetables, the crops, the meat,

1:03:23 the fish, all the wealth of the natural environment of Egypt,

1:03:27 which was all obviously brought to the land

1:03:31 through the good offices of the king,

1:03:32 the bringer of all bounty, the intermediary with the gods.

1:03:36 But also this causeway contained something rather more disturbing.

1:03:41 Evidence that dark forces were at work.

1:03:46 Further on down the causeway emerged a counterpart image.

1:03:52 The flip side of bounty.

1:03:57 An image so unusual it's now displayed in Sakara's museum.

1:04:01 And it really is one of ancient

1:04:04 Egypt's most haunting and revealing works of art.

1:04:10 Here we see these dark forces at work.

1:04:14 What we have are two rows of emaciated victims of famine.

1:04:23 These poor people, they're weak with hunger.

1:04:26 They're falling down.

1:04:27 They're suffering.

1:04:29 And this is basically ancient Egypt coming face to face with reality because

1:04:34 these are believed to be the Bedawins who inhabited the desert fringes of Egypt.

1:04:39 So it's as if this kind of idea of suffering,

1:04:42 the forces of chaos are on the periphery of Egypt,

1:04:45 but they're getting ever closer to the Nile Valley.

1:04:48 Egypt is starting to waken up to the fact that chaos isn't all that far away.

1:04:53 This is ancient Egypt beginning to suffer.

1:04:59 Such gritty realism had rarely been portrayed before.

1:05:03 Chaos depicted as the suffering of real people.

1:05:08 This isn't happening in some esoteric realm of the gods where chaos is

1:05:12 sort of portrayed as some sort

1:05:14 of disperate magical force very detached from reality.

1:05:19 This is reality.

1:05:22 [Music] Through such realistic images,

1:05:26 the Egyptians were expressing their fears to the gods,

1:05:29 appealing to them to keep these forces of chaos at bay.

1:05:38 But instead, the starving famine victims would turn out to be a chilling omen.

1:05:56 Up until now, Egypt's prosperity had flowed from its one source of water,

1:06:02 the River Nile, whose annual floods enriched the soil,

1:06:06 allowing life and agriculture to flourish.

1:06:11 This natural abundance was the very bedrock on which

1:06:15 Egypt and its perpetual world order was able to thrive.

1:06:21 But this lifeblood was about to run dry.

1:06:27 Evidence shows that at the end of the 3rd millennium BC,

1:06:30 the Nile flood levels fell dramatically.

1:06:34 As the very thing that brought them life began to diminish,

1:06:38 the Egyptians believed that their gods had begun to abandon them.

1:06:42 And for the next century,

1:06:44 the ancient texts talk of suffering, starvation, and even cannibalism.

1:06:58 Traditionally, Egyptian society had been built on the belief

1:07:02 in the divine power of its kings.

1:07:05 Without this belief, the pyramid age would never have been possible.

1:07:10 But now, in its time of need,

1:07:12 Egypt's king seemed increasingly powerless in the face of such natural disaster.

1:07:19 And this would come to a head with a ruler who was well past his prime.

1:07:28 Claimed to have lived for a 100 years,

1:07:30 he was Egypt's longest lived monarch, King Pepe II.

1:07:40 And this space was once a ceremonial running track.

1:07:43 The type of place where Pepe would have to display

1:07:46 his physical prowess to prove himself to his people.

1:07:50 Now, when any pharaoh had celebrated 30 years reign,

1:07:53 they had to perform the jubilee ceremonies.

1:07:56 And this involved running the ceremonial jubilee race.

1:08:00 Four times around this circuit as king of the north,

1:08:02 four times around the circuit as king of the south.

1:08:05 It was the ultimate public display of their fitness to rule and their strength.

1:08:11 It really showed who was in charge of Egypt.

1:08:14 But that's where Pepe's advancing age would eventually let him down.

1:08:19 Of course, when Pharaoh was relatively young and fit,

1:08:22 this would have been a great celebration.

1:08:24 But in the case of poor Pepe, then in his 90s,

1:08:27 it became all too clear that Pharaoh was no living God.

1:08:31 And this really undermined the whole concept of what it was to be a pharaoh.

1:08:40 Clearly as mortal as his subjects, any natural disaster must have seemed

1:08:44 the fault of this less than superhuman king.

1:08:50 And this combination of a weakening pharaoh

1:08:53 and failing harvests led to rapid decline.

1:08:58 Ancient Egypt now faced its first major political crisis.

1:09:03 For the power and apparent divinity of the pharaoh that had

1:09:06 been so very important in the pyramid age had now vanished.

1:09:16 Everything that bound Egyptian society together had begun to fall away,

1:09:22 and Egypt was plunged into a dark age.

1:09:30 In this time of growing uncertainty,

1:09:33 when the Egyptians had lost faith in both the monarchy and staterun religion,

1:09:39 they increasingly turned to the power of magic.

1:09:54 This is a rather unsettling thing.

1:09:58 It's an ancient Egyptian mask.

1:10:01 It's almost 4,000 years old and it's made of linen covered in a thin

1:10:06 layer of plaster and then painted predominantly

1:10:09 black with colors picked out on various features.

1:10:14 Of course, the Egyptians are well known

1:10:17 for making elaborate arrangements for their afterlife.

1:10:21 The death mask placed over the mummified body recreated the features

1:10:26 of the dead to make them recognizable to the gods.

1:10:31 But this mask is different.

1:10:33 It was made to be worn by the living.

1:10:36 And we know this because of the very distinctive eye holes,

1:10:40 which you can see there.

1:10:42 And this would allow the wearer to see around them.

1:10:46 You can imagine when this was applied to the face,

1:10:48 fastened on, tied on behind the head,

1:10:50 it would transform that individual into a completely different entity.

1:10:56 Traces of paint on the linen reveal how it might

1:10:59 have helped the wearer embody some form of magical being.

1:11:03 [Music] Whoever wore this was going to some

1:11:09 effort to transform their appearance to try and tap

1:11:12 into the hidden forces of the gods and to control the world in which they lived.

1:11:16 It's as if the Egyptian individual that wore

1:11:18 this was trying to take charge of their own destiny.

1:11:26 But the mask isn't the only evidence of magic.

1:11:33 For in their dark ages, the Egyptians increasingly began to write out

1:11:38 curses and spells on pots and figurines.

1:11:43 Scrolled across one was the curse.

1:11:46 Die Henoi, son of Inte,

1:11:49 a form of magic sufficiently small scale to be performed within their own homes.

1:11:55 And one of the most graphic ways they did

1:11:58 this was to take a piece of clay or a simple pot like this one and write upon it

1:12:02 the thing or the person that they wanted to control.

1:12:06 They often used red ochre because red

1:12:09 was associated with the powers of destruction.

1:12:13 So if I was doing this, I'd put on it the thing I'd want to stop,

1:12:17 which are early morning calls and alarm clocks.

1:12:22 So, you've got to imagine Egyptians from all walks of life doing this.

1:12:26 The priest wanting to protect the pharaoh,

1:12:29 the soldier in battle against an enemy, or simply a hated love rival.

1:12:34 So, all sorts of Egyptians could be on the receiving end of something like this.

1:12:41 And then to activate the curse, they smashed the pot.

1:12:47 [Music] It was a symbolic act to annihilate the name

1:12:53 of the enemy and therefore to control that enemy.

1:12:58 Oh, that does feel better.

1:13:00 Not unlike voodoo, such practices are found

1:13:03 in many ancient cultures and Egypt was no exception.

1:13:09 But it's far from the way we imagine the formal timehonored rituals

1:13:13 of the temple led by the king at the head of the religious hierarchy.

1:13:18 This is an Egypt that's becoming more suspicious, more fearful,

1:13:23 and more aware of the threats to their world,

1:13:26 natural disasters, political breakdown, and foreign powers.

1:13:31 And this little wax figurine is a means to control

1:13:34 anyone that threatens the balanced order of Egyptian life.

1:13:41 Welcome to the age of fear.

1:13:47 A time when every element of Egypt's world view was in doubt.

1:13:54 Their faith in their king, in their land,

1:13:57 and even in their gods had all faltered.

1:14:02 This is one of the lowest points in Egypt's long story,

1:14:05 and its effect reverberated throughout the Nile Valley.

1:14:11 The king, traditionally based in the north, was no longer the source of wealth.

1:14:16 So, royal officials abandoned court and relocated

1:14:20 back to their hometowns throughout the country.

1:14:24 Disunited, Egypt reverted back to how it had been a thousand years earlier,

1:14:30 breaking up into a series of local regions called gnomes.

1:14:34 And now, a new kind of leader emerges to dominate the dark ages.

1:14:40 No longer a single king, but multiple warlords.

1:14:53 And we know much about one of them because he

1:14:55 left his detailed autobiography in his rock cut tomb at Moala,

1:14:59 well away from the usual tourist sites.

1:15:04 [Music] His name was Ank Tiffy.

1:15:13 Now, Ank Tiffy is a smalltime official who's worked his way up through

1:15:18 the ranks to become the regional governor or no mark as it's known.

1:15:23 And in the decline in central government,

1:15:26 the power vacuum that opens up is now filled by the Antifises of this world.

1:15:34 Antify's tomb is quite modest by ancient Egyptian standards,

1:15:38 but its interior walls tell of his rise to power.

1:15:43 And Egyptologist Gary Shaw is going to help me unravel Antify's story.

1:15:49 You can see the man himself.

1:15:50 Ah, the great man.

1:15:51 A great man carved standing there.

1:15:54 He got a great hairstyle.

1:15:56 He does.

1:15:57 That is lovely.

1:15:58 I'm liking him already.

1:15:59 Yeah, the man himself.

1:16:00 He has a great tomb as well.

1:16:03 The hieroglyphs and images that fill the walls reveal how Ank

1:16:07 Tiffy exploited the power vacuum at the end of the pyramid age,

1:16:11 reducing the king to nothing more than a footnote.

1:16:15 The only time you see the name of a king in the entire tomb is right here.

1:16:21 This tiny little carto.

1:16:23 It couldn't be any smaller.

1:16:25 Look at the size of that.

1:16:26 This is Nephicare.

1:16:27 And that's it.

1:16:28 Is that it in the old tomb?

1:16:30 The old tomb.

1:16:30 one mention of a king and just I think

1:16:33 that really emphasizes just how important he thought he was alone.

1:16:37 He didn't need to mention the pharaoh.

1:16:38 He didn't need to say uh that the king told me

1:16:41 to do this so I did this because of the king's favors.

1:16:44 He just did it himself.

1:16:45 That is extraordinary.

1:16:46 I think that cartoou alone of everything

1:16:49 in the tomb encapsulates this whole period.

1:16:53 Kings have been reduced to something on a minuscule level and the local

1:16:57 rulers are shown on a huge scale and it's all about them isn't it?

1:17:02 Ank Tiffy had enhanced his own political career and wanted

1:17:06 to ensure the gods were in no doubt as to his importance.

1:17:10 So the elaborate language once exclusive to the king

1:17:14 was now part of Anktiffy's own boastful propaganda.

1:17:18 This warlord was an egoomaniac.

1:17:21 He also says that he's a hero without equal, without peer.

1:17:26 And you get that here.

1:17:29 I'm a hero without peer.

1:17:31 And pretty much almost every uh inscription in this tomb

1:17:35 ends or includes this statement at some point inside.

1:17:37 And what did he do to kind of justify these claims?

1:17:40 He emphasizes all the good things he did for the people.

1:17:43 Uh this was meant to be a time of of drought and famine,

1:17:45 so we're told in the texts.

1:17:47 And he tried to guide them through this.

1:17:50 is managing it by feeding everybody and doing all sorts of good things.

1:17:53 Giving bread to the hungry,

1:17:55 ointment to those without ointment and sandals for those who

1:17:59 were barefoot and wives for those without wives.

1:18:03 So, it's it's basically telling us about a time of turmoil.

1:18:06 Yeah.

1:18:06 But he's probably just overexaggerating because the more

1:18:09 he exaggerates just how awful it is,

1:18:11 the more great he looks when he says, "Well,

1:18:13 these are the nice things I did for everybody." And you get this here.

1:18:16 He talks about the entire South uh dying from hunger.

1:18:20 Oh, look at that.

1:18:21 That That's a really graphic hieroglyph.

1:18:23 I love that.

1:18:24 The guy fallen over.

1:18:25 Yeah.

1:18:26 He's definitely dead.

1:18:29 And but then it gets even worse that it

1:18:30 says that every single man is eating his children.

1:18:34 He didn't allow this to happen in his gnome, of course, where he lived.

1:18:37 Everything was fine.

1:18:38 And at the same time, he's also a fantastic warrior.

1:18:40 We're told over here inevitably.

1:18:42 How did I know that was coming?

1:18:44 Yeah, absolutely.

1:18:44 Yeah.

1:18:45 The these texts on this particular column talk about his abilities as a warrior.

1:18:50 In his biggest boast of all, Ankiffy,

1:18:52 the local hero, almost claims the status of a god.

1:18:58 I am the beginning and the end of mankind.

1:19:01 Since nobody like myself existed before, nor will he exist.

1:19:08 In Egypt's dark age,

1:19:09 warlords like Anktiffy had replaced the real kings of Egypt.

1:19:15 And Ankiff's delusions of grandeur, so vividly expressed inside his tomb,

1:19:20 are even more emphasized on the outside because he

1:19:23 chose burial inside a rock shaped like a natural pyramid.

1:19:27 He wanted to be the local pharaoh.

1:19:33 And in a way he was because whoever

1:19:36 fed and protected the people also led the people.

1:19:42 But as the power of warlords like Ankifi grew,

1:19:46 so did the conflicts between them.

1:19:50 And over time, as they either defeated

1:19:52 their neighbors or formed alliances with them,

1:19:56 two separate dynasties of warlord kings emerged.

1:20:00 One in the north at Heracleopoulos where they wore the red crown of lower Egypt

1:20:06 and one in the south at thieves symbolized by the white crown of upper Egypt.

1:20:13 Egypt was a divided kingdom of two lands and between them lay a war zone.

1:20:20 [Music] Situated at its center lay Egypt's most sacred site,

1:20:32 its earliest royal burial ground and still

1:20:37 today an evocative and atmospheric place.

1:20:41 This was the resting place of Egypt's first kings whose mummified

1:20:46 bodies were buried in elaborate burial chambers beneath the desert floor.

1:20:52 a safe place for their souls.

1:20:54 Or so they thought.

1:21:00 [Music] But hostilities between the two waring

1:21:07 factions were about to plum new depths of horror with an assault so blasphemous

1:21:14 it would change the face of Egypt forever.

1:21:17 One of the most violent acts was recorded in later texts as the vile deed.

1:21:22 For the northern warlord kings fighting their southern

1:21:26 opponents here actually desecrated these royal tombs.

1:21:31 For their troops set fire to the tombs and destroyed the royal mummies.

1:21:37 At a stroke, Egypt's physical link to its ancient past was severed.

1:21:42 Such an act of desecration was completely

1:21:46 unimaginable and the Egyptian people were rightly appalled.

1:21:50 Although the northern kings deeply regretted what their troops had done,

1:21:54 the destruction was irreversible and the origins

1:21:58 of Egypt's royal past lost forever.

1:22:03 Of course, the problem with such times of destruction is

1:22:06 that there's very little left of them for us Egyptologists to find.

1:22:11 But clues do remain if you know what you're looking for.

1:22:17 Today, what's left of the violation of this royal burial ground is surprising.

1:22:23 Thousands upon thousands of broken pots.

1:22:27 Although most are not part of the destruction itself,

1:22:30 they represent centuries of atonement for the loss

1:22:33 of Egypt's physical connection with its past.

1:22:42 Now, not long after the desecration,

1:22:44 this became a place of pilgrimage where people came

1:22:47 with little pots like this one filled with food,

1:22:50 drink, incense, which they offered up to the souls

1:22:54 of the dead kings once buried here.

1:22:59 It was believed that at death,

1:23:01 these souls of the kings had joined with the soul of Osiris, god of the dead.

1:23:06 And as this place became a site of pilgrimage,

1:23:09 it's as if the people of Egypt were trying

1:23:11 to make amends for the desecration of the past.

1:23:18 Egypt's spiritual connection to its royal ancestors was all it

1:23:22 had left after the northern warlords had destroyed their physical remains.

1:23:28 And the desecration soon provoked violent retaliation.

1:23:34 Directly across the desert from Abidos [Music] lay thieves,

1:23:42 the stronghold of the southern warlords,

1:23:47 and they would soon rise up against their northern

1:23:49 rivals and attempt to resurrect Egypt as a united land.

1:23:55 [Music] Back in 2000 BC, thieves was a one donkey town.

1:24:02 And yet, its warlords had two distinct advantages over other leaders.

1:24:07 They lived on a bend in the Nile called a Kenna Bend,

1:24:11 a strategic control point of rich farmland.

1:24:15 And their local god was Montau, the god of war.

1:24:19 [Music] The warlords of thieves would reunite Egypt

1:24:26 and one in particular came to the four.

1:24:29 His images were carved into the walls of his Theban

1:24:32 tomb complex and his name tells us much.

1:24:39 This is the Theban warlord Montoteep.

1:24:44 And there's a real clue as to what

1:24:46 was happening at this part of Egyptian history because

1:24:49 his name Monteoteep means the local war god Montu

1:24:53 is content because hoteep simply means content and happy.

1:24:57 So if the war god was happy with Monteep,

1:25:01 this means that he was a very powerful military figure.

1:25:04 And this is a wonderful scene.

1:25:06 There are a lot of little clues here to tell us what's going on.

1:25:09 And if you look really closely, you can see hands embracing him,

1:25:14 flanking him at his back, at his front, around his middle.

1:25:18 He's being embraced by the gods.

1:25:21 Chief amongst whom is Mont himself.

1:25:23 And there he is.

1:25:24 He's nose tonose with the king.

1:25:26 He's giving him the breath of life and infusing him with his own divine power.

1:25:34 It was the power of victory,

1:25:36 one that finally brought an end to Egypt's first dark age.

1:25:41 Monte really did live up to his name as a true

1:25:45 son of the war god because he took his armies north.

1:25:48 He conquered the north and he reunited Egypt.

1:25:53 But best of all, he's got the red crown on.

1:25:56 And this is the red crown of the north

1:25:58 because Monteep is declaring to the world, I might be a southerner.

1:26:02 I might be from thieves.

1:26:03 I should be wearing the white crown.

1:26:05 But look at me now.

1:26:06 I have the red crown.

1:26:07 I am the king of the north.

1:26:09 I'm the king of the south.

1:26:10 And I have reunited Egypt.

1:26:14 As Egypt's new king, he became Montotep II.

1:26:19 But his victory came at a high price.

1:26:23 The grim details of what his soldiers went through

1:26:26 can be found on thieves west bank at Dear Elbach.

1:26:32 It was inside one of the tombs here

1:26:34 that the remains of Monteotep's warriors were uncovered in 1923.

1:26:43 Their bodies silent witnesses to Egypt's civil war of 4,000 years ago,

1:26:49 which careful analysis revealed in fascinating detail.

1:26:54 Now the archaeologists found around 60 bodies

1:26:57 in the tomb and these are the original excavation photographs.

1:27:03 All of them had been naturally preserved,

1:27:05 naturally mummified in the hot dry climate.

1:27:08 So you've still got the skin and the hair

1:27:11 and crucially evidence of how these men had fought and died.

1:27:16 Some of these bodies have been pierced by arrows.

1:27:19 This one goes right into the left side of the chest.

1:27:22 Others had actually been buried

1:27:24 with these leather wrist guards that archers use.

1:27:29 10 of the warriors had been killed with ebony tipped arrows.

1:27:34 But in others, the wounds are even more brutal.

1:27:38 You can see here somebody's hit this man on the head with a real whack.

1:27:42 And you can see this very, very graphic area of damage there.

1:27:48 And after these series of furious blows

1:27:50 have been rained down on these poor guys,

1:27:52 they lay helpless on the field of battle.

1:27:55 Their bodies picked at by vultures.

1:27:57 You can see here the dreadful damage.

1:27:59 It's such a profound image.

1:28:05 The bodies reveal evidence of the weapons used

1:28:08 against them as they fought for control of Egypt.

1:28:13 Arrows, slingshot, and even rocks had been hurled at the warriors from above.

1:28:20 Eventually, their bodies were collected

1:28:22 from the battlefield and carefully wrapped in linen.

1:28:26 This linen bore the insignia of the Theban

1:28:29 tomb complex belonging to their leader, Monteep.

1:28:33 But just as significant as the bodies themselves

1:28:36 was where Monteep chose to bury his fallen heroes.

1:28:42 Today, the warrior's resting place is a little known sealed tomb.

1:28:49 But 4,000 years ago, Monteep honored his dead soldiers with a burial

1:28:55 amongst the graves of his highest officials,

1:28:58 making them part of his monument to victory.

1:29:02 The new king had created what could

1:29:04 well be the world's first known war cemetery.

1:29:09 Now, I'm lucky enough to have been given special

1:29:12 permission to see Mont Hotep's soldiers for the first time.

1:29:16 These guys are going to be taking down the tomb wall for me,

1:29:19 allowing me to actually meet the very people

1:29:21 who fought in Egypt's civil war around 2000 BC.

1:29:25 So, I am very, very excited.

1:29:36 And it was the same curiosity which drove a team of American

1:29:39 archaeologists to excavate their original mass grave in the first place.

1:29:46 [Music] [Music] Now reburied in a neighboring tomb,

1:30:04 the bodies of Monteotep soldiers have rarely seen the light

1:30:07 of day since their discovery over 90 years ago.

1:30:21 Now, this is really, really super frustrating,

1:30:24 but in the interest of health and safety, I can't go in there immediately,

1:30:28 much as I really want to, because all the stale

1:30:30 air is built up as the walls being sealed,

1:30:33 and we've really got to let this out with all the fungal

1:30:37 spores and the bacteria and everything else that's so detrimental to health.

1:30:42 Early Egyptologists tended to rush straight

1:30:45 in and risk the so-called Pharaoh's curse.

1:30:48 So, a little waiting is essential.

1:31:00 I can't believe we're actually going to enter this tomb now.

1:31:03 It's It's one of those rare moments you get

1:31:06 in a Egyptological career into a tomb that's hardly ever visited.

1:31:11 the wall had to come down and who knows what we're

1:31:13 going to find inside cuz I certainly have never seen this before.

1:31:16 So, it's a very very special moment.

1:31:30 This literally wasn't at all what I expected.

1:31:33 Nobody knew what to expect.

1:31:35 It's staggering.

1:31:36 I've never ever been into a tomb quite like this before.

1:31:43 The mask is a very good idea because there's all

1:31:47 sorts of things floating around in the atmosphere in here.

1:31:50 Not just the dust of ages, but the dust of human beings.

1:31:54 And as such, we have to be very, very respectful.

1:31:58 It's a large rock cut tomb, and although its walls are unfinished,

1:32:02 it's typical of those created

1:32:04 for courtiers and officials throughout these cliffs.

1:32:09 Wow.

1:32:10 It's a mummy fire body.

1:32:13 It's absolutely incredible.

1:32:15 Oh, that's that's quite something.

1:32:20 And if you look along the length of this very long tomb, look at the floor.

1:32:27 This isn't stone.

1:32:30 These are human remains and mummy wrappings.

1:32:34 And there are chambers and corridors leading off.

1:32:37 again full of wrappings, the linen of ages.

1:32:47 Some of it is claimed to be the very linen that bound

1:32:49 the bodies of Monteotep's warriors to help preserve them for eternity.

1:32:55 But at first glance, it's hard to get a clear picture,

1:32:59 for this particular tomb seems to have

1:33:01 been reused many times during Egypt's long history.

1:33:07 part of a shoulder.

1:33:08 You see the way the skin's folded and dried out.

1:33:14 Partial human body still with much of it soft tissue intact.

1:33:19 It hits you immediately in the face and you're

1:33:21 confronted with what a tomb is all about.

1:33:24 Make no mistake, this is the home of the dead and we're in amongst them.

1:33:30 It's a very, very emotive and powerful place to be.

1:33:37 But what's striking is how little is left of their bodies.

1:33:41 Like many other tombs up and down the Nile,

1:33:44 they've been subjected to centuries of looting and damage.

1:33:49 And amongst all these linen wrappings and debris

1:33:53 and human remains themselves are the tangible remains

1:33:57 of these men who died so bravely

1:33:59 in their efforts to reunify Egypt for Monteep, their leader.

1:34:20 Having just come out of that tomb of very very mixed emotions,

1:34:25 I don't really know what I was expecting to see.

1:34:27 Certainly some of Monteep's soldiers.

1:34:31 Perhaps some of them were.

1:34:32 It's highly likely.

1:34:34 Essentially, what we're looking at are the ancient Egyptians themselves.

1:34:39 These are the ancient Egyptians.

1:34:41 Temples, tombs, pyramids, this wonderful culture.

1:34:46 It's all well and good studying these esoteric

1:34:50 aspects that are distinct and marvelous and grand.

1:34:54 But when it comes down to it,

1:34:57 things we should really be interested in are these people.

1:35:11 Monteep's reunification of Egypt marked a new beginning,

1:35:16 the dawn of what would become known

1:35:17 as the Middle Kingdom [Music] and the rise of thieves.

1:35:28 [Music] Monteep made it the new spiritual heart of Egypt

1:35:36 and it would stay that way for the next 2,000 years.

1:35:44 But whereas the war god Montu had

1:35:46 dominated the previous century of Egypt's story,

1:35:49 the deity that now took center stage was Hatheror,

1:35:53 the goddess of love, joy, beauty, and motherhood.

1:35:57 the goddess whose origins can be traced right back to the earliest of times.

1:36:04 And believing that Hatheror dwelt in the cliffs of Dear Elbach,

1:36:08 Monteep chose this site not only for his war cemetery,

1:36:12 but for his own tomb complex.

1:36:15 It was Monteoteep that first built here

1:36:18 in this dramatic place where the cliffs meet the desert.

1:36:22 Believed to be the home of the goddess Hatheror herself.

1:36:25 It was a fast track to the afterlife.

1:36:28 And for Monteoteep and his men who had lived and died by the war god Montau,

1:36:33 they all now rest in the eternal embrace of Hatheror.

1:36:45 [Music] The first to build at Dear Elbachi was Monte,

1:36:55 the founder of a reunified Egypt.

1:37:00 He was so influential that almost 600 years later,

1:37:04 female pharaoh Hat Shepsut built her owner temple right next door

1:37:10 to tap into the religious and political power of her illustrious predecessor.

1:37:19 [Music] In the Middle Kingdom, life for ordinary people was on the up.

1:37:30 Food was plentiful.

1:37:34 Wealth and trade flourished,

1:37:39 and farming was revitalized with new irrigation systems.

1:37:44 [Music] Yet the dark age had nonetheless left its mark on the Egyptian

1:37:52 mindset as revealed in the way they prepared for the afterlife.

1:37:58 [Music] In the Old Kingdom, tomb walls were often covered in elaborate scenes

1:38:03 and texts replicating an idealized version of the Egyptian world.

1:38:09 But in the dark ages, people had seen their sacred sites ripped apart.

1:38:15 So instead of such tum, many in the middle kingdom opted for its cheaper

1:38:20 equivalent with something much smaller and much more intimate.

1:38:32 [Music] While these may look like children's toys,

1:38:39 they were in fact made nearly 4,000

1:38:41 years ago to be placed inside Egyptian burials.

1:38:47 Now, these wooden models were designed to provide the deceased

1:38:51 with an eternal supply of food and drink in the next world.

1:38:55 And so, we have all the basics here,

1:38:57 the Egyptian staples of bread, beer, and beef.

1:39:05 So we have the bakers at this end and they're grinding the grain to make

1:39:10 flour which will then be made into the bread

1:39:12 loaves that are cooked in this fire.

1:39:15 And the the baker is in front there.

1:39:17 The arms are quite damaged but presumably shielding his face

1:39:22 from the heat as we know from other examples.

1:39:25 move to the middle and we have the butcher

1:39:27 here and he's cutting the throat of this ox

1:39:31 and the legs are bound here to keep the animal in situ while the deed is done.

1:39:36 And then we move on to the end and we have the brewer.

1:39:40 This is a fabulous, fabulous example because he's pushing the mash through

1:39:46 a sie and the sie's even being drawn on there on the top.

1:39:51 actually in proportion with the rest of it.

1:39:53 This individual's ordered rather more beer than either bread or beef.

1:39:57 Um because this section of the model is almost half its length,

1:40:02 but you can see the vats of beer carefully laid on their side.

1:40:06 It's a wonderfully evocative piece.

1:40:08 These people have been working for 4,000 years.

1:40:11 They're still at it.

1:40:12 Look at them.

1:40:14 The key elements of Egyptian culture were back and they

1:40:18 look little different from times of plenty in the previous millennium.

1:40:25 Look at this busy crew grappling with the sail poles ready

1:40:28 to launch the boat off the Nile's banks and this granary silo.

1:40:36 Inside, workers haul sacks of barley while a scribe counts the crop.

1:40:48 And of course, there are also female figures.

1:40:52 In Egypt, women enjoyed much the same status as men,

1:40:56 unlike their sisters in many other parts of the ancient world.

1:41:01 They're also producing one of the Egyptian staples, but linen,

1:41:05 the cloth, which was used to make pretty much every Egyptian garment.

1:41:09 When you see this standing woman here,

1:41:12 she's spinning the thread with this spindle.

1:41:16 And the thread that she's busy making,

1:41:18 she'll then hand on to her two companions here, the weavers.

1:41:22 And they're using this horizontal loom that's pegged to the ground to produce

1:41:27 the bolts of cloth which will be fashioned into the wraparound dresses,

1:41:30 the kilts, the loin cloths as worn by pretty

1:41:34 much every ancient Egyptian man, woman, and child.

1:41:39 The lives depicted in these busy little

1:41:41 scenes are the comfortable and the familiar,

1:41:44 representing the Egyptian idea of security.

1:41:50 This isn't to Karma's death mask.

1:41:51 This isn't the finest piece of art you'll ever see.

1:41:54 But that isn't the point.

1:41:56 These are real people doing real jobs.

1:41:59 This is ancient Egypt up close and personal.

1:42:04 Order had been restored within Egypt,

1:42:07 but the fears that once tore Egypt apart hadn't disappeared entirely.

1:42:14 For now, they were projected outwards to the world beyond its borders.

1:42:22 So, Middle Kingdom monarchs like stern old Cesosterus

1:42:25 III focused on national security and wealth creation.

1:42:31 Cesostrus is infamous for his devastating

1:42:34 military campaign south into Goldrich Nubia,

1:42:39 but he also opted for a more permanent kind of control by building castles.

1:42:46 Now, this is a map of southern Egypt and Nubia, which is modernday Sudan.

1:42:52 And where Aswan is, that was the border between the two.

1:42:55 And Egypt maintained its control over Nubia through a series

1:42:59 of forts with around eight of these built by Cesostrus himself.

1:43:04 These middle kingdom forts were within signaling distance

1:43:07 of one another along the southern Nile down into Nubia.

1:43:13 They were all part of a massive state building program designed to subjugate

1:43:18 the local population and maintain the flow of goods and people up into Egypt,

1:43:26 particularly Nubian gold.

1:43:30 Very few of these forts still survive.

1:43:37 These are some of the last images ever recorded of the largest at Buhen.

1:43:45 It was filmed in 1962 during its excavation.

1:43:50 And after the creation of the Aswan Dam,

1:43:53 these massive mudbrick walls disappeared forever beneath

1:43:57 the waters of the new Lake Nassa.

1:44:06 But Bouhen isn't completely lost to us because

1:44:08 the excavation records are kept here at the Egypt

1:44:11 Exploration Society and they reveal an unexpected aspect

1:44:15 of Middle Kingdom Egypt as well as photographs.

1:44:19 They hold architectural plans of the fort drawn up during the excavations giving

1:44:25 a real insight into the immense scale of the Egyptian crackdown in Nubia.

1:44:30 Hi Chris.

1:44:31 Hi Joe, how are you?

1:44:32 I'm well, thank you.

1:44:33 God, this looks like an amazing photograph.

1:44:36 What does it actually show?

1:44:37 Well, this is an aerial photograph, Joe.

1:44:39 So, what we can see here along the bottom,

1:44:41 this strip is actually the river Nile.

1:44:44 And then right on the banks of the Nile, emerging from the sand here,

1:44:46 we see this square outline of the massive uh fortification of the site of Buhen.

1:44:53 But once uh the excavators began to um

1:44:56 uncover the full extent of what we could see, this is what they came across.

1:45:02 That just looks like a medieval castle, doesn't it?

1:45:05 Very rarely, do you think ancient Egypt Oh, yeah.

1:45:08 Castles.

1:45:09 And yet, here is the evidence in front of us.

1:45:11 Absolutely.

1:45:15 Designed to keep the enemy out.

1:45:17 Buhen shares features with the castles of Europe,

1:45:20 but all constructed 3,000 years earlier.

1:45:24 [Music] Most astonishing of all is its sheer size.

1:45:32 There's a little scale on this map gives you an idea.

1:45:35 This is roughly 100 m.

1:45:37 So just the Nile facing wall here is well over 400 m long.

1:45:43 If you think about the Great Pyramid of Kufu at Giza,

1:45:46 that's 200 m along the base.

1:45:48 So, we're talking about the length of two Great Pyramids along here.

1:45:52 The total circumference of this wall is well over a mile.

1:45:56 Um, and the walls, these outer walls are 11 m high,

1:46:01 inside which you could fit around 20 football pictures

1:46:06 because as well as controlling the Nubian gold supply,

1:46:09 Egypt intended to rule by intimidation.

1:46:14 This is the Middle Kingdom's great monumental architectural statement.

1:46:20 Pyramids, monumental tombs were not really the kinds of buildings they needed.

1:46:23 What they very much needed were these heavily fortified

1:46:26 fortress towns to guard the frontier of their territory.

1:46:31 When this fortress arrives in the barren

1:46:35 empty desert landscape in the Middle Kingdom,

1:46:37 this would have been a massive statement.

1:46:41 Something very, very big, powerful, strong,

1:46:44 scary has suddenly arrived in the desert.

1:46:46 So, anybody traveling from Nubia north into Egypt has to sail past this.

1:46:50 And this would have taken quite a while to sail past, wouldn't it?

1:46:53 Absolutely.

1:46:54 Yes.

1:46:54 Imagine looking up.

1:46:55 You're in a little boat on the Nile and you're looking up and up and up and up.

1:46:58 And you can see all these arrow slits,

1:47:01 people training their arrows perhaps on you just,

1:47:04 you know, you're being watched.

1:47:05 It's that big brother mentality, isn't it?

1:47:07 Exactly.

1:47:12 [Music] Rising up by the Nile, Buhen was a gleaming citadel of power.

1:47:19 But most of all, it was an early warning system.

1:47:23 The eyes and ears of a nation defined by suspicion and fear.

1:47:30 But Egypt's southern border wasn't the only one to be fortified.

1:47:35 The northeastern border with Palestine was also

1:47:37 secured with such defenses to monitor the large

1:47:40 number of foreign traders regularly traveling

1:47:43 to sell their goods in superw wealthy Egypt.

1:47:47 And the visit of one such group is portrayed here on a tomb wall.

1:47:52 A caravan of wealthy merchants and their families.

1:47:56 Clearly not Egyptian with their distinctive

1:47:59 hairstyles and brightly colored clothes.

1:48:04 Known as the Armu people, they traded in such goods as the black leather,

1:48:08 vital for Egypt's production of eye makeup.

1:48:14 And their distinctive pottery has been found across the Nile Delta

1:48:18 where many of them settled to live and work among the Egyptians.

1:48:23 But within a century, some of these armo had infiltrated high

1:48:27 office and eventually took over Egypt itself.

1:48:31 Now, these nomadic armor people who came in and out of Egypt

1:48:34 on a regular basis to trade are portrayed here in this wonderful tomb scene.

1:48:39 And yet, the most important part of the entire

1:48:42 scenario are three small hieroglyphs right in the middle.

1:48:47 They reveal one of the other terms the Egyptians used to name the armu.

1:48:53 It's basically a crook,

1:48:55 a scepter and that's written with two symbols and that's pronounced heka.

1:49:01 It means ruler.

1:49:02 And then the third of the three symbols is

1:49:06 kind of undulating uplands which means desert or hill country.

1:49:10 Basically the Egyptians use this symbol to denote a foreign land.

1:49:13 So you put these signs together ruler of foreign lands.

1:49:17 And this really is the clue to what happened next

1:49:21 because these armo of Palestinian origin eventually became the Hixos.

1:49:27 The Hekahasut are the Hixos and they ruled

1:49:29 Egypt from the north between 1650 and 1550 BC.

1:49:36 But as tension between the foreign

1:49:38 rulers and their Egyptian subjects gradually escalated,

1:49:42 Egypt entered a second dark age.

1:49:46 The Hixos made an alliance with the Nubians to the south,

1:49:51 and the Egyptians found themselves trapped between two enemies.

1:49:57 Although we know little of this difficult time,

1:50:00 some fascinating texts do survive.

1:50:04 Perhaps the most compelling are the words of a royal

1:50:07 letter sent by the Hixos king south to thieves.

1:50:11 Its message would prove so explosive that it galvanized

1:50:15 the theans to once more regain control of their land.

1:50:19 Now this letter was either a colossal

1:50:22 diplomatic faux power or simply downright rudeness.

1:50:26 And it involved the Egyptian goddess Tarwer,

1:50:29 the pugnacious blade wielding hippo.

1:50:33 Terret may have been a protective deity, but she was also a ferocious creature.

1:50:41 with features borrowed from the hippo and the crocodile,

1:50:44 animals the Egyptians feared.

1:50:47 So it seems the Hixos king Aus set out deliberately to insult the thieans.

1:50:58 Now the letter takes the form

1:51:00 of a complaint in which Apus is basically complaining

1:51:04 that the bellowing of the sacred hippos

1:51:06 in thieves is keeping him awake at night.

1:51:09 Expel the hippopotami from the lake.

1:51:12 They do not allow me to sleep day or night because their noise is in my ear.

1:51:19 Now, many have taken this to be a rather eccentric comment,

1:51:22 but I think it actually alludes to the powerful women of thieves.

1:51:27 It seems that Apus is actually comparing the wife

1:51:30 of the leader with the feisty hippo goddess herself.

1:51:35 And soon it would be the Theans who

1:51:38 would decide that the Hixos had had their day.

1:51:41 They had to go.

1:51:46 And soon this war of words had

1:51:48 escalated into armed conflict between the two powers.

1:51:57 But the Egyptians of thieves had also gained the means

1:52:01 to launch their attack with something developed by the Hixos themselves.

1:52:06 State-of-the-art weaponry, in particular, a new kind of bow,

1:52:13 known today as the composite bow.

1:52:19 It would revolutionize Egyptian warfare.

1:52:23 Wasn't it a lovely shape?

1:52:24 It's a beautiful thing.

1:52:26 This may look like a bow made of solid wood,

1:52:29 similar to those the Egyptians had always used,

1:52:33 but the secret of the composite bow is all down to the elements within.

1:52:39 It's composite because it's made out of different materials all joined together.

1:52:44 So there's a wooden core form the center of the bow,

1:52:47 but inside the curve on the belly of the bow is

1:52:51 horn glued onto the wood which forms a really powerful spring.

1:52:56 So the heart the cow horn will go there.

1:52:58 Yeah, that's right on the inside of the curve.

1:53:00 And then on the outside of the curve, an even more unpromising material,

1:53:04 senue, which horrid looks like something the cat would enjoy.

1:53:08 And there's all covered over with birch

1:53:09 bark to protect the glue from the elements.

1:53:13 Before the Hixos occupation,

1:53:15 the Egyptians had shot arrows from bows carved from solid wood.

1:53:20 They were quite large, unwieldy, and only effective at fairly close range.

1:53:26 But in the composite bow, animal horn added flexibility and the senue strength.

1:53:33 It's a clever combination of ingredients, isn't it?

1:53:36 making it the ultimate in ancient archery.

1:53:41 It just asks you to to do that, doesn't it?

1:53:44 It does.

1:53:44 It's fabulous.

1:53:45 There's a real sense of power behind this, isn't there?

1:53:48 It's a beautiful thing.

1:53:49 Let me show you.

1:53:50 So, this is why it's such a game changer

1:53:53 really because it's a bow that you can use.

1:53:55 It's quite short.

1:53:56 You can use it in a chariot and yet Whoa, that was brilliant.

1:54:03 Well done.

1:54:05 The composite bow was easier to handle

1:54:07 and shot faster arrows with much greater accuracy.

1:54:12 The Egyptians had little choice but to adapt or remain an occupied nation.

1:54:20 So by copying the new military technology,

1:54:22 they were eventually able to push the Hixos

1:54:25 out of Egypt all the way back to Palestine,

1:54:30 securing Egypt's northern frontier once again.

1:54:40 And when the new bow was used in conjunction with the other Hixos introductions,

1:54:45 the horse and chariot, the three combined to express the power

1:54:50 and supremacy of Egypt's new Egyptian rulers.

1:55:01 This marked the start of the new kingdom which

1:55:05 began when the powerful Theban leaders took the throne.

1:55:09 This dramatic rebirth in royal power was mirrored by the rise of thieves

1:55:13 local god Amoon based at his cult center the temple of Cararnach.

1:55:20 And it would be a moon who now protected Egypt and its kings.

1:55:25 [Music] Yet, thanks to the Hixos legacy, these were a new kind of king.

1:55:31 And it's on this temple's walls we can

1:55:34 clearly see the effect of the Hixos occupation.

1:55:37 For as Pharaoh smites his enemies, this is Egypt reborn, a fully armed,

1:55:43 fully charged superpower whose kings,

1:55:45 shown on a monumental scale, are superheroes.

1:55:53 [Music] Over some 800 years since the pyramid age,

1:56:03 Egypt's story had been one of upheaval, collapse, finally rebirth.

1:56:11 The Egyptians had reclaimed their culture and entered a truly golden age.

1:56:17 [Music] Hundreds of tons of stone to portray a mighty pharaoh.

1:56:30 Colossal testament to Egypt's golden age.

1:56:41 I think it's probably here at the feet of the colossia

1:56:44 of Mennon we get a real sense of who Amanoteep III was.

1:56:50 In my opinion, Amanoteep III was ancient Egypt's greatest pharaoh.

1:56:56 [Music] He presided over the the zenith of Egyptian culture and civilization.

1:57:02 He is the golden age.

1:57:04 He is the epitome of everything that made ancient Egypt brilliant.

1:57:10 [Music] The rise of this great civilization

1:57:15 was powered by its extraordinary belief system.

1:57:18 [Music] where the pursuit of the perfect

1:57:22 afterlife was everything capable of withstanding disasters

1:57:29 and dark ages to then reemerge as the most powerful empire in the ancient world.

1:57:44 [Music] In this episode,

1:57:48 I'm going to enter what I regard as Egypt's greatest era, the New Kingdom.

1:57:56 Whoa, what an amazing chamber.

1:58:00 A time of luxury, grand designs, and unparalleled splendor.

1:58:06 Isn't this absolutely beautiful?

1:58:10 But like all good things, it couldn't last forever.

1:58:14 Egypt's powerful religion would prove to be its greatest weakness.

1:58:19 And I'll discover how the priests became so rich their power

1:58:23 struggle with the crown destroyed the very unity of Egypt.

1:58:30 It was this very conflict that would transform this golden age

1:58:34 into one of decadence and corruption and would eventually tear Egypt apart.

1:58:42 And by looking again at Egypt's greatest superstars,

1:58:46 I'm going to investigate what really happened during the glittering new kingdom.

1:58:53 Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt.

1:59:04 [Applause] The new kingdom nearly 3 and a half thousand years ago and the time

1:59:10 of Amanoteep III when Egypt's expression of power

1:59:15 and belief reached new heights of enormity.

1:59:23 I've joined an international team of archaeologists who are excavating

1:59:27 just one of the vast monuments Ammonoteep created hiserary temple.

1:59:37 Now being here, you really get a sense of what it must have been like three

1:59:40 and a half thousand years ago when this place

1:59:43 was a building site much as it is today.

1:59:46 All these statues all around Ammanotech III's image coming up in their hundreds.

1:59:52 And yet as the archaeologists today assemble all these pieces,

1:59:56 this is literally history coming out of the ground piece by piece.

2:00:03 In the pyramid age, royal tombs anderary temples were a single complex.

2:00:09 But 1300 years later, the two were built separately,

2:00:13 reflecting a new era of opulence,

2:00:15 epitomizing the greatest dynasty of all, the 18th, the time of Amanoteep III.

2:00:26 For centuries, pretty much the only visible remains

2:00:29 of Ammonoteep's temple were his two colossal statues.

2:00:35 Now, archaeologist Dr.

2:00:36 Hurig Serusian and her team are finally uncovering

2:00:40 the full splendor of this once mighty monument.

2:00:44 You touch and it's it's it's like glass.

2:00:48 Yeah.

2:00:48 Covering over 86 acres,

2:00:50 this was not a tomb like the pyramids, but a huge complex.

2:00:55 The largesterary temple ever created.

2:00:58 It's a massive massive unbelievable.

2:01:01 You have to imagine this is only the major temple, the main temple.

2:01:05 You have to imagine other temples, processional ways, sphinx avenues,

2:01:10 uh magazines, workshops, treasures, pools,

2:01:13 gardens, priest house, administrative houses.

2:01:17 All this was a a big city in the uh in in in the capital.

2:01:22 Overwhelming in size.

2:01:24 This grand design was built as the place where his soul could be woripped

2:01:29 for eternity while his mummified body was

2:01:32 buried in the valley of the kings nearby.

2:01:35 But during his lifetime inside the temple, a permanent priesthood was employed.

2:01:41 All ruled over by the pharaoh.

2:01:45 Amanoteep's massive statues flanked the temple's main entrance.

2:01:51 Beyond them lay a second pair and then a third.

2:01:57 Ammonoteep's image repeated throughout the temple complex.

2:02:08 I wish one day they they find the time machine.

2:02:11 I go back.

2:02:12 Can I come?

2:02:13 I'll come with you.

2:02:16 We may not have a time machine,

2:02:18 but 15 years of work have begun to reveal some of the temple's former glories.

2:02:24 Normally, these would have been meters up in the air.

2:02:26 But to actually engage, it's so very tactile,

2:02:32 so very intimate, holding hands with the pharaoh.

2:02:38 This colossus from the temple's second gateway is flanked

2:02:41 by one of the best preserved statues of Amoteep's principal consort,

2:02:46 Queen Thai, his great royal wife here standing and by miracle

2:02:53 having been saved by all the catastrophes which struck this temple.

2:02:58 So he's protected her for centuries really, hasn't he?

2:03:03 Carved to be no bigger than Ammonoteep's lower leg,

2:03:06 Queen Tai's size served to exaggerate the pharaoh's superhuman status.

2:03:14 These massive statues were more than a memorial.

2:03:17 Each worshiped to guarantee the immortality

2:03:20 of the king's soul, the pharaoh as God.

2:03:24 This is my great surprise to you.

2:03:28 And Hurig has saved the very best till last.

2:03:34 dress.

2:03:39 Oh.

2:03:41 Oh, flipping out.

2:03:47 It's Ammonoteep's head at 3 m tall, carved from the finest white alabaster.

2:03:54 Oh, don't know what to say.

2:03:59 Over the years, I've seen many of his portraits,

2:04:02 but rarely one as stunning as this.

2:04:05 Look at it.

2:04:05 Look at his nose.

2:04:08 This is an absolutely amazing portrait sculpted face of Amanoteep himself.

2:04:14 Never seen anything like it.

2:04:18 With hundreds of statues like this, Amanoteep was multiplying

2:04:22 the image of himself as Egypt's most powerful god,

2:04:25 bringing light and life to the world [Music] because whoever controlled

2:04:38 Egypt's religion controlled Egypt and with it a vast amount of wealth.

2:04:45 Now, Amanoteep wore gold from top to toe,

2:04:49 and he handed it out to his courtiers as gifts,

2:04:52 but he also used it as a diplomatic weapon.

2:04:59 Ammonoteep's clever use of Egyptian gold is

2:05:02 recorded on stone scarabs like this one.

2:05:07 They served as the pharaoh's news bulletins,

2:05:10 which he circulated around his empire with updates inscribed on their base.

2:05:17 In this case, it was a new marriage of the king.

2:05:21 It effectively records his marriage to a Syrian princess,

2:05:25 a princess from the land of Mitani.

2:05:28 And it recounts how having uh sent gold to the princess's father,

2:05:33 he then sent out one of his daughters for the pharaoh to marry.

2:05:38 So, a kind of male order bride if you like.

2:05:41 It reports that her name was Killer Heaper and that she arrived

2:05:48 from Mitani in Syria with no fewer than 317 ladies in waiting.

2:05:56 Clearly impressed, Amanoteep added the comment,

2:06:01 "It's a marvel." [Music] With this diplomatic marriage only one of many,

2:06:09 they were an effective way of securing peace and prosperity.

2:06:16 Ammonoteep was able to utilize his key resource,

2:06:20 his gold to kind of get everything he wanted to maintain

2:06:25 his status as the supreme monarch in the ancient world at that time.

2:06:31 [Music] Gold bought Egypt peace with its neighbors with Amoteep III's

2:06:38 empire stretching from what is now Syria as far as modern Sedan.

2:06:45 But within Egypt itself,

2:06:47 gold had a different use and could even guarantee a fast track to the afterlife,

2:06:54 emphatically expressed by a great treasure in the museum in Wigan.

2:07:00 A stunning golden face.

2:07:07 [Music] Originally part of a woman's coffin,

2:07:15 her lielike features were preserved to allow

2:07:18 her soul to recognize her in the afterlife.

2:07:22 Isn't this absolutely beautiful?

2:07:25 Clearly the gold suggests to us that this was someone of very special,

2:07:29 very high status, very wealthy.

2:07:31 [Music] Although we can never know her name,

2:07:36 she had clearly spent a fortune in preparing for her perfect afterlife.

2:07:42 Covered in gold leaf,

2:07:44 she stares out at us with eyes of alabaster and black obsidian.

2:07:48 [Music] We can really see into the world,

2:07:52 into the thought patterns of the Egyptians themselves.

2:07:55 Because as stunning as this face is, it was simply buried in a tomb,

2:08:00 literally buried in a hole in the ground,

2:08:02 not for human eyes, but to be seen by the gods

2:08:05 and the spirits of the dead with whom this woman wanted to join.

2:08:10 And that's why her skin is gold because the gods had golden skin and she

2:08:15 wanted to be recognized by them as one

2:08:18 of their own taken into their eternal care.

2:08:21 For the Egyptians, it was a special pact

2:08:24 between themselves and the gods that made their country,

2:08:29 made their empire so very powerful, so very special.

2:08:33 In the golden age, this special pact shone more brightly than ever before.

2:08:39 With Egypt's wealth poured into their faith in the afterlife

2:08:44 and with increasing amounts of gold accompanying the royal mummies,

2:08:48 their tombs needed to be kept secure at all costs.

2:08:54 So, a secret burial place was established

2:08:57 for Egypt's pharaohs on thieves west bank.

2:09:01 [Music] the Valley of the Kings.

2:09:12 [Music] It was essential that each royal mummy was

2:09:17 buried safely in their tomb in a custom dating back

2:09:20 to the beginning of time because each one became a royal

2:09:24 ancestor whose cumulative souls formed the very essence of Egypt.

2:09:30 [Music] The royal tombs had been desecrated once before,

2:09:39 breaking Egypt's spiritual link to its ancestors.

2:09:43 [Music] So to prevent this happening again,

2:09:49 the pharaohs of the new kingdom chose burial deep in this remote

2:09:53 valley where they could lie undisturbed in rock cut tombs.

2:10:00 And this became Egypt's most sacred place.

2:10:10 Such elaborate preparations for the afterlife also fueled a growing economy.

2:10:17 And just as in the pyramid age,

2:10:18 the industry of death shaped the lives of many ordinary Egyptians.

2:10:26 For not only were there tombs to cut and temples to build,

2:10:29 but statues, shrines, coffins, sarcophagi,

2:10:32 and all the paraphernalia of the afterlife.

2:10:39 And with this came all the ingenuity

2:10:42 of sourcing everything from alabaster to granite to gold.

2:10:49 This is a copy of the world's earliest surviving geological map

2:10:53 dating from around 1150 BC and the reign of Ramsy's IV.

2:11:00 This map is a guide to the stone quaries and gold

2:11:04 mines of a 15 kilometer stretch of Egypt's eastern desert.

2:11:10 It's almost as detailed as a modern geological

2:11:14 map with different colors for the different rock types.

2:11:18 So over here, these large areas of black are the sedimentary rocks.

2:11:25 Back here where it turns pink, these are the ignous rocks like granite.

2:11:30 Other little features include areas of gold

2:11:33 mining and then throughout you have this very

2:11:37 subtle speckling and these are the areas of gravel known to be very accurate.

2:11:45 The map was made for one specific quarrying expedition when 8,000 men were sent

2:11:52 into a desert valley 130 km from thieves to mine stone for royal monuments.

2:12:05 But what's special about this map is that it leads us to the ordinary people

2:12:10 who were employed by the pharaoh to build the tombs in the valley of the kings.

2:12:16 It was discovered by archaeologists at the workers's village of Darl Medina.

2:12:21 A purpose-built settlement to house the tomb builders,

2:12:25 architects, artists, and scribes together with their families.

2:12:30 This would have been a bustling place.

2:12:32 It's streets full of children playing, deliveries being made,

2:12:36 and all the colors, sounds, and smells of everyday life.

2:12:42 It's one of the workers who lived here who made the map.

2:12:47 Now we even know the identity of the map maker, the scribe ammon.

2:12:52 His distinctive handwriting is well known from a range

2:12:55 of other literary works from poems to prayers, maps to tomb plants.

2:13:01 And it's thanks to one particular little inscription

2:13:03 with his name on that we even know where he lived.

2:13:06 Ammonact lived here.

2:13:09 [Music] This is the scrib's house.

2:13:18 Ammonact was one of the many skilled workers that rose through

2:13:21 the ranks of society in the generations following the reign of Amanoteep III.

2:13:28 He became the head scribe of this entire village.

2:13:32 So a very very important man.

2:13:35 And yet it's a very sad tale as well because as he gets older

2:13:39 we know that his eyesight started to fail because a prayer of his has survived

2:13:44 in which he makes this very personal address to the local goddess Merritt Seager

2:13:49 who lived at the top of the mountain up there and he's imploring the goddess.

2:13:54 He's saying my eyesight is failing.

2:13:56 I see darkness by day and for a scribe

2:13:59 for a consumate draftsman like ammonact how sad that would have been.

2:14:04 Here I'm an act praised to Merritt Sager.

2:14:10 Both of them symbolically portrayed without their eyes.

2:14:16 It's hard not to resist this image that as he got older and more infirm,

2:14:20 he would have gone up the steps to the flat roof with failing

2:14:24 eyesight try to focus on the job in hand trying to mix his paints,

2:14:31 apply the the lines and the words and so forth and needing the full

2:14:35 sun on a day like this just to get through the working day.

2:14:44 But just like his predecessors who built the pyramids,

2:14:48 Amanact would have felt a sense of greater purpose.

2:14:53 We can imagine him and his neighbors

2:14:55 in Derel Medina working towards a single aim, creating the royal tomb.

2:15:05 The new kingdom pharaohs had created a new image for themselves.

2:15:10 Elaborate building schemes requiring new towns full of workers.

2:15:15 A strong economy supporting an ever grander

2:15:18 vision both for this world and the next.

2:15:22 [Music] But the spiritual convictions that had brought Egypt

2:15:34 to its senith had also created a serious threat.

2:15:41 In the New Kingdom, much of the Egyptian state centered on thieves.

2:15:47 While its west bank was mainly dedicated to its city of the dead,

2:15:51 the east bank was where most people lived

2:15:54 and the site of Egypt's main state temple, Carach.

2:16:00 [Music] As Carac was rapidly becoming

2:16:07 the largest religious complex of the ancient world,

2:16:10 its influence grew exponentially and likewise the power of its priests.

2:16:22 To get a real sense of what's going on, we need to go behind the scenes.

2:16:33 I'm being allowed through an ancient

2:16:35 passageway once only accessible to Carak's clergy.

2:16:39 From the top, more more wonderful sign.

2:16:44 [Music] It leads to the top of the temple's

2:16:49 main gateway and gives a view of Carach.

2:16:52 Not many get to see.

2:17:01 Just look at that.

2:17:03 You could fit NRAAM and St.

2:17:05 Paul's Cathedrals in here and still have acres to spare.

2:17:10 It is immense.

2:17:13 [Music] Within Carnak, a series of chapels, shrines,

2:17:19 and sacred precincts covered a total area of more than 250 acres.

2:17:28 [Music] This was Egypt's religious heart for almost 2,000 years.

2:17:43 The reason why Carach is so vast is that every

2:17:47 pharaoh poured so much of their wealth into this temple.

2:17:53 Their gold and their spoils of war all filled the temple's coffers.

2:17:57 And each pharaoh also wanted to build their own halls,

2:18:01 shrines, and obelisks in an attempt to outdo their predecessors.

2:18:06 And yet all to the greater glory of Carnak's chief god, Ammoon.

2:18:13 Over the course of centuries,

2:18:15 Amoon had risen from a local Theban god to Egypt's state deity.

2:18:21 And his worship was the engine that fueled the nation.

2:18:28 So every pharaoh had to keep a moon content,

2:18:31 offering him their wealth and tending to his every need.

2:18:37 And this privilege fell to Carak's high priest

2:18:40 and was performed in the temple's inner sanctum.

2:18:45 Secret ceremonies at which the only others permitted were the royals.

2:18:51 Here we are in the very heart of Carak Temple.

2:18:54 This is where the god lived.

2:18:57 The god himself lived inside his sacred statue.

2:19:02 The original wouldn't have been much bigger than this.

2:19:05 Would have been solid gold.

2:19:07 It would have lived inside a little golden

2:19:09 shrine sealed by a pair of small doors.

2:19:14 [Music] Each morning the high priest would come in.

2:19:18 He would awaken the god's spirit.

2:19:22 He would greet him.

2:19:23 He would wash him.

2:19:25 Anoint him with perfume.

2:19:27 apply his eye makeup and then dress him in various linen outfits,

2:19:32 apply the small pieces of jewelry to the god's statue,

2:19:36 and then the god would proceed to enjoy his day.

2:19:40 A moon received daily meals of the finest foods,

2:19:44 roast meats, bread, fruit, and vegetables accompanied by wine and beer.

2:19:52 Clouds of incense would drive away evil forces.

2:19:56 and musicians and dancers entertained him.

2:20:02 And by keeping their most important deity content,

2:20:06 it was believed that a moon would in turn make the Nile flood each year,

2:20:11 make the sun rise each morning, and maintain Egypt's supreme status.

2:20:19 [Music] The high priest's direct access to a moon

2:20:27 made them the greatest beneficiaries of Carnach's growing prosperity.

2:20:35 This tranquil lake is where the male and female clergy bathed twice

2:20:40 each day and night to maintain their ritual purity before the gods.

2:20:49 Known as the pure ones, they set themselves apart from the rest of society

2:20:55 with their distinctive appearance achieved through

2:20:58 their own set of daily rituals.

2:21:03 Part of this process of ritual purity involved using an array

2:21:07 of implements on a daily basis to transform their appearance.

2:21:13 And one of the most important things they did, they had to remove all body hair,

2:21:18 male and female clergy, using razors like this.

2:21:21 So every day having to shave their heads and their entire bodies,

2:21:26 keep them free from lice and all these kind

2:21:28 of things which would have inhibited their sense of cleanliness.

2:21:32 It was essential that they also had a very clean

2:21:35 mouth because they'd be speaking the words before the god.

2:21:40 And so they use something which is quite a a modern thing.

2:21:45 Basically natron salt, a kind of bicarbonate rather like a modern bicarbonate

2:21:50 toothpaste which would get their teeth nice and clean.

2:21:55 Scrupulous not only with dental hygiene.

2:21:58 They wore reed woven sandals and robes of pure white linen.

2:22:06 And having transformed themselves in this wonderful way,

2:22:09 they also had access to these polished metal mirrors,

2:22:14 they could then admire their transformed appearance because it

2:22:18 was important to distance themselves from the great unwashed.

2:22:22 For the ancient priests,

2:22:24 cleanliness really was next to godliness and they were the god's chosen people.

2:22:33 [Music] As the wealth and power of Carach's priests grew,

2:22:43 their authority over Egypt began to rival that of the king.

2:22:51 Cararnach's priests had farreaching influence,

2:22:55 active not only by day, but also by night.

2:23:01 One of these priests was called Nact.

2:23:04 He was a priest of the hours of a moon,

2:23:06 which basically means he was an astronomer.

2:23:08 And he would sit by night on the flat temple roof,

2:23:12 which was effectively an ancient observatory,

2:23:15 and he'd be able to chart the progress of the stars and planets in the sky,

2:23:19 watch the movement of the heavens, and by doing so,

2:23:23 the priests of Egypt were able to work out when to celebrate specific events.

2:23:29 But of course, what this meant is that Carak never closed.

2:23:33 It was a 24-hour a day concern.

2:23:37 It meant the priests were always there.

2:23:39 It meant the priests were always watching.

2:23:46 [Music] Fully aware of the potential threat posed by the Carac clergy,

2:23:52 Amanoteep III employed his own relatives

2:23:55 in the temple to guarantee their loyalty.

2:23:59 But such subtle means of control were about to evaporate.

2:24:04 Enter a new pharaoh.

2:24:07 Akenatan, son and heir of Amanoteep.

2:24:14 [Music] But unlike his father, Akenatan was no diplomat.

2:24:21 His zealous ambitions would soon plunge Egypt

2:24:25 into an age of political and religious extremism.

2:24:30 [Music] Early in his reign, Akenatan found a swift way to stamp his authority

2:24:37 on the priests by building a controversial new temple complex at Carach.

2:24:46 Now, what we're looking at here is something very, very unusual.

2:24:51 It's part of a wall from Carak Temple,

2:24:53 but not the traditional part of Carnak Temple.

2:24:57 It's a section that was built a little way beyond,

2:25:00 and it was a new revolutionary building.

2:25:02 It wasn't built like the old style Carnack in huge,

2:25:05 big monolithic blocks of stone,

2:25:07 but these small, easier to handle blocks, which meant,

2:25:10 of course, it could almost spring up overnight.

2:25:14 But most shocking of all were the images that this new temple portrayed.

2:25:20 Aenatan had begun to dismantle Egypt's traditional religion

2:25:24 and replace its many deities with a single god.

2:25:28 If you look very carefully, the images are very different to what went before.

2:25:34 A moon is nowhere present.

2:25:36 The god of Caruk himself isn't represented in his own temple because

2:25:41 the god shown here is a form of the sun god called the arton.

2:25:47 And you can see the multiple rays coming down ending

2:25:51 in human hands giving their blessings to the main figure here.

2:25:56 And it isn't the high priest of a moon.

2:25:59 Faroon's priests were no longer in control at Carach.

2:26:07 and the moon himself was now replaced by the Artton sun god.

2:26:13 In fact, life in Egypt was turned on its head.

2:26:19 And whereas previously courtiers would bow very low before their monarch.

2:26:24 Now times had changed.

2:26:26 These people had their faces in the dirt before Pharaoh.

2:26:30 They're lying prostrate before him.

2:26:32 This marked the beginning of a new age.

2:26:36 [Music] It was an age when the only

2:26:40 way to reach God was through his intermediaries,

2:26:43 twin monarchs Akenatan and his wife and co-ruler Nefertiti.

2:26:49 [Music] And when the priests objected, the royal couple closed Carac,

2:26:55 sacked its priests, and seized its treasury.

2:27:01 They then moved their whole court 400

2:27:04 kilometers down river from thieves and in less

2:27:07 than 10 years built a brand new city [Music] known today as a mana.

2:27:19 Its palaces, temples and tombs were filled

2:27:23 with images of the Arton, the Sundisk god.

2:27:31 Gone were the multiplicity of gods to worship.

2:27:35 Now it was the sun that was celebrated each day with hymns,

2:27:39 prayers, and offerings presented on a truly lavish scale.

2:27:49 [Music] But the couple's vision of utopia came at a price.

2:27:58 And when Akenartan died after a 17-year reign, Egypt was bankrupt.

2:28:06 His son became king of Egypt.

2:28:09 And although he reigned for less than 10 years,

2:28:12 he still became the most famous pharaoh from the whole of Egyptian history.

2:28:20 Tuton Carman.

2:28:25 His treasure discovered by Howard Carter in 1922

2:28:29 was the most famous archaeological find of all time.

2:28:34 Toutin Carman's mask is the epitome of ancient Egypt.

2:28:39 So very familiar, yet like so many of his treasures,

2:28:43 holding a longstanding secret.

2:28:52 I've come to Oxford University's Griffith Institute

2:28:56 to examine the most detailed records of his burial.

2:29:02 So, in this first stack, these are all Carter's notes,

2:29:08 diaries, journals, and then right at the bottom down here,

2:29:12 we've got all Harry Burton's original

2:29:14 glass negatives captured on delicate glass slides.

2:29:18 These are the original negatives taken by Howard

2:29:21 Carter's photographer at every stage of the 10-year excavation.

2:29:26 So this shows the very first view they had of the mummy.

2:29:32 They reveal Toutton Carman's burial in a way not usually seen

2:29:36 for this is the linen shroud over his third innermost coffin.

2:29:44 This is as if the Balmers have just finished.

2:29:48 The family have laid their wreaths and floral

2:29:51 tributes before the lid finally went on.

2:29:55 What a privilege to actually see this in black and white.

2:30:00 Wow, that's pretty profound.

2:30:08 For all his fabled wealth,

2:30:10 Tilton Carman was in life a fairly insignificant pharaoh.

2:30:15 But his premature death after only a decade as king offered Carak's priests

2:30:21 the perfect opportunity to obliterate all trace

2:30:25 of Akenatan Nefertiti and the Ammana period.

2:30:33 And these wonderful photos of his burial treasure reveal how they did it.

2:30:43 On his famous golden throne,

2:30:45 Toutin Carman and his wife Ankenamoon are depicted together.

2:30:52 But all is not what it seems as recent research has discovered.

2:30:57 We look at the back of the queen's head where her wig originally was.

2:31:02 It's been slightly cut down there.

2:31:04 The same with Tuten Carman's crown.

2:31:07 A new crown has been added here.

2:31:10 So, it's little things like this because headgear

2:31:12 regalia was crucial in identifying these royal individuals.

2:31:17 By altering the images, the throne had been customized for Ton Carmon.

2:31:24 But the biggest giveaway as to whom this once belonged is

2:31:28 in the deity that looms large above the king and queen.

2:31:32 So although a moon is also named on this throne,

2:31:36 it's the art and sundisk that does take center stage and really

2:31:40 does cement this piece as a royal throne from the Ammana age.

2:31:45 So it seems that the two figures once believed to be

2:31:48 Tuton Carman and his wife were originally Akenatan and Nefertiti.

2:31:58 Another clue comes from the most famous artifact from ancient history,

2:32:03 the golden mask of Tuton Carman.

2:32:07 Or is it?

2:32:08 Recent research has zoned in on one long overlooked feature,

2:32:13 and that is the decidedly pierced ears.

2:32:16 Because it's been suggested that this mask was originally made for someone else.

2:32:22 The research suggests that Toutin Carman

2:32:25 wouldn't have worn earrings beyond childhood.

2:32:28 So by the age of 20 when he died,

2:32:31 he would not have been portrayed with pierced ears.

2:32:35 This mask was not made for an adult male pharaoh.

2:32:39 Indeed, when the gold has been compared,

2:32:42 the face is made of completely different gold to the rest.

2:32:47 Evidence of soldering is clearly visible on the mask.

2:32:51 It now seems as if Toutton Carman's own face was

2:32:55 effectively grafted on to the mask of a previous ruler.

2:32:59 A previous ruler who had pierced ears for earrings.

2:33:03 A previous ruler who may well have been

2:33:05 a woman who may well have been Nefertiti.

2:33:11 [Music] [Applause] In fact, it's estimated that around 80% of the objects found

2:33:18 in Tuton Carman's tomb originally belonged to either Akenatan or Nefertiti.

2:33:25 And with all of it dumped together like

2:33:26 this, it was a kind of spiritual decluttering.

2:33:32 As far as the priests were concerned, all this was tainted gold.

2:33:36 And so the burial of Tuton Carman was

2:33:39 the perfect opportunity to bury the unwanted past forever.

2:33:48 While the city of Ammana had been abandoned then demolished,

2:33:52 the memory of everything it represented was likewise being erased.

2:33:59 Egypt's state religion was restored.

2:34:04 Carnak's priests were back in business and thieves

2:34:11 was once again the seat of sacred power.

2:34:14 [Music] And now the next dynasty of the new kingdom was in control.

2:34:24 Having died without an heir,

2:34:26 Tuten Carman was succeeded by a line of militaristic rulers.

2:34:31 the 19th dynasty.

2:34:37 With no direct royal ancestry,

2:34:40 the new dynasty needed to reconnect with Egypt's illustrious past.

2:34:45 So, it reinstated traditional beliefs in a renaissance

2:34:49 led by one of its most influential rulers, Seti.

2:34:56 His tomb in the Valley of the Kings

2:34:59 is the largest pharaoh's tomb ever created here.

2:35:06 Currently close to the public.

2:35:08 I've been given special permission to explore this labyrinthine treasure.

2:35:15 The tomb's inviting us down further down into the underworld

2:35:18 and it's just drawing us into the darkness.

2:35:20 It's a really really deep tomb.

2:35:22 this.

2:35:26 It's 174 m of corridors and chambers, all chiseled out by hand and covered

2:35:35 from floor to ceiling in some truly spectacular scenes.

2:35:40 Wa!

2:35:41 What an amazing chamber.

2:35:44 Absolutely filled with little golden twinkly stars.

2:35:49 But the walls of Set's tomb carry a clear message,

2:35:54 demonstrating the return of Egypt's traditional deities in full force.

2:36:04 And here we see him seti with the gods.

2:36:07 [Music] [Applause] This is a brilliant chamber.

2:36:17 It's repeated images of the pharaoh Seti with the gods.

2:36:21 The gods are back and he's keen to show that.

2:36:24 And so we see him here with Anubis,

2:36:29 the elegant black jackal god of embarmming and the dead.

2:36:34 Here Seti is making offerings to Hatheror,

2:36:37 the maternal goddess of love who takes all dead souls into her care.

2:36:44 and Horus, the god of kingship,

2:36:46 wearing the joint crowns of upper and lower Egypt.

2:36:52 Then Seti makes the strongest connection with Egypt's past

2:36:55 in the portrayal of the ultimate deity in the tomb,

2:37:00 Osiris, god of the underworld.

2:37:03 He represents every single pharaoh that's gone before Seti.

2:37:08 He represents the accumulated powers of the royal ancestors.

2:37:12 and Setsi is keen to show himself in the company of Osiris.

2:37:16 He's tapping in to that greatness that made Egypt such a strong nation.

2:37:23 [Music] Every image,

2:37:27 every hieroglyph in Set's tomb harks back to the golden age of Amanoteep III.

2:37:35 And continuing with this golden legacy set his reign was a true renaissance

2:37:40 of art and culture with the ultimate jewel in his tomb, his burial chamber.

2:37:51 That is absolutely superb.

2:37:58 This is really incredible.

2:38:00 It's taking that nighttime sky motif and really really running with it.

2:38:09 This is the night sky as seen through the eyes of the astronomer priests.

2:38:15 And this is where the royal mummy would have lain in its alabaster

2:38:19 sarcophagus allowing seti's mommy set his soul

2:38:23 to look up at this spectacular ceiling.

2:38:27 [Music] Egypt's traditional belief system is

2:38:33 here writ large covering every surface.

2:38:37 [Music] Egypt was back.

2:38:46 Seti had brought back the days of glory.

2:38:50 It's as if the Ammana period had never been.

2:38:53 And for the average man and woman in the street,

2:38:56 that was a wonderful thing because order had been restored,

2:39:00 chaos had been brushed away, and everything was all right with their world.

2:39:14 The golden age had been restored, but not just for the larger than-l life

2:39:20 pharaohs with their glorious tombs and vast monuments,

2:39:24 but for the majority of Egypt's population, too.

2:39:30 This included the inhabitants of Darl Medina,

2:39:33 the tombbuilder's village near the Valley of the Kings.

2:39:37 At the edge of the village was a great pit, the community dump.

2:39:42 Inside which were discovered tens of thousands of pieces of pottery

2:39:46 and stone covered in pictures and words written in hieratic script,

2:39:54 a kind of hieroglyphic shorthand.

2:39:57 These are the ancient Egyptian equivalent of post-it notes,

2:40:00 shopping lists, and text messages.

2:40:05 This is uh the kind of stuff that speaks to everyday life,

2:40:10 what's going on underneath the surface.

2:40:12 With the help of hieratic expert Dr.

2:40:14 Glenn Godenho, we can catch a glimpse

2:40:17 of this intimate world far away from kings and gods.

2:40:22 Which is your favorite amongst these ones?

2:40:24 I always go to this one.

2:40:26 This is really nice because this one's uh basically

2:40:28 a list of stuff you take to a party.

2:40:30 What you've got is tabulated information.

2:40:32 So, you've got vertical and horizontal lines, and in each of those spaces,

2:40:36 you've got a name and the stuff they brought to that particular event.

2:40:39 I mean, this person here, the name's missing from this, but this person

2:40:42 brought the most stuff, about 11 items.

2:40:44 We've got bread, for example, being brought along.

2:40:47 Uh, next down, we've got some beer.

2:40:49 So, one jug of beer as well as beer.

2:40:53 And bread, it lists a veritable feast.

2:40:57 Fruit 20 pieces, beans, one jar full, fish, meat, and even a cake.

2:41:11 The thing I like about this is the idea of a community coming together.

2:41:15 It really does make the ancient Egyptians

2:41:17 that more real because we can relate to them.

2:41:19 We all like a good party.

2:41:22 But of course, life isn't always a party, and people fall on hard times.

2:41:28 This fragment begins with a story of a breakup.

2:41:32 Hessu Neb divorced the lady hell and then it goes

2:41:37 on to record a heartwarming story of support from its anonymous author.

2:41:43 He seems to have wanted to look after this lady hell.

2:41:46 And so the text goes on and it says that the the author

2:41:49 of this spent uh three years giving one

2:41:53 measure of Emma wheat to hell every month.

2:41:57 But it doesn't end there.

2:41:59 So she gives to the author here um a sash.

2:42:02 So a piece of clothing.

2:42:04 And she says in this line here uh to offer it at the riverbank.

2:42:08 Um the riverbank is where the market was, right?

2:42:11 And she says that um she'd like one measure of um of Emma wheat for it.

2:42:16 But no one wanted it.

2:42:17 No.

2:42:17 So yeah.

2:42:18 Yeah.

2:42:18 The text goes on to say uh that um

2:42:21 the author tried to offer it down at the riverbank,

2:42:23 but uh he gives a customer a view.

2:42:26 It's right here.

2:42:28 One word bean, which means bad.

2:42:31 A Yeah.

2:42:31 Yeah.

2:42:32 So So it wasn't even worth one measure of Emma.

2:42:35 So that is sad.

2:42:36 But the author's such a good egg that that um he says that he buys it off

2:42:41 of her for well over the market value of this thing

2:42:43 that wasn't even worth one measure in the first place.

2:42:45 Anyway, nice guy.

2:42:47 Pity we don't know his name.

2:42:49 Yeah, it's a real shame.

2:42:50 It's a real shame.

2:42:52 But at least we have his words.

2:42:54 One of the many voices from Darl Medina which

2:42:57 still speak to us across 3,000 years of history,

2:43:02 telling us of the highs and lows of lives familiar to us even today.

2:43:11 For most people, the new kingdom had been an age of plenty.

2:43:16 But it wasn't to last.

2:43:19 The golden era of wealthy pharaohs was becoming ever more superficial.

2:43:26 [Music] Set his son Ramsy's II was Egypt's

2:43:34 most prolific builder overspending on ever more ostentatious monuments,

2:43:40 the best known of which was his temple at Abu Symbol.

2:43:44 But such over-the-top building projects emptied the royal coffers,

2:43:49 as did a series of costly foreign wars.

2:43:53 So by the time of Ramsey's III, the cracks had certainly begun to appear.

2:44:02 As inflation increased, supplies in the state granaries ran low.

2:44:08 So the grain which formed the monthly wage

2:44:10 rations of state employees like tombbuilders and artisans

2:44:14 was no longer paid when due and it

2:44:17 sparked the first recorded labor strike in history.

2:44:21 It happened in 1155 BC when the tomb builders

2:44:25 began to complain that their food supplies hadn't been delivered.

2:44:28 And when it happened again the following month, they simply down tools,

2:44:32 marched to the nearest temple and shouted, "We are hungry.

2:44:38 To make sure their grievances were heard, they staged a sitin at the temple.

2:44:47 But the state's response only added insult to injury.

2:44:54 Local officials could only hand round a delivery of pastries.

2:44:58 Not much use to anyone.

2:45:00 The indifference of the authorities provoked many more weeks of protest.

2:45:05 Their grievances only increased, and soon the striking workers had taken

2:45:13 to shouting out at passing authority figures, including the mayor.

2:45:19 The workers were finally fobbed off with enough supplies to shut them up

2:45:23 in time for the pharaoh's jubilee celebration to pass by, unhindered by trouble.

2:45:31 But the striking workers had highlighted the waning power of the monarchy.

2:45:36 With the pharaoh now served

2:45:38 by an increasingly inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy,

2:45:43 the glorious bubble of royal extravagance finally burst.

2:45:47 [Music] And the pharaoh's rivals were waiting in the wings.

2:45:55 The priests of Cararnach,

2:45:59 having grown powerful through the revenues given to the gods they served,

2:46:03 the writing for the royals was quite literally on the wall.

2:46:08 And you can see what I mean in this little known part

2:46:10 of Carak Temple where the high priest is making a very bold statement,

2:46:20 but only if you know how to read the footnotes.

2:46:25 Now this is a fascinating scene.

2:46:27 We have the pharaoh Ramsey's the 9inth

2:46:30 and he's facing his high priest shown here.

2:46:33 But there's something extraordinary about this scene because for the first time

2:46:38 the pharaoh and the priest are shown on exactly the same scale.

2:46:42 They are the same height.

2:46:43 That's why the priest is looking so pleased.

2:46:45 He has his arms raised as if in triumph because these guys are so clever.

2:46:50 They've actually got the pharaoh standing on a box.

2:46:54 So he's a fraction higher and yet in reality they're the same height.

2:47:00 This really shows that the priests are in power.

2:47:03 They're basically saying to the king, "We are the same size as you.

2:47:07 Therefore, we are as important as you are.

2:47:12 [Music] Priests have become full-time politicians.

2:47:19 Vying with the throne for power,

2:47:21 they destabilized the balance between church and state,

2:47:24 the relationship on which Egypt's entire culture depended.

2:47:30 So great were their ambitions that by the end of the new kingdom,

2:47:34 the priests took control of the entire south.

2:47:38 And with the pharaoh ruling only the north,

2:47:41 the country was split into its two ancient halves.

2:47:49 But even worse was to come.

2:47:55 It's at Medinat Habu Ramsey's III'serary temple that we can find out

2:48:01 just how little interest these politician

2:48:04 priests now had in the royal afterlife.

2:48:07 They were only concerned with their own status and their own wealth.

2:48:14 Now, this next disturbing part of Egypt's story not only

2:48:18 spelled disaster for its core belief in the royal afterlife,

2:48:22 it left a torturous puzzle for Egyptologists,

2:48:25 which we are still trying to piece together.

2:48:31 It's an extraordinary story that begins not in the temple,

2:48:35 but in a small house built later within the grounds.

2:48:40 [Music] Because the priest's corrupt ambitions will be

2:48:45 put into practice by the man who lived here.

2:48:53 His name was Buddha Armon and as necropolis scribe

2:48:57 he worked in the nearby valley of the kings.

2:49:01 This is the man himself, Buddha Armon with his shaven head,

2:49:04 his starch kilt, his arms raised in prayer.

2:49:08 He's praying to the great god of thieves, Amun himself.

2:49:13 Although Buddha Armon's story doesn't quite live up to this image of piety

2:49:18 because it was here that he received a letter of instruction from his boss,

2:49:23 the high priest of Cararnach.

2:49:27 This is a copy of that letter and its contents

2:49:30 are mindblowing because the high priest is telling Bhut Armon,

2:49:35 "Go and perform for me a task on which you've never before embarked.

2:49:40 uncover a tomb among the ancient tombs

2:49:43 and preserve its sealed door until I return.

2:49:48 And although this language is quite euphemistic and cryptic,

2:49:52 both the sender and recipient knew exactly what it

2:49:55 meant and it would have a profound impact on Egypt.

2:50:02 Buddha Armon had been promoted.

2:50:04 His new title was opener of the gates of the necropolis.

2:50:11 [Music] So he and his men set out for the Valley of the Kings,

2:50:16 taking with them tools and bundles of linen.

2:50:21 Their mission nothing less than the systematic dismantling

2:50:26 of the royal cemetery in search of gold.

2:50:30 It was an order to accumulate wealth.

2:50:33 [Music] Tomb robbing itself was nothing new in ancient Egypt.

2:50:44 But what's different about this looting is that it's

2:50:46 an order from the ruler of upper Egypt, the high priest himself.

2:50:51 This is looting sanctioned by the state.

2:50:54 [Music] Knowing the secret location of the royal tombs,

2:51:05 Buddha Armon began what was euphemistically referred to as restoration work.

2:51:11 The final taboo was about to be broken.

2:51:18 So Utan and his men set to work.

2:51:21 They break open the seal of every royal tomb.

2:51:24 They move the lid of the sarcophagus,

2:51:26 take out the royal mummy in its nest of gold coffins,

2:51:29 and proceed to unwrap each one.

2:51:33 Next, they strip them of anything of value.

2:51:36 Gold masks, jewelry, and amulets, all taken for the temple treasury.

2:51:42 [Music] As for the mummies,

2:51:46 they're rewrapped in fresh linen and all buried together.

2:51:53 For the cashstrapped priests, these royal tombs were no longer inviable,

2:51:59 but little more than a series of dead bodies resting

2:52:02 amidst the gold they needed to achieve their political aims.

2:52:10 So for 20 years, this very tomb became one of Buddha Armon's

2:52:14 rewrapping workshops where archaeologists found fragments

2:52:20 of the gold prized from royal coffins,

2:52:22 traces of the lost treasures of numerous pharaohs [Music] and Buddha

2:52:37 Arman's Handwriting was discovered on the rewrapped mummy of Ramsy's III.

2:52:43 [Music] With no regard for the sacred, even the great Pharaoh Amoteep III ended

2:52:53 up repackaged in the coffin of Ramsy's III,

2:52:57 covered with the ill-fitting lid of Seti II.

2:53:05 [Music] Only one tomb hidden by rubble escaped the wholesale plunder.

2:53:22 Yet the ultimate violation of ancient Egypt's soul was now complete.

2:53:30 Clearly, the priest kings of Cararnach had

2:53:32 got what they'd always wanted, absolute power.

2:53:36 No longer interested in the royal ancestors,

2:53:38 who were simply a source of revenue to be robbed and discarded,

2:53:42 the devout had become cynical,

2:53:45 and the royal afterlife nothing more than an illusion.

2:54:04 This is about as far north in Egypt as it's

2:54:06 possible to get because out there is the Mediterranean.

2:54:13 To my west is Libya.

2:54:15 to my east, Palestine and Arabia.

2:54:18 While Egypt itself lies down there to the south,

2:54:21 a thousand kilometers of desert cut right

2:54:23 through the center by the mighty River Nile.

2:54:26 And at its top lies this, the great port city of Alexandria.

2:54:36 It was ancient Egypt's last and most influential capital.

2:54:40 It was a city of great power, wealth, and luxury.

2:54:45 the greatest in the world.

2:54:49 Alexandria was also home of one of Egypt's most famous pharaohs, Cleopatra,

2:54:56 the final ruler of a Greek dynasty and the last

2:54:59 in a long line of foreign invaders who'd each claimed Egypt for themselves,

2:55:04 seduced by its legendary splenders.

2:55:13 By now, the pyramids were already thousands of years old.

2:55:17 They were the beginning of a seemingly indestructible

2:55:20 core belief that had survived chaos, famine, and war.

2:55:25 It's as if they've been picked clean.

2:55:29 A belief that would shine even more brightly in its fabled golden age,

2:55:34 whose temples, tombs,

2:55:36 and glittering treasures had made Egypt an irresistible temptation.

2:55:42 [Music] As jealous foreign rulers ida weakened Egypt,

2:55:50 how could it survive successive waves of foreign attack?

2:55:58 But Egypt had a secret weapon.

2:56:01 A culture so strong and deeprooted that it seduced

2:56:05 and then absorbed all who would claim it as their own.

2:56:10 Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt.

2:56:30 Throughout the first millennium BC,

2:56:32 Egypt faced wave after wave of foreign invaders.

2:56:39 But in the face of such a strong and long lived culture,

2:56:43 all who would try to take over Egypt would themselves be taken over.

2:56:48 [Music] Almost a thousand years before Cleopatra,

2:56:58 Egypt had entered its third intermediate period,

2:57:02 a time of political decline and vulnerability.

2:57:05 [Applause] [Music] For it's the beginning of the 22nd dynasty around 945 BC.

2:57:14 The priests are in charge of the south,

2:57:16 but in the north, the vultures have started to circle,

2:57:20 waiting for their chance to swoop as a group of Libyan

2:57:23 generals seize power to rule as pharaohs of a divided land.

2:57:36 In many ways, Egypt's waning power had been triggered by a loss of faith.

2:57:41 When the authority of the new kingdom pharaohs had begun to crumble,

2:57:45 Egypt's once pious priests had helped loot

2:57:48 the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings,

2:57:51 systematically dismantling Egypt's previously

2:57:54 unshakable belief in the afterlife.

2:57:57 [Music] With the decline in power of the new kingdom pharaohs,

2:58:03 the Libyans, who'd fought for the Egyptians as mercenary generals,

2:58:07 gradually infiltrated Egypt's power structure and eventually

2:58:11 took power as the 22nd dynasty, [Music] the first king of the 22nd in Sheshan.

2:58:29 had a number of sons who helped him keep control of Egypt,

2:58:33 one of whom was called Nimlot, and these are the bracelets of Prince Nimlot.

2:58:39 Egypt's Libyan rulers understood that looking and acting Egyptian

2:58:44 would help to keep the country under their control.

2:58:48 These beautiful bracelets are just a tiny

2:58:50 fraction of the golden treasures created for Egypt's

2:58:54 Libyan royals who on the surface at least

2:58:57 upheld many of Egypt's most sacred traditions.

2:59:01 They are portraying the very small figure

2:59:05 of the god Horus who symbolized Egyptian kingship.

2:59:09 Shown as a young child emerging from a lotus blossom

2:59:13 and on either side is protected by the rearing cobras.

2:59:16 the royal ureas symbol.

2:59:21 Yet in some ways these images are simply window dressing,

2:59:25 lip service to ancient Egyptian traditions in order to claim a greater prize.

2:59:31 For the Libyans had organized nothing less than

2:59:34 the state sponsored plundering of Egypt's royal tombs.

2:59:39 They were so transfixed by the wealth,

2:59:42 by the gold, by the bling of ancient Egypt.

2:59:45 They wanted it for themselves and over their several centuries rule.

2:59:50 While they appeared to look like pharaohs and to rule as pharaohs,

2:59:53 Egypt never feels to have been a cohesive, united kingdom.

2:59:59 They weren't Egyptians at heart, and that's really what mattered.

3:00:06 In many ways, Libyan rule was destined

3:00:08 to fail because even if they were militarily superior,

3:00:12 their adoption of Egyptian culture was at best

3:00:15 superficial was insufficient to unite the country.

3:00:19 In the north, a squabbbling Libyan elite

3:00:21 fought amongst themselves, while in the south,

3:00:24 the Egyptian priesthood, including yet more Libyan princes,

3:00:28 still clung to power.

3:00:30 The fragmented Egypt was easy pickings for any would-be invader.

3:00:35 Egypt needed a regime that could reconnect

3:00:37 with its most powerful asset, its history.

3:00:41 And by 747 BC, that's what happened when the Kushite rulers

3:00:46 of Nubia made a direct spiritual connection with Egypt's glorious past.

3:00:51 Now, the Kushites were Egypt's southern neighbors in Nubia,

3:00:56 and from time in memorial, they and the Egyptians had kind of battled

3:01:01 around the sort of southern border of Egypt.

3:01:04 By the 8th century BC, however, the Kushites had the upper hand.

3:01:10 They were fervent believers in Egypt's traditional gods,

3:01:14 in some ways, making them more Egyptian than the Egyptians.

3:01:32 The kingdom of Kush in Nubia was at the very edge of the Egyptian world.

3:01:38 Having been repeatedly conquered by Egypt,

3:01:40 the Kushites have been hugely influenced by Egyptian beliefs.

3:01:51 believes that centered on this great sandstone mountain, Jebel Barkle.

3:01:57 [Music] For centuries, it had been regarded as the mythical mound of creation.

3:02:04 [Music] The mound from which Egypt's great creator god, Amoon, was born.

3:02:15 [Music] Here is the holy mountain.

3:02:20 This is where the god lived in his primeval form.

3:02:26 Dr.

3:02:27 Tim Kendall has spent almost 30 years working at the site.

3:02:31 Being at the southern limit of the empire,

3:02:33 it was where where the Nile began, where fertility began.

3:02:37 And so it had to be the place where creation began.

3:02:41 So this was the they imagined this is the birthplace of the god Ammon.

3:02:47 And so this was the primeval car.

3:02:51 When the new kingdom pharaohs had arrived here in 1500 BC,

3:02:55 they built this temple and dedicated it

3:02:58 to a moon and his wife, the goddess Moot.

3:03:02 And when the Egyptians withdrew from Nubia some 400 years later,

3:03:07 the native Kushites continued to honor

3:03:10 the sacred mountain and Egypt's spiritual traditions.

3:03:14 As the Kushite kings gained increasing military power,

3:03:18 they also claimed Egypt for themselves.

3:03:22 So when King Pi led a Kushite invasion of Egypt in 747 BC,

3:03:27 he didn't plunder or destroy,

3:03:29 but restored and rebuilt and founded Egypt's 25th dynasty.

3:03:39 The irony is that he's conquering Egypt to put everything right.

3:03:44 I suppose.

3:03:45 So, it's all such a cycle of of rebirth, regrowth, redevelopment,

3:03:50 and the Kushite kings are really kind of tapping into that ancient power source.

3:03:55 Yeah.

3:03:55 And just sort of giving it back to the Egyptians,

3:03:58 starting time all over again and doing it right.

3:04:00 So, they had that same sense of history and continuity as the Egyptians.

3:04:04 They are the natural successors of the 18th dynasty kings.

3:04:09 Fueled by a genuine desire to make their own mark in Egypt's long story,

3:04:13 the Kushites began to rebuild Egypt here in their Nubian heartland.

3:04:19 King Pi expanded the existing temple of Amoon at Jebel Barkle

3:04:23 to balance the original great temple of Cararnach in Egyptian thieves.

3:04:29 But while the Kushites had absorbed the culture of Egypt,

3:04:32 they still had their roots here in Africa.

3:04:36 This cultural fusion is quite clearly expressed

3:04:39 in this extraordinary representation of the Egyptian goddess Moot.

3:04:44 The face of the goddess Moot has tribal scars.

3:04:47 And look, we'll see if it shows with this light.

3:04:52 You see the three lines of her face.

3:04:55 So, this is an Egyptian goddess with a Nubia makeover.

3:04:57 Yeah.

3:04:58 She was a goddess of Nubia,

3:05:00 and it was appropriate for Nubians to have tribal scars.

3:05:03 So this is a very very graphic version of the way in which

3:05:07 local Nubians were making the traditional deities

3:05:10 of Egypt their own physically marking them.

3:05:13 It's as if she's being stamped as a Nubian.

3:05:16 Yep.

3:05:17 How incredible.

3:05:18 This is such a land of surprises.

3:05:20 That is beautiful.

3:05:23 [Music] Yet, this land of surprises has something else in store, too.

3:05:37 Gale force winds whip up the worst sandstorm in years.

3:05:43 It's a powerful reminder that the ancients would also

3:05:46 have had to deal with such dramatic natural phenomena.

3:05:54 You certainly taste the grapes in your tea.

3:05:58 The ancients would have tackled this using spells, rituals.

3:06:04 They would also have made extra offerings to specific deities,

3:06:09 most notably Osiris's brother, God Seth,

3:06:12 the god of turbulence, the god of storms,

3:06:14 the god of red-headed individuals, who was seen as somewhat turbulent, too.

3:06:19 Can't imagine why.

3:06:29 I'm seeking shelter in this shrine cut into the mountain by Pi's son to Harker,

3:06:34 which is currently undergoing major restoration by an Italian mission.

3:06:39 It apparently reveals graphic evidence of Egypt's continuing powerful influence.

3:06:47 Never been here before.

3:06:47 I have no idea what's going on in here.

3:06:50 So, this will be as new to me as it is to you.

3:06:54 Oh, flipping heck.

3:06:56 It's a real privilege to see the time

3:06:58 blackened walls finally giving up their secrets.

3:07:02 Wow.

3:07:03 Look at that.

3:07:03 Look at that.

3:07:04 Oh, that is Oh, that is so beautiful.

3:07:08 They're bringing out not just the golds, but the blues.

3:07:12 These two colors, the bright blue of the sky and the Nile and the gold.

3:07:18 this sort of really powerful color of the sun god.

3:07:21 This is Tahaka, the Kushite's most powerful and important pharaoh.

3:07:26 In classic Egyptian style,

3:07:28 he's shown offering to the god Amoon and his wife, the goddess Moot.

3:07:33 It's raised relief.

3:07:34 This is old school.

3:07:35 This is old school technique.

3:07:37 This is skill.

3:07:38 And they're all overlaid in this yellow gold.

3:07:41 And you can even see the little scales on this corlet that Amoon's wearing.

3:07:48 Every details here, it's fabulous.

3:07:51 It's like Christmas morning.

3:07:52 This This is just extraordinary.

3:07:54 Just look for yourselves.

3:07:55 Just look.

3:07:56 Look at their faces.

3:07:57 Look at their eyes.

3:08:00 This wall truly exemplifies Egypt's ancient magic as those who try to conquer

3:08:06 it end up being seduced by it and then become a part of it.

3:08:11 It's a sincere attempt by Tahaka to connect his kingship

3:08:15 to the achievements of the pharaohs of Egypt's past,

3:08:18 in particular to the rulers of the new kingdom.

3:08:24 [Music] So although history records that Tahaka conquered Egypt,

3:08:37 this scene reveals it's actually Egypt that conquered Taharka.

3:08:42 It's as if the Egyptian identity will always win out no matter what.

3:08:48 So much so that Taharka is even shown with the ram's horns

3:08:51 of a moon identifying him as the son of Egypt's god of gods.

3:08:58 These were worn by Amoteep III in Luxar temple in the 18th dynasty.

3:09:02 They were later worn by the great Alexander

3:09:05 to show he too was the son of a moon.

3:09:08 And here we have Taharka in all his finery in all his splendor.

3:09:14 [Applause] [Music] Who knew that they were

3:09:20 here hidden away in this special special rock?

3:09:23 We've come to the heart of Jebel Barkle.

3:09:25 Now we've come to the heart of Egyptian religion

3:09:28 because this is the very birthplace of a moon himself.

3:09:32 And here it is just for us right now emerging from the walls.

3:09:36 Very few people have ever seen this.

3:09:40 [Music] Here inside the temple where only the most pious were

3:09:48 allowed to harker is shown in deference to Egypt's most powerful god.

3:09:54 [Music] And outside on the mountain he exhibits his devotion

3:10:02 on a truly monumental scale by embellishing the very top of its pinnacle.

3:10:09 180 m tall and 11 m from the cliff face.

3:10:13 It seems completely inaccessible,

3:10:16 but Taharka pulled off an incredible technical achievement.

3:10:20 He built a crane arm and elaborate scaffolding in order

3:10:24 to make his own permanent mark on the mountain.

3:10:28 What he did was he made a an inscription

3:10:30 for himself commemorating his victories east and west.

3:10:34 And then underneath his men set a small statue

3:10:37 of the king and they covered the inscription with gold.

3:10:40 Today you can hardly see it, but in those days it would have

3:10:43 been the most conspicuous feature of the mountain.

3:10:45 I mean, that's meant to be seen by the gods.

3:10:47 Seen by the gods.

3:10:49 Of course, no mortal eye could read this from the ground,

3:10:52 but that wasn't the point.

3:10:55 This was a message to the gods carved on a monument built to impress.

3:11:01 completely covered in gold, it reflected the sun's rays,

3:11:04 and it acted like a giant billboard

3:11:07 as it telegraphed to Harker's message for miles around.

3:11:12 And this again hked back to Egypt's

3:11:14 past when previous pharaohs had placed gilded

3:11:17 capstones on their pyramids and obelisks

3:11:20 to harness the potent powers of the sun.

3:11:25 Just to the east of Jebel Barkle lies the necropolis of Nuri

3:11:29 where the Kushite king's transformation

3:11:31 into Egyptian pharaohs was finally completed.

3:11:35 For the dynasty who' invaded Egypt were now copying Egypt's ultimate symbol.

3:11:40 And for the first time in over a thousand years,

3:11:43 the kings who ruled Egypt were buried in pyramids.

3:11:47 When the kings made their capital at Memphis,

3:11:50 they were living right across the river from the Great Pyramids.

3:11:53 Taro spent most of his life there and was familiar with the great pyramids.

3:11:57 And so when he died,

3:11:58 he needed a pyramid of commensurate scale and uh and this he sort

3:12:03 of established this new type and it was followed by all of his successors.

3:12:09 The Kushites eventually built more pyramids here in their Nubian

3:12:13 homeland than the Egyptians had built in Egypt.

3:12:17 And just as at Giza, the Harkus pyramid is precisely aligned to its environment.

3:12:29 For on the exact day when the Nile flood begins to recede,

3:12:32 the sun sets just like this directly behind the Jebel Barkle pinnacle.

3:12:39 Yet only on this specific day and only

3:12:42 when viewed from the top of Tahaka's pyramid.

3:12:46 That is totally impressive.

3:12:48 Not just a skill, a feat of engineering,

3:12:51 but but such devotion to the gods, the gods obser observing nature.

3:12:55 I mean, it would take huge amount of observation to get the position just right,

3:13:00 to get the day just right.

3:13:03 Surrounded by these pyramids,

3:13:07 the images of Amun and Moot and their monumental temples,

3:13:11 it's easy to forget that the Kushites were

3:13:14 actually a foreign power who' taken Egypt by force.

3:13:18 Yet, it's almost as if Egypt was taunting its invaders.

3:13:21 While you may try and dominate our land,

3:13:24 our culture will ultimately dominate you.

3:13:27 And as such, the Kushites left a legacy of renewal and resurrection.

3:13:35 But like all Egypt's conquerors, the Kushites moment in the sun was fleeting.

3:13:41 For their 25th dynasty lasted but a century as a far

3:13:45 more ruthless and ambitious power now invaded [Music] in 674 BC.

3:13:56 The fearsome Assyrian army marched into Egypt.

3:14:00 As ruthless expansionists, they had little interest in Egyptian culture.

3:14:06 They graphically demonstrated their contempt

3:14:08 by sacking the sacred city of thieves.

3:14:13 [Music] The Assyrians, unlike the Egyptians,

3:14:26 they're interested in expanding their empire and really

3:14:29 taking over other parts of the world.

3:14:31 And they do that by violence.

3:14:35 This very unegyptian bronze helmet was discovered in thieves.

3:14:39 It is one of the very few objects that reveal the Assyrian takeover of Egypt.

3:14:46 Despite possessing equally powerful iconography of their own,

3:14:50 the Assyrians had little time to leave their mark.

3:14:54 They simply stamped their authority upon Egypt

3:14:57 by trying to rip out its religious heart.

3:15:02 This holy complex, this really huge sacred

3:15:06 space had never been attacked in Egyptian history.

3:15:09 And so for a mob to damage the temple, to damage statues perhaps,

3:15:15 to damage precious things would really

3:15:17 have been absolute anathema to the Egyptians.

3:15:20 What's really striking is it's obviously not an Egyptian item.

3:15:23 But the Egyptians didn't even wear helmets, did they?

3:15:26 They relied on their thick hair, didn't they?

3:15:28 So for me, it really evokes a completely alien image.

3:15:33 I mean, the Assyrians, I mean, war was their business, wasn't it?

3:15:37 [Music] With their sophisticated weapons and armor,

3:15:48 the Assyrians were a war machine whose

3:15:51 unstoppable progress seemed to spell disaster for Egypt.

3:15:56 Yet, after little more than 20 years,

3:15:59 the Assyrians returned east to tackle problems at home,

3:16:03 leaving vassels in charge of Egypt.

3:16:06 based at the delta city of Seace.

3:16:08 These were the Seite kings,

3:16:11 shrewd Egyptian politicians who first appeared to serve their Assyrian

3:16:15 masters but soon became strong enough to declare their independence.

3:16:21 Egypt was now back in Egyptian hands.

3:16:24 The Seites instigated a spectacular renaissance in native culture.

3:16:29 At the heart of which lay Egypt's

3:16:31 most powerful symbol of national identity, mummification.

3:16:37 But no longer limited to humans, there was an explosion of animal mummification.

3:16:43 Everything from dogs, cats, crocodiles, ibis, and even tiny shrews.

3:16:50 The ancient Egyptians had always mummified their dead both human and animal.

3:16:56 And with the Seites,

3:16:58 we can almost see it as a way of the Seite kings trying to declare we are Egypt.

3:17:04 We are important.

3:17:05 This is what makes us special.

3:17:08 No one else in the ancient world could mummify like the Egyptians.

3:17:11 And so they rolled it out a millionfold.

3:17:16 With animals specifically bred for mummification

3:17:20 and then sold as offerings at temples,

3:17:22 the Seites had reinvigorated Egypt's oldest industry.

3:17:27 Death was once again big business.

3:17:32 [Music] Now, this might look pretty silly,

3:17:51 but around 2,000 years ago here at Sakara,

3:17:54 this would have been a very common site.

3:17:56 [Music] This place would have been packed

3:18:01 with pilgrims with priests making animal mummies

3:18:04 and they be trundling the mummies across the landscape in carts like this one.

3:18:08 So we must get out of our minds this idea of Egyptian priests as these pious,

3:18:12 quiet figures wafting through the landscape when by this time

3:18:15 it was all carried out in great numbers.

3:18:24 And it was Egypt's endless ability to reinterpret its

3:18:28 core beliefs that was the key to its longevity.

3:18:31 For millennia, the Egyptians had believed that the pharaoh

3:18:35 was a living god who embodied the soul of Egypt.

3:18:39 When the king died, their soul lived on in their mummified body,

3:18:43 which must be kept safe to guarantee the continuity of Egypt.

3:18:48 So, they'd always buried their rulers in the safety

3:18:51 of pyramids or elaborate rock cut tombs.

3:19:00 But in times of increasing unrest and foreign rule,

3:19:03 the Egyptians could no longer rely on even having a pharaoh to bury.

3:19:08 And so they turned to another centuries old practice.

3:19:13 The cereap at Sakara is a huge subterranean tomb complex

3:19:18 in which the concepts of kingship and animal mummification were fused together.

3:19:24 For each of these giant granite sarcophagi once contained

3:19:28 an animal believed to embody all the qualities of kingship.

3:19:32 This is the burial site of the sacred apis bull.

3:19:39 These were the bodies of mummified bulls

3:19:42 of of such importance to the Egyptian mindset.

3:19:46 They extended all this effort and cost

3:19:49 to create a suitably impressive burial site.

3:19:52 And they've done this in spades.

3:19:54 As one bull dies and is mummified and buried,

3:19:57 the other one is then woripped in life and at death mummified and buried again.

3:20:01 And so there's a real progression.

3:20:03 The cult of the apist bull dates

3:20:05 right back to the beginning of Egyptian history.

3:20:08 And it's closely linked to the pharaoh.

3:20:10 It was believed that when the sacred bull died, it became one with Osiris,