[Dr. Hashesh] The robbers left him in sitting position.
-[Prof. Barta] Uh-huh. -So this is a proof
that he treated badly from the robbers
during the tried to retrieve the...
[Prof. Barta speaking]
Yeah, yeah.
[narrator] For the robbers to go to such lengths,
Ptahshepses' mummy must have been decorated with valuables,
further proof that he was important.
Back outside, it looks like Miroslav's team
at the top of the shaft has found another structure.
[men shouting in native language]
[narrator] At the pyramid complex
of the Second Sun King Sahura,
Mohamed's team is excavating more
of the mysterious structure from beneath the spoil heap.
So, we are now collecting every single detail that we find
in order just to get a complete clear picture for us.
[narrator] He wants to know if the structure dates
from the time of Sahura,
as the paint pot suggests.
That's graffiti here, original one.
[narrator] In the next layer down,
Mohamed has spotted some hieroglyphs
in the stonework.
It's a very similar color.
[narrator] It's an important clue.
The paint from this ancient graffiti
matches the powdered paint from the pot.
So now we will go deep
until we reach the original floor.
So definitely this comes from the, uh, original structure,
and this structure belongs to the funerary temple.
It's very significant.
[narrator] Mohamed has uncovered
that the foundation stones are embedded in the bedrock.
This means it is a previously undiscovered part
of the temple complex of Sahura.
Now he wants to find out
what the structure was used for.
In Saqqara...
[men speaking native language]
[narrator] ...Miroslav wants to know
the identity of the owner
of the empty burial chamber.
[Prof. Barta] This is an amazing discovery.
[narrator] His team has unearthed a new structure
while excavating near the top of the shaft.
It's a chapel made of beautifully carved limestone
that Miroslav thinks belongs to the tomb owner.
He's hoping it will give him a clue to who the owner was
and when he lived.
Now we have it live finally.
The first column is praying to Anubis for a good burial,
and then we have the most important title,
Medjeh genooty, um, Master Sculptor.
This is it, this is the most important place in the tomb.
This is the name of the deceased
reading Kae-im-heset.
We know who he was, what was his name,
and what were his duties at the court.
[narrator] Miroslav has uncovered
the burial chamber and chapel of Kaeimheset,
the Royal Sculptor.
[Prof. Barta] It's quite rare to have
the complete evidence.
[narrator] The architecture of the chapel
suggests that it dates from about 100 years
before the time of the Sun Kings.
Around 2600 BCE,
high officials like Kaeimheset built simple tombs
like these for themselves to achieve eternal life.
At the heart of the tomb sat a false door,
a magic gateway to the world of the dead.
By the era of the Sun Kings,
tombs of high officials like Ptahshepses were larger,
with more rooms to store offerings
for the deceased.
The decoration was far more elaborate,
with beautiful reliefs
depicting scenes of a prosperous life.
Both these men were important officials
in their own eras.
But the extreme luxury of Ptahshepses' tomb
compared to Kaeimheset's
shows how far the Sun Kings
had elevated the status of non-royals.
Miroslav has added another piece
to the picture of how the Sun Kings governed Egypt.
Today is a really good day for our mission,
and I'm happy not only for myself but the workers,
because they always like to discover something.
[narrator] In Abusir,
at the pyramid complex of Sahura,
the Second Sun King,
Mohamed has excavated a foundation stone
that indicates the structure he found is an original wall.
Now, he wants to work out what it was used for.
[speaking native language]
[narrator] The team begins to excavate the area nearby.
[Dr. Khaled] It's promising, it's promising.
That's very promising.
[narrator] They've found a second wall
running parallel to the first.
[Dr. Khaled] It's ancient, so it's untouched.
They are already aligned with each other.
[narrator] It looks like the walls form part
of an undiscovered limestone avenue.
What we will do now is continue the excavation.
I'm looking forward to see
if this wall extends toward the pyramid.
Then of course it will be very exciting news for us.
[narrator] At the pyramid complex
of the Second Sun King Sahura,
Mohamed is investigating what he hopes
is a limestone avenue.
[Dr. Khaled] My hunch is this could be
the beginning of the side entrance
to the temple.
[narrator] In 1907,
the excavation uncovered a central sacred causeway.
It led to an entrance to the temple
that could only be used by the king.
That's why everybody used the side entrance.
[narrator] Instead of using the sacred causeway,
priests relied on a second entranceway
to access the funerary temple of Sahura.
Inside the temple,
priests performed rituals in the name of Sahura's cult,
a practice that continued for 200 years after his death.
Sahura's temple also became a place of healing.
Both rich and poor traveled from across Egypt
to receive carvings chipped from the causeway itself.
They believed these carvings offered blessings
that bestowed not only the power
of the Sun King Sahura,
but of the Goddess of Healing, Sekhmet.
For Mohamed, uncovering the priests' avenue
would be a hugely significant find.
I'm very excited because it's still going
towards the-the-the pyramid.
It's a new structure that was never located
or recorded before.
This is an extraordinary discovery.
Every day you find new evidence
that's changing completely
our understanding about this, this monument.
[narrator] Sahura's funerary complex
became the template for all his descendants who followed.
So, Mohamed's discovery gives him key information
about the Sun Kings Dynasty
and how they were honored after death.
It's, it's great. It's really great.
[narrator] In Saqqara,
Chris has come to the pyramid
of the final Sun King, Unas.
When he became pharaoh,
an expanding court of officials
was growing ever more powerful.
Unas needed to reassert his authority,
and Chris believes his pyramid might tell him how he did it.
[Dr. Naunton] This pyramid might not look like much,
but it is hugely significant.
This pyramid would change Egypt forever.
[narrator] Whilst the tombs of officials
were richly decorated,
the walls inside the pyramids of the pharaohs
were always bare.
Unas broke with that tradition in an extraordinary fashion.
[Dr. Naunton] This is really special.
The decoration inside the burial compartments here
is really something.
The walls are completely covered,
every inch of them,
in hieroglyphs and enormous, lengthy inscription.
Unas' real legacy.
No tomb had ever been decorated
like this before.
[narrator] Unas' pyramid texts
are a set of 228 spells and hymns
designed to secure the pharaoh's path
to the afterlife.
When a pharaoh died,
priests would recite spells and incantations
to guide the king's soul
on its journey to the afterlife.
But Unas took things a step further.
He instructed masons to carve those spells
into the walls of his tomb
so the pharaoh's soul could do without the priests.
It would be able to read the spells
inscribed on the burial chamber itself.
With the holy words and rituals to guide it,
the spirit stood the best possible chance
of journeying to the afterlife
to take its place among the gods.
By recording the resurrection spells
onto the walls of his tomb for the first time,
Unas was using these pyramid texts
to claim absolute supremacy
over both the gods and his subjects.
[Dr. Naunton] Unas' great innovation
was reserved for him.
He was only pharaoh who had the right
to have their burial chamber decorated with these texts,
the key to the eternal next life.
[narrator] Ultimately, Unas' attempt
to wrest back control failed.
He died without an heir,
and the throne of Egypt passed to a commoner.
The era of the Sun Kings was over,
but their legacy lived on.
[Dr. Naunton] The pyramid texts which appear here
for the first time
would continue in use for another 2,000 years.
More importantly,
the ideas that are included in these texts,
so the king's journey to the next life
to join with the gods,
would remain a fundamental part of Egyptians' belief
in the way the world works.
[narrator] Today, archeologists continue
to uncover new evidence
about how the Sun Kings changed Egypt.
To help them run the country,
they created a new class of officials
and rewarded their closes aides
with beautifully decorated tombs.
But once the Sun Kings began to surrender
their political power to those bureaucrats,
the erosion of their authority was unstoppable.
While Unas' pyramid texts guaranteed his immortality,
he could not produce an heir.
The sun had finally set
on the dynasty of the Sun Kings.
♪♪
[narrator] On the Nile's West Bank,
in a city of the dead...
[Dr. Bahaa Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] ...archeologists have found a hidden tunnel.
Doctor!
[narrator] Buried under tons
of sand and rubble,
a coffin could reveal clues
to how war made Ramses the Great...
[Gaber speaking English]
-Doctor! -[narrator] ...into an icon.
Oh!
♪♪
[narrator] Ramses II,
the greatest pharaoh of Egypt's golden age.
Born some 20 years
after the death of Tutankhamun,
he ruled Egypt for nearly seven decades.
More than 3,000 years later,
hundreds of his monumental structures survive,
proclaiming him the everlasting warrior king
who brought glory and prosperity
to Egypt through battle.
Today, archeologists
are peering beyond the stonework,
investigating Ramses' military achievements
and his impact on the generations of Egyptians
that followed his reign
to understand how a king became a legend.
In the sacred ancient center of Abydos...
Egyptian archaeologist Sameh Iskander
is in his 16th year
exploring one of Ramses' most iconic monuments.
[Dr. Sameh Iskander] Working here for so many years
at the Ramses II Temple,
I feel this affinity.
I am fascinated by his accomplishments,
and I want to know more about him.
I am obsessed by him and his reign and his legacy.
[narrator] Sameh wants to know
how this great warrior pharaoh was seen by Egyptians
in the decades and centuries after his death.
He's investigating the area surrounding
the very first temple Ramses put his name to.
♪♪
Constructed using fine white limestone,
Ramses' temple at Abydos covered an area
half the size of a football field.
The king dedicated it to Osiris
and he placed 26 sandstone statues of the god
in its outer courtyard.
So far, Sameh's excavations have revealed
that the temple was also crowded on both sides
by 42 vaulted storerooms.
Sameh knows a temple this important
wouldn't have existed in isolation,
so now he's searching for clues beyond the enclosure wall.
♪♪
[Iskander] Temples or tombs
don't just get built and out of an abstract
and, and empty space. There is life around it.
We're trying to explore this area here to the west
to see if there are any structures
that are connected to the temple.
[narrator] Sameh has 150 men
shifting sand and rock
across an excavation of over 10,000 square feet
hoping to find ancient buildings.
Over here, we came across this structure.
We really don't know yet what it is.
[narrator] It appears to be
a complete building entirely buried by desert sand.
The team's first task is to dig out the area
in front of the structure.
[speaking native language]
[Iskander] I see, I see pieces of a bone there,
a couple of, a couple of bones.
This is a burial site for sure.
We are here in a tomb.
[narrator] In Egypt's extreme south...
Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian
has come to one of Egypt's most imposing temples
to investigate the origins
of Ramses II's fearsome reputation.
It is spectacular here!
The great temple of Abu Simbel
with its four imposing colossi
of Ramses the Great.
[narrator] Ramses built Abu Simbel
not just as a statement of power,
but as a warning to his enemies
across Egypt's southern border.
Large parts of the temple complex
celebrate the king's military strength.
[Dr. Arto Belekdanian] It's incredible how much
of the wall space here
is dedicated to scenes of war.
[narrator] The reliefs record battles
Ramses fought
over the first half of his long reign.
Arto is hunting for evidence
of one of Ramses' earliest military engagements.
There it is,
right there is a scene
that shows where it all began.
Look at the headdress,
the horned helmet with the spherical shape on top,
the round shields, those massive swords.
These are not Egyptian soldiers,
in fact they are part of a mysterious group of people
known by the fantastic name of The Sea Peoples.
♪♪
[narrator] The Sea Peoples
were pirates who preyed on the rich
trading ports of Egypt's fertile Nile Delta.
After just two years on the throne,
Ramses mustered his navy,
and mobilized to protect his kingdom's wealth.
At their first battle he cornered his foes
and overwhelmed them with a much stronger force.
The pharaoh won a resounding victory
over Egypt's maritime enemies
and then drafted the captive Sea Peoples into his own army.
The records etched into the temple walls
suggest Ramses had good reason to bolster his army
with battle-hardened conscripts.
Ramses' reign coincided with a time
of economic turmoil in the Mediterranean.
Threats to Egyptian stability were coming thick and fast.
On the outside of the temple, here,
I found over a dozen representations of kneeling,
tied up, defeated peoples.
It is clear that Ramses has been busy
since he defeated the Sea Peoples
early in his reign.
[narrator] Each bound-up captive
represents a different foreign power
who coveted Egypt's wealth,
looking to wrest control from the pharaoh
as their own societies crumbled.
♪♪
Yet Ramses' inscriptions suggest victory after victory.
To uncover the tactical secrets behind the king's success,
Arto needs to explore deeper into the temple.
♪♪
On the west bank
of the Nile at Dra' Abu El-Naga...
Egyptian Archaeologist Bahaa Gaber
is exploring a giant ancient cemetery
cut into a mountain.
[Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] Bahaa wants to know how Egypt coped
in the increasingly volatile Mediterranean
once Ramses II's 66-year reign
came to an end.
Dra' Abu-El-Naga is the ideal place to search,
as it's one of the main burial sites
for nobles of the Ramesside era,
a roughly 200-year period during which
11 pharaohs took Ramses as their royal name.
[narrator] This year, halfway up the mountain's slope,
Bahaa believes he's found a promising lead.
[narrator] During the Ramesside period,
nobles often built shrines or chapels
above their burial chambers
where visitors could leave offerings.
A tight passage leads down to the entrance
to a cramped cavity filled with rubble.
The team will have to clear the rock to see what's inside.
♪♪
[Gaber] It's such an amazing feeling
when you stand in front of the door
removing the first block
and then you will see what's behind.
You can't put it in words.
[narrator] As the team removes debris
from the end of the passage,
archaeologist Ahmed El-Tayeb
concentrates on the entranceway itself.
Mr. Bahaa!
[speaking native language]
[Gaber] Yes?
Did you find anything?
Oh, that's beautiful.
[narrator] If there is a concealed tomb nearby,
a chunk of a doorway is a key piece of the puzzle.
♪♪
[narrator] In the shadow of Ramses' temple in Abydos,
Sameh's team is nearing the floor of the pit
at the entrance to what appears to be
a buried mudbrick tomb.
[Iskander] I think this is multiple burials
because we have certainly bones from a child
and others from a grownup.
How many persons, it's hard to tell so far.
[narrator] Before he can break open the tomb's entrance,
Sameh must recover and record every single bone
deposited outside it.
♪♪
This is the upper part of the skull.
I think we're getting very close to the bottom of this opening
but it's neatly blocked.
I don't think it was opened and re-blocked,
but we'll find out.
[narrator] The mudbricks sealing the entrance
appear undisturbed.
It suggests the original tomb owner
could still be safely entombed inside.
With the end of the workers' shift approaching,
Sameh will have to wait to dismantle the wall.
[Iskander] We need to be patient.
We really don't know what's beyond this,
but I can tell you right now,
once we clear this,
we're gonna get a better idea what's inside.
[narrator] At Abu Simbel,
Arto is looking for evidence to explain
how Ramses won his reputation
as one of the most successful warriors in Egyptian history.
Ramses II has defeated his seaborne enemies,
and now having incorporated them into his army,
showing great military sense,
he had his next challenge to face,
his enemies on land.
Over to the south were the Nubians,
to the west the semi-nomadic tribes of Libya,
and then to the north his greatest enemies of all,
the Hittites.
[narrator] The Hittites controlled
much of today's Middle East
during the tumultuous period of Ramses' reign.
They were Egypt's main rival superpower
in the Mediterranean,
amassed in great numbers
right on Egypt's eastern border.
For Ramses, they posed an existential threat.
Arto wants to see how Ramses met this challenge
to Egyptian territory.
Oh, look at this scene. This has all the clues.
Clearly archery
was a very important element in Ramses' army,
but so were battle axes, spears, daggers.
And here's a horse,
which is harnessed to the most high-tech,
cutting-edge piece of military equipment,
the chariot.
[narrator] The chariot had been introduced
to Egypt as a weapon of war
just a few centuries earlier.
For the warrior king
and the future of Egyptian civilization,
it was a game-changer.
♪♪
The traditional Egyptian archer
could attack from distance on foot,
but was relatively static and vulnerable to enemy fire.
Mounting troops on chariots
made them more mobile and harder to hit,
while also extending their range.
♪♪
One soldier drove the chariot,
while the archer shot arrows from a platform at the rear.
Egypt's wealth meant Ramses could deploy 2,000 chariots
in a single battle
to bear down on the enemy with overwhelming force.
Ramses II put the war chariot to tremendously effective use.
And here he is aboard his chariot.
He has no need for a driver.
He has tied the reins around his waist.
Truly, he was a master of the craft.
[narrator] Riding his chariot alone
with a bow drawn impossibly far behind his head,
Ramses presented himself as a mighty hero
who led from the front.
Out on the battlefield his lighter,
more maneuverable chariots gave Ramses an edge
over the cumbersome Hittite vehicles.
It meant he could successfully defend Egyptian territory.
But the warrior pharaoh wanted more,
to expand his borders
and take the fight to the Hittites.
But to defeat a rival superpower
in its own backyard
required more than chariots.
Look at that, something new.
A fortified location sitting atop a high hill
with high walls.
You can see the ramparts.
[narrator] The Hittites were no pushovers,
and on their own ground
they had the advantage of fixed stone defenses.
They're organized, they're well-armed,
and they are in control of many such fortified locations.
Clearly, Ramses had a challenge ahead of him.
[narrator] To investigate the pharaoh's campaigns
in Hittite lands,
Arto needs to visit another of Ramses' monuments
to his military greatness.
At Dra' Abu El-Naga...
the rock fragments Bahaa's team uncovered
in the shrine's entrance suggest the presence
of a tomb from the centuries
following Ramses' death.
If he can find the crypt, its contents could help him
build a picture of life and death after Ramses' reign.
[Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] The sandstone building material
confirms the shrine is from the right time.
[narrator] At the end of the shrine's entrance passage,
Bahaa's workers continue to haul out rubble,
hunting for bodies.
Doctor!
[narrator] It's a stunning find,
a beautifully preserved wooden coffin
painted with images of gods
and elaborate scenes of resurrection.
Its presence confirms Bahaa's team
has uncovered a tomb within the Ramesside shrine.
Now Bahaa wants to know who it belonged to.
Doctor!
[narrator] In Abydos...
the sun is rising on a new day of excavation.
Sameh is almost ready to open a buried structure
to the west of the Temple of Ramses II.
He hopes it will help him understand
how Egyptians felt about Ramses
in the generations following the warrior pharaoh's death.
[Iskander] I have no idea
what could be inside, no idea,
but I can't wait.
The unknown in this type of work is so exciting
because we know there was something inside at one point
but is it still there?
[narrator] As Sameh's foreman, Ayman,
prepares to work on the entrance,
the morning light reveals intriguing details
in the surrounding brickwork.
We can see from these lines here that the bricklayer would,
would run his fingers here
to create some kind of a rough brick for better adhesion.
Very interesting, they are curved,
and I can tell for sure they came from the temple.
[narrator] Egyptian master builders
normally only used curved bricks for rounded walls.
The bricks used to build the tomb
match similar fragments Sameh has found
while excavating and restoring Ramses' temple.
They appear to have been reused
from a set of domed structures attached to the monument.
So during our excavations in the past two or three years,
we came across the walls of these storage magazines silos.
So each of these storage magazines
contained about 100 cubic meters
of grain, that is a lot of grain,
and perhaps that's what Ramses II needed for his army.
[narrator] For a pharaoh at war, grain was critical.
In an economy without money,
the bread and beer produced from grain
both paid and fed the king's entire force.
His horses alone
needed 6,000 pounds of feed every day.
The army of Ramses the Great
was legendary, over 100,000 soldiers,
one of the largest forces ever assembled
in Ancient Egypt.
To sustain his fighters,
the king gathered thousands of tons of grain
from farms in the Nile Valley.
To store the grain,
Ramses built vast silos at his temple complexes,
making them a vital part of his military machine.
The nearby structure
seems to have been built at a later date,
once Ramses' grain silos had fallen into disuse.
[narrator] Foreman Ayman
is ready to break open the seal.
We're gonna start to take the bricks one at a time
because I have a feeling
that the sand that we see on top of that,
uh, collapsed vault will start to come down.
So, we need to do this very, very carefully.
♪♪
[narrator] In Dra' Abu El-Naga...
excitement is growing in the Ramesside tomb.
[narrator] A noble's burial
could yield rich information
about how Egypt weathered the social upheavals
that continued to bring down Mediterranean kingdoms
after Ramses the Great's long reign.
[narrator] It's an exceptional discovery.
[Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] The face is part of a delicately carved
and painted coffin lid.
Together with a richly decorated coffin,
it's evidence of a high-status burial.
The fact that the two parts are lying separately
shows that the tomb has been disturbed.
[Mohamed Beabesh speaking English]
[narrator] Alongside the prayers
and scenes of resurrection painted on the coffin,
nobles would have been buried with valuable items
to assist them in the afterlife.
With a coffin broken open,
these are almost certainly now gone.
But for Bahaa, the treasure is the burial itself.
[narrator] In Abydos...
Sameh's foreman Ayman Mohamed
is delicately unblocking the entrance
to the buried structure.
Whatever is inside
could have lain undisturbed for more than 3,000 years.
I see... sand.
That's it, only sand so far.
[narrator] At the other end of the structure,
workers have now uncovered a hole in the roof.
The vaulted roof had already collapsed at some time
and the sand got inside it.
[narrator] Either the tomb has been robbed via the roof
or the ceiling has collapsed naturally.
It's going to take some time getting the sand out.
[narrator] Sameh's workers
need to exercise extreme caution
operating beneath the degraded mudbrick roof.
One wayward thrust of a shovel
could bring down the entire structure.
Patience, patience, patience. You need to take your time.
♪♪
[narrator] Fifty miles southeast in Luxor...
Arto has come to one of Ramses'
most ambitious buildings:
The Ramesseum, his mortuary temple.
Designed to glorify his achievements
as pharaoh for eternity,
it's the ideal place to explore the events
Ramses wanted his descendants to remember.
Look at this place!
Just wow!
[narrator] Arto's investigating
how Ramses fought his campaigns
against the Hittites' fortified cities
and cemented his status as Egypt's greatest warrior.
You can tell that Ramses II employed his best sculptors
in this place.
It is truly remarkable.
[narrator] Arto scans the decorated walls
for evidence of how the warrior king
overcame the Hittites' defenses.
Look at all this chaos.
This is battle, this is war.
And there's Ramses II dispatching his enemies
under the shadow of that fortified location.
I mean, look at these ramparts.
You see that ladder?
You don't necessarily destroy the walls.
You climb over them.
And right there, there's a column of hieroglyphs
identifying this city,
and it says, ah, it's a little bit broken off
but at the very end it's spelling out "our."
The first bit is missing but this can't be anything
but the siege, the famous battle of Dapur.
[narrator] The city of Dapur was heavily fortified,
and hundreds of miles inside Hittite territory.
Ramses needed more than chariots
for this sort of siege warfare.
He had to come up with a different strategy.
♪♪
Approaching from one side of the city,
Ramses' troops used a tall ladder.
Below, more soldiers engaged the defenders
drawing fire from beneath a mantlet,
a covering shield that sheltered them
from projectiles.
With the enemy's attention
drawn to one end of their city,
the king's main force struck the undefended side.
With this pincer move, Ramses was victorious.
He captured the city of Dapur
and claimed the territory for Egypt.
You can imagine the army of the king,
with Pharaoh himself present, his resplendent armor,
his crowns, his jewelry, glowing under the sunlight.
Clearly, this would have been a terrifying experience
for the city's defenders.
[narrator] Inscriptions from Ramses' time
call him "The one who breaches walls,"
and boast that he and his army
captured no less than 18 towns
in a single season in his eighth year as king.
Ramses' temple inscriptions
suggest a series of crushing victories,
but in reality his campaigns in the east were costly.
Long periods of fighting deep in Hittite territory
took their toll.
His wars left a more complicated legacy for Egypt
than his claims of glory suggest.
♪♪
[narrator] In the Ramesside shrine
at Dra' Abu El-Naga,
Bahaa is searching the remains
of an ancient crime scene
for evidence of what happened in Egypt
in the centuries following Ramses' death.
Normally the coffin should have the face of the owner
of the coffin himself. So that's him!
The beautiful face of that man.
It's amazing!
[narrator] The face may portray the owner of the coffin
but its style seems not to match
the date of the tomb.
Bahaa believes the casket was made
after the Ramesside period ended,
suggesting this is not the tomb's original owner.
This coffin was buried during a later,
darker time.
[narrator] After Ramses' death,
his successors, including
nine more pharaohs called Ramses,
continued to hold the unrest in the region at bay,
seeking to emulate the warrior king's success.
But eventually, the unrest
engulfing the region caught up with them.
The death of King Ramses XI
marked the end of the Ramesside era.
Egypt finally succumbed to the economic collapse
sweeping the Mediterranean world.
As rival factions fought for control in a power vacuum,
Egypt split in two,
and law and order collapsed across the country.
The ancient tombs that used to be closely guarded
were left unprotected and became vulnerable.
The treasures the elites had locked away
for their afterlives were now a temptation
for those living in troubled times.
♪♪
[Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] Whilst the door jamb
proves the structure is Ramesside,
the later coffin suggests the tomb was reused
around the time of Egypt's economic collapse.
Bahaa believes this coffin was placed
in an older Ramesside tomb to protect it.
But in the chaos, no resting place was safe.
From kings down to recently deceased nobility,
the valuables buried with the dead became a target.
For Bahaa, the tomb's fate adds rich detail
to a key period in Egyptian history:
the disintegration of a long-established
social order as Egypt's golden age broke down.
The only question that remains
is did the robbers leave the body intact?
[narrator] In a stroke of good fortune,
the debris covering the coffin
has saved the mummy itself.
[narrator] Bahaa's final job
is to rescue the ransacked noble's remains.
[narrator] The team will carefully transport the coffin
to a laboratory where specialists will stabilize
and interpret its extraordinary paintwork.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] But Bahaa's work is on the mountain.
His mission to reconstruct the centuries
following the death of Ramses the Great goes on.
♪♪
[narrator] In Abydos,
Sameh's team is continuing the careful work
of removing sand from the fragile vaulted tomb.
Somewhere hidden in the debris
could be clues to how Egyptians here
felt about Ramses' long warlike reign
in the centuries after his death.
With the tomb's floor just inches away,
the excavation picks up pace.
We're finding more skulls here.
All the, the remains we have here,
they seem to be coming from different periods.
[narrator] Like the pit outside its entrance,
the tomb appears to be packed full of skeletal remains
deposited at different times.
So far, we came across four human skulls inside the tomb.
Every five minutes we come up with something new.
[narrator] As the workers make
discovery after discovery,
Sameh brings in a specialist
in working with fragile artifacts.
So this is Mohamed who's a conservator.
[narrator] He scans the cavity with fresh eyes.
[narrator] In Abydos...
Ah, ah, ah, ah. It's a decorated coffin.
[narrator] Sameh's persistence
in the tomb beside
Ramses the Great's temple is paying off.
-You can see red, green... -Yes.
-...and Egyptian blue also. -Yes.
[narrator] Although the remains are fragmentary,
they could still help Sameh reveal who was buried here
and what Ramses meant to Egyptians
in the centuries after his reign.
Whoa!
[narrator] With the tomb now cleared to floor level...
Okay.
[narrator] ...Sameh can finally analyze the burials.
Wow, we have this mud sarcophagus,
painted with these beautiful colors.
This is the head, the top has already gone,
and on top of it
we have the skull of a donkey
which is very, very unusual,
and very interesting to have
a head of a donkey as an offering.
And it's laid directly on the sarcophagus
[narrator] In ancient Egypt,
donkeys were seen as animals to be respected,
their ability to bear burdens enabling long-distance travel.
The intricately painted casket
topped with a donkey's head
suggests the original tomb owner
was someone with status.
This person with this kind of coffin
which has elaborate decorations in the outside
must have been a person of some means.
[narrator] Built with bricks taken from Ramses' temple
and situated just steps away from the monument,
the tomb implies that even after Egypt's golden age
had begun to crumble,
Ramses' legend still carried weight.
At least nine other people of lower status
were buried haphazardly alongside the owner
either inside the tomb or at the entrance.
Their states of preservation suggest some date
to more than a thousand years after Ramses' death.
[Iskander] This is a great discovery.
We can get a glimpse of the mindset
of the Egyptians centuries later after Ramses.
[narrator] A thousand years after the warrior king died,
Egypt's golden age was long over.
But Ramses' monuments
remained popular burial grounds.
His legend lived on.
[Iskander] The name of Ramses II
as the great warrior,
stayed in the memory of the Egyptians
for many centuries after his death.
[narrator] Sameh still has acres of ground
to explore around the temple precinct.
It could contain hundreds of burials,
nobles and commoners alike.
♪♪
The warrior pharaoh seems to have commanded respect in life
and for a thousand years after his death.
But was it simply for his military success?
♪♪
In Luxor...
Arto wants to explore how Ramses sustained
multiple grueling campaigns beyond his eastern frontiers.
And earned the admiration of the entire country
for centuries to come.
Ramses II had a problem .
He was fighting wars abroad
for months on end, besieging cities.
His supply lines were stretched as far as they could go.
What was the solution?
[narrator] A papyrus acquired
by a dealer in antiquities
in the 1830s could hold the secret.
The text contains evidence of a huge building project
Ramses commissioned
as his military ventures gathered pace.
I'm looking at this fascinating papyrus .
Parts of it are going into incredibly vivid detail.
It's actually describing this brand-new gleaming capital
founded by Ramses II.
And right here, it's also giving us its name,
Pi-Ramses, the House of Ramses.
♪♪
[narrator] Strategically built
on an island in the Nile Delta,
Pi-Ramses was hundreds of miles closer
to Hittite territory than the former capital.
What this means is Ramses II founded his capital
at the very edge of Egypt,
making it a perfect launching point
for all of his military campaigns.
♪♪
[narrator] With a giant temple
complete with an imposing avenue of sphinxes,
Pi-Ramses was built with an emphasis on grandeur.
But Ramses capital was no vanity project.
Next to the palace, rows of stables
housed nearly 500 horses,
serving as headquarters for Ramses' chariot corps.
The streets bristled with silos for grain,
enough to feed an army.
And great furnaces smelted bronze
into shields and swords.
This beautiful new city was really designed
as an engine of war.
The strategic location of this new city
meant that Ramses II could penetrate further
into enemy territory and stay there for longer.
[narrator] Ramses' monumental inscriptions
were designed to promote his triumphs for posterity.
He showed off his victories in vivid detail.
But on the walls of Ramses' mortuary temple,
Arto finds evidence that the warrior king
also recognized the cost of constant war.
He knew when to stop.
This right here is the text of the peace treaty
that Ramses II forged with the King of the Hittites.
And it was so important to him
that he immortalized it into stone
in the setting of his funerary cult for all eternity.
He forged the Egypt Empire through war,
but the way to maintain it, it was through peace.
[narrator] With his enemies subdued
either through force or treaty,
Ramses secured two centuries of stability for Egypt.
He earned a warrior's adulation on the battlefield
but won respect through strategic discipline.
With each new discovery,
archeologists across the country shed light
on the veneration Ramses the Great inspired.
As kingdom after kingdom,
founded in the wake of social and economic upheaval
across the Mediterranean,
Ramses' shrewd military decisions
held off the inevitable end of Egypt's golden age.
And his reputation survived,
his own version of history etched in monumental stone:
Warrior Pharaoh, King of Kings.
♪♪
[narrator] In an ancient necropolis
in the heart of Egypt...
[workers speaking native language]
[Dr. Bahaa Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] Archeologists are hunting for tombs
from the era of Tutankhamun.
[narrator] They will be the first to set foot inside
for thousands of years.
[narrator] They're hoping to unravel the mystery
of an ancient religious revolution.
♪♪
[narrator] Tutankhamun, Egypt's most famous pharaoh.
Known as the Boy King,
he came to power when he was 9 years old
and ruled until his death aged 19.
But during his short life, he oversaw a transformation
in how the Ancient Egyptians worshiped their gods
that had far-reaching implications
for the rest of Ancient Egyptian history.
Today, archeologists across Egypt
continue to hunt for clues
to this spiritual upheaval.
They unearth evidence of mysterious religious rituals,
investigate how some gods were banished
and others rose to power,
and search brick by brick to understand
how the Boy King's far-reaching religious reforms
had their roots in the chaotic reign of his father.
♪♪
Near Luxor at Dra' Abu el-Naga...
Egyptian archeologist Bahaa Gaber
is excavating an ancient necropolis
that contains burials from the era of Tutankhamun.
It's a very rich area.
The number of the tombs,
more than 2,000 tombs have been discovered until now.
[narrator] The burials here
could contain valuable information
about how Tutankhamun shaped Egypt's religious customs
during his reign.
This season, Bahaa and his team
are focusing on an area of sand
near the base of the necropolis.
They have a meticulous system
to make sure they don't miss anything.
[Dr. Gaber] When we start from the beginning, we have
to divide the area into the squares.
For us, this is the first square,
and that's the second one and this is the third one.
We are looking for the bedrock.
[narrator] In each 16-by-16-foot square,
the workers dig all the way down to the bedrock
searching for any structures hidden in the sand.
We've found a border of a courtyard.
You can see the corners around the area.
It means that this is the courtyard of a tomb.
[narrator] It's a promising start.
The New Kingdom period is the era of Tutankhamun.
Now that the team has found the courtyard,
they're on the lookout
for signs of buried grave goods.
Ah.
♪♪
[narrator] On the West Bank of the Nile, near Luxor...
American Egyptologist Meredith Brand
has come to Tutankhamun's tomb
to explore which gods the Boy King revered.
[Dr. Meredith Brand] This is so exciting.
So this is the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb.
It's wonderful to go to the place
where the greatest
archeological discovery in Egypt,
and probably even the world, took place.
[narrator] Tutankhamun's mummified body
lay sealed in this tomb for over 3,000 years.
Meredith has special access to examine
the burial chamber's walls up close.
[Dr. Brand] This is my first time getting to go
into the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.
This is fantastic.
Oh, wow!
Look at that.
You can see every single detail,
all the individual strokes, the lines.
[narrator] The Ancient Egyptians honored
over 2,000 deities,
and the pharaohs were seen as a divine intermediary
between them and the gods.
Over the centuries, the popularity
of individual gods waxed and waned,
and some gods even combined into hybrid deities.
Meredith studies the painted reliefs
to identify which gods Tutankhamun chose
to surround himself with.
[Dr. Brand] Here is the god Osiris,
the god of the underworld,
embracing Tutankhamun.
Over there is the goddess Nut.
This is somebody who worshiped
the full pantheon of the Egyptian religion.
[narrator] When first discovered,
Tutankhamun's tomb was crammed
with more than 5,000 lavish grave goods,
many of which honored the gods.
A shrine bore a statue
of the jackal-headed god Anubis.
His sarcophagus was decorated with images of four goddesses.
And on the royal chariot, an image of the solar falcon
representing the sky god Horus.
But one object poses a mystery.
Tutankhamun's golden throne
was emblazoned with a strange sun disc
and a different name for the Boy King, Tutankhaten.
The golden throne is highly decorated
with imagery of the young pharaoh.
Meredith wants to examine it more closely
to see what clues it holds.
[Dr. Brand] This is an image
of the golden throne of Tutankhamun
and when I look at it, I see there's something
a bit unusual.
I don't see any other gods, but I do see a sun disc
with arms coming down holding a key to life.
This is the god the Aten.
[narrator] The mysterious Aten,
unlike the other Egyptian gods,
didn't take the form of an animal or human.
It was represented as a simple sun disc.
The throne with its alternative version
of Tutankhamun's name
suggests that at some point during his life,
the god Aten was very important to him.
But in the young pharaoh's tomb,
the throne is one of the few traces
of this mysterious deity.
[Dr. Brand] In Tutankhamun's tomb,
we don't have the image of Aten.
It's not painted on the walls.
[narrator] To find out more about why
the Aten wasn't featured in the tomb,
Meredith wants to explore the site
of a cataclysmic religious upheaval.
♪♪
At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna...
archeologists Basem Gehad
and Ann-Kathrin Jeske
are excavating a huge temple complex
that was in use during the New Kingdom...
the era of Tutankhamun.
We are expecting
that we could find more information
about these temples that nowadays you can't see
clearly at the site because of the destruction.
[narrator] The buried temple is located
in the fertile ground close to the River Nile.
Digging here is difficult
for even the most experienced archeologists.
[Dr. Gehad] It's a kind of challenging site.
The landscape here is completely different
than any other place that I have worked,
because I'm used to working in the desert.
Now we are working in mud and silt,
and everything is just, like, buried
into these compact layers.
But if it's easy, it's not fun.
That's what makes a very good archeologist.
[narrator] Among the ruins
of the temple's ancient gateway,
the team has already uncovered something special.
[Dr. Gehad] We can see here one of these blocks
which was in the core of this building,
and it bears the cartouche and the name of Akhenaten.
[narrator] Pharaoh Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father.
Akhenaten was the second son of the Great Amenhotep III.
He never expected to be king,
but when his older brother died,
the crown fell to him.
Akhenaten married the legendary Nefertiti
with whom he had six daughters.
But his son Tutankhamun would be his successor.
This season, Basem and Ann-Kathrin hope
that this site can tell them more
about the religious regime
during Tutankhamun's early life.
Ann-Kathrin oversees excavation of a smaller secondary temple
that sits in the grounds of the main Hermopolis site.
[Ann-Kathrin Jeske] We excavate with seven
to eight workmen
in each square.
Some are moving the soil.
Today, I hope we manage to excavate 20 more centimeters,
and I hope to find here
more information about this temple.
[narrator] As the workers painstakingly scrape away
at the compacted soil,
Ann-Kathrin watches for any signs
that there's a structure below.
[Jeske] Here it's just the soil, it looks a bit different,
it's a bit more sandy,
and our foundations are filled with sand,
so it might be an indication
that we've come closer to the foundation.
[narrator] It's a promising sign
the team is digging in the right area.
[worker] A.K.
[narrator] One of the workers spots something
buried in the soil.
[Jeske] Oh!
It seems like we have limestone blocks.
♪♪
[narrator] 170 miles north
of the Valley of the Kings,
Meredith is exploring the ruins of the ancient city of Amarna
to find out more about the mysterious god
the Aten and the role it played
in Tutankhamun's early life.
This is the best place to find out about the Aten.
It was here that Tutankhamun was born and raised
back when he was known as Tut-ankh-aten.
[narrator] The city of Amarna was built from scratch
by Tutankhamun's father, Pharaoh Akhenaten.
He intended it to be the new capital of Egypt.
Oh, this is so beautiful!
[narrator] Meredith examines an impressive
inscribed boundary marker known as a stela.
It is one of 16
that delineates the ancient city limits.
[Dr. Brand] This is a lovely stela
and at the top, there's this sun disc Aten,
and its divergent rays are coming out like arms
and they're shining on the king and his family.
[narrator] This stela reveals a lot
about the Aten and its role during the reign of Akhenaten.
This text says that the Aten is his divine father.
It shows that the Aten is the only god
that Akhenaten is worshipping,
and it makes it clear that his wish
is for all of Egypt to follow this one god.
This is a remarkable text.
It's a huge departure from thousands of years
of Egyptian history.
[narrator] Ancient Egyptians took religion very seriously.
Many houses had their own shrine
for everyday worship.
When Akhenaten came to power,
Ancient Egyptians worshiped a pantheon
of more than 2,000 gods.
But a few years into his reign,
the pharaoh banished all the gods except one,
the Sun God Aten,
creating one of the world's first monotheistic religions.
For many Egyptians, this would have been heresy
but they had no choice but to follow
their pharaoh's new god.
[Dr. Brand] It's hard to overstate
how huge of a change this was for Ancient Egyptians.
The gods were in every single part of their life.
So, if their baby was sick, they prayed to the gods.
If they were worried about the harvest,
they prayed to the gods.
So what Akhenaten did was tell the Ancient Egyptians
you can't practice your religion anymore
the way you want to,
and that must have been very hard.
[narrator] The consequences of these unpopular changes
had far-reaching implications for the entire country.
Akhenaten's reforms were not just a radical religious change,
they were a huge political and economic power grab.
The priesthoods and the temples held huge amounts
of the country's resources and wealth,
and by closing them and firing everyone that worked for them,
he fundamentally changed
the political and economic structure
of the entire country.
[narrator] Akhenaten's changes even extended
to how the pharaoh was depicted in reliefs.
He and his family appear with slim torsos,
wide hips, and long spindly arms,
breaking with longstanding traditions.
The young Tutankhamun, born Tutankhaten,
grew up in this radically different world
surrounded by the cult of Aten.
Tutankhamun would have grown up indoctrinated
in his father's religion.
And his entire life was mapped out for him.
He would have ruled from here in Amarna
and then been buried here,
but that obviously didn't happen.
[narrator] Next, Meredith wants
to explore Akhenaten's tomb
to find out why Tutankhamun later abandoned
his father's new capital and its heretical religion.
♪♪
On the west bank of the Nile
at Dra' Abu el-Naga...
Bahaa is inspecting an object
that he hopes dates from the era of Tutankhamun.
[Dr. Gaber speaking English]
[narrator] Ushabti figures are typically placed
in the burial chamber of a tomb
as part of the deceased's funerary goods.
[narrator] Foundations of a courtyard
and an ushabti statue dating from the New Kingdom
are encouraging finds.
If they discover a tomb from that era,
it could offer valuable insight
into the area's religious customs
during the time of Tutankhamun.
We're still working on that courtyard.
[narrator] Bahaa is hoping the courtyard leads
to the entrance of a tomb.
It's another one, yeah?
So this is not just one coffin.
I think that that's more than one.
-[worker] This one is smaller. -[Dr. Gaber] It's a smaller?
I think from the size of those coffins
they were for, uh, just small children
who we can say that between 1 and 3 years at least.
It's something different, this is the first time
that I see something like that in, uh, in our site.
[narrator] The team searches for any grave goods
around the coffins.
Oh, wow, that's a ancient one.
Oh, be careful, Ahmed, be careful.
[narrator] At Hermopolis Magna...
Ann-Kathrin and Basem
are investigating the promising limestone blocks.
[Jeske] We might found here now
the foundation trench
of the outer wall of the temple.
[narrator] They're searching for more information
about Akhenaten's religious regime
during Tutankhamun's early life.
[Jeske] Here it's really where we can expose them,
and then we start slowly removing the structural support
and then we take out the stones.
[narrator] After chipping away the surrounding mud,
it's clear that these aren't ordinary building blocks.
[Jeske] It's very likely that this is a talatat block,
and in this part of the temple
we don't find talatat blocks very often.
It's a rather rare find.
♪♪
[narrator] Talatat blocks
are small sandstone bricks
designed to a standardized size
that first appeared during the reign of Akhenaten.
Smaller than the traditional limestone blocks
used to build temples and pyramids,
they were light enough for one man to carry
making construction faster and more efficient.
Akhenaten managed to quickly build
his new capital of Amarna
thanks to this revolutionary block design.
We know that these blocks are from the time of Akhenaten
simply based on the dimensions.
The same dimension was only used in his period,
not before and not, uh, afterwards.
[narrator] The discovery of talatat blocks
is a crucial find.
It shows that parts of the temple were built using
this Amarna period stonework.
The team now needs to remove the blocks from the trench
to properly inspect them for any signs of decoration.
[Jeske] The moment I see decoration,
I'm happy because when I find
something like a representation of the king
or even god or some scenes, this would be really exciting.
[narrator] The team ties the talatat block together
with string to prevent it
from falling apart when they move it.
[Jeske] They are going to lift it now,
and you have to imagine it's not super easy
because this block is about 70 kilos
[Dr. Gehad] Are you ready?
[narrator] Finally, everything is set.
Basem gives the go-ahead to lift out the block.
[narrator] The team rotates the block
to inspect what's underneath.
[Jeske] Oh!
This is a nice find.
♪♪
[narrator] At the Dra' Abu el-Naga Necropolis...
Bahaa and his team are inspecting
the intriguing object they found
next to the series of children's coffins.
[Dr. Gaber] This is a bag.
You can see the handle, you can see the bag inside.
When he died, his parents actually took his bag
and put it next to his coffin,
because he was a child, he loved to have his bag,
he loved to have his bag with him in his second life.
[narrator] The Ancient Egyptians believed
that objects they were buried with
would travel with them to the afterlife.
This child wasn't old enough to own elaborate statues
or golden treasure.
Instead, they were buried with their most prized possession,
a humble bag made from reeds.
It's beautiful.
That's such an amazing excavation
we found something like that.
[narrator] In total, the team uncovers
three wooden coffins and two children's bags.
[Dr. Gaber] The coffins is not in good condition
so we have, uh, to move them safely
from here to protect them.
[narrator] The team transports the coffins and bags
to the storage magazine to preserve them.
Now they can get back to searching
for the Tutankhamun era tomb.
♪♪
[narrator] In Amarna...
Meredith has come to investigate the tomb
of Tutankhamun's father, the Heretic King Akhenaten.
She wants to find out more about what happened to Atenism
after Akhenaten died.
This is the Royal Wadi.
It's where Akhenaten built several royal tombs,
and this is where Tutankhamun would have been buried.
[narrator] Akhenaten decreed that the city of Amarna
would be the final resting place
for himself and his dynasty.
This was to be his new Valley of the Kings.
[Dr. Brand] Oh, wow!
[narrator] The walls of Akhenaten's burial chamber
have been badly damaged by floodwater,
and little remains of their original decoration.
Meredith searches for any evidence
of the pharaoh's heretical religion, Atenism.
[Dr. Brand] This is a sun disc,
and it shows that this tomb belonged to Akhenaten.
For him, the Aten was everything.
His tomb must have been covered with Aten sun discs everywhere.
[narrator] But very few inscriptions
now remain inside the tomb.
And in several of them,
the names of those depicted have been hacked out,
making them illegible.
At the time of his death,
Akhenaten was still a true believer
in his new religion.
But Atenism was wildly unpopular
with the Ancient Egyptians.
It disrupted the economy,
shattered family's religious beliefs,
and left the former temples and their priests in disarray.
Once Tutankhamun took the throne,
everything changed.
[Dr. Brand] This is the Restoration Stela.
It was found in Karnak Temple
where Tutankhamun would have placed it prominently
for everyone to see.
And this is an important document.
[narrator] The stela records
the ruinous state of the former temples,
and that Tutankhamun restored them
so the old gods would return.
This stela, it makes it very clear
that Tutankhamun had completely rejected the Aten
and the religious revolution.
It shows that he wanted to put Egypt
back to the way it was
and forget the entire Akhenaten, Aten,
and the Amarna episode.
[narrator] In the wake of Tutankhamun's
great declaration,
workers tore down temples and sacred sites
dedicated to the Aten.
All mention of the heretic Akhenaten
was erased,
his statues and paintings destroyed.
Tutankhamun even abandoned his father's new city, Amarna,
leaving it to crumble into the desert.
Tutankhamun would have been a young boy
when his father died,
so his earliest memories
would have been the cult of Aten.
And despite his father being a true believer,
when he ascended the throne, Tutankhamun,
and his advisors probably,
decided that the stability of the country
was more important
than the religious revolutions of his father Akhenaten.
[narrator] The once-powerful priests
who had lost their jobs
when Akhenaten banished the old gods,
may have pressed the young Tutankhamun
to reinstate the old ways
and hand back power to the priesthood.
But Akhenaten had spent a lifetime
establishing his monotheistic religion.
To find out how the Boy King restored the old gods,
Meredith wants to explore
one of Ancient Egypt's greatest temples.
♪♪
At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna...
Ann-Kathrin inspects the Tutankhamun era
talatat block from the trench.
[Jeske] Wow, we have here a cartouche
and even fragment or residue of paint,
so here is some blue paint.
[narrator] The team wants to investigate
what information is inscribed on the block
and work out how it ended up here
in Hermopolis Magna,
10 miles from Akhenaten's Amarna city.
So here, I can see the outline of one cartouche,
and here is the outline,
it seems like a second one.
[narrator] A cartouche is a hieroglyph
that represents the name of a pharaoh.
It's a significant discovery for the team.
We haven't discovered such a block in the temple before,
so this is something exciting.
We have here evidence of a secondary carving.
This cartouche is not the cartouche
of any Amarna king but Merenptah.
So yeah, on this Amarna period block
is now a cartouche of a much later king.
[narrator] This block shows that King Merenptah,
who came to power decades after Akhenaten,
took talatat blocks from Amarna
and used them to build part of this temple.
He made this block his own
by putting his own name on, um,
Akhenaten's, um, building material.
This is really an exciting finding,
and this helps us a lot to understand
more about how the kings of the 19th Dynasty
dealt with, um, Akhenaten's heritage.
[narrator] Next, the team wants to study the blocks
to understand how and why these later kings
used Akhenaten's talatat blocks here.
Now we are going to transport them to the magazine.
♪♪
[narrator] In Luxor...
Meredith has come to the ancient temple complex
of Karnak.
Some of the monolithic structures here
pre-date Tutankhamun's reign by centuries.
[Dr. Brand] I've been here so many times
but every time I come back,
I'm blown away by the sheer scale of this place.
It's enormous and so beautiful.
[narrator] Before Akhenaten,
Karnak was the main center of worship
for some of Ancient Egypt's most important gods,
including Amun.
Meredith wants to explore how Tutankhamun,
having turned his back on Atenism,
restored the old gods to Karnak
and the rest of Egypt.
[Dr. Brand] Tutankhamun would have come here to Luxor
and Karnak Temple after he abandoned Amarna.
It was here in Luxor that he changed his name
from Tut-ankh-aten to Tut-ankh-amun.
[narrator] Amun, the Creator God,
was one of Egypt's most popular deities,
believed to have saved Egypt from foreign invaders.
Amun was king of the Egyptian pantheon
and considered to be father to the pharaoh himself,
bestowing divine authority on the pharaoh's earthly rule.
[Dr. Brand] Tutankhamun wanted to honor
the most important god,
and by putting the God's name back into his own name,
he made a personal connection with that god.
[narrator] After reaffirming his commitment
to the old ways,
the young pharaoh needed to show the rest of Egypt
that his father's legacy was no more.
Tutankhamun began by making his mark on Karnak.
Outside the complex,
he started work on a glorious processional avenue.
He took statues of sphinxes that bore Akhenaten's image
and replaced their heads
with those of rams representing Amun.
Hundreds of sphinxes lined Tutankhamun's avenue,
which stretched nearly 1,000 feet
between the temples of Amun and Mut.
♪♪
Meredith heads to the south of Karnak Temple
to inspect the monumental avenue
of sphinxes herself.
[Dr. Brand] Ah, this is fantastic.
This is a criosphinx.
It's later than Tutankhamun
but it shows what his sphinx would have looked like.
This has the head of the ram and the body of a lion,
and this is a protective god associated with Amun.
[narrator] Tutankhamun's criosphinx
would have had a statue of the Boy King
between the lion's paws,
a sign Amun was protecting the pharaoh.
The message is very clear from Tutankhamun,
the God Amun is back, the old gods are here to stay,
and the Aten is no longer the main god of Egypt.
[narrator] Tutankhamun had to completely rebuild
Ancient Egypt's religion.
The Boy King re-established Karnak
and its priests' religious statues
in an attempt to restore his honor among the population.
It was a complete religious counter-revolution.
But the young pharaoh ran out of time.
[Dr. Brand] Despite Tutankhamun's efforts
to restore the old gods of Egypt
and undo what his father did,
he died when he was only a teenager
and couldn't achieve everything he set out to do.
[narrator] Although Tutankhamun died young,
the religious reforms he had begun
swept across Egypt.
The priests regained power,
state resources were diverted away from Amarna,
and the old gods returned to sacred temples like Karnak.
♪♪
At Dra' Abu el-Naga...
We are very close to the entrance of the tomb.
[narrator] Bahaa is unearthing
a series of funerary cones.
Made of clay, stamped with the tomb owner's name,
they typically mark the entrance to a tomb.
[Dr. Gaber] Families, when they visited the tombs
they left those cones in front of the tomb
or above the, the tomb itself.
[narrator] He hopes the tomb could provide clues
to the area's religious customs
during the era of Tutankhamun.
[Dr. Gaber] I can see that the wall had been cut
so I can see, it's a hole, this is the hole of the tomb.
We must clean it layer by layer.
[narrator] The team races
to clear sand and debris from the tomb entrance.
Eventually, the opening is big enough
for Bahaa to squeeze inside.
I think we are ready to go in.
♪♪
[narrator] At the Dra' Abu el-Naga Necropolis...
Bahaa is investigating the new discovered tomb
for the first time.
♪♪
[Dr. Gaber] When I discover something new,
it's such a beautiful feeling.
You are the first one who enter to the tomb.
You are the first one who touch it, the mummy,
the vessels, the statues, it's an amazing feeling.
It's not a small tomb.
I can see it's a big hole and another room,
and we have a room here too.
Some of the skulls.
Wow! The linen around it.
[narrator] He examines details in the tomb
to try to figure out the era it was constructed.
[Dr. Gaber] The walls so rough, that was a style
of the Middle Kingdom period tombs.
The people who were buried here,
the nobles who lived during the Middle Kingdom period.
[narrator] The style of the tomb
and the characteristic rough walls
means Bahaa now thinks the tomb was built 500 years
before the reign of Tutankhamun.
It's a setback for the team.
But the date does offer a clue
to how this tomb would have been used
and why it is here.
It was during this time
that a major religious festival in honor of Amun,
the god Tutankhamun restored, was founded nearby.
♪♪
The Festival of the Valley
was a joyous celebration of the dead,
where crowds gathered at Karnak every year in May.
A statue of Amun was carried on a ceremonial boat
across the Nile, from east to west,
symbolizing the journey to the Land of the Dead.
Worshippers piled masses of flowers onto the statue
to imbue them with the god's essence.
Families then took these flowers to the tombs
of their loved ones,
feasting and drinking all through the night.
[Dr. Gaber] Tombs in Dra' Abu el-Naga
were very important,
because they are on the way of the procession
of the Festival of the Valley.
So the relatives of the dead people,
they stopped first here.
[narrator] The Festival of the Valley was celebrated
right up to the time of Akhenaten.
But he probably banned the festival
as he would have considered the occasion heresy.
It's a vivid example
of how Akhenaten's revolution disrupted
ordinary lives as well as religious practices.
It would have torn apart the bond between families
and their deceased loved ones.
When Tutankhamun came to power,
restoring the old gods opened the way for his grateful people
to celebrate these popular religious events once more.
The Festival of the Valley returned back,
and the families came again to the West Bank
and they visited their relatives' tombs.
♪♪
[narrator] At Hermopolis Magna...
Basem comes to the team's magazine,
where all the talatat blocks unearthed
from decades of past excavations are stored.
He has a hugely ambitious plan.
He wants to work out how all the fragmentary images
on the talatat blocks originally fitted together.
There are thousands of blocks, of the talatat blocks
that came originally from Amarna.
[narrator] These talatat blocks once formed
elaborately decorated walls of palaces, temples,
and monuments in Akhenaten's city of Amarna.
But following Tutankhamun's restoration of the old gods
and the dismantling of Amarna, the stonework was reused.
The scenes originally inscribed on the walls were lost.
[Dr. Gehad] It's a big mystery.
No one knows what was the original scenes
that were composing
the main stories on these walls.
[narrator] Basem hopes the scenes
will reveal more about Akhenaten
and the religion Tutankhamun so firmly rejected.
[narrator] But with around 3,000 talatat blocks
discovered to date,
it's like piecing together
the world's largest 3D jigsaw puzzle.
Basem's first step is to digitally record
every talatat block unearthed at the site.
[Dr. Gehad] What I'm gonna do now is ask
one of my team to do a proper professional photograph
for this talatat block
so we get an image
that could be calibrated to the software.
[narrator] The team photographs
each talatat block several times
using different lighting setups
to ensure they capture the tiniest of details.
Basem has a hunch this block
and one other belonged to a typical
Amarna period royal boat scene,
so he uses a similar scene
already pieced together from a different Amarna site
as a reference.
[Dr. Gehad] Using the software and the images
that Mahmoud took, we've managed to identify
the exact location of these two blocks
that relates to part of the royal boats.
It's a complete boat with these, uh, long beams
and signature of the royal palace.
[narrator] It's a great result for the team.
Using this innovative process,
they have managed to identify the location of two pieces
from this ancient wall relief puzzle.
But with thousands of blocks still to document
and more being unearthed each season,
it's a hugely ambitious project.
[Dr. Gehad] This is one small part of the story
of this huge, uh, jigsaw puzzle game
that we are trying to solve.
Hopefully, by this initiative
we would be able to compose more
and more of these talatat blocks
so that we would be able in the future
to display them in a proper museum.
And then everyone could see the daily life scenes of Amarna.
[narrator] The era of Akhenaten
and his religious revolution remains
one of the most mysterious periods of Egyptian history.
[Dr. Gehad] It seems that every kind of evidence
that proves, or tells, the story of Akhenaten
was completely either erased
or reused as foundation
so it would be completely for centuries hidden,
no one would see it.
[narrator] But at sites like Hermopolis Magna,
archeologists are slowly piecing
the story back together,
one block at a time.
Today, archeologists across Egypt
are uncovering more
about Tutankhamun's religious counter-revolution.
How he and later pharaohs
tore down buildings and statues
to abolish his father's heretical religion.
And how the restoration of the old gods
would have delighted his people and restored peace
and stability to Ancient Egypt.
♪♪
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