Ancient Egypt - Beyond the Pyramids (Episode 2)

beyond the pyramids beyond all you think you know lies an undiscovered Egypt I kept saying to myself my god I can't believe it what happened next is one of the great moments of modern archaeology a great Pharaoh welcomes his children to the underworld it turned into the most incredible sight I've ever seen in my own hidden tombs on earth after thousands of years nothing like this has ever been found before now leader Woodward guides you through an Egypt field were privileged to see Egypt beyond the pyramids 500 miles south of Cairo a stunningly beautiful temple perches on the edge of the vast desert within its walls lies a toppled thousand ton image of one of Egypt's greatest kings who left behind one of Egypt's greatest mysteries the fate of his many children it is a saga that some believe will end in a remote tomb in the legendary Valley of the Kings this jumbled pile of huge stones was once a statue of Ramses the second ruler of Egypt over 1200 years before the Christian era his face gazes towards the sky here as a shoulder this was one of the greatest statues ever carved and it was erected here at the Ramesseum ramses mortuary temple close to present-day look saw in the 5th century AD the Coptic Christians are believed to have pulled down the statue and over the centuries earthquakes further destroyed the Fallen Pharaoh's likeness force Ramses had the last word his image today is anything but a colossal wreck this statue better symbolizes the role of ramses ii in Egypt's history he was a king who led his armies to victory who built the most astonishing structures all over Egypt he ruled for 67 years his was a reign longer than all but one Pharaoh and when he died history would remember him as Ramses the great ramasees was in his early 20s when he succeeded his father SETI the first in 1280 BC SETI had been a dynamic and successful Ferrum and saw to it that his son was well prepared to follow him as a child young ramasees accompanied his father to war he learned firsthand the lessons of leading an army while still a young man he studied engineering techniques he oversaw the stone quarries where the huge obelisks were cut to decorate Egypt temples the training paid off ramasees the seconds reign as Pharaoh was unsurpassed in its stability and achievement the teenager who had followed his father into battle became a determined warrior who defended Egypt from outside threats ramasees also learned his lessons as an engineer he left to history some of Egypt's most monumental and beautiful structures in a civilization of great builders this pharaoh was certainly one of the greatest over 3,000 Egyptian citizens were put to work just to cut the stone for the beautiful temple he dedicated to himself the Ramesseum and on towering cliffs overlooking the Nubian Nile ramasees had carved one of history's greatest monuments to ego the breathtaking temple of Abu Simbel four colossal statues of the Pharaoh himself saw 60 feet high Yesha Bosco AFET the ham says has kept a meaning on figure I think Ramses can be included amongst the greatest historical figures of ancient Egypt he was a talented military man who saw battle who in fact ensured a certain stability to the kingdom of Egypt starting at the Delta and all the way to Nubia Egypt was covered with monuments which tell the story of his reign Rameses was indeed a great warrior and his enormous building projects of odd people since the earliest tourists sailed the Nile in Greek and Roman times during his reign Egypt's fame and wealth grew and his subjects experienced a bountiful and secure era so great was Ramses opinion of his own accomplishments that he would take the immodest step of declaring himself divine a God living among mortals however his divine status would not have impressed one notable group of visitors to his country judeo-christian tradition names ramasees ii as pharaoh at the time Moses led the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt of Rama sees many impressive accomplishments his greatest may have been his prodigious feats of fatherhood the beautiful Nefertari was his most famous wife but he had many other official queens lesser wives and concubines with all of these women ramasees fathered over 100 children that we know of including at least fifty sons having many wives and children was probably not unusual for a pharaoh but what was unusual was that ramasees proudly listed and portrayed his children on the walls of many of the buildings he constructed he's often obsessed I hope I don't pass your day off on ham says Don let's keep out this table he reproduced his children on the walls of the temples and long princely processions where we find both the king's sons and daughters it's thanks to these lists that we are able to somewhat establish Rameses descendants it exactly plays on foremost pharaohs of ancient Egypt we know nothing about the members of the royal family for ramses ii we know the names of many of his wives we know the names of many of his sons and many of his daughters more than two dozen of each ramses ii was indeed a singular fellow in that no other pharaoh before or after him had ever given so much attention to his children despite such unusual public acknowledgement by their father we know very little about the lives of all those children being an heir to ramasees throne was a frustrating process he would rule for 67 years and outlive five of his successors the first of these was amun-her-khepeshef who died in the 40th year of ramasees rule if indeed ramasees was the Pharaoh of the exodus amun-her-khepeshef would have been the firstborn son slain when God sent the seven plagues against Egypt though it is doubtful history will ever be able to confirm this of the other princes of ramasees we know few details son number four emwazi was highly regarded and may have been his father's favorite he was an important priest and oversaw the construction of many of Ramsey's most dramatic building projects he died in the 55th year of ramasees reign mayor neptr was Ramses 13th son and we know little about him until he was appointed general of the army in the 40th year of Ramses reign he was probably the real power behind the throne for the last decade of his father's life even as an old king ramasees was tall for an Egyptian five feet eight in his final years he was troubled with arthritis and curvature of the spine and like most of his countrymen his teeth bothered him he was slightly built with a sharply hooked nose and large pierced ears we might guess that he was a bit vain since even as a very old man his hair was dyed a stunning shade of red until the very end ramasees ii remained ramasees the great active assertive and an enormous presence in the life of his nation but even for a living God the end in this world does finally come 1213 BC ramses ii at last died around the age of 90 considering life expectancy in egypt was just a little over 30 the gods may have been revealing to mortals the great nature of their king he was succeeded by his thirteenth son Merneptah who ruled for another nine years before he too died but of the many other sons of ramses we know of the tombs of just two all the rest have vanished they are the lost princes of Egypt the long reign of ramses ii at last came to an end in 1212 be seen it was surely a time of great sadness in Egypt few of ramasees subjects would have known any other king for forty days priests performed the exacting ritual of mummification on Ramsey's body the stomach intestines liver and lungs were placed in special containers called canopic jars the body was dried with a special salt then adorned with jeweled amulets and wrapped in linen strips at last the mummy was placed in an elaborate coffin and began the journey to the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt we're standing in the tomb of ramses ii this magnificent chamber has only recently been excavated and has never been filmed before this is the largest single room in the valley of the kings the pharaohs mummified body would have been carried into this chamber and lowered into a huge sarcophagus placed here his internal organs in their canopic jars would be put into an alabaster chest here and lowered into this shaft above it was a beautiful gilded would enshrine the priests having completed their last rituals would have swept away the dust of their footprints as they backed out of the tomb leaving the great Pharaoh alone here for eternity in this beautiful space deep within the mountain the world has seen the beautiful treasures that were discovered in the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen who died over a hundred years before Ramses if this was the treasure that was buried with Tut a minor king with little impact on Egyptian history we can begin to imagine the Magnificent objects and adornment which must have filled the tomb of Ramses that great but Ramses was not lucky in his choice of final resting place within 150 years tomb robbers had found their way in and carried off what must have been a treasure beyond our dreams from this a tomb of the Pharaoh of the Pharaohs all we have left are a few precious fragments recently discovered by the french egyptologist Kristiana block now let dr. Hamza's do le vrai a certain employed object in the tomb of ramses a second a number of objects which belonged to the funeral decoration were found notably vestiges of the canopic jars in which the viscera of the king had been placed we also found vestiges of the funeral bed at the front end were two leopard heads like these which still show very beautiful traces of color which looked like gold if we do see is a trapeze absolutely more exceptional and this absolutely exceptional piece a statuette of Ramses as a rather young man it was placed near the Kings mummy in a tomb which must have been absolutely sumptuous one of the most beautiful royal tombs copper diamond robbers had invaded tombs since the earliest days of royal burials usually working in gangs they sometimes bribed guards more often they simply broke into the tombs after political unrest or threats to national security distracted the attention of those charged with their protection other than these few artifacts ramasees great burial treasure had vanished but by some miracle ramasees mummy was undisturbed the priests who saw veronik mummies as gods took drastic action to protect ramasees remains from desecration along with the corpse of his father SETI and many other kings ramasees mummy was secretly moved to an ancient long ignored tomb less than a mile from the Valley of the Kings here the body of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs was left unsaid ammonius least act with other royal mummies his secret resting place was so near yet so far from the place which had been so lavishly crafted to hold his corpse his own great tomb now sat abandoned and unprotected the final indignity was that in the centuries after the Pharaohs money was carried out of here the rare desert thunderstorms came in and filled this tomb with water the magnificent paintings and carvings which once covered every surface here were devastated plaster fell from walls rock carvings collapsed and flood debris steadily filled this tomb from floor right up to the ceiling those who discovered this place could barely find enough space to enter it finally over 3,000 years after they were hidden the mummies in the secret cache were recovered in 1881 by German Museum curator a Millbrook the whereabouts of ramasees remains were no longer a secret but nothing was found in the hidden cache of mummies or in ramasees own tomb to shed light on the mystery of the great kings missing sons how could these Prince's whose existence had been so thoroughly documented vanish from history it would take over 100 years to find an answer that answer suggests that Ramsey's sons may have been within walking distance of their father's tomb all along coming out of Rameses tomb into the Valley of the Kings you can see that he had company there are 61 other tombs here just a short walk up there is the legendary tomb of Tutankhamun SETI the first Ramses father is buried there menephta his son just around the corner but where are the tombs of the many other sons of ramses are just thirty yards away over there his tomb Kings Valley number five and kv-5 may well hold the answer to that question in 1825 the Egyptologist James Burton entered the tomb he pronounced it unimportant later this whole area was buried under tons of rubble tourist buses passed within feet in 1987 American Egyptologist Kent weeks uncovered this entrance to the tomb when at last he entered he made what many call the most important discovery in Egypt since two-ton come on for the first time in over 3,000 years the world edged closer to at last solving the great mystery of ramasees lost sons for 450 years Egypt's pharaohs were buried in a desolate desert canyon as a safeguard against tomb robbers it has come to be known as the valley of the kings here 62 tombs were dug from the limestone these subterranean palaces were embellished with sumptuously beautiful carvings and paintings but by the third century BC the Valley of the Kings lay silent and forgotten in the early 18th century an English clergyman named Richard Pocock visited the valley and drew its first map other European Egyptologists followed but their mapping of the tombs remained imprecise and inaccurately plotted in the 1970s dr. Kent weeks a leading American Egyptologist from Washington State decided to begin the first mapping of the Valley of the Kings using survey techniques which relied on extremely accurate measurements it would take over a decade of hard work just to accumulate all of the data but sadly by the late 1980s there was little money left to print up the detailed map weeks wanted so he decided to use the knowledge he'd accumulated and tackle another ambitious task so I thought we would what we would do is to take the little money that we had at that point and do something that I had considered doing a few years earlier and that was to go back into the historical records try to identify tombs that had been seen in the nineteenth century but for one reason or another had gone missing and tried to relocate those tombs and put them on the map of the Valley of the Kings as well after an extensive search of historical records one tomb stood out it had been seen during the 19th century and given the designation kv-5 standing for King's Valley number five in 1825 the Englishman James Burton cut a 25 meter crawlspace in to kv-5 he drew a sketch plan which revealed the presence of eleven chambers but his notes did not inspire enthusiasm or excitement from his peers even Howard Carter the discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb used the kv-5 hillside only as a dumping ground for debris from his excavations they buried the tomb under three metres of film as if that weren't enough another series of flash floods from torrential rains that hit the Valley of the Kings occasionally dumped more debris over the tomb entrance and hidden by 1920 possibly even earlier than that kv-5 was a dim and distant memory there was nothing to be seen but Kent weeks was intrigued by the drawings of the tomb that Burton had made in his plan it looked like no other tomb that I had ever seen before most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are long corridors cut deeply into the bedrock this tomb on the other hand had in Burton's drawing about six chambers that went off in all directions from the entrance like tentacles of an octopus and I thought gosh what a strange-looking - why don't we see if we can't locate this something else grabbed weeks interest by 1989 some researchers were suggesting that The Lost kv-5 might also be the missing tomb of Ramses children from Burton's notes Kent weeks had an idea of where in the valley to begin looking he made a decision he would try and find what had been lost for so long we dug basically a narrow trench about 3 feet meter wide the first thing we encountered was I cut in the bedrock that very clearly delimited a man-made not a natural pit or depression in the hillside and then we began finding traces of staircases after months of hard work Ken tweet staff had cleared the entrance pit two kv-5 now at last the moment had arrived to look inside well in the summer of 1989 we had cleared the stairway come down to this doorway leading into the first chamber now it didn't look like this it was completely filled floor-to-ceiling with flood debris that had washed in what's of a level right to here right here and it was only because of a small little channel that had been dug by James Burton in 1825 we could see anything at all inside here are traces of Burton's lampblack on the ceilings where he was peering through so you just crawled through Burton's original tiny hole that's right that was the only access into the tomb and even at that point we could not see any of the side walls I'll be talking about inches here or what sort of size was this so it was a tight fit for me let's put it that way a very tight fit so you managed to crawl in probably little guessing that you were gonna be working just in this room for how long what you stood it took us five years to clean this chamber out but even by the second year we knew we were on to something on kv-5 because at top of the wall we found a series of hieroglyphs that indicated that this tomb was the burial place of one of the sons of ramses ii whose cartouche is here and we have his name on the airship a chef now that young man was the firstborn son of rameses ii so this was the first confirmation you had that one of Ramses sons might be buried here yes exactly and the firstborn son at that but shortly thereafter it got even better because on this wall when we exposed the text at the top we found another scene with Ramses a God and a son who here is not on here have a chef but a son whom we call Ramses Junior to avoid confusion with his father suddenly we knew that we had a tomb with multiple burials there were at this point at least two royal sons buried in this tomb that was something that had never been seen before Kent weeks was now certain that kv-5 promised to be much more than just a minor tomb even though he still didn't know if it was bigger than the eleven chambers detailed in Burton's original sketch but making progress in unlocking kv-5 secrets was agonizingly slow the Valley of the Kings may get on average one or two millimeters of rain a year if that but every once in a while perhaps once every 50 60 70 years a rainstorm hits this area and it causes disaster by the time those waters those flood waters and their debris reach kv-5 the entrance to the valley they can be traveling at 30 40 miles an hour carrying boulders the size of stoves or refrigerators the 11 floods that hit kv-5 filled it chock-a-block full with debris sand silt limestone chips that over the centuries dried to an almost cement like consistency clearing away tons of flood debris which filled the tomb proved to be enormous ly time-consuming the techniques of moving dirt out of a tomb or any archaeological site in Egypt haven't changed much in the last 100 years we still take baskets these are made of old tires fill them up using trowel Zoar shovels or picks whatever and carry them by hand in a bucket brigade out the door of the tomb it had taken five years just to empty two small rooms although Kent weeks had uncovered the names of two of Ramsey's sons he'd found little else now the much larger chamber three waited to be cleared what weeks would discover in this part of the tomb would justify all the years of patience and hard work Kent weeks crawled into the third chamber into this tiny gap he hoped to find something underneath this huge pile of debris but he couldn't get to it he realized that the weakness of these pillars and the ominous cracks in the limestone ceiling above my head meant that this whole area would have to be stabilized work has only just been completed now Burton's map shows a mysterious door against the back wall and Kent weeks gradually dug his way towards it until by 1995 he managed to find just enough space to crawl through that doorway what happened next is one of the great moments of modern archaeology Kent weeks at last prepared to look beyond chamber three he would be heading into space no one had entered since the Pharaohs we thought what we would find is another small chamber like that in the front chamber one chamber - instead we shown our flashlights down and we saw nothing blackness it meant that the chamber went on and on and on we could not see an end wall later on when we put electricity in the tomb it turned into the most incredible sight I'd ever seen in my life a hundred feet down the corridor lined on either side with doorways we find a statue of the god Osiris seeing him along here and you must already have known that this was the most incredible find I kept saying to myself my god I can't believe it there's nothing like this anywhere in the Valley of the Kings there a Shamus here on every side I'm every 10 feet or so we find a doorway some leading into small chambers others leading into Suites of rooms muslimah blocked up you can see him quite clearly were they oh we haven't done these yet he's incredible you must have known at this moment that what you were finding here was probably one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century nothing like this has ever been found before so you got to this point here and you saw this amazing sight a life-size statue of what that first we thought was the god Osiris but what we now think is a representation of King Ramses as Osiris the deified King welcoming his sons down this corridor and into the next life the beautiful statue of ramasees offered further proof that this was almost certainly tomb for his royal sons and with the amazing discovery of corridor 7 in its complex of rooms the significance of what Kent weeks had revealed began to dawn on the world most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings contain no more than eight rooms Ramsey's the first Ramses the great grandfather had just four as did the legendary Tutankhamun weeks had already discovered at least 65 rooms and more soon appeared nothing like it had ever been found kv-5 seemed to move off in all directions at once this corridor is very perplexing it drops more steeply than any other corridor in the tomb fact some of the side chambers that are cut here actually lie beneath floor of chambers on an upper level now at the bottom of this deeply sloping corridor suddenly we descend four steps and we find ourselves in another large pillared Hall in this case one with three pillars down the center of the rectangular room this is a good example by the way of the stratigraphy that we're confronted with in kv-5 filling this chamber like the others chock-a-block full of flood debris you can see the different layers deep inside the tomb hundreds of feet from the entrance flood debris continued to be a problem this is one of the many unexcavated corridors in kd5 this one head south directly towards Tutankhamun's - nobody's quite sure why there's a blank wall at the end there may be another doorway the problem is getting to it with all its chambers and corridors this tomb is nearly half the size of a football field and all of it is packed with this debris behind it they may find more pottery remains canopic jars maybe even mummified remains some of this stuff is as hard as concrete mechanical excavation is out of the question all of it tons and tons of it has to be removed by hand but the flood debris was only one of the obstacles which still hid the secrets of kv-5 I think this is one of the most potentially interesting parts of kv-5 but unfortunately it's also the most dangerous because it lay under the roadway which for the last 40 years has had tour buses rolling over it the entire ceiling has collapsed it would be a very expensive undertaking but I'd be willing to bet you that if we were able to do this we will find evidence here maybe a sarcophagus maybe other funerary equipment it clearly proves this chamber v was the place where one of the sons of the king was buried because of the flooding carvings and paintings on the walls of kv-5 had been badly damaged but as the chambers began to be emptied remnants of carving made it clear that kv-5 had once been magnificently decorated now the carving on this north wall here in corridor 7 is absolutely spectacular it's one of the best examples we have of relief carving in the tomb originally of course it was painted and all we have now are the outlines but even so you can see the elegant workmanship in this figure of a son unfortunately his name is missing again being presented by his father ramses ii across a pile of offerings to the gods in this case canoe and the goddess Hathor elegantly carved in a beautiful face but a strange thing happens in this corridor right at this point up to now we've had beautiful relief carving that stops and instead from here onward the walls are roughened it's called keying for plaster I have no idea what the reason for this is except one possibility perhaps this corridor originally stopped at this point went no further and then the corridor was lengthened the tomb was enlarged in order to provide additional burial space for additional sons of Ramses a second who had pre deceased him as more and more damaged carvings have been revealed in the tomb the job of reconstructing their original form has been handled by Ken's wife Susan she painstakingly makes detailed tracings which are studied to recreate the missing carvings and the paint which covered them once the missing lines are redrawn Susan replicates the original colors based on tiny fragments of paint found on the tombs walls this is son of Ramses he's wearing a very bright blue collar and he's wearing a rather elaborate priestly sacred garment which is yellow with red stripes every day is exciting you never know what and you might see every time we look at the walls even though I've may have drawn the wall and stared at it for 10 days every once in a while the light changes there's something different I see for the first time finally after 3,500 years we can again look upon the glorious paintings which once enhanced this tomb but in kv-5 success is often matched by frustration again and again the tune seemed to taunt the weeks as if the great ramasees himself were withholding the answer to the mystery of his missing sons we know that originally this tomb was magnificently decorated but brilliantly colored painted relief but because of the flooding a lot of that paint and plaster has washed off and nowhere is that more frustrating in this scene in the second chamber we have Ramses the second a figure of his son and directly above the son if we can just make out the hieroglyphs Kings son of his body and the name is missing we have no idea who who it might be given the title given a figure of the son we were very excited about this it could be maybe son number six number seven number eight in our list of people buried in this tomb we were so close but we just didn't get the cigar after 10 years of excavation kv-5 with more than 100 chambers had already proven to be the largest and most uniquely designed to min the valley of the kings and probably in all of Egypt it had clearly been built by ramasees ii and little by little evidence had begun to accumulate that indeed he had created this tomb for his many sons we have the names of several sons written on the walls of KT v we had more than two dozen representations of the king presenting various of his sons in the afterlife to the gods we have objects grave Goods canopic jars found in several chambers in kv-5 and on those we have the names and titles of five different sons of ramses ii Kent weeks would soon find evidence of a much more personal nature in 1998 kv-5 at last began to give up some of the bodies that had rested in this special tool for so very long like any good mystery what was needed to solve kv-5 was a body after 9 years of searching Kent weeks finally thumb we had some of the irons in the fire during the early years of work and kv-5 that it wasn't until just a couple of seasons ago that we cleared the northern half of this room chamber two and much to our surprise when we got down to floor level we found two parallel very nice regular cuts that defined what obviously was a pit now I think originally this may have been the burial place of whoever was buried in this tomb when it was only a two chambered tomb in the 18th dynasty what we found when we got to the bottom of the pit was a series of layers of Bones and beneath that three adult male human skulls with the neck vertebra still attached and traces of mummified tissue and wrappings over their body beneath that we found a fully articulated adult male body a mummy about 50 years old lying in a position like this directly on the ground and I think probably given the position of the arms in the position of the body it may well be that that and maybe the other three skulls too are in fact sons of Ramses a second why would so important a mummy be left in such a crude and unadorned pit Kent weeks believes the answer is very simple when tomb robbers entered kv-5 they went down deep into the tomb into the burial chambers of his sons grabbed the mummies and brought them up here near the front door where the light was good and they could see what they were doing they ripped the bodies apart in their search for gold jewelry and pectoral necklaces and so forth and then simply dumped the body parts on the ground some of them washed into this pit this is one of the three skulls that came from the pit in chamber two and what we're doing now is cleaning this getting it ready to study not by us but by anatomist and geneticists all of the teeth are rather heavily worn including the the front the incisors the canines and all of these features together with the sutures the joins between the bones in the skull suggest that this is probably an adult male the next thing of course we'll want to do is to see try to determine if we can whether this is the skull of an individual who is related to the other bodies in the tomb we would love to relate them to Ramses anybody who's seen a photograph of the mummy of Ramses or even in fact a representation of him in Egyptian art recognized the fact that he was shown with a very prominent nose and that might be one of the the anatomical features that we could look for in trying to determine relationships scientific analysis of skulls is only one of the many tasks that can't be done in the heat and dust of the Valley of the Kings some of the most demanding work in unlocking the secrets of kv-5 doesn't happen here in the tomb at all but rather in an office back in Cairo when we started work on the Theban mapping project back in 1979 we were operating on a real shoestring today we have a full-time staff on the project of eight people down and a part-time staff of volunteers and part-time employees who were scattered all over the world it's a very diverse project and one of the fun things about being an archaeologist these days is in fact trying to pull all of these disparate specialties together can you pull it up in section what I'd like to do summers take a look at this detailing here the the work our graphic designers and architects are doing is extremely useful it gives you a new means of looking at the material and of doing comparative studies of that material we want to prepare a cd-rom of the theban necropolis taking advantage of the photographs that our staff have been collecting the architectural drawings that we have been preparing and of course historical materials as well we'll be able for example to stop at a site like looks or a temple on the east bank and we'll be able to generate a series of three dimensional drawings that show the various stages in the construction of this temple this of course is kv-5 we thought we could produce something that would not only be useful to scholars but it could be fun and exciting for grade school kids for example eight nine year olds who are doing Egyptology in school for the first time in spite of all his efforts Kent weeks is the first to admit that there is much yet to be done in kv-5 the work is exacting and slow and the task has continued to grow so far 150 rooms have been found and only 7% of those have been clear but one thing has already been established in 3,000 years of tomb construction in ancient Egypt there is nothing that remotely resembles kv-5 in its incredible size or design why did ramses ii apparently create so unusual a mausoleum for his many sons Kent weeks thinks he has one answer we know that during his reign he had himself declared to be divine he had to assign to his children to at least the heir apparent many of the secular duties that he would ordinarily have performed now once one of his sons the heir apparent was made a secular Pharaoh he was no longer simply a son who might one day inherit the throne he was a junior king you have to bury a Junior King in a rather more elaborate way numerous other of his sons each of whom in turn had moved into this strange Junior King position died before him and they too came to be interred in this very strange too there are still more questions than answers to be found in kv-5 but the tomb has proven that our knowledge of ancient Egypt is far from complete for Kent weeks the search as always will go on he has wanted to be an Egyptologist since he was a boy in Washington State now he hopes to give something back to the work he so loves in addition to our work in kv-5 over the next several years one of the things I most want to do is help develop a master plan for the protection of the Valley of the Kings and indeed for all of thieves rising groundwater pollution increasing population in the adjacent villages increasing tourism are taking their toll on all of the sites here tombs and temples both I can't think of anything that would make me sadder than to realize that future generations would be denied the opportunity to visit something as magical as a Valley of the Kings it would be a real shame if little eight-year-old kids in Everett Washington hundred years from now couldn't dream of this place like I did Ken weeks has been working on KB 5 over 10 years sometimes there was no assurance that his work would reveal any more than a few empty rooms and always the distraction of having to find funds to support all of this but his patience and hard work have yielded what is becoming one of the most exciting finds in Egyptology over the next few years kv-5 will reveal more of its secrets why was such an immense tomb built what's become of its contents and maybe yes maybe Kent weeks will discover if other suns of the great Ramses still rest somewhere within these walls

Channel: Zakerias Rowland-Jones

Views: 152,696

Rating: 4.6037297 out of 5

Keywords: Egyptian Pyramids (Structure), Ancient Egypt (Literature Subject), Ancient History (Field Of Study), Documentary, Episode 2

Id: HiYjiAnxBfo

Length: 45min 6sec (2706 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2015