King Tut's Shocking Origins + Other Amazing Secrets of Ancient Egypt 😱 Smithsonian Channel

touched mother the younger lady she's been laid to rest here back in cairo in the treasure trove that is the egyptian museum here just a few feet away are the remains of akhenaten tut's father when albert compared his genetic profile with that of the younger ladies he discovered something shocking in a 21st century museum and a three and a half thousand year old tomb egyptologists are piecing together the supernatural story of turankaman's life after death of a pharaoh on a mission through the underworld fighting against the forces of darkness to save the sun and the earth from annihilation with the highest possible stakes the people who packed tutankhamun's tomb did everything in their power to ensure he was prepared for the mission ahead [Music] the ancient egyptians were very big on insurance so they had lots of safety nets in case one thing didn't work one spell didn't work there was a backup spell if this got destroyed there was another backup object so you always had things that would help you get to where you went wanted to egyptologists now believe this is why tutankhamun took 5 000 objects to the afterlife the more he took the more chance he had of defeating the demons and overcoming the obstacles that lay ahead but one shocking find has always perplexed archaeologists the mummified bodies of two baby girls today their fragile remains are being conserved at the grand egyptian museum dna analysis reveals these two tiny girls were most likely tuna commons daughters but tragically both had been stillborn one girl at around four months and the other at nearly full term there was such a high mortality late for infants and sort of stillborn children in the ancient world that it's not surprising but it is extraordinary to have them carefully mummified wrapped up cocooned put in these coffins and placed in their fathers too these tiny mummies are an incredibly rare discovery but egyptologist joyce tilsley believes there is an explanation for their burial alongside the pharaoh she suspects they were the ultimate insurance policy tooting carmen was very wealthy he could have dug a grave for his daughters anytime he wanted to so the fact that their bodies have been saved to be buried with him suggests that perhaps it's not just a practical reason but there's a ritual reason for them being there as well in ancient egyptian art women and girls were often cast as protectors standing alongside their fathers or the gods and for joyce they were more than simply good luck charms they were active participants in tune uncommon's journey through the underworld by being either physically in the boat with tutankhamun or just having their spirits supporting him while he's in the boat tootin will be protected by these two daughters who he has in the tomb with him master stonecutter fatih ali hamid works on a block of tura limestone with the kind of techniques that were first used on this site over 4 000 years ago so that the pyramid would have smooth sides the outer face of each block was cut to a precise angle then it was polished using a sandstone brick and fine sand as an abrasive it's a process that takes time skill and a great deal of effort you can see how much of his body he's putting into this work too he's really putting absolutely all of his effort into it um can i uh anna is he okay um yanny oh well you know i'm kind of proud of myself i can already see many of the tool marks disappearing just um for example right here you can see these tool marks are almost already completely gone the aim is a finished product that is not merely smooth but shining we can also see the difference between the unworked side with the incredible bright whiteness of the worked limestone the pyramids that we see today are obscured by smog blackened by pollution this is what they actually would have looked like this level of workmanship carried out by hand over the entire surface of the pyramid would amount to millions of man-hours the exciting thing about studying pyramid building is that you learn both about the micro and the macro not only did it require incredible skill in these small environments but also incredible administrative skill uh to be able to marshal the human uh energy and power of hundreds if not thousands of people to build these objects to bring the objects here to work them and get them and then put them up in place we can now form a picture of how the pyramid would have looked on the day it was completed a perfect triangle of white dominating the horizon and reflecting the powerful egyptian sun with a dazzling glare i must have truly added to the impression of giza as a magical port city bathed in sunlight if not actually existing ethereally in the celestial light british egyptologist dr chris nonten is on the trail of an ancient egyptian mystery what i can see is a shaft a deep shaft cut directly into the rock goes down about 20 meters about 60 feet and it leads to a network of tunnels and these extend for about 100 meters 300 feet something like that and in the walls of these tunnels there are niches kind of side chambers the discovery is known today as the royal cash among the mummies are ten pharaohs including some of the greatest names of ancient egypt but alongside legendary kings like ramesses the great and seti the first is a little-known pharaoh whose reign is shrouded in mystery [Music] second nen ray tao siken ray isn't as famous as some of his successors like ramesses the great or seti the first but the fact that he was buried alongside those pharaohs suggests that for the ancient egyptians he was every bit a part of that line of great kings who is this mystery pharaoh buried among the greats the first clue an inscription on the lid of his coffin n ray the brave why the brave hidden inside the coffin was a mummy the likes of which had never been seen before when we look at the front of his face it certainly doesn't look normal it's very distorted you may just be able to see the ends of the nose there but the whole of the nose the eye on the right the bridge of the nose the eye on the left are all very distorted second enray is unique he's the only mummified pharaoh ever found with such violent injuries [Music] dr richard shepherd is a world renowned forensic pathologist his specialty the investigation of suspicious deaths these are the two wounds to the right side of second henry's head this is a wound where actually a piece of the skull has been forced in it's been smashed into his brain underneath this producing this large crater like effect this wound has a slightly different appearance partly because i think a bit of the bone has broken off possibly as the weapon was removed it's flipped a piece of the outer part of the skull off but this too has actually cut through it's punched into the skull [Music] a mutilated mummy with an heroic epitaph understanding how he died is the key to unlocking the secrets of his life shepard turns to the only full autopsy ever performed on the body it was carried out 100 years ago by anatomist elliot smith his conclusions second end ray died from axe wounds received in battle dr shepard is taking a closer look at smith's report elliot smith says in his report and i'd back it up forensically for my knowledge now when i look at these two injuries what i can say is that they are both lethal wounds and you'd probably only need one of them to cause death but the two together are a certain cause of death the experts agree on the cause of death fatal acts blows to the head but did he receive these wounds on the battlefield and if so why risk a pharaoh's life on the front line for almost a century tutankhamun's dazzling treasures displayed in the cairo museum have told the story of the boy king's short life [Music] but now as all of his 5 000 treasures are being brought together at the new grand egyptian museum another far stranger tale is emerging not of tutankhamun's life but of his supernatural experiences after death the ancient egyptians weren't obsessed with death they were obsessed with living and they wanted to live the best life they could and they wanted that to continue if they could after death egyptologists believe this is why tutankhamun's tomb was crammed full of everything from golden statues to simple loincloths his tomb was a colossal supernatural suitcase packed with everything he'd need to help him navigate the afterlife and live there forever but what did turankaman expect to find when or if he got there for egyptologist salima iqram the answer lies in some of the smallest items discovered in his tomb you needed to eat in the afterlife and tutankhamun was a teenage boy so clearly he wanted to be well supplied and so he had bread he had wine he had pomegranates little green onions and garlic so he could flavor his food or munch on the green onion and there are dates there are piles of dates here but what's really amazing about two carmen's dates is that they were pitted so he wouldn't have to chew around and throw out the pit so these are really posh dates for the afterlife and these were just the appetizers for the entree tutankhamun could choose from an all-you-can-eat buffet of egypt's finest meats he had ribs he had large joints of meat coming from the full leg of cattle and they're all these boxes of mummified poultry often the containers are made in the shape of what they are supposed to contain it was a feast fit for a pharaoh pre-cooked pre-packed and preserved for eternity what is the real story of tut's tomb and can new clues help reveal its ultimate secrets in a quest to find answers chris nonten has traveled to the valley of the kings where carter made his original spectacular discovery inside the tomb he notes something striking about the design so one of the first things you notice when you enter this tomb you come down the descending passageway and you need to take a right turn this is quite unusual for 18th dynasty tombs because in most cases what you would expect of a pharaoh's team would be a left-hand turn in ancient egypt the left was a symbol of masculinity it was so important that the entrance to every king's tomb from tut's dynasty involves an immediate turn to the left the only other right-hand turn is in the a female pharaoh so the question then is if in the case of the tomb of hatchet suit a right turn means the tomb of a female pharaoh should we be expecting here not the burial of a male king tutankhamun but a female pharaoh instead it appears king tut's tomb was probably built not for a man but for a woman the female clues do not end there dr yasminel shazly sees something intriguing about them if you look carefully at the face the faces on the stoppers of these canopic jars you'll notice that the portrait is quite different from that of tutankhamun they look more feminine experts agree that the heads on tut's canopic jars have features that are more like a woman than a man and remarkably experts are even finding female features on the most famous piece of tut's treasure his death mask normally a king's mask would all be made out of the same materials but tut's mask is different el shasley reveals why the the face is originally separate from the headdress and they were welded together so there are two different pieces there is a further clue on the ears of the mask's headdress the earlobes are very interesting because the ears were originally perforated in three-dimensional art men did not normally represent themselves with perforated ears it suggests that the face itself did not originally belong to the rest of the headdress and that the headdress belongs to a woman the pierced ears indicate that tut's iconic headdress may originally have been made for a woman as were many other objects in tut's tomb the enduring question has been who was she most egyptologists will agree that this is a 3 000 year old piece of propaganda there are dissenting voices serious doubts are beginning to emerge about the manner of the bust's discovery there are those who would go even further in questioning not only the manner of the discovery but whether it is in fact ancient at all one man believes that the nefertiti bust is a 20th century fake [Music] if you look at the bust you can see a beautiful edwardian lady done up in egyptian makeup sean greenhalgh knows fakery in 2007 he sold this armani statue to a uk museum for a six-figure sum what he didn't reveal was that he'd made it himself greenhalgh is a convicted forger his work has fooled experts all around the world he sees the hand of a faker all over the nefertiti bust it's supposed to be the work of a master sculptor but the technique says otherwise for greenhouse what gives the game away is the layer of stucco plaster that covers the limestone core and forms the bust's most intricate features that's the work of if not an amateur than a second or third raid sculptor and none of those would work for the pharaoh we'd only have the best i'd be like finding a michelangelo sculpture in marble and then you'd find out that the ears the eyes all the hands the difficult parts were all made in stockholm added on just wouldn't be done and there is another inconsistency nefertiti's missing eye the left socket is empty while the right eye is made from an inlay of black wax and rock crystal greenhouse believes that the right eye is genuinely ancient sourced to make the bust look real it's a major point to its fakery because it's the kind of thing i've done myself sourcing beads or pearls or whatever in a piece borhardt searched the area where the bust was discovered offering a cash reward to anyone who could find the missing eye it never was found greenhouse believes it never existed it would be possible to source a quartzite eye or to find a pair well that would be very long gods greenhouse argues this is the only way to explain the empty socket to ancient egyptians the eyes were a window to the soul so representing the queen with one eye missing would be a shocking sign of disrespect finally green halsh thinks he knows why the forger picked nefertiti and the armana period if you're going to pick a period of egyptian art to fake the armana period is really the best because the sculpture wasn't any more difficult than any other period but it is the most valuable today to collectors and the rarest because it lasted such a short period of time the damage on it is the major point of it being a later copy it's something i've done myself i've something i've seen on other fakes it's quite obvious that you look at where it's damaged the ears are damaged so obviously it's been dropped left and right sides the back of the head has been damaged and most telling the cobra on the conical cap is almost obliterated to remove it it would have taken off the nose the brow ridges and the chin there's absolutely no damage to the face the damage is selective and that's a dead ringer for a fee when the discovery of the nefertiti bust was announced to the world it revived the memory of a queen all but forgotten for 3 000 years to understand who she really was and why the bust was made we first need to understand the role that nefertiti played in the turbulent reign of her husband the pharaoh akhenaten when arkanatan came to power he started making some fairly radical changes egyptian religion has always been strongly polytheistic so many different gods were worshiped akhenaten decided to deny the existence of those gods his people would worship just one god through him that would be the light of the sun he called it theoten seems to have had a moment of truth of of seeing that all of these other forms of divinity that that people so liked really had no substance there's nothing you can see except what is man-made the only form of power that you can't really understand is the sun and it's there you can see it and that's all that matters so though he's a king akhenaten is a revolutionary his changes send a shockwave through egypt [Music] to the ancient egyptians simply to say that there was one god and none of the others existed would have profoundly affected the understanding that egyptians had of their whole environment and their whole cosmos [Music] and when all this happened nefertiti played a central part this is a tomb carved into one of the cliffs outside armana this is a beautiful image here of akhenaten and nefertiti in a chariot being pulled by a galloping horse they're both under the race of the aten and they're the only ones who are receiving the athens blessings [Music] traditional egyptian religion had functioned by pairing a male god with a female goddess who in turn create an offspring and that engendering ensures the recreation of the world every day now with those gods abolished akhenaten and nefertiti took their roles for themselves they would be the only link between the life-giving sun god and the world of the living so he was the male god of creation and she is the female goddess of creation and by coming together as this image represents enforce the recreation of the universe in cairo egyptologist dr yasmin l shasley is investigating the mystery of a newly discovered pyramid fragments of wood found in the burial chamber have been pieced together they form a coffin lid with a beautifully carved face coffins normally had features that were similar to the owner but idealized because that's what they would look like for eternity the restoration has revealed something astonishing this isn't a king it is in fact a mystery woman she's wearing the hathor wig that was very popular during the middle kingdom and was only worn by women the answer may lie with another object found in her grave a chest decorated with hieroglyphs could they reveal the mystery woman's name what's extremely important about this chest is that we know that it belonged to a princess because here it says uh satni su daughter of the king and then it would be followed by the name the name is the most damaged area which is very frustrating the ancient egyptians believed that the worst thing you could possibly do to anyone was erase their name if we managed to find her name and say it again then she would achieve immortality it's not just her name that's a mystery discovering a princess in a pyramid is highly unusual this kind of pyramid design is specific to a king it's not what you'd expect a junior member of the royal family to be in normally a princess would simply have a shaft tomb in a chamber at the bottom of it which makes the whole thing a real mystery to understand more about the princess the team must investigate the age she lived in egypt's middle kingdom these models from the time give us a window into her world [Music] stretching from 2030 to 1650 bc it's known as egypt's classical age [Music] it produced the first historical novel called the story of sunuje and new techniques of working with gold to create the finest jewelry of the ancient world locked in cairo museum are the treasures of another middle kingdom princess we have here the crown of princess numet from uh it's made out of gold and inlaid with semi-precious stones and here at the front you have a branch with very very intricate leaves and flowers this necklace is a very delicate and very intricately decorated this for example is the symbol of life and this one this is a very famous amulet as well it's the eye of horus that helps protect the wearer the newly discovered tomb probably contained material very similar to this a lot of gold which is probably why it would have been robbed a long time ago ordinarily there was a very clearly um articulated process for burying the king and making sure that everything was perfect it appears that this was not the case for tut one of the interesting features of these walls and the paintings is these strange sort of spotty marks these black patches that you see all around the walls are in fact organic they are mold [Music] this mold appears nowhere else in the valley of the kings at first conservation experts worry that in this otherwise dry environment the mold was being caused by the breath and sweat of countless tourists but a study of howard carter's original photographs revealed that this could not be the case [Music] and it gives experts an insight into events over 3 000 years ago to the precise time of young tut's burial it seems that his tomb was sealed before the paint on the walls had dried the supposition is that the walls had some residual residual humidity from the painting that was still there when the tomb was sealed in this case if the paint was still wet you very much have this sense that everything was done as quickly as possible conservation expert adam lowe and his team recently took high resolution photographs of the burial chambers paintings at a resolution of up to 100 microns they reveal details as small as the tip of a human hair including the individual brush strokes of ancient craftsmen seen close up the brushstrokes do seem to have been painted in a hurry you can see here there are clearly traces of brush marks that are clearly done like this so they're not done like this the application of the ochre color is done very fast with bigger brushes i mean that's a very fast mark that's ah um my estimate is that it wouldn't have taken a team of skilled painters much over a week to paint tootin carmen's team painting a king's tomb normally took years of work so why was tut's tomb prepared in such a rush egyptian kings normally had their tombs built and decorated long before they died but tut's mummy reveals he died unexpectedly around the age of just 19. according to ancient tradition only 70 days can elapse between the moment of the king's death and the sealing of his tomb dr hutan ashrafiyan is a leading surgeon he specializes in cold cases from the ancient past by carefully studying the family dr ashrafians noticed distinct medical patterns that together could explain what killed king tut the family are very interesting in that they all died relatively young we know that akhenaten died early we know that tutankhamun his son died early we know that the great grandfather died relatively early they died at a sequentially younger age there's another familial pattern hidden here in plain sight so this is tut's dad we think so this is the the statue of akhenaten let's have a look at him and you know clearly this isn't not a male form it does look very feminine wider hips this is meant to be a pharaoh but he doesn't look like a normal man several generations show the same body shape and a recent analysis of tut's loincloths found in his tomb reveal that his hips were also abnormally wide dr ashrafiyan believes some of king tut's family suffered from gynecomastia causing men to develop feminine features such as breasts and rounded hips our search for a genetic culprit is narrowing tut's mother the younger lady she's been laid to rest here back in cairo in the treasure trove that is the egyptian museum here just a few feet away are the remains of akhenaten tut's father when albert compared his genetic profile with that of the younger ladies he discovered something shocking it's not only that this is the father and this is the mother of king tut they turned out that their brother and sister which was a big surprise for us so tut's mother and father so their mother and father they were also brother and sister so tut was a product of incest a lot of incest happened they didn't like to get royal and non-blood mixed so they tried to keep it within the royal family so it's official comprehensive genetic profiling has proved that tut's parents were brother and sister turankaman was born out of incest da shore 15 miles south of cairo it's one of egypt's most mysterious royal graveyards today only a handful of pyramids survive but the remains of many more lie hidden beneath the desert sands egyptologist dr chris nonten has spent his career hunting for these lost tombs he has come to da shore where egyptian archaeologists have made a thrilling discovery this is a pretty exciting moment we're in uh it's an amazing kind of lunar landscape this is the bent pyramid just slightly closer to us and what's known as the red pyramid behind it but we're going to a much less well-known part of the site where something very intriguing to say the least has been uncovered just very recently this crater was the site of a large quarry until workers stumbled upon blocks of finely cut limestone buried deep in the sand egypt's ministry of antiquities began to excavate excavations have revealed a passage that once led from the entrance to deep under the pyramid [Music] the stairs lead to an underground complex the heart of the pyramid these huge blocks are protecting the only access to the chamber and any mummy and treasure that may be hidden inside and unlike any other pyramid found so far it still appears to be sealed [Music] egypt's ministry of antiquity has granted permission to raise the capstone to reveal what lies within finally after three days of effort the tomb gives up its secrets for the first time in almost four thousand years [Music] but what's inside is a shock oh goodness me its contents are in disarray [Music] the archaeologists hope to be unveiling treasure but now there's a mystery to solve there are two questions here that we need to start trying to answer one is who was buried here who was this pyramid built for and then secondly how is it that an apparently completely sealed unbreached burial chamber comes to have been disturbed it's becoming clear they've stumbled upon an ancient crime scene someone got here first and robbed the burial chamber [Music] you

Channel: Smithsonian Channel

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Keywords: ancient egypt compilation, secrets smithsonian channel, king tut, ancient egyptian, egypt, egyptian, mummys, nefertiti, akhenaten, king tut's tomb, king tut death, king tut mummy, king tut origin, king tut incest, pharaohs, ancient egypt history, history compilation, archaeology, pyramids egypt, mummification, smithsonian channel, education, smithsonian history, smithsonian compilation

Id: DKluUdV6ddw

Length: 37min 34sec (2254 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020