The History Of Daily Life In Ancient Egypt | Our History

thank you one of the very great pleasures of the Cairo museum is that here gold looks like gold not that awful weightless thing that you see in big exhibitions where they shine lights on things and they sort of float off in a sort of glittery Christmas card look here this really looks like a work of art try and look through the gold and see the piece it's amazing to think that it's actually constructed out of two sheets of gold riveted together somebody's worked it with a hammer from the back a man tapping away and he's done it with such accuracy that he's even reproduced the cheekbones slightly tilted because Tutankhamun had an accident when he was a boy and his cheekbones are an eighth of an inch out and so is that gold mask people I knew who had seen this mask when it first came from the tomb said that it looked more shiny brighter than it does now that's because they put such a high polish on it that when the Modern Cleaners came to wipe it with a cloth they scratched the ancient Surfers what a Marvel an object made by people whose lives were saturated in deep colors and Shining textures Master Craftsman of breathtaking precision and this in the age when Stonehenge was new past Tut's gold mask very few of them ever bothered to come here yeah this case in the museum contains some of its minor masterpieces set up about 80 years ago by one of the early directors of the museum an idiot he put really the finest small objects that had ever been found in Egypt you see most the things that are this size were usually sort of bashed out in the workshops and they're pretty things but they're not wonderful but this director he had such an eye that he could fathom the masterpieces in this case just jumps with life peace there for example that tiny little statue at the top it's the only known statue the man who built the Great Pyramid King keeops and that little thing there extraordinary strong face of a woman Queen T who gave birth to this heretic King who tried to turn all of Egypt upside down as all of her characters stamped on that little bit of stone there now this woman she's equally filled with life as the queen and the King well she was the wife of a man who spent most of his life Gathering corn for a small village in Upper Egypt she was an interesting person she was very quick-witted when her husband was away she actually took control of all the village Affairs one of the things she did for example was to go around and inspect all the measures for the week with which the people made bread she wrote a very cross note to her husband saying that somebody was fiddling them when he came back she Jolly Bells he got punished she also looked at all the family Affairs as well very competent woman in fact in her day she ran the village and these other people along here they probably have friends in the same Village it's a village we know more about probably than any other Village in the ancient world they're also the actors of our drama [Music] and this is where they lived the village of der El Medina hidden in the hills of Thebes the village of Craftsman the families of men women and children packed in neat houses Set Side by Side foreign [Music] science has given us more information about these ancient people than we have about most people of the last century [Music] this for example was the Bohemian part of town over there live some scribes who painted coffins in their spare time over there live the leader of the village choir I don't expect his neighbors ever made much complaint about the prior practice though because next door live this awful heathcliff-like character who spent most of his time bellowing at his poor old adoptive stepfather and in here The Little Old Lady Who so loved her pet monkey that she adopted a slave boy to sit and feed her grapes all day and in this house well there lived the Village store keeper it's not a very interesting job actually but sort of important and the villagers considered his fat jars so important his big jars of fat that were rendered down from The Oxen that they used to roast the two men went to court over one of these for 17 years and here the little village describe in his spare time used to sit and write love poetry can you see him licking his brushed and slowly writing his words by himself I kissed your open mouth and it made me drunker than Wine the father of our village the maturis in the modern world there's a check called yarislav Journey he was a professor of egyptology in Oxford he studied the village in its people 50 years even when he was 70 he was still walking slopes like this climbing looking for The Village's inscriptions on these rocks over here our ancient villages scribbled millions of little texts little graffiti told you about their days of life and birth and things like this and that is why an elderly Oxford professor was still scrambling about here even when he'd retired because professor cherny knew these people name by name he could tell individual handwriting he could tell when a man had written something as a Young Man an old man and these texts are so detailed in themselves this one here for example is written on the 13th of September 1275 BC can you see him there he is a tiny little faint head he's here there and there's two arms coming up and praying looks like he's waving to us and 1275 BC doesn't it the Royal scribe ramosa what he's doing is announcing his appointment to the Villages of Royal scribe to work in a king's tomb he's very proud of being a scribe because ramosa was the son of a messenger was not a scribe at all and normally scribes of course it would be handed down from father to son so nobody would actually celebrate the appointment because you'd be celebrating the death of your dad but ramosa was a self-made man and so he was pretty proud of it and this is what Professor cherny came up here to find this little figure he was a man in the words of Orton's poem against who the Bureau of Statistics could find no fault the perfect Egyptian the man on the thieben Omnibus and we know all of this from The Village's own records much of which was written on the most surprising material these bits of stone are called ostrica by archaeologists the product of making tombs what The Quarrymen literally cut out the walls they laid around the Valley of the Kings in hundreds and hundreds of thousands and it was these beautiful smooth white flakes the ancient scribes and many other people at the Village too picked up and used for writing and after all in such a hard environment it's a pretty good and permanent surface to work on it was something which you could later then put on to fragile Papyrus to keep in the Royal records so this is what to us holds the Village Life all the hundreds and thousands of documents the records come principally from this sort they wrote on it not in the flowery hieroglyphs of The Monuments in which a little seated man like this one might indicate the word love or to take but in a very rapid script which is called today hieratic and it's that script flashing across the surface of these stones which tells us so much about those ancient people archaeologists found thousands of these ostrica buried in a deep pit close by The Village [Music] a precise and careful documentation of ancient life a library of love and envy of greed of griefs and friendships all held in letters laundry list receipts bills contracts Deeds prayers and sometimes even Exquisite drawings and this is hardly surprising for our villagers were some of the greatest artists of the ancient world the men that made the king's tombs [Music] foreign [Music] no no no no [Music] let's just try and feel our way through this old landscape when Thebes was the capital of the world it was in a thousand BC that's exactly what it was so let's imagine for a minute that these mountains are filled with the ancient thebans again the people that lived here for five or six hundred years absolutely honeycombing all over these mountains here and every night of course they would walk in a great Mass down and look over the fields again back to the city which they all loved there they would smell the sweet breezes of the river in the evening what an extraordinary sighting must have been over there great Dusty silty mass of houses with two huge temples at each end probably with great white walls around them sticking out from these wire walls flag poles and pennants all flashing in the Sun that by the way is the first thing that the returning thebans saw as they came around the bend in the boats on the Great River of course the crops were very different in those days none of these tufty sugar canes it's down eight feet high the fields would have been very much smaller and you'd have been very much more aware of all these little rivlets of water that had been coaxed off the Nile wonderful irrigators but sort of lazy people they didn't go in for great water and irrigation schemes they were little men doing little things very very carefully and surrounded all around them these huge white temple compounds one after the other 14 of them in a great row each one with its own individuality and each one to a particular God and everybody here knew exactly what Temple belonged to what God and each Temple had its own Festival throughout the year when the gods came down the canals to each of the temples and visited one another and here hidden away the little village of our workers the special men that went down into the underworld in the Valley of the Kings an extraordinary group of people now the tomb makers Village was some three miles from the Valley of the Kings this is the path that the scriber mosa used every day to get to work and one of his favorite sites must have been this Gathering of temples the most beloved of all feven temples today we call the rocky Bay der El Bahari these temples here contain a part of the very essence of ancient Egypt their whole attitude to the world in which they lived and it's one that's very different from ours so when you first come to look at Egyptian things can be a bit disappointed but that's because they're interested in a different Universe they inhabited a different world to us that's where these temples can come in for us because here you see how the ancient Egyptians related to the landscape if you think of the greek temple more often than not like a gothic church even they're in a prominent place on the top of a hill or somewhere and they dominate the whole landscape somebody once said that they're like diamonds through which the landscape is refracted man is actually imposing himself and all the hills around this Temple this sits absolutely in the landscape in fact The Architects here actually cut a bit of the cliff away and there's a balance here between the forms of the buildings and the form of the landscape one flows into the other that's what makes it such a magical and wonderful place this is the exact point which ramosa turned his back on the living the great city of Thebes to move over the horizon quite literally into the Realms of the dead into the underworld foreign under the natural pyramid of this mountain is the Valley of the Kings the Mountain's goddess Merit Sega she who loves silence looks down to the gates of the Underworld the fathomless tombs of Imperial Thebes [Music] this then is the modern doorway of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time the most famous tomb in the world the tomb of Tutankhamun tattoo and of course as everybody knows it was found by an Englishman Howard Carter in 1922 in his book he says that he was digging for years and it was very difficult and you know there was this last minute gamble when his backer Lord carnarvon wanted to give up because he couldn't afford it and all this stuff but I think there's a little different story really that's somewhat near the truth so if you look at his excavation records what you discover is that he was digging very very close to here years and years before and in fact he may have actually come down on the doorway the two men left it again now why would anybody have done that well I think because Carter understood carnarvon Carter knew that he had to keep some of his discoveries back for the moment when carnarvon's enthusiasm flagged carnarvon said no I can't go on any more car to save one more season he turned up here on the first November he was digging here three days later he made a very narrow Trench just about down where I'm walking and on the fourth after three and a half days work he was already back at the doorway for the greatest archaeological discovery of all time [Music] the tomb's doorway was filled with rubble slowly Carter's men dug their way down a sloping corridor they found a white plastered wall stamped with the Royal necropolis seal all over it Carter slowly took a stone just underneath a wooden lintel which ran across here you peered through into the tomb the first thing he noticed was the candy was holding flickered as the hot air trapped in the Tomb of three thousand years rushed out past him then his eyes slowly began to accustom to the Gloom he said he thought he saw a wall of gold he was dumbstruck now Luke Canaveral was standing next to him and he was a shorter man he couldn't really see and he was desperately trying to find out what was going I was tugging Carter's sleeve Carter was glued of course to the most famous archaeological picture of all times because in the little room in front of him stood those three huge gold couches of the king the Royal chariots laying a great Heap over there and all over the floor all the paraphernalia of Tut's called must have been the most extraordinary moment ever in archeology can you imagine what Carter must have thought thank you he's still there you know the only king of all the kings that were buried in the Valley of the Kings had been buried in an amazing Labyrinth of ritual as King's burials were nothing like our burials at all today they didn't even serve the same purpose this is not a memorial she's more like a machine a piece of machinery if you look around the tomb as in all the other Royal tombs you find not one memory not one word of how great or how powerful or how little or how unfortunate or how rich or happy the king had been nothing about their personality at all only the king meeting the Gods these tombs are important too for the next king that over there tells that story it shows Tut's successor engaged in the Riots of burying the dead King you see every new King buried his father in this careful ritual order which established the dead King as a god which made the living King as the Son of God and a true king of Egypt so these tombs are like Christian tombs they're not people waiting for the last Trump in here these are a part of a political statement a religious political statement so there's no Christian horror about the place there's no Gothic myth there's no curse involved here there's no reason anybody should curse this tomb this tomb is a functioning thing at the time of the funeral it worked it's done its job they might not have liked them being robbed but there was certainly never any worry of these awful myths that surround them today [Music] now Tutankhamun's tomb can show you what a buried Pharaoh look like but he can't show you a real Royal tomb they were vast and took years to make compared with those great monuments type was buried in a hole in the ground real Royal tombs are very different [Music] just as our villagers were not slaves and were not killed after they had finished the tombs so neither were most of the king's tombs hidden away let me show you what they look like great higher decorative doorways a single huge passage cutting straight into the mountain [Music] the richly decorated walls visions of the underworld the life's work of scriber Moser and our villagers [Music] in a long straight line halls and corridors lead down to the chambers of the royal burial and unlike toot and common secret tomb all of them easily and inevitably robbed and plundered thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] that's the same as Rama sees the second of course for a real particular point you see this great statue I'm sitting on the edge of his broken chest here's the top of his arm here his head busted lays out over there somewhere for a particular point and the point is this really these statues are not made like they are in the movies you know with 55 extras banging away with chisels these are really incredible works of art nobody can make them today it's not because we lack the skill or any individual acts of skill it's because we don't work in community anymore look at the way these muscles are explained here see here's the shoulder coming around here and then slowly and perceptibly through hundreds of inches it comes out and then rolls in again to hit that muscle there an incredible description of an arm it's even more incredible when you think there was probably one man working on this bit and another one working on this bit it shows a community of craftsmanship that the Western world's completely lost it's it's gone it's not it's not good enough to say there's no man can make this in the world today no man ever made this this was made by a group of people that worked together in an extraordinary Harmony our villagers were just such a group of artists amazingly they left us a detailed record of their working lives here in the village Cemetery [Music] Apple of one of the workmen of the village called hippie now he wasn't buried here this was a place where people came on high days and holidays to have a meal to share their food with the dead and also to offer to if he and his wife so it's a sort of link between this world and the next really and here you can see the man himself who lost his head unfortunately with his wife and their daughter and they're worshiping as you would expect yeah the king of the underworld with his blue skin and behind him the goddess of the western Mountain the peak that stands over the village and you can see she's a beautiful lady with a fine dress it's a woven pattern this and it's very interesting because you only find this particular design either in tombs in the village or in the Royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings as they're both painted by the same people of course you'd expect that this makes all these terms here rather special they have this wonderful quality about them the best artists in the world here you can see what actually went on in the chapel there is ippy and his wife again sitting on their chairs and their children are offering them food they're a bit indistinct of course you can see the sun is offering this lovely pot painted up and in it Bunches of onions but it's what's in this detail in this tomb is so interesting and so very unusual too see this little white table here you see on it lovely dish will be decked with flowers and inside the dish little figs these joints of meat and here a beautiful duck lovely curved neck you see it's been slit open it was stuffed with something delicious like some nuts or something I expect and it would have been baked in honey it was a real delicacy in ancient Egypt and other joints of meat it's all these little details that are so delightful in this tomb here you see if he is wearing these wondrous linen robes the finest linen ever woven anywhere at any time was made here and on if his lap the family cat what is really fascinating about this tune why it's a privilege to be here because not many people actually ever get in this tomb is the fact that all the support industries that kept these people in such sort of magnificence really are all painted on the other walls of the Tomb is as if he wanted to bring them all along to keep his standard of living up so here we've got a little picture of the very men who washed his clothes it's quite unique they're the village servants and they are all chattering away and scrubbing and washing down by the river see on this wall if you had really rare scenes of The Village servants painted don't often see these sort of people in the terms look here's here they are the fishermen of the village edging through the marshes at the side of the river in their boat there's a good middle class artist he's made the workers all look a bit comical you see with a funny round nose and rough hair and they're all sort of chattering and gesticulating in each other but nevertheless funny though they were a nice big catch of fish for the villagers which after always their main source of protein and here after the fishing right in the corner here can just make out one of the same fishermen mending his Nets and he's done an extraordinary detail and that hand is really we're talking about quarter of an inch here you know and every fingernail and even a knot you can see man tying it up in this chap here it's one of the village Craftsmen he's working on a mummy mask much like the mummy Master tooting Carmen this fool you see is really filled with the Villagers at their own work here for instance is one of the tool kits The Carpenter's toolkit have a saw here with its teeth and its handle a little strange but much like a modern saw and here the final part of the Mummy is this scribe painting away and the beard which comes on the wooden mummy case and this little fellow of course is holding the mummy out to stop it moving around whilst he's painting now normally though artists hold their Paints in Egypt in quite large bowls but this man he has a scribal palette it's another indication really that it was the scribes themselves who were very much involved in painting things in the village in fact you know this whole wall is just sort of filled with village life it's quite extraordinary underneath the artist in this scene here where there's a dozen workmen working your way on some great beer like a great wardrobe some ceremonial object has really looked at his fellows in a very caustic sort of an eye and this guy here for example lucky fellow just had a big heavy Mallet dropped on his foot and he's calling out to the guy above to be more careful you see whilst this man looks around it's a big object you can see they're actually working on the top of it here a man has left his bag full of tools just like a plumber's bag see with a saw and a chisel sticking out to it and here well somebody's gone to sleep and somebody else is waking up perhaps because the full one's coming you know and these little fellows of course are the people that lived in our village houses so as much as the past can ever give you itself in real life this must be [Music] most of our workman's Village has been excavated during this century rubble and wind blown sand had sealed it for 3 000 years now our village is empty it's people have gone away their houses are ruined but not too far away modern villagers are still living in much the same way still employing the ancient methods to cope with many of the basic problems of daily life just as our ancient villagers did the Nubian villagers use vaults to catch the wind and cool their houses in the Nubian villagers still use the flat roofs to sleep on in the hot summer months and to store their things our ancient Villages did the same much of North Africa still causes water by evaporation in the age-old way that our village is used [Music] of course such comparisons get ever more dangerous in their details but in their order and regularity their environment and their building methods these two Villages ancient and modern share a great deal [Music] [Music] but to see the actual stuff of Village Life we must go North to Turin whether it's preserved a unique treasure the tomb of car the architect the wonderful thing about this tomb is that our villager took all his house with him to his grave this is a time capsule it's what was in every village house this bed here with his Linen in its blankets this is the bed he slept in that curve that's like curve in the middle is the bump that you get when you sleep in a bed too long that's his pillow over there it's a strange hard wooden thing that fitted under the ear it must have been excruciatingly uncomfortable God knows how they survived this is his wife's handbag or what passed for a handbag in those days I suppose like lots of handbags very strange mixture of pretty little things you see those two little ducks heads on the top of a perfume flowers how delightful there's another perfume flask in there as well and it's still sealed with perfume that's three thousand years old and here a little pot in front is a eyebrow pencil and at the bottom of it would have been this black stuff called the ladies in Egypt still drop into their eyes so that the black powder floats off and makes a fine black line around their eyes pretty good very healthy for the eyes that's the lady of the house is weak it's made of human hair she wore it to parties it must have come down right over her shoulders and this this is the gentleman of The house's toilet compartment you see he's still got what passed for Grill cream in those days a special perfumed hair oil these are his razors the extraordinary things beautifully made bronze you sharpened this Edge I think but God knows how you ever Managed IT I suppose I like that summer God knows how you ever managed to shave with such a thing I haven't actually worked it out this this beautiful little thing the things of everyday life the things that people carry about with them that are closest to them this little worn figure of a horse a little pair of tweezers for pulling out those odd hairs Egyptians were very fastidious people you can see that too in their clothes look at these wonderful examples of ancient tailoring practically unique look at the care and Delight in this neck the tail has made this beautiful Loop and then caught it in a bow just like a fashion designer you see that little decoration on that stick that's the sort of decoration that people must have had in their houses but which hardly survives today or we've got less than monuments it's a very famous stick from our village and on it it says support me oh stick in your old age this if you like in the next case here really I suppose it's the heart of ancient Egypt it's a fuel parlor certainly because these are onions real onions from the ancient fields and that's ancient bread just as they make it a day except this is more than three thousand years old and though of course of the standard ingredients if you look at any Egyptian stingler the first prayer will be give my spirit bread and onions to eat that's the basic diet that's the diet the fueled the people that made the pyramids and our Villages when they were making the Royal tombs but this bread is a special bread this has come from the altars of the Gods from the temples you see as you gave things the gods you wanted Gods to hear your prayer so those little ears so that your prayer will be heard fashioned and the loaves of bread so that naturally brings you on to this case in this case is full of man's kitchen isn't that extraordinary look there's a kitchen pot a nice bronze cooking pot still full of porridge or some gooey stuff that he was cooking up in it it doesn't look very delicious anymore I must say and these are all his herbs is herbs his dates his raisins his garlic all the food laid out for his spirit and care for little bowls brought straight from his household of course it would have been unlucky once he died to leave it there that's why it's all in his tomb but this it's only a tiny little amount this if you like is The Village's wages because this is what the people were paid in there's a sort of little symbolic gesture in the Tomb this is the Grain and every month those donkeys came up the track bearing the king's grain for the people that made the Royal tombs and that is some of the men's wages from our village you may wonder why such intelligent people as the ancient Egyptians at our Villages indeed bother to bury dead people with all these possessions around them and these beautiful things too well I think to answer that question you really have to start to look just a little into how the ancient Egyptians divided the person up because in these divisions of a person each one of these divisions had its own heaven now this is a burial chamber it's the burial chamber of a villager called synergy and this is where his corpse lay and that was a part of synegem's Personality just one part of it his body and this is Osiris the great god of the underworld the great green-faced God and these two eyes these staring eyes looking out through the strange mirror that divides this world from this mysterious region of Osiris so this is the gods domain and this is part of the heaven the body inhabits and that of course is why the possessions are here because possessions really are part of the body your clothes your chairs and the food you need to eat it's part of the Destiny part of the heaven of the body and that's one of the things that are made so well because it is a heaven now there are other heavens for different parts of the person one of those is the person's soul now that goes up to heaven and these are the souls of our villagers these Stars up here here's syneju worshiping older Villages but he too would be a star and shine in the night sky but our villagers were very keen on the heaven that belonged to a person's personality to his image and this is a village of heaven and for a man who spent his life in the desert chiseling away on dry Rock oh it's an engine saw his Heaven as his beautiful garden with lots of canals running through it with date palms and beautiful flowering plants and perfumes and of course he plows the fields he's not a real farmer he's ever plowed a feel in his life this is strictly your Sunday farmer you know with with their fine Linens and things here they plow and here they reap [Music] oh two of the great wonders of ancient Thebes were the colossi of memnon each one carved from a single block of glistening quartzite the hardest Stone the ancient people ever quarried and this carried from a mountain hundreds of miles away [Music] the most remarkable thing in this place perhaps is that which has vanished one of the biggest temples ever made Behind These two statues stood two vast mountainous entrance walls where I'm standing a single doorway as big as an aircraft hangers Granite hinges the huge wooden doors of Lebanese Cedar covered in bronze so as I turn now into this spare field you must imagine that I'm walking through a great Courtyard now I'm coming to what used to be the heart of this Temple that's left of this colossal wreck is this wondrous Stone stealer it's a fine irony really because this if you like is a deed by which the king gives the god his Great temple these lines actually record some sort of an agreement the two have made between themselves listen I'll read you a remarkable piece of this document with a king is actually boasting to the god about his great gift come memoray Lord of Thebes see the house that I have made for you I've made it an excellent work of fine white sandstone I've filled it with monuments with statues made of mountains of alabaster and pink and black granite of gold and every Splendid costly Stone Without End the God is greatly impressed by this according to the Steeler and in the end he takes the gift and he takes the sun to his heart come my son Ammon hotep I've heard what you say I've seen your Monument I am your father and I accept what you have made for me so with this great gift of course when a huge Foundation went hundreds of thousands of workers scribes and everything else and Ramos was one of these it was where he got his education now why would such a fortunate young man leave this lavish compound and go and live in a small village in the desert well to understand that we have to go to one of the oldest and most elegant monuments in the Valley of the Kings the tomb of King Tut Moses III [Music] thank you the tombs of the Old Kings have been made in a very particular way see the artists and The Quarrymen that have made them left the walls Bear right up to the time of the funeral all they painted was the stars on the ceiling and the Border underneath it was only after the king had been put in his coffin that the scribes came in here and quickly dashed off the wall paintings just two or three days you see the painters knocking in this border here were moving so fast down the wall they couldn't even be bothered to move away a box we've stood here so this area is left blank of course that box came in with the Royal Funeral and that was the same time that these people were working away here because the painting of these texts was actually a part of the funeral they're not supposed to be art they're actually supposed to be very careful and detailed instructions on how to do something and that's why they're done with such Precision though so fast it's a very funny mix really see these writings were very very special they were probably only known to a very few people in Egypt they were guide books of the underworld you see them at work here it's another indication of just how fast they're going see these scribes are holding in their hand a palette and a Papyrus the Papyrus that holds the text their brushes in the other hand so they're dipping their brush and the paint looking down at the text and writing from right to left they go to and then the brush Runs Out dip it again look at the papyrus off they go again brush runs out again dip of the paint look at the papyrus start off again fat and just at this point here you've looked at the wrong place in the Papyrus you can see he's copied the same phrase see that eye there from there to there as it is from here to here it looks down again realize what he's done and he's off again straight away without even bothering to stop [Music] but later Kings the kings of our villagers work for wanted more opulent monuments and this brought about a change that affected the lives of many people including our scribe ramosa foreign to make such beautiful walls in the new tombs was a long and laborious process first of all the artists flattened the wall out so flat so precise I mean much more than any Modern War we've ever seen really and then the outline draftsman came along the guys who laid out the whole walls they started off with strings which they dipped in red paint and these were laid the precise intervals along the wall that they wanted and snapped against the wall to give dead straight lines and then vertical ones were added too those fit absolutely harmoniously to the architecture then a man working very slowly very carefully very laboriously came round and redid it all in black so the way the rushed version was perhaps a little wrong this one was finally placed and this was done very carefully because of the next process was so very laborious and that was cutting down all the back surface of the wall and you can see a man actually at work here this thing is half finished this is where the sculptor is working you can just see him I mean he's literally walked out the door and I've come in right three thousand years later and he has a chisel in his hand and he's standing here going like this and he's slowly slowly working around this figure and this figure represents the Flesh of the king going into the underworld so for the sculpture this figure has to live and that's the terrifying thing about this work because it goes on for yards and yards and tens of yards and hundreds of yards through the tombs so all these signs down there these little hieroglyphs that are letters of the alphabet these are actually little living people little living men little living birds can you imagine the work so the gods and goddesses at the bottom of the ball to give them more skill and when you get onto those huge beautiful figures of the Kings and gods in the outer corridors well they're really the work and the long and involved work of Master Craftsmen obviously making Tunes like this is a lot more hard work and labor than making them much smaller and simpler old tombs and of course that's why they're not finished it's why the first ones aren't finished anyway because the gangs were still working in the old ways so what happened was that the whole process of making a royal tumors reorganized couldn't make the games much bigger because there simply isn't the room in these terms to employ hundreds more people it actually proved practical to keep the gang about the same size what they did do was to streamline the actual work process of the gangs themselves because that had been actually rather lackadaisical the old foreman had ordered the chisels and seen the suppliers and made the reports now that was a special gang of scribes brought in to control all that work separate from the foreman and that is why ramoza joined the villagers so here in the Valley of the Kings he spent the rest of his life controlling the work of the king's tomb and as he grew old training his successors and one of these is stepson has left his Mark all over the Cliffs of the royal Valley now here's Howard Carter 1917 and here next to him can hear copper Chef 1300 BC is a difficult man a cunning old man in fact the time he worked here he understood how the village worked and how how all the little courts could be manipulated and exactly how the power structure worked he was sometimes very rude too he was very manipulative but he was a historian he made himself a personal copy of the text of the battle of kaddish he made lists of all the temples at Thebes he was very interested in history and in Kings but the men didn't like him much to them he was bossy and arrogant and perhaps that was just as well for making tombs was hard work first you cut out the doorway from The Rock then foot by foot you cut your way into the cliff and in Ken her copper Chef's day was especially urgent but his King was old and Ill when he took the throne and wanted his tomb in a hurry the Workman reached this point in the tournament after about three years and then the quarryman hit a snag quite literally that up there they bashed away that huge lump of Flint with their chisels for some 20 days at least that's what Ken her accomplisher's record tell us but of course they didn't get very far they just managed to chip a little bit off the end it must have completely buckled their copper chisels and that's all they had you see no steel at all so they just left it there and carried on Ken here copper Chef's records are very exact he was in charge of the baskets which They Carried all the chippings out of the tomb was also in charge of the chisels and he was in charge of the lamps and it was by these flickering Halos of light that the villagers hurried to finish the tomb [Music] so the poor old King's funeral procession wound down through the corridors came into the Royal burial chamber poor old corpse blown as dry as an egg it's arthritic body all wrapped up in bandages covered in resins put in two beautifully finely made Cedar coffins another Alabaster coffin was enclosed under this now Imagine A procession this is not like a procession today with orderly people walking in ranks this is a swarming mass of people very intent on doing things the right way so you've got all our villagers down here with great wooden staves to move this into the final position over the coffins and right at the end of the funeral after everything was done and all the priests and all the villagers had swarmed all over everything Ken hair copper Chef monitor other of the priests would have gone round and carefully lit before candles to keep the spirits of sand and of demons out of the cause and just before they left after they did that they put water on a bed of grain that would rise in the dark and give the magic of growth to the dead King [Music] [Music] the skyline of Thebes quiet an ancient landscape the ones held within it the capital of Imperial ancient Egypt and our village the village that made the Royal tomb a landscape in which life is still lived in the shadow of the ancient people a landscape in which our ancient Villages went to Market this Market that has been held on the same day in the same place from all the 4 000 years [Music] where the landscape and its people still hold the dignity and rhythms of ancient life [Music] my friend asked me if I would come here again tomorrow to drink some more of his tea and I would told him I would inshallah if God Wills you can't do anything here without saying that you have to say inshallah after anything I will walk down the road if God Wills tomorrow I will come to see you again if God Wills everything is by the will of God and this isn't just if I'm lucky it really means if God will let you come it's very funny here if people ask you do you have a God if you like me you say no I don't have a God people cannot understand that and then they look back a little while and they said but you say if God Wills like we say inshallah and you say ah yes but with us that there's nothing if I'm lucky do people hear it is very very real God is directing every moment of every day for them [Music] it's like that today in Egypt and in a sense it always has been [Music] consider the temples of the Nile and why they stand why kings that lived in mud brick rooms attended gods in huge Chambers made a fine hard Stone [Music] the temples were links Between Heaven and Earth the lenses that pulled the universe into Focus they studied Egypt with their mystical interconnections temples built upon the rhythms the movements of the universe the chambers that held the chanting of numberless lives absorbed in elegant pieties and just as the temples held all the powers of the Gods so did the very landscape of Thieves here beyond the Western Horizon of the city is the Valley of the Kings where the Imperial monarchs were buried with the dying sun in tombs made and decorated by our village Craftsmen [Music] fifteen hundred years before Christ they were already working here generation after generation of villagers quarrying Plastering sculpting and painting these deep mysterious Caverns set in the Valley Rock [Music] tombs designed to sustain the kings of Egypt throughout all eternity foreign [Music] [Music] so let me try and tell you what's going on here because this this is the heart of the mystery in a way the center of the Egyptian universe is the place where the Egyptians reconciled death and life the King's death the state of Egypt and The Rebirth of the land every year with its crops and the Sun every day in the sky and for death to be reborn you need a womb and the womb is the burial chamber of the king you also need a mother and the King sometimes is seen as the son who is arising every morning and so here you see the sun dying in the evening going into the mouth of his mother pass through the hours of Darkness which is the underworld in these red dots one two three four and so on through the 12 hours of the night that every hour there is a door and at every door there is a demon and you need the spell to overcome that demon and then the King after overcoming the 12 hours of the night in his gigantic struggle is born again between the thighs of his mother goddess over there as Egypt is born every year on the Niles flood and every day at sunrise [Music] if the ancient Egyptians the landscape was filled with the gods and all their powers [Music] sometimes the very Cliffs and rocks were carved into the figures of the Gods and in the middle of this Enchanted landscape our village has built a settlement in which they lived whilst they made the Royal tombs on the horizon between the Valley of the Dead Kings and the living Valley of the Nile all the two makers slept here in the evening sat on Stone benches and talked together and here it is that we will find the Hut Of The Scribe Ken hair copper chef that's the house of Mr kaha used to make heart scarves in their only spare time for mummies that's the house of his friend over there I think yes that's right used to paint little wooden plaques this then that's right this is the biggest house in the village belonged to our scribe of course there would have been a door there in those days I've opened this way here's his bed and this yes this is his office see it's the biggest most important room in the village the only one with a nice tiled floor that means then that out there yes there it is that's his seat I wonder if he was sitting on that when he was propositioned by his hairdresser scribe spent a lot of time having their heads shaved as they wore elaborate wigs but why would anybody want to bribe scribe Ken hair copper chef well it was a pretty important man in the village after all he was scribe here for some 50 years you've got to think that from this tiny little room you send letters out of the king to the vizier to all the officials of Thebes the villages to the priests just about everybody he knew everybody in a sense he was Mr Fix It especially the village where he sat on a law course and everything he was a pretty big man it's an unusual man too because he doesn't seem to have married till he was over 70. when he did married a girl of some 12 years old actually I think the young girl quite liked the old man she had no children by him she married again another Workman and she had seven or eight children by a new husband but her first son and her eldest she known Ken her copper Chef after the old scribe close by their settlement our villagers made their own Shrine and this exactly at a point from where they could Glimpse the vast Temple of Karnak deep in the shimmering heat of the Green valley below [Music] both Shrine and Temple were dedicated to the same God Ammon the king of the Gods there were many other powerful gods in Egypt such as Horus here at his Temple at edfu [Music] now Horus and his story are essential for any sort of an understanding of the ancient Egyptians and here his great family epic covers Acres of wall in this scene Horus is on the right his mother who is kneeling is in the middle and the man on the left is the king believe it or not they're all attacking a small hippo who lies under the prowl of the boat now this hippo is his uncle in another disguise he's Seth and he represents the forces of chaos and disorders a good animal really when you think of this great sort of blundering Beast that runs through rushes and busts things up and everything they're attacking him because Seth is trying to get the kingship of Egypt and he's killed the real King to his horus's dad and Horus is therefore fighting for his legitimate rights so this is a battle between Chaos on one hand and order on the other now the interesting and subtle thing about the Egyptians is they didn't only Revere Horus as a representative of legalness and order they also revered Seth because he's the other end of the tension which represents civilization they even saw men of Seth in their own Society one of these at our village was a man called par neb if ever there was a man of Seth in the village it was the foreman buried in this tomb and there is the old reprobate Panhead himself actually it's very difficult to talk about people like this because people tend to deliver rather over quick moral judgments on them and there's a man who drinks and fornicates it makes big rows it makes travel but at the same time he's a very talented man he's actually talented enough to run a gang of work when I make royal tombs for some 20 years as much loved by his family and by a lot of other women in the village too for that matter you got in and out of scrapes for a long time but at the same time he kept the gang together for what near now 20 years through five Royal tombs and in that time they made some of the finest work in the Royal terms in the Valley of the Kings [Music] I was very fortunate at this time that parnabb's gang held some of the finest Stone Carvers ever that worked in the valley it was their Fortune Too that they were able to work on this beautiful Pure White living Rock because this limestone in this part of the valley is some of the best anywhere Thebes now these people use their skills not to make dinky little patterns all over the walls in the manner of excellent Craftsmen but as thinking artists look at these beautiful broad shapes here normally people with this sort of skull at their hands try to celebrate it all the time in complexity these guys go for the reverse they go for the large long meditative shave a very simple form that nevertheless describes perfectly say this Kilt or the curve on the leg in the simplest possible way that in a sense is one of the Supreme artists of art of simplicity this is an excellent example of their sense of design for example the king's arm comes down as a simple shape turns into beautifully sharpened lines on the fingers which again lead us into the water running from this pot sharp little black quivering lines shatter over an offering table here that are resolved in three beautiful Globes of fruit very simply and then flow down to the bottom the tensional result it's the sort of magnificence of design that you can expect only the finest artists and all the time as you walk along details your throwaways of the art icle you can imagine then that in a community of artists such skills and talents would attract a lot of jealousy especially when paneer made few concessions to respectability [Music] this Lively drawing has been taken from these fragments of papyrus the celebrated erotic Papyrus of Turin which after years of dedicated study Scholars are successfully restored in all its Rich detail now we don't know for certain if the boarding satter in these pictures is Panera or not certainly they were painted in our village and could easily have been inspired by his activities here for example he has fallen dead drunk out of his bed parleb wasn't always that amiable [Music] no one knows anymore why panev lost his temple one night but loses temporary did and we do know that when he lost his temper he came running down this street went over these steps up to this very door with a brick and tried to bash in the lock to get to the foreman who was standing terrified out of his wits on the other side of the door it was an extraordinary evening in the village it must have caused a great fuss nine men came and grabbed him and hauled him off and it kept him all night Papyrus that recalls the event says that six of them were beaten by him in the course of that an extraordinary man a man who could keep a Red Rage up for hour after hour after hour and this Foreman was no just man to get angry with he wasn't the boss of the gang he was the very man who had adopted parnip so partner is showing this awful rage towards a man who is showing him affection and will continue to show an affection afterwards obviously Panera was a very difficult emotional man well how did parned manage to survive and flourish the answers here in this Royal tomb parleb's wonderful sculptures at its entrance have followed deeper into the tomb by these miserable drawings Throne was weak little kings came and went and in such dismal times men with parnip's talents often flourish the drawings took what five minutes each yet they are the exact equivalent of these wonderful golden statues from the earlier tomb of Tutankhamun and it was for stealing just such a statue that par neb was eventually stopped so how on Earth can you say with such confidence that you know about all these people that lived after all 1200 years before the birth of Christ people like paneb well they made things they made hundreds and hundreds of stones but now are scattered through the museums of the World by piecing all the information that they hold together we can reconstruct their story this piece for example is quite an important piece a family history also quite a pretty thing as well you see here on the top there's a little drawing of fruit and vegetables it was set up outside the tomb and the family will come up and leave these little offerings here for the spirits the dead and I guess when they poured the wine on here that ran down this little slot went down there but the one they poured was date wine because see there's a pretty little palm tree here so the person who is receiving this offering the spirit of the dead person must have quite liked date wine now here are the people sitting down that one this inscription tells us is pan ebb's own wife now it's one of the very few mentions of her name that we have this one here again the inscription tells us this is his grandson and he is being offered to rather unusually actually though this figure here which is part of son one of pione's son so the Steeler actually is a rather sad little document because it's showing us that the father is making arrangements for the spirit of his son that his son had died before him what's even sadder of course with parnabb's family it's the little Stones like this tell us that partner was killed for his crimes the one of his sons ended up working in the mines for his part in it being sent off to the mine was a terrifying thing for Egyptians and unfortunately it was quite a common one in our village in fact it was so common that one of the scribes actually drew a map of the place now is the oldest map in the world this is a copy of it the original was about 10 foot long so you can see it's a horrible great black Valley running through it the red Dotty snake is the road the end of the road a Red Mountain and that's what we're going to find you know there's only one place really that fits our ancient map that's here the Wadi Hammer mad it's a strange place it's a great road that runs from the Nile to the Red Sea it's a 7 000 year old road at least people have been coming down here that long and I've just been wondering about the place and I found all sorts of evidences strange little things of the early Travelers I suppose I found a piece of a stone pot could well be three or four thousand years BC that piece I found that New Kingdom Water jar from the period of our village here the Romans of course lots of Roman Pottery around this world that's where they dropped they were the people that put little stations through here and controlled everything very carefully and of course you had to pay to go it was the Roman Empire and so we have a notice which says that in the reign of domitian for example it cost five Drax for a camel to come down here cost five Drax for Traders and for Sailors at the Red Sea and 20 Drax for [ __ ] and that's a funny thing because one of the early Christians a very saintly man was coming down here and the Customs officer said to him what have you got with you and he said nothing but Temperance righteousness and charity and the man wanted to charge him 60 directs because he thought there were three [ __ ] [Music] well I'm sitting in the exact spot in the valley which is indicated on this part of the ancient map look you can see the tops the great Black Hills behind me and very interestingly see these pink dots the Ancients noticed that in the floor of the valley there were these colored stones these little pink Stones everywhere they put them on their mat because they're really Keen geologists and that's what they're here for a stone so they're likely to notice things like that there are other Clues here to what happened to parnip's son and they're on the very walls of the valley [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] nope nope nope no none of these the right texts look I tell you how I can tell that it's because of these shapes here and the signs that are in them because these shapes called cartouches hold the Royal name they call cartouches because the engineers that came with Napoleon's Expedition thought this shape was the same as the great Wards of gun cotton that the the armorers used to put down the barrels of the cannon to fire off the shot and here of course in ancient Egypt it's a simple little rope and they always come in pairs will usually come in pairs where they always contain the name of the king look I tell you how you can read this one originally where that's a bit broken now it was a little animals a set animal and so this name reads set and this sign e so you have set e beloved that signs mean beloved of the god patar and that's spelled out for you these are just phonetic signs like an ordinary alphabet the god Pata he of the beautiful face the god of Craftsman every King like to be beloved of the Gods you see so there's the name of our seti in his Cartouche with a decoration decoration of feathers above and a nice little gold side another decoration really but very appropriate for this mining area here underneath but still it's not the inscription of parneb's son we've got to go somewhere else to find what happened to him beautiful isn't he but it's not parliamson it's Min the god of the western desert ah no this looks like something oh yes that's it here's the Cartouche it's the king I'm looking for Ramesses IV and there he is up there you see worshiping first Ammon of Thebes and behind men of this desert and this text talking about the grand Expedition the king organized here it was a wonderful show the high priest came 50 other priests in attendance charioteers Army squadrons even vets for the horses must have been amazing the real Grim work the part of the par neb's son was in was digging the stone for the Royal sarcophagus and in that work of the eight and a half thousand people who came here 900 of them died it's in this awesome place that paneb's son probably ended his days it's really the finish of the village Feud can you imagine sleeping in little rough Huts in the desert Stone here's so hot from the midday Sun and feel it coming off your hands now it's extraordinary place you imagine banging away day after day to the skin on your hands goes so hard if you can't strain your fingers out anymore they're just like receptacles to hold the tools you work Paul neb's son never worked in a Royal tomb again foreign you know one of the most remarkable things about this map is not only is it as the first map in the world it's also a treasure map because inscription on the end of it says these are the mountains in which gold is quarried and if you're very careful and look at the landscape closely you can actually identify where the old gold mines were see we've come up here through the gray mountains of the Wadi Hammer Mount where pan EB's son worked and now we come here into the red mountains there are many different valleys running off and this is a very unusual feature in the desert we've got five Exes from this little Valley and here they are on the map one two three four five so if I'm right the ancient Gold Mine should be quite close to this Shrine which is marked there which means the actual Shrine itself is just over there so I'm climbing what the map calls the mountains of gold I'm going up to the shrine of Ammon of the pure Mountain well this seems to be the oldest inscription in the place and that's only ancient Greek I suspect this is the shrine of Ammon because holy places have a habit of staying on one spot for a very long time here so if we assume that this is the shrine of Ammon and those mountains over there according to our ancient map the hills in which the gold was washed [Music] that road there well that's still the road that leads to the Sea [Music] that there then the ancient map tells us is the mountains of silver and gold and over there behind that modern house the settlement of the gold workers these gold mines in this area were the third biggest in ancient Egypt Nubia was the greatest gold poured in from there mainly to Plate the temples some to go in the tombs of the Pharaohs some for jewelry of the Court indeed but for men who worked here was a terrifying experience the work was long and hard I suspect thousands upon thousands of men die as the ancient people were quarrying this terrible hard granite for their gold you'd expect to be pretty economic in their mining than they were what they did you see was to follow these tiny little veins in the granite which held the goal tiny but very rich grain s of gold and fat they followed deep into the rock until it gave out and in fact they were so efficient at quarrying these grains we've got a few late Victorian eccentrics came back here to reopen The Works they weren't bust there was nothing left for them but in their time of course in the Ancients time they provided tons and tons of the precious metal they've never saw the thought of how strange it is when you think of all the gold there has been in the world how most of it over the centuries is recycled Generation by generation for its jewelry its precious metals when you think that ancient Egypt used gold for plating huge Temple walls they had ton upon ton of it gold like the sand of the desert says the Bible was in Egypt it's highly likely that people now who wear modern rings have just a few flecks Pharaoh's gold with them Pharaoh's gold was not of course money there wasn't any in ancient Egypt gold was quarried to decorate Kings and courtiers and plate temples especially the theban temples the awesome houses of the Gods on Earth Quarry came here to the Temple of Medina Harbor built in the 12th century before Christ in the reign of Ramesses III the last of the great temples of the thieben Empire and the best preserved [Music] [Music] and by the side of these great stone temples were the mud brick palaces of the Kings so through the king's private doorway into the corridor of his harim behind every one of these doors the Royal lady let me show you something quite interesting you don't usually see one of the ladies bathrooms look how practical it is you see the king's Palace it was all made of mud brick and it's a great material here in Egypt but it's very bad with water and can you imagine as the two ladies stood here and poured the water over the king how it would have splashed down him run off hit the walls and brought the palace down in half an hour so the Masons have faced his bathroom with wonderful Stone and over the top we put a very hard fine white Plaster even to stop the water seeping through to the mud brick Beyond and bringing the bit down behind it's a great bathroom and it's far better than anything our village has ever had so this is the heart of the Egyptian State and the center of the empire it's the place where the Expeditions of the gold mines was worked out and provisioned and it was here that the gold was brought after it had been quarried it's the economic capital of Egypt it's a very difficult concept to explain because the state works completely differently from any modern one imagine Gothic Europe say with a king and Nobles and The Peasants who working for the Nobles and the Nobles who are in the end supporting the king well it's the same here except the Nobles are the gods so the king who owned all of Egypt and everybody in it parceled up the land to various gods and the gods priests then built their temples and the priest took all of the produce of the land offered it to the Gods on the altars of the temples and when the gods had had their fill of it they gave it back to the priests who used it for their own food and also supported the Royal Court on the side it's an extraordinary idea it also makes churches here the temples as they are it makes them if you like the Westminster the White Halls the the White House the Palaces the offices of government all wrapped into one so around this Temple which after all is a holy place we have the granaries of Egypt The Stables the warehouses the sculpture Studios and the priest houses and the Heart of all this the Temple of the god [Applause] and here in the holiest most sacred part of the Temple you'll find something you never see in a Christian Church a Butchery and a great ball ing along in the Egyptian sunlight look at him he's been kept in his stall all his life is specially fattened up for this moment when he's brought to the temple for slaughtering they put garlands on him ostrich feathers amongst his horns and his Hooves you see a curled right round because he's never walked before he's really only existed for this moment when he's brought into The Butchery and slaughtered in a sense he represents the essence of the contract between man and the gods because on the other side of this rule is a god shrine so here you have it Gods give men the food men offer it back to the gods and at the end of the day on the altars the priests take back the food and eat it themselves the accounts of this vast sacred combine of some seventy thousand people cover this entire wall in this part of the temple calendar in front of me here is the rations for the temple given to the god each day that is collected from the temple warehouses that have been brought in from the countryside put on the altars of the god and distributed back to the temple employees like the priests the accountants and even our villagers it's an incredible list I'll show you how it works includes everything of course includes vegetables and onions and herbs and bread 8 000 loaves of bread look here are the numbers you can see them see these little curls they're hundreds and these Loops are tens those Strokes won so we've got 360 five daily one that will be of course and then the product here and all this column here as I say is all green herbs lettuces cilantro this column here is so small it must be some very pungent herb that you don't need much of so this is really the list of wages if you like in an economy without money and of course our Villages would have got a lot of their food from here [Music] our village tomb makers were civil servants supported entirely by the state this lady has baked loaves which have been a day's ration for an ancient Village household of say 8 to 14 people and this was not all the food that the state provided Chicano is it [Music] so our bread was the last delivery really which makes up this display which is really a family's daily ration at the village give or take a little because our records are a bit wobbly but also the Egyptian scribes are because when they talk about Bunches of things they never actually tell you how much is in a bunch what we do know however is the basic ration is bread the old ancient bread and beer I don't expect they got it in liter empties like this the beer they made was made of barley this stuff there was just under four kilos of barley delivered to the Village a day which makes about 10 liters worth of beer do you know there are over 70 sorts of beer in ancient Egypt look much like porridge to start off with I think pretty revolting to our taste but then they added things to it if you wanted to make yourself especially high that day you could add dates with a lot of sugar in or pomegranates to give it another taste I suppose they add those freely too if you really wanted a good heavy beer you can mix it with pure flowing honey was the only substance that the village could actually produced themselves that hives up in the area by the tombs in little cylinders the bees I suppose were buzzed down to other people's fields in the cultivation and come back to make their honey there vegetables of course I always think that Egypt's always had the best vegetables in the world and these are some of their oldest onions well the basic reference for all of ancient Egyptian history is everybody's Spirit begs to be given bread and beer and onions for an offering part of our standard Villages diet of course the fish well we've given a rather a generous Supply here I think on average they seem to have got about half a kilo of fish a day per household not much so you might say then that as regards high protein food this daily diet is a bit short of course it would be supplemented by the cheese down there that sort of goat's cheese now this is not a bad daily diet but then you think that our village has also got meat perhaps on average every third or fourth Day in the year the great feast days of the calendar when herds of animals are driven up to the village for Slaughter these Feasts were really the heart of ancient Egypt the punctuations of the year they were also the core of the religion because if most religions I think you can safely say set out a comfort people to make them feel in a good place in the universe at one with everything the ancient Egyptians went about that not by prayer and thoughtfulness but by doing things like building pyramids an actual concrete link Between Heaven and Earth if you like and by processions processions after all that are the same as the movements of the sun through the sky through the gods through the heavens following the moon going through the Starry Night and these same processions took place here on the ground in Egypt so just as the moon went through the night so the gods of Thieves were taken from Temple to Temple and those were the Great celebrations of the Egyptian Year everybody came to them the villagers all the people of Thebes it must have been incredible like a imperial coronation with regiments of soldiers from all over the Egyptian Empire dancing girls everybody laughing and dancing you see the Egyptians rather like their gods weren't sober and they weren't prudish for instance they brewed a special beer at the time of the festivals and special breads over the time the priests who were carrying the God on a great sort of shrine as they mounted on their shoulders the time they came out they were probably in a pretty Jolly state so you can just see all the thieves here stamping and dancing and shouting in this marvelous exotic display all ostrich feathers gold linen quite an incredible performance so these are the temple butcheries with the with the Priestly butchers carving away to get the offerings ready for the Festival of opiate which of course they get to consume later on you can see them this one's laying on its side so high you see it comes right out to there these are his back legs here tied together and here's his tail at the back this man's attacking his head of course underneath the meat's been prepared it's already on an offering table and there's a priest Fanning away Jenny to keep the flies off of the meat here you can see it's a bit of a further along in the preparation of these offering tables we've got fruit here cuts of meat the priest is pouring wine into a bowl which is later poured over this great massive offerings and here are two priests working away on the final details again the same sorts of offerings with the special bread baked for the festival there and these people here are putting little bowls of fire and amongst the offerings the famous child offerings the Bible all these offerings were given up to the gods to the accompaniment of Music which rose for the temples rather like incense in a Christian Church a sort of medium between man and the gods here you see the temple priestesses they're shaking these magical rattles have the face of the goddess hathoron and the goddess of love and they had little bars of metal across them and when they shook them it made this magical tinkling noise in the temple as well as music of course there's also dancing a few of the dancing girls giving their all for the gods and look how wonderfully the sculpturers drawn the hair and a beautiful natural curve here we're coming up to the sanctuary of the temple and you can see the final and completed offering tables these are sort of side offerings here these are great bundles tied up Papyrus stems tied up with the flowers hanging down and pomegranates and grapes and you see the birds the tongues hanging out they've been throttled and their wings disjointed stop them moving and these would have hung on hooks around the sides of the offering tables along with these beautiful bundles of Papyrus flowers and green leaves Egyptians loved plants this band originally which is hanging from the main offering table here would have had flowers and great necklaces all the way along Egyptians used to wear those too here you see the main detail of a really beautiful offering table with dates pomegranates grapes figs and at the top again bundles of Papyrus and all this exotic mess of food was heaped up and prepared for Ammon in the darkness of his shrine but not all times were good times soon the higher walls of Medina Harbor would shelter our villagers from bands of desert tribesmen [Music] in his youth King Ramesses III at fought hard campaigns and taken thousands of foreign prisoners [Music] after his battles the hands of his Semitic foes and the uncircumcised penises of Barbarian tribesmen would be cut from the dead and Royal scribes will compile lists of their numbers to be presented to the great gods of Thebes but Ramesses III had left thieves to live in the Delta where he and his successors spend most of their time hunting the Wild Marsh bulls and building cool glistening palaces and the Kings took the army with them old Thebes which in Gold years age and indiscretions will be left defenseless it was also being threatened by natural forces slowly almost imperceptibly the Nile was being strangled as the lakes of central Africa dried out and for Egypt the Nile is its life's blood without it there is no life nothing [Music] but this happens slowly so slowly in fact that in the beginning even the peasant that worked the land failed to notice thank you gradually more and more land had to be watered artificially the river had to be carefully parceled out to cover the Earth year by year Nile gave life to less and less much of Egypt's land was slowly dying [Music] the first effects of this were felt in the vast vaulted grain stores at Thebes where stocks began to diminish and for our villagers working in this tomb the tomb of Ramesses III there were lean times who with the government in the Delta a weak bureaucracy now ruled at Thebes month after month as the men worked in this term they saw their standards of living going down the supplies were late in coming nobody seemed to care they complained nobody did anything about it then one day as they came in in the morning their indignation just boiled over and they walked right off the job so all swearing great Oaths as the Papyrus says the men climbed up out of the Valley of the Kings went along this path down towards the Nile Valley and over there to the ramasium where they thought their food was being stored that they should have had where they wanted to Stage a great protest as the Workman came down here on their protest you can't really say they were dizzy with Hunger or anything though they were angry enough to claim they were what if that was going on was that they were a body a professional Craftsman and they felt they were being badly treated they felt the priests were withholding the rations from the temples they felt that authorities sort of forgotten about them that there was nobody to complain to and generally they were being neglected it was really very much like a modern industrial dispute in fact what they were doing was going to the RAM and sea and just sort everybody out the men had walked off the job before they'd never walked down into a temple and they'd certainly never come right into the heart of the temple which is what they were doing this time right into the middle of the ramosium and there they intended to stay the night it was going to be the first sit-in in history it's nice to think of our men coming into this Courtyard angry perhaps a bit at first then as the evening comes on them sitting down a little group in the corner about 50 or 60 of them or murmuring away and passing around the onions and the bread in fact they won in the end they had a few more strikes and slowly the situation got sorted out and their rations went up again never as much as before but enough to keep them going but actually there's something rather more significant than just winning a strike they're also lost a bigger battle because the community split because before in the valley the scribes and the chief of police and all the important men of the village had always been absolutely a one with the community but during this try they hadn't supported the men this was something the men did by themselves and so in a way you can say that it was the first time that there was a class division it opened in the village that never went away [Music] [Music] thank you the Amber Cliffs of Thebes the desert the fringed the capital of ancient Egypt a pitulous place where the men who made the king's tombs were born worked all their lives and died [Music] our villagers were here over three thousand years ago and they're still here in this preserving desert where little changes a landscape filled with fragments of ancient life the ancient Egyptians use these Cliffs like a scribbling pad they wrote all over them they recorded everything on them from coronations to people's deaths and births all sorts of things here it's a very faint inscription now it's gone down gold with age like the whole cliff written with a very practiced hand of a master scribe man called Amma knacked who worked on the Royal tomb and it tells us that he brought three of his sons out here with him youngest sons they were because he had older ones by now already grown up and then act himself would have been 45 50-ish a senior man at the Village indulgently taking the youngest of his large family on a big treat what did they come here for they came to the desert for a most extraordinary thing they came here to see a waterfall [Music] [Music] this is another waterfall and this one's right at the head of the Valley of the Kings right above the Royal tombs it's funny you don't think you're a bit raining much here in the desert do you in fact it doesn't match you only get a few spots a year here but when it does rain in the desert sometimes you get these terrifying electrical storms and then a flood occurs because the rain comes down in buckets hits the driest sand and runs across the surface and of course it could come down off the Sahara anywhere in down is the Nile Valley sometimes of course you can even come down into the Valley of the Kings you get this incredible mass of stones and sand just roaring through here happens in a minute by the way one minute is sun shining here next minute the skies dark pink lightning and boulders are smashing through the valley something the two workers were very very aware of and one terrifying in night but just as well they kept watch because it seems that none of them were hurt when the water came right down here smashing through here gouging these Cliffs tearing the bottom off that Cliff probably knocking over part of the rock there and filling it right up so you get to this level here you see down there some 40 foot lower that's the old floor of the valley the new floor of the valley where the trembling surprise Workman must have come and stood it was just here and this is where they left their names and scratched little pictures of the Gods the great Gods who caused these terrible events they built a new settlement high above the Royal Valley on a little Ridge well out the way of any floods it was much more lavish than anything they'd ever had before and it has the most extraordinary features in it it's Village has no kitchens in it no sellers no larders no charcoal from cooking has ever been found here in fact it's only little places for sitting and sleeping all the cooking we're sent out from the village by the wives down below and do you know we've still got some of the orders the men sent home things that say please send some more beans for my two brothers that have just turned up and I suppose the women would Trot out the path with bowls of steaming food for the men that lived up here it's very odd you know the relationship between men and women in our village women came in several titles it was for example a mistress of the household who was pretty Posh and ran a lot of servants then there were other wives more sort of common law wise I suppose you might call them who went out to work they are called citizenesses by egyptologists they got good divorce settlements The Loft and their marriages broke up after five or six years but they would argue it out and write down a written agreement between the parties and people parted friends and often men and women both circulate around different households in the village but you know the real Crux of the relationship between men and women in this Village is really the emotional one and in that they seem to show an advance on most other communities really up until the last hundred years or so the clue to all this is the love poetry because in the love poetry you can see you can see an inequality of emotion between men and women both sexes fall in love both sexes have strong sexual emotions which are considered right and proper and beautiful and they're expressed in the language of the religion in fact a lover will compare the Beloved in the same way that a man will address his God he will say you have hair of lapis lazuli your perfume goes through me and she will reply in exactly the same strong language I think the love poetry indeed is some of the most beautiful things that our village has given the world because that's where most of it was written [Music] thank you the wild goose soars and swoops it alights on the net many birds swarm about I have work to do I am held fast by my love alone my heart meets your heart beloved of men who rules my heart oh happiness of this hour let the hour go on forever since I have laying with you you raised up my heart be it sad or gay do not leave me my lover is on yonder's side the river is between our bodies the waters are Mighty at flood time a crocodile waits in the shallows I enter the water and brave the waves the crocodile seems like a mouse to me [Music] I found my lover on his bed my heart was overjoyed said I shall not leave you my hand is in your hand you and I shall wander in all the places Fair [Music] none of scribe amanak's daughters would have worked upon the Royal tombs but within the tradition of Hearth and Home village women enjoyed a higher status as is shown in several ancient medical papyrus Egyptian doctors were really interested in women's disorders they had more remedies example for say curing the pain of childbirth or menstrual disorders and they did for digging arrowheads out of people or curing knife wounds in fact I think that is if you just look at that alone it's a very interesting reflection of the care and status of women in Egyptian Society and nowhere is this more true than in the ceremonial that surrounded the act of childbirth and for that the maternity bed was moved into the front room the public room of the house where people normally came together in the evening to sit and talk it was just taken over for the whole Riot that surrounded childbirth first of all the walls were painted out not a bad idea and on them were painted figures of the gods that you associate with childbirth that's toweris with the great round stomach she's a hippopotamus God and little black dwarf called Bess who runs around banging a tambourine and for some reason was a great favorite of pregnant women and then the ancestor Shrine which is in every one of these front rooms was also adapted you see normally this being the shrine there were little figures of the Gods standing along the back wall and these were pushed back two columns of bricks were erected there now the ancient name really for childbirth is on the bricks that's the name for the event of childbirth and that's where the woman sat squatting actually in the most modern position has come right back into fashion I suppose in the last few years and that is where the village lady gave birth to their children right in the public area of the village but in fact they did have some privacy because this was decorated for the event they put two wooden columns up and Garland it all with lotuses and green plants and flowers which people in the desert love so much of course what a sensible Arrangement it was not only were they using the most modern techniques that we use today they were also taking the woman out of the normal environment of the house away from whatever dirt was around and putting her in a different and enclosed place and there she sat for 30 days after childbirth many of these practical household rituals have continued at Thebes to this day our ancient Village held a family whose job was exactly the same as this man's [Music] foreign the mysterious profession of catching snakes and scorpions with a mixture of skill and Magic and in the time of the ancient Village this man would have also been a doctor treating everything from snake bites to ulcers if you look at the medical remedies of course then a modern doctors really put their noses out because they don't actually believe that if you mix up tortoise brains and peppermint oil rub it on your right shoulder it's going to help an ulcer but in fact it might just and I tell you how because it shows a system of caring in the village it shows a way of looking and sympathizing with people if for instance you look at a Papyrus on eyes you'll find it on eye diseases you'll find it has something like 20 or 30 different diagnoses very very careful anybody looking that careful in the eye and cleaning it carefully and worrying about the patient seems to me is part way to a cure ultimately our village was controlled from the other side of the river scribe amanact had to walk down from the desert and cross these fields to the river and catch a ferry to see his boss and at the Landing then as now was a market [Music] and still today many of its goods will be well known to the ancient scribe but today some things are long gone such as the slaves and the brightly painted coffins that the villages made especially for this Market which would be swapped for food and clothes and other luxuries that the state did not supply [Music] on the river these fishermen could well be those of ammonax Village netting the tomb Maker's evening meal hard-working men who had known the Scribe well and would serve his village Faithfully for Generation after generation [Music] as the head man of the village now almost as the patriarch of the village scribe have a knack would have been the one who came across this River many times a week on business for the community that is collecting the food sending back tools picking up the pigments for the pain for use in the Royal tomb this 3000 years ago was an amazing sight because they weren't just these tourist boats there there were the grain box of Ammon the god owned 40 or 50 of them and they went up and down the river bringing in the grain from the fields the great temples there were also more exotic vessels that have come across the Great green which is what the ancient Egyptians called the Mediterranean there have been opium boats from the Mycenaean ports Cedarwood coming in from the Lebanon June of herberries from biblos all sorts of rare and exotic things [Music] oh and at the heart of the great City the vast Temple of Karnak [Music] is today millions are drawn from all over the world to see what the ancient people made but they come to a strange and puzzling place buildings speaking strange tongues in an architectural language the few can understand I wonder how many tourists go away over awed by the Stones yet puzzled by the central mystery in the place what does it all mean where do these doors and Colonnades and pillars and pylons and shrines and dark rooms lead filled with people the place still seems empty veiled [Music] this is the building's heart a small empty room but it provides no clue but there is an intelligence at work here now the important thing to remember about Carnac Temple is that it isn't a church there's no altar no congregation it's the secret house of a god basically this is its geometry it's a great long path that goes from the front door to the innermost recesses of the Temple and from that the first Architects when they plan the temple out through two guidelines same distance apart on each side of the main axis and every building that went on that axis of that Temple every time they built a bit more bigger and bigger and bigger was Guided by those lines that they'd already put down right at a foundation of the temple the distance apart of these lines is controlled by a series that we modernly call the Fibonacci series it's not really so difficult it just means every number in it is the sum of the two previous numbers so it goes one two three three and two five five and three six seven eight etc etc so that these measurements which go in qubits which is the ancient Egyptian measurements about half a half a meter or something goes one cubit two cubits three five and eight and so on now that's a wonderful scheme and it means you can go on building a building in harmony forever and ever however it does mean that in the last stages of the building you're getting very very big sizes indeed so this is why the first pylon is absolutely fast so it follows then that behind the great first pylon is the biggest and newest Courtyard in the Temple of Karnak behind that on the main axis through the Gateway over there is the hyper style Hall [Music] foreign [Music] the most extraordinary one of the bravest ancient monuments in the world and the biggest Hall of pillars ever made 134 of them and it's Brave in a way because these pillars are not set in straight lines like those in Greek temples but they're made like a clump of trees and in fact that's what it's meant to be it's meant to be a huge Papyrus swamp and these great piles of stone meant to represent Papyrus stems swaying gently in the Wind the Egyptians used their wonderful hall for many different things the kings of his ears and the high priests used to hold trials and commissions in here and I'm a knacked The Village scribe used to bring the copper chisels here for resharpening in the temple workshops the most important single function of this Hall was as a processional way for the Gods [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] through the darkest most mysterious part of the temple the walls are coming in the ceiling is coming up the floor is coming down we're coming to the apex of the triangle with the house of the god and all around our God in other little shrines stand small and mysterious shrines of the Gods of Egypt [Music] [Music] unfortunately when he goes to the middle of Karnak to the heart of the Great temple the God's gone and the house where he stood well it's ruined you can't really tell what went on Once Upon a Time only the king of Egypt and his closest delegates came in here and they attended on the figure of Ammon stood here on this Stone it's really difficult to see today but there are other temples in Egypt where you can get some idea of what a God's house looked like and nowhere better than here the best preserved temple in all Egypt the Temple of Horus at edfu so that then standing over there in the Gloom is the very House of the god magnificently cut from one piece of granite burnish like silver standing in a Sandstone room and in that one over there behind two wooden doors one stood the god Horus these houses you see were like the first Hut ever made on the first mound that ever appeared in the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation and in this heart stood Horus the god in a Papyrus swamp and you can still see the Papyrus swamp inside to a [ __ ] as it was who stood in a swamp the swamp was at the dawn of creation Horus was the first bird standing on the first piece of land here in the heart of this Temple every Egyptian temple had a lake of creation and on every Egyptian Temple's Lake each morning there were certain Acts that simulated the creation of the world one of these was to do with our friend here who laid the egg which held yes it did didn't it had the egg which held two things held the atmosphere which separated the Earth from the sky and it held a goose which quacked and made the first sound going crack to make the first sound so we're going to simulate one of these marvelous events that hasn't been done for three thousand years we're going to launch him onto the lake of creation just as they did in Karnak the priest did incarnate 3000 years ago oh mate here we are then we got come on that's it go on down the hole go on come on [Music] foreign [Music] some of our Village's most intimate possessions are encased in the great museums of the world this little room in Turin probably has more recorded Egyptian history in it than any other room in the world these you see are unroll rolls of Papyrus on which the scribes have written here caught records of a royal trial this the oldest map in the world but this Papyrus is the one we've come to see it's a bit of a Tatty Relic the world in it is Magic look at this little head it's an animal playing a double flute it's the Pied Piper of Hamlin underneath is a bird climbing a ladder that's a balmy thing for a bird to do is bird can't fly all the animals in this Papyrus are actually doing strange and insane things this is a modern copy because as you can see the original is a bit Tatty but you can actually work out what's going on here and what you see is this absolutely insane world the donkey a donkey a bad animal being a priest all sorts of weird wonderful things in it now this may look like a comedy but it's no joke it's basically unstable topsy-turvy world and there is another sort of drawing Upon This Strange papyrus they showed 12 couples 12 couples of the villagers making love it's an erotic Papyrus it's the only one that survived extraordinary document think about it what it shows you in this one long thin strip you can divide it down the middle one half is Stressless tenderful loving centerfold if you like no time in it at all the other cycle is mad crazy animals doing weird things it's a it's a religious subconscious you can say you're actually looking right into somebody's mind I can tell you more about that inside of their mind too I can tell you that about five percent of The Village's dreams are concerned with making love how do I know such a thing well we actually have a book of dreams from the village gives you a list of four or five hundred dreams and gives you interpretations so you can say for example that if you dream you're eating crocodile flesh you're going to become a tax inspector if you dream you making love to your wife in public bad bad bad anxiety dream that is so there's a lot of anxiety in their dreams by the way can you imagine 15 of them are about loss of face fear that your words your wouldn't be understood in a village so you've got to think of our villager lying in bed bang as his awful dream he wakes up he's oh my God is a terrible interpretation in the Papyrus what can I do well the Papyrus actually tells you what you can do what you do is you get up you go down to the cellar and you eat a lot of bread and drink a lot of beer and you have a prayer oh God Isis don't let it happen to me and Right Through The Village's most secret thoughts and during their most private acts there was a single God who looked deep into their hearts The Village Oracle was an especially sacred statue of the king Amon Hotel the first man who had founded the village and probably who laid in the first whom the villagers ever made his Shrine was the most revered set High amongst the other temples of the village it was from there that the statue was sometimes carried by the villagers little processions like the great statue of Ammon rayak Karnak looking for instance to the Valley of the Kings there he would be carried over the mountains with all the workmen laughing and singing in front of the statue when they got to the valley they put the god down have a good drink and eat the special cakes they've made good time has had by all and they brought the god back at night it was like a little outing for him but probably the most important function of the God was a sort of a safety valve for the village problems because people used to ask the god questions sometimes for example you'd be taken down the Village High Street and their people will come out of their houses and ask the God who has taken my mat or will my boy get promotion or how long will my father live and that God would answer them and it was on one of these occasions that a sculptor came out of the house and asked the god to find his stolen clothes so the village magician was sent for he walked along in front of the procession as they passed each house he shouted out the name of its owner the house of kaha a house of synergym the house of nepha then slowly the procession moved down this part of the High Street ground or halt here right in front of scribamanak's house must have been a terrifying moment for him after all there was this God accusingly standing outside his front door and he rushed out he addressed the god directly he said these clothes of which you speak did my daughter really take them the God said that she had so you can imagine the rather crestfallen scribe went back inside saw his daughter and together sorted out the clothes and gave them back to the man who'd accused them now we don't actually know whether these clothes were in some sort of a dispute or whether his daughter was a thief that's as far as The Story Goes but how you may ask did God actually manage to say yes or no to anything how did the stone statue move well what really happened was that as the bearer has moved with the god his power came into their shoulders so as they marched down the higher Street in this particular Park the statue pressed down on them so hard they couldn't move when Emma knacked asked his question the answer was indicated by the god nodding backwards and forwards that's how the God delivered his verdict such strange things still happen at Luxor which is a part of ancient Thebes built on it indeed tedemosk over there Mosque of Abu hajjad that's built in amongst The Columns of the Luxor Temple there's many egyptologists would like to know what it says on the text that are buried in the walls of the mosque so they must have been pretty delighted when in about 1935 King Farooq donated the mosque on which I'm standing to hold the remains of the great Saint who was buried in the mosque the strange thing happened when the engineers turned up to move the Saint the old man who'd come from Baghdad to convert all of Luxor to Islam they found that when they approached his tomb to lift his body and bring it to his new mosque they froze they couldn't move it's exactly the same thing that happened when the pallbearers carrying the Oracle went past Emma knack's house they froze too it's exactly the same situation and as the Oracle pointed the finger at Emma knack's daughter so the Old Saint still lies in his tomb the egyptologists are still wondering what's buried underneath it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] when on the neck first became a scribe to work in the Royal tombs the artists were in the doldrums you get the feeling when you look at their work because this is the war was done about that time but they were really knocking it out the life had gone out of the work and that really is the severest test of Egyptian art does the guy look like he's alive does the eye look like it might see you does the arm like it might move well I think if you look at this arm very quickly you'll see that this angle there is so badly drawn it just doesn't articulate properly it doesn't look as if it could ever swing that's because first process in this work was badly done these walls you see were left wide and then the master draftsman came in and Drew the lines that the sculptors were then engraved on the wall the ancient Egyptians described it they said outline draftsman then gravened by chiseled chisels and then colored and that's what you've got here but look the outline draftsman is really not too worried about the King as a living man he's just earning his bread shuffling quickly around the face miserable little lips that you can hardly see a snake that's wobbling around on a little thin stick and isn't really alive an ugly clunking wig all this contrives to turn it into a rubber stamp for us I think I'm not an act himself as a painter and he designed and painted coffins all his life even after he became scribe and you can see his impact in the tombs in the 20 years he worked here in fact together with his sons one of whom became the master color artist he really oversaw Renaissance in the Royal terms so that this poor and miserable and lifeless figure blossomed into the wonderful paintings of the later Kings [Music] foreign [Music] this is probably the only tomb in the Valley of the Kings we can actually see the master draftsman working on a wall it's my favorite tomb in the valley actually is probably one of the greatest tombs of Egyptian art and it's still a bit secret not many people know about this too or it's wonderful drawings so tomb of this man that bashed up here Prince Montague man who was in charge of the royal chariotry but is the artist that are more interesting than the prince here really let's just look at one line so that's how you really get to see the quality of these painters look at this arm here it runs down and then in another color it starts up there again now the artist before he made that line because that line takes second to Second and a half there's thought that this wonderful costume that the prince is wearing is just going to pull slightly on the king's arm so the skin is moved down slightly that's really thinking about it before you make the move you think I want this quality and I want that quality and you have the skill in your arm to be able to do it in one single stroke that's amazing actually it's not just the quality of thought and action because these guys actually had to make their own paints and brushes there were no tubes about in those days so all these lovely colors here were Ground Up on pallets probably several days before they actually came to work in the two they did this old test and it still works for paint today you know you get a little dab of the pain and you put it between two fingernails and you rub your fingernails together and you can feel the grit there it's not ground enough and you have to grind it for another four or five hours when it is ground finely enough and you've left it then you have to let it stand in the water for a couple of days because if you don't when you start drawing these vast long lines here the little brushes that you use just filter the water from the pigment and you're left with a line of water so this is not just incredible skill you're looking at it's also great sophistication and knowledge of your craft and what an amazing sophistication it is too these lions run for feet after feet after feet in one stroke that means that the man actually has control in his arm and his arm muscles almost like a dancer and that's what this brush is doing really is just sort of dancing through the air look at this line down the front of the face here very quick very sharp he knows exactly where he's going and he's got the control from the end of his brush to his arm like a samurai warrior you know I mean you can just do it it's really amazing brush work and he's thinking all the time see these wigs made of wool so to get a nice Edge to describe the texture the artist has mixed a bit more water with his paint he's run it Loosely down the edge and that really has all the textures on the person are described sharp gold necklace the little tassel that wrinkles on it that holds it the tassels of the road it carefully worked out with great thought so as the attention this lucky prince got by his artists here you can see him in a succession of scenes he's worshiping Gods the prince worshiping one God after another down the wall and you know in the end the most amazing thing about this tune is that you can date it so accurately that this Prince is stuck like a flying Amber because these scenes have been going on for thousands of years they are Timeless but this Prince with all these nice new clothes and his great wigs and his special jewelry he comes from 1140 BC exactly [Music] by Monto here copper Chef's time some 20 Kings have been entombed in the Royal Valley it must have been the greatest treasure chest of the ancient world the Fort Knox of its day imagine the incredible wealth gold and precious stones all quarried from the mountains of Egypt re-buried in these Cliffs [Music] gold the very skin of the Gods and there were plenty of thebans and foreigners brave enough to try to rob the dead Kings and not to collect their treasure either but to smash it up and smelt it down ranged against the thieves was a police force before the modern Road was cut the entrance to the Royal Valley looked like this a small stairway leading to a narrow cleft in a rock face and around the closed Valley a ring of little watchtowers looked down upon the Royal tombs the valley was so quiet that any sound a footfall the chisels blown would rise like the whisperings in a cathedral Dome [Music] the Royal tomb stood open to view shut off from the world only by Thin cedar doors but in fact much more guarded these ancient Kings than these snakes spitting their magic Venom at ancient thieves for the police regularly inspected the door seals would have quickly detected a break-in so the robbers had to find other ways into the Royal tombs either made their own tunnels or came in through other doors through old tombs long since empty it was in the very last chamber the old tomb that the robbers found that they had come for was this a pile of chippings on the back of the pilot shittings some plaster and some Stone rudely stuffed into a hole and this hole they knew LED down into a royal tomb beneath them that's where they broke through then the man all tumble down their rope jumped onto the floor of the royal tomb and then of course it was just a short scramble through here down to the doors of the royal burial chamber all that stood between them and the King laying in his burial chamber was a thin Cedarwood door which stood here small seals which they broke threw the door open and the probably frightened Men by now tumble down these steps into the Royal burial chamber in the sentence of the king and around him all the goods of his court I suppose they quickly strip those but the real nut the real pearl of the whole piece was the mummy of the king himself laying inside his sarcophagus so they pushed the lid off and it smashed as it hit the floor and I'm staring on the bits [Music] put the Royal body out tore into the mummy band just stripped all the jewelry from him ripped off the Royal heart scarum took the bracelets from his wrists and all the gold leaves that were down his body threw that to one side discarded took his coffins which were still covered in gold and took them from the tomb to spoil at their leisure [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] was now widespread throughout the ancient cemeteries of Egypt most of the gangs included a Boatman who had Ferry the thieves away from the plunder Graves sometimes Landing them upon an island where they would set fire to their Loot and distribute the melted drops of gold amongst themselves fortunately old scribe Ammon necks had not lived to see the plunder of the royal tombs but his son prescribed harshiri had and he was very worried for some of the robbers were tomb makers members of his own family who lived in the village and although Thebes was a large city it was a tight-knit community gossip spread through it like wildfire it was very difficult to keep secrets in an effort to forestall the arrest of the villagers harshiri Hit Upon a cunning scheme [Music] he would pass off The Village's crime upon other gangs of Tomb robbers so he made an official report to the mayor of Thebes telling that the Royal tombs had been robbed forcing him to investigate a grand committee was convened and crossed the river traveling all around the Myriad Royal cemeteries examining the seals upon the tomb's doors in a two-day inspection the two makers held their breath then the news spread through the temples and into the village they were in the clear we must have sighed with relief but then it was that they made their faithful mistake not knowing scribe harshiri's plan they all piled into fairy bones and crossed the river to confront the mayor the man who they thought had been their accuser in a great Victory celebration so the village is poured down here to the Temple of Karnak down this very path in a great happy mob actually it's really a political expression because they were celebrating the uncomfortable defeat of their accuser the mayor they were out to find his house now for a celebration in front of it well the mayor's house has long gone to dust but certainly was in a few feet of where I'm walking at the moment what we do have and perhaps there's even more remarkable is the record of the exact conversation the pass between him and the angry villagers well they got to the house and there was one hell of a row the mayor came to the door and met them and said you have rejoiced at me over the very door of my house what do you mean by it and the prince of reports to the King by now the villagers were in full flying they said all the kings together with their Royal wives and their Royal mothers and the Royal children who rest in the great and Noble necropolis as the Valley of the Kings are protected and insured forever and ever and now the mayor was very angry because he knew they had been robbing the tombs and he said then your Deeds belay your words and at that moment really they'd sealed their own fate because the mayor was going to get them [Music] the first thing he did was to isolate the village despite all scribe harshera's frantic efforts the donkey trains that brought their food was stopped and the villagers depended upon the state for their food slowly began to start the BDI was fixed on The Villages and their movements were restricted the thieves loot still in the village houses could not now be moved or hidden [Music] and then disaster struck they had a house to house search of the village and they found a lot of gold and silver and as usual they didn't actually arrest the bosses of course but the deputy foreman and three members of each gang and then they brought them in their loot here across the river they imprisoned them in a temple and that is what I'm looking for yeah that's what we've come to see here's the king here's his name is his hands and here a bit bashed up he's a goddess then a hat she wears a feather now this feather is a feather when you die and are called up for judgment goes on one half of a pair of scales just like the scales on the Old Bailey right and on the other side goes your heart with the feather weighs more than your heart the crocodile eats you up and that of course is why the men came here because this is her Temple it's the Temple of Justice the Temple of Mount and this is where they imprisoned the eight villages can you imagine poor old scribe harshiri came across the river and sat probably on this very Stone and looked through the grill from the door Legacy and he looked through the grill and he thinks despite all his efforts they've got them they've got a lot of members of his family really they've got his younger brother and his three sons got an uncle and his three sons the scribes helpless he could do nothing and that evening he goes away and then for 24 days those guys are questioned and they are questioned and lists are made and lists and their arms are twisted because this is not a court of law really they're not actually deciding whether these guys are guilty or innocent what they're doing is trying to get the loot back so that's why they're making these lists all the time and really in the end the terrible Agony they're going through because it is Agony it's pretty badly pretty bad torture end only comes when they've got that money back well what did you do an 1107 BC when you run the pools because that's about what these guys have done they've ripped off a jackpot really when you think they're the foreman I've made about 50 years salary and the other Robbers with him and made about 25 years that's a lot of money together so the lists that they made the confessions are absolutely fascinating if I could cross section of Stephen life really so what did they do with all their loose well they came from a poor Village so with some of it they bought food but after all food was still relatively inexpensive there were lots of other things they could get they went out and bought themselves new linen clothes lovely sandals they brought good strong beer meat cooking oil all sorts of wonderful things and from all the women that are on the records without apparently performing any function you imagine a good deal of wine women and song went on as well [Music] but those days were over now the eight men were taken back across the river but they never went back to their Village probably in the end they were tied to wooden stakes in the desert simply left to die and even after this the villagers were not LED off the hook the vizier saw to it that they had no rations for another three weeks and they starved they one day turned up again in Thebes brought the whole village here to the Valley of the Queens it's going to teach him a lesson at first hand problem to this tomb here the very tomb of the eight men robbed there's this door of course the tomb door looked nice and shut it's nice white seedlings down the front absolutely untouched unrobbed it so seemed because of course if you remember the eight men are gone in the back of the Tomb to rob it so the vizier had the door took down and to nobody's surprise of course the inside was smashed of fragments sarcophagus was in pieces the coffins were smashed up and everything The Villages must look very shame-faced indeed the vizier turned on them and said don't do that again and he let them have their rations because they've been starving now for a long time [Music] but The Village's humiliation did not stop there although the vizier had restored their rations the donkey trains did not come to the Village bringing their food and still starving the villagers walked down from their Village past the great state temples and across the green fields to the vizier State barge was moored at the riverbank [Music] and there they pleaded with him and then and only then he finally relented and gave them bread from his own food stores and ordered them back to work immediately [Music] and in the paintings The Village artists made at this time in the king's tomb something of The Nightmare of those months remains the Royal underworld seems haunted by specters of The Village's own sufferings [Music] thank you [Music] the river and the Sun twin gifts of the gods that supported the civilization of ancient Egypt [Music] from the distant age of the pyramid Builders until the present time the Great River has served as the nation's Highway [Music] in ancient times it was also the main artery of the state carrying both Pharaoh's gilded bark and the state barges that took the Royal grain to our village the village of the craftsmen who made the tombs of the Kings [Music] just imagine that you're in this same place the ancient town of esner just south of Thebes in Upper Egypt three thousand years ago or to be more exact imagine you're here on the 8th of September 1085 BC 2 000 years before the Battle of Hastings you're in a similar boat made of wood perhaps not the iron with a different rigging with a similar sized crew and down in the hold scribbling away at his notes an ancient scribe scribe jut modes the chief man of our village the village of the people that made the Royal tombs he's come to Esna to gather wheat it's a lucky man in a way and head of the village now because a few years earlier the village had been close to starvation now the scribes are themselves going out into the countryside to get their own food to gather their own wheat come to essner to the temple Granary to exact the Royal taxes and he'd come at a wonderful time of year on the higher Nile flood when the river runs straight out to the desert the whole thing glistened like silver a wonderful trip and when he went back with enough wheat to keep him for two months going high on the Wind happy to feed his village again especially happy indeed for a few years earlier this green land the Bread Basket of Thebes and some of the world's most fertile fields had withered and died [Music] for a while the farmers had managed to feed the city from stocks they had gathered in during more plentiful harvests but slowly inexorably famine came to the valley it was as if the desert had come down to the River's Edge and they called it a year of the hyena the man in charge of this terrible time was him the high priest he ruled Thebes he ruled all the thousands of Temple bureaucrats and everybody in fact he was a very important man on this relief for example he appears exactly the same height as the king it's quite subtle because the King has been put on a little plinth but if you actually measure the figures up they're the same height so the high priest has become a really big deal but still being a priest he didn't have an army so when the starvation hit the area in the year of the hyenas when there was really terrifying times at Thebes he had no way of controlling the riots that took place and so somebody was brought in from Nubia the viceroid Nubia came with his black troops up the Nile and took control of Thieves and likely so much he stayed and how do you think we know all this well right through the theban temples runs a fragile thread of History a busted hieroglyphic text on a temple wall of course the temples are covered in these and it really tells you how careful you have to be when you come to places like this you don't run into them or kick them or stand on them or something because these have got hundreds of years of history on these things this one for example only exists in half see these are the lines of the hieroglyphs here and originally there was a block on top above we can get mostly my think out of this these tiny little marks and things and some of them are made by tourist boots but just look at this so I put this mirror here see those signs jumping now perhaps that's where a tourist is going to kick the wall or something like that but if you really look closely sometimes you can see the ancient chisel mouths and we know what sort of chisel marks we're talking about so when you get to a sign right over here on the edge look at that line jump jump up into shape there and that can tell you the difference between the guy coming up from new viewer not coming up from you but it can be that important that's why this sort of work is so interesting might not look much but it's really fast it's better than digging holes in the ground anyway these columns they ran up here of course onto another block we don't have the other block now but very fortunately the guy who worked on this particular wall man who first translated it realized that all this was the copy of an inscription on the base of a statue and so he was able to restore these bits we didn't have but of course there are four unique lines in this text and they're the ones we're interested in and they're over here one two three four five six seven eight eight months from the year of a hyena you know it's the only mention of this and any temple in Egypt see in this inscription this way that's just prayers to Ammon but in that direction is actually the speech of a man from three thousand years ago it's his voice speaking to us on a lump of History and it tells us of the state's collapse of a time of terrible Anarchy poor old Egyptians first of all their high priest is suppressed then the Nubian Viceroy who turned up with his troops to put things right started to settle here it was 10 years of chaos it must have been very hard life but the king settled it he sent his General here to take control and this is his name Britain here Harry Hall don't forget it they're coming back to him because he's a man really who left the biggest mystery of the village I think you might say he was also powerful enough to get his name in a Royal Cartouche powerful enough to to instigate a series of Royal commissions to look at all the terrifying things that happened in the year of the hyena describe jutmos was appointed on the commission that was to investigate the losing of the temples in the year of the hyenas it was a terrible time it was a time when a woman with a small garden of date palms could sell little press blocks of dates for silver was a time when thieves called their loot bread it's not in the modern hip sense of the word but in a very real sense because they were stealing for bread and in the tempo itself jutmost found even more terrible things that happened when Jack moose and the Commissioners investigated what had happened in the temple situation looked even worse see these doorways one's partly plated in gold see these holes along the bottom here probably held the wedges help the gold lay flat on the walls all around here then the center of course would have been two vast cedar doors the wood alone was worth a fortune and would come all the way from the Lebanon after all and the cedar was covered in this case with copper and bronze in great quantity we know that because Jack Moses Commission had a very made a very accurate record of exactly what happened here and what happened was this the junior employees in the temple started slowly presumably as they started to starve slowly to nibble away at the Copper and nobody noticed so they took some more and nobody noticed and they took some more then one day their boss came in and noticed that all the copper was being stripped off the doors and whilst they waited in trepidation he asked for his cut of the loot which they gave him and that of course was the end because Behind These doors that the priest had stripped and sworn into blanks lay the shrines of the Gods and so the priests move in on them these shrines you see will see the boxes covered with a very heavy gold sort of much heavier than a gold leaf really quite heavy stuff and this was what they pulled off stripped away and then the Carpenters came in and saw the planks up it's the end of Egypt although They carried on in this church for a thousand years it was really a re-creation of the original The Original Flower was lost in the year of the hyena [Music] poor scribe jutmos instead of making new monuments he now spent his time investigating and plundering The Works of his forefathers it was a time of disillusion and insecurity and a hard age for his villagers describe jutmos left us no great monuments of his own but he scribbled all over the cliffs here at Thebes this is one of the more extraordinary as he's put the actual date he came here and scratched into the Rock October the 5th 1079 BC that's a date he works out now of course in those days he pre-expressed it year 18 such and such a Time and there's his name describe japmo's and with it he's written four generations of his family right back to great grandfather almond Act of course things are very different and I'm a nice day he was a big man who made big tombs in a rich state most was overseeing the dissolution of all that he was more interested in his family little things memorializing the great relatives that it had in the past our scribe had come to this lonely Valley to check on that Asian Royal tomb behind me and he was particularly interested in it because the generals of his own time didn't want to be buried in the public tombs in the Valley of the Kings we were looking once again at these little remote valleys to put their own secret tombs inside oh with these new rulers and their new style of Tomb would come a different life for the Old Village perhaps this was none too soon by this time Jump Moses ancestors have been varying The Village dead for 500 years in his crumbling Hillside good job Moe's couldn't build himself a tomb like this there was simply no room left above ground and underneath the hillside was like a Swiss cheese brittle with holes the cemetery was simply full up things were just as bad in the village the old houses were getting really decrepited in this one for example the roof collapsed during a brief rainstorm and all the Papyrus rolls that were stored in here was the Village Library was soaked if you go to the BM the British museum or the Louvre and you see the roles of Papyrus today you can see on their backs the sand where the scribes had laid them out here on the ground to dry the walls as you can see are all buckling 25 coats of paint now covered them so it was really time to move there are other reasons too as general Harry Hall who ruled Thebes really needed an independent body of intelligent literate thebans to help him run the place because he didn't really want to get involved with the old power blocks the priests and the army they were really rather discredited in the year of the hyenas the villagers were therefore is perfect choice [Music] family by family they moved down to the enclosure of the Fortress Temple that held the offices of the administration [Music] so the village moved to this part of the temple enclosure at Medina Harbor The Scribe japmo has built himself a magnificent house here these are the ruins of it I'm walking through at the moment much much bigger than anything he'd ever had at the village and quite in keeping with his status is one of the most important men in Upper Egypt actually he was away most of the time and it was his son Buddha Amino actually put out these columns so it was Boo Damon who had himself carved on The Columns of his house at Medina taboo and he really is our last character in all of Village history he was a kind man and a big family he loved his mother and father and he had great reverence for the traditions of Thieves for the Old Kings and temples he lived in a difficult time it was a time when as the generals had given The Village's land so there would be self-sufficient they were all learning to be farmers in a sense it was Squire butaman now you have this unlikely picture of these two makers who haven't touched a farm implement for 500 years rushing around asking Farmers how to plant trees and things but it was quite a hard life poor butaman's wife died in the process and he was very fond of her he wrote her this really very touching letter good to me and my mother and father they have come but you my wife have been taken away from me you who brought the cattle home you who attended to our Fields you who were loaded with all kinds of heavy loads when there was no resting place to put them down oh actually my wife you gracious one as woman wife seems to have made the young Buddha Ammon wise Beyond his years and that perhaps was just as well for the task that now confronted him was grim with scribe jutmose away from Thebes the generals asked his son but almonds were open the tombs in the Valley of the Kings again bututarama would have slithered down this same corridor on the way to inspect the tomb then come to a sudden hold here right on the edge of a 40-foot pit designed amongst other things to stop thieves then he could have looked over the doorway on the other side and there he would have seen the robbers hole the great rope hanging down from me like a tail depressed I expect he threw his own rope down here and crossed crossed to the other side but he probably used the robbers rope to climb up and look still down there the same rope that they all used by the time the buta ramen we got this far into the Royal tomb he must have realized that another King's burial had been robbed [Music] and once again as the end of the royal burial chamber he found the lid of the sarcophagus pushed to one side and then realized with that awful sinking feeling I expect that another king had been robbed and the jewelry torn off his body [Applause] well what would you have done you see boot almond hadn't just found a king that had all his jewelry taken off him the courts have been hacked about all the bandages have been split open [Music] and the two well that had been rendered into fragments it was if somebody like Cromwell perhaps had gone into the Abbey and taught everything to visas with every little item of any value smashed the fragments that was a depressing scene that bhutana had to deal with the statues of the gods are stood around the king in their shrines these have been taken out the arms and legs have been ripped off thrown against the wall everything was stripped everything was Bare everything rendered into useless fragments these for example were simple jars that held grain and even these the thieves went round and smashed them to see if there was anything hidden amongst the grain well what would you have done to save the ancient Kings the three thousand years after Buddha ammon's death no one knew the answer then just over a hundred years ago the truth came to light as a modern villager ahmedab the rasool walked down this mountain track today the frightening path is called Agatha Christie's path after an episode in one of her stories when a criminal uses it as a shortcut to build up a false alibi but his young Ahmed climbed that day he had solved another mystery for across the valley we've spotted a small hole just there in the cleft of sunlight was a recent cave-in and the shrewd Ahmed realized the entrance to an ancient tomb [Music] Ahmed and his brothers had opened one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of all time [Applause] one of the secret vaults where Buddha ammon's Kings had finally been laid to rest a dozen pharaohs in a borrowed tomb [Music] the brothers treated their Treasure Trove with great care visiting it but three times in 10 years and then taking only the richest and most precious of its Treasures to sell to private collectors but with all their care their secret was out and a cat and mouse game developed the whole problem of which museum should house these Royal mummies became a contest between the abrasaur brothers and the professional egyptologists digitologists of course went it for a number of reasons there were certain political advantages from such a great discovery and there was also professional advantages in their career but perhaps most important was the simple fact that pure science demanded they should find the tomb intact and not as handed out bit by bit by the address all Brothers the abrasile brothers on the other hand well their demands were a little less esoteric after all the Turks have been occupying Egypt for a long time and had reduced this part of the country to extreme starvation finding a tomb like this was really finding the Croc of gold and the family held onto their Discovery with a tremendous tenacity the authorities came into this house here and dug up the floor found nothing they threw one of the brothers in prison another they taught is a such an extent he could never walk properly again but in the end the adversals managed to bargain with the authorities by which they did quite well and after about a year of this Dickering and havering backwards and forwards a terrible war of nerves one of the Three Brothers led the Europeans to the ancient Kings of Ben times were very hard and even with their soldiers to guard them the egyptologists were frightened when they came to take the ancient Kings in a great procession like that Thebes had seen many times over the Millennia the ancient Kings all wrapped in Ship Sails for their journey to Cairo were carried back down from the desert and into Thebes again past the Fortress Temple where Buddha Amin had lived through the ruined monuments of the ancient Kings [Music] and there it is said a strange thing happened for as the soldiers and the egyptologists carried off their trophies all the villagers came to watch this strange progress and a great whale like that hurt of the ancient funerals echoed again through the thieben fields through the empty temples and into the desert cemeteries Beyond [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] whilst Buddha Ammon collected ancient Kings his father scribed jutmo sails South on a mission for the generals that ruled Thebes his boat landed at the elephantini the town on the southern border of Egypt its name taken from the strange-shaped granite rocks that seemed to the Ancients to be carved into Stony elephants and there he rode home to his village the start of a remarkable correspondence between father and son that is one of our most Vivid slices of ancient life [Music] started by describing his journey South [Music] I've reached the general he said indeed I found that he sent a boat to meet me I met him at the town of elephantini and there he gave me bread and beer and he said to me May the war god favor you we are going up to Nubia to meet the Rebels the place where they are his letter arrived safely in Buddha Aman's house but can you imagine here in the family home of Thebes the Scribe sitting on his chair here all the family all around him as they sat and tried to write a letter to bolster up the old man's spirits do not go forth to see the fighting they said you have not been taken there as a prisoner or press ganged you have been taken South in order that advice may be thought of you stay in the bottom of the boat protect yourself against the arrows and Spears you were not to abandon us all for you know that you are the father of us all and as soon as my letter reaches you please write me a letter in your handwriting that I may know you are still alive the sun must have been greatly reassured by his father's next letter because it contained all that marvelous individual mix of compassion and irritableness that he must have known so well by this time now by the way that old man was deep in Nubia he was praying to strange Gods he says at the top of his letter I tell every day satis and a new kiss to cause you to live and to be in health not the old gods of Thebes then goes on to give his son an order rather a sad order the generalists said to me cause the men to work on the spears you to give the copper Smiths The Village chisels and have them made into Spears in other words the tools which the villagers traditionally used in the Royal tombs are now to be used for armaments in many ways that's the end of The Village Life and then a pure blast of his old dad why do you not write to me and tell me what is in your heart he says do not cease writing to me buddhama must have smiled a bit when he got his father's impatient letter but he replied in good enough heart now the children are all right your wife and daughter will write no harm has come to them all your people are alive prospering and healthy then he went on to discuss some business some Spears that got lost that he'd sent to his father with the troops and some bandages too indeed the campaign has started so quickly that even the general had left his clothes behind on when he got on the boat at the end of the letter he made a usual prayer now he said I am praying to the Ammon of our old village I'm standing in his open court daily unweakening praying that soon we may fill our Embrace with you again the scribe's last letters from Nubia were written in a deserted Fort next to a closed gold mine a long way from anywhere I tell the Horus of Cuban he said this strange neglected place to bring me back alive from yah now yah's a strange name if you look at Egyptian letters you'll find it can be anywhere it can be in Egypt Syria Nubia just about anywhere one egyptologist has suggested the true meaning I think and that is hell hole a really awful place it goes on the Scribe goes on I'm abandoned in this far off land and cannot fill my Embrace with you when your letter reached me my heart became alive my eyes opened and I raised my head whereas I had been ill but now I'm all right again and then he goes on with the normal thoughts of Village business give your attention to the donkeys the men who are in the fields and pray to Ammon to bring me back alive [Music] sadly the old scribe didn't live long after he wrote that letter we don't know whether we return to Thebes or not certainly died about that time and was buried in the family vault but the desert village the sand was now slowly covering the houses the rooms where the tomb makers and their families sat and laughed together in the evening light were being sealed in to be carefully excavated three thousand years later [Applause] [Music] no longer would the villagers climb up from their houses to the cemetery and leave offerings for their ancestors [Music] no more would the villagers like the little candles in a ghostly Halloween to guide The Souls of their ancient dead back from their pilgrimage to the city of Osiris [Music] even the records of Buddha Ammon and his family suddenly stop and then as the villagers completely disappear we suddenly realize how fragile has been this link with these ancient lives by happy chance however Buddha ammon's own coffin has been preserved final product of this Village of master painters who made some of Egypt's finest monuments and can proudly stand beside the best draftsman of any age [Music] scribe himself painted some of this images of the royal tombs now decorating the coffins of a humble scribe foreign [Music] smile holds in it perhaps a hint of a final extraordinary mystery remember Harry horn is Cartouche the man who left us with a mystery because the villagers buried him but we've never found his tomb come to that the village buried two of his successes and we haven't found their tombs either [Music] and we know that they are still in their tombs and still probably unplundered surrounded by all the treasures of their burial for not one piece of hairy horse tomb has ever been found unlike other monarchs who are now in museums though their tombs are still unknown [Music] now in Harry Hall's day the Valley of the Kings lay robbed and opened no king would have ever been buried there we may assume then that the general rests in other Cliffs buried far away from the old cemeteries by Buddha Ammon and his villagers [Music] a Congregation of Clues has led me into these distant valleys [Music] these ancient paths for one beautifully made and well-designed range mile after mile into the Desert Hills often rising up through sheer Cliffs by means of hidden staircases that are cut into the clefts in the rock face [Music] [Music] [Music] five and even 10 miles from food and water the paths run on and on leading sometimes to ancient settlements shelters for people in a hard environment usually inhabited only by scorpions snakes and crows judging by the pottery that still lies all around them settlement dates to the age of our villages [Music] what then was happening here well another man was also puzzled by these strange signs of ancient life and he spent month after month walking through these Hills [Applause] hmm there he is Howard Carter 1916 six years before he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun if you want to ever see anything interesting in these waddies look for that name because the chances are Howard Carter got there before you the first man ever to look in these desolate distant places when all the other archaeologists are working down in the big temples he was in these lonely desert valleys Looking for Royal tombs he really hit a jackpot because on this wall is a really massive inscription you can't see it's rather difficult to see but because it's scratched very faintly but it's here in great long lines of text what it tells us is that in a certain day in January 1057 BC describe buta Ramen our old friend came out here to look in the mountains the next sign where there were coffins left somebody reported that there were coffins laying around out here in the mountains Buddha Ammon came up here with a group of men for five or six days now what on Earth was a royal scribe such as senior man doing in such a desolate place well the answer as how a Carter discovered lies just over this Ridge that tomb is the reason why Carter was scouring these Woodies the tomb of Queen hatshop suit and he's credited as being the discoverer of it or Lord carnarvon is he wasn't even in Egypt at the time let me tell you the whole story because it's one really on which the sun will never set a perfect Empire yarn Carter was sitting in his house one night and his servant came and told him that eight men were robbing a tomb high in the mountains so Carter set out with his own rope by midnight it's on the top of that Cliff over there looking down the side he couldn't see anything it was a pitch black but he could hear voices murmuring way down and he saw a rope hanging down with the side of the Tomb so he cut the rope put up his own and then climbed down it into the darkness into the night an extraordinary thing to do all the extraordinary confidence those people had so climbed down into the tomb and then as he puts it there was an awkward moment you can imagine it going to the Englishman standing there in his in his job prison I amazed local people wondering what the hell was going to happen next so a few sentences pass between them and as Carter said they saw a reason and scrambled off his rope and ran off into the dark and Carter it was then who was left as king of the Tomb so let's recap what led us into this distant Valley was These Old Paths strange settlement The Rock inscription of scribe butter Ammon himself and then at The Valleys ending a royal tomb in the next Valley the same pattern repeats itself buteraman was there Howard Carter excavated these deep pits and he also found this tomb where a princess had been buried but sadly it had been ruined long before Carter's day and in the next Valley too the pattern is again to be found here hidden deep in this cleft was a tomb cut for Three Princesses and this has provided much of the splendid ancient gold in New York's Metropolitan Museum [Music] this entire network of valleys is filled with the same Clues and these repeat themselves in the same pattern one after another clearly the two makers labored long and hard in this distant place for hundreds of years right up to the time of King Ariel [Music] and that's why I believe that the search of the Lost tombs should be continued in these valleys [Music] let me show you what I look for well I'm especially interested in these deep cracks for example that run right down into the valley floor [Music] one of the real giveaways for finding one of these tombs is this great crack because a lot of the ancient tomb makers use these cracks as one wall of the shaft which they would dig down into the ground then of course when they dug the tomb they would put some plaster over the top of it these cracks which were made by being waterfalls would fill up again with that sort of debris there and cover the tomb completely so it would absolutely vanish but the most important clue the one that really tells you this is a tomb is on this wall over here because this piece of wool here has been chiseled Away by a man using a flint ax dog it's quite obvious when you come to see it first of all along the edge here you can see the bashes that the Flint's made see one two three four five boom boom boom and you know that's not natural because you can see the Grain in this rock look here on this Edge where it really bashed it away it's chipped off lumps going that way so this rock is actually the Grain in this rock it's like a sandwich and this guy's been cutting the end off it could never naturally go like that sort of service in a hundred thousand years it couldn't go like that so all this here has been smoothed off naturally by a man and then here of course well that little thing's a foot Mark foot hold for the man to go down into the tomb so having proved that this is man-made that we've got a nice big hole beneath us this is the tune for going into and I must say whenever I do go into these tombs I always leave my hat at the top so people know where I am stuck in a tomb like this blooming hours I'll ask it now somebody had to come and lift me off in the end it was terrible idea oh dear full up oh my God well still full up nobody's been down there in a long time and that I think is the bottom the large water jar perhaps in the burial perhaps and the people who made the tomb certainly it's from the same time as the tomb about 1500 BC but that's some 500 years too early for Harry Hall so I have concentrated my search in an even more remote Valley foreign let me show you why here's our man again Howard Carter 1916. it's a very busy year he must have been rushing about all over the place excited enough to write his name here well start with somebody else has written the name here a few years before him Buddha Ammon our Royal scribe was here A Thousand Years BC he buried Kings but the most important clue on this rock and even nearer to how Carter's own name the name of the priest king Harry Hall remember him the man who built the temple in Karnak well his tomb's never been found there is papyrus in Vienna which actually talks about building it archaeologists assume it's somewhere around here I think Carter had a pretty good idea where it was which is why of course he dug so many holes here looking for a buried tomb spurred on no doubt by these rationalists of ancient workmen and inscriptions and tell us of Royal tombs [Music] but the biggest clue of all in this desolate place is this non-descript heap of rubble this Hillside might just look like a crummy heap of rock but it's actually far more than that you see these sort of stones these type of chippings really don't occur naturally they're made by a man banging at a rock hopefully of course making a tomb in this case the extraordinary thing about this Hillside too is that we can tell almost how old it is and that's because of its color you see these beautiful amber rocks around us get this way because of particles of clay that are brought here in the wind it's ordinary white Limestone just let it get on the south downs but it's Stained It's almost like a suntan this beautiful brown color and that's of course is what you can see here now that takes two or three thousand years to build up but if we yank out one of these rocks you can see there Pure White underneath our Rock's been there a long time and it's been cut by man so Carter comes to this empty Valley full of its inscriptions and they're in the middle is a huge pile of rocks which from his experience in the Valley of the Kings look just like toon shippings what was he to think well for the answer to that you have to turn to his laundry list he's a busy man and scribbled away on anything you could find and on this list under items that say he's got to pay his house boy and buy some raspberry jam we find a list of the things he found in this Valley now we found fragments of wood that is bits of scaffolding and things like this he found bits of rope very handy for moving things he found charcoal from the men's cooking the most important thing of all was he found something which he called a boss from a sarcophagus in fact he found four of them now these sarcophagiar bosses these are rather interesting things these are left by the people who cut the sarcophaga guy from The Rock standing out from the main shave of the sarcophagus they're very useful when you're moving these big heavy things through the landscape now something to tie the rope on to like big knobs of course when you put them in the Tomb you then cut them off so the sides are left nice and smooth because we never found the sarcophagus but Carter found four bosses in this very Valley so what an immense amount of evidence is here the pathways leading to the site the men's houses the inscriptions that mention the tomb chippings that come from a tomb fairly obvious isn't it somewhere in this great circle of cliffs lies at least one king silent in an unplundered tomb [Music] foreign searching out ancient Clues and perhaps even the tomb itself perhaps isolated here on a sheer cliff perhaps like Carter's hidden deep in a rocky cleft thank you it's a long and arduous business eventually the entire Valley must be mapped and every little text every small piece of evidence hunted down and carefully evaluated [Music] evidence like this faint ancient path running diagonally across your screen a path incidentally that leads straight to the bottom of this Rocky cleft oh it's a good one nobody's been around here for a long time nobody's dug it no later things no pots could be quite a good one [Applause] Goodness Me well this is it the end of the line the end of the ancient road too I didn't expect to see great gold pot sticking out the ground or huge shining white door with a royal necropolis seal stamped in the middle of it I tell you why because I came up that great screw of rock and that's come down from the chimney quite recently in the last few centuries brought down by the bats that live up there and the water that's washed down through here so actually about 10 feet above any ancient level that's in here still you can sometimes find something to look at around here some little Mark some ancient chisel knot perhaps because you see the ancient basins often smooth the rock up for several meters above tomb doors sometimes they left little dots of red okra about the place there's nothing here though another mark but nonetheless this is a very good place this is absolutely virgin sight I mean there's been no Christian hermit has ever lived here how a car has not dug the place about it's absolutely untouched except by a few bats and the rocks that have come down from above so it could well be that as a kin just a few feet under me extraordinary isn't it they tell you there are about 14 of these in this body one day I want to come back and dig them out can you imagine what it would be like if we found a king and you see us there have all the archaeological Arc lights around the door and slowly go into the burial of a king and then suddenly because you're involved in a archaeological ritual you're joining on again to The Villages because they had their rituals old boot Ramen when he put the king in the coffin he was doing it to an order and then we'll be taking it out to an order the two of us if you like or the people of today and the people of the past which is better we'll be joining together over thousands of years in a single tremendous ritual [Music] [Music]

Channel: Our History

Views: 1,541,700

Keywords: our history, documentary, world history documentary, documentary channel, award winning, life stories, best documentaries, daily life, real world, point of view, story, full documentary, history, historical, history documentary, ancient egypt, egypt, ancient history

Id: XslP4H179SA

Length: 197min 15sec (11835 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023