The Mysterious Black Mummy (Ancient Egypt Documentary) | Timeline

a rock shelter in the Libyan desert the site of an unprecedented discovery a tiny mummified child until the moment he was unearthed everyone thought the Egyptians had invented mummification in Africa but this discovery led dr. Savino to learn eeeh and his team to develop a new theory which challenges everything we thought we knew about ancient Egypt mummification knowledge wasn't born in Egypt but in another place in another culture in another part of the history of the Africa well were these people where did they come from how did they achieve this incredible high standard of mummification at such an early date and unknown people mummifying their dead long before the Egyptians this child would prove to be the key to unlocking a long-lost African culture the Sahara this is the largest desert in the world it's also one of the hottest places on earth and one of the most remote Italian archaeologist dr. Savino to learning at the University of Rome has been driving for two days his destination is the a caucus mountains in southwestern Libya it's a North African country to the west is Algeria to the east Egypt this inhospitable terrain has driven away all but a handful of Tuareg nomads but it was once home to our family who mummified their child year after year Sabina returns to this majestic landscape hoping to uncover its secrets [Music] it all began 40 years ago with the discovery of the little mummified boy gwandma who judge he took his name from the rock shelter where he was found it has taken Savino and his colleagues decades to reveal the full significance of this discovery I think that Mommy and the rock shelter really started the archaeological and historical reconstruction of the ancient civilizations here in the Sahara we think of Libya's population today as largely middle-eastern yet the team still believed that thousands of years ago this area was inhabited by black Africans from the south but apart from some rock art depicting black hunters archaeologists had no proof of this the discovery of the mummy changed all and the significance of the black mummies we have the first evidence of black people in the area that it was supposed to be but we hadn't heard evidence of this this was the beginning of an extraordinary quest that would ultimately reveal an unknown African culture [Music] the wonwoo who judge rock shelter is a simple place a ledge just wide enough to provide shade from the midday Sun Savino has returned to the rock shelter where he meets Tuareg tribesman mr. Ramadani who witnessed the discovery of the mummy they focus on one small area the place where savino's predecessor professor Mori actually found the mummies it was already visible because it was partially brought light by natural erosion so we have to to major that the the exact position of the of the worm holders mommy should be somewhere just here when a small sack came to light no one was prepared for what it contained they open this sack and they found a mommy inside so it was really amazing soon after he died this young boy was put in a fetal position then embalm dand placed in a sack made of antelope skin the sack was then insulated by a layer of leaves this careful preparation protected his small body from the elements for the next five and a half thousand years the Italian archaeologists knew they had found important evidence it wasn't just the apparent colour of the Mummy's skin it was the shape of his skull which suggested he was black and if he was this could rewrite the history of mummification in Africa they needed to be sure after a tortuous 10-day camel journey to the nearest town with their fragile cargo the team returned to Rome to have the mummy analyzed dr. Georgiou Manzi of the University of Rome is the world's foremost expert on human remains in Libya and his department boasts an impressive collection of Libyan skulls the reason why the members of the Italian team in the 50s inferred that the child was a black child a Negro child is mainly a consideration of his face especially the length here of the root of the nose also here the moving forward of the mouth examination of the mummy's teeth also revealed his age at death when the Italian team first examined the were mood child they look at the teeth and found that it was very young especially using x-rays it was easy to determine the exact age looking at teeth still in the bone in the Ovilus so the team had established that Juan Maharaj was a black two and a half year old boy but it was the results of the carbon-dating which were so amazing Quan Maharaj was five thousand five hundred years old this made him the oldest black mummy ever found in Africa but where did he come from who had mummified this boy a thousand years before the Egyptians supposedly invented mummification in Africa the origins of the five and a half thousand year old black mummy were a mystery to find out more about the boy Sabina returns to the Tripoli Museum where the mummy now rests Effendi the most impressive evidence of mummification is the skin on the school you can see all around the school is gain of a child you can see here just in the longest pine and ribcage we have a lot of skin which is really very very to be found you see here the remains of this organic matter this is really the remains of the true into of the mummy it's impossible to find this kind of evidence without the process of mummification another point is the first act of mummification i esteem is a cat along the stomach and the removal of building tears and probably they put some to him an organic matter just to stop any kind of bacterial activity inside as much as Egyptians didn't deny Bali Varma who charge was mummified in a sophisticated way using a process called evisceration this means that incisions were made along his stomach and thorax then his organs were removed an organic preservative inserted to stop his body from decomposing as the oldest eviscerated mummy ever found in africa gwandma who judge suddenly found himself on the world stage academics like mummy expert and Egyptologist dr. Jo Ann Fletcher were intrigued I first became interested in the black mummy around probably around 15 years ago with the publication of a major work on mummification all over the world the key point of interest in the mommy it's a fact that it's been eviscerated the internal organs have been removed from the chest from the thorax and of course from the abdomen and because of this very sophisticated form of evisceration what we have is essentially the earliest form of complete mummification yet found in Africa and it's interesting that everybody always goes to Egypt is the home of Mora fication and yet in fact from the dates of the black mummy there's certainly nothing like that going on in Egypt at that time so my question to myself was did this black mummy in any way contribute to the later Egyptian practice of complete mummification or did the two traditions develop independently [Music] popular tradition hazard that Egypt is the only ancient civilization in Africa it's art and religion were renowned and according to the Orthodox view it was definitely the home of African mummification but there are those who believe that the black mummy is challenging this established school of thought professor David Mattingly specializes in siharan civilizations what a mummy has discovered somewhere in the central Sahara it's perhaps not surprising that the average person in the street might assume the direct involvement of Egypt somewhere in in this process and I think it's a common image that Egypt is like a searchlight shining out illuminating those dark spaces of the Sahara and yet one Maheu church was artificially mummified fifteen hundred miles to the west of the Nile Valley and a thousand years before the Egyptians were eviscerating their dead was it possible that mummification in Africa began in the central Sahara are not in Egypt and if the Egyptians didn't prepare the black mummy who did it really does beg the question who on earth could achieve such a remarkably preserved corpse I mean who were these people that could do this I mean I personally know very little about them so where did they come from how did they achieve this incredible high standard of mummification at such an early date [Music] [Applause] [Music] finding out more about these people and their culture is exactly what Savino Dalarna has been doing for the past 12 years his search for answers began in the rock shelter of Varma who judge we're careful excavations have yielded vital clues there here deem all the history of the one who taught occupation this charcoal the remains of a fireplace probably four thousand years ago five thousand up to six thousand years ago which is the one hood judge time and this was the ancient floor of the same age of the one who does mommy and you still have the gold dropping the fact is that during one maja judge Veera the most important part of their life was cattle this seem surprising cattle don't live in deserts but they features strongly and rock out throughout the a caucus mountains more than 50 percent of the paintings from the one watered period we are cut so this really explained the importance of this animal 6000 years ago [Music] cattle and goats one mA who judges people were evidently animal herders but how could they survive in this desert the remains of a simple plant provided the first clue that the home of wonwoo who judge once looked very different viewing the team the one who just Hira more than five thousand years ago five thousand five hundred years ago we have here evidence of Poland from tithi plans which are plants really very water demanding Tifa plant still exists in the region but they thrive only in oasis where water is abundant so could this whole area of once been lush savanna it was time for the climatologists to provide some answers one of NASA's satellites brought the Sahara to the attention of dr. Kevin white he now heads a team at Reading University which uses the latest technology to study ancient environments NASA scientists were looking at images of the Western Desert as an analogy of their studies of the Martian surface and they were looking at it with using radar instruments and comparing those with more conventional satellite images and they discovered a whole series of buried river networks underneath what is now a sand sheet the radar penetrated the desert surface to reveal an ancient system of river channels that once fed into vast lakes these lakes dried up long ago and are now what the scientists call paleo lakes Kevin white is using this technique to uncover similar channels in Libya's central Sahara but it is the Paleo lake sediment that Kevin is most interested in because it tells the story of the past lake sediments tend to capture a lot of information about what was going on in surrounding slaves and surrounding landscape and we can start to reconstruct vegetation communities we can start to reconstruct something of the the hydrology the nature of the water and we also get a fossil record which can be useful in some circumstances but as you can see it's a bit of a difficult place to get into to reconstruct these climates the team needs to collect field samples for analysis Kevin's colleague dr. Nick Brooks is planning a trip to Libya using satellite maps this is a difficult bit up here up over that dune there over this way and then there's definitely a gap through there so this is easy just one more little dudes get over there then you've reached this area means the three that gap there I guess over that's on the country if you can get up to this point here then it's just downhill really that'll be a slip place there we know people were living here round about the time of why I'm a huge judge because we found pottery and stone tools from around that period what I'm actually looking for is things like organic lake deposit so we can radiocarbon date then we can also date things like snail shells and freshwater snails that we know must have lived in a wet environment we can date animal bone if we can find bones of things like elephants and rhinoceros and crocodiles and fish even that would be fantastic Nick and Savino are colleagues they're heading for a dry riverbed a few hours from a farmer who jazz-rock shelter could the evidence of this site prove this area once looked very different so what was your favorite out of the whole the whole suite of engravings we brought up in Masson dish my favorite one actually is the cup like figures [Music] Matan douche is one of the most famous rock out sites in Africa can see the divine on your upside down with the two human figures still the some kind of box it's a lot of animals there is the elephant and two or three giraffes with a lot of superimpositions yeah it's quite complex rise EDT draff is really impressive that's very well it's nice but it's still pretty good yes and the three hair forced kept apply figures over there and my favorite is the one in the corner just really it's I think it must be so rough hard candy what am I then do share reality we find the drops night is down here it looks like it hasn't gone far [Music] enigmatic figure yeah [Music] yep let's go the aalayam ribcage the back is quite quite evident all the animals depicted here live only in savannas but it was the next copy that completed the picture for Nick one of the most famous is the representation of a crocodile with a wild form style which is believed to be the oldest style of rock arty and what a maddened oh Sh it's really spectacular and we know that things like elephants and giraffes and some of the other big animals can live in quite dry environments not as dry as we've quite here today yeah but this is really the final proof this this was a river you need crocodiles don't live in arid environment so looking at the carvings on the rock face here we can with a bit of imagination speculate about what the landscape would have been like what would been going on we'd probably be standing at the water's edge here maybe when it was a seasonal River or something we have maybe some hippos down here in the shallows this probably would have been a dangerous place to stand because pure to have crocodiles coming coming out of the water onto their backs a lot of animals so why the animals just just please perhaps elephants coming down to the water [Applause] over there we would have had a Savannah landscape and I saw a lion on the rock carving so perhaps he would have had Lions hunting the giraffe and hunting gazelles or whatever as well as the people that were here hunting the animals it's a it's a piece of African landscape just like you'd see in southern Africa today but isn't barbed by or Tanzania or Kenya today but some parts of those [Music] conjuring up the image of this Garden of Eden in the Sahara today takes a lot of imagination but it is still possible to experience what an ancient lake was like even in the middle of the desert Gaborone is one of a handful of oases left in the Sahara and it gives us a glimpse of the environment during the time of gwandma who judged the black mummy growing around the edge of the lake our living fossils that take us straight back in time is exactly the vegetation we found in rock shelter we actually found the pollen grains in the excavation there are 5,500 years old so it's exactly the same vegetation so this means that at the time of one more just mummy we had this kind of plan so this kind of environment so it means a lot of water armed with samples Nick returned to England his results will not only complete the picture of this ancient Saharan landscape but they would ultimately help answer a much greater question about the origins of ancient Egypt itself dr. NIC Brooks and the climate team at Reading University has spent years collecting samples in the Libyan desert analysis of their data has given them enough information to produce an environmental modern going back ten thousand years let's give it a try the lakes reconstructed according to our field data so we're going right quite deeply into the sand it's easier flying over in than driving let's look about you're on here the model takes us back from the arid present-day through the time of Juan ma who judge to when the Saharan climate changed dramatically covering the dunes with vegetation and telling the valleys into lakes it all happened 10,000 years ago when a shift in the Earth's axis caused the tropical monsoons to penetrate right into the central Sahara and with these rains came the ancestors of gwandma huge 20,000 years ago humans black humans coming from the south following the monsoon Belt occupy the central range of the Sahara this led to the first occupation of the central Sahara and we have these black people in the center ranges in the article's mountains and in the immediate surroundings and they were not the only ones around seven thousand years ago people from Mesopotamia and Palestine arrived introducing cattle and goats into the central Sahara so we can we can imagine that the center of Sahara the ethicist Mountains has been one of the first word melting pot because we have black people coming from the south and and say something like white people coming from the Near East and probably Eastern Sierra today in Libya you can see the legacy of this early melting pot walking in the streets of present-day Libya I'm always struck by the incredible diversity of humanity that that one encounters and there were flakes broadly the sort of crossroads position of Libya within the Mediterranean with its siharan hinterland there's been a great melting pot throughout its history but what's really surprising is how far back in time that goes this intermingling of white Mediterranean types with negroids harmon types and that we can see very clearly from this work in the central Sahara this ethnic diversity explains some intriguing rock art that initially puzzled Savino the face of this people are not black as one more huge but they are white and you can see this looking at it profile of the face and to the style [Music] it is this mixed race culture which mummified one movie judge but what kind of society did this young boy living we should imagine that we have here probably four five families 25 30 40 people living here they used round huts each family is probably two or three cows and family and 15 goats rivers trees bushes really it was a different environment and their time their time to stay here and and people sitting down and prepare things you have to imagine that these people had to meet him to discuss and able to claim rights over hand pastures and water so it means social obligations it means cultural rules and I think that Dean be the one who taught mommy is really a piece a very important a very important piece of this evidence but what else can the black mummy tell us about this society one important clue is the ostrich egg shell necklace that he was still wearing unbroken when he was first discovered we still have some few beads on that face of ostrich egg shows in ancient societies the inclusion of grave Goods indicated ritual and ceremony and the mummification process suggested something else even though wonwoo who judge is the only complete Saharan mummy ever found these people have been mummifying their dead for hundreds if not thousands of years before the boy died now this is a really sophisticated form of mummification and it wouldn't have just appeared from out of nowhere the black mummy is obviously almost the end result of a very complex development in this very highly skilled procedure but why was this young boy mummified was it because he was special the familiar one more that we can say was not particularly rich or particularly powerful the fact is that this kind of possible society were quite egalitarian in their social organization the fact that this is a very small child that's been when we find with a great deal of care and attention suggests that this is a society which doesn't necessarily judge individuals by their achievements so the fact that people were obviously mummifying those in society who are frequently regarded as as the least important the children presumably in the hope that they would live again in some form of afterlife can I think tell us a great deal about their was responsible there's obviously a great deal of compassion and love that would have gone into such a procedure and a desire perhaps to keep the dead child with one at all times but it was the date Ranma who charged was mummified that raised the key question did mummification in Africa begin here in the central Sahara we have here Lee in this very place the oldest mummy natheless more than five thousand years old and is at least 1,000 years older than the Egyptian mummies so this means that the mummification process the mummification knowledge wasn't born in Egypt and we have here the first evidence of this so this really very tempting to suggest some kind of say movement or some kind of circulation of ideas from central Sahara spraying spreading out up to the Nile Valley so it is really tempting to do this but as ecologist I need hard evidence to do this Savino knew that many of the descendants of the black mummy had been forced to move out of the central Sahara just 500 years after his death the environmental work had confirmed another dramatic climatic change around 5,000 years ago returning the Sahara to its present arid State the gentler climate of the Nile Valley beckoned could wonwoo who judges people have ended up moving east and taking their mummification knowledge with them and if so did these Central Saharan people bring any other rituals into the Nile Valley [Music] the archaeologists began to look for other traditions shared by both cultures [Music] observe Ino search led him on a journey of expiration all over the Libyan Sahara his quest took years I'm looking for again [Music] but eventually he found his first clue it was an unremarkable pile of rocks on a boulder-strewn plane called the Mossad just 60 miles from the Juan Mata Church rock shelter it was like finding a needle in a haystack Savino had stumbled onto a mysterious circular monument which would prove that cattle held a ritual significance in the lives of the Saharan people it included bloody ritual slaughter here was evidence of a cattle cult the engraving of this cattle when I discover it told me that probably this monument had something to deal with the cattle cult and so I decided to excavate this circular monument and we found the bones and charcoal of cattle so this was the really the very first hard evidence archaeological evidence of a some kind of ritual connected to the cattle cult cattle bones dated around the time of Juan moo-hoo church were buried in a circular stone monument with a diameter of almost 10 feet and pottery was left as ritual offerings but the burial was only part of savino's discovery in a stone circle next to the grave he found the slaughter area what is attempting to suggest that probably the the cow which the cow has been actually killed here and probably people prepare the cat or the shoulder meat and after they they made some holy fire to to start with their ritual and after that they just bring a small part of bones and they put a part of this boss just inside this monument and another small part just at the base of the engraver the slab the whole evidence is some people bring the animal you're not really attend sharing their meat and after putting the devil's here Savino believes these people were praying for rain they sacrificed what was most precious to them their cattle and cattle rituals would play an important role in the Egypt of the Nile Valley the discovery of the ritual areas for the slaughter of sacred cattle in Libya in these saharan cultures very much puts me in mind of later practices in fur on aqui gypped whereby cattle were ritually slaughtered within the temple precincts and then offered as the sacred offering on a daily basis to the the gods in question not only that but during the funerary cult of the deceased where human mummies were buried in tombs the sort of high points of the funeral Rite was to sever the four leg of a cow and while it was still quivering with life offer it to the mouths of the deceased in order to transfer the life which still could be seen twitching in this severed limb this will be then transferred into the body of the deceased human with the hope the fervent hope that these people would then live again in the afterlife and so you have cattle used as a means to transfer sacred power sacred knowledge sacred energy if you like into deceased humans and so you have this sort of symbiotic relationship between human and animal that's very clear in pharaonic Egypt and as we're seeing in in the Saharan cultures equally clear further west so the Egyptian idea that cattle provided a channel between humans and gods was not a new one in fact the cattle count had been present in the central Sahara for thousands of years before it reached its zenith in the Nile Valley it's quite tempting to suggest that some kind of relationship actually should exist between this important huge cultural readiness of catapult in the Sahara and the rise of catapult in the Egyptian analogy I think is quite is quite quite likely [Music] Savino had established that like in Egypt both mummification and cattle cults were central to this Saharan Society and then in a dry Wadi less than a mile from the cattle monuments he found something even more conclusive the engraving of an animal-headed figure most exciting subject of this engraving is shiridi dog mask this kind of human beings are actually one of the most important subjects to represent in the indian massage area we can understand the age of the grieving from the column which is very black it means very very old what is the relevance of this kind of dating from these engravings is that the the presence of human beings masks bearing and in this case we have dog mask is much older than the kind of evidence we have in the nile valley although organic matter in the crevices of the engraving was carbon dated to five thousand six hundred years savino believes this carving could be as much as a thousand years older I find it very interesting that these animal headed human figures exist outside of Egypt at such an incredibly early date and then later in veronik culture you find exactly the same motifs repeated in the very sophisticated Egyptian art form the Egyptian god Anubis has become one of the most recognizable symbols of ancient Egypt this is Anubis the ancient Egyptian god of embalming and the guardian of the dead and his likeness was actually used by the ancient Egyptians in mask form in the form we see in front of us during the very sacred rituals of the funeral in funerary rites one of the priests would wear this exact same mask and perform the magical rituals which would enable the dead to live again in the afterlife and I find it really fascinating that in the Saharan cultures were finding petroglyphs of human beings wearing jackal masks almost dog-headed figures in fact at least a thousand years prior to the emergence of a new base in ancient Egyptian mythology the overwhelming evidence suggests that this defining Egyptian cult of human animal worship actually arose in the Sahara but could a small obscure society really have had this much influence it was time to widen the search and the evidence found right across Africa would astound everyone you the archaeologists had to know whether the culture of one woohoo Church the black mummy had spread beyond Libya 500 miles to the south a site in modern-day Niger began to provide the answers in the 1980's French archaeologists uncovered pottery human burials and rock art which were all almost exactly the same as the evidence found in Libya by the Italians and similar artifacts were found throughout North Africa it looked like this culture was far more widespread than anyone had ever imagined just you a Tripoli the via Chiron and the Nile and just in the center we have the rocky coast mountains and we have Algeria Libya Egypt and Sudan and Chad a nature and Molly so this area is bigger than Europe so it means that all this very very large extent was inhabited during ancient times by the same ancient africans horror culture the size of this culture was extraordinary it spanned most of North Africa from Mali to the western fringes of Egypt itself in many ways this vast Saharan culture really didn't have to go very far in terms of physical distance in order to influence the people of the Nile Valley they were almost there so it was just a very short step from the Western Desert of Egypt right into the now valley itself the big picture was almost complete but the archaeologists still needed proof that this African culture had affected Egypt they needed evidence of a direct link they needed proof of contact the Italians turned to the most prevalent artifact in the a caucus mountains pottery at the one of food a cave savino had already discovered pottery shards dating back to the earliest pottery in Africa would they find the proof here that the Sahara had directly influenced the Nile Valley we can still see this is a piece of pottery and Romney's 9,000 years old it is decorated with impressions with a waiting mud with a waving motion and it's this patrice among the oldest in the world the italian team collected enough pottery shards to reconstruct an entire pot it's now back in Rome with Savino this the pottery we have in the area one whole church is typical for the kind of decoration probably six thousand years old this kind of decoration which it is made with impressions with a stick we find pottery decorated in this identical way in a very large area this pot was not a one-off it was representative of a distinctive siharan style and it was completely different from the undecorated pottery may join the same period in the Nile Valley but then excavations in the southern nile valley revealed something extraordinary suddenly around 6,000 years ago a new style of pottery appeared it was siharan and this was proof of contact so it means that either people home in my view ideas and and and this kind of communication arrived in the south of Nevada in some 6,000 years ago it all made sense the Sahara was drying and a people in search of water had to move the nearby Nile River and its fertile valley was like a magnet [Music] this was the final piece of the puzzle here was evidence that the siharan culture had reached and influenced the nile valley but what had happened to these people burial monuments rock art and the black mummy was some of the only finds to prove they'd ever existed despite their influence and sophistication only a few traces of this remarkable culture have been reclaimed their history had literally been covered by the sands of the Sahara a heritage of ancient Egypt and the central Sahara have been incredibly intertwined over the last 10,000 years but if we go back to about five to eight thousand years ago I think we find a period in which the relationship was expressed in a rather different way to the sort of common model that we have today instead of that search light shining out from Egypt illuminating the desert maybe we need to think about a desert culture which is shining many little lights on a fledgling Egypt in the Nile Valley and that's actually going to play the important role in the formation of ancient Egypt itself I find it quite extraordinary that this central siharan civilization shows all the features that we generally associate with later Egyptian pharaonic culture and mummification is a prime example there are definite links between the two cultures as to which came first most Egyptologists would like to think he gypped but I think a lot of this information from the Saharan cultures really must make us think again but journey of discovery has led a dedicated team of archaeologists to uncover the secret origins of Egypt the greatest ancient civilization ever known and it all began with a chance discovery in a remote corner of the Sahara of the body of a mummified boy whose legacy was far greater than his parents could ever have imagined [Music] our motors was a a little boy of two years in half living with his family and the article's mountains more than five thousand five and ages ago they were sub-saharan people Africans and they accidentally gave the word the oldest black mummy it has yet seen [Music] you

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Keywords: mummies history, history of the world, documentary history, TV Shows - Topic, history channel documentary, mummies history channel, Full Documentary, ancient earth, real, BBC documentary, ancient egypt, Channel 4 documentary, Documentaries, Documentary, ancient egypt documentary, history documentary, 2017 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, ancient egypt history, ancient egypt for kids, stories, Full length Documentaries, ancient history, timeline documentary, History

Id: A-FJGpD-8Xs

Length: 47min 56sec (2876 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019