The Mystery Of The Rebel Pharaoh: Egypt Detectives (Ancient Egypt Documentary) | Timeline

[Applause] akhenaten Egypt's most controversial Pharaoh over 3,000 years ago this turbulent King began a revolution overturning centuries of Egyptian belief but his great experiment died with him and in the resulting backlash his successors tried to erase his name from history savate drove Akhenaten to risk becoming the most reviled Pharaoh in Egyptian history was his revolution driven by necessity greed or divine inspiration to solve this mystery Egyptologist Dominik monserrat an archaeologist Miriam Cooke journey to a cannot UNS abandoned city and discover an extraordinary project which is for the first time letting us look into the mind of Akhenaten the rebel Pharaoh [Music] akhenaten should have been just another in a long line of pharaohs but instead just five years into his reign he suddenly and inexplicably decided to change everything banishing the old gods and closing their temples he announced that one God now ruled Egypt and as if to draw a line under the past moved his capital and 50,000 of his subjects to a new city he ordered to be built hundreds of miles from their own homes but why what clues remained one of the greatest Egyptian mysteries must still lie in the ruins of his lost city so this is where the Egypt detectives decide to begin their search [Music] at the time of Akhenaten's birth around 1350 BC Egypt had two ancient capitals Thebes the religious center in the south and Memphis the political hub some four hundred miles to the north but when Akhenaten came to build his new capital at a site now known as Amana he inexplicably placed it as far from these old seats of power as possible on this isolated desert site [Music] their story of Akhenaten's been told many times but nobody's ever really explained why he decided to move the capital here to a mana and moving an entire capital city now that would have been a huge undertaking yeah would have meant displacing tens of thousands of people making them leave their homes and what was familiar and then getting them out here and making them work bloody hard to build a whole new capital city today only ghosts remain at our mana when the Pharaoh died his dream died with him and just 25 years after it was begun his city was left to be reclaimed by the desert but in an empty tomb high on the cliffside above the city a clue to what drove Akhenaten can still be found carved on the walls this tomb was cut into the living rock at a time when Akhenaten city still thrived and his courtier I for whom it was built carefully recorded his master's new beliefs on its walls [Music] this is the face of Akhenaten and above him shines the optin or sun disk this the Pharaoh now proclaimed was the one and only God but for most Egyptians this was unthinkable heresy for millennia they had worshiped many gods usually represented in human or animal form these gods they believed had made Egypt great now a new Pharaoh had swept them and their priests aside and had even declared that he was the new high priest the single connection to the Sun God they must all now worship the courtier I however had no doubts and the unique inscription Don his to exalt of the new god it's the him to the Aten Akhenaten son statement of religious belief there's nothing else like it in the whole of Egyptian religious literature can you read somewhere yeah sure your radiance fills every land with your beauty I am your son born from your rays so kind of manifesto yeah you could put it that way in this him to the Artin Akhenaten set out his new ideology he told his people that there was now just one all-powerful God the Artin to whom he alone could provide access this was the one simple truth but was this divine inspiration or Machiavellian cunning Miriam and Dominic decide to head south to the city where Akhenaten grew up to see if the roots of his conversion can be uncovered there [Music] the journey south from amana takes the egypt detectives away from Akhenaten's radical new vision back to the old religion of egypt at thebes the great temple of karnak was the center of the royal cult of our moon and a focus of the old Egyptian religion whose history even then stretched back thousands of years here the temple walls show another more surprising side to the young Akhenaten's far removed from the heritage of the history books well here's a Connaughton well what's left of him so denotes just like a traditional ferrand okay smiting the nine enemies of Egypt that's a very standard image yeah and another standard thing is the inscription at the top which talks about in worshipping our Moon well conventional images like this dates from the beginning of Akhenaten's reign but within the next couple of years things begin to change completely Akhenaten had taken the throne not in that name but his Amenhotep the fourth a name which honored the God our Moon worshiped at Karnak but all was not well between the royal house of Amenhotep and the religious house of our moon by the time of Akhenaten succession the large temples had become as rich and powerful as the Pharaoh could Akhenaten sudden conversion to organism have as much to do with the politics of this power struggle as with divine inspiration dominic has found an archeologist who thinks it might there was a problem between the Amma priesthood and the kingship with the the priests jockeying for ultimate power and by the time I can Artin comes to the throne and this has been going on for several generations and it was obviously something which I cannot endure decided to to grapple with and solve for so I can augment religious revelation actually had some very practical benefits for him in his new religion he was the only high priest the only channel of communication with the one and only God the priests of other gods when our irrelevant and powerless and we're better to assert his power then outside the wealthiest temple of them all at Karnak if you go up there you might get a better view of this [Music] what could you see but it looks pretty much like a wasteland from up here but I can't see that there's plenty buried archaeology here well that's the remains of the Great Temple I cannot infilled on this site the game patent that means I have found the athlete and it's evidence of his religious ideas unfolding it was a highly provocative gesture building the new art and temple directly outside the ancient house of Arlen and was clearly designed to confront of the old religion head-on so why is he building out here well that's exactly the point the temple originally faced that way so it's back was turned on the temple of our Moon oh god I'm just gonna come down okay so Akhenaten began his campaign against the old faith here at it's very heart in Thebes yet the temple of our Moon still stands while his temple is just rubble so what went wrong why didn't he finish what he started in Thebes but instead chose to leave the city forever and move to a lonely desert site hundreds of miles away the answers may lie in an extraordinary project which is painstakingly reassembling the evidence left by Akhenaten will these fragments help the Egypt detectives explain what turned the once dutiful King into a rebel Pharaoh the Egypt detectives are on a quest to investigate the mystery of ancient Egypt's most controversial Pharaoh Akhenaten over 3,000 years ago this Pharaoh suddenly turned his back on the traditional gods of Egypt and moved almost 50,000 of his people to a desolate spot in the middle of the desert but what drove him there piety power or panic the answer to this question is now coming to light in an archaeological project that is reconstructing the story in Akhenaten's own words using records found hidden within the walls of the Karnak temple at Thebes this gate was constructed over a decade after Akhenaten's death but at its heart lies a clue to the fate of that Pharaoh's dream the core of this building is made up of unusually small blocks called Tala tad [Music] amazing tip is so this is the economical temple project yes the results of that here but these talat are not just ordinary stones they had a life before they were used in the gateways of Karnak as a decorated walls of the great art and temple demolished soon after Akhenaten his death on their side like clues to the real story of the rebel Pharaoh professor Don Radford has the job of analyzing this elaborate jigsaw and Mariam has joined him at the warehouse where the blocks are stored what sorts Hallett art that's the term we apply to a standard-size block 52 centimeters long by 26 wide about a hundred pounds which a single person could carry a man a worker how do they compare to a normal building block well the standard sized block in Egyptian masonry is much larger or something about in the order of this weighing two to two and a half tons usually so considerably heavier and more difficult to move than a teletag don Redford believes that the size of these blocks is significant Akhenaten was in a hurry to build his temple and these smaller blocks meant his builders could work faster certainly they speeded up the work and Akhenaten seems to have wanted that the workers were being forced to work so quickly that design and layout sometimes was faulty and it seems rather sloppy work do you get the sense of an impulsive character behind this building technique I do I do think there was an impulsive nurse in his in his personality he was bound to worship the Sun God to promote that single God and he was going to do so by eliminating all other allusions to mythology in Egypt which of course would entail referring to other deities this was an athame to him this was he was going to forbid it and he was moving in stages towards a very purified almost puritanical type of religion devoted to a single God akhenaten was clearly in a hurry to push through his revolution rushing to replace the old gods rushing to begin his new order but was this through religious fervor of fear [Music] this is pylon 10 a huge gate that once guarded the Karnak temple its core is still piled high with tarlatan and at the very top one sandstone block holds another enigmatic clue a message from Akhenaten to his people a message they may not have wanted to hear [Music] at last the inscription can you translate it yes I think I can't this is the most important column which reads they have stopped one after the other whether our precious gems or gold or silver I presume he's speaking of the occult images of the gods that phrase the gods have stopped that's a rather strange statement what exactly is he saying that and the gods have stopped what does that mean that's very odd actually very strange the verb he uses to cease movement or to start is what elsewhere in Egyptian texts is used of what the Sun never does the Sun keeps going around and around without ceasing but here he's saying that other manifestations of the supernatural have ceased so this is obviously it seems to me one of these speeches that were made periodically by the kings of Egypt to their court and for public dissemination on walls and this sort of thing and he is making here an announcement so what impact would this have had it must have been a bombshell Akhenaten was attempting to end the centuries-old Way of life at a single stroke in one simple pronouncement he had declared that the old gods of Egypt were dead and only his God the Sun disc lived on ceaselessly circling the heavens but Don Radford believes that this message was not what the people of Pheebs wanted to hear and that their hostile response may have driven Akhenaten to found his new desert city to show Miriam evidence of this opposition Don takes her to the west side of the Nile where the Egyptian was traditionally buried their dead well here we are tomb number 188 the tomb of Paran emperor of the theban necropolis and they're already at work shall we give them a hand clearing the Sun this tomb belonged to one of Akhenaten's loyal servants and it walls still bear witness to the fervent opposition which is revolutionarily well it's really damaged isn't it oh yes about 80 years ago a family lived here and they're cooking fires covers the ceiling with soot Paran F is tomb was caught over three thousand years ago and on its walls or recorded the extraordinary changes that he witnessed in his lifetime from Akhenaten as childhood to the Cultural Revolution of his reign and here is the man himself perinephric standing before his king facing his king and gesticulating with his hand to his mouth which is a sign of deference before the monarch you don't want to speak or breathe directly on him here is what I'm talking about so these are clearly traditional gods but I can see the ardent disk right here that's right this represents a major change and here you see violently hammered away the rock where the figure of Akhenaten was originally placed to Egyptians destroying a king's image destroyed his place in the afterlife a demonstration of almost fanatical hatred for the man they had once called Pharaoh but why and in the four columns down here there were invitations to other gods well I think there is something of an answer in this very tomb and I'll show you as for the servant who is not diligent concerning the divine offerings of the Sun disk he gives himself into your power so this is giving us an idea of the political situation in Thebes at the time there is a veiled threat the servant who is not diligent who is Lex about the new program that the king is instituting is going to give himself in to the power of God and that's a forum for ill well I can show you that if we go down the wall over here I cannot an intended to convert his people by threats not faith here is Paran ever seated on a chair with his servants and secretaries in front of this revolution affected more than just his people's beliefs it was destroying their livelihood but measuring for the Sun disk is in super abundance in fact the the incomes the endowments are being diverted from all the other gods temples into the new temple of the Sun disk what he was doing was really throwing people out of work and all the other temples and it was building up a considerable amount of resentment against him ordinary people faced financial disaster as their employers the temples were closed down I cannot now have the temples money but that was also his people's income the Egyptian temples were the powerhouses of the Egyptian economy so someone like I can't leak um so long closes down all the temples and takes over their assets then this is making quite a considerable economic statement and it is economic suicide in breaking the power of the temples the Pharaoh was bankrupting his people and it seems neither the priests nor the thousands of people they employed were prepared to accept this lying down for all his power Akhenaten couldn't change Thebes fast enough so he simply left the problem behind he abandoned the old city with all its reminders of the old religions abandon his own temple outside Karnak and headed off to the desert site of amana where a vision told him to found a new capital he was running from his critics [Music] he was receiving criticism it was not veiled criticism if these were evil words as he characterizes them he's simply cut and ran and created this new sort of dream city of his in the wastes of the desert where he could be his own man put down his own roots and he didn't have to deal with anyone that amanna there is evidence to support this idea Akhenaten's own words inscribed on tablets erected on the city boundaries read like the words of a frightened man it was worse than those things heard by any Kings who had ever assumed the white crown so Akhenaten hadn't moved his capital to Amman a purely from choice he'd begun his revolution of Thebes but in Thebes it had started to go wrong now he was afraid and probably with good reason I think one can interpret this as indicating that there was some opposition to Akhenaten sparks which could even have manifested themselves in an assassination attempts for the King an assassination attempt would have been the ultimate challenge to Akhenaten's power base leaving him no option but to leave Thebes and heading to the desert to create his new city this is a new and startling portrait of a unique feral a man whose impetuous desire to establish ultimate power nearly wrecked his country's economy and left him haunted and hunted King of a dreamlike desert city that would prove little more than a mirage Miriam is convinced by this practical explanation but Dominic still sees in Akhenaten's work the hand of a man divinely inspired I prefer the idea of Akhenaten as a practical politician he's a man driven by circumstances rather than being a grand thinker its tactics he's not strong enough to implement the changes he wants to hear at Thebes so he moves to Amana I think we've just got completely opposing views that's not the Akhenaten I know but will we ever know the real to look into the mind of Akhenaten is still to look into an enigma shortly after his death his own heirs began a full and terrible backlash against his revolution his temples were destroyed his image removed from every building document and painting that could be found he became to the Egyptians a non-person a man and a time they pretend it had simply never happened only now is his story reloading from the sands of our mana a lost Pharaoh for a lost city a man whose vision inspired by avarice power and panic went too far and too fast for his people to follow [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: real, documentary history, pyramids, egypt, History, Full length Documentaries, stories, Channel 4 documentary, Documentary, 2017 documentary, history documentary, TV Shows - Topic, history, Pharaoh, ancient egypt, Full Documentary, egypt documentary, Documentaries, Documentary Movies - Topic, BBC documentary

Id: nEJdWD-UX6k

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2017