The Mystery of the Pharaoh's Stone: Egypt Detectives (Ancient Egypt Documentary) | Timeline

[Music] géza last resting place of three of the greatest pharaohs in Egyptian history a wonder of the world and home to a mystery in a temple connected to the Pyramid of the Pharaoh Khafre archaeologists discovered a huge and perfectly preserved statue of the king carved in an exotic iridescent stone but this sculpture is in no local rock in fact this striking material can only be found deep in the desert hundreds of miles from Giza so how did Catherine's people manage to bring this marvel here 4,000 years ago to investigate this puzzle Egypt detectives archaeologist million cook an Egyptologist Dominik monserrat searched out the lost qualies of Catherine and undertake a unique experiment in ancient Egyptian engineering [Music] the statue stares out at us across four millennia a silent monument to the achievements of a lost civilization it still inspires all in those who come under its gaze none more so than Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass is one of the busting it for the snatchers never meet by an pass capture it's really unique I always say that he looks like a king look at the sculpture put the royal blood in the statute that you can feel that is a king when I look at the profile of that statute I can really feel that the hawk is taking the king and flying with him up to the sky made for a living God the presence of this statue at Giza is also something of a miracle it was carved from a single three ton block of nice a rare stone not found anywhere close to the pyramid site the question for the detectives is where did this huge stone originally come from and how did the Egyptians with no modern technology manage to get it here the logical place to begin seems to be the valley temple where the statue was found this is in itself an incredible feat of Engineering it is constructed of massive blocks of red granite which like the statue also must have been carried great distances as this rock isn't found locally perhaps finding the source of this could provide the first clue to the statues origin the detectives decide to split up Dominic's expertise is best put to use researching ancient Egyptian technology [Music] Miriam meanwhile head south down the Nile to meet the archaeological team who are working on the puzzle of Catherine's quarries a swamp the southern edge of ancient Egypt this has been identified as where Catherine found the massive red granite blocks to build his valley temple though low Aswan is hundreds of miles from Giza quarrying here was possible thanks to the Nile when the blocks of stone had been cut from the cliffs and roughly shaped on site they only had to be moved a short distance to the river where they could be loaded onto barges letting the water do the work of carrying them north to the pharaoh's court without the river these quarries would never have existed as the job of moving the cut stones more than a few hundred metres would have been impossible but Aswan is not home to the where nice of the statue in fact this rock doesn't occur anywhere on the banks of the Nile in 1999 an international team of scientists came together to see if they could solve the riddle of the location of Catherine's missing quarry and discover how the Pharaohs builders actually brought the stone to visa mainly towards actually we find it at our interpretation release that is fairly typical it yeah I guess this is coming from kind of this tool [Music] for Miriam finding the statue stone means a journey deep into Egypt's hostile western desert to the place where team leader Ian Shaw believes they have rediscovered the lost quarry of Katherine in the 1930s a British army patrol had taken a road into the Western Desert and got lost in a sandstorm in their confusion the patrols stumbled upon a mysterious place called gebel el asesor scattered everywhere across the desert they saw blocks of stone and countless stone tools nearly four and a half thousand years after Karen's stonemasons had left there for the last time the patrol had accidentally found his quarry this was the source of his prized stone d n on the team have come to this desolate site many times and by carefully removing centuries of sand they have begun to uncover its secrets here we are this is what you've been looking for the cairn quarries I recognise the stone it's very distinctive isn't it this is one of the spoil heaps that forms part of these the whole quarry set up and you know I'm standing on the spoil heap which is a mixture of material which has been taken out from over here and you can see lots of that of the blocks that they've begun to work that have come out of the ground over there and down here lots of lovely big fragments of precisely the kind of stone that the Catherine statue is made [Music] but how could these discarded tools and fragments of stone in the desert be definitely linked to Katherine [Music] it looks like these lots have been specifically placed here what do you have to imagine is that originally here between these two big slabs of the Catherine stone there was a plan with the name of a ruler who sent an expedition here and that rule it was Khufu this is the vital link Khufu was Catherine's father proving that the quarry was known and used during that dynasty perhaps it was even memories of the wonderful stone brought back by Khufu's expedition that inspired his son to commission his own extraordinary statue but the Egypt detectives still have questions Egyptians moved heavy stones by water but this quarry is 35 miles from the nearest point on the Nile where it could be transferred to a barge for the journey to Giza so how had they moved it miriam calls dominic to see if his knowledge of egyptian wall paintings might show any light on how these engineering problems were solved I can think of one particular tomb that might be really helpful but the thing is that the picture may be really damaged I've heard that it's not in very good shape so well I think you should really go and have a look at it it's up a really steep slope so I'm not promising anything the tomb is a Deir el-bahri a necropolis over a hundred miles south of Cairo but Dominic isn't convinced he can even get there a recent operation on his ankle makes him extremely anxious about his chances of success there are two things that I'm worried about one is that the relief may no longer exist and the second is that it's up a very very steep mountainside which I don't think I'm going to be able to get up it was going to be a tough climb and there was no guarantee that there would be anything to see at the end of it things like these reads apology the tomb was made for an Egyptian governor who immortalized his glorious life on its walls old records show that the painting depicted how a huge statue of the moon dominic just has to hope that this ancient picture still survives it's quite hard to see in here and start to master the bright light and out of the desert but at first it looks as if Dominic is out of luck these Coptic crosses they look like very good news because it might mean that the paintings been vandalized there's been a rock fall from the ceiling as well which is left this great huge blank and here is but you can see a massive statue being drawn along on a sledge and it's being lubricated as it moves along by water being poured on it and it's being pulled by these massed ranks of men 3d who are pulling on the ropes that are attached to the sled to move it along the wall painting suggests that there is no real mystery to moving huge stones Egyptians simply put them on a sledge and use the brute force of a huge number of laborers to drag them along it's time to call Miriam hello yes I did I did and the relief is in really good shape what does it show about the movement of the blocks well they're put on sledges wooden sledges which are drawn along by teams of men on ropes and to ease the movement of the sledges water is poured as a lubricant so do you think this is the answer this is how they're getting the blocks out of the quarry yeah I think that's the answers are how they move the blocks so is this the end of the trail for the Egypt detectives did Catherine get his stone by simply sending hundreds of men into the desert to drag it back for him back at the quarry however the discovery of mysterious stone structures in the sand suggests the Egyptians had in fact been far more ingenious than anyone had imagined Egypt detectives Dominic Montserrat and Miriam cook are investigating the mystery of this statue of the Pharaoh Khafre it was carved from a block of very rare stone that came from a distant desert quarry usually the ancient Egyptians relied on barges on the Nile to transport such heavy blocks but this quarry was deep in the western desert so how did they move a 3 ton rock across 35 miles of scorching sand to reach the Nile dominic has found a tomb painting showing a huge statue being dragged by hundreds of men suggesting brute force was the answer if so they should still be evidence at the quarry of this massive desert army Miriam asked Ian Shaw if his team know how many people worked here 4,500 years ago how these blocks were moved an image that comes to my mind his large numbers of men dragging these sledges with big blocks on top of them how feasible is that here would have worked it's not possible that there weren't large numbers of people at this site Ian's evidence comes from his work here amongst the low stone walls of what was once a workers camp well we've got the remains here of some kind of oval encampment so you can see that the wall coming around here that the side of it that the slope and the kind of numbers that you're talking about that it would be needed to halt one of these great huge sledges along there just too many people to have housed in something like this there just wasn't any kind of large settlement you'd expect to be housing the kind of workforce that you'd need to pull one of these big sledges so something other than force must have been used to move Catherine's stone there was simply never enough people at the quarry here to do it in the way shown in the painting the investigation seems to be going nowhere stuck in the engulfing smothering desert sound a problem from which Catherine's enigmatic statue had somehow escaped the team no the answer must lie in the quarry itself if they can just put together all the keys an obvious start would have been to make the blocks as light as possible and the team's geologist Tom held ow has shown that this is what happened instead of moving massive raw blocks the Egyptians cut them down to a convenient statue size in situ sculptors call these blanks they were using hammer stones like this one here that's made of the slightly harder stone that the can use for carving the surface or hammering the surface to be smooth to one plane and this one is a whole one also like this one you can see I've been used it's broken into and left in the quarry so in this case you can see this is a asymmetrical block that is quite flat on the bottom and it's a teenage narrow edge here and it's of patata here and that is actually fitting the shape of a sitting parallel sculpture so this was the sort of size block Catherine had moved but it was still far too large to simply drag at a swan the answer had been water transport so could that be the answer here was there once water in the desert the archaeologists went back to the data for long-term climate change and made a remarkable discovery around 4,500 years ago when the quarry was in use North Africa was probably greener and seasonally wetter and sure enough team member Elizabeth Bloxom has found evidence that suggests there was once at least some water at the quarry Elizabeth why do you think this is a well it looks very similar to a small Hut it's what if you look at the ground surface you can see it's this very dark brown mud with very very deep cracks here indicating that it's a well and the water was coming up into these cracks and is it the same period as the Karen quarries yes yes it is because they're similar wells in the quarries and one of them had an old kingdom pouring vessel in the base in a similar crack like this how does this particular well inform us about climate change that it was a wetter environment here simply because the water was so close to the surface about three feet so indicates seasonally higher rainfall at the time many other wells have now also come to light at the quarry suggesting that water was available here 4,500 years ago but you can't float a barge on underground water so we have water here but we're still 35 miles from the Nile is there any river or channel that could have connected the two that might provide some kind of water transport well we do have the the wadi Tushka which is just a short distance over there today the wada Tushka is a dry Valley but 4,500 years ago in the rainy season it could have filled up with water and provided Egyptian engineers with a connection to the Nile but there is still a problem the wadi is some distance from the quarry itself so the ancient Egyptians had to first get the stone overland to the wadi and then somehow get the blocks onto the water so could the answer lie in these puzzling structures back at the quarry itself these wedge-shaped ramps were built from the same stone used in the Pharaohs statue but with mysterious tracks of their base the team are convinced these must hold the final clue [Music] we've established that the environment was a lot wetter at that time and that water possibly played an important part in the transport of these blocks but what is this and and how would this have fitted into the equation well basically we know that this is a type of stone ramp of the time of cairn and like most ramps the basic idea seems to have been taking the big stone blocks that would eventually be statues up to the top here and our initial assumption was that what they were trying to do was to get them onto some kind of conventional wooden sledge but then we excavated further and we realized how high the ramp is a conventional low-lying sledge would only come up to this height but we also have these very deep and wide tracks so it seemed that this was purpose-built for a vehicle that we don't know about in the archaeological record so far but purpose-built for what kind of vehicle do you think we know that the task that the Egyptians had was to get the stone from here to the Nile to the river and we know that the cairn statue was found at Giza and are therefore that was the ultimate destination of the statue blocks eight hundred miles up to the north by River but they would also want to minimize the amount of times that they moved to block so what you're suggesting is a kind of amphibious vehicle that's certainly one possibility moving the Pharaohs stone by sledge would have been an almost impossible task so the archaeologists believe that the ancient Egyptians may have come up with an ingenious engineering solution an amphibious vehicle this would only need to be loaded once and could then move the stone across both land and water this sketch gives us an idea of how this remarkable vehicle might have looked a simple sturdy raft made buoyant with inflated animal skins underneath the raft were runners that allowed it to be precisely placed in front of the RAM that's the reason for those mysterious tracks then it could be dragged probably by animals to the flooded Wadi Tushka and from there floated down to the Nile this theory is partly supported by this rare wall engraving that Elizabeth found it depicts an ancient raft provided with additional buoyancy by animal skins filled with air which could then bear the weight of these huge stone blocks but where the archaeologists correct the Egypt detectives return to a swamp to put the theory to the test could such a craft have solved Catherine's transportation problem in a swamp they have commissioned a small-scale version of the craft from team member our deal Kalani he and his colleagues use only the materials available to the ancient Egyptians wooden planks rope and inflatable goat skins to create one of these amazing amphibious barges [Music] to test the theory properly the model has to be precisely scaled and balanced what's the scale of this compared with the the loading ramp and the track with the size of the one that would have been used in conjunction with three loading ramps for these two pieces of wood here are these the runners that would have drawn into those ruts in front of the ramp yes exactly they would fit in into those tracks as final preparations are made it begins to look doubtful whether this apparently fragile craft will bear the weight of the stones they have prepared exactly one-quarter of the original full-sized load [Music] there's only one way to find out as the Sun sets over the Nile the craft is loaded then prepared for launch it's the first time the idea has been used in four and a half thousand years will it float the answer is a surprising but triumph from yes this may only have been a miniature version of a much grander original but it proves that the principle works such a craft could have carried the rare stone from the quarry to the wadi Tushka and then to the Nile for its final journey to Giza only then after a 700-mile journey across sand and water put that precious iridescent rock be transformed into the image of Catherine himself granting immortality and stone to a man the Egyptians believed had been a god on earth [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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

Id: 90ly8GtME3Q

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2017