The Mystery Of Tutankhamun's Gold | Egypt Detectives | Timeline

it was the archaeological find of the century perhaps the greatest single discovery of all time millions of gays awestruck at these incredible finds but these dazzling treasures have blinded generations of archaeologists to a startling fact that could change our understanding of this most famous Pharaoh forever for there is something surprising about the contents of this tumor if you look closely at that material you'll see it's something like 80% of that material was never made with Tutankhamun in mind these are not Tutankhamun's treasures so why are they in his tool to solve the riddle Egypt detectives Dominic Montserrat and Miriam cook investigate the very strange life and death of Tutankhamun [Music] Luxor on the east bank of the River Nile in the Pharaoh Tutankhamun's lifetime he would have known this city as thieves his religious capital and home to the great Karnak temple devoted to the worship of his own favored God a moon this was where the young Pharaoh came to praise the God from whom he took his name Tutankhamun the living image of the Armenian and where the Pharaoh himself was revered as a living God this was also the place where the body of the King dead at just 20 years of age began its extraordinary journey into an eventful afterlife in 1320 to be see from here sailed the remains of this minor Pharaoh who should were it not for a quirk of fate have been relegated to complete obscurity it was a short journey across the Nile to the West Bank the land of the dead to join his ancestors who inhabited the lavish royal tombs for the Valley of the Kings by the time archaeologists began to rediscover these tombs in the 19th century most have been robbed of their contents but one somehow had been missed Tutankhamun's inside was a dazzling array of everyday objects and golden treasures gold which never tarnished and which the Pharaohs believed touched them with immortality but for all their fame this vault and its treasures have only very recently been examined in detail and the story they're beginning to tell is as rare and strange as the object themselves [Music] it's been called the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century and millions of people have seen it worldwide but there's still an awful lot that we don't understand about Tutankhamun's tomb it's remarkable that so little analysis has been done on the contents of the tomb yeah it's as though archaeologists have been so overwhelmed with the sheer amount of material that they've just described it rather than looking at it in any detail it's possible that it might be something really odd about - danke Buda - what makes this neglect all the more surprising is that Howard Carter the archeologist who first set eyes on the tomb knew immediately that there was something very strange about what he'd uncovered Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 after a long and frustrating search in the Valley of the Kings it was the discovery of a lifetime a tomb sealed shut for 3,000 years and a glimpse of an ancient world that time itself had passed by treasure after treasure was unearthed chariots gilded sarcophagi wrapped in the cold in place of stone goddesses exquisite Thrones and chairs collections of models and miniatures Botts as a result of this unique discovery Tutankhamun a pharaoh otherwise destined for obscurity suddenly became one of the most celebrated of all ancient Egyptians but Carter remained disturbed by what he discovered as his notebooks show Carter recorded his discovery of the tomb in 1922 in great detail these notebooks are real gold mine it's only now that we're beginning to fully realize how insightful he was a number of things bothered Carter about the discovery he knew that royal tombs were usually begun in the lifetime of the Pharaoh to allow time for the cutting and decorating of a vast and elaborate series of galleries and burial chambers from the rock of the valley floor Egyptian texts also made it clear that the finished tomb then had to be filled with personal items from the Pharaohs life which they believed he would take with him into the next world finally the Pharaoh who succeeded had to ensure that this was done and that the funeral followed precisely the required rites so his predecessor would arrive safely in the afterlife and then he would take the throne of Egypt but this was not how Tutankhamun was buried he noticed how small and how peculiarly laid out the tomb was in relation to other Kings tombs and valid Kings he also noticed a strange pile of debris at the foot of the great sarcophagus which suggested that the coffins inside had been cut down could the coffins have been made for someone else then adapted in ancient Egypt this short have been unthinkable pharaohs had to be buried with their own possessions carter's conclusion was radical all in all cotta thought to turn car moon had been buried with a job loss of other people's stuff Howard Carter died before he could discover if tooth in Cumberland really did have a second hand tomb and since then few archeologists working in the Valley of the Kings have been inspired to follow up his nagging suspicions now finally one has dr. Nikolas wheels he obviously went through all the pieces in the tomb he looked at everything he catalogued most of it I don't think he really fully grasped the implications of all of this I really don't think anybody anybody has has done but why has the world's most famous archeological find been ignored I think a lot of professional Egyptologists have considered to two comes to be rather for God populist therefore not really worthy of serious consideration just a glamorous assemblage of material with with no historical implications or ramifications so we've decided to look beyond the gold and the glamour to see if he could find the other story hiding in the treasures of Tutankhamen in the mid-1990s I started going through the material again and noticed that there wasn't fact something more to be said about Tutankhamun's tomb if you look closely at that material you'll see that something like 80% of that material was never made with Tutankhamun in mind it was secondhand material which Tutankhamun had taken over it's no news and revé discovery doesn't just affect the smaller finds it may radically alter our view of the greatest treasure of all the quintessential objects of Tutankhamun you look at it closely though I think he's never made for two I think it was reused potential the reason I say that is because if you look behind underneath the back it's now displayed with a Paramecium you see that there is a silver mark running down side the face I think the face has been replaced was originally made for another King and we used to so who originally stared out from behind the mask of Tutankhamun Egypt detectives Miriam Koch and Dominic Montserrat are investigating the puzzle of Tutankhamun's tomb the young king seems to have been buried in an unusually small tomb with a job lot of other people's possessions even his most famous golden masks may not originally have been his so whose was it archaeologists Nick Reeves has come to a dramatic conclusion I think the face has been replaced was originally made for another king and reused for Tutankhamun my own feeling is that the mass was originally made for achenar - this is an astonishing claim Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father and Egypt's most notorious ruler in his lifetime he abandoned the old gods and unleashed a Cultural Revolution that left his country and people in chaos after his death his successors immediately set about reversing everything he'd done so why would Tutankhamun be buried beneath his hated father's mask all good detective stories begin with a dark secret in the past and in this case all the leads take us back to the city of a mana Amana the desert city built by Akhenaten hundreds of miles from Egypt's traditional capitals of Memphis and Thebes and Tutankhamun zone dark secret [Music] this was where Tutankhamun probably grew up in the city at the heart of his father's revolution it must have been a turbulent childhood one in which thousands of years of certainty and belief were swept away with ferocious zeal and the young prince found himself protected only by the Rays of the new God the Sun disk of the Artin could the fate of this lost city provide the vital clue in solving the mystery of Tutankhamun's tomb it's time for the detectives to compare notes she's a common is really pretty important in terms of his family background oh God well we don't know for sure who his mother was but she may have been Nefertiti the wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten who threw Egypt into turmoil with his religious reforms and overturned the old gods including our Moon and moved the whole capital city from Thebes down to this new site Amana right and that's where Tutankhamun is born not under that name but as Tutankhaten with a name honoring his father's God the Aten or death I'd son disk and then Akhenaten dies and within a few years Tutankhaten becomes Tutankhamun exactly and I think the whole mystery of Tutankhamun's burial lies in that change of name [Music] the boy who carried his religion in his very name had been born into his father's religion and dedicated to the art nur but by his death bore the name of the old God our moon but his father had said that our moon is dead so how her Tutankhamun brought this God back to life the detective set out for the Luxor Temple to look for evidence built by Tutankhamun's grandfather it was dedicated to the ancient God our moon yet these are images of Tutankhamun himself engraved on this temple when he was King and they show him doing something extraordinary something his father would have despised to moon they're quite damaged though not very clear although I can make out that it's Tooting car moon and he's wearing the halls of the moon it's not extraordinary by wearing the horns of a moon Tutankhamun was completely rejecting his father's religious revolution to him our moon was clearly not dead but there's Tutankhamun again he's burning incense and that's our Moon God his father turned his back on they returned to the old gods to the Cameroon's changing Egypt now but if Tutankhamun had turned his back on his father's religion and restored the old gods that makes the borrowed contents of his tomb even more baffling for amongst the thousands of objects stacked inside are many relics from his father's city of Amarna if we look closely at this throne here we can see an armored Sun disc on its back now this was a symbol of a failed religious experiment that was over when Tutankhamun was a baby the answer to this riddle has been found by Nick Reeves in another puzzling tomb in the Valley of the Kings known simply as tomb 55 this was first found by Edward Ayrton in 1907 and like Tutankhamun's tomb it was packed with strange objects from our Mona what I was interested in was was as the relationship between Tutankhamun's tomb and this odd cache 2255 and it's when I started working through the material again that's principles that I saw that there was in fact a connection between Tutankhamun's tomb and 2:55 and that connection explains what had been going on the items artined discovered should have been buried at Amana but someone had clearly brought them back after that city was abandoned amongst those remains there is a clue to just who that might have been items from Tutankhamun zone rain unmixed up with the cash perhaps he had returned them to Thebes but who then had buried him with these inappropriate relics of the dead religion of his childhood that answer may also lie in the Valley of the Kings in a peculiar collection of objects recovered from a site called tun 54 it's a whodunit we need to discover who was in power when Susan come who died because they would have been the people organizing his burial oh right here the leftovers from Tutankhamun's burials amongst the torn pieces of linen left over from his mummification were clues identifying his main mourners and amongst them were jars that had the funeral meals of the mourners and they show us that there were only a handful of people here at the burial from these names recovered at this site to immediately stand out for domination first of all there's an kiss on a moon the widow because he always suspect the widow first love detective story and then this ie an older man who's been around the centers of power for a long time since before Tutankhamun was even born these were names from a mana from Tutankhamun's turbulent childhood I had been one of his father's right-hand men while unconcerned a moon was a daughter of Akhenaten and the wife of Tutankhamun so what was their role in the mystery of Tutankhamun's tomb the solution lies in the tomb itself eighty years ago Howard Carter became the first man to gaze on this burial place for almost 3500 years and the answer to the riddle was written had he but known it all around him so we're right at the heart of the mystery here this is Tutankhamun sarcophagus and his body is still inside here and we need to find out what was happening at his burial 3300 years ago well there's a clue in this part of the wall painting here's Tutankhamun and he's receiving the opening of the mouth ceremony it's a ceremony which will enable him to speak words in the next world also being reborn but look who's performing it for him it's ie for that's usually done by the son of the dead person so I is placing himself in the role of successor where's more than that this cartoon shows that he's already Pharaoh that's the prerogative of Kings and we know from other evidence that by this time he's already married to Duncan's widow and Kessinger Moon issues so we have our two suspects right here I and the widow Aiden car moon away from the heat of the Valley of the Kings it's time for the Egypt detectives to work out their next move well we know that Tutankhamun was buried with a strange collection of his forebears possessions relating to the failed religious experimented on mana and we also know that his widow and Cassano moon and I her new husband and the new Pharaoh are organizing this rather odd burial so we have our two suspects and now we need a motive that motive has to lie somewhere in the past lives of I and unconcern amoun themselves lives that lead back to our mana this was where I first thought he would be buried and the strange tune he began here holds clues to what brought him back to Thebes and on to the throne [Music] this is the tool I started but never finished and it tells us a lot about this great survivor of ancient Egyptian politics when work began here I was closely involved in Akhenaten's new religion and lauded his King and his new guard on the walls of his tomb but when the Pharaoh died his people deserted his revolution and so I deserted his faith and this site with them I was a realist not a revolutionary and he quickly saw that Akhenaten had left a people traumatized by religious persecutions and bankrupted by his suppression of the old temples to survive he would have to return to the old faith in the old city of Thebes [Music] the Egyptian temples were the powerhouses of the Egyptian economy so someone like an art Li comes along and closes down all the temples and takes over their assets then this is making quite a considerable economic statement and it is economic suicide but if I helped Tutankhamun to restore the old religion and the economy then why did he bury him with so many reminders of his tragic and dangerous karmana past the answer according to reeves lies in Tutankhamun's own untimely death after 10 years on the throne the young pharaoh suddenly died at the age of just 24 I it was a disaster he had planned to rule Egypt next but plans for Tutankhamun's burial were still years away from completion when you think about the position that I must have found himself in he wanted to succeed and in order to succeed to the throne an Egyptian king has to prepare for his predecessor proper Egyptian burial difficulty was that Tutankhamun had died young presumably unexpectedly I suppose we can assume that there wasn't really time [Music] and so it came as a shock and I was faced with a with a problem there had been no time to finish or even stars a suitable royal tomb for tooth and camel so I it seems ordered an existing tune design for a lesser noble to be adapted this might explain why the King's final resting place is so small but so beautifully finished now he just had to fill it with the traditional items necessary for the King's afterlife what does I do to solve the problem that he's faced with having to give to Tonka moon and effective world burial well I think he was lucky because he was faced with this problem to dismantle [Music] Akhenaten and his family had originally been buried at Amana but after the city was abandoned someone perhaps Tutankhamun himself ordered his family's royal mummies and burial Goods be brought back to Thebes all the burial equipments back to seats put it in a pile from this pile they cherry picked the pieces and either for two enormous burial and what was left I had a hurry if he was to succeed and he needed fuel goods immediately the armaan are items for all their tragic connotations were available and so he used them the treasures of the discredited father would have to fill the tomb of the son who betrayed him was buried with other people's possessions because there wasn't any time to manufacture his own these treasures would have been destroyed if they hadn't have been kept safe from Tutankhamun's tomb Tutankhamun's tomb is more than a treasure for amongst the gold and glory lies the story of a forgotten time it would be nearly three and a half thousand years before light would shine again on these treasures and only now are we just beginning to piece together the silent story they tell the tale of a pharaoh who betrayed his father's dream in life but who accidentally preserved this memory in death locked in his own you you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, egpyt, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, history documentary, 2017 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, stories, documentary history, origins, Documentaries, Tutankhamun, real, assassin's creed

Id: 6md5qDSXwXM

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2017