The Pharaoh Tombs: Inside The Lost City Of The Pyramids | Private Lives Of Pharaohs | Real Royalty

foreign [Music] were until the 20th century the largest structures in the world [Music] for over 4 000 years they've aroused awe and speculation in all who've seen them [Music] how were they built and who built them [Music] there have been many extraordinary theories [Music] but now for the first time archaeologists are able to give clear answers to these questions [Music] discoveries made in the shadow of the pyramids are overturning many long-held beliefs and rewriting the history of ancient Egypt the people who built the pyramids have now been found and reveal an astonishing insight into an ancient past [Music] what we've been doing so far is opening small Windows onto this ancient reality it's this information that brings the people back to life that allows us to reconstruct their lives this is reconstructing history when we write about this in the history book and the archeology book it will be the most important chapter in this book [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] the three pyramids at Giza represent the peak of the pyramid building art in ancient Egypt all were constructed in the middle of the third millennium BC over the lifetimes of Just Three Kings khufu's pyramid the Great Pyramid is the largest and was the first to be built the other two were built by his son Caffrey and his son menkare although it's still vast mankara's pyramid is the smallest but it was to be the last pyramid built on the Giza Plateau such an awesome feat would never be attempted again [Music] and how the Pharaohs succeeded in building their massive pyramid tombs has remained a mystery to this day [Music] most of what we know about ancient Egypt is based on what has been found in the tombs and temples of the Pharaohs and the Nobles who served under them even rituals have been recorded like this Foundation ceremony marking the spot where a pyramid would be built [Music] who then built -built cells and the secrets of how they did it and lost to history [Music] until recently all excavations have produced no sign of who these people were and as a result our most enduring beliefs about the pyramid Builders come from ancient hearsay it's long been a common belief that the pyramids were built by slaves that's what the Greek historian Herodotus claimed when he visited Egypt two thousand years after the pyramids had been completed and it's a view that has persisted right through to Hollywood is a streaming platform that is just for history fans with fantastic documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world we've got unrivaled access to the world's leading historians with hundreds of documentaries featuring everything from Boudicca to the British royal family we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a pre-trial and real royalty fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use code real royalty at checkout but that belief was to be shattered by a series of extraordinary discoveries which began 10 years ago foreign a small suburb of Cairo was the unexpected site of one of the most important finds in egyptology of the last hundred years in 1990 a mechanical Digger being used in construction work on the edge of the town hit a large block buried in the sand the construction stopped and archaeologists moved in [Music] the block Unearthed by the Digger turned out to be the wall of a large building as they dug through hundreds of tons of sand a team of archaeologists began uncovering signs of a vast settlement dating from Two and a Half thousand years before Christ [Music] it stretched for half a square mile but there were signs of it extending much much further could this be where the people who built the pyramids had lived what's been called the lost city of the pyramids the team was led by egyptologist Mark laner we have some things here that look like workers houses but most of what we're finding is look looks as though it's geared towards production one of the first things we found were intact bakeries where they made bread in these enormously large pots these could be massive things sometimes weighing up to 25 kilograms big thick pots they have these Ledges they look like Bells when they're upside down each one of these pots was kind of like a portable baking machine hundreds of bread molds and many baking pits was evidence of food production on a vast scale it was the first clue that they might be getting close to the pyramid Builders themselves then one day a chance Discovery was made in the dunes just above the site of the Town by the chief archaeologists of the Giza plateau zahi hawas foreign the chief of the guards came to me and he said sir a lady was riding a horse and the leg of the horse felt down and it showed a small mud brick wall I came here I looked at this piece of matbreak I said that's it this is the tombs of the pyramid builders archaeologists have so far discovered over 600 tombs positioned on two levels at the lower level there are a large number of simple tombs and raised above them a collection of more ornate and Better Built tombs there were no mummies inside just bones buried with simple items tools and pots almost every day we discovered a tomb or a statue or of skeleton or a piece of pottery when we excavate here we were very lucky because thieves in antiquity were not interested in the cemetery because there is no gold and that's why they left every tomb is intact [Music] not only were they intact but the tombs of some individuals bore inscriptions which related to working at the pyramids [Music] confirmed the picture that had already started to emerge from the excavations below [Music] was it a charge of the bakery that markliner found down here and if you look here you have your very unique sins these people are making beer and now some scenes here packing a bread there could be no doubt as to who these people were these were indeed the tombs of the pyramid Builders overseers and workers as well as tombs of people who ran the food facilities that there were tombs that seemed to belong to people in much more important positions inscriptions showed that they organized different parts of the pyramid construction over Chief Workman we have a title of someone say that this was the overseer of the west side of the pyramid titles artists uh inspector building tombs director building tombs all of this confirm that those were the workmen and the overseer who built the pyramids taken together the details emerging from the tombs and the evidence of food production began to suggest a larger picture [Music] the archaeologists now knew that this was a site where many hundreds perhaps thousands of people had lived and worked constructing the pyramids but who were these people [Music] then came the first evidence which threw into doubt that generally accepted theory that they were slaves the evidence came from the food production areas down in the pyramid town in a lab by the pyramids archaeologists have collected thousands of bone fragments the remains of preparing or eating food and they came from what to ancient Egyptians were very high quality foods we found evidence of fish we found curious troughs and benches they're very long and they're very low they're only about ankle height I hadn't seen anything like this before working in Egyptian archeology alongside these benches we found fishbone embedded in the floor the team discovered that many small rock-like deposits of Ash on the ground contained fragile ancient fish bones and the only way to really get it up intact without it just crumbling is to actually drip consolidate on it and then we actually take it up take up a piece of the floor with the fish bone in it and the bones were not only from fish there were also fragments of meat bones in enormous numbers when we analyzed the bone that we so meticulously recover every scrap of animal bone our animal bone specialist tells us there's an awful lot of cattle and cattle was very expensive meat came from from the provinces and a lot of the cattle that we're finding here is Prime Cuts and under two years of age so everything about our site suggests it's expensive [Music] Meat and Fish seemed like an unlikely diet for the pyramid Builders if they were slaves what was emerging was a picture of a large and well-fed Workforce provided with the best foodstuffs available at the time [Music] nervous [Music] but the full truth as to who exactly these people were was to come from the workers themselves from the workers Bones the first ever profile of the pyramid Builders was painstakingly pieced together [Music] more than 600 skeletons have been on Earth so far from the workers tombs one by one as they are found scientists in Cairo have been examining every bone from the very first there were surprises the first thing we met with was a female skeleton and then we found males and females and the children as well when we made the demography of this material we found that between the adults we have the 50 percent or males and 50 percent are females and the the percent of the children it was about 23.6 percent and this is a very high percentage of children foreign the equal numbers of men and women found and the proportion of children with babies as young as a year old indicated to the Egyptian scientists that they were finding families and families living and working at the pyramids didn't suggest a slave Workforce [Music] the only way to know for sure if these were families would be to look at DNA from the bodies [Music] extracting DNA from Bones this old is incredibly difficult fraught with problems of contamination very few labs around the world have ever succeeded even when it's been possible the normal success rate for obtaining uncontaminated DNA from such bones is around 40 percent but scientists at the Cairo University Medical School have been getting success rates of nearer 80 percent [Music] see the extraction of the DNA of the bones are difficult and especially if the bones are old but they were not contaminated they were well preserved they were preserved by the sand and they were not exposed to light or winds and that's why our DNA yield is good [Music] if these were indeed families as the bones suggested then DNA analysis should find genetic links between the adults and children confirming they were true family groups [Music] [Applause] a relationship that you say a very close compatibility in the genes so we classified them as a family [Music] the evidence from the DNA of complete families was the strongest indication so far that the pyramid workers were not slaves or if they were they had a very different way of life from the one suggested by Herodotus but there were more surprises to come when further analysis was carried out on the bones of the workers it was to lead to an astonishing revelation one that was not only to give an important insight into the life of the pyramid builders but to disprove the slave Theory once and for all [Music] after four and a half thousand years the people who built the pyramids had been discovered but who were these people their skeletons were starting to throw dirt on the belief that they were slaves they have been well fed and they lived in family groups but there were more extraordinary discoveries about their lives to come from the bones you can squeeze many many information about their life and how they looked during life this is what our aim when they died where did they jump we can think about the diet we can think about the workload there are many things which she can be squeezed from the bones [Music] and now the bones were to show not only who these people were but even how the pyramids had been built [Music] some of the 600 skeletons discovered were broken or crushed but intriguingly those bones had features that suggested they had received Medical Care now for the first time scientists were able to compare the injured bones of the workers with the only other bones displaying medical treatment that had ever been found from that period Bones from the tombs of nobles discovered over 50 years ago this is from the Nobles and we see here this this part of the bone it shows us that it was affected by a fracture and it is healed you can see that the alignment of the bone is in a very good way and I'll show you now a other one from the the workers that you you can see the same the same alignment of the bone you can see this part also of the bone it is affected by a fracture and this yield in also uh almost a a normal alignment this means that these people are taking a medical care like the Nobles if the workers had been slaves it seems very unlikely that they should receive the same medical attention as the Nobles of the period Papyrus dating from a thousand years after the time of the Giza Pyramids shows just how much time and skill was needed for medical care experts believe the workers bones themselves suggest that the same methods described in the Papyrus might well have been followed during the pyramid building at Giza the ancient Egyptian doctor approached setting fractures in a very similar way to the way we approach them as well today first point was to observe the fracture to lay on the hands to actually look at the fracture the doctor's assistant would have taken hold of the opposite arm the healthy arm which wasn't fractured whilst the doctor himself actually took hold of the fractured arm and both of them would have pulled at the same time [Music] once the fracture had been reduced the structures here are quite unusual quite particular because it then tells the doctor to apply this unknown mineral to the arm and also honey then these linen splints were applied to either side of the fracture and it was wrapped in bandages and honey is then applied daily until the patient recovers foreign [Music] the bones went on to reveal more signs of medical care that have astonished scientists around the world one of the most remarkable finds was evidence of amputation among the earliest examples ever found [Music] to survive an amputation in an age without drugs or medical equipment was nothing short of extraordinary the high standard of medical care that the laborers of the Giza Plateau enjoyed it makes it quite unlikely that they were slaves to start off with why for instance spend time and effort looking after slaves if this was simply slave labor then another slave can be brought in all the evidence emerging from the discoveries now seemed conclusive these people were not slaves in fact based on the food and medical care they received they could even be described as privileged but the bones also showed that the life of a pyramid worker was by no means an easy one when scientists examined backbones they found that most of them showed indications of extreme stress this is one of the vertebrae lumbar vertebrae of one of the workers it shows signs of stress these signs appears in many ways we can see this this bone it is compressed we can see the curvature here and also the the edges here and the lower Edge so these are the signs of stress that we see the spinal compression resulted in backbones that were severely distorted bent to an enormous degree comparison with the bones of the Nobles showed that the workers were dying on average 10 years earlier the signs of stress and early age of death weren't surprising after all building a pyramid was a colossal undertaking for these mere mortals each of the blocks in the Great Pyramid of Khufu weighs up to 10 tons and measures more than a cubic meter to cut transport and place just one block like this would have been a feat in itself but the Great Pyramid contains 2.3 million such blocks how could mere humans have built something like this [Music] pyramid was made like a Stairway with tears or steps when this its first form was completed the Workman used levers made of short wooden logs to raise the rest of the stones they heaved up the blocks from the ground in his account the Greek historian Herodotus was clear he had been told when he visited Egypt that it took a hundred thousand slaves 30 years to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu [Music] [Music] but a very different picture was emerging from the excavations at Giza the discoveries had proved Herodotus wrong once the pyramid Builders were not slaves could they now shed any light on how the pyramids were built and test the numbers that Herodotus had given based on inscriptions found in the tombs and the number of skeletons discovered zahi hawas was coming to the amazing conclusion that there were just 5 000 core workers skilled Artisans and overseers and a mere 15 000 laborers I can say 20 000 workmen fifteen thousand who comes in rotation and they work for 12 hours but rotation every three months they go to The Villages another crew they come back another gang they come back but the five thousand are the permanent technicians who work for the king Dr how was his Figures were an astonishing 80 percent lower than those of Herodotus could they be right it was an American Construction expert Who provided the answer as they were making discoveries at Giza zahi hawas and Mark lehner began working with Craig Smith who planned huge modern structures airports and subways when he looked at Herodotus he wasn't convinced hundred thousand workers would have been 10 of the entire Egyptian population of that time it didn't seem plausible or likely that it really took that many people for so long and that kind of intrigued me and uh spurred me on so to speak to look further into how we would actually build it with the technologies that the Egyptians had at hand with the new information emerging from the discoveries of Giza Smith set out to apply the techniques which he had used in planning modern projects to khufu's Great Pyramid but in order to calculate how many workers would be needed to build the Pyramid he had to determine how the pyramid itself could have been constructed more discoveries on the site at Giza were bringing to light the techniques which had been used Mark laner had found workshops for making copper tools and inside the workers tombs were implements made from Stone and Flint which had been used for cutting the Limestone pyramid blocks so the next question was how quickly the workers could have quarried the blocks using such rudimentary tools one of the constraints that one faces is how many blocks can you produce in the queries and move up to the site with a work crew of a few thousand people which is what we anticipated would be available for that function one of the things that really was spectacular and was being able to see the Quarry marks the blocks where they were going to be cut I was able to verify a number of the assumptions that we made about time that it would have taken to do that using fairly simple tools stone tools and small copper chisels they would have cut around each block that they wish to extract when they reached the bottom of the block they would have started undercutting and then finally using large wooden levers they would have prized each gigantic block free and you can just imagine the conditions in a quarry like this Smith's calculations showed that a pyramid block would have to be cut delivered to the site and set in place at a rate of one block every two to three minutes so now he could begin to work out how many workers were needed but how would they have moved the stones to the pyramid site we have a clue from a tomb of a high official of the Egyptian government a few hundred years after the pyramids were built and in that tomb there's a scene of a colossal Stone statue of the Tomb owner being transported and it's been carried on a wooden Sledge dragged Along by teams of men and the passage of the Sledge is being eased by the pouring of water just in front of it to lubricate the ground surface [Music] [Applause] the problem of how the builders could have transported the blocks to the site had been solved but a bigger question remained how did they then raise them up the pyramid itself you think of it that the top of the great pyramid khufu's pyramid is almost equivalent to a 50-story building it sort of puts it in perspective and moving stones that weigh a ton or more up to that height becomes a central issue of construction Mark Lena attempted lifting enormous blocks with levers just as Herodotus had described and concluded that building a pyramid this way would have been difficult if not impossible but on the Giza Plateau there are the remains of parallel walls used to enclose ramps leading from the quarries to the pyramid sites and he believes that similar walls would have enclosed the ramps which were used to take huge Limestone blocks up the pyramid itself the space between them was filled with debris and the walls retained the debris and this formed a roadway upon which they dragged the stones that they were quarrying in into the south at to the north for building the monuments they're made out of limestone chips gypsum and tuffla and in fact the area to the south at Giza the area of the quarries is filled with Q millions of cubic meters of this kind of material and a lot of this is the remains of the Great Pyramid ramps I believe that were taken apart and pushed back into the quarries at the completion of the big projects which were the big Giza Pyramids but Craig Smith needed to establish exactly what type of ramps would have been used clearly you would not have a single ramp to the top of the pyramid a simple calculation that you can make would show that would take more material more work than building the pyramid itself so we believe the Egyptians were like you and I they were rational people they didn't want to work any harder than they had to and so they would find a way to do that with the minimum amount of effort the team tested a range of ramp designs using 3D computer animation after many months they had developed the most likely design [Music] our model showed us that if you built the ramp up to where you roughly at a third of the height of the pyramid that enabled you to put half or more of the blocks in place and so we envisioned a big ramp that would get to that level and then after that a smaller wrap that wrapped around the pyramid built off the pyramid itself because at that point you're handling smaller blocks and they're far fewer blocks to be placed and so that struck us as a rational way to do it foreign [Music] the Rams themselves would have been attached to overhanging layers of limestone on the pyramid blocks and then removed from the summit down but that wasn't the end today only at the very top of one of the Giza Pyramids that of kafri is there any trace of the final stage of construction well the pyramids look impressive enough today as they are but if you imagine that when they were first finished they would have been coated from top to bottom in smooth white Limestone from Tura across the river then the effect must have been truly dazzling most of this casing has been stripped off many centuries ago to build the city of medieval Cairo but if I hold up a piece of Tura Limestone and let the Sun reflect on it you can see just how dazzling the pyramids must have first appeared the Limestone facing would have been applied to the pyramids as the ramps were removed having shown how the Great Pyramid was probably built Craig Smith could finally address the question of how many workers it had taken over how long could the apparent evidence on the ground that a mere 20 000 people were involved be right or was Herodotus closer to the truth when he said it took a hundred thousand workers laboring for 30 years Smith Drew up a detailed work plan every activity was accounted for in terms of the number of people required to perform it and the time it would take thank you [Music] our studies indicated two to three years to prepare for construction five years to actually construct the pyramid and two years or so to remove the ramps and clean up and finalize the site we found that the Peak Workforce occurred in the fourth fifth and sixth year of construction when a lot of laborers were required to move the blocks up the ramps onto the pyramid and that was about forty thousand people at First Sight Smith's figure of 40 000 workers appeared to contradict both theories but it was based on the number of workers required to build the Great Pyramid in the shortest amount of time 10 years yet the historical evidence suggests that each of the pyramids was built throughout the reign of each King approximately 20 years and over 20 years Smith concluded it could be done with just 20 000 workers his uh maximum Workforce for the Great Pyramid was something on the order of forty thousand but perhaps it could have been done for somewhere as low as 20 000 and that's getting right in line first of all with egyptologists assumptions and they're coming at it from another point of view but the the evidence the data that we're finding yeah I think is pointing to an order of magnitude of of 10 20 000 people altogether Craig Smith's calculations were consistent with the archaeological findings all the evidence indicates it took twenty thousand people to build the Great Pyramid in about 20 years the discoveries at Giza had proved Herodotus wrong the workforce was not made up of slaves and they numbered far fewer than a hundred thousand but they raised a big question of Their Own how would 20 000 free men and women organized into the construction of the pyramids and why did they do it further discoveries were to suggest a totally new theory about the building of the pyramids [Music] I'm almost more interested now in how the pyramids built Egypt than and how the Egyptians built the pyramids [Music] the discoveries made at Giza had proved that the Builders of the pyramids far from being slaves were treated as something of an elite and they had shown that they numbered 20 000 people not the hundred thousand claimed by Herodotus but now the bones of the workers were to suggest a remarkable new theory about where these people had come from a and why they had come to the pyramids [Music] many bizarre theories about the pyramid Builders have been based on the conviction that the Egyptians themselves could not have built such enormous structures it's very important to know that they were Egyptians they were not people came out of the space they were not came from Lost Civilization as we hear these days many stories that do not really have any true in it at all but with the bones of the workers support zahi hawas's contention that the workforce were Egyptian before the discoveries of Giza scientists in Cairo had been analyzing the DNA of modern Egyptians the workers bones were now providing ancient DNA it meant that the scientists could compare the two sets of samples and the results were compelling people who are living here they are the same as the people who had been living thousands years ago okay and now the moderns are the descendants of these ancient Egyptians [Music] DNA research confirmed that the pyramid Builders were Egyptian and the people still living in the Nile Valley are closely related to those ancient Egyptians proofs for no doubt that the builder of the pyramids were Egyptian and you know if they were not Egyptians there would never be buried here they will never be buried in the same method of the Asia Egyptian you do not have any doubt to tell us that those people are not Egyptians at all they were Egyptian by Blood the DNA had proved that the pyramid workers were Egyptian but their bones were now to reveal more and something quite unexpected during her research bomino Carmel had obtained DNA samples from Modern Egyptians which showed genetic variations around the country when she compared these with the DNA taken from the workers bones they were startling correspondences from our preliminary studies we can see people coming from the whole Nile Valley coming from the very upper the Aswan to the nileville Delta and so I can say that the all the Nile Valley citizens at that time they were participating in the building of the pyramids foreign at a time when the world's first cities were being funded people had come to Giza from all over Egypt but why did they come there were clues in the design of the workers tombs some of them were mounds of stone or mud which looked like miniature pyramids if workers were building their own pyramids it began to suggest that pyramid building was a widely shared ambition and the King's pyramid was simply the most important example they say in the Old Kingdom pyramids were only for kings and queens and they say later in the New Kingdom from 1550 BC or 30 000 years ago pyramids became for everyone but now I can say that pyramids from the Old Kingdom became for everyone if pyramids were for everyone then perhaps building the king's pyramid was also for everyone perhaps people came together from around the country to build a pyramid for their King who was also their God not because they had to because they wanted to [Music] there was evidence that the food provided for the pyramid Builders was also coming from all over Egypt from the animal bones recovered at the excavation site Mark Lena was finding that cattle had been brought into Giza from all around the country the fact that we have such a preponderance of cattle suggests that this was a kind of national project that's being provisioned and supported by all of Egypt and its provinces far and wide to be very flip and short about it these pyramids were like Amish barn raisings in the United States now in an Amish barn raising the families all come out the young people the teenagers in the family the young men probably don't have a choice it's obligatory that you come out to the barn raising but it's not something they are totally adverse to because there's feasting and they're you know they're socializing communities would come together to create something for a kind of father figure [Music] was forming the same view of the building of the pyramids as a national project a grand scheme in which Egyptians from all over the country volunteered to come and work towards a common goal [Music] foreign we have to understand that the Great Pyramid was the national project of the whole nation the one million individual who lived in that time for 23 years they get up in the morning every individual in Egypt think of building the parrot [Music] hawas and Lena were forming a picture a picture of the pyramids is a great socializing Force young people came from Villages perhaps numbering several hundred few thousand and you can imagine them coming here and seeing something that probably looked a little bit like a Cecil B Demille Epic and they saw people numbering in tens of thousands and then they were spun off there's evidence from ancient Egyptian texts that you served a period of time in the grunt labor there were Specialists who were here full time and then the grunt labor was spun off perhaps back to their villages the advances were not in tools techniques and Technology the advances were in Social organization [Music] to organize 20 000 people from all over the country to work on one huge building project had never been attempted before at the workers tombs zahihawas was Finding inscriptions which showed how the workers were arranged into teams or files each gang was one thousand workmen and each gank a changed to five files each file consists of 200 workmen each file had a name and that's really the organization of building the pyramid there was now evidence of tens of thousands of people being drawn from all over Egypt and organized by a sophisticated and complex bureaucracy some believe that with this process the pyramids laid the very foundations of modern government quite clearly in order to mobilize a large Workforce to build a pyramid such as the great pyramid at Giza the court needed to have absolute control of resources both Manpower and other economic resources and so what we see at the time of the Giza Pyramids really lays the foundations for Egyptian civilization later on [Music] when a sickly King menkari came to inspect his pyramid nearing completion on the Giza plateau it marked the end of an astonishing era pyramids would never again be built on this scale menkari's predecessor had died before his Great Pyramid was finished [Music] to avoid the same fate mancari had planned his own pyramid to be smaller but he also died before its final completion it was a lesson to every King who was to Reign after him now an unfinished pyramid is absolutely no use at all if you're an Egyptian king and so perhaps the lesson that was learned over the generations was that unless you came to the throne at a very young age it was safer to begin a much smaller pyramid in the secure knowledge that you might finish it before your death and therefore it would be effective for you in the afterlife foreign [Music] in a period of under a hundred years one of the greatest achievements in Civilization had been completed and although such structures were never attempted again the legacy of the pyramids in terms of National Organization is arguably still with us four and a half thousand years later are now in the beginning learn from these people because there's people they left us as civilization that always clear our future this excavation will continue for another 30 years but I always believe that you never know what the sand of Egypt my height of Secrets the pyramids have always provoked or and wonder now the discoveries at Giza have added another dimension to our understanding and Rewritten history pyramids with the achievement not of a hundred thousand slaves but of twenty thousand ordinary men and women

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Length: 49min 26sec (2966 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023