The Secret Of Tutankhamun's Tomb And Other Ancient Egyptian Mysteries | Egypt Detectives | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] it was the archaeological find of the century perhaps the greatest single discovery of all time today Tutankhamun's horde Remains the Cairo Museum's biggest draw millions of gays are struck at these incredible fines you 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 tomb if you look closely at that material you'll see that something like 80 percent of that material was never made with Tutankhamun in mind these are not Tutankhamun's Treasures so why are they in his tomb to Solve the Riddle Egypt detectives Dominic Montserrat and Miriam cook investigate the very strange life and death of Tutankhamun [Music] thank you 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 Amun this was where the young Pharaoh came to praise the god from whom he took his name Tutankhamun the living image of the arm wound 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 1322 BC from here sailed the remains of this minor pharaoh who showed 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 of the Valley of the Kings by the time archaeologists began to ReDiscover these tombs in the 19th century most had 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 objects themselves thank you [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 there might be something really odd about Susan kaboons too what makes this neglect woman more surprising is that Howard Carter the archaeologist 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 tool sealed shot for three thousand years and a glimpse of an ancient world the time itself had passed by [Music] treasure after treasure was Unearthed chariots gilded sarcophagi wrapped in the cold Embrace of stone goddesses Exquisite Thrones and chairs collections of models and miniature boats 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 history hit 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 our extensive catalog of documentaries covers everything from the rise of Hannibal Barker to the illustrious Treasures of King Tut so sign up today for broadcast quality documentaries uncovering the mysteries of the ancient world we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout 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 tool then had to be filled with personal items from the pharaoh's 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 rights so his predecessor would arrive safely in the afterlife and then he could 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 King's tombs in the Valley of the 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 than 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 Carter thought Tutankhamun had been buried with a job loss of other people's stuff Howard Carter died before he could discover if Tutankhamun really did have a second-hand tomb [Music] and since then few archaeologists working in the Valley of the Kings have been inspired to follow up his nagging suspicion now finally one has Dr Nicholas Reeves he obviously went through all the pieces in the Tomb he looked at everything he cataloged 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 archaeological find been ignored I think a lot of professional egyptologists have considered Tutankhamun's tune to be rather fog or populists therefore not really worthy of serious consideration um just a glamorous assemblage of material with with no historical implications or ramifications so Reeves decided to look beyond the gold and the glamor to see if he could find the other story hiding in the treasures of Tutankhamun in the mid-1990s I started going through the material again and noticed that there was in fact something more to be said about it in Carmen's tomb hi if you look closely at that material you'll see that something like 80 percent of that material was never made with Tutankhamun in mind it was secondhand material which Tutankhamun had taken over for his own use and Reeves Discovery doesn't just affect the smaller fines 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 that the mask is never made for Tutankhamun at all I think it was reused for Tutankhamun the reason I say that is because if you look behind underneath the back of the Mask as it's now displayed in the Clara Museum you see that there is a solar Mark running down the side of the face along the neck and up and across I think the face has been replaced I think that that mask was originally made for another king and reused for so who originally stared out from behind the mask of Tutankhamun [Music] Egypt detective Miriam cook and Dominic Montserrat are investigating the puzzle of Tutankhamun's tomb the young king seemed to have been buried in an unusually small tomb with a job lot of other people's possessions even his most famous golden mask may not originally have been his so whose was it archaeologist Nick Reeves has come to a dramatic conclusion this has been replaced Plex was originally made for another king we've reused for Tutankhamun my own feeling is that the mask was originally made for economy this is an astonishing claim agonarten 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 successes 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 Amana Amana the desert City built by akanaten hundreds of miles from Egypt's traditional capitals of Memphis and Thebes and Tutankhamun's own 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 arten 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 Harman is really pretty important in terms of his family background go on well we don't know for sure who his mother was but she may have been Nefertiti the wife of the Pharaoh akanatum who threw Egypt into turmoil with his religious reforms and overturned the old gods including our moon and moved the whole Capital City from thieves down to this new site to domana right and that's where Tutankhamun is born not under that name but as tutankham with the name honoring his father's God the atom or deified sundisk and then Akhenaten dies and within a few years two becomes Tutankhamun exactly and I think the whole mystery of Tutankhamun's burial lies in that change of name the boy who carried his religion in his very name had been born into his father's religion and dedicated to the aten but by his death more the name of the old God our moon but his father had said that our moon was 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 this corner of the temple is full of images of Tutankhamun they're quite damaged though yeah they're not very clear although I can make out that it's Tutankhamun and he's wearing the horns of the Moon isn't that 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 these burning incense and that's our moon the guard his father turned us back on they're returning to the old gods Tutankhamun'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 content of his tomb even more baffling for amongst the thousands of objects stacked inside are many relics from his father's city of Amala [Music] if we look closely at this throne here we can see an art and or a sun disk 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 tool in the Valley of the Kings known simply as tomb 55. this was first found by Edward Urton in 1907 and like Tutankhamun's tomb it was packed with strange objects from Amana foreign the relationship between Tutankhamun's tomb and this odd cash team 255 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 tune 55. and that connection explains what had been going on the items aren't discovered should have been buried at Amana but someone had clearly brought them back after that city was abandoned foreign s there is a clue to just who that might have been items from Tutankhamun's own rain are mixed 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 tomb 54. it's a whodunit we need to discover who was in power when Tutankhamun died because they would have been the people organizing his burial well we've got an important clue right here what is it it was used to store 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 just that had the funeral meals of the mourners and these show us that there were only a handful of people here at the burial from these names recovered at this site two immediately stand out for Dominic first of all there's anchors on the moon the Widow because you always suspect the Widow first in a detective story and then this eye 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 Amana from Tutankhamun's turbulent childhood I had been one of his father's right-hand men whilst Uncle moon was a daughter of akhanatan 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 3 500 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's sarcophagus and his body is still inside here and we need to find out what was happening at his burial 3 300 years ago well there's a clue in this part of the war 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 and so be reborn but look who's performing it for him it's I.E but that's usually done by the son of the dead person so I is placing himself in the role of successor well it'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 Tutankhamun's Widow and Kessler Moon here she is so we have our two suspects right here I and the Widow of Tutankhamun away from the heat of the Valley of the Kings it's time for the Egypt detectives to work out their next move we know that Tutankhamun was buried with a strange collection of his forebear's possessions relating to the failed religious experiment at armana and we also know that his widow and casino Moon and I her new husband and the new Pharaoh are organizing this rather odd burial so we have our two suspects but now we need a motive that motive has to lie somewhere in the past lives of I and ankansana moon themselves lives that lead back to our mama this was where I first thought he would be buried and the strange tomb he began here holds Clues to what brought him back to thieves and onto the throne [Music] this is the tomb 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 akanatan's new religion and lauded his King and his new God on the walls of his tomb but when the Pharaoh died his people deserted his Revolution and so I deserted his faith and this sight 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 and the old city of Thieves [Music] Egyptian temples were the powerhouses of the Egyptian economy so if someone like economy comes along and 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 Amana 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 20. for I it was a disaster he had planned to rule Egypt next but plans for Tutankhamun's burial was still years away from completion well when you think about the position that I must have found himself in he he wanted to succeed and in order to succeed um to the throne an Egyptian king has to prepare for his predecessor proper Egyptian burial the difficulty was that Tutankhamun had died young and presumably unexpectedly asked because we can assume that there wasn't really time to have prepared anything and so it came as a shock and I was faced with it with a problem there had been no time to finish or even start a suitable Royal tomb for Tutankhamun so I it seems ordered an existing tomb designed 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 of having to give Tutankhamun an effective Royal burial but I think he was lucky because he was faced with this problem at the time when they decided already to dismantle the world to atamon and ship all that material back to Phoenix akhenaton and his family had originally been buried at our mama but after the city was abandoned someone perhaps Tutankhamun himself ordered his family's Royal mummies and burial Goods be brought back to Thebes what they did was to bring all the burial equipment back to Thebes but in a pile from this pile they cherry-picked the pieces they needed for tuning Apartments burial yeah and what was left what was left over was then reded out amongst the people who did originally belong to I had to hurry if he was to succeed and he needed funeral Goods immediately the amount of 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 we found out that Tutankhamun 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 in 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 grave [Music] akanatan Egypt's most controversial pharaoh over 3000 years ago this turbulent King began a revolution overturning centuries of Egyptian belief that his great experiment died with him and in the resulting backlash his successes tried to erase his name from history so what 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 Dominic Montserrat an archaeologist Miriam cook journey to akhenaten's abandoned city and discovered an extraordinary project which is for the first time letting us look into the mind of Akhenaten the rebel pharaoh [Music] thank you 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 old homes but why what Clues remained to 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 at the time of akkenaten's birth around 1350 BC Egypt had two ancient capitals Thebes the religious centered in the South and Memphis the political Hub some 400 miles to the north [Music] but when I can often 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 the story of akinaten's been told many times but nobody's ever really explained why he decided to move the capital here to Amana and moving an entire capital city now that would have been a huge undertaking yeah it 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 goes to 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 cliff side above the city a clue to what drove Akhenaten can still be found carved on the walls [Music] come on look at this this tomb was cut into the living rock at a time when akanatan City still thrived and his courtier eye for whom it was built carefully recorded his master's new beliefs on its walls [Music] [Music] this is the face of akkenarten and above him shines the arten 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 inscriptions on his tune exalt the new God it's the hymn to the atom akanatan's own statement of religious belief there's nothing else like it in the whole of Egyptian religious literature can you read some of it 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 hymn to the aten Akhenaten set out his new ideology he told his people that there was now just one all-powerful God the arten 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 akenarten grew up to see if the roots of his conversion can be uncovered there the journey south from Amana takes the Egypt detectives away from akhenaten's radical new vision back to the old religion of Egypt [Music] at thieves 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 far removed from the heretic of the history books well here's Akhenaten or what's left of him but he looks just like a traditional therapist look he's 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 worshiping our moon so what happened well conventional images like this dates from the beginning of akanatan's Reign but within the next couple of years things begin to change completely Akhenaten had taken the throne not in that name but as Aman hutep IV a name which honored the God our moon worshiped at Karnak but all was not well between the Royal House of amanhotep and the religious House of our moon by the time of akhenaten's accession the large temples had become as rich and Powerful as the pharaoh kadakhanatan's sudden conversion to artemism have as much to do with the politics of this power struggle as with divine inspiration Dominic has found an archaeologist who thinks it might there was a problem between the Almond priesthood and and the kingship um with the the priests jocking for ultimate power and by the time akanatan comes to the throne and this has been going on for several Generations and it was obviously something which [Music] decided to to Grapple with and and solve once and for all so I cannot and 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 were now irrelevant and Powerless and where better to assert his power than outside the wealthiest Temple of them all at Karnak if you go up there you might get a better view of it [Music] what can you see but it looks pretty much like a wasteland from up here but I can see that there's plenty of buried archeology here well that's the remains of the Great temple akanatan built on this site the gempa atan it means I have found the acne 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 our moon and was clearly designed to confront the old religion head-on but I can see that we're outside the boundaries of the temple Precinct yeah so why is he building out here well that's exactly the point the temple originally faced that way so its back was turned on the Temple of our moon hold on I'm just going to come down okay so Akhenaten began his campaign against the old Faith here at its 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 sight 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 a once dutiful King into a rebel pharaoh the Egypt detectives are on a quest to investigate the misery of ancient Egypt's most controversial Pharaoh Akhenaten over 3000 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 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 thieves this gate was constructed over a decade after ekenarten'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 talatat [Music] this is amazing it is so this is the Okanagan Temple Project yes the results are there but these talitat are not just ordinary stones they had a life before they were used in the gateways of Karnak as the decorated walls of the Great arten temple demolished soon after akhenaten's death on their side like Clues to the real story of the Rebel pharaoh Professor Don Redford has the job of analyzing this elaborate jigsaw and Miriam has joined him with the warehouse where the blocks are stored what are teletat that's the term we apply to a standard size block 52 centimeters long by 26 wide about 100 pounds which a single person could carry a man a worker how do they compare to a normal building block well the standard size 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 teletar 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 fast 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 impulsiveness in his um 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 anathema 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 foreign 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 [Music] this is pylon 10 a huge gate that once guarded the Karnak Temple its core is still piled high with talatan 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 ah well here it is at last the inscription can you translate it yes I I think I can 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 the occult images of the gods that phrase the gods have stopped that's a rather strange statement and what exactly is he saying there then the gods have stopped what does that mean that's very odd actually it's very strange the verb he uses to cease movement or to stop is what elsewhere in Egyptian text is used of what the son 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 um he is making here an announcement back to 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 [Music] but Don Radford believes that this message was not what the people of Thebes 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 Egyptians traditionally buried their dead well here we are tomb number 188 the tomb of paranaeffer of the theba necropolis and they're already at work shall we give them a hand clearing the sounds why not right this tomb belonged to one of our canaton's loyal servants and its walls still bear witness to the fervent opposition which is revolution had Unleashed foreign about 80 years ago our family lived here and they're cooking fires uh covered the ceiling with soot better enough's tomb was cut over 3000 years ago and on its walls I recorded the extraordinary changes that he witnessed in his lifetime 's childhood to the cultural revolution of his reign and here is the man himself Aaron effer 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 art and disc right here that's right this represents a major change and here you see a violently hammered away uh 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 invocations 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 sundisk he gives himself into your power so this is giving us an idea of the political situation in thieves at the time there is a Veiled Threat the servant who is not diligent who is lacks about the new program that the king is instituting is going to give himself into the power of God and that's uh for for ill well I can show you that if we go down the wall over here I cannoten intended to convert his people by threats not Faith here is para never 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 livelihoods what's the measuring for the sun disk is in super abundance in fact the the incomes the uh 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 had the Temple's money but that was also his people's income the Egyptian temples were the powerhouses of the Egyptian economy so if someone like economy comes along and 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 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 akanatan 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 religion abandoned his own temple outside Karnak and headed off to the desert site of Amana where division told him to found a new capital he was running from his critics [Music] he was receiving criticism it was not Veil criticism if these were evil words as he characterizes them he simply cut and ran and created this new sort of Dream City of his uh in the waste of the desert where he could be his own man put down his own roots and he didn't have to deal with anyone at Amana there is evidence to support this idea that can happen'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 Amana 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 akananda's plans which could even have manifested themselves in an assassination attempt at the king an assassination attempt would have been the ultimate Challenge to akhenaten's power base leaving him no option but to leave theebras and head into the desert to create his new city this is a new and startling portrait of a unique furrow 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 well I prefer the idea of akanathan as a practical politician he's a man driven by circumstances rather than being a grand thinker its tactics is not strong enough to implement the changes he wants to here at thieves so he moves to Amana I think we've just got completely opposing views that's not the akanathan I know but will we ever know the real Akinator [Music] to look into the mind of akanaten 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 pretended had simply never happened only now is his story re-emerging from the Sands of our Mana a lost Pharaoh for a lost city a man whose Vision inspired by aberless power and panic went too far and too fast for his people to follow foreign 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 Catherine 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 Katherine's people manage to bring this Marvel here four thousand years ago to investigate this puzzle Egypt detectives archaeologist Miriam cook an egyptologist Dominic monseran search out the Lost quarries of keflam and undertake a unique experiment in ancient Egyptian engineering [Music] thank you [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 zakihawas is one of the most beautiful statues ever made by sculpture it's really unique I always say that he looks like a king look at the sculptor put the royal blood in the statue that you can feel that is a king when I look at the profile of that statue I can really feel that the hook 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 encouraged great distances as this rock isn't found locally perhaps finding the source of this could provide the first clue to the statue's origin the detectives decide to split up Dominic's expertise is best put to use researching ancient Egyptian technology [Music] Miriam meanwhile heads South down the Nile to meet the archaeological team who are working on the puzzle of Catherine's quarries [Music] that's one the southern edge of ancient Egypt this has been identified as where Catherine found the massive red granite blocks to build his Valley Temple although 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 parties 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 meters 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 pharaoh's Builders actually brought the stone to Visa many tools actually were founded and at our execification well at least that is fairly typical of it yeah I guess this is coming from Hawaii which famous kind of this tool [Music] foreign finding the statue of stone means a journey deep into Egypt's hostile Western desert to the place where team leader Ian Shaw believes they have rediscovered the last Quarry of Catherine 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 Asa scattered everywhere across the desert they saw blocks of stone and countless stone tools nearly four and a half thousand years after Catherine stone masons had left there for the last time the patrol had accidentally found his Quarry this was the source of his prized Stone Ian and the team had come to this desolate site many times and by carefully removing centuries of sand they have begun to uncover its secrets this is what you've been looking for the Catherine quarries it's an incredible place I recognize the stone it's very distinctive isn't it this is one of the spoil heaps that forms part of the the whole Quarry setup and here I am 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 the blocks that they've begun to work that have come out of the the ground over there and down here lots of lovely big fragments of precisely the kind of stone that the Catherine statue is made from foreign but how could these discarded tools and fragments of stone in the desert be definitely linked to catherum [Music] it looks like these blocks 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 slab with the name of a ruler who sent an expedition here and that ruler 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 [Music] Miriam calls Dominic to see if his knowledge of Egyptian wall paintings might throw any light on how these engineering problems were solved I can think of one particular team 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 I don't know how far well I think you should really go and have a look at it the problem is that it's up a really steep slope so I'm not promising anything a necropolis over 100 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's going to be a tough climb and there was no guarantee that there would be anything to see at the end of it here it is things I do for egyptology 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 would be moved Dominic just has to hope that this ancient picture still survives quite hard to see him here in this dark team after the bright light and out of a desert but at first it looked as if Dominic is out of luck these Coptic crosses don't look like very good news because it might mean that the painting's been vandalized there's been a rock fall from the ceiling as well which has left this great huge blank and here it is okay it is after all that it's badly broken up by the rockfall 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 Mass ranks of men three deep 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 used the brute force of a huge number of laborers to drag them along it's time to call Miriam hello hey Miriam it's Dominic oh Dominic did you get into the tomb 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 put on sledges wooden sledges which are drawn Along by teams of men on ropes and to ease the movement of the sledges the 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 yes the answer to how they move the blocks it's 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 suggest 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 Catherine 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 quality was deep in the western desert so how did they move a three-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 there should still be evidence of the quality of this massive desert army Miriam asked Ian Shaw if his team know how many people worked here 4 500 years ago my mind is 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 the remains here of some kind of oval encampment um so you can see that the wall coming around here and then the side of the the slope and the kind of numbers that you're talking about that would be needed to haul one of these great huge sledges along just too many people to to have housed in something like this there just wasn't any kind of large settlement that you'd expect to be housing the kind of Workforce that you'd need to to pull one of these big sledges so something other than sheer force must have been used to move Catherine's Stone for they were simply never enough people at the Quality here to do it in the way shown in the painting [Music] [Music] 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 know the answer must lie in the Quarry itself if they can just put together all the clues an obvious start would have been to make the blocks as light as possible and the team's geologist Tom heldal has shown that this is what happened instead of moving massive raw blocks the Egyptians cut them down to a convenient statue-sized in situ sculptors called these blanks they were using hammer Stones like this one here that's made of a slightly harder stone that they can use for carving the surface or hammering the surface to its move to one plane and um this one is the whole one but you're 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 thin Edge narrow edge here and it's a bit fatter here and that is actually fitting the shape of a sitting power or sculpture so this was the sort of size block Catherine had moved but it was still far too large to Simply drag foreign the answer had been water transport so could that be the answer here was there once water in the desert the archaeologist went back to the data for long-term climate change and made a remarkable discovery around 4500 years ago when the collie was in use North Africa was probably Greener and seasonally wetter the the evidence that we have here and sure enough team member Elizabeth bloxham has found evidence that suggest there was once at least some water at the Quarry on this side of the research so Elizabeth why do you think this is a well because it looks very similar to a small Hut so if you look at the ground surface you can see it's this uh very dark brown mud with very very deep cracks here indicating that there's a well and the water was coming up into these cracks and is it the same period as the Catherine 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 it 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 4500 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 Wadi tuska 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 over land to the Wadi and then somehow get the blocks onto the water [Music] so could the answer lie in these puzzling structures back at the Quality itself these wedge-shaped ramps were built from the same Stone used in the Pharaoh statue but with mysterious tracks at their base the team are convinced these must hold the final clue [Music] but 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 kefiring 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 well 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 kefiren statue was found at Giza and that therefore that was the ultimate destination of the Statue Blocks 800 miles up to the north by river but they would also want to minimize the amount of times that they moved the block so what you're suggesting is a kind of amphibious vehicle that's certainly one possibility moving the Pharaoh Stone by Sledge would have been an almost impossible task so the archaeologists believed 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 route were Runners that allowed it to be precisely placed in front of the ramp 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 returned to Aswan to put the theory to the test could such a craft of solved Catherine's Transportation problem in arts Farm they have commissioned a small-scale version of the crowd from team member Adil khalani 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 badges [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 tracks of a quarter of the size of the one that would have been used in conjunction with the loading ramps so these two pieces of wood here are these the runners that would have gone into those ruts in front of the ramp yes exactly they they would fit in into those tracks [Music] 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-size load there's nothing 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 triumphant yes ability 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 tusker 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] five thousand years ago the Egyptians invented something astonishing the pyramid for a hundred years the Egyptians continued to build more pyramids always very close to the first one every one of these was a huge construction requiring thousands of workers and millions of tons of raw material and then suddenly for no apparent reason they moved the whole operation North to a brand new site [Music] but the Pharaohs were not simply content to change sight once despite huge logistical problems they kept changing location in the Nile Valley something very powerful was driving them to ceaselessly choose new places to build pyramids but what was it to investigate this mystery egyptologist Dominic monsalat and archaeologist Miriam cook go on the trail of the wandering pyramids [Music] thank you foreign to trace hundreds of years of pyramid building the Egypt detectives have taken to their mobile headquarters letting the river take the strain of carrying them between the sites for the Pharaohs building those monuments however things were not so simple each time a new location was chosen a whole city of laborers stone masons Architects and surveyors had to be moved we settled and supplied the whole extraordinary project had begun logically enough close to the ancient Capital Memphis from where building work could easily be overseen but then quite suddenly that site was abandoned in favor of a new location at Giza but even here the Pharaohs were not content and they moved again and again and yet again eventually ending up close to where the whole project had started at Sakara for years experts have argued over whether it was purely practical considerations or some deeper religious reason that drove the moves why isn't there just one Great Pyramid field where each Pharaoh could rest surrounded by his predecessors archaeologists have not yet reached a consensus and the Egypt detectives are no exception this is the situation we have this is the pyramids at Sakara and then the move up to Giza and we need to explain why well these are religious monuments the Egyptians are incredibly particular about their sacred spaces so I wonder if there isn't some religious aspect of the Giza Plateau that influences the relocation Dominic's years of research suggest to him a religious explanation but Miriam is after archaeological evidence was it significant that the first pyramid built to the new Northerly location was the massive Great Pyramid building the Great Pyramid was the most challenging engineering feat that they'd ever attempted the puzzle must have something to do with that the move north must have solved engineering or structural problems well what problems well that's what we need to find out [Music] to discover what practical considerations drove pharaohs to choose a pyramid site Miriam has decided to look more closely at the construction and location of the earliest pyramid of wall built around 2650 BC at Sakara this was the first in what would soon become an essential part of the pharaoh's burial right [Music] Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh was resurrected as Osiris King of the dead so to ensure his smooth transition into the Afterlife great care was taken not only with mummifying his body but also with providing him with a suitable tomb from which he could Ascend to Heaven this was the origin of the pyramids foreign the Egyptians were great pragmatists take this first pyramid right behind me here at Sakara it's called the step pyramid and it looks very different to the other pyramids its sides are stepped not smooth and it's these very steps that tell a story [Music] [Music] before this pyramid was built the elite of ancient Egypt were buried in flat roof Tunes called mastabas foreign look at this first step it's obviously the first thing to be built and the incredible thing is they could have stopped right here without going any further they'd already created a low-lying flat roof tomb called a mastaba until the step pyramid the Kings had been very happy to be buried Within These mustabas so the builders could have packed up their tools and gone home but they didn't they had an inspiration why not build big and place more mustafa's on top of the first and that's just what they did and then they built another and then another and then another and the result was the very first pyramid I think the evolution of all the pyramids was the result of these practical what-if experiments the ancient Egyptians became increasingly ambitious testing the limits of their skills and their raw materials [Applause] searching for the deeper spiritual answer among Egypt's ancient religious records very and meanwhile went in search of a concrete example to prove her point kuchi on Earth practical reasons why the Pharaoh cuckoo had first decided to move away from Sakara and build far to the North at Giza [Music] to find out she has arranged to meet a leading Egyptian geologist Dr bakay asawi to discover more about the ancient Egyptians most essential raw material a limestone was used in building all of the pyramids what makes it such a perfect Building Material it's very durable kind of rock and secondly Egypt is very rich a limestone and said that it has a layering and jointing which help querying the types of limestone so the layers actually dictate the size of the blocks yes certainly and you can see you can see the layers this is the size this is the maximum size the rocks can be cut from these layers so the Pharaoh khufu's Grand plans could have been limited by the size and availability of the Limestone blocks at Sakara so when they wanted to build a bigger pyramid they were actually limited by the raw material here yeah and not only this but also because of the space also you don't have quite a good space here to build bigger pyramids so they had to go to a different place oh yeah indeed they did foreign after almost 100 Years of pyramid building at Sakara the new Pharaoh Khufu found the site could not cope with his ambition to build the greatest pyramid of all time so he moved his entire operation North to Giza well we're here at Giza made this a better place to build you look at the stones behind you find that you have several layers of rocks and this this limestone is a lot more easy to get out yes the joints on both sides and then the building planes then you can easily pull the Rock from the from its original place [Music] so it is unfinished blocks yeah that's why that's how the they do it you see by chisening the uh along the joints by harder rocks and that's how they cut this into big pieces of course depending on the joints and on the bedding planes and that's why they came here because uh it's bigger blocks than any other place in the in the area Dr desawa's Theory suggests that it was the availability of larger stone blocks and a greater expanse of flat ground on which to build the persuaded Khufu to abandon the burial site of his ancestors and move to Giza practical Reasons from a practical pharaoh [Music] was the perfect place with stone blocks to work to work with and a solid on which to begin building one of the Wonders the Great Pyramid how do you account for the next pyramid they didn't build that here at Giza but miles away over there I don't see the problem with that there was plenty of good Limestone up there as well well go with me we're going up to Abu ruash and I'll show you a more powerful reason than geology for building pyramids up here in the North [Music] geology might explain why building moved from cicada to Giza but what Miriam can't explain is why the next Pharaoh then abandoned this apparently perfect site and moved again perhaps it's time to see if Dominic really can discover more compelling answers deep in Egypt's ancient religion [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] the Egypt detectives are trying to discover why pharaohs built the pyramids where they did but competing theories mean tensions are rising Miriam cook an archaeologist is drawn toward the Practical geological solution while egyptologist Dominic Montserrat believes the location of the pyramids is the key to a greater mystery whose whose solution lies in the religious beliefs of the Pharaohs themselves so why after the Great Pyramid was built at Giza did the next photo Jennifer move the building operation yet again to Abu ruash [Music] well you brought me here and I'm standing on the pyramid but it doesn't look very finished to me that's right it probably never was finished it's always seemed like an odd thing to do to come all the way up here to build if there's all that marvelous Building Stone on the Giza plateau I just don't find the geological argument accounts for everything well how would you explain it then Dominic well if we've been standing up here four and a half thousand years ago we'd have been able to see heliopolis and I think that's a really important clue and why is that well if you buy me a cup of coffee I might just tell you okay you're on heliopolis the center of sun Worship in ancient Egypt and the city at the heart of the pharaoh's beliefs a city now lost in suburban sprawl but what does this to do with pyramids [Music] first I want you to explain why you think heliopolis is so important for the move to aberration Giza if you look at the names of the thoroughs who build at Giza and Abu rash you see something really interesting because first of all you've got Jennifer at Abu rash and then kaiaphra Catherine and mancaro who built the third pyramid at Giza the curry exactly and one of these three pharaohs all got in common ray in their names the sun god Ray was clearly Central to the beliefs of these pharaohs so much so that they even adopted his name for them he was The God Who sailed across the sky in his solar boat by day and across the underworld of the Dead by night when they died these Kings also believed they would join him on this journey a journey that would begin when their bodies were laid to rest in their Immortal Monument their pyramid well heliopolis was the city of the sun wasn't it they must have been worshipers of his cult because they all chose names which honored him well you can have your coffee now oh thank you but we still know so little about heliopolis well that's right it's just a suburb of modern Cairo now might be worth checking out site of heliopolis today has been overwhelmed by the suburbs of Cairo but do any clues survive to link these Sun pharaohs with their Sun City and can these provide a solution more compelling than Miriam's [Music] let's get a good move from up here Miriam has arranged to meet Dr David Jeffries a veteran archaeologist who spent years trying to unravel the secrets of the lost city of heliopolis and its connections to The Cult of sun worship David takes Miriam to a place right in the center of what was the ancient city where they can get a bird's eye view of the area you're right well it's definitely worth the climb we've got a wonderful view from up here we're looking over the town and Temple area of eviopolis at first the view from the minaret made heliopolis seem even more mysterious one of the greatest religious complexes of ancient Egypt engulfed by urban sprawl and smothered with Haze but in the midst there is a clue an obelisk built many years after the pyramids but linked to the days of the pyramid Builders archaeologists have discovered that it marks the original site of the massive long-lost Sun Temple devoted to the worship of the sun god Ray after years of research David Jeffries has put together a theory to explain why pyramid building sites were changed that's a good idea right so we're standing here in Sun City I wanted to find a spot until the Sun at least let's uh let's talk about it now so if we've got a huge Sun Temple and Pharaohs who are building pyramids who are associated with the sun cult what's the link well it's interesting because the uh whole question of the distribution of pyramids is not really well understood if they seem to skip about in an almost random way but one thing that is significant is that when the sun cult becomes important to the royal family they move to Giza and then to aberos and really that's when the connection with the sun cult becomes really clear Raj Edith who is the first one to have ra the Sun Ray the sun in his name uh and to call himself the son of the sun he bills at aberowash which is the most clearly visible from where we are at heliopolis and then all the Giza Pyramids are in a a direct line of sight with heliopolis four and a half thousand years ago the Pharaohs would have been able to see the sun Temple here at heliopolis from their pyramids at Giza and David Jeffries believes that this view from tomb to Temple was Central to their religion but not everywhere across the Nile had such a clear view on the outskirts of Cairo standing escarpment known as The Citadel Rock this would have blocked the view of the sun Temple at heliopolis from many locations across the river so perhaps the Pharaohs that followed the sun cult were choosing the location of their tombs in order to ensure that they did have a view of heliopolis so it's all about lines of sight it could well be yes [Music] for the followers of the sun cult so the theory goes seeing really was believing as the Pharaohs became more obsessed with worshiping the sun they had to choose pyramid sites which would guarantee a good view of the center of heliopolis so the Pharaoh jediflay had built his pyramid at Abu rulash to ensure he had a clear view of the Temple of his favorite God Rey [Music] the next Pharaoh Kai Frey went back to Giza as did his successor mankale but both chose sites where they still had a clear line of sight with heliopolis but the map also shows a weak Link in this Theory I think that there's a problem with this lines of sight theory of David Jeffries pharaohs built their pyramids near Sakara at this place called abusir and they were still worshiping the sun god Ray but the problem is that the line of sight between abusia and the sun template heliopolis is blocked by The Citadel Rock [Music] [Music] so is David Jeffries wrong why did the pyramid Builders at abusia choose a site with no clear view of this vital Temple Miriam decides to invite him to abusia to see if he had an explanation but He suggests they actually meet just a few miles north east of the pyramid site among the ruins of another extraordinary building and where we're standing is the key site we're actually on top of the sun Temple now we only know of two of them as it is we're standing on the the actual Tower of the of the sun Temple so what's that structure down there for right well rather like a pyramid the sun Temple is surrounded by its own Temple complex and what we're looking at is is really a unique structure we don't have anything quite like it from anywhere else in Egypt and it's an altar of what is sometimes called Egyptian Alabaster or travertine consisting of four segments that are actually a hieroglyphic sign it's the the offering table with a loaf of bread on it the sign for hetep which means to be satisfied or to to make offerings with its rows of pens for hundreds of sacrificial animals and hewed basins for collecting their blood if it's a very substantial and hence important structure and most significantly of all from its top there is a clear line of sight to the pyramids and but this wasn't the central Sun Temple at hediopolis that previous fellows had gone to such lengths to be in sight of so Miriam still needs an answer even when the kings are building at abuse the point really is this question of visibility from the center of the sun cult itself at heliopolis the abuse of pyramids are out of sight from heliopolis in building back near their capital of Memphis these pharaohs had seemingly sacrificed that all-important view a view previous rulers had gone to huge lengths to protect just to the south of heliopolis south south of Cairo you've got this commentary that sort of sticks out from the the main Cliff line uh where the Islamic Citadel was built we call it the Citadel Rock and that interrupts the line of sight between heliopolis and the abusia pyramids even though the episode pyramids are some Kings but they're pyramids are back near close to Memphis and they cannot be seen from the center of the sun cult but with some Temple can the pyramid would have had a view of this their own Sun Temple which itself then had a direct line of sight to hideopolis what David is suggesting was that this Temple created a visual link a relay between the abusia pyramids and hediopolis it is an ingenious solution to the pharaoh's problem of building near their physical capital of Memphis but also maintaining their connection with their spiritual home at heliopolis a uniquely Egyptian answer to reconciling the physical problems of pyramid building with the spiritual demands of the Gods this was the truth behind the riddle of the pyramids Egyptian kings chose their burial places with an eye to the gods but also with concern for the massive logistical effort involved in building these legendary structures [Music] building a pyramid could be a lifetime's work for thousands of people from stonecutters to priests but in undertakings at Colossal Enterprises everyone knew they had to balance the physical needs of the construction with the spiritual requirements of the Pharaoh together these in the form of the pyramid ensured Egypt would itself remain a wonder of the world [Music] it's time for the Egypt detectives to compare notes and see whose theory is right [Music] well I must admit I did think that the whole pyramid building business was to do with geology and building blocks but David has convinced me there's more to it I had a feeling it wasn't as straightforward as your geological argument yeah but don't forget that the first move to Giza was about limestone and space and not suncles fair enough so we're both right yep chin chin

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 557,347

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, tutankhamun, tutankhamun tomb, tutankhamun documentary, tutankhamun mummy, pyramids of egypt, pyramid documentary, pyramids of giza, ancient egypt documentary, ancient egypt history, ancient egyptian tomb opened, ancient egyptian, Odyssey, odyssey

Id: p4NAGue6xeA

Length: 93min 37sec (5617 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022