Discover the Secrets of Ancient Egypt | Engineering an Empire | Full Episode | History

[Music] five thousand years ago in an age when greece and rome were but a distant dream one civilization conceived the impossible and built the unimaginable the egyptians worked on a much grander scale than anyone did for millennia enriched by their conquests and empowered by their gods the indomitable pharaohs of egypt built the ancient world's first stone monolith its tallest building oldest dam most impenetrable fortress greatest city and the ultimate monument to one ruler's ego it's a clear message do not mess with egypt egypt's engineers boldly redefined the limits of architectural possibility but their road to

eternal glory was riddled with blood betrayal and outright disaster early summer 3000 bc rain clouds begin to form over the ethiopian highlands 800 miles south of the egyptian border before long a drizzle becomes a torrent and the slumbering brooks awaken with a furious rush of flood water churning blood red with the sun-baked silt of east africa downhill these streams combine to form the blue nile which accelerates for 850 miles before slamming into its sister river the white nile in sudan united the two rush northward into egypt as the nile a river at the center of

a civilization on the rise if the flood will not come this year will be femin no one will eat all the egyptian will be hungry if the flood will come strong maybe can destroy things by late july the nile spills out over its banks and consumes the entire valley leveling everything in its path for 600 miles from the south of egypt all the way to the mediterranean sea low-lying villages are washed away and thousands of locals are left homeless in egypt flooding is an annual event but devastation on this scale is inconceivable too much water

causes a disaster of untold proportions people's fields were flooded and rotted certainly children would have died there would have been widespread inability to feed families and we even have from literary texts notions that at the worst moments of famine there could be even cannibalism horrible untold disasters while flooding consumes every corner of egypt its new capital city memphis stays dry thanks to the massive 49-foot dam that surrounds it it is the first dam ever built in recorded history the driving force behind the dam and the city it protects is the first pharaoh of egypt's first

dynasty he is a warrior with a passion for building and his army has recently united upper and lower egypt into one great kingdom the first king of egypt would have been more powerful than previous chieftains because he had all of egypt under his control the king was placed by the gods upon the earth to help regulate things and to maintain the proper functioning of the cosmos and he provides for the egyptians not only in this life but in the life to come at memphis meanes would enforce his will over mother nature with the help of

some innovative engineering technology hello i'm peter weller the flood just described occurred many many times over the course of egypt's five thousand year history archaeological records during the reign of minis are sketchy but we do know that minis took dramatic steps to prevent a flood of this magnitude his engineers are said to have built a massive barrier to protect the city of memphis from the inundation and that dam was supposedly so sturdy that it redirected the nile thereby securing the safety of memphis now the idea that any civilization 5 000 years ago could accomplish this

is absolutely astonishing [Music] today the dam built by meanies is lost to history but another ancient dam endures just east of memphis known as saad al-khafra and dated to 2700 bc this obscure ruin gives a glimpse into the dam building techniques of egypt's early engineers it consisted of two massive stone walls standing 35 feet tall still 15 feet shorter than meaney's dam each wall was 80 feet thick at its base and 40 feet thick at the top dirt and loose stones filled in the space between them [Music] one hundred thousand tons of rock and rubble

had to be quarried and transported to build this dam and even more for the one built by meanies five thousand years ago a project of this magnitude would have required incalculable labor and effort nowadays you tell someone to move a 10-ton block of stone they immediately want to go out and rent a crane 200 years ago you didn't need it 3000 years ago you didn't need it people did not think in terms of machines they thought in terms of human labor while mini's dam endured for millennia archaeological evidence suggests the saad al-khafra dam was a

monumental failure today there is a 110 foot wide gap in its center suggesting that it broke apart due to the pressure of the water it was built to retain there may have been a flash flood at a crucial point in the construction of the dam and the water swept through and completely ruined it for the earliest egyptian engineers who were pioneering projects that had never been conceived before structural disasters were a natural part of the learning curve there was no precedent for the kind of massive constructions that they came up with in their minds they

knew they wanted to represent the power of the pharaohs and yet looking at the landscape they only had nature to guide them it really required imagination and a tremendous use of natural materials the mysterious pharaoh means was a key figure in egypt's transition from a sleepy coalition of tribal farmers into a regional superpower his reign is said to have lasted 62 years it ended savagely when he was mauled by a hippopotamus while out on a hunt but the dam he built would endure long after the last of egypt's pharaohs had gone home to the gods

it was the cornerstone in egypt's building legacy a feat that would inspire generations of pharaohs to attempt ever bigger ever bolder feats of engineering egypt is the crossroads between africa and the middle east and the presence of this river the nile makes it the only country of the sahara desert with a steady natural water supply so from the time humans could walk upright hundreds of thousands of years ago they've been drawn here to this river initially nomadic tribes emigrating from sub-saharan africa to the middle east follow the path of the nile later on during the

dawn of agriculture around 9000 bc tribes of farmers begin to settle on its banks when meanies finally united all of these people under one flag so to speak around 3000 bc the empire of egypt was born since then countless human dramas have permeated egypt but the nile has remained the one constant presence in the center of it all and despite the occasional catastrophic flood it's the reason why the world's first empire rose here and not someplace else at the dawn of the third millennium bc as egypt's separate city-states began to consolidate through conquest the river

that had long been integral to basic survival assumed a new role as the engine driving an unprecedented economic and territorial expansion network of man-made harbors and canals were constructed to link far-flung territories and irrigate an otherwise barren landscape massive barges became the 18-wheelers of the age and the canals formed the equivalent of an interstate highway system the egyptians didn't really need to worry about roads or wheels because they had the nile because the river would flow south to north and then you could use the wind from north to south then the egyptians would dig canals

to get you in your east-west directions and again if you wanted to go anywhere else so there were great canal diggers and the engineers would construct canals that were kilometers and kilometers long and this was used to transport all kinds of things whether it was large numbers of people whether it was grain food stones nearly 2 000 years before the romans built their first mud huts the pharaohs were harnessing the power of engineering on an unprecedented scale and for the first time in history technology was beginning to revolutionize not only the way people lived but

the way they died [Music] nowhere was the ingenuity of the ancient egyptians more apparent than in their lavish royal tombs the ancient egyptian concept of the afterlife is very different than what christians and jews believe for instance it's much more palpable the dead need us [Music] their survival is important somehow for the proper functioning of things tombs are houses in stone subterranean houses because you're living there in death this is your after death home initially the tombs of egypt's pharaohs were simple mud brick structures called mastabas mastabas typically consisted of two main elements a rectangular

superstructure above ground that could be visited by priests and loved ones and a substructure of sealed chambers carved out of the bedrock below these chambers housed the king's sarcophagus and all the amenities he would need for eternity they have bathrooms and and wash basins and things so you can wash your hands so they clearly were assuming they were going to live in the underground parts of the tomb [Music] as royal tombs became more sophisticated pharaohs began building separate shrines nearby where priests could worship their spirits this was the first step in the evolution of the

royal tombs from simple mastabas into the colossal complexes that still dominate egypt's western desert the pyramids all told the ancient egyptians built more than 100 of them 80s still stand today and they contain enough stone and mortar to construct a wall 10 feet high and 5 feet wide from new york to los angeles the sheer volume of stone that was brought from quarries all over egypt put into fashioned and put into place on the building site and the organization that went into that i think is mind-boggling to us [Music] today the pyramids still stand as

the ancient world's main attraction but they were no overnight success [Music] it took six pharaohs four generations of builders and numerous engineering disasters to achieve such perfect proportions the pyramid builders began their quest for architectural perfection at a place called saqqara it was there in the year 2667 bc that an enterprising young pharaoh named joser claimed the throne and commissioned the world's very first stone superstructure his tomb project would solidify egypt standing as the world's most advanced civilization and propel his pioneering architect into the pantheon of the gods [Music] 2667 bc in egypt a new

king is crowned he is jose the second ruler of egypt's old kingdom period jose would establish a reputation as a wise and pious ruler even two thousand years after his death he would remain the model egypt's later pharaoh sought to emulate during his reign he was so popular that he ceased being a mere mortal in the minds of his subjects and became the first of egypt's pharaohs to be deified as a god he is worshipped later on in the 19th dynasty as the opener of stone which is very significant they made the connection between jose

and the discovery of stone one of jose's first acts upon taking power is to lay the groundwork for his last he commissions the construction of his tomb complex the final resting place that will play a central role in his eternal fate the concept is traditional egypt's kings had been building lavish tombs for centuries but the result this time would be revolutionary aside from its unprecedented scale jose's tomb complex would differ from those of his predecessors in one fundamental way it would be built not from mud bricks as the previous ones had been but from stone

much of the rest of the world like the americas and europe was not up to very much apart from you know maybe piling a few rocks on top of the other there was activity in mesopotamia where you've got large-scale mud brick architecture but egypt seems to stand alone and is completely unique in its use of stone at that time to build his dream tomb out of stone jose turned to his right-hand man an architect of humble roots named imhotep not only was him hotep joser's chief architect he was also treasurer high priest and vizier a

role roughly equivalent to prime minister but it would be his groundbreaking work on jose's burial complex that would earn him immortal praise even the romans great engineers in their own right would one day worship at his altar [Music] but imhotep's architectural revolution which would culminate with the construction of the world's first pyramid didn't begin with one sudden epiphany at first he simply set out to build egypt's biggest and grandest mastaba the first order of business was to select a burial site for the pharaoh choosing a place for your tomb was a complicated business the sun

rose in the east and would go down in the west so it would die in the west and if you were going to be like the sun god you would be buried in the west and tombs would then face the east so they would face the rising sun with the promise of free birth and resurrection jose settled on saqqara a sacred national cemetery dating back to the age of the pharaoh meanies it lay on the west side of the nile directly adjacent to the capital city of memphis with the burial site picked out the next

task was to assemble a labor force to build his portal to the afterlife the pharaoh would rely on the sweat of his subjects when you say slavery to an american you think of what happened before the civil war uh here and it's clear that egypt didn't have that kind of slavery but the idea of ordinary egyptians flocking to work on the king's pyramid as a labor of love is probably an exaggeration as well recruits would be compensated with food beer clothing and tax breaks they were organized into divisions of about 20 men apiece in all

500 of these divisions numbering some 10 000 men were recruited to build jose's burial complex in addition thousands of women were drafted to keep the men properly clothed and fed the most important thing about building the pyramid is not only the engineering techniques but it is administration how can you organize more than 10 000 workmen they were living in barracks 55 workmen in each park and they go and they work cutting the stones in the quarry and they take one day off and they go in the day to hunt to fish in the nile with

his workforce in place imhotep set out to build the world's first stone structure but before he could build up he had to build down [Applause] he started by digging a vertical burial shaft 23 feet wide and 92 feet deep to house the pharaoh sarcophagus next imhotep's laborers carved a second shaft through which the pharaoh's body would be lowered adjoining the burial chamber was a series of subterranean rooms meant to serve as the pharaoh's afterlife palace about one thousand feet to the south a second tomb complex was hollowed out from the bedrock like many pharaohs before

and after him jose would have two tombs [Music] each would serve an essential spiritual purpose in the northern one his mummified body would be laid to rest to the south his internal organs would be placed embalmed and sealed in canopic jars during mummification one of the important parts was to empty the body cavity of all the internal organs because if you leave them inside the body would rot and basically explode so the lungs the liver the stomach and the intestines would be removed and they would be dried using a mixture of salt and baking soda

then after they'd been dried for you know a few weeks they would be um cleaned off oiled and wrapped up in mummy bandages and placed in boxes [Music] the mummified body of jose is buried in this maze of tunnels underneath his step pyramid here at zakara there are nearly four miles of hidden passageways here that are totally off limits to tourists and sightseers seeing as how the ceilings have a tendency to cave in once in a while by the time moses left egypt this place had already been here for over a thousand years the purpose

of many of these tunnels still remains a mystery somebody had served to deter confused tomb robbers and again others may have been the work of tomb robbers themselves but because hardly anybody comes down here you never know what you're gonna see walking around a corner like a secret passageway or stairway it's very easy to become confused down here for instance if you come to a t intersection like this and you go right when you should have gone left you're lost now i'm getting very close to the chamber where joseph was actually buried but in front

of it will be a series of rooms that'll serve as sort of a burial palace and in those rooms might be the amenities that joseph will take with him to his afterlife or the mummies of his relatives now this is just remarkable that i've been descending into this pyramid for hundreds of feet and i come upon this perfect chamber underneath the bedrock that holds possibly the bones of one of jose's relatives like that [Music] joseph's engineers built dozens of rooms like this for his afterlife palace when you're down here you can stumble on things like

this real mummy wrap or pottery that's 5 000 years old or this this highly decorated wall with this beautiful aquamarine enamel inlay are these hieroglyphs that are so well preserved they look as if they were carved yesterday i'm sitting in the rubble of joser's main funerary chamber above me is a massive vault as you can see his body would have been lowered down and put to rest here this room is the center of jose's funerary complex it was once supported by these beams that were from phoenicia modern-day lebanon and they're probably about 4 600 years

old [Music] we are as far down in jose's tomb as we can possibly go and some people say this area predates jose right here is a sarcophagus made out of solid alabaster that was probably the sarcophagus of one of jose's relatives above us is jose's step pyramid arguably the very first edifice ever made of stone on earth but that only tells half the story what we see above earth is only half the story because down here is jose's real palace the palace of his death and it certainly befits a very powerful pharaoh who had egypt's

best and brightest engineers on the job as work on the substructure of jose's burial complex continued imhotep turned his attention to the superstructure above that would ultimately seal it off from the outside world with virgin mountains of limestone and a vast labor force at his disposal imhotep marched forward fingers crossed into an uncharted frontier 2659 bc centuries before stonehenge the egyptians are at work on the world's first stone megastructure a colossal tomb complex for the pharaoh jose at the helm of the project is imhotep jose's royal architect [Music] in a limestone hillside near sakara thousands

of his laborers are pioneering a fledgling industry quarrying they are perfecting a system to cut extract and transport massive building blocks [Music] their first challenge is to carve up the cliff face into symmetrical slabs quarrying was done by pounding the rock into grooves with hammer stones and it was by sheer effort cutting trenches and then trenching out the blocks and then cutting them off underneath and rolling them out of the quarry once the stones are extracted they have to be hauled over uneven desert terrain from the quarry to the construction site using nothing more than

ropes sleds muscle and sweat they apparently had wheels but dragging heavy things over sand wheels are not very suitable and sleds are obviously much more appropriate because that's what they used with his tomb project in safe hands jose turned his attention to strengthening egypt's empire he pioneered mining operations in the sinai peninsula fattening the nation's coffers with a steady supply of turquoise and copper and he pushed egypt's southern boundary down to aswan the so-called first cataract of the nile which would remain the nation's southern border through much of its history ten years into his reign

the pharaoh still felt strong and egyptian tradition dictated that work on his tomb had to continue until his death with the ground floor finished and with plenty of time left to build bigger and better imhotep set his sights skyward and began a series of expansions that would revolutionize architecture on top of his mastaba he added a second smaller one on top of that a third and then a fourth stacking them like layers of a wedding cake with his stone blocks holding steady he decided to go even bigger extending the four steps out to the west

and adding two more on top of those joser's tomb gradually took on a shape unlike anything the egyptians had ever laid eyes on the groundbreaking form would come to be known as a step pyramid it's almost as if imhotep is working out in architectural form in that one structure the whole evolution from just simple mounds that existed earlier to a massive statement that sets the tone for pyramids forever after after nearly two decades of work jose's step pyramid stood 20 stories tall and surrounding it an entire complex was under construction that would set a new

standard for royal burial sites to the north a small palace was built adjacent to that were two ceremonial houses representing upper and lower egypt [Music] around the entire complex which was bigger than yankee stadium a massive limestone enclosure wall reached three stories high today as in ancient times the only way to enter the complex is through a towering gated colonnade that contains the first 40 stone columns ever erected on earth each one rises 33 feet and the framework surrounding them testifies to the fledgling state of engineering in the age of imhotep the architect was afraid

his columns might tip over so he attached each of them to a side wall to provide extra support they built it this way because they did not understand that you could build a freestanding stone column so we're in an architectural step here where they're doing trial and error jose died in 2648 bc his 19-year reign had proven to be an age of unprecedented engineering innovation as word of his passing spread up and down the nile mourners flocked from the farthest corners of egypt to pay their last respects there would be a huge procession coming up

from the valley with priests with professional mourners who would be ulating and sort of ripping out their hairs and crying out for the death of the king [Music] it's conceivable that a young child named sneferu was there to witness jose's final farewell sneferu would grow up in the shadow of the steppe pyramid and one day rule egypt himself as pharaoh he would become obsessed with achieving engineering perfection but his relentless quest to build a better pyramid would run head-on into disaster 2613 bc 35 years after the death of jose a pharaoh named sneferu ascends to

the throne and founds egypt's fourth dynasty or ruling family he is the son of the previous pharaoh huni but his mother is just a minor queen so to consolidate his claim to the throne sneferu marries his half-sister hetta paris whose royal blood is more pure among the royalty of ancient egypt such incestuous alliances are almost routine forget half sister the egyptian pharaohs often married their true bloodline sisters and the reason for this goes back to egyptian mythology the gods into mary osiris and isis are brother and sister by marrying his sister the king is acting

like a god with his sights set on divine status sneferu launches a charm offensive to secure the goodwill of his subjects he addresses even peasants as my friend or my brother and to transcend the shadow cast by jose's larger-than-life reign sneferu embarks on a relentless quest for engineering perfection that will make him a legend [Music] according to the greeks there were seven wonders of the ancient world among them the hanging gardens at babylon the colossus of roads the temple of diana at ephesus and the pyramids of egypt but of all those magnificent wonders it is

only the pyramids that have survived the ravages of time and man it is the reign of snef roo that provides the essential link between the step pyramid of jose which is innovative but primitive and the great pyramid of khufu at giza three generations later which is considered to be the apex or pinnacle of pyramid building it was sneferu who really worked out the kinks through a long and arduous process of trial and error and turned pyramid engineering into a veritable art form sneferu funded these massive building projects by beating up on his neighbors he looted

nubia libya the sinai peninsula and among his subjects that earned him the title is the smiter of barbarians and sealed his reputation as one of the most formidable pharaohs in the history of egypt sneferu's first engineering challenge came at me doom a sacred burial site south of saqqara there the ruins of his partially collapsed pyramid still dominate the desert landscape the meidum pyramid was a puzzle whether it was a collapse or whether the stone was simply robbed away or whether it was unfinished all of these are questions meidoum represents a crucial turning point in pyramid

construction the pyramid's core consisted of eight stone steps proceeding skyward at a sharp angle snefru ordered his builders to fill in those steps from top to bottom with packing stones then he enclosed the core within a casing of polished white limestone giving the structure the smooth sides he sought it's as though snefru didn't want to take the stairs he wanted an elevator so he has this abstract design that pulls them right up to the sky which is what the pyramid does it realizes in concrete form the most immaterial of things the rays of the sun

light [Music] by all appearances the pyramids extreme makeover was a success but beneath its gleaming facade there was a problem if you look at the pyramid today you can see it sort of striped and what those stripes represent are the polished exterior surfaces of the those two internal step pyramids and these obviously don't have a lot of friction so when you build something up against them once they once they begin to slide there's not much to hold them in place today 4 600 years after the medum pyramid was constructed signs of its destruction are plainly

visible just three of the pyramid's original eight steps remain intact and the outer casing added later by snefru lies in a massive mound at its feet could this be evidence of a catastrophic collapse i believe the theory that the peril of my doom was collapsing is not true we have evidence in the new kingdom there is a man came to see to visit the pyramid and he talked about the glory of the pyramid if the pyramid was collapsed in the old kingdom they will never talk about the glory of the pyramid but what snefru did

next seems to corroborate the collapse theory in his second decade as pharaoh he abandoned the medum pyramid and started over at dashur a virgin patch of desert within a stone's throw of saqqara there his engineers set out to build the first true pyramid from the ground up but as building progressed they found themselves on the brink of another engineering disaster when it was nearly halfway completed there seemed to have been some sort of difficulty that caused some sort of structural damage that occurred in the internal chambers of pyramid there are crack structural cracks and one

argument is that the pyramid was built on unstable bedrock as they were going up the internal chambers started to to exhibit these cracks and so they had to reduce the weight was determined not to abandon his second pyramid despite its flaws so his builders rushed to shore up the struggling structure enlarging its foundation by more than 50 feet on all sides then as they continued upward they did something even more drastic they abruptly changed the angle of incline from 54 to 43 degrees today the awkward-looking monolith is known as the bent pyramid the bend pyramid

is one of my favorites it shows that man is trying to correct himself while snefru seemed driven to complete the bent pyramid there's one major piece of archaeological evidence that suggests he wasn't entirely happy with it another pyramid just a mile to the north inscriptions found nearby indicate that this one known as the red pyramid also belonged to snefru having twice failed in his quest to build history's first true smooth-sided pyramid snefru laid his legacy on the line and channeled all of egypt's remaining assets its manpower its money and its best engineering minds into one

final push for glory we see then a fantastic kind of drive to create this ideal pyramid form that must have been so strong a drive that it was worth the enormous expenditures the emptying out of the state coffers and the just huge work crews we have to imagine for pouring then putting together these massive monuments building a third pyramid for one pharaoh would mean bleeding the empire dry but snefru ever the shrewd politician knew how to sell himself and his engineering obsession sneferu was simply a pr genius he was the first king to use his

personal name rather than a special throne name he stooped to conquer so to speak he he made himself more accessible in order to make himself greater and more famous and more divine in an effort to avoid the structural problems that had plagued them before snefru's engineers pursued a more gradual angle of inclination on the red pyramid and they also strengthened its foundation by using large blocks of superior limestone the blocks now have grown enormously in size and the builders are confident about moving and putting into place huge blocks of stone weighing several tons rather than

the smaller blocks that were used in the step period [Music] to haul each stone to its final location a team of 20 men pulled it on a wooden sled over a ramp made of mud rock and rubble water was poured in front of the runners to reduce friction on the way up 4 600 years later debate still rages on how these mud ramps were configured there are three prevailing theories the first is that one massive straight ramp was built on one side of the pyramid theory two is that there was a system of spiraling ramps

that wrapped around it and the third theory assumes a combination of the first two you will never find evidence about this ramp around the pyramid everyone has volunteering but we really cannot decide hundred percent how it really looked like after all the rough stones were stacked and the capstone placed on top an outer casing of high quality white limestone was laid over the exterior builders started from the top and worked their way down polishing the casing stones with copper chisels the finishing off of the outer casing of the pyramids must have been a highly skilled

job you can get a pretty good feel for what that must have been like at darshan at the bent pyramid where you can stand at the bottom and look straight up the the smooth casing still today maintaining that straightness and it's like looking up a sheet of glass it took three attempts and several decades but in the end sneferu's quest for personal perfection succeeded brilliantly the red pyramid behind me is the first true pyramid ever built not only did snefru's engineers crack the code in erecting a smooth and symmetrical monument but they mastered the process

of building large and open rooms inside of one the chambers inside snefru's red pyramid can still be accessed through an opening 92 feet up its north side at the end of a long corridor that descends back down to ground level the space opens up into the first of three rooms built to house sneferu's remains and all of his immortal treasures building a huge chamber like this within the superstructure of a pyramid was a unique challenge to the ancient engineer because of the pressure from above of millions of tons of rocks forcing itself downward so to

disperse this pressure sneferus builders came up with an ingenious engineering innovation the core build vaulted ceiling they stepped in the sides gradually by about 10 centimeters each step and so built a kind of inverted pyramid shape in the burial chamber roof so you got to a narrow point along the top which could be spanned very easily the room buried deepest within the red pyramid is the burial chamber a sprawling space with a ceiling that rises 49 feet it was here in 1950 that the bones of a middle-aged male were discovered but there were no accompanying

inscriptions to identify it so we have no idea who he was some egyptologists believed that they were the bones of snefru himself others say no that that pharaoh was buried over in the bent pyramid because the bent pyramid has a more complete funeral complex around it whatever the case we don't know what happened to sneferu and it's a mystery that may never be solved snefru's three decade reign ended around 2589 bc but his burial monuments succeeded in securing his immortality excavations at dashur have revealed that even 2 000 years after snefru's death offerings of incense

were still being left in his memory snefru's son and successor khufu would build on the engineering foundation laid by his father and create the biggest and most perfect pyramid ever constructed the great pyramid at giza each of the great pyramids four sides is almost perfectly symmetrical rising at a precise angle of 51 degrees [Music] when khufu built his towering monument egypt's old kingdom was at the height of its wealth and power but within four centuries the great empire of the pyramid builders plunged into darkness in the 22nd and 21st centuries bc drought famine and chaos

consumed the country until a new line of pharaohs emerged from the south determined to recapture egypt's long-lost glory their relentless military campaigns would expand the borders of the empire farther than ever before and leave behind a trail of blood fear and impenetrable fortifications that would renew egypt's stranglehold on absolute power 1864 bc a warrior pharaoh is blazing through nubia on a devastating campaign of conquest the era is egypt's middle kingdom period a time remembered by later generations as the empire's golden age the pharaoh is cesarous iii his objective is threefold to secure egypt's southern border

to take control of trade routes in nubia and to plunder as much nubian gold as his troops could carry nubia from the beginning was very important to the egyptian because this is the source of gold and gold for the egyptians were very important [Music] the path to gold runs through a group of nubian warriors known as the kermans [Music] while cesarous can claim the advantage of a large and well-organized army the kermans have a lethal weapon of their own [Music] the nubians were renowned even into the early middle ages as expert archers the arab invaders

called them the pupil shooters they were actually able to shoot out the eyes of attacking horsemen the kermans pose a formidable obstacle but for cesarous a brooding figure of imposing height and commanding presence failure is not an option in so many cases you can't say anything about the king's personality or his nature and scissors is an exception to that because you do have this series of remarkable portraits of him that have survived that are unlike anything that was produced for earlier kings the portraits of caesar's look alternately arrogant sad he's moved he's very very human

experience has done something to him this is a pharaoh who has personality he's got depth in his face he has sorrow or concern and age his face reflects the care that he has for the people of egypt as the kermans would learn the hard way the pharaoh's love for his own people did not extend to his enemies his army ripped through nubia seizing treasure and territory at every turn and blazing a path of death and destruction on a monument to his reign of terror that marked his southern border cesarous bragged openly of burning the enemy's

crop fields slaughtering its men enslaving its women and children and poisoning its wells he comes across like a roman general he actually says he who protects my boundary here he is my son he is born to me but as for him who does not protect my boundary who does not defend it he is not my son he is not born to me it's really quite amazing and direct as his army pushed south cesaros peppered the nile valley with a series of imposing super fortresses that would stand guard on a nubian frontier and showcase the strength

and superiority of egypt this has been built more than 3700 years ago in a time that military architecture was not known to anyone maybe hearts any army in ancient time they live in hats but for the egyptian to think about this it was very intelligent because they know that nubia was very important and they know that danger could come from there the remnants of the forts built by cesarous stood well into the 20th century a testament to the prowess of his engineers and they're still here there's just one problem that makes it a little difficult

to visit them they're all at the bottom of this crocodile infested lake this is lake nassar a man-made creation formed when the aswan high dam was constructed in the 1960s it runs 350 miles long more than 400 feet deep and every last trace of the middle kingdom super forts lies lost beneath it one of the largest of sezostris's super forts was built at buhen which had been a trading post since the old kingdom the buhan fort stretched almost two football fields long and utilized technology on a par with the european fortresses of the middle ages

nothing like the fortress of buhan had ever been seen throughout the ancient mediterranean world one of the reasons why it's so important from an engineering perspective is that has layers of defense emplacements for archers so that you could fire arrows in any number of directions against an invading army and then even outside of those walls you had a moat and then a wall beyond the moat so that any enemy army trying to attack the fortress would have to climb over this wall enter the moat be exposed to the archers on the outside walls and then

take two successive fortification walls before reaching the very interior of the fortress the bugan fort could house a thousand troops at a time including captive nubians who were forced to serve six years in the pharaoh's army by the end of his reign cesarous's fort network stretched more than 200 miles south of asswan into present-day sudan and solidified egypt's chokehold on the region reigned for 39 years for centuries after his death in 1831 bc his groundbreaking garrison stood guard on the nubian frontier but they wouldn't always be manned by egyptians over the course of the following

two centuries his conquests were relinquished as the middle kingdom came apart at the seams it becomes brittle it weakens kerma grows as a power in nubia and the forts in the end pass into karma control apparently without any signs of major conflict or destruction while the kermans reemerged in the south a middle eastern warrior tribe known as the xus conquered the north egypt's once glorious empire suddenly shriveled egypt would remain hopelessly under siege for the next 100 years but in the 16th century bc a new kingdom of native pharaohs would rise up and re-establish egypt's

former prominence among those rulers would be an opportunistic queen who would break through the gender barrier and assert absolute power 14 centuries before the birth of cleopatra 1479 bc the death of pharaoh tutmos ii leaves a power vacuum in egypt's royal palace his son by a harem girl tutmos the third is proclaimed king but he is a young child and can't rule alone so the widowed queen hatshepsut steps in to fill the power vacuum she becomes the young boy's co-regent but she rules like a full-fledged pharaoh at chepsup begins to seize more and more actual

political power and by the seventh year of the joint reign of had chepsuit and ted moses iii had chapsu actually calls herself king hatshepsut was not supposed to be a king because in ancient egypt men only has to rule women cannot rule to take her gender out of the equation hatshepsut simply switches it her body takes on the contours of a male and she wears the traditional strap-on beard of egypt and her body doesn't show female characteristics to be taken seriously as pharaoh hatshepsut knows she needs to build like one so to immortalize her reign

for the ages she commissions a massive mortuary temple on the west bank of thebes the hometown and power base of the new kingdom pharaohs it will serve as a shrine to her spirit after death and perpetuate her connection to the gods [Music] to build it she turns to her chief architect senenmut he is a commoner who enjoys a very special relationship with the female pharaoh a lot of people like to think that heart chepsuit and sun and moot were more than professional friends and certainly there is some very obscene graffiti with their names over them

um showing them in sort of compromising positions that adds fuel to the rumor [Music] regardless of his amorous talents senenmut would prove to be a masterful engineer hatshepsut's temple at der el bachry is the enduring proof of his genius and a testament to his undying devotion he did this from the emotion of love is not really as a duty to the queen no he did it for his lover and therefore the temple is unique it's different from any temple ever built in egypt today the temple is surrounded by barren desert [Music] but in ancient times

landscaped gardens and pools would have made it one of the most lavish monuments in the world the temple rises in three levels of terraces built into the slope of a towering limestone cliff the terraces are connected to each other by a broad central staircase the upper levels are supported underneath by long collinated porticos on the walls inside one of them are reliefs depicting hatshepsut's divine conception heart shep suits mortuary temple is really a great vehicle for propaganda you have a scene showing the guard amun coming to her mother then there's sort of an intimate moment

after which hot shep suit is conceived with the help of various goddesses and then the next scene shows her being greeted with great acclaim by all the gods and being hailed as a divine birthed king at daryl bachry the architect senenmut succeeded in creating a one-of-a-kind temple for a very unique pharaoh the project took 15 years to complete years during which hatshepsut's stepson tutmos the young pharaoh in waiting quickly came of age he would soon come knocking to claim his rightful throne in order to retain her own power hatshepsut would launch a pr campaign to

remind her subjects that she was descended from a god and she would engineer a series of towering monuments to drive that message home obelisks advertising her link to her divine father amun ra the form of an obelisk is fairly simple it is a tall solid four-sided tower with a pyramid-shaped tip carved from one piece of stone and decorated from top to bottom and carved relief now at first glance an obelisk may not seem like much of an engineering feat but all things considered it is one of the most stunning and artistic building achievements of all

time the story of the obelisks begins in the ancient granite quarry at swan 115 miles south of thebes this is where most of the egyptian obelisks originated and where one still lies unfinished carved out on three sides at 137 feet long and weighing over 1100 tons i am standing on what would have been the world's largest obelisk had it been completed it was abandoned when it was cracked but today this obelisk can still give us a clear idea of how these things were quarried out now workman pounded away at this granite using a dolorite ball

like this one dolorite is harder than granite so if you pound hard enough and long enough the dolorite will eventually chip away at it to cut out an obelisk this big experts figure it took about 130 men a full year so can you imagine pounding and pounding and working for a full year of your life just to have the thing you're working on crack and then you got to walk away well in one way they were lucky they didn't have to move it once an obelisk was finally freed from its granite foundation the next challenge

was to transport it often hundreds of miles to its final destination to do this egypt's engineers turn to old reliable the nile and use the yearly flood to their advantage the problem with transporting great stone blocks statues and obelisks would have been that these displaced an enormous amount of water and the bottoms of the boats would in various points along the nile have scraped or even gotten stuck and so it was preferable to try to move these great pieces of stone only during the inundation season when the rising waters of the nile created a much

deeper bed after the obelisk was shipped down river to its permanent home engineers faced their final and most formidable hurdle raising it how exactly they did it remains a mystery but there is one prevailing theory about the process [Music] first builders would install a granite base strong enough to bear the weight of the obelisk next they would surround that base with an enclosure wall made of mud brick that enclosure would then be filled with sand on two sides of the wall mud brick ramps would be erected using ropes and a series of sleds laid underneath

the obelisk it would be pulled up one ramp by laborers descending the other until it rested upright on the sand the sand would then be dug away gradually as laborers continued to pull the obelisk toward vertical until it landed squarely on its base sadly for hatshepsut her reign didn't end so smoothly around 1459 bc her beloved architect senemut suddenly disappeared without a trace the following year the pharaoh herself perished under mysterious circumstances egypt's most powerful female the patron of the empire's most stunningly modern architectural feat faded silently into history not much we can tell about

how she died her body's never been found we found her tomb and we didn't find her body yet so that's another mystery we are looking for 35 centuries later there's no smoking gun but there is one prime suspect hatshepsut's stepson tutmos iii the rightful heir so long stifled by his stepmother may have had the last laugh after he took over hachepsot's statues and monuments were destroyed and her name was eliminated from official historical records tutmus went on to become a great conqueror stretching the boundaries of the empire farther than any other pharaoh from present-day syria

into central sudan after thomas iii egypt really owned these territories in a way that it hadn't previously they were really vassals of the egyptian king so in that sense he was a conqueror twelve hundred years after the first pyramid was built egypt was at the peak of its power but just when it seemed to be invincible a rebel pharaoh would suddenly emerge whose radical world view would shake the empire to its foundations his unquenchable thirst for absolute power would spawn the construction of a new capital city engineered to position him as the center of the

universe thebes 1352 bc karnak temple the epicenter of egyptian society is buzzing with anticipation the beloved pharaoh aman hotep iii has died and his son amenhotep iv is poised to become the most powerful man on earth it isn't long before the new pharaoh starts to send signals that his reign will be different the name means a moon is pleased but the rise of the new kingdom and the prominence of thebes is the central city in egypt a moon became elevated as the king of gods the priests of amun were centered here at the temple of

karnak these priests controlled a third of the wealth in all of egypt and when it came to religion they called the shots but the new pharaoh aman hotep iv had no intention of letting anyone else call the shots about anything except him and thus began the classic struggle between church and state now there were several gods associated with amun and one of them was ra the unseen spiritual force or power behind the sun the actual disk of the sun and its rays that which you could see was a god called aten and aman hotep developed

an entire religion around aten a second-tier guy who up to now been playing in the minor leagues but thanks to the new pharaoh got bumped up to the big show [Music] during a journey north in the fifth year of his reign amenhotep came upon a barren patch of desert sheltered by towering limestone cliffs there aten spoke to him saying this was where creation began deeply moved by his spiritual encounter the pharaoh changed his name to akhenaten meaning the servant of aten and he decided to abandon egypt's capital at thebes modern-day luxor and build a new

city on this virgin site 180 miles away supposing the president of the united states closed down the capitol and up stakes and sort of moves to texas and says this is the new capital here you can imagine what would happen to the people in dc and it would be the same for the people in luxor who suddenly everyone loses their jobs their capital is gone and then they have to follow achalan off to a new place the rebel pharaoh named his new city akatatan meaning the horizon of atan today it is known as amarna and

it retains little sign of the enormous structures that made it egypt's most bustling metropolis more than 3 300 years ago akhenaten wanted his city built immediately so he could move right in his impatience challenged his engineers to invent a new way to build faster they responded with a pioneering breakthrough small limestone blocks cut into a standard size that could be easily carried and stacked the blocks called talitat by archaeologists were an ancient precursor to today's pre-fabricated building materials the talitat were very useful in that it was very quick to put up a building you didn't

have huge groups of laborers pulling large blocks it's much easier to have a large number of people each carrying one block and just use them like bricks the design of the city itself was equally groundbreaking amarna would cover 24 square miles running eight miles along the east side of the nile and three miles inland its layout would radiate from the royal tomb like sun rays emanating from a pharaoh's spirit a wide royal road would run parallel to the river linking the central city to the palaces and temples of the pharaoh [Music] he went to a

place that no one ever touched a completely clean place and establish this town and this is why it's unique aton was maybe the first and the most important planned city on earth akhenaten's new city sprang up with unprecedented speed within two years of its founding it was home to twenty thousand people and had all the amenities needed to sustain a burgeoning population the city's borders were designated by large carved reliefs called boundary stila several of these have survived and their inscriptions convey in no uncertain terms whose land lies between them at amarna the pharaoh had

created his own universe and placed himself and his family squarely in the center of it in every depiction from amarna anyone outside of the royal family is shown bent over bowing constantly to both akhenaten and the royal family so he seems to have required that people bow and scrape in his presence in a way that we had never seen with previous pharaohs the sun king had four large palaces within his city each serving its own personal and spiritual purpose the only one that still survives in any discernible form is the north palace remnants of animal

stalls and spectacular wall paintings with wild birds have been found here suggesting that this was the pharaoh's private nature retreat but there are also the remains of a lavish garden and the foundation of a collinated throne room where akhenaten might have received important visitors the pharaoh's obsession with excess also extended to amarna's houses of worship a couple miles south of the north palace lie the ruins of a complex known as the small otton temple the word small is a misnomer the complex covers almost 70 000 square feet an area more than twice the size of

the white house the whole temple was once surrounded by a mud brick enclosure wall inside were three courtyards separated by towering walled gateways called pylons in egyptian religious belief the pylons are associated with the two mountains of the horizon so as the god traveled in and out of the temple through these pylons it was like the sun disk rising and setting into the hills of the horizon inside the temple's first pylon was a court with rows of brick offering tables and a ramp that ascended to a high brick altar beyond the next one was another

court containing a house for the resident priest within the third was the heart of the temple the holy of holies where the spirit of aton dwelled archaeologists think the small atan temple might have been intended to serve as a permanent shrine to akhenaten's spirit but the tyrannical pharaoh would not be worshipped in death as he had been in life in the second decade of his reign he began to lose his grip on absolute power it seems that started to take his religion more and more seriously and thus avoided any of the responsibilities of state he

just ignored what was going on beyond the boundaries of his city so egypt's empire shrank because a lot of the other people in the powers of the east started eating away at it many of the details of akhenaten's last years remain elusive but one is undeniable his mysterious death in 1336 bc unleashed a wave of pent-up hatred among his former subjects his statues were broken off and buried in the ground smashed up inside the tomb of mary ra the pharaohs high priest the walls are covered with scenes of life during akhenaten's reign the most telling

of all the images is that of akhenaten riding a chariot with his head and body scratched out while it was too late to punish the pharaoh in life there was still time to devastate his afterlife destroying an image of a dead person is a really horrible act in egyptian thinking because it kills the possibility of the soul returning to its eternal home so we know that this was about the most brutal thing that could be done to a person after their death after crippling his spirit akhenaten's subjects abandoned his city within a few years after

the pharaoh's death amarna looked like a ghost town in the wild west power soon shifted to akhenaten's nine-year-old son tutankhatan king tut was anxious to distance himself from his father so he restored supreme power to the god amun changed his own name to tutankhamun and moved egypt's capital back to thebes there the pharaohs who followed him would engineer the most stunning tombs in egypt's history and stock them with the most priceless treasures ever collected those tombs are still nestled quietly between the hills and crags of the world's most famous cemetery the valley of the kings

bc as the sun rises over the west bank of thieves another week in the service of the pharaoh begins for a team of workmen who live here in this village of der el medina every morning these workmen kiss their wives and children goodbye and begin a one-hour commute on foot to their office on the other side of these mountains in a place we know today is the valley of the kings today we associate the valley of the kings with pharaoh tutant kamen popularly known as king tut whose body was found there completely undisturbed in 1922.

but gold and artifacts aside tut's actual tomb is one of the smallest and simplest in the entire valley tomb building really hit its stride 40 years after tutt was buried during the reign of seti the first [Music] when seti the first came to power in 1294 bc he inherited a fragile empire for the previous six decades egypt had faltered in the wake of akhenaten's chaotic reign there was a real need to re-strengthen egyptian power in its traditional form and to get back to the kind of height of empire that we've seen under thot mosel iii

seti the first had a real challenge in front of him as he sought to re-create that empire again seti was a battle-tested soldier who had previously served as egypt's supreme military commander with the discipline and determination expected of an army veteran he would restore order to the kingdom and absolute power to the throne his strategy would rely on two time tested tactics conquest and construction at karnak temple seti would leave his mark by commissioning the legendary hypo style hall one of the wonders of ancient architecture it is a vast forest of 134 towering columns some

as tall as a seven-story building the columns are so wide that it takes ten grown men linked arm and arm to surround one what the ancient egyptians were trying to do was to build a big room unfortunately they never were able to master interior space so if you wanted a big room you had to fill it with a huge number of columns tucked away in a remote corner at karnak is an unfinished column that reveals how seti's builders created such towering pillars of polished stone first the area around the base of the column was filled

in with mud and rubble then rounded slabs of stone were dragged up a mud ramp and stacked one by one when you reached roof level you started to take the dirt away and you dress the surfaces of columns and walls and eventually when all the dirt is taken away and all of the dressing is removed you have a perfect column while the columns in the hypo style hall cemented seti's engineering legacy its wall release bolstered his tough guy persona the pharaoh was determined to reclaim the northeastern territory lost during the amarna period so he launched

a series of military strikes into syria and palestine where he commandeered phoenician ports and trade routes the reliefs at karnak show seti capturing and killing prisoners of war during those campaigns as seti soldiers were terrorizing egypt's northeastern neighbors his tomb builders were preparing his eternal residence in the valley of the kings there the work took on the efficiency of an assembly line first a team of stone masons began cutting the tomb out of solid rock with simple copper chisels they were issued with these oil lamps and you knew how long the oil lamp and the

wick would last so if they used up their oil lamps and wicks you knew that they were working for the right amount of time but if they didn't you knew that they'd been cheating you [Music] plasters followed behind the stone masons covering the rough walls with a layer of gypsum and whitewash to make them smooth once the walls had been prepared several artists would come and sketch the plan of the master craftsman and the sketches would be made in black ink and then the master would come along and correct these in red and in some

places we still have the correction so you can tell where people messed up the sketches identified the pharaoh with the sun god ra and depicted his journey through the underworld during the night in the burial chamber at the back of the tomb that journey would culminate with the pharaoh's rise into the heavens the next morning to begin his journey across the sky once these scenes were sketched out the walls were turned over to sculptors who meticulously chiseled away the surface surrounding each drawing to create a three-dimensional raised relief some people would just specialize on hands

some people would do faces so you would have different workers working at different times on the various parts of the tomb wall [Music] once the ball had been completely carved it was painted as each team of workers made their way further into the mountain it became clear that seti's tomb would be unlike any ever built it began with a long entrance corridor descending down two staircases before reaching a deep vertical shaft designed to catch flood water and robbers tomb robbery was a constant hazard and we know that from documents found at derral medina which is

the village where the tomb builders lived that from time to time the people involved in tomb robberies were found out and brought to trial if robbers made it past the shaft they would encounter an elaborate ruse on the other side a false burial chamber it was big enough for a pharaoh's tomb but left empty and unfinished sending the message that no one was buried here but beneath the floor to the left of the false burial chamber a secret staircase was hidden it led to another long corridor that opened up into the real burial chamber this

is where seti the first was buried sadie's tomb is the most fantastic nothing like that had ever been found before and although there are other very beautiful tombs in the valley of the kings seti's tomb is the most thoroughly decorated of all of them seti the first whose triumphs in building and in battle had restored egypt to its former glory died unexpectedly in 1279 bc an examination of his mummy suggests that he was less than 40 years old after seti's death the torch was passed to his son ramses ii [Music] ramsay's would father more than

100 children survive ancient egypt's most legendary battle and blanket every corner of the empire with massive monuments to his own ego his 67-year reign would mark the peak of ancient egypt's glory and so the seeds of its demise [Music] 1964 a.d an international army of engineers and archaeologists is rushing to save one of ancient egypt's most precious monuments from annihilation the site is abu's symbol in egypt's extreme south where two colossal temples built during the reign of ramses the great are in danger of drowning beneath the rising waters of lake nasser the new lake has

formed because of the construction of the aswan high dam 140 miles downstream now contractors from five nations are in a race against the clock to deconstruct the temples inside and out and move them piece by massive piece to higher ground [Music] first the engineers cut the temples into movable blocks and transport them to a new site 200 feet higher and 600 feet further inland there the blocks are re-stacked against and within two artificial mountains of reinforced cement after four years of steady labor and 3 200 years in existence the temples of abu simbel have a

new home it was a miracle it's a sign of cooperation it's a sign of genius of comparing engineering of yesterday and engineering of today the abu symbol temples of ramses ii and his queen nefertari were the most magnificent building achievements by the most magnificent pharaoh in the history of egypt they were cut from scratch right out of the face of a virgin cliff think mount rushmore with a huge church carved inside the mountain right behind the presidential heads ramses the great ruled in the 13th century bc and by this point the egyptians had been cutting

stone for 1500 years and they had it down to an absolute science but if there was ever a question that science could become art that is the answer this temple is in effect a monumental sculpture that demonstrates what is possible when art and engineering combine with just a wee bit of ego ruling for nearly seven decades ramses ii was the pharaoh of pharaohs from childhood all the hopes for his dynasty rested on him and he was treated with a reverence usually reserved for the gods themselves [Music] his status as egypt's golden boy made him the

country's most eligible bachelor and husband he had at least 21 children by the age of 21 and at least 17 wives over the course of his life he would father as many as 110 sons and probably as many daughters why so many children well that is part of his virility the pharaoh was considered the bull and a bull is kind of a primal symbol of male sexuality ramsay's blood is likely to have been just expanded in incredible percentage so that thousands of years later there would have been hundreds of thousands of people who had some

uh possibly the blood of ramses the great [Music] ramses excelled not only in love but in war for centuries egypt had been mired in a seesaw struggle for control of ports and trade routes in the middle east ramsey's father seti had recently made inroads there but the region's dominant tribe the hittites remained a formidable foe like his father ramses would take up arms in an effort to expand egypt's borders he would attack the hittite kingdom in syria with twenty thousand men the largest known force in egyptian history they had by this point acquired chariots the

double bow a whole slew of other kinds of sort of instruments of warfare certainly in the ancient world they were amongst the greatest warriors as formidable as the pharaoh's forces were the hittites had even more soldiers but despite being outnumbered ramses fought to a bloody stalemate and returned home a hero reliefs were carved to commemorate the pharaoh's bravery on the walls of countless egyptian edifices including his great temple at abu symbol construction on it began around 1269 bc in the 10th year of ramsay's reign its engineers employed a process similar to tomb construction in the

valley of the kings all these colossal sculptures would have been carved by a community of people working together working all over these colossal pieces and we know this from representations in the tomb of rekhmirah which shows the temple workshops the sculptors are at work on larger than life-sized three-dimensional statuary showing them working on the face working on the shoulders working on the arms working on the body and the legs and out of this communal effort they created a piece of work which has the perfect proportion the statues of ramses outside the great temple stand 69

feet tall making them the largest that had ever been sculpted in egypt inside an entire temple complex is carved out within one massive rock the first atrium alone has eight more towering statues of the pharaoh beyond that is a series of other rooms a second atrium a sanctuary and smaller side chambers that may have served as storerooms for sacred offerings every facet of the temple's design was meant to send a clear message to all who entered that ramsey's the great was a god among the living ramses ii is shown not only worshipping the gods but

worshipping an image of his own deified self so you have ramses ii as pharaoh worshiping ramses ii as god all taking place during the lifetime of ramses ii [Music] the heart of the temple is its sanctuary which lies more than 200 feet inside the mountain within it are four statues of egypt's mightiest gods pata the creator amun the supreme god ramses the living god and raharakti the sun god twice a year on the 22nd of february and october the rays of the rising sun strike the faces of the three gods associated with it ramses raharakti

and amun some egyptologists describe significance to those dates such as the pharaoh's birthday and his coronation date others chalk it up purely to chance this is really normal like you know if you look at around your house any place the sun will hit a certain place in your house twice a year that's really a natural thing next door to the great temple stands the one carved out in honor of ramsay's most beloved queen nefertari while the pharaoh could have any woman he laid eyes on his heart belonged only to her nefertari is absolutely beautiful in

the representations that we have of her she must have been really spectacular and in fact there are inscriptions that say that she was the woman by whom the north wind blows on her temple's exterior facade there are six statues four of ramses and two of nefertari each standing 33 feet tall this is the oldest temple in egypt where the queen statues stand as tall as the kings underscoring her uncommon significance [Music] just as ramses ii is deified in his temple nefertari is also deified in her own nefertari is actually shown as the goddess hathor so

she becomes a divinity just like her husband during the reign of ramses the great the temples at abu symbol stood as an imposing reminder to northern bound travelers that a powerful empire lay just over the horizon [Music] that empire nearly 2 000 years in the making would spend the next thousand years in decline within a few centuries of the death of ramses the great in 1212 bc the new kingdom had fallen victim to the same circumstances that destroyed the previous ones increasingly weak leadership and economic depression over the centuries a revolving door of foreign conquerors

nubians libyans assyrians persians even alexander the great and the greeks took hold of egypt finally with the suicide of that legendary cleopatra vii in marched octavian caesar with the legions of rome and ancient egypt was finished [Music] over time these temples were buried by the desert sand lost to history just like the civilization that built them but in our time they have been reborn to stand once again and proudly proclaim the power and ingenuity of the world's first true empire [Music] the egyptians put the foundation of engineering they were the people who invented engineering without

the benefit of computers or cranes egypt's engineers created monumental masterpieces that testify not only to their sophisticated understanding of architectural principles but to their ability to harness huge numbers of men and materials to execute them the egyptians worked on a much grander scale than anyone did for millennia really they have to have had tremendous confidence in themselves and in their construction capability but the imposing structures the egyptians left behind are the result of much more than granite limestone and laborers they epitomize unparalleled genius unrivaled technology and the beginning of mankind's eternal struggle to engineer a

bridge between the human and the divine [Music] you