Top 10 Treasures Of Egypt | History Documentary | Channel 5 #AncientHistory

first we'll be heading to Cairo today the capital of Egypt for number 10 Mike Adam top ten treasures meet Ramses the third Ramsey's was a man with lots of enemies he had to fight off invading armies from the Middle East to defend Egypt the real trouble came from within the kingdom his wife queen Tommy wanted her son on the throne so she hatched a plot to assassinate her husband now we know all about this because it's recorded on a virus that's now in Turin and this historical event is known as the harem conspiracy we're told

that the plot fails the conspirators were arrested and sentenced to death what happened to Ramses is there any evidence on this mummy that tells us exactly what happened to Ramses yes after mierda Siskin around his neck we found it bandages as you can see here and we didn't know why that Pantages is a little bit thicker than the other Pantages and after made a CT scan we found it that he had been assassinated by cutting his throat Wow so that was definitely so this was a mortal wound so he couldn't have survived it no we

cannot survive because it's big enough to cut the neck and to make the kingdom died within a few minutes after the blood the blood expelled out so this is very amazing after three thousands of years we revealed the secret about which way he had been assassinated that's the incredible thing about history is that it's constantly changing there are constantly new stories new new chapters being written in without out and now we're exploring the Nile Delta where the great river nile meets the mediterranean sea in search of number nine now countdown of great Egyptian treasures the

rosetta stone it was a stone covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs but that's not all underneath there was what seemed to be a translation in ancient Greek the experts began by looking at the Greek which they could still read and they found the word Ptolemy which they knew was a Pharaoh's name the challenge was to find the ancient Egyptian equivalent what they did was they looked in the hieroglyphs to try to find a cartouche it's a bullet-shaped thing and inside that's where the Pharaohs name was always written this was the very first word they were able to

read in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs the first step in deciphering a language that had been dead for 1,500 years so down here you've got the name Ptolemy in Greek and then up here is the name Ptolemy in ancient Egyptian but this is how they managed to decoding so what you have is a square that stands for a pig a semicircle for a team that kind of rope shape is an O the lion is an owl underneath here you've got sand and then these two Reed's or a Y so slowly slowly it meant that they could start

to piece together and ancient Egyptian alphabet that meant they could suddenly translate and next we investigate a lost treasure that was plastered in so many Hara glyphs it took 40 years just to copy them down when they were finally all translated they told tales of incest and murder and at the center of it all the family of Egypt's most famous queen Cleopatra to get there we're travelling more than 600 miles up the River Nile to a city in Upper Egypt the treasure number eight this is our next treasure the temple of edfu this splendid temple

was built by a single royal family known as the Tommies who ruled egypt from the 4th century BC until the last and most famous of the whole dynasty Cleopatra the entire building tells the story of the great Egyptian Queen and her family through the words and pictures carved into the stone walls this whole Gateway was built by Cleopatra's dad Ptolemy and you can see Ptolemy they're rather graphically shown slaying his enemies and sacrificing prisoners but Ptolemies enemies weren't all Outsiders his own daughter Cleopatra's older sister led an armed rebellion against him which he brutally crushed

he had her killed leaving little Cleopatra as his heir with a family like that you could say that for Cleopatra this temple wasn't a symbol of royal harmony but a nest of snakes as generation after generation of close family members engaged in a deadly game of intrigue murder and incest in fact out of these twelve ancestors of Cleopatra every single one was in an incestuous marriage and at least seven came to a sticky end so when Cleopatra herself came to the throne in 51 BC she inherited a tricky family legacy to say the least but

also this stunning temple a family power base just outside Egypt's capital Cairo is one of the most famous treasures in Egypt it's our treasure number seven at number 7 on our list of treasures it's the Great Sphinx at Giza the Sphinx crouches at the entrance to one of the busiest tourist sites in the world the Giza Plateau famous for its mind-blowing ly huge pyramids but even in this epic setting the Sphinx is a showstopper I always find that a scale of this incredible creature absolutely jaw-dropping it was the biggest sculpture made in ancient Egypt and

it's still one of the largest anywhere in the world but that wasn't obvious when explorers first encounter the Sphinx the giant statue was buried neck deep in sand all they could city poking out was an enormous stone head but they were mystified but once they've cleared the sands they could appreciate the Sphinx in all its crazy glory a human head and shoulders on the body of a lion taller than a six-story building the Sphinx was built on such a massive scale because it had an incredibly important job to do basically to be a giant guard

dog carved out of the rock to keep watch over the Pharaoh buried in the pyramid behind all the way beyond Egypt's far-flung southern border but it's a journey that's worth every moment to reach number six in our countdown of top ten treasures when you finally get here to Abu Simbel it is impossible not to be awestruck this temple was built by ramses ii probably the greatest of all egyptian pharaohs he ruled for astonishing 66 years one of the longest reigns in history and boy he loved to build this whole temple is a monument to his

reign and now here beyond the southern border he's also giving a powerful warning to the neighbors [Music] there's just one overriding message to this temple it's saying I'm in charge don't mess with me this is Ramsay's ego built in stone and it has left us with the most awe-inspiring place the temple walls are covered with ferocious images of the Pharaoh defeating his enemies number five in our countdown the step pyramid is revolutionary one of the earliest surviving monuments in all of Egypt and the world's first ever pyramid a hundred and fifty years older than the

Sphinx and the famous Great Pyramid at Giza and it's also the world's first stone cut building but it's not what's above-ground that gets the car onto our list of treasures but what lies underneath my feet because down here there is a whole subterranean world and not only that but here there are thousands possibly millions of mummified bodies this is the final resting place for 16 of Egypt's earliest pharaohs but it was also a graveyard for Queens and nobles and ordinary Egyptians for 3,000 years so many mummies were buried here that Sakura became Egypt's biggest the

city of the Dead stretching over four square miles all these mummies are remarkable enough but archeologists have also discovered something else there aren't just humans hidden here [Music] but animals to numbers that beggar belief eight million mummified dogs in one mass grave 4 million ibis birds in another the necropolis was also home to cats the booze crocodiles fish and some well it's anyone's guess next let's go to one of the most famous places in Egypt an ancient city on the banks of the Nile to discover treasure number 4 a temple of Luxor for centuries this

is one of Egypt's most splendid temples but if you're imagining somewhere silent and serious think again this was party central the really brilliant thing about this place isn't just its architectural splendor but the fact that it would have been absolutely pulsing with life so here you've had priests with their heads and their bodies shaved and all these columns you can see some of the traces there they'd have been absolutely bright with a kind of riot of color and then when you came out into the courtyards there were plates of electrum which was a mixture of

gold and silver that would have reflected back the sun's rays so it would kind of ricocheted out as an extraordinary light show during festivals Luxor was the ultimate party venue all of life was here indulging and wild drunken blowouts singers musicians and dancers like these gorgeous backflipping acrobats this time we're leaving behind the great cities and heading into Rocky Mountains not far from Luxor for treasure number three today we simply described it as the Valley of the Kings from around 1600 BC the mummified bodies of pharaohs were brought here to be buried in tombs cut

into the steep sides of the valley hidden within this rocky terrain are 63 tombs and they're just the ones we found so far they include the tombs of the most famous Pharaohs in Egyptian history Tutankhamun the boy King Ramses the great builder of Abu Simbel and our role assassination victim Ramses the third robbers were a key reason Egyptians began to bury their rulers in this remote location up until now and Pharaohs had been buried in great big pyramids a bit like the Step Pyramid that we saw at Sakura and these were fantastic demonstrations of their

might and their power but they were also huge signs saying that treasure was buried there so they were incredibly tempting for robbers and Raiders and that's why the ancient Egyptians began to bury their kings far from prying eyes in this valley so remote they hoped would keep them in their tombs safe forever but there is one treasure that was always going to be as nearest dammit the top of the list we're staying right here in the Valley of the Kings for treasure number two when this tomb was first opened in 1922 by the English archaeologist

Howard Carter very few had heard of the Pharaoh whose body lay inside but he was soon to become a household name toot and kar moon and that was because unlike the other tombs in the valley this tombs treasures had been kept safe from the thieves and what fabulous treasures they are this is one of three spectacular gold coffins found here each lying inside the other like Russian dolls the outer two were made of wood covered in gold but the inner one was solid gold weighing a hundred kilos today that gold alone would be worth over

three million pounds getting up this close and really understand why they used gold to make these amazing coffins because the idea was that covered in gold the gods would realize that these Pharaoh's these God men are actually divine and inside the inner gold coffin lay the body of the Pharaoh so here he is this is the mummified body of the teenager Tutankhamun I've really feel for him he looks like fragile mind you he's the only mummy in the entire Valley still in his original - lying all alone in an empty chamber but originally the rooms

of this tomb jam-packed with what Carter described as wonderful things pharaohs were buried with hundreds often thousands of their precious and personal objects so things like weapons and beds and jewelry and food and throw pad lunches some of them even took with them their favorite pets who'd been mummified so is everything you could possibly need for your journey to the afterlife [Music] number one on our countdown of Egyptian treasures is the Great Pyramid at Giza [Music] rising almost a hundred and fifty meters out of the ground it remains one of the most gobsmacking constructions in

the world [Music] it took over 20 years to build this pyramid and it's been estimated that each one of these blocks which weighs between one and two and a half tons each would be put in place every two minutes every day of that twenty years the stone was brought from all across Egypt including granite from more than 500 miles away in the south of the country the entire Giza Plateau would have been teeming with activity over ten thousand workers twirling at the greatest building site the world had ever seen when the Great Pyramid was finally

completed it was the tallest man-made structure anywhere in the world a record it held for 4,000 years [Music] however many times I come here I find this monument completely mind-blowing I mean if you just think about that affects me now today and I know how it was built how it would have impacted on the imagination of history across not just centuries but thousands of years and originally the pyramids would have looked even more imposing covered in polished white limestone it would have raised out under the desert Sun much that casing was actually physically shaken off

around 700 years ago when there was a massive earthquake round here but you can get a hint of what it would have looked like if you look at the tip of that neighboring pyramids so just try to imagine this landscape in its heyday it would have gleamed out with innovation it must almost have felt futuristic you