King Tut's Treasures: Hidden Secrets Rediscovered (Full Episode) | National Geographic

totin common spectacular [Music] Treasures now for the first time since they were discovered all 5,398 objects are being brought together in a new $1 billion [Music] Museum this will be the first time many of them have been seen for a century look at the horse look at the horse look at the horse scientists have been using the latest Imaging and forensic technology to unlock long buried Mysteries to reveal The Man Behind the Mask so many tiny details are visible again this wasn't just a hall of treasure it was a veritable Arsenal not of a boy

King but a warrior on a global stage Egypt's spectacular Tuten [Music] common he's the most famous most studied Pharaoh in history but even today tutan Common's Treasures still have much to reveal now the most comprehensive forensic examination of all Tuten Common's 5,000 Treasures is underway and several key objects have captured expert's attention at the heart of the investigation a mysterious dagger found on tutin Common's mummified body Priceless golden Chariot decorations painstakingly reconstructed after resting in fragments for 3 and half thousand years and the leather remains of a strange armored tunic these three Treasures will tell

us much more about the real Tuton common not as a boy but as a warrior it's a new chapter in a story that began in the Valley of the Kings on the afternoon of November 6 1922 in the barren desert west of the Nile British archaeologist Howard Carter made the greatest archaeological discovery of all time the almost completely intact tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh tutan common egyptologist Dr Chris nonon has been given a rare chance to get up close to Howard Carter's personal account of the momentous Discovery this is Howard Carter's journal and it's

amazing for me to see this because this it really is as close as you can get to the very moment that Carter looked on this incredible Hall of objects for the very first time this meticulously handr entry records Carter's astonishment as he peered inside the tomb becoming the first person to Gaze on its wonders for 3 and a half thousand years say the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another when lord canavan said to me can you see anything I

replied to him yes it is wonderful tutan Common's Treasures captivated the world in the months and years following their Discovery they were painstakingly excavated and transferred to the KIRO Museum since then millions of visitors have marveled that many of the items found in Tuton Common's tomb these iconic Treasures paint a picture of a Pampered boy King who died tragically young this is the Tuten common every school child knows a boy too young to rule an emotionally and physically weak puppet ruler but this image is based on the tiny handful of tutan Common's Treasures on display

in the Cairo Museum that make up just a fraction of the 5,000 objects found in Tuton Common's burial [Applause] chamber the rest have been locked away in the Museum's basement until now the new Grand Egyptian museum is now gathering together all of Tuten Common's Treasures with the aim of putting the whole collection on display for the first time since their Discovery in 1922 the treasures in these boxes will shed new light on the story of Tuten K thousands of objects were simply packed away when they were first Unearthed and have never been studied or analyzed

but now in the cuttingedge labs and sto rooms of the grand Egyptian museum all this is about to change behind this unassuming door lies an egyptologists Paradise wow welcome in storage 93 especially for artifacts of toan filled with Priceless treasures and dripping with gold in this room tutan Common's prized possessions are being brought together to be stored and conserved in climate controlled conditions there's some boats staffs there beds Chris nonon is one of a tiny handful of experts to gain entry this is a super exciting moment to be here to see all of this material

being ready for exhibition in in the new Museum it's once in a lifetime kind of chance to see this the last time these Treasures were together was inside Tuton Common's tomb Professor Selma ikram believes it's only Now by seeing the treasures together that egyptologists can begin to tell the full story of the pharaoh's life there is so much material in the Tomb of tutan it's really a bit like an attic where you know people's mothers have put all of their bits and pieces so that they have their memories they have their entire life encapsulated from

babyhood onwards and Tut's tomb is like opening up his attic and being able to see inside his past life seen together totin Common's Treasures are now painting a radical new portrait not the boy King as many had thought this is totin common the warrior king inside the tomb Howard Carter found six chariots seven throw sticks four daggers dozens of bows hundreds of arrows eight Shields and a unique and sophisticated set of armor so this wasn't just a hall of treasure it was a veritable arsenal of weapons but these weren't the toys of a boy King

it would seem they were the weapons of a man people romantically called Tuton khaman the boy King and that's because he came to the throne when he was 9 and a half but he died when he was about 19 and by the age of 14 in ancient Egypt you man so really it's more of a romantic myth calling him the boy King because he really was a proper truly grownup King today this King's Story is being Rewritten by the artifacts he took to the afterlife and there's one treasure tutun common seems to have highly valued

tucked away in a corner of the Cairo Museum lies a small dagger with a big secret the latest technology has revealed startling new information about this weapon soon to be moved to the Grand Egyptian [Music] Museum information that is out of this world the sheer scale of Tuton common Treasures is breathtaking from Golden refugees to elaborate beds to simple items of clothing but tutin common was also buried with an arsenal of weapons just draw after draw after draw all containing arrows this entire section yes just for this one kind of object it's amazing in this

second Millennia BC stockpile there's one weapon that Tuten common seem to have highly treasured since its Discovery this spectacular dagger has been on display in the Cairo Museum tucked away in a corner passed by as visitors flock to Tuton Common's Big Ticket Treasures might not be the most famous object that was discovered in the Tomb but I think this dagger is one of the most interesting this deadly weapon contains a secret that's been hidden in plain sight for nearly a century now the dagger has been reanalyzed to reveal totin common as a warrior hungry for

power in this world and Beyond the dagger was found inside Tuten Common's coffin it was resting directly on his body this was one of the most important objects for tutankamon it seems it was found very close uh to The Mummy just above the king's abdomen it's clear there was something special about this dagger to Tuten common and there's no doubt in its beauty its handle is extremely finely decorated in gold and these bands which are inlaid with precious materials the pommel at the end is made of rock crystal this sheath made of beaten gold is

decorated with this very intricate Floral Pattern but Tuton Common's tomb was Dripping in Gold and Gems so why was this dagger buried inside his coffin on his body what made it so precious the answer lies in the dagger's blade perhaps the most interesting aspect of it actually is the blade which is made of iron iron is one of the most common elements on [Music] Earth but in Tuten common Egypt iron was rarer than gold three and a half thousand years ago iron was almost non-existent in Egypt we don't get any archaeological evidence for iron smelting

in this part of the world until the 6th Century BC that's 800 years after Tuten common died the iron in the dagger's blade wasn't mined or smelted in Egypt so where did it come from the mystery has puzzled experts since the dagger's discovery nearly a century ago but until recently there is no way to know where the iron in the blade came from without destroying it now thanks to the use of advanced non-destructive x-ray analysis curators Can Shed new light on this ancient mystery because there's more than iron in this blade this technique allows us

to see the kind of unique chemical fingerprint of the blade of this dagger and crucially it tells us the percentage of the very ious different elements iron occurs in nature mixed with other elements this mixture is unique to each source of the metal yes by identifying the Blade's unique chemical fingerprint the curators have been able to pinpoint its origin so just we need everyone to move away for three M three M please for health and safety because we now going to run the X-ray the machine fires high energy x-rays into the dagger blade and it's

the energy reflected back that reveals the elements contained inside okay it's done so what we have now is the result of X-ray test and we can see the elements here of the uh chemical composition and we can see now Three Peaks which of the iron and nickel and Cobalt okay what the curators found was the proportion of nickel was unusually high what what does this tell us about the kind of iron that was used to make this taget I mean this kind of chemical composition is not find on the smelted iron found in Egypt or

even in this planet there's no match on Earth for the iron in this dagger if this iron doesn't come from this planet where does it come from it's only coming from the meterorite from a meteorite met right yes the iron in tutin Common's dagger is extraterrestrial its Journey began thousands perhaps millions of years ago from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter 250 million miles away a lump of rock and metal plummeting faster than a bullet toward Earth it slammed into the planet's surface shattering into fragments of molten iron somewhere in the Sands of Africa

these fragments lay for thousands even millions of years until they were found and collected to be melted forged and crafted into an object of rare Beauty and Power the iron in this dagger has been on an extraordinary Journey egyptologist Aiden Dodson believes Tuten common knew this iron fell from the heavens back 1500 or 2,000 years earlier than tanam Moon they talk about irons from the sky as being a somewhat miraculous material the ion has a power it's from it's from the gods to Tut in common the dagger must have seemed like a gift from the

[Music] gods now another hidden set of artifacts not seen in their original glory for 3 and a half thousand years are shedding new light on tutin Common's ambition a unique combination of images that display him as a powerful ruler of not just Egypt but the world duen common took six chariots to the afterlife carefully dismantled and stacked in his tomb's antichamber when Howard Carter discovered the tomb he found at least 1,500 tiny gold flakes Under The Chariot he didn't have the technology to deal with these bewildering metal fragments so he put them in a box

in the hope that someone in the future might now decades later these gold fragments have been finally reassembled world-renowned gold conservator Dr Christian emman has been piecing the flakes together his work reveals a series of stunning images that show to ten at the center of the world so many tiny details are visible again yeah which were not visible when they were excavated emman discovered these gold fragments are parts of golden panels once used as decorations on the harnesses and trappings of tutin common [Music] chariots these bewildering fragile jigsaw puzzles have so far taken three years

to piece together so every single piece which we could reattach to the gold sheet is another part of a huge puzzle but still there are missing pieces and we try of course now to fix those little things yeah back to its original position emman has pieced together at least 70 intricately embossed gold panels made to decorate six leather Chariot [Music] harnesses and they would have made a powerful impression on everyone who saw them these images haven't been seen since the doors were sealed on Tuten Common's tomb 3 and a half thousand years ago for egyptologist

Professor Salma ikron interpreting them is an incredible [Music] privilege this material is fabulous because it's never been on display before even though it is from the Tomb of the most famous King Tuten common Salma has been decoding these images designs that reveal Tuten Common's Ambitions stretched far beyond Egypt's borders the Tuten Chariot leather is unusual because it doesn't just have normal Egyptian propaganda imagery at first glance you think oh this is just sort of animals fighting amongst themselves but then you realize there's a griffin involved which is a near Eastern Animal some of the plants

used are very much in the Syrian tradition and then you have this running spiral which is a Gian so you've got this cocktail of great Empires and great artistic Traditions coming together these foreign designs were deliberately chosen to present tutin common as a player on an international stage and the most powerful ruler in the ancient world this combination of styles seems to emphasize the fact that he wanted to show that he had very long reaching arms of power as it were and he could control all sorts of places and people the gold decorations from the

harnesses suggest totin common wanted to be seen as an international Statesman and a chariot about to be moved to the Grand Egyptian museum shows just how far he was prepared prepared to go in pursuit of that power so this Chariot is going to be 3D scanned today uh and so first thing that has to happen of course is that this case which has been protecting it for decades is coming off right before our eyes here for egyptologist Chris nonon it's an amazing opportunity to examine the ch iot's lavishly decorated surfaces before it's transported the chariot's

current condition must be rigorously analyzed so what's happening is that this handheld device is being used um to take a rapid succession a whole sequence of images which are creating a digital model of the Chariot and this is incredibly important because we need to understand the condition the shape um of The Chariot in its current situation so that it can then be reassessed when it goes into the new uh Grand Egyptian museum the detailed Digital model will ensure the Chariot remains in exactly the same condition after it's moved one of the things that's just incredible

about being up this close with these objects is you get a sense of the incredibly fine detail few people ever get beyond the protective glass to to study this Chariot so it's a rare opportunity to see just how the young Pharaoh wanted the world to see him what we can see here is some of this utterly Exquisite decoration on the inside of this Chariot it's um rendered in beaten gold and it shows a freeze of foreign captives enemies of tutankamon but this beautiful decoration depicts graphic brutality that indicates Tuten common would stop at nothing in

the pursuit of power there's a rope which runs right the way along this scene which is which is binding them all some of them are tied by the neck some of them have their hands behind their backs some of them have their hands tied at their wrists and above their heads their detailed features and distinctive costumes identify the captives as Egypt's traditional enemies from the south and the north he was trying to convey this idea of being the ruler over all of the foreign people who surrounded his country armed with an iron Dagger from the

gods and proclaiming his power from a chariot decorated with golden images of his International Supremacy totin common set out to dominate the ancient world but these Treasures appear to be too beautiful for the battlefield so was all this just for show a king playing it being a soldier or was it a genuine warning that Tuten common was a serious warrior king now groundbreaking new Research into a mysterious armored tunic found inside Tuton Common's tomb could provide the answer it was really a state of Arts piece of military equipment this is the critical piece of the

puzzle that could prove just how far tutan common was prepared to go in pursuit of power and it raises the possibility that Tuten common was willing to go to [Music] war in the state-of-the-art Labs of the grand Egyptian museum ancient leather specialist Lucy Skinner has come to see one of Tuten Common's most intriguing Treasures this unique armored vest could help prove something extraordinary that Tuton common dismissed for nearly a century as a powerless boy King was willing to go to war oh wow these are are the remains of tutan Common's personal armored tunic it would

have been an impressive and intimidating sight now 3 and a half thousand years after it was intuned with tutan common and after nearly a century in storage it's been moved to the Grand Egyptian museum for Lucy it's her first opportunity to analyze the armor up close it's fantastic to see it like this I've been working with ancient Egyptian leather for almost a decade and finally I get to see this item actually that piece can can you nothing like it has ever been found from ancient Egypt Lucy believes understanding how the armor was made will shed

new light on why it was made and prove whether it was made for show or for battle at least 2,000 leather scales were stitched together to overlap ridges prevented the scales from being forced apart the result was flexible resilient armor you can really see clearly can't you how the the ridges on each of these scales they overlapping each other if an arrow were to hit the armor these ridges prevent it somehow from coming apart so it gives some added protection Lucy believes a sophisticated manufacturing technique made the armor strong and flexible a practical piece of

equipment rather than a ceremonial showpiece and to confirm her Theory Lucy wants to examine two similar sized scales in detail so this technique is called reflectance transformation Imaging it's an Imaging process where you take a series of photographs with different lighting angles and then the shadows and the highlights from each image are Amalgamated into one and it just highlights the details surface details really really really clearly on the on the surface of the object so this is really excellent this is great we can really see the texture on the surface it's the first time these

scales have ever been examined in forensic detail and Lucy immediately notices a striking similarity between the two scales zoom in a little bit on the right these scales they're almost exactly the same aren't they in the same the same size um the same width the kind of the The Ridges are in exactly the same position they're extremely consistent I mean it really suggests that they they found the optimal kind of method for making these things and then they were reproducing it again and again and again to Lucy the best explanation for the scale similarity is

that they were made using a mold the medial Ridge you can really see that it's very defined I mean it strongly looks like it's been pushed with some pressure into a mold molding the leather would make the scales consistent thick and strong Lucy believes one reason to do that would be to make Tuten Common's armor battle ready the way the surface looks super compact like this it definitely um this would deflect quite a a large impact I think ingeniously designed and meticulously manufactured this armor was made to withstand arrows Lucy believes it wasn't for show

it was for battle and Tuten common could have worn it on the battlefield it was really a state-of art piece of military equipment it was almost like the Kevlar vest of the ancient Egyptian World a real Warrior facing real threat would want such Advanced armor but who was Tuten common planning to go to war with who did he feel threatened by and why in the stor rooms of the new Grand Egyptian museum egyptologist Professor Salma ikram has found a bow belonging to Tuten common that pictures his worst enemies golly we've never seen this before first

time to see it since its Discovery nearly a century ago this bow has been locked away in the basement of the old Cairo Museum this is the top of the bow because this has got the enemies of the north and that's got the enemies of the South the Nubians are in the South and various asiatics are in the north and in fact sometimes the libyans as well Salma believes this bow was never fired in anger it's too beautiful for the battlefield but it's a critical clue in Tuton common story because it reveals a country and

a pharaoh under threat to the south insurgencies in a colony of Nubia threatened Egypt's supply of gold and precious goods from Africa to the Northwest Libyan tribes made violent incursions into Egyptian territory and in the East the aggressive hittite Empire Advanced through Syria ever closer to Egypt's borders Egypt was been turmoil its allies had become enemies and the expansionist aggressive Hittites were knocking on Egypt's [Music] [Applause] door this is why tutan common was buried with an arsenal of weapons as well as the celestial dagger and high-tech armor curators at the Grand Egyptian museum are unpacking

dozens of functional bows hundreds of arrows Shields and throw sticks together they're painting a picture of totin common as a warrior king with the hardware and the motivation to go to war and this is forcing egyptologists to look again at all of tutan Common's Treasures even those that have been on display in the old Cairo museum for decades could Tuten Common's true identity have been hidden in plain sight was the warrior king in front of us all along so this is a box from the tomb of Tuten khaman and it's it's decorated in all sides

with scenes of the king in his Chariot going off after the enemies and he's Waging War using the exact same weapons that egyptologists and scientists are analyzing at the Grand Egyptian museum the large bow arrows and armored tunic the decorated harness and chariot [Applause] have the king shown riding his Chariot and he draws this massive bow and lets fly and all of the enemies from the south are then being hit by his arrows and are falling down at his feet and what's nice then is on the other side you have a very similar thing happening

but this is for the northern enemies of Egypt so they're you know they're big bearded people from Syria area and and they're being trampled by the king's horses they're going out to go under the wheels of the Chariots um and again toah is loosening his bow and off they go this is Tuton common the warrior king in the thick of battle leading from the front you got a sense of the landscape and the chaos and the Heat it's fantastic since its Discovery nearly a century ago the images on this box have been dismissed as fantasy

but the weapons pictured on the box are the same as the weapons found in Tuten Common's tomb so if the weapons shown here were real were these events real too are these violent battle scenes closer to reality than some have previously thought did tutan common lead Egypt's armies into battle the answer lies outside the grand Egyptian museum on the banks of the Nile and thieves in the spectacular ruins of Luxor Temple this was ancient Egypt's religious capital and every Pharaoh wanted to make their Mark here by Recycling and recarving stones from earlier buildings we don't

have a lot of evidence for twoam Moon's buildings but we do have fragments here and there that suggest that he might have erected temples and that if he did he would have included battle sings like this today tutan Common's battle carvings are scattered across the site pieces of a colossal seemingly impossible three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle archaeologist Ray Johnson has spent 20 years painstakingly recording and digitally reassembling tutan common battle scenes with fascinating results the chillingly Vivid details include severed hands skewered on sticks and a caged prisoner hanging from a ship's mast egyptologist Aiden Dodson believes these

carvings are more than simply propaganda as many have thought the nature of these reliefs is such that they don't appear to be stereotyped ones they seem to be specific and therefore I think there's a reasonable case to be made that these blocks from Lua do report a particular campaign and in this campaign tutan common takes Center Stage it seems likely that the king had some direct involvement physically in these campaigns and there's no reason to assume that the king if he's being shown there wasn't actually there some egyptologists now believe these shattered fragments of stone

record real historical events and that the image of Tuton common as a frail boy King has to be reassessed he wouldn't be in that case a kind of feeble diseased guy who had trouble walking couldn't possibly have participated any in any sort of athletic events instead we'd be looking at a kind of a young vigorous athletic Warrior the celestial dagger and decorated Chariot reveal a man hungry for power the arsenal of weapons and high-tech armor suggest he was ready to to fight and the painted box and carved battle scenes are powerful evidence that Tuten common

LED his armies into battle together these Treasures suggest a different image of the world's most famous Pharaoh as a warrior king who may have gone to war and possibly never returned [Music] in the labs of the new Grand Egyptian museum history is being reexamined and a picture of Tuten common as a warrior king has emerged a man hungry for power protected by high-tech armor and a magical iron Dagger from the gods leading from the front In the Heat of battle a man who died at age [Applause] 19 did the Young Pharaoh die in battle did

tutan common make the ultimate [Music] sacrifice in the Valley of the Kings inside the tomb where he was laid to rest 3 and a half thousand years ago lies the mummified body of tutan common for 33 centuries oils and resins have preserved his body and his secrets for the last century since his tomb's Discovery debate has raged over his cause of death there has been endless speculation about whether he had malaria whether he had septicemia which killed him whether he'd been hit on the head so really a lot of ink has been spilt on this

instead Salma believes the key to discovering what killed tutin common isn't to investigate how he died but where and she thinks this x-ray of Tuten common skull contains a clue here's a skull and this is a layer of resin and this is a second layer of resin so the fact that they're two different layers of resin suggest that Tuten Haram was mummified in a two-part sort of process which is very unusual mummification needed to begin within days of death immediately what you have to do is void the body of its internal organs and sometimes even

the brain because otherwise you get bacteria and you puff up and you might explode the two-part process may be a signed the totin common was mummified temporarily to prevent decomposition before a full mummification could take place it is possible that he died away from the Nile Valley and so some form of initial mumification was carried out it could be because he was on an expedition of some sort now it could be that he was fighting some sort of campaign in the desert not close to the Nile a chest x-ray reveals something even stranger there's something

very obvious missing because there's no heart and the egyp always kept the heart in the body because you have to keep the heart in order to make a safe transition between this world and the next the absence of the heart might suggest that whoever carried out the mummification was not as skilled as they should have been or that Tuten needed immediately attention somewhere far from where the top class imas were the evidence suggests duon common could have died far from home around late 1323 BC Egypt armies were 750 mi from home in Northern Syria fighting

their Archen enemies the Hittites if Tuten common was the warrior king that the evidence suggests then chances are he could have been there too we know that Egypt was involved in military activities in Northern Syria whether or not damoon was at the head of the Army's in the in the depths of Syria one can probably argue the idea that he had actually was up there in Syria with the Egyptian armies seems pretty persuasive it's possible Tuton common fought and died in this campaign in a distant corner of Egypt's Empire cut down in the prime of

his life as a warrior king well perhaps tanon died just as he was leaving his Mark he'd begun to regain territory overseas which had been lost to reestablish Egypt as the great power in the region and you know who knows if he'd lived perhaps he would have had a great and glorious Reign and his dynasty would have carried on for a long time and history would have been very different as the thousands of Tuton common Treasures are reunited at the new Grand Egyptian museum many paint a picture of a young Pharaoh determined to stamp Egypt's

mark on the world a Celestial knife one of his most personal and prized possessions newly restored gold Chariot decorations depicting an international Statesman and cuttingedge body armor suggesting he was ready to go into battle for his country together they tell the story of Tuten common as a warrior not a boy but a man who may have made the ultimate sacrifice [Music]