3100 BC: Unearthing The Origins of Ancient Egypt | Immortal Egypt | Timeline

can't we'll get up [Laughter] this is brilliant this is obviously an iconic image taking a camel ride by the pyramids surely it encapsulates the spirit of egypt but such an image is completely misleading because there weren't any camels here when the pyramids were built four and a half thousand years ago and that's the thing ancient egypt is instantly recognizable but all too often completely misunderstood so i'm gonna try and change that good luck shall crank the great pyramid of giza final resting place of king khufu over 140 meters from bottom to top no wonder it

still pulls in the crowds and the occasional egyptologist it's hard to really get it into words but we are now entering into the depths of this iconic monument of ancient egypt it's a very care it's a very busy iconic monument though it's available and as we set foot on this journey upwards it's a brilliant metaphor for the way that the ancient egyptian civilization literally rose up from the earth to a real zenith so come with me and i'll show you something really brilliant because the pyramids are really only the tip of the iceberg [Music] oh

oh flipping out [Music] so all this was a big city overwhelming that is absolutely superb in this series i'm going to explore the story of what i consider to be the world's greatest civilization more than 4 000 years of history that has shaped our world and left unmistakable marks that can still be read today i'll be looking into every nook and cranny from little known tombs it's staggering i've never ever been into a tomb quite like this before to the hidden corners of vast monuments it's like being on top of the world isn't it yeah

we are in the tub of [Music] karnak so it's really no surprise that weird and wonderful theories about ancient egypt crop up all the time but what i find so amazing is that this most intriguing civilization was actually created by people not so very different from you and me and that's the story i want to tell a story full of secret treasures dark deeds and sometimes controversial theories this mask was originally made for someone else and for the first time i'll be piecing it all together from the earliest egyptians to the last of the pharaohs

wow look at that look at that oh that is oh that is so beautiful welcome to my story of ancient egypt the big question is how did ancient egypt begin where did the first egyptians and their extraordinary culture come from [Music] this immortal civilization was thousands of years in the making so to pull it all together is a daunting task but bear with me as it's utterly fascinating but we won't begin with massive monuments but with some enigmatic clues you could easily miss [Music] this is curta around a hundred kilometers south of luxo unless you're

an archaeologist you almost certainly won't have heard of it because there aren't any great temples or royal tombs to admire but high in the cliffs you can see real signs of ancient life here [Music] thousands of years before the pyramids and this is where our story begins welcome to kurta joanne thank you so much for letting me come here it's incredibly exciting it's the first time you're here i suppose nothing escapes the sharp eye of dr dirk hoyger and he's got something very special to show me not many people have been here before you because

it's it's a quite recent discovery these carvings in the rock reveal an amazing story about the beginnings of egyptian life it's a nineteen thousand year old picture gallery [Music] complete with its own hippo back line very short tail fine legs belly line front legs and the mouth is shown you're probably smiling but then again a nipple is always smiling but another type of animal is by far the most common here that's that's cattle not just cattle there's the mighty aurochs the wild profit wild cattle and the extremely powerful images that seem to be in movement

they are the charging down to orders aren't they these wild aurochs were ancestors of the domestic cow and nearly twenty thousand years ago beef was the main thing on the menu about maybe fifty percent of their diet was composed of all rocks so they were experts and masters in representing this animal [Music] it's always high on the cliff very prominent positions that give an excellent panorama over what must have been in the paleolithic the hunting grounds of the people it's easy to picture these early hunters here as they tracked their prey [Music] but the landscape

would have looked very different from today because back then this was savannah grassland a green and fertile region [Music] do we have any idea why these creatures were engraved on these rocks here we can guess joanne but we don't know maybe they wanted to influence the hunting maybe this is some sort of hunting magic it really is magical to sit here and imagine egypt's earliest nomadic people passing right through this spot and portraying on these very rocks the animals that they saw all around them human figures and boats joined the animals as the carvings became

stranger and stranger but these carvings are also the earliest glimpse of the amazing things to come these are the first signs of what makes ancient egypt well ancient egypt as for its ancient landscape this evolved under dramatic circumstances ten thousand years ago gravity tilted the entire earth of its axis by about half a degree and this had a profound effect on climate and as the world began to change egypt would never be the same again these early people were nomads seasonally mobile pastoralists who moved around following the summer reigns and these rains really were the

vital life-bringing force which created the greenery on which wild animals depended but of course with climate change these rains began to dry up okay you can cut the rain the diminishing rainfall forced both animals and people towards large lakes which formed during the rainy season one such area is nabta playa 100 kilometers southwest of a swamp and here these nomadic hunters began to settle into communities but still reliant on the annual summer reigns they needed to predict exactly when these would return and so they turned to the night sky welcome to the beginning of time

quite literally because this is egypt's oldest calendar at around 7 000 years old this stone circle from nabta playa is the earliest evidence of how egyptian weather forecasters became astronomers they aligned its central stones to the circumpolar stars visible in the night sky all year round when the sun appeared directly overhead the stones cast no shadow the mid-summer rains were approaching this meant that the animals would drink the plants would grow and the world would survive for another year so in many ways this circle represents the solution to the very real problem of survival but

the egyptians would take this a step further i think the really great thing about these mini monumental markers is that this is the earliest example we have of the way in which the egyptians are aligning their monuments to various things to the sky to the cardinal points and from now on every tomb every temple every monument will be aligned to the heavens to the very gods themselves [Music] if the stars in the rain were this closely linked then this world and the next must be won and the same [Music] and this has been described as

egypt's earliest sculpted stone monument and dates from around 5000 bc [Music] this chunk of sandstone was quarried over a mile away from where it was eventually discovered this certainly suggests a kind of sense of community where people were already working together to achieve a desired aim in this case the stone was hauled into place and then there are clear signs that it's been sculpted into a specific shape now you might have to go with me on this but some believe that this is in fact a cow with its large hindquarters and this sculpted head now

the cow was a vital part of everyday life for these people it was a source of meat of milk and of blood key sources of protein they needed to keep them healthy and yet so important was the cow they chose to take it through into the afterlife with them to sustain them on a spiritual level and this is the very beginnings of the great cow goddess hathor hathor may have started off as a source of milk and meat but eventually she would be loved and idolized by millions of egyptians since she represented love joy beauty

and motherhood and although her image develops from a lifelike animal to a female face with cow's ears this may be hathor's very earliest incarnation [Music] yet hathor is only one of a multitude of gods and goddesses the egyptians just couldn't get enough of them over the centuries emerged hundreds if not thousands of deities each with a specific purpose and appearance some came in human form some had animal heads they could be male female even androgynous it seems that there were few aspects of life that didn't have their own gods we know that in the very

earliest times their gods resembled familiar things the world around them elements of nature and certainly animals and over time the animals their forms their shapes their characteristics distilled down into this sort of divine figure each one worshiped for a different quality in the case of the ram they were worshiped for their procreative powers in the case of the cow for their nurturing motherly instincts then of course you've got rather different creatures the dangerous creatures the ones that lived on the edges of the egyptian world the lions the crocodiles the jackals but it wasn't just about

finding the appropriate divinity it was about gaining power over them the goddess sekhmet was a ferocious lioness and the bringer of death to humans so the egyptians transformed her into a deity as a way of controlling her destructive powers by a worshipping segment it was believed that she could be placated and transformed into a more benign deity on so many levels the egyptians were trying to tap into nature to affect the way that nature then in turn affected them in many ways egypt's unique religion was the glue that held society together uniting the population and

underpinning almost every aspect of life it's everywhere in tombs in temples in everyday life and yet there is another even more fundamental element without which ancient egypt would never have existed at all [Music] later greek historians famously observed that egypt was the gift of the nile and how right they were because as the climate continued to change the desert lakes eventually dried up leaving the egyptians with just one source of water this is an incredibly special place located in modern sudan it nonetheless forms the very source of egypt but it's the place where two great

rivers meet the white nile and the blue nile which combine here to form the world's longest river flowing from the heart of africa and out into the mediterranean sea for much of the year the wide lazy white nile is the main source of water until annual rainfall in the ethiopian highlands swells the fast-flowing blue nile today the modern aswan dams hold back these floodwaters but until the 20th century huge volumes of water and fertile silt surged down river to flood the entire nile valley bringing life and fertility to the desert that is egypt this annual

nile flood was the single most important event in the lives of every ancient egyptian for its life-giving waters brought the nutrients and minerals which enriched the soil all along its banks and this allowed agriculture to flourish egypt is blessed with some of the most fertile land in the world where farmers can grow everything from sweet corn and garlic to bananas sugarcane and cotton bad away it's quite intensive farming isn't it the land gives the people a lot doesn't it yes but we need to give the land also rest we grow one time and we leave

it for one month then after we use the land again to grow again that's amazing that it only needs one month rest time and then it can be planted again yeah sometimes 15 days sometime one month yeah but it really does emphasize that this land of egypt has always been so rich and so giving to the people it's always given the people everything they need and it's the nile that turned this desert land into a paradise [Music] and seven thousand years ago the people who could no longer survive in an increasingly desert landscape were forced

to migrate towards it as their only source of water so ancient egypt took shape as these people came together along the banks of the nile in the north settlements clustered around the delta and the fiom and in the south around the kenner bend this was the beginning of egypt's so-called two lands upper and lower egypt which developed into two distinct cultures [Music] but what they both had in common was the astonishing fertility replenished every year by the miracle of the nile [Music] el cab located to the south of the kennebend is one of upper egypt's

earliest settlements [Music] and while it may lack the wow factor of the pyramids it's actually far more revealing to see traces of this amazing evolution because here we can see how a nomadic lifestyle was soon replaced by a settled social structure and although it was a slow and gradual process archaeologist elizabeth hart can identify each stage of this transformation wow you do work in an enclave but it's much cooler down here it's lovely actually so down at this level we have sterile soil where nobody lived and then starting around 4 200 bc are layers of

silt from the nile flood followed by wind accumulated sand and then another layer of silt and then more sand and here you can see it really well a thin silt layer from the nile coming up and flooding and then the sand and over here we have a hearth feature so this tells us that humans were actually living on these and coming into the nile valley and then moving back out and we also found lots of pot shards and stone tools in these layers you know it might be a small space but you've got people's real

lives unfolding within it aren't you and we have thousands of years of it here when we started people were just moving into the nile valley they were just starting to farm and by the end here we have pharaohs and a whole united egypt it's really impressive when you think about all the change that happened over this chunk of sand although we are still centuries away from the grand pharonic monuments you can still find traces of the lives these ancient people lived if you look hard enough for very little has survived except for tons of pottery

yeah this one is uh yeah so it's five thousand years old five thousand years old these pots help us to identify when this early society began to produce a food surplus a pivotal transition which required robust pottery for the storage of large-scale food and drink production these bread molds from slightly later are one of the most common finds so you heat the mold then the dog gets into into it and by the heat of the mold the the bake the bread will be will be baked but this comes in massive amounts these are the beer

jars ah bread and beer egyptian staples oh nice nicer beer jar this is the nuts and bolts of how egyptian chronology all came together in the early days isn't it yes the pottery is especially fundamental to understand how people were living yet in egypt living was only half the story because what really sets the ancient egyptians apart is their view of death to them death wasn't the end of life but a new beginning a transformation from the world of the living into an everlasting afterlife and such a belief would shape egypt's most mysterious practice and

my favorite subject [Music] mummification although the origins of this enigmatic tradition are only now becoming clearer the burial of their dead had a strong significance from the very earliest times this is a typical burial from around 3400 bc the body is curled into the fetal position and here placed within a reconstructed pit grave surrounded by the belongings he might have had in his earthly life like pottery jewelry and a palette for preparing cosmetics everything that was important to him in life accompanied him into death and i think that's quite significant because it shows that already

five and a half thousand years ago the egyptians wanted to take it all with them they clearly believed that something happened beyond death death was simply a transition into another state of existence when you continued to live and it was assumed you would need everything you'd needed in your life on earth his body was naturally mummified in the hot desert sand but its placement here may not have been accidental because even when dead the body had to be preserved in order to house the soul for eternity a skeleton simply wasn't good enough skeletons bones they

are very very anonymous and yet when the soft tissue the skin the hair is all present we are ourselves and that's exactly what this individual represents being face to face with one of the very earliest egyptians gives us insight into the development of their ideas about the afterlife it started off as a practical thing burying the dead in a relatively small space bundled up and then it developed these layers of kind of like the symbolism the fetal position this idea in rebirth into the next world it's almost like the seed from which the egyptian funerary

belief system evolved this is the very beginning of a process which would be repeated a million fold throughout egyptian history this is combination of the esoteric underpinned by the practical which really does sum up the egyptians in a nutshell from the very beginning the egyptians were masters of making sense of their world no matter how complex and mystifying it might seem to us and this same ability to bring order is also found in the way they structured their early society adopting levels of bureaucracy that border on the obsessive in the ancient city of abidos the

site of egypt's first royal burial ground archaeologists found the origins of a system that we still have to put up with today [Music] it's most fitting that this city of death was the fine spot of the earliest means of calculating that other great certainty taxes the evidence comes from small bone and ivory labels like these which have been dated to around 3250 bc the originals are probably the size of a postage stamp and you can see that each one is engraved with images of animals of birds of plants and so forth and each one is

pierced for suspension to a chest or pottery vessel which would have contained oil linen grain and it's thought that these symbols represent the regions that produce these commodities which were then brought here to abide us thought to have been sent as tax payments these tiny labels show how these early people were already capable of collecting duties from a vast geographical area some experts even believe these symbols can be vocalized by turning the simple drawings into sounds makes this the world's earliest known writing now isn't it interesting that the world's earliest writing wasn't developed to express

some great outpouring of emotion or expressed grand passion it was simply a means of calculating taxes these symbols soon became a sophisticated writing system of elegant signs we call hieroglyphs which means sacred carvings and these signs represented every aspect of the egyptian world which were only translated in 1822 with the discovery of the rosetta stone [Music] and a common language was needed as goods were transported between the two lands of upper and lower egypt the people of lower egypt had also developed trade links with the rest of the ancient world but as more warlike regions

began to emerge in upper egypt it soon became clear that the nile had spawned two very different and distinctive cultures and in many ways the only thing they really had in common was this great river [Music] the inevitable clash between these cultures is recorded on what many consider to be ancient egypt's founding document taking the form of a giant ceremonial cosmetic palette this is an exact copy of the original nama palette and however idealized and embellished it depicts the pivotal moment when the southern king nama defeated his northern enemy a split second after this mace

comes down onto this northern enemy's head and he's executed he's killed he is no more nama himself remains the first king of a united egypt and what this means is that the whole of the country is now united under one man's rule he is setting himself up quite literally as the god king as the one central figure at the very pinnacle of the pyramid that forms egyptian society and from him everything else flows egypt is now the world's first nation state [Music] what made ancient egypt ancient egypt is all here the art forms the reforms

of religion and even the world's first writing hieroglyphic script this is the name of nama the catfish no and the chisel no no no striking catfish as the first king of egypt narma is protected by the cow goddess hathor stands beside horus the falcon god of kingship and is dressed in all the same paraphernalia as every king who succeeds him he has the tie on false beard to emphasize his virility and his strength and this is matched of course by the time bull's tail it's a wonderful feature this idea you could just tie a little

tail onto the back of the belt and then take into yourself the power of a bull this pallet is egypt's earliest historical document it's the blueprint of how every future pharaoh will be portrayed in the company of the gods [Music] yet perhaps most significant is nurma's smiting pose this powerful image with the mace held high will be endlessly repeated throughout egypt's long history this is a horrible way to die to have your brains bludgeoned out and yet even this the egyptian artist can show in an almost ballet-like pose it's been sanitized it's been elevated to

a piece of art and yet the message still gets through for the next three thousand years every one of egypt's subsequent rulers would try and link themselves to egypt's first pharaoh to rule legitimately and successfully they had to be absorbed into the complexities of the egyptian hierarchy both in this world and the next so their names were recorded on a series of king lists a kind of royal family tree and the best preserved of these is here in the temple of seti the first at tabaidos it lists himself and 75 of his royal predecessors going

right back to the very dawn of egyptian history with the very first king up there king nama and the other important detail about this is that it's essentially emphasizing that royal continuity because seti has his own young son ramses the crown prince actually reading out these names on a piece of papyrus paper so it's as if seti is saying to the gods look i'm now pharaoh and this is my son who'll succeed me to become yet another name on this remarkable list in all egypt had over 300 pharaohs organized into 30 dynasties but in the

case of egypt's earliest kings being male immortal was not enough they needed to prove their divinity by exercising absolute control over their subjects and the evidence for this was found in the desolate desert surrounding the ancient city of abados [Music] this was egypt's first royal burial ground the original version of the valley of the kings now being here you get a real sense of the importance of this place for the ancient egyptians for as the wind funnels down this valley and swirls around the sand if you listen very carefully you can hear a whispering sound

a whispering ones thought to be the voices of the very dead themselves and here egypt's earliest kings were laid to rest within huge subterranean burial chambers like this the location of the final resting place of egypt's third pharaoh king ger one of the largest and most complex tombs of the first dynasty and although it's been recovered in sand it clearly demonstrates the power that juror still wielded even in death jer himself was buried here in the central chamber but all around a 318 subsidiary graves of his courtiers not only that a little way beyond many

others were also buried in total 587 individuals accompanied this man into the next world which is incredible enough but there is evidence of a more sinister twist the fact that this tomb was all sealed over at the same time suggests these people may have been victims of ritual sacrifice perhaps even ritual stabbing as portrayed in art of the time and certainly that power over life and death would give any king a godlike status [Music] now later kings seem to have realized that killing all their courtiers in one go was not the best use of people

who were a precious state resource after all he'll be around to make the next king's cup of tea although this cruel and short-sighted practice of ritual killing soon died out it had nonetheless demonstrated that egypt's rulers had complete control over their subjects an essential step along the route towards building the pyramids and indeed egypt itself yet the egyptian people were not slaves by this time egypt was a land of plenty where all could enjoy its bounty both in life and in death this is the later tomb of an official called eru qatar and here he

is greeting us he's coming to the door of his own tomb emerging from the walls captured in all his splendor with his finery on his jewel belt and his white linen and kilt even details down to his little sort of pencil mustache looks a little bit like clark gable to be honest the scenes in his colorful tomb depict a refined life that's a world away from egypt's earliest farmers we have iroquatar seated in front of a table of food offerings there's fruit vegetables wine and so forth the berries are coming forward with offerings to sustain

his soul irukata was the royal butcher an important member of court and with royal courtiers no longer sacrifice for burial with their king they could now make their own elaborate preparations for the afterlife there are a couple of scenes up here of the household servants making the beds of iroquota and his family they're stretching out the linen sheets they're bringing even a little fly whisk and the ancient egyptian pillow the headrest there so even in the afterlife heru qatar will be comfortable hirokita's tomb is in saqqara a sprawling city of the dead for egypt's first

capital memphis yet zakara wasn't just the burial site of courtiers but of kings and the site of a revolution in royal tomb building [Music] and whereas previously the dead had tended to be buried away in the desert hidden away almost here at sacara high on the desert escarpment the dead were literally placed on display up to this point the egyptians attended to build their tombs and temples like their houses from organic materials from the mud break wood and reeds which rarely survive but in the third dynasty the great innovator king jose built his legacy in

something far more permanent for he built in stone which could potentially last forever jose built this huge stone wall to surround his tomb complex although his architects and workmen still drew their inspiration from the natural world you can see that the masons are just trying to get their head around how to actually work with this stuff what forms to put it in so we have egypt's first hyper style hall of columns sure but it's taking the form of reeds bound together to make the kind of columns that would have been in joseph's palace down by

the nile but this of course is a house for death this is a palace of eternity and must be built in something as solid as stone [Music] at the rear of his complex is an intriguing stone shrine where i can come face to face with king jose himself the shrine looks like it's suffering a severe case of subsidence and yet the egyptians purposefully built it on this very definite tilt it has these two holes here where modern tourists can see jose but jose can see them you can actually see beyond them because this face is

true north it faces the northern stars which the egyptians called the imperishable ones and so at death jose's soul could rise up and merge with these stars so he too would be imperishable and he too would never die in order to ensure that his soul could live on jose's body needed somewhere safe to rest within a tomb truly fit for a king most burials were topped by a simple single-story building called a mastaba meaning bench but jose did something radical josem really wanted to impress with his funerary monument so another step was built on top

i think jose must have quite liked the effect that this gave and so built a third step fourth step a fifth step sixth step when they stood back and looked they realized they'd built egypt's first pyramid pretty impressive the step pyramid stands over 60 metres tall and still dominates the sacara landscape at the time it was the largest building on earth reinforcing jose's status as a living god in the grandest of ways it certainly secured his place in egyptian history with ancient visitors flocking here to marvel at his achievements now jose had created a true

landmark but it also created egypt's first tourist attraction if you come with me i'll show you the evidence because in here we have what many tourists still leave today appreciative graffiti and this is the original handwriting of a couple of ancient visitors from around 1300 bc who were so impressed by what they saw they described jose's pyramid as if heaven were in it and they credit jose with being the inventor of stone [Music] but why did jose build this was it just an ego trip or an exercise in personal vanity or was it designed to

show the world just how far egypt had come because in only a few centuries these disparate people had come together to create the world's first nation state [Music] egypt was now an unstoppable powerhouse a nation unified both politically and culturally under a single ruler whose authority was limitless yet it wasn't just the king who could achieve immortality for the man who designed and built jose's pyramid was destined to become even more famous than the pharaoh he had served [Music] this statue base once held a full-sized figure of king jose but carved into its base is

also the name of his architect and here we can see it with this reed the owl and then the little mat with a little bread loaf on which reads and here is the man himself although most likely a commoner by birth imhotep rose through the ranks to become one of egypt's most powerful officials he was made the royal chancellor the prime minister he was even made high priest of the sun god he was the ultimate local boy made good because he then gained a reputation as an academic as a great healer and he was famous

the length and breadth of egypt he was ultimately worshipped as a god imhotep represents the ultimate in social mobility a kind which was certainly possible within egypt's unique society [Music] this was a society in which ideas were often taken to extremes with one and a half million people united by an absolute belief in the power of their king and in the certainty of the afterlife egypt enters its most ambitious era so far the pyramid age over 130 pyramids would be built across egypt and they represent the zenith in royal tomb building huge state-sponsored civil engineering

projects that used vast resources of materials manpower and time [Music] the largest of all the great pyramid of king khufu which took over 20 years to build and in order to build something so ambitious an entire city was created specifically to house the construction workers just beyond this monumental wall it's known as the wall of the crow and it separated the silent sacred space of the dead from the busy bustling city of the pyramid builders [Music] this five-hectare site once housed workshops bakeries a tool-making facility and a fish processing area for this was an integrated

self-sufficient community of over 8 000 people who even had their own medical care [Music] anthropological archaeologist dr richard reading has been excavating the site since 1991. where we are now this is kind of a big workshop a big industrial park where there's lots of activity going on out here they're probably using granite statue maybe granite column we find tools out here for polishing the granite we find tools out here for chipping at the granite it's very well planned we have three streets we have north street main street we're on and we have south street down

there so we're walking down man you're walking down main street the pyramid workers live cheek by jowl in two-story barracks you would have walked in you would have been in a very quiet dark long narrow room this is where they would have slept there would have been a a higher bed for the overseer at each end and then everybody would have laid down probably with their head in this direction or the other direction exactly like this you would be lying here like this and this would be your your nighttime position very comfortable can i can

i try out the obviously sure you want to try the overseer's bed there delusions of grandeur is it this one or that one yeah it's that's the that's the wall you're the way right where you are oh so this is all right so if i if i sat down here yeah the overseer's bed is actually buried under a few centimeters of sand and the floor here is probably under about a half a meter of sand so this is nice yeah i'm keeping my eye on you now that's right you can see me if i got

up in the night and i tried to sneak out to go someplace you would see me everything the workers needed was here on site the team have recovered data that shows that workers consumed 74 cattle and 257 sheep and goats each week this coral area could hold a weak supply of cattle before more were shipped in from egypt's grasslands you could have almost just in time delivery coming down another small herd coming down from como hissing or the delta coming down and in it's a really well-oiled machine you can see now how efficient the egyptians

were obtaining their food bringing it to the right place at the right time for the right people it's brilliant absolutely it was it wasn't just simply the food it was everything there was the copper to make tools there was the stone being brought in here from osmond and other areas so a lot of things were coming into here these were government workers they got everything from the government in many ways this settlement is egypt in microcosm a highly ordered social structure with job specialization and mass cooperation it's hard to believe that in a relatively short

period of time egypt had been transformed from simple subsistence into a united state which could provide for everyone who worked on its behalf what we're seeing here is the final building block in egyptian culture but not just for the pyramid age for once this infrastructure was in place it would never change so whether they're building a pyramid or setting up a colossal statue the level of organization and cooperation would remain the same but this was the foundation stone of egypt [Music] the pyramids are eternal testament to just how powerful egypt had now become and in

many ways they are egypt at this time dominating everything around them on a gigantic scale and towering above the giza landscape is the great pyramid [Music] it took around 20 000 people to set in place the 2.3 million blocks of limestone it remained the tallest structure anywhere in the world for 3 800 years until the building of lincoln cathedral spire in 1300 a.d it's a phenomenal achievement for any civilization at any time but for me its exterior can't compare to the sense of wonder once you venture inside the roof of the grand gallery passageway is

built of multiple layers of enormous limestone slabs rising over eight meters high massive massive blocks of masonry built on a god-like scale that's surely what kufu wanted i sincerely hope kufu's eternal resting place was rather less congested than it is today but it still gives a real atmosphere of the busyness that must have been here on a daily basis these guys were hauling massive massive blocks hundreds of feet up literally into the air these guys were magicians just look how brilliantly these courses have been laid these are perfect and if i any modern architect to

be able to replicate this using the tools that the ancients had at their disposal wow here we are at the zenith we're at the heart of the pyramid now king kufu's burial chamber and we've hit it at exactly the right moment because the pyramid is closed for lunch so we've got the whole place to ourselves and you really get a sense of the sanctity of this divine mausoleum the walls and roof of the burial chamber are lined entirely in granite and it was within here that the body of the great king khufu was sealed ready

for his final journey into the afterlife at the heart of the pyramid in terms of its architecture but we're literally in the heart of ancient egypt i feel like i should be speaking in a whisper because the acoustics are so extraordinary it's a sterile plain stark room it's pretty much like a bank vault and when you think about it that's exactly what it is because it once contained egypt's greatest treasure the mummified body of the god king which contained the soul not only of kufu but of all the generations of pharaohs stretching way back to

king narma forget the jewels forget the gold its real treasure was in here and it's the first time i've ever been in here without crowds and crowds of other people and speaking now the sound of the voice reverberating around immediately takes you back four and a half thousand years to the day of the funeral to the sacred words the priests would have chanted to revive the soul of the god king it's miraculous it's a wonderful spectacular place that affects every sense visually audibly in every sense it it's it's beyond words really i think i probably

better stop talking now so now all the elements that made a patient egypt were in place a well-fed highly organized population that unswervingly followed their god king and all of whom shed this fervent belief in an afterlife life in egypt was good [Music] now of course none of this could last economic disaster and famine plunged egypt into chaos this is ancient egypt beginning to suffer with the pharaoh's power melting away local warlords ransacked its most sacred sites egypt's dark age was coming make no mistake this is the home of the dead [Music] [Music] you