NARRATOR: Egypt, the richest source of archaeological treasures on the planet.
SALIMA: Oh, that's a fabulous one!
NARRATOR: Beneath this desert landscape...
lie the secrets of this ancient civilization.
JOHN: Wow, you can see why the pharaohs chose this place.
NARRATOR: Now, for a full season of excavations
our cameras have unprecedented access
to follow teams on the frontline of archaeology...
ASHRAF: I'm driving so fast because I'm so excited!
KATHLEEN: It's an entrance, we can see an entrance.
NARRATOR: Revealing buried secrets...
ANTONIO: I have just been told that they have found something.
DON: Oh my god.
NARRATOR: And making discoveries that could rewrite ancient history.
This time, new secrets about one of Egypt's greatest rulers...
WORKERS: Hey-ah-ho!
NARRATOR: The pharaoh queen, Hatshepsut.
Doctor Szafranski discovers buried treasure at her magnificent temple...
NARRATOR: The Darnells uncover how she formed a mysterious
double identity to seize power...
COLLEEN: 'For my beloved daughter', not son.
NARRATOR: And John and Maria unearth a rare and intriguing statue.
JOHN: Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold.
Do you realize what you've just pulled out of the sand?
NARRATOR: Luxor, Egypt...
a landscape strewn with ancient ruins and magnificent temples
built for the great pharaohs of Egypt.
Cut into the surrounding mountains lies the finest temple of them all.
Its owner was a revolutionary,
a rare female pharaoh,
called Hatshepsut.
Now archaeologists are searching for clues to reveal more about this
enigmatic pharaoh queen.
Leading the hunt is Polish archaeologist Dr. Zbigniew Szafranski.
NARRATOR: The landscape is dominated by Hatshepsut's immense temple,
constructed to commemorate her reign as a pharaoh.
Ancient builders carved the site directly into the towering rocky cliffs.
They built it in three separate levels,
each one a terrace connected by ramps over 100 feet long.
At the top, 26 statues of the god of the underworld, Osiris, stand as guardians.
This masterpiece of ancient architecture is the key
to the secrets of the pharaoh queen Hatshepsut.
DR SZAFRANSKI: It is an exceptional building.
The temple is unique in the history of Egyptian architecture and in the
history of the world architecture.
NARRATOR: Dr. Szafranski and his team have been excavating and restoring
Hatshepsut's temple for the past 19 seasons.
DR SZAFRANSKI: Hi, hi, hi!
NARRATOR: They are on a mission to piece back together the temple ruins.
120 years ago,
legendary British Egyptologist Howard Carter
was part of the team that excavated this site.
Much of the temple was buried and badly damaged,
and little was known about its owner.
Today, Dr. Szafranski continues working to restore and rebuild the temple,
to reveal the secrets of the pharaoh queen Hatshepsut.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut was only the second woman to ever become a pharaoh,
and the first for nearly 300 years.
The fearless queen oversaw military campaigns to Egypt's southern borders,
and claimed to have visited the battlefield herself.
She built a fleet of ships to sail the Red Sea
and re-established an international trade network,
bringing back exotic goods and riches.
Under Hatshepsut, Egypt prospered and she built giant monuments
across the country to show that she was in control.
Hatshepsut's temple was just one of around ten megastructures she built
during her 22 year reign.
Across the Nile she erected vast swathes of a giant temple complex called Karnak,
and a 98 foot obelisk, the largest standing in Egypt today.
But the extraordinary life of this radical woman still poses many mysteries.
Now, archaeologists are on the hunt for new clues.
80 miles south of her temple in Gebel, El-Silsila, lies one of Hatshepsut's quarries.
Here, on the banks of the Nile...
JOHN: What do you want, mate?
NARRATOR: John Ward and Maria Nilsson from Lund University
are getting ready to excavate at the quarry.
JOHN: These lovely eggs.
MARIA: Do you want some bread?
NARRATOR: They want to investigate how Hatshepsut used the
quarry during her reign.
In dig season, they live on this boat with their baby son Jonathan,
daughter Freya, and dog Carter.
MARIA: What are you going to do today, Freya?
MARIA: Yeah?
JOHN: When you're a little bit older you can come over and help Daddy, yeah?
MARIA: Archaeology and Egypt itself has been with me since I was a kid.
I knew from the beginning.
That I'm here now is no surprise to family and friends back home.
The very day that I gave birth to Jonathan
we were going through what we actually needed on site.
JOHN: We never stop, it never stops for us.
MARIA: No. JOHN: Even on Christmas Day.
Guys, come on! We're ready?
NARRATOR: John and Maria have spent the last ten seasons investigating this site,
used by Hatshepsut.
JOHN: Hatshepsut was responsible for removing hundreds of thousands of
tons of sandstone from this quarry alone,
let alone the other quarries across the whole landscape.
NARRATOR: With evidence of over 10,000 years of
human activity across 15 square miles,
it's one of the largest archaeological sites in Egypt.
Here, the couple is excavating an abandoned statue.
They want to know if it belonged to Hatshepsut.
MARIA: Good morning Sphinx-y.
NARRATOR: An unfinished, ram-headed sphinx.
JOHN: It's a unique find.
MARIA: It is.
NARRATOR: The sphinx is a mythical beast modeled on a lion,
but with the head of a human.
Others were carved with the head of a ram, and are known as criosphinxes.
They act as guardians, protecting the entrances to
pyramids, temples, and sacred sites.
It's thought that Hatshepsut started the greatest display
of sphinxes known to ancient Egypt,
an avenue of sphinxes, enhanced over the centuries,
stretching nearly two miles
between the great temples of Luxor and Karnak.
MARIA: It's absolutely amazing, it's one of those dreams to, to work with this
kind of monumental statue.
JOHN: Let's go there.
NARRATOR: John and Maria need to dig out the buried sphinx to confirm
where this statue was meant to go.
They set to work to see what lies beneath the sand.
JOHN: Guys!
[clapping].
NARRATOR: 120 miles from Luxor, in Aswan, lies Qubbet el-Hawa.
This site is a densely occupied necropolis of around 100 ancient tombs.
Some have never been opened and hold secrets to how the necropolis
was being used during Hatshepsut's time.
MARTINA: It's amazing.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Martina Bardonová is part of a Spanish team preparing
to open up one of the unexplored tombs.
MARTINA: When I was about 15 I read about archaeology in Egypt,
then I completely fall in love.
NARRATOR: Martina wants to excavate inside a new, unopened tomb, but before
she can get to it she needs to clear a pathway through the sand outside.
MARTINA: Everything is covered.
I'm thinking about which was to take off the sand.
The basic problem here.
NARRATOR: Strong desert winds have blown sand in front of the tomb entrance.
[speaking native language].
NARRATOR: But after just an hour clearing a path,
the team makes a discovery that could put a halt
to everything.
MARTINA: Aah!
NARRATOR: One of Martina's team has found parts of a body hidden in the sand.
NARRATOR: These human remains appear to be ancient.
MARTINA: It's, basically it's so fragile when, when you touch it or when you,
when even the sand around moves it's just falling apart.
We can put wet toilet paper because otherwise the bones crack.
WOMAN: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Martina needs to find out why this body is outside the tomb,
and find any clues that will help her to put a date on the burial.
As she clears away the sand, the bones reveal something even more unusual.
MARTINA: It looks like achild, it might be a child.
NARRATOR: In the quarry at Gebel el-Silsila,
John and Maria are excavating
what could be one of Hatshepsut's sphinxes.
JOHN: Come and get your apples and pears now, come and get them!
This is my archaeological field box,
it's a little bit heavy, but this is the prototype.
A new version will come next season I hope, which will be lighter.
At the moment we've just got a nice stony layer on top which goes for the first two to
three centimeters, then beneath that if I stick my little magical tool inside
and then withdraw it, it's full of that,
which to the untrained eye is just black powder,
actually that's iron filings from the chisels of the quarrymen of these quarries.
The sand still today contains a memory of all that work
that took place here thousands of years ago.
NARRATOR: The sand even holds clues about what the workers had for lunch.
JOHN: Fish bones.
Someone could've had a nice meal down by the belly of the sphinx.
NARRATOR: As work continues, the team unearths something
remarkable from under the sphinx.
JOHN: Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, hold!
No, no, no, no, no!
Stand there, stand there.
Hahahahaha!
Do you realize what he's just pulled out?
A small sphinx!
Oh wow!
That is absolutely beautiful.
A small criosphinx.
There's the two haunches, there's the head, there's the head,
there's the body, here's the body.
What a discovery, I mean it's fantastic, it really is.
KHALED: Wow.
JOHN: Isn't she beautiful?
NARRATOR: Large sphinx statues are seen throughout Egypt,
but a miniature on this scale is one of a kind...
JOHN: Meet the child.
NARRATOR: And must be recorded by the dig inspector, Khaled Shawky.
Khaled is supervising the dig to report any finds back to the Egyptian government.
KHALED: This is amazing.
This is very wonderful.
JOHN: Personally, I think it's a model.
Was it the son or the child, possibly, or the apprentice, copying the master,
the master's making the real thing.
KHALED: This is a copy, yes, I think so.
JOHN: And he's making a copy. You've got the horn here.
KHALED: I see that, yes.
JOHN: For that, but this side is broken off. KHALED: Yeah.
JOHN: He's gone in there and he's gone whack!
KHALED: I see that.
JOHN: And the whole, boom!
And that's probably why it was discarded.
NARRATOR: John thinks the miniature was carved out for practice.
JOHN: Fantastic. KHALED: Brilliant, well done.
NARRATOR: It's an astonishing find.
JOHN: Find me another one, guys.
NARRATOR: At Hatshepsut's temple, Dr. Szafranski is
investigating the paintings she left on the walls.
The imagery holds clues to Hatshepsut's life, and reveals a family power struggle with
her nephew, who was also her stepson, Thutmose the Third.
DR SZAFRANSKI: Here we seeHatshepsut and behind her
we have a figure of Thutmose III.
We have two kings.
NARRATOR: Images etched into these walls reveal the story of Hatshepsut's
extraordinary rise to power.
She was the first-born of a royal family,
but tradition dictated that ony men could become the pharaoh.
So power was granted to her infant stepson.
But after seven years of acting as his aid,
Hatshepsut made an unprecedented move for power;
she overtook her stepson,
and proclaimed that she was now the king of Egypt.
DR SZAFRANSKI: We see on the walls of this temple there are two kings,
but Hatshepsut is always number one.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut's power play was revolutionary.
Now, Dr. Szafranski is searching for new evidence
to piece together her mysterious life.
In the ruins next to Hatshepsut's temple,
the team has discovered a ring of ancient mud bricks.
DR SZAFRANSKI: We're on the top of something,
now we'll go deeper and see what is inside.
NARRATOR: They think artifacts could be buried here,
but after a day of digging, progress comes to a halt.
A one-ton block of sandstone is precariously balanced on top of the mud bricks.
If the block falls, it could destroy any treasures buried beneath.
NARRATOR: Dr. Szafranski's team have no heavy-lifting equipment on site,
so they have to improvise.
WORKERS: Hey-ah-ho!
NARRATOR: If they can't move the block they won't be able
to find out what's hidden beneath.
WORKERS: Hey-ah-ho!
[speaking native language].
NARRATOR: 50 miles from Hatshepsut's temple, in El Kab,
Yale University professor John Darnell
and his wife, Egyptologist Dr. Colleen Darnell,
are beginning their season.
They're using digital technology to record ancient rock inscriptions
to figure out how hieroglyphic writing began.
DARNELL: I want to be absolutely certain that we have beak as it should be,
and that we have this here crest as it should be.
COLLEEN: Hm-mm.
NARRATOR: The pair has spent over 20 years exploring the deserts and temples of Egypt,
to interpret these ancient carvings.
During dig season, they analyze their findings for publication
here at their home.
COLLEEN: This is about as spectacular of an expedition house,
a dig house, as you can have anywhere in the world.
The view of the Nile, the mud brick architecture,
it's really a dream come true.
These are about 90 years old, linen, it's pretty remarkable that it survived
so it's fun to play archaeology with clothing as well.
I have a 1920s jodhpur and suit set,
and a fun pair of 19-teens knickers.
NARRATOR: Today, the couple is heading across the Nile,
to investigate a mysterious set of inscriptions.
DARNELL: There's just no duplicate for looking at the inscriptions themselves
on the actual monuments within these great architectural settings.
NARRATOR: Their destination is Karnak Temple.
Its beautiful chapels and decorated courtyards cover a massive site.
Here many great pharaohs, including Hatshepsut, left their mark.
But there's a mystery: despite being female,
Hatshepsut is often depicted as a man.
COLLEEN: So here we seeHatshepsut and Thutmose III
and they're wearing identical crowns, broad collars,
starched kilts, so if you were to approach this wall without
being able to read the hieroglyphs you wouldn't be able to tell who is who.
NARRATOR: Throughout the site, Hatshepsut continually
represents herself with male features.
COLLEEN: She's wearing a male kilt, and even the pharaonic beard.
NARRATOR: But hidden in the hieroglyphic text,
Colleen finds evidence of her real gender.
COLLEEN: Here we have the female indication
of her gender within the text.
'For my beloved daughter', not son.
DARNELL: They know that this is a woman in the role for which most of the iconography
and most of the terms are masculine.
So the Egyptians are aware of this and, and they work with it.
NARRATOR: Evidence on a temple wall reveals
Hatshepsut wasn't hiding her femininity,
she was proving she was a pharaoh.
A fake beard was a way to show a connection with the god Osiris.
Even male pharaohs wore an artificial beard.
But other items she wore were also reserved for men,
like the famous headdress, the nemes, and the kilt.
But she transformed herself with these symbols of power
to strengthen her image across the kingdom.
Hatshepsut dressed not as a man, but as a pharaoh.
Hatshepsut blurred her gender to be considered equal,
but how equal was society for women in ancient Egypt?
Near Hatshepsut's temple, in a tomb site called Dra' Abu el-Naga...
SUZANNE: Take one side out of the corridor with the human remains on the edge.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Suzanne Onstine, and her team from the University of
Memphis, are investigating the roles of women in ancient Egyptian society.
SUZANNE: One of the things that I really focused on in my career
was what were women doing, what were women's lives like.
Every time I come to work here I feel really excited because there's no better feeling or
job satisfaction really.
NARRATOR: It's Suzanne's tenth season excavating this tomb, but it's still packed with the
body parts of men, women, and mummified children.
Torn apart by ancient looters, the team must piece the human remains back together.
SUZANNE: This is skull fragments.
Not everybody feels comfortableworking with the dead,
but this is my job in terms of bringing light to
ancient Egypt and bringing light to individuals.
WOMAN: No that one's spines. It's a pelvis.
SUZANNE: Right now we're organizing the human remains, we have hundreds, thousands
and thousands of bones, and so keeping track of them is a bit complicated.
I think, Jesus, penises or packets?
JESUS: This is... SUZANNE: Probably penis.
JESUS: Hmm. SUZANNE: Yeah?
JESUS: This is probably penis, this is probably packet.
SUZANNE: Packet, okay. Too big to be penis.
JESUS: Yeah.
SUZANNE: There's a lot of shrinkage in the afterlife.
We found several of these mummified pieces, some of them are packets of the,
the organs that were placed back inside, occasionally one is a
penis that has been detached from a body.
Even King Tut lost his penis, it actually had just sort of fallen down into the
sarcophagus nearby, but somebody noticed it was gone one day
and there was a big situation looking for King Tut's penis.
NARRATOR: Handling these intimate body parts is not for the fainthearted,
but combing through the pieces, Suzanne makes a dramatic discovery.
SUZANNE: She was probably about 20 years old and I'm inclined to think
nearly 100% that she died as a result of childbirth.
NARRATOR: At the necropolis in Aswan,
Martina is unearthing the remains of a buried child outside the tomb entrance.
MARTINA: You can see quite well he's very tiny and very fragile.
If I compare it with my four years old niece, so she's like that, that big.
It's emotional because you know it's, it's a child.
NARRATOR: Child mortality was high in ancient Egypt,
but it's rare to find them buried and preserved at this necropolis.
MARTINA: Whenever you find some it's, it's something.
NARRATOR: The team must move the bones of the child to get access to the tomb.
But as they clear the area, they find something else
staring up from beneath the sand.
MARTINA: Aah! Oh my god.
NARRATOR: Martina's team have just uncovered an ancient face mask made of cartonnage.
NARRATOR: The mask covers the head of an adult mummy buried outside the tomb,
but the team must strengthen it with resin before they can attempt to move it.
This precious cartonnage mask was meant to help ensure a successful afterlife.
NARRATOR: The cartonnage should help the team reveal who these bodies are,
and when they date from.
But strong winds are on the way, and the team must work fast.
NARRATOR: 120 miles north...
SUZANNE: And just hold it for a minute.
NARRATOR: American archaeologist Suzanne Onstine is piecing together the
remains of women and children.
SUZANNE: This child right here is really very touching.
His face is still preserved.
NARRATOR: She's searching for clues to their roles in society,
around the time of Hatshepsut.
She's found dramatic evidence of one individual's life, and death.
SUZANNE: The vagina is the hole here, still very distended,
so we know that within 24 hours of giving birth and passing a child
that she died, because otherwise the vagina
would've shrank back to its original anatomical position.
So to find real evidence for something that is sort of commonly spoken about,
that childbirth is a really dangerous time for women in antiquity,
really kind of unique in a very dramatic fashion.
NARRATOR: The mortal dangers of childbirth are clear,
but Suzanne believes women still held positions of power.
SUZANNE: Just looking at the, the paintings we have evidence for them
participating in all levels of society.
The scenes throughout really emphasize their sort of equal stature.
NARRATOR: But the female pharaoh Hatshepsut wanted to be more than just equal.
In the ancient quarry at Silsila, while John continues to dig out the sphinx,
Maria is investigating the site for evidence of Hatshepsut's mass building campaign.
Inside a temple at the quarry, the carved relief scenes on the walls have been changed.
MARIA: The reliefs that we see on the walls now are not the original scenes.
If we start to look closer, in fact what we can see here
are the tell-tale signs underneath
of an original scene that is no longer here.
We can see a ship transporting an obelisk.
NARRATOR: The ghost images hidden in the wall reveal how Hatshepsut
may have been shipping obelisks from Silsila.
Hatshepsut was famous for her supersized
320 ton obelisk cut from granite further south,
but lifting it upright would stretch the limits of ancient engineering.
Builders dragged the obelisk up a ramp, and then carefully dug away the earth beneath,
until the base hit the foundations in the rock.
Finally, an army of builders used ropes to pull this monumental obelisk upright.
MARIA: It's putting it all together, I, it's, it's, making a full circle.
We have the beautiful golden sandstone, we've got the,
the workers actually during the time of Hatshepsut.
I personally love working with queens and female pharaohs so for me it's wonderful.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut may have been shipping obelisks from Silsila,
but what was driving her to build these colossal monuments?
At the Karnak Temple, John and Colleen Darnell think the answer
lies on Hatshepsut's giant obelisk itself.
COLLEEN: It's majesty of this noble God...
DARNELL: Who has made for her father...
COLLEEN: She addresses futuregenerations and literally tells us that people
who shall come generation after generation will know why she did this.
She's doing this for deep purposes of religious devotion.
But on the flipside when youlook up at the obelisk someof the largest hieroglyphs are
the name of Hatshepsut herself, so this is a giant statement of propaganda,
I mean there's, there's no missing the fact that this is a projection
on a monumental scale of pharaonic power.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut built these monuments to immortalize her name, not as a woman,
but as one of the greatest pharaohs of Egypt.
Beside Hatshepsut's temple, Dr. Szafranski and the team need to move a
one-ton sandstone block so they can excavate underneath.
WORKERS: Hey-ah-ho!
NATALIE: Mabruk!
Mabruk, I think we're almost there.
WORKERS: Hey-ah-ho!
NARRATOR: With the block finally moved,
they can begin to dig through the sand layers.
NARRATOR: Underneath the temple ruins, the team have unearthed
ancient fragments of pottery.
MARIUSZ: I think we have the first complete pot.
NATALIE: Look at that.
MARIUSZ: Yeah, the whole pot.
NATALIE: Wonderful huh? Isn't that nice?
MARIUSZ: We are very excited and happy because nobody maybe
except ancient Egyptian were seeing this before.
NARRATOR: These small clues could help Dr. Szafranski unravel the mysterious events
after Hatshepsut's death.
When she died around the age of 50, her stepson, King Thutmose the Third,
finally regained his power.
And higher up the cliff, Dr. Szafranski sees evidence of his temple.
DR SZAFRANSKI: It was not possible to build a bigger temple than the temple of
Hatshepsut, but it was higher.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut's immense temple took up the prime spot in the mountain
of the Valley of the Kings.
So Thutmose the Third built his temple right next to it, but in an elevated position.
Ancient builders constructed huge columns on top of a raised platform.
Dr. Szafranski's team has figured out what this temple would've looked like and
discovered its upper terrace was 11 feet higher than Hatshepsut's,
a political powerplay by Thutmose to finally overshadow his stepmother.
DR SZAFRANSKI: It was better visible, point number one in the Valley.
He wanted this effect.
NARRATOR: Thutmose had tried to upstage Hatshepsut, but in a twist of fate,
ancient earthquakes and landslides have left his temple badly damaged.
It may never look as it once did, but Dr. Szafranski and his team
are working to restore what remains.
DR SZAFRANSKI: Today we have restored temple of Hatshepsut but after let's say five, ten
years we'll have restored temple of Thutmose III as well.
It's only a matter of time.
NARRATOR: In Aswan, Martina and the team
are finishing their excavations outside the tomb.
MARTINA: Tired?
[speaking native language].
WORKER: No, no, no. No, no, not tired.
NARRATOR: They've managed to move the bones and delicate cartonnage
into the onsite lab.
From studying the decorative style, Martina believes these burials dated to
a few hundred years before the time of Hatshepsut,
in a period called the Middle Kingdom.
MARTINA: We know that it's a Middle Kingdom date,
the cartonnage was really well done,
it was high quality work, and we know that they were
let's say higher status persons.
NARRATOR: Martina thinks the child and adult burials are a family connection
to whoever owned the tomb, but her team must continue
to unearth the secrets of who or what is hidden inside.
MARTINA: It's going to be amazing to see finally how it looks like.
NARRATOR: After a grueling few days, the team heads back to the dig house.
NARRATOR: In the quarry at Silsila...
JOHN: Ahmed! AHMED: Yes?
NARRATOR: John Ward is still excavating what could be the
remains of one of Hatshepsut's sphinxes.
JOHN: What I've got is basically a dressed piece of sandstone,
and I can feel a nice right angle corner here.
What I'm hoping actually that is, is the top part of the head here, which is missing.
One, two, three.
Hold, hold, hold, hold.
WORKERS: Hold, hold. Hold! Up!
JOHN: And turn him over.
Turn him over.
Shuay, shuay, shuay.
The head of the sphinx.
So now we have a complete sphinx as far as I'm concerned.
Both Maria and I do not consider this a job, this is life, Silsila is our life,
these guys are our family, and it's mankind's history.
All started here.
NARRATOR: After a long, hot dig, John can finally show Maria the enormity
of what they've unearthed.
MARIA: Oh wow.
NARRATOR: The abandoned sphinx statue is nearly ten foot high.
MARIA: Wow! This is just silly.
Why on earth is it still here?
NARRATOR: It's the largest they've seen at the quarry.
MARIA: As far as I know there'sno records whatsoever of
any unfinished sphinx that is intact like this.
NARRATOR: It's in such good condition, it's a mystery
why this giant statue was abandoned.
It's possible a small fracture in the stone could have stopped the work.
But John and Maria still want to find out where this sphinx was destined to go.
JOHN: So we need to now look at all the sphinxes, the Sphinx Avenue of Hatshepsut,
Karnak's, find out where we have one of this size.
You're looking at over five ton there, if not more.
It really is.
MARIA: Wow.
NARRATOR: At the magnificent Karnak Temple, Hatshepsut began construction of the
Avenue of the Sphinxes.
Some statues have been moved, damaged, or have even disappeared,
but hundreds still remain across the temple site.
JOHN: How do you want to tackle this?
NARRATOR: John and Maria Ward have come to Karnak to try and find a match
for the sphinx they've discovered back at the quarry.
JOHN: Our tail goes further along the back paw, then sweeps round.
These don't look big enough at the front.
NARRATOR: As well as matching the style, the couple is looking for black specks,
called "inclusions," within the sandstone itself.
MARIA: If we can find those black inclusions, the little black dots, then we know that
it's from, most probably from the same quarry.
JOHN: From the same quarry, hmm.
MARIA: And from the same period.
JOHN: I'm not seeing any.
MARIA: These so far do not show any such marks.
No, I think we need to explore a little bit further.
NARRATOR: There's no sign of a matching sphinx on the avenue outside the temple walls,
but hidden inside the temple they find another style.
JOHN: They, they are different, Maria, they are different.
That haunch...
MARIA: Yeah.
JOHN: Look at the belly cut.
MARIA: I would agree.
JOHN: And look, look at the front, see the, the girth of the neck...
MARIA: I would agree.
JOHN: Coming down and that would, the paws...
MARIA: And, and you've got the black inclusions.
JOHN: Black inclusions. Wow! There we have it!
NARRATOR: Although damaged, the couple is certain these sphinxes came from Silsila.
JOHN: At Silsila they haven't been finished, they're,
they're still in their raw state.
They would've been transported to here.
NARRATOR: The evidence suggests John and Maria's sphinx would've made a
remarkable journey, carved out at the quarry...
shipped 100 miles down the Nile and placed at Karnak Temple.
JOHN: I'm feeling very proud, I feel like a proud father.
These are our children, this is from Silsila.
Everything, bit by bit by bit, has culminated in this one moment.
Bang. The sphinx.
NARRATOR: By Hatshepsut's temple, Dr. Szafranski and
the team continue their excavation.
NATALIE: Look at that treasure, it's filled with content.
DR SZAFRANSKI: And the pot looks like New Kingdom.
NARRATOR: They have unearthed ancient pottery, and food buried in the ground.
These were gifts to the gods, offerings made when the temple was first built.
MARIUSZ: It's a very important piece in this puzzle.
NARRATOR: Bit by bit, each of these small finds is helping
to unearth the secrets of this magnificent site.
Dr. Szafranski has dedicated his life to revealing the legacy of Hatshepsut,
the incredible pharaoh queen.
NARRATOR: Hatshepsut was a leader, a politician, and a revolutionary
the likes of which the world had never seen.
Against all odds, Hatshepsut rose to become a pharaoh,
and through her magnificent temple,
she is remembered once again.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.