NARRATOR: Egypt... the richest source of
archaeological treasures on the planet.
MAN: Oh, wow, look at that!
NARRATOR: Hidden beneath this desert landscape,
lie the secrets of this ancient civilization.
[speaking native language]
ARCHAEOLOGIST: I never seen something like this.
NARRATOR: Now, for a full season of excavations,
our cameras have been given unprecedented access
to follow teams on the front line of archaeology.
WOMAN: This is the most critical moment.
TEAM: Ahh!
NARRATOR: Revealing buried treasures.
WOMAN: Oh! MAN: We are lucky today.
JOHN: Wow, lots of mummies.
WOMAN: The smell is horrible.
NARRATOR: And making discoveries that could rewrite ancient history.
JOHN: We've never had the proof until now.
COLLEEN: This is where it all started.
ALEJANDRO: My goodness, I never expected this.
[applause]
NARRATOR: This time, archaeologists hunt for some of the most intriguing
Egyptian artifacts of all.
JOHN: Oh, wow.
NARRATOR: Mummies.
JOHN: Oh, there's wrapping and mummy everywhere.
NARRATOR: John and Maria discover a hidden tomb entrance.
[speaking native language]
JOHN: Yes! MAN: Oh! JOHN: We have light!
NARRATOR: Veronica and Alberto investigate an ancient crime scene.
VERONICA: We found the mummies everywhere.
NARRATOR: And Alejandro looks for treasures hidden beneath
the bandages of his prized mummy.
ALEJANDRO: In five minutes we will know.
[theme music plays]
NARRATOR: The ancient Egyptians, famous for their pursuit of immortality.
They made mummies by preserving the dead with salts, oils, and wrappings,
hoping their bodies would live forever.
And covering these mummies with gold and jewels,
they sought to guarantee success in the afterlife.
Yet, only a tiny fraction of these mummies have ever been discovered intact.
Most were destroyed by ancient thieves looking for treasure.
For archaeologists, finding an untouched burial is the holy grail, and the chance to
uncover extraordinary new information about the people and society
of this great civilization.
Among these archaeologists are husband and wife team, John Ward and Maria Nilssen,
here for their 13th season to excavate their site in southern Egypt.
JOHN: Okay, everybody on the car.
ARCHAEOLOGIST: Okay.
NARRATOR: But before they can start digging,
they must transport their 20 strong team to the site.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: With just one vehicle.
JOHN: Don't push me further off!
[speaking native language]
JOHN: Looks very cozy in there.
MARIA: Doesn't it!
JOHN: I'll just precariously hang off the back.
[laughing]
NARRATOR: The site John and Maria want to investigate today
sits right on the mountaintop.
TEAM: Oh! [speaking native language]
NARRATOR: It's the final day
their excavation permit allows them to dig on site.
MARIA: Come on, guys. JOHN: Come on, guys.
NARRATOR: This area, Gebel el-Silsila, is known for its huge stone quarries,
where ancient pharaohs mined stone for their giant monuments.
But it was also the site of a small town built to house the workers,
where they lived, died, and were buried.
JOHN: Souka you're gonna be with Nils and Souna.
NARRATOR: John and Maria are on the hunt for the graves of
the town's middle classes, like the specialist stone masons.
JOHN: Move that lot.
NARRATOR: A tomb with any mummies or burial goods could hold valuable information
about this ancient Egyptian community.
JOHN: So you've got about 10, 15 minutes to get that open.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: John's particularly keen
to investigate a structure he's named Tomb 15.
JOHN: We've got a monument that once stood right on top of this mountain.
And, at some point in history, some looters came along and actually dug a hole
through the floor of that monument, and, lucky for them, discovered a tomb.
NARRATOR: The monument could have sat on top of a high status tomb.
And, though he knows it was looted for valuables in antiquity, John hopes that the
robbers may have left traces of the tomb's owner behind.
JOHN: I am hoping to find remains of the mummies that were entombed in there.
Some indication of what they were entombed with, their funerary ware, to understand
the importance or the status of them within the community.
NARRATOR: Keen to use every minute of their last day, Maria gets to work exploring
a different part of the site.
She quickly spots something amongst the rubble.
MARIA: Oh, John! Do you wanna come in?
JOHN: What have you got?
MARIA: I actually think that I got a game piece here, a game board.
What I can see are three vertical lines and a series of several horizontal lines.
I found myself a senet game. I know it's difficult to see.
JOHN: Yeah, I can see.
MARIA: I just turned the stone around.
NARRATOR: Senet was a popular board game played throughout ancient Egypt.
It was also a funerary offering.
Squares of the game representing different hazards the deceased would
need to navigate to reach the afterlife.
The great Tutankhamen was buried with five senet games
in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Could this find be a hint that an important mummy is hidden somewhere nearby?
MARIA: This is a game that was played.
JOHN: Well, it was played by royals and laymen alike.
JOHN: I mean, everybody, from the workers all the way right up to the viziers, all the way
up to the living god, the pharaoh himself played it.
NARRATOR: But on closer inspection, Maria isn't sure that this senet board
was a burial offering.
MARIA: Look where I am, I'm in beautiful shade,
I got the breeze coming through.
JOHN: True, true.
MARIA: What if the men who quarried these monuments, what if they sat here,
had their break, and you've got the senet game here.
NARRATOR: Perhaps not a game for a deceased tomb owner, but the tomb builders.
Still an exciting sign they are in the right place.
MARIA: Wonderful.
NARRATOR: But they only have six hours left on site to find
the chamber they are looking for.
JOHN: Jose!
NARRATOR: 40 miles south, along the Nile, in Aswan
sits the hillside necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa.
In his 11 years of working here, Professor Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano has already
discovered four new tombs and ten burial chambers.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: The site's location, on ancient Egypt's southern border,
makes it a particularly exciting place to excavate.
ALEJANDRO: This area was the frontier between Egypt and Nubia where the people
interchange not only products but also ideas.
Bilal, don't find another tomb, hey?
[laughing] [speaking native language]
NARRATOR: Last year at this site Alejandro and his team
made the discovery of a lifetime.
ALEJANDRO: Get ready.
NARRATOR: An incredibly rare undisturbed burial with a 4,000 year old wooden coffin
containing a completely untouched mummy.
ALEJANDRO: Yeah, we have been very lucky.
It's impossible to explain the feelings that I am having.
NARRATOR: The coffin is covered in hieroglyphic markings, immediately giving
the archaeologists vital information about who this mummy might be.
The hieroglyphs reveal the person inside is a male named Shemai.
They describe him as a priest and overseer of the stores, controlling the distribution
of grain amongst the local population.
The markings also identify his father as Khema, a governor,
a powerful ruler in the south of Egypt,
and his mother as Satethotep, the daughter of Sarenput I,
a man trusted by the pharaoh to be the founding governor of this region.
But these discoveries came right at the end of last season,
and now the team are keen to uncover more of Shemai's life story.
Alejandro begins the search at a spectacular tomb nearby
that he began excavating two years ago.
Thanks to the coffin, he now knows that this belongs to
one of Shemai's distinguished relatives.
ALEJANDRO: This is one of the stars of the necropolis,
it's the tomb of Sarenput I, Shemai's grandfather.
NARRATOR: On the outside wall of the tomb is an intricately carved family portrait.
ALEJANDRO: We have Sarenput I sat and receiving the homage of
his wife, his mother, his eldest daughter,
Satethotep, who was Shemai's mother.
NARRATOR: But Shemai himself doesn't appear.
ALEJANDRO: We did not have any reference to Shemai before
the discovery of his funerary chamber,
so he was member of the family,
but for any reason he was never represented here.
NARRATOR: Though Alejandro has discovered other human remains at this necropolis,
he has never found any of the family members represented on this tomb wall.
Now the body of Shemai, the missing son, provides a unique chance to investigate.
Who were the people of this great ruling family?
And where did they come from?
40 miles away in Gebel el-Silsila,
John and Maria hope they are on the cusp of their own mummy discovery.
With time already very tight to complete their work,
Maria begins excavating at tomb number nine.
MARIA: Okay, are you ready, Trish?
NARRATOR: Working alongside team member, Tricia Coletto, she hopes this chamber will
reveal more clues about Gebel el-Silsila's inhabitants.
MARIA: Take a while for the eyes to adjust.
TRICIA: Eyes to adjust a little bit.
NARRATOR: Earlier this season the team cleared this tomb and found the stone slab empty,
but the broken remains of a mummy half buried in the mud of the floor,
looted by tomb robbers.
MARIA: They find the mummies, they will break them in half for the sake of finding the
few little glittery things that might adorn these.
NARRATOR: But the looters feared the mummy's curse,
so they completely destroyed the mummy,
hoping it could then never reap its revenge in the afterlife.
TRICIA: The looters have torn our little friend apart and
unceremonially thrown him or her back inside the tomb.
NARRATOR: The small handful of tombs that have been discovered with treasures
intact provide a glimpse of why mummies were so sought after by thieves.
The most splendid is the mummy of Tutankhamen.
Beneath the stunning death mask and under the wrappings is a treasure trove of over
100 ritual ornaments.
Around the neck alone dozens of precious amulets, covering the chest a golden vulture and
a winged cobra, deities of upper and lower Egypt.
On the navel a black resin scarab, a symbol of immortality,
and around the waist and thigh the king's prized daggers,
made of gold and iron hammered from a meteorite.
These valuable objects were meant for the afterlife,
but were an irresistible target for the living.
To properly examine the looted mummy that they are working on,
Maria and Tricia must first carefully remove it from the ground.
MARIA: Now what I think we should do this morning is to lift this block to start.
NARRATOR: But just as they are ready to begin,
Maria spots something worrying in the sand.
MARIA: That's concerning.
TRICIA: Oh, yes, I see it.
MARIA: Yeah. We might have a snake.
NARRATOR: Maria has spotted
the fresh tracks of a snake in the sand,
and it could still be hiding somewhere in the tomb.
John joins them to lend some support.
TRICIA: Good luck.
MARIA: Okay, if you're still in here, I come in peace.
Tapping a bit.
JOHN: Maria, don't tap it, just lift it.
MARIA: All right. JOHN: Yank it.
MARIA: I don't want it to end up falling on our mummy.
JOHN: Just be safe.
NARRATOR: Many of the snakes in Egypt are deadly.
JOHN: Are you okay? MARIA: Yeah, there's tracks.
JOHN: Yeah, don't lift the stone.
Try and keep back from the door please.
[grunting]
JOHN: I got it.
[grunting]
MARIA: Well. JOHN: Nothing?
I tell you what, I'm gonna carry on with my work and leave you with your snake.
NARRATOR: Maria and Tricia can't be completely sure the snake has gone.
MARIA: I removed a hole where it entered.
TRICIA: Okay.
You've scared him off anyway, I think.
NARRATOR: But with the clock ticking, they decide they must press on.
TRICIA: We have to be careful to distinguish what is mummy and what is dirt here.
MARIA: Yes. TRICIA: The stone can go.
NARRATOR: By excavating the body from the mud, they hope to discover more about the
role of this person in Gebel el-Silsila's community,
but the state of the mummy makes their task tougher.
MARIA: More pieces.
TRICIA: A little piece of skull.
MARIA: Yeah, I got more here.
And they burn to such heat
that the white bones turn blue.
NARRATOR: Ancient looters would often burn the mummies they found inside a tomb.
MARIA: They're after gold, and by burning the mummies it's easier for them to open them up.
Very sad.
NARRATOR: The ancient Egyptians would have dreaded this kind of mutilation,
they went to huge lengths to mummify and protect their dead,
believing that, to, succeed in the afterlife
key elements of the body and soul must be preserved intact.
The first was the Ren, your identity and name.
it lived for as long as your name was spoken.
Ib was the heart, the seat of your soul, the good force in your life.
Sheut was the shadow, an image of yourself that was reborn every day at sunrise.
Ba was the unique personality,
it left the body in the form of a bird at night and at death.
The Ka was the vital essence, the force that animated the individual,
and the Khat was the physical form of the body,
which must be preserved, or mummified, for the dead to be
granted eternal life.
TRICIA: I feel like I personally get attached when I'm working on a mummy, and
you feel like you're getting to know them, and you feel like a caretaker.
NARRATOR: At Tomb 15, John has just hours remaining to search inside for any evidence of the
tomb's owner's status in the town, but he has a puzzle,
right now the only way into
the chamber is via the hole dug by ancient looters.
JOHN: Found the door yet? ARCHAEOLOGIST: No.
NARRATOR: John hopes that if he can find the tomb's original door, it could be
inscribed with a name or date identifying who was buried here.
JOHN: Theoretically it should be somewhere in this area.
NARRATOR: He decides he might have more chance of locating it from inside the tomb,
descending through the looters' tunnel.
JOHN: I must admit I'm a little bit worried about going down there,
but I know what to do if I find a snake, call Maria.
[speaking native language]
JOHN: Oh wow.
[panting]
Oh, there's wrapping and mummy everywhere.
I am surrounded by the remains of the poor souls that were interned in here
but have been completely looted.
This is the part I really want to get to, and find out if this is, oh wow!
[laughing]
NARRATOR: An area of fallen rocks could point the way to the tomb's original entrance.
JOHN: No, it's far too small.
This is not big enough by any stretch of the imagination, so where's my entrance?
NARRATOR: 75 miles north of Gebel el-Silsila is Luxor,
one of the richest archaeological sites in the world,
home to magnificent temples of the pharaohs,
the tombs of the nobles, and the great Valley of the Kings.
Here, in the foothills of the famous valley, at the necropolis of Asasif,
a team of archaeologists from Spain works to solve an ancient mummy mystery.
The site is unusual because of the sheer number of
ancient artifacts and the level of devastation.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist, Veronica García Martinez is tasked with piecing together
the thousands of shards and fragments the team has found here.
NARRATOR: And amongst the debris there's something much more grizzly.
NARRATOR: The mummies that Veronica and her colleague Alberto are investigating
are in a very bad state.
NARRATOR: Just like John and Maria's site, these mummies were looted by thieves looking
for precious jewels and amulets, and again the bodies have been mutilated to avoid
inciting the curse of the dead.
But here the robbers were very particular in their desecration.
NARRATOR: By dismembering the corpses like this, the looters hoped to deny the dead of all
possible means of enacting their revenge in the next life.
NARRATOR: So far the team has found more than 350 mummies here.
Now they want to know why were so many people buried in this one spot?
They think the answer could be connected to this site's original purpose,
as a tomb complex for a man named Huy,
vizier to King Amenhotep III, who ruled from 1390 BC.
The vizier was a very powerful position in ancient Egypt,
second in command only to the pharaoh himself.
NARRATOR: Professor Francisco Martin-Valentin works at the heart of the burial ground.
The once magnificent tomb chapel that Huy himself spent years designing and building
in preparation for his death.
NARRATOR: When Francisco began his restoration work 11 years ago, the chapel was in ruins.
Now he's hoping that clues in the stone wall inscriptions could help solve the mystery
of the mummies.
NARRATOR: As Francisco puts the pieces of this stone puzzle together,
it's clear that this tomb has not just been weathered by time,
it has been systematically vandalized.
All inscriptions depicting the tomb's owner have been mutilated.
He thinks the damage here is not down to looters looking for treasure,
but someone much closer to Huy.
Huy was vizier during the reign of both Amenhotep III
and his successor, Amenhotep IV.
Amenhotep IV, in an attempt to cement his power, soon abolished the worship of
traditional gods in favor of just one,
the Aten, and changed his name to Akhenaten.
Refusing to follow his heretic king, Huy added inscriptions inside his own tomb declaring
loyalty to the old gods.
When Akhenaten found out, he ordered the destruction of Huy's tomb chapel.
The Vizier, Huy, was never seen again, and his mummy has never been found.
It seems that Huy was murdered for his beliefs by order of the pharaoh,
and by destroying his name and likenesses, his Ren,
the killers ensured that he would never be able to pass peacefully into the afterlife.
But amongst the rubble the team has found a very special fragment,
a rare image of the vizier's face.
NARRATOR: By reinstalling this piece to its original position in the wall inscription,
Francisco hopes to right the wrongs of these ancient vandals,
giving Huy back his Ren and, in theory, his place in eternity.
On the mountaintop in Gebel el-Silsila.
JOHN: What have you got?
NARRATOR: John and his team are searching for a hidden tomb entrance,
and things are looking up.
JOHN: What it looks like is actually the entrance to Tomb 15.
NARRATOR: To be sure, John wants to see whether this hole lines up
with the chamber below.
JOHN: We're gonna continue now, clean this entire area, and I would be downstairs
cleaning from up, or down up, and hopefully we'll meet halfway.
NARRATOR: Maria gets word of the discovery and arrives
to supervise the team digging on top.
[speaking native language]
MARIA: I can see light, it looks like we've got the ancient doorway.
JOHN: I think they're breaking through. [laughing]
NARRATOR: It seems John could be in the right place after all.
MARIA: Yeah, [speaking native language]
JOHN: I can hear Maria's voice. Oop!
NARRATOR: The workers on the surface pick up the pace, but without knowing John's precise
position below them, there's a real risk the tomb could collapse on top of him.
JOHN: Ah! We have light!
MARIA: Oh, aye-aye-aye! You okay down there?
JOHN: Yeah. Come up.
I'm fine! I'm fine! Still alive!
[all laughing]
MARIA: There's his head!
JOHN: How are you doing, guys? MARIA: Hi!
NARRATOR: John finally breaks through what he hopes is the ancient doorway to the tomb.
JOHN: I think we've found the entrance!
MARIA: We did, it's a shaft.
NARRATOR: But there is still a puzzle.
This opening still doesn't seem big enough to get a mummy through it and into the tomb.
JOHN: Well, we'll continue and take this back and see where we can get up to.
NARRATOR: At the necropolis of Asasif in Luxor, inside the vizier's tomb chapel,
Francisco and his wife, Teresa, have found the correct location for the
fragment bearing Huy's face, and are ready to restore it to its rightful place.
NARRATOR: After three and a half thousand years,
Vizier Huy's image is finally complete, and,
according to ancient Egyptian traditions,
his spirit lives again in the afterlife.
But this site still holds a mystery, why did the team find over 350 mummies
scattered around Huy's tomb?
Who were these people?
Veronica and Alberto examine one of the mutilated bodies,
inserting a tiny camera in through its nose.
NARRATOR: Veronica is looking for a crucial sign that
she can only find inside the skull.
NARRATOR: Removing the brain was a prestigious part of
mummification that few could afford.
NARRATOR: This man's high status is a clue to why he and hundreds of other mummies are
here at Huy's tomb.
After the pharaoh Akhenaten died, worship of the old gods,
like Amun, the king of the gods, was restored.
Veronica and Alberto think that Huy became regarded as a martyr,
and his tomb a place of pilgrimage and burial for the elites.
NARRATOR: Sadly, like so many ancient mummies, this pilgrim was later plundered for his
burial riches, and mutilated by the robber to avoid a curse.
NARRATOR: 115 miles south, in Aswan,
Alejandro is on the hunt for clues about another
elite Egyptian, his extraordinary intact mummy, Shemai.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: The evidence at the burial site revealed his name and ancestry
within a family of powerful governors.
But to uncover more about his age, any amulets and perhaps even further clues about this
enigmatic ruling family and where they came from,
Alejandro must probe Shemai's mummy itself.
ALEJANDRO: Tonight we have came here to the store of the Ministry of Antiquities in
Aswan where Shemai's mummy is kept.
We are going to transport the mummy to the hospital
in order to do a CT scan.
NARRATOR: It's been a year since Alejandro last saw Shemai, and now he hopes that
a CT scan will allow him to peer beneath the mummy's bandages for the first time.
ALEJANDRO: When I saw the box and the mummies, it's a respect.
In that same ways it's part of my family.
NARRATOR: The hospital is across town and the CT scanner is only available outside
regular hours, which means the team must travel at night,
the most dangerous time to travel through the city.
ALEJANDRO: I'm nervous, definitely, I'm nervous.
NARRATOR: A mummy like Shemai is a priceless ancient artifact, and still a prime
target for thieves, so armed police escort the team through the busy streets.
ALEJANDRO: Egypt was so plundered in the past that they try to avoid any kind
of modern robbery or wherever.
NARRATOR: Shemai's body could be wrapped with precious jewels,
a modern-day looter's jackpot.
NARRATOR: But the risks of the journey are worth it for Alejandro, who's desperate to
find more about Shemai after a year of waiting.
ALEJANDRO: I feel very excited because it's an opportunity to
know perhaps the causes of his death,
or perhaps the amulets that we are going to find,
so it's amazing.
NARRATOR: After a tense 30 minutes, the armed convoy makes it safely to the hospital.
ALEJANDRO: We go.
NARRATOR: But will the scan give Alejandro the answers he's looking for?
A CT scan of Tutankhamen, the world's most famous mummy,
revealed an incredible level of detail.
Beneath 13 layers of bandages lies Tutankhamen's body.
The embalmers drenched his head in tree resin to preserve the soft tissues of his face.
X-ray evidence of healthy teeth revealed a good diet, and still developing wisdom
teeth indicated he died a late teenager.
A hole in his skull and a bone fragment in his head were telltale signs the embalmers
removed his brain.
These features are all typical of the advanced mummification
reserved for the highest in society.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: Alejandro hopes that Shemai's CT scan might reveal
the same kind of forensic clues.
Technicians carefully place his prize discovery onto the scanner.
TECHNICIAN: You find it in a coffin?
ALEJANDRO: Yeah. We excavated it last season,
and we have the titles, which are very interesting,
he was the overseer of the grain store.
TECHNICIAN: Mm-hm. NARRATOR: As well as looking for amulets
and a possible cause of death,
there is a mystery that has puzzled Alejandro ever since
he first opened Shemai's coffin a year ago.
ALEJANDRO: Oof, uno venticinco. 125.
It's quite short.
My daughter is more or less like this, and she is eight years old. So...
NARRATOR: Could Shemai really have been as young and
held the title of overseer of the grain store?
Alejandro hopes the scan will finally help to determine his true age.
ALEJANDRO: We are going to begin the scanning, so we need to leave the room.
NARRATOR: The forensic anthropologists look closely at Shemai's teeth to estimate
his age when he died.
ANTHROPOLOGIST: Nueve.
ALEJANDRO: Nine years old?
Nine years old, he's a child.
NARRATOR: For Alejandro, such a tender age at death
suggests that Shemai never actually
held the title inscribed on his coffin.
ALEJANDRO: If he was only nine years old when he died,
it means that it's impossible that he might
hold in reality the title of overseer of the grain store.
NARRATOR: It's more likely that this was a posthumous promotion designed to give
the boy a position of status in the afterlife.
[speaking native language]
NARRATOR: Alejandro is getting closer to uncovering Shemai's true story.
ALEJANDRO: Five minutes we will know more about him.
NARRATOR: In Gebel el-Silsila,
Tricia has just over an hour left to excavate the mummy in tomb nine,
when she discovers something unexpected.
TRICIA: Maria, would you please come over?
I think we have something interesting, I think we don't have one mummy,
I think we have two.
NARRATOR: A second mummy is an intriguing development.
Family members were often buried together in the same tomb,
so these two could be related.
But both have been burned by the ancient looters to get at the precious amulets,
fusing the mummies together.
MARIA: Oh wow, look how burned that is.
TRICIA: I know. The resin is now basically turned to stone.
MARIA: Yeah, and glued together.
I don't know how we're gonna do this.
Let's see.
NARRATOR: It's now a huge challenge to remove both bodies
before the work must stop.
[Tricia sighs]
The problem is, if we leave it here,
it will most probably be destroyed even more.
If we lift it, we might have to actually take that bone to the side.
TRICIA: I think we take the femur out.
MARIA: And we're fighting the time now.
NARRATOR: With only one hour remaining, Maria faces a tough decision.
NARRATOR: She decides that trying to lift
the burnt mummies out of the ground with
so little time risks too much further damage.
MARIA: What we'll do is protect it as far as we can and we will rebury it.
TRICIA: I think it's the right idea.
NARRATOR: Maria's disappointed not to be able to remove the mummies today, but the
discovery of two individuals means she could have found a family group,
an exciting prospect to explore next season.
TRICIA: You're going to stay here for a while, my friend.
MARIA: Yeah, we did our best.
NARRATOR: In Tomb 15, John is still trying to dig himself out of
what could be the original entrance.
Having left her mummies behind, Maria heads back to help.
MARIA: Let's see if we can...
NARRATOR: And she's just in time for a surprise discovery.
[grunting]
JOHN: There's another doorway!
MARIA: What? To where?
JOHN: Another chamber!
There's a whole new chamber directly in front of me.
I can see the chisel marks, it's full of mummy wrappings.
NARRATOR: It's a tantalizing find, a whole new area of the tomb,
potentially with a rare intact mummy.
But they now have just minutes left before they have to close the site, so this will have to
be another project for next season.
Now John must stick to his first task, finding the tomb's original door.
JOHN: I just need to move some of this sand so I can get my butt in here,
you can see I'm stuck again.
NARRATOR: There's no sign of the grand entranceway John was expecting, so could this small
opening be the original doorway after all?
The only way to test if it's wide enough for a human mummy
is for John to climb through the gap himself.
[Maria laughing]
[coughing]
JOHN: Hello, darling.
How are you?
MARIA: Happy to see you on this side. [laughing]
JOHN: Wow, that was something and a half.
MARIA: Well done, you.
NARRATOR: The dimensions seem to fit.
[laughing]
JOHN: Absolutely amazing.
NARRATOR: It's an unexpectedly emotional experience for John.
JOHN: Most of us get to have the experience of going through the entrance
into tombs that have been looted, not the other way round,
coming out of the entrance, having dug it from the inside.
NARRATOR: If this is the original door, it could hold
crucial clues about the tomb's owner.
Sadly, there are no markings to indicate a name or date, but John and Maria are still
able to glean valuable information from the stonework.
MARIA: The shaft is absolutely beautifully dressed.
NARRATOR: The craftsmanship of the masonry and the existence of the extra chamber suggest
that this was an important individual.
JOHN: This tomb definitely belonged to someone of some status within the community.
It wasn't just a worker.
The other chamber, we've just got a glimpse of it.
What awaits us inside is yet to be revealed.
NARRATOR: At the university hospital in Aswan,
Alejandro waits nervously for more information about Shemai.
ALEJANDRO: Que tiene?
ANTHROPOLOGIST: Necklace.
ALEJANDRO: Ah, he has a necklace.
NARRATOR: Inside the CT scanner the mummy is slowly revealing its secrets.
ALEJANDRO: He is wearing a necklace with small beads.
NARRATOR: But Alejandro still has unanswered questions.
The ancient Egyptians usually mummified members of the elite, removing their organs
and brain while preserving the rest of the body.
Alejandro is keen to see whether Shemai has received the same treatment.
[speaking Spanish]
ALEJANDRO: Yeah.
[speaking Spanish]
ALEJANDRO: Yeah, we can see the remains of the brain inside the head,
so it was not taken out.
The nose was not perforated to drain the brain.
NARRATOR: Over the course of the evening, the scan has revealed a host of
new information about Shemai.
Beneath the bandages is a 4-foot 1-inch tall skeleton
with little surviving tissue.
His mouth has a mix of both adult and baby teeth,
which puts his age at death around nine years old.
Around the neck is a ceramic necklace designed to magically help him reach the afterlife,
a hallmark of high status.
But unlike other elite mummies of the era,
his brain, now shriveled, was left in his skull.
Why was Shemai's body so poorly preserved when he came from
such a powerful Egyptian family?
Alejandro has a theory.
ALEJANDRO: We need to think that we are in the periphery of the state.
The best specialist would be in the court, and we are in
the southernmost province of Egypt.
They had no experts in mummification here.
ANTHROPOLOGIST: Ahora...
This is new, it's different. MAN: Yes.
NARRATOR: But the CT scan
has one more surprise for Alejandro, Shemai's ethnicity.
ALEJANDRO: Well, they have just told me that Shemai
had the Nubian features,
which means that the ruling family was probably Nubian,
and that was unexpected.
NARRATOR: Examining Shemai's anatomy closely, the thickness of his bones and the shape of
his nasal cavity, the anthropologists think he was a Black African,
likely from neighboring Nubia.
A huge revelation that challenges the prevailing image
of the Egyptian ruling class.
ALEJANDRO: We always thought the ancient Egyptian elite were Mediterranean type,
and in this sense Shemai is representing the society
of a frontier in which
different ethnic groups were mixed.
At the end it doesn't matter the color of your skin, Shemai was Egyptian.
NARRATOR: It's been an incredible night of investigation and discovery
for the team, who have added a brand new page to the history book.
ALEJANDRO: Thank you very much for your help, it's very useful.
NARRATOR: With their carefully preserved mummies and elaborate tombs,
the ancient Egyptians sought eternal life after death.
Despite a curse to protect them from robbers, few mummies ever survive intact.
But for the lucky archaeologists who discover them,
it's an incredible opportunity to uncover
the secrets of this fascinating civilization,
and by protecting and restoring the mummies, they help return
the souls of the ancients onto their path to immortality.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.