I'm Alice Roberts and I'm on an adventure
to look at the world's oldest and greatest civilisation.
I'm travelling the length and breadth of Egypt by train,
following the river Nile from Alexandria to Aswan
to discover its ancient past.
I want to find out about
those who found the tombs, temples and pyramids
and dig even deeper,
to understand what life was like for the ordinary people that built them.
I'll learn about the vast scale of archaeological treasures
from an age-old kingdom.
And find out there's still much more to be discovered buried in the sand,
unseen for thousands of years.
In the final part of my journey,
I track down some extraordinary hieroglyphics...
Oh, my goodness! That's a woman in childbirth.
Yes.
..21, 22...
..find evidence of overly-ambition stone masons...
Just imagine the disappointment when a massive crack appears.
..and discover how one woman
is hoping to shape the future of archaeology and tourism in Egypt...
Instead of wanting to create this Disneyland open-air museum,
tourism today should be focused on real, authentic experiences
with the people.
..as I travel Ancient Egypt by train.
I'm starting my journey today from Luxor.
As I travel along this last stretch of railway,
I have Amelia Edwards' book with me
that helped to inspire my fascination in Ancient Egypt.
I'm continuing south, upriver,
and I'll be stopping off at a whole series of sites
that are strung out like jewels along the banks of the Nile.
And I'm really looking forward to visiting some of the places
that Amelia Edwards went to more than 100 years ago,
and finding out how different they look today.
Every town along this train line
seems to have its own Ancient Egyptian temple.
They're all dedicated to different deities -
and there were a lot to choose from.
We know of at least 1,400 gods and goddesses
that were worshipped in Ancient Egypt.
They represented different aspects of nature and human concerns,
from the sun to fertility
and childbirth to crocodiles.
I'll be stopping at four stations form Esna to Aswan
to meet a variety of different deities
worshipped in the later centuries of Ancient Egypt...
..on the final leg of my Egyptian journey.
Esna is a small city, with a population of around 60,000.
Thank you.
Walking along its main shopping street,
I eventually find what I'm looking for.
When Amelia Edwards came to Esna,
she had real trouble finding this temple.
And she describes wandering through the marketplace,
asking people where it is,
and the chemist says "'urayib", which means "nearby".
And then she sees it but, as she says,
it was buried up it it's chin in the accumulated rubbish of centuries.
And she's got a painting of it too.
So, this is what it looked like.
And you can see the floor level there,
you can see the ground surface goes right up
almost to the top of the pillars, to the capitals.
And you can see those three
are the three to the left of the main entrance to the temple.
So, it's extraordinary how much work has happened since then,
how much excavation has gone on
in order to reveal the temple in all its glory.
Now that all the sand and debris has been cleared,
it reveals a dramatic difference between the ground level of today
and that when the temple was built, just over 2000 years ago.
This temple is dedicated to Khnum,
a very ancient deity linked to the Nile, fertility and creation,
and worshipped throughout Egypt.
He's represented as a man with a ram's head.
In mythology, Khnum was also a potter,
moulding human children out of clay on his potter's wheel.
The facade of the temple
combines images of Khnum and other Egyptian gods
with the new rulers of Egypt, Roman emperors.
But as you step inside,
the wonders of this place become apparent.
The walls and ceilings are covered
with stunning images and hieroglyphics.
But it's the 24 columns holding up the ceiling
which, to me, are the most beautiful,
particularly their tops, or capitals.
There are lots of different designs of capitals here
and they're all beautiful.
Some of them are flowers.
Some of them seem to be papyri.
They're all different plants.
And the colours are amazing.
So, they've just restored this side,
and then they're busy at work on that side
doing this restoration...
..very carefully removing the accumulated dust and dirt
to reveal these beautiful colours.
I've persuaded the foreman El Tayeb Khoder
to come down for a quick chat.
So, you're supervising all of the work here?
Yes.
How long has it been so far, how long has this project been running for?
Maybe four years. Four years.
They start 2018.
You started in 2018? OK.
How much longer do you think before it's all done, all restored?
One more year.
One more year? OK, so you're nearly there.
Yes, one more year.
Yeah. And how many people have you got working here?
30 up.
30 people up there? Yes.
Yeah.
It's going to look amazing. Yes, yes.
I'll have to come back when you've finished this work. Yes.
Show me what you're doing out here then, yeah.
Are these hieroglyphics?
Scene here, a main scene.
The main scene, the main scene of the temple.
In the temple, yes.
And these seem to be unusual hieroglyphics.
Yes. They're not just parts of words.
Here, when she births.
Oh, my goodness! That's a woman in childbirth?
Yes, he is inside his mother,
and he take out to the light.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's beautiful.
Really, really lovely. Yes.
I'm back at Esna station to catch the train heading south.
The next stop is Edfu,
just 30 miles down the line.
The railway slavishly follows the twists and turns of the Nile.
I'm travelling to Edfu
on my adventure through ancient Egypt.
Here, there's a temple of the falcon god Horus.
Like the temple at Esna, this one had fallen into ruin
when the Roman empire pivoted to Christianity as the state religion.
It became buried in centuries'-worth of rubble, sand and silt.
In the 19th century,
French archaeologists led the excavation
to reveal an almost intact temple from the Ptolemaic period.
I'm meeting the head of Tourism and Antiquity...
Ahmed, hello.
..Dr Ahmed Hassan.
Nice to meet you.
This looks amazing.
Presumably, when it was first excavated,
it was completely surrounded and partially covered
by mud-brick buildings like this? Yes.
And what about the structure of this temple, then?
I can see the two pylons there. What's the rest of the temple like?
Yeah, it's typical design of the Egyptian temple.
But it was considered to be the best preserved temple,
because it was most recent temple
and remained under the sand for many centuries.
Yeah, completely buried. Yes.
Yeah. That's why it was preserved.
And what we can see behind us here
are layers and layers and layers of mud-brick buildings.
So, presumably that was all around and on top of the temple as well?
Yeah, it was the original part
which represented the city of the workers in ancient Egypt
when they build the temple.
This is archaeology too. Yes.
Just because it's built of mud-brick. Yeah.
Archaeological investigation has shown that the Ptolemaic temple,
which dates to the late 3rd century BCE,
replaced an earlier temple.
It seems that the falcon god, Horus,
had been a special deity for the people of Edfu
for thousands of years.
You suggested you might have pre-historic evidence?
Yes, a lot of finds have been uncovered here.
The falcon god cult existed here from pre-history.
Yeah? Yes.
That's amazing, isn't it?
A lot of falcons have been found here and watched here,
so it was called the city of the falcon.
And what does Horus represent, then?
He was the god of the sky.
And the commercial roads had to be protected by a god.
So, protector of the trade routes through Egypt?
Yes, it was a transit point.
Edfu was on the commercial road
between Egypt and the rest of Africa.
So, the falcon god was considered the protector.
Right. I think we should get in there, don't you?
Yes, of course.
As we walk towards the temple,
two towers form its gateway, or pylon.
Looking at those pylons, it looks like they've got windows in them.
Are they original? Yes.
The pylon is considered the address of the temple,
which was built as two inclined walls
with spiral staircases
to carry the priests up to these windows
to throw gold pieces over the people
during the main celebration of the temple.
Are people bringing tithes, taxes to the temple?
Yes, but the taxes were paid in the form of offerings.
OK.
Offerings for the god, and, at the same time,
taxes for the state of Egypt.
All together? Yeah.
That's why the main doors of the temple
were open just one time a year.
Oh, really?
When you have the main celebration of the god.
Passing through the pylon gateway,
we enter the first courtyard...
..surrounded on three sides by 32 columns,
..with floral capitals like those at Esna.
The first courtyard, it was an open court
to permit the visitors
to cut the neck of the animals inside the temple.
That's why it was left open,
to dry the blood of the animals.
So, sacrifices are taking place? Yes, the sacrifices.
We have to consider that all the columns here were coloured.
The sun and the sand have cancelled.
So, it's completely gone, the traces of paint have completely gone.
The next part of the temple is protected by Horus himself.
And we have a massive statue of Horus, with the double crown.
Ah, he's lovely. I like him.
Here's the hypostyle hall,
which special rank of people...
And another 12 columns in here? Yes, 12 columns.
Once again, this temple includes a roofed hypostyle hall,
the preserve of the higher echelons of society
with important rooms leading off it.
And here we have a small chamber called the House of Life,
which was the library of the temple.
Oh, really?
The House of Life, that give us the impression
how important the book in ancient Egypt was.
Oh, that's amazing, isn't it?
The House of Life is the library.
At that time, it was full of papyrus,
which was very important,
because a lot of them had the structure of the temple.
So, when it was excavated, there were papyri in there?
We lost it completely. Oh.
So much information.
But there's a lot on the walls.
Some of these images, though, have been attacked.
We've got this defacing of the pagan gods.
Is this Christians coming and doing that? Yes.
And, look, every single character here has been attacked.
It's damaged here. Yeah, they damaged here.
And all the way up. Yes.
The damage is thought to have been deliberately carried out
under the orders of Roman rulers in the 4th century,
who banned non-Christian worship.
..the real heart of the temple here, aren't we?
Lastly, we enter the sanctuary,
the most sacred space in the temple.
So, right in the inner sanctuary now?
Yes, the Hall of Horus,
the most important place in all the temple.
And the first place built in the temple,
dedicated to the god himself.
This is a replica of the wooden barque, or boat,
of the god.
The original is kept in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
And it would have been used to carry a statue of the god Horus.
Imagine that this boat was caried up on the shoulders of the priests,
one a year, to go outside to show the people
this is your god,
this is the one who you addressed your sacrifices.
The measurements of the god statue,
it was about maximum 1m high...
Yeah, so it fits in there. ..of gold.
This is what it would have been carried out in
but actually it was in that shrine. Yes.
You can imagine that the only person
who had permission to get inside this place was the king.
And when he was not here,
he had to appoint the high priest to perform the rituals every day
on behalf of him.
You can imagine that he asked the god
and heard the answer,
and had to tell the people,
"This is the answer of the god."
Yeah. Yes.
He's the one who's meant to be the conduit, yeah.
Between the people and the god.
Back at Edfu station,
and the contrast with the Temple of Horus
couldn't be greater.
But it's great just to watch local life.
My next stop, just over an hour away,
will be at a town of a similar size to Edfu,
with a population of 60,000,
and another incredible temple.
I'm here to see the temple of Kom Ombo,
which, once again, dates to the Ptolemaic period
in the 2nd century BCE.
And, again, this would have replaced an even more ancient temple.
I'm meeting the Director of Aswan's Antiquities, Abdel Saeed.
Abdel. Hello.
Hello, salaam alaikum. Nice to meet you, salaam.
Where did you learn Arabic? Ah, last week.
Last week. Just a week, Is it your first time to Egypt, yeah?
It's my first time in Egypt. And I'm having an absolutely wonderful time.
This temple is one I'm particularly looking forward to, though.
That's why I came here, to show you so interesting scenes
here inside Kom Ombo temple.
Kom Ombo, like so many other temples,
was rebuilt during the time when Egypt was ruled by
the descendants of Alexander the Great's general, Ptolemy.
I'd like to tell you something really very, very interesting.
Why did Greeks and Romans reconstruct those temples?
When they came, they found ancient Egyptian temples,
but they were damaged, destroyed.
Why did they reconstruct them?
They wanted to control Egyptians through the religious feeling.
Of course, yeah.
Because religious feeling was and is still very strong with Egyptians.
So, when they reconstructed those temples,
they could control Egyptians.
Right, OK, yeah. Yes, yeah.
The god worshipped at the temple of Edfu
took the relatively benign form of a falcon.
But here at Kom Ombo,
the temple was dedicated to a much more dangerous presence -
the Nile crocodile.
The crocodile god Sobek
had been worshipped in Egypt for more than 2,000 years
when the Greeks arrived on the scene.
So, what was Sobek about, then?
I mean, he's obviously a crocodile so he's fierce.
What were his other attributes?
If you look in details about the language itself,
S-O-B-EK, Sobek,
that was the name of the crocodile, the worshipped the one,
it means the one who causes the woman to be pregnant.
Sobek connected with the fertility, plus the frightening or the fear.
Yeah, of it's a real kind of dual personality there, isn't it?
Yes, exactly, exactly.
That's why it was worshipped as the local god here in Kom Ombo,
because of this big island which is facing Kom Ombo Temple
on the river Nile here.
It was said that it was full of crocodiles,
which forbid Egyptians to cross the island to the Nile easily,
so they worshipped him at the beginning
because they were afraid to him.
It's almost as though by worshipping him,
you can capture that danger and you can turn it around.
To avoid his danger, yeah. I agree with this opinion, really.
To avoid his dangers, they worshipped him.
So, if he's a god of fertility,
is that human fertility, is it about having offspring?
But is it also about agriculture, is it about the Nile?
Both of them, because you know that
the river Nile represented the main source of life for Egyptians -
it was, and it is still.
So, everything, they wanted to connect
between the human beings and the Nile.
But in fact, Sobek wasn't the only god worshipped at Kom Ombo.
This temple is highly unusual, and it's split right down the middle,
with one side for Sobek
and the other dedicated to the god Osiris.
And it has not one, but two hypostyle halls.
And if we go through here, what's here?
We're going deeper into the temple? Yes.
The amount of hieroglyphics is overwhelming,
especially when you realise they can be read in multiple directions.
Covered with hieroglyphics. Yes, everywhere.
But Abdel can decipher this writing.
During the old kingdom,
they used letters, signs, with a picture at the end -
we call it 'determinative' - to explain the word.
Yeah.
Because hieroglyphic was written from right to left,
from left to right, from top to bottom,
how can I figure out the direction
from right to left or from left to right?
Just look at the faces of the signs. Oh!
The faces are looking to the right, so I have to start from the right.
But here, the faces are looking to the left,
so I have to start from left to right.
Oh, that's clever.
What Ahmed's about to show me
reveals an incredible link
between the ancient Egyptians and us today.
What have we got here, then?
Calendar for the first time, or a part of the calendar.
Oh, really? Yes.
OK, take me through it, then - what are we looking at?
During the reign of the king Djoser, 2600 BC,
astronomer noticed a star appeared in the sky
when the flood of the river Nile reached Memphis, the old capital.
Then that star disappeared,
then reappeared again
during the flood of the river Nile again.
So they calculated the period between
appearance and reappearance again for that star.
They found a full year.
They divided that period into three different seasons.
The first season called the Nile flood - Akhet.
Could you repeat, Akhet. Akhet.
The second season represented the growing of the plants, planting
called Peret. Peret.
The third season represented the harvest of the plants,
cutting of the plants, called Shemu.
Shemu. So, Akhet, Peret, Shemu.
Every season had four months,
every month had three weeks,
every week had 10 days.
Please, so far could you calculate how many days per year, so far?
It's about the same, then isn't it? 360.
Not yet. 360.
What about the extra five days?
You're going to have to add them on sometime.
Ancient Egyptians considered them
the most famous festivals of the most famous gods and the goddess -
Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys and Horus.
So far, what happens during the festivals?
What happens - everybody's very happy,
everybody's staying up late, everybody, sometimes, drunk.
So, they didn't calculate happiness days in the age of the man.
Everybody should be far from extra five days
when he calculated his age.
We still live on this calendar in our farming,
for Egyptian farmers, called the Coptic calendar.
Yeah? Yeah.
In the calendar, the annual cycle is symbolically linked to the gods.
Again - Akhet, Peret, Shemu.
Flood, planting, harvest.
Represented as Sekhmet, yeah.
Lion head. Yeah.
And here she's being the seasons. Yes, exactly.
You never see something like that except here.
Yeah.
And what else did you want to show me, Abdel?
I would like to show you something
that will be a very big surprise for you.
Abdel knows I originally trained as a doctor.
For the first time and the last time,
just here in Kom Ombo,
a very nice representation of medical instruments.
Here in the middle, we've got all these medical instruments,
I can see knives, or scalpels,
some kind of shears,
and some forceps up there.
That's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, that...
It shows you very vividly that people were performing surgery.
Exactly, you can imagine.
Egyptians were very intelligent,
and they were very advanced about medicine
since the Old Kingdom.
Towards the lefthand side you can see something else -
our famous goddess Isis.
She is sitting in the position of birth.
Up of her, we can see the goddess Meskhenet,
the goddess of birth who taught Isis
how could she give birth to children.
Yeah, yeah.
Healing and childbirth -
it's interesting, isn't it, that this medical technology,
this very kind of hands-on medical technology
is represented here in a temple,
that it has this religious aspect to it.
Of course, yes.
Because the temple was not used just for religious.
No, it was a hospital, it was a school, it was a library.
Yeah.
The temple now has its own crocodile museum,
containing remarkable artefacts relating to the worship of Sobek.
This s a great image of Sobek on this stela.
Here he is, seated in the centre in this register
with these people bringing him piles of offerings,
presumably saying to him,
"Look, here's all this food. You don't need to eat us."
Ancient Egyptians had a love/ hate relationship with Sobek,
as they did with crocodiles themselves.
These are ferocious creatures
that they're sharing their world with.
They're there in the Nile,
and they're extremely dangerous.
But if you can get Sobek on your side,
maybe, then, he becomes a protective god
and he can save you from the dangers lurking in the water.
It wasn't enough just to carve sculptures of crocodiles,
the bodies of these reptiles were preserved,
just like those of the pharaohs,
by mummification.
Part of the worship of Sobek
also involved breeding and raising crocodiles.
And they were viewed as living incarnations of the god Sobek.
And they were very well looked after -
some of them even have their claws painted.
And when the died, they were mummified.
And this tends to happen in the later periods,
so the end of the first millennium, BCE,
right into the Roman period.
And you can see the care taken in mummifying these crocodiles,
the layers of bandages.
And then these mummified crocodiles are themselves
offerings to the god Sobek.
I like the way that they've got
bone plaques with painted eyes on them as well.
These huge mummies of crocodiles
remind us of the reverence that
ancient Egyptians had for these animals,
and for the crocodile god, Sobek.
And I think some of that is about trying to tame,
to manage that ferocious element
that existed within the river Nile.
But also, Sobek was completely bound up with the inundation as well,
with the flood of the Nile,
which was life-giving, absolutely essential.
And it's interesting, of course, that Egypt is just so different now.
With the building of the Aswan dam the Nile no longer floods.
The landscape is very, very different
to what the ancient Egyptians experienced.
And we don't really have any crocodiles now
below the level of the dam - north of the dam.
But they were already being hunted to extinction
in the centuries before that.
So, here are some crocodile's eggs.
And these, again, were brought as votive offerings to Sobek.
And they have another layer of symbolism as well,
in that crocodiles lay great clutches of eggs,
very large numbers of eggs in one nest.
And the mother will make her nest
above the level of the Nile flood.
So there's a bit of magic here,
that crocodiles knew
how high the inundation was going to reach each year.
As the day ebbs away,
I'm close to my final destination on this epic journey.
I'm approaching Aswan,
30 miles from Kom Ombo,
around 500 miles from Cairo
and 700 from my starting point in Alexandria.
I'm now on the approach to Aswan.
But I've seen bits of Aswan all over the place,
Because the pink granite from here
ended up in temples and tombs all over ancient Egypt.
And this is it - my final station stop.
But it's not quite the end of my Egyptian adventure.
In the morning, I'll be visiting a quarry
that provided the stone for monuments.
I'll meet a progressive Egyptian archaeologist,
and I'll be taking a boat to an island to see Philae Temple.
It's so beautiful down here on the banks of the Nile.
And looking over to the other side,
I can see some archaeology over there.
I can see some really ancient walls,
features rising up onto the hillside.
You also get that really strong impression of
Ancient Egypt existing right alongside the modern.
There's some more tourists just crossing the river here,
Egypt is so geared up for tourism.
It's so important to its economy.
If we think back to Amelia Edwards in the 19th century,
this is where tourism was really starting.
And she studied Ancient Egypt.
We can definitely call her an Egyptologist.
But she was also very much a tourist.
And I'm just another one of these pilgrims.
It's really interesting to look around here,
and just reflect on how different this landscape is from Alexandria,
from the delta.
Everything's different. The vegetation's different.
You're looking down at the Nile, but you're straight up into desert.
This is very much a desert country.
And this southern half of Egypt
was sometimes united with the north,
but sometimes existed as a kingdom in its own right.
This is ancient Nubia.
There's no doubt that during my travels through Egypt
I've encountered a lot of stone -
tons of the stuff, in fact.
It's the fabric of ancient Egypt.
Some of that stone was local to the place it ended up in.
But if the ancient Egyptians wanted to make something special,
like a burial chamber or a sarcophagus for a pharaoh,
they would use the very best granite.
And that came from Aswan.
I'm here in one of the ancient northern quarries of Aswan
where this stone came from.
Round this quarry, you've got all of the evidence
of the quarrying at work,
you can see how they were chiselling into the stone
and putting wooden wedges in to break blocks off.
But we've also got some drawings as well.
So up here you can see some birds, maybe ostriches.
I think they look a bit more like flamingos.
And if I was working here in this hot quarry -
I mean, this is so hot in Aswan today,
it's about 40 degrees -
Then you'd probably rather be sitting somewhere next to water
looking at a flock of flamingos.
And there's a man, I think, a possibly a boat.
Now, that might relate to the way that stone is leaving this quarry.
It is being taken out of the quarry and loaded onto boats,
probably onto a canal, and then out onto the Nile itself
and from there, all over Egypt.
11, 12, 13...
The ancient Egyptians were master builders,
the pyramids stand as testament to their engineering knowhow.
They were clearly ambitious,
but it didn't always go to plan.
..25, 26, 27, 28, 29...
Here in the quarry is evidence of
ancient Egyptians reaching for the stars,
and being thwarted by earthbound geology.
They'd carved out an enormous obelisk,
and then it cracked.
42.
42m long.
This piece of stone is ENORMOUS.
It's 4m across, it's 42m long.
If it had been lifted out of the quarry,
it would have weighed well over 1,000 tonnes.
And just imagine the disappointment when you've done all this work
and you've carved out the whole shape of it,
and you're getting ready to go underneath and lift it up,
and a massive crack appears,
and all of that work was in vain.
This almost looks like a natural gully,
but, of course, this was all carved out by hand.
They must have been so annoyed, mustn't they?
You can see these natural cracks.
I suspect many more have appeared since it was quarried,
since it was formed.
And elsewhere in the quarry
you can see how these natural cracks and fissures are used
to help split out useable chunks of stone.
But, of course, what you want here
is this whole thing to stay completely intact
and to be lifted out as one piece.
But, I mean, if this had been lifted out of the quarry,
this would have been the biggest obelisk in all of Egypt.
Visiting this quarry certainly puts into perspective
all the architectural wonders I've seen on my trip.
It's really interesting to have seen this stone everywhere
and to have seen it finished, beautifully smooth,
carved with cartouches and hieroglyphics.
But then to come back to here and see where it all comes from
and see that whole process,
and imagine the hundreds and thousands of people
that were engaged in building
all of those tombs and all of those temples.
I've been wowed by the splendour of ancient Egypt.
But I've certainly felt that we've left people behind.
We've been so focussed on pharaohs,
did we think about the rest of society?
Towards the end of my journey,
I'm really keen to meet an Egyptian archaeologist
who has some radical ideas about how we should look at the past.
Monica. Hello!
Morning. Morning.
Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you.
Shall we get on our... Yes, let's do that.
Perfect.
There's a lot to discuss,
but I'm also keen to learn about Philae Temple,
which will be my final destination.
Monica, tell me about Philae,
when was it built and who was worshipped there?
Philae was built in the late period.
It was very small at the 30th Dynasty,
but then it grew with the Ptolemaic kings,
because Isis was worshipped in that temple.
And then later on, Roman emperors such as Augustus and Hadrian
added to the temple of Isis there.
And it was continued, even, to be in service
up until the Christian period,
I think the Christians were very scared
because Isis was this very strong woman.
Yeah. What do you think it was about the cult of Isis
that made her so popular.
Isis was very popular because she was the goddess of motherhood,
she was the goddess of love,
she was also the goddess of medicine.
And I think what I find fascinating about Philae
is that it had an abaton.
And an abaton, in Greek architecture,
was this place where sick people would go to heal.
So, this magical place.
And of course Isis was the goddess of magic.
I mean, I think that's a really interesting time,
that you have these deities persisting through time,
but this period when they seem to quite abruptly disappear.
And I wonder what was actually happening at that time.
I don't think they disappear.
It becomes part of the hidden culture
that's not written, but it's practiced.
Still practiced today? Yes.
I've seen many women
going to temples early morning with a friend,
because this is how she would conceive a child, in her mind.
Yeah.
It's interesting to think about how this ancient archaeology
sits within modern Egypt,
because it is all around us,
and there are all these...
And it's within us, not just around us, it's within us.
People practise it in their daily life,
without necessarily writing an article about it
in a peer-reviewed journal.
Yeah, yeah.
We only study the ancient past
from the perspective of the treasures,
not from the perspective of the people,
of the culture, of the humans.
Knowledge is more valuable than gold.
It's not about the gold, it's not about the mummies,
it's not about the secrets,
it's, I think, about the regular life an ancient Egyptian.
There's a really practical element to this as well,
which is that there's a completely intertwined relationship
between archaeology and tourism here in Egypt.
So, I mean, how does that effect archaeology,
and how can it work well, do you think?
I think instead of wanting to create this Disneyland open-air museum,
tourism today should be focussed on real, authentic experiences
with the people who live on a very ancient land
and how they interpret the past.
And I think tourism as it was in the '80s and the '90s,
with these big buses flocking into archaeological sites
is bad for the archaeology,
and it's bad for the tourist experience.
I think the practice without involving the communities
is replicating the 19th- and 20th-century
colonialist attitude towards archaeology.
And without having the people have a say
in how they want their sites excavated, conserved and managed,
and including them in long-term development plans for these sites,
I think Egypt is like how Gramsci specifies
in his quote that the past is finished
but the future is not here yet.
So, I think the past is finished,
and the future of doing things the way they should be done
is not here yet. Yeah.
So it's still evolving, it's still changing - we're not there yet.
Yes, we're not there yet.
So, you'd like to see more community engagement... Yes, definitely.
..with the local communities around archaeological digs.
Yes, with social history documented.
Community's important for understanding the past
because we do not study the past in a glass box.
We study a living past.
The site is left for the local community.
If we are to safeguard these sites into the future,
it must be done through the local community.
Thank you again. You're welcome.
Bye-bye. Bye.
As I drop Monica off,
I have plenty to think about before I reach Philae Temple.
The rive Nile has been the one constant throughout my adventure -
throughout Egyptian history.
It provided the way for granite to be transported
all the way up to Alexandria.
The height of the Nile flood
would determine the success of the harvest
and the legitimacy of the king.
Ancient Egypt and modern Egypt depends on the Nile.
But when Amelia Edwards came here in 1873 to visit Philae Temple,
she would have gone somewhere different.
In 1902, the first Aswan Dam was built to control the floods.
In the lake that it created,
the temple of Philae was submerged.
And then, in 1971, an ambitious plan was put into action
to move the temple to a nearby island.
The temple was surrounded by shuttering
so river water could be pumped out.
And the entire temple was dismantled
and moved to the new location.
Every block was numbered and carefully recorded.
Over 50,000 individual pieces
were moved to higher ground,
some weighing as much as 25 tonnes.
Amelia travelled to the original temple by boat,
as she wrote in her book.
"As the boat glides nearer, between glistening boulders,
"those sculptured towers rise higher against the sky/
"They show no sign of ruin or age.
"All looks solid, stately, perfect.
"One forgets for the moment that anything is changed."
It's astonishing to think that
this temple has been entirely dismantled and rebuilt here.
If you didn't know before you came, you wouldn't think twice.
The temple itself is devoted to
the story of the brother and sister gods Isis and Osiris -
brother and sister who were also married.
The temple today is home to a family of cats.
Inside the holy of holies here,
there's a lot of destruction, a lot of iconoclasm.
That's part of the story of the temple.
But you can still prepose the mythology,
you can still see all these elements of the Isis myth,
Isis and Osiris.
And Isis as a mother of Horus as well.
And, of course, that idea of divine motherhood doesn't go away.
Philae Temple is beautiful to look at,
difficult to understand
and not in its original location.
It's like an allegory of ancient Egypt itself.
I'm ending my journey here at Philae Temple,
a monument that Amelia Edwards saw on her journey up the Nile
at the end of the 19th century,
although, now it's in a different place.
It was moved when the dams were created, and the waters rose.
The Nile has changed
and Egyptian archaeology itself has changed,
and it will keep on changing.
Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2023