(ominous exotic music)
- Hundreds of tons of stone
to portray a mighty pharaoh.
Colossal testament to Egypt's golden age.
I think it's probably here,
at the feet of the Colossi of Memnon,
we get a real sense of who Amenhotep III was.
In my opinion,
Amenhotep III was ancient Egypt's greatest pharaoh.
He presided over the zenith
of Egyptian culture and civilization.
He is the golden age.
He is the epitome of everything
that made ancient Egypt brilliant.
The rise of this great civilization
was powered by its extraordinary belief system,
where the pursuit of the perfect afterlife was everything,
capable of withstanding disasters and dark ages,
to then reemerge as the most powerful empire
in the ancient world.
In this episode, I'm going to enter what I regard
as Egypt's greatest era, the New Kingdom.
Whoa, what an amazing chamber.
A time of luxury, grand designs,
and unparalleled splendor.
Isn't this absolutely beautiful.
But like all good things, it couldn't last forever.
Egypt's powerful religion
would prove to be its greatest weakness.
And I'll discover how the priests became so rich
their power struggle with the crown
destroyed the very unity of Egypt.
It was this very conflict that would transform
this golden age into one of decadence and corruption
and would eventually tear Egypt apart,
and by looking again at Egypt's greatest superstars,
I'm going to investigate what really happened
during the glittering New Kingdom.
Welcome to my story of ancient Egypt.
(chanting in foreign language)
The New Kingdom, nearly three and a half thousand years ago,
and the time of Amenhotep III,
when Egypt's expression of power and belief
reached new heights of enormity.
I've joined an international team of archeologists
for excavating just one of the vast monuments
Amenhotep created, his funerary temple.
Now, being here, you really get a sense
of what it must have been like
three and a half thousand years ago,
when this place was a building site,
much as it is today.
All these statues all around,
Amenhotep III's image coming up in their hundreds.
And yet, as the archeologists today assemble
all these pieces, this is literally history
coming out of the ground piece by piece.
In the pyramid age,
royal tombs and funerary temples were a single complex,
but 1,300 years later, the two were built separately,
reflecting a new era of opulence,
epitomizing the greatest dynasty of all,
the 18th, the time of Amenhotep III.
(solemn music)
For centuries, pretty much the only visible remains
of Amenhotep's funerary temple
were his two colossal statues.
Now, archeologist Dr. Hourig Sourouzian and her team
are finally uncovering the full splendor
of this once mighty monument.
- You touch, and it's...
- It's like glass. - Yeah.
- [Joann] Covering over 86 acres,
this was not a tomb like the pyramids,
but a huge complex,
the largest funerary temple ever created.
It's a massive, massive area. - It's unbelievable.
You have to imagine, this is only the major temple,
the main temple.
You have to imagine other temples,
processional ways, sphinx avenues,
magazines, workshops,
treasures, pools, gardens,
priest house, administrative houses.
All this was a big city
in the capital. - Overwhelming in size.
- Yeah, it is.
- [Joann] This grand design was built as the place
where his soul could be worshiped for eternity,
while his mummified body was buried
in the Valley of the Kings nearby,
but during his lifetime, inside the temple,
a permanent priesthood was employed,
all ruled over by the pharaoh.
Amenhotep's massive statues
flanked the temple's main entrance.
Beyond them lay a second pair,
and then a third.
Amenhotep's image repeated throughout the temple complex.
(regal music)
- I wish, one day, the find a time machine.
I go back to one day.
- Can I come?
I'll come with you.
We may not have a time machine,
but 15 years of work have begun to reveal
some of the temple's former glories.
Normally, these would have been meters up in the air,
but to actually engage, it's so very tactile.
So very intimate, holding hands with the pharaoh.
This colossus from the temple's second gateway
is flanked by one of the best preserved statues
of Amenhotep's principle consort, Queen Tiye,
his great royal wife.
- Here is standing, and by miracle,
having been saved by all the catastrophes
which struck this temple.
- So he's protected her for centuries, really, hasn't he?
Carved to be no bigger than Amenhotep's lower leg,
Queen Tiye's size served to exaggerate
the pharaoh's superhuman status.
These massive statues were more than a memorial,
each worshiped to guarantee
the immortality of the king's soul, the pharaoh as god.
- This is my
great surprise to you.
- And Hourig has saved the very best til last.
(Hourig speaking foreign language)
Oh.
Oh, flipping it.
(Hourig speaking foreign language)
It's Amenhotep's head, at three meters tall,
carved from the finest white alabaster.
Oh, don't know what to say.
Over the years, I've seen many of his portraits,
but rarely one as stunning as this.
Look at it.
Look at his nose.
- Yeah.
- This is
an absolutely amazing
portrait, a sculpted face of Amenhotep himself.
Never seen anything like it.
With hundreds of statues like this,
Amenhotep was multiplying the image of himself
as Egypt's more powerful god,
bringing light and life to the world,
because whoever controlled Egypt's religion
controlled Egypt,
and with it, a vast amount of wealth.
Now, Amenhotep wore gold from top to toe,
and he handed it out to his courtiers as gifts,
but he also used it as a diplomatic weapon.
Amenhotep's clever use of Egyptian gold
is recorded on stone scarabs like this one.
They served as the pharaoh's news bulletins,
which he circulated around his empire
with updates inscribed on their base.
In this case, it was a new marriage of the king.
It effectively records his marriage to a Syrian princess,
a princess from the land of Mitanni,
and it recounts how,
having sent gold to the princess' father,
he then sent out one of his daughters
for the pharaoh to marry,
so a kind of mail order bride, if you like.
It reports that her name was Gilukhipa,
and that she arrived from Mitanni in Syria
with no fewer than 317 ladies in waiting.
Clearly impressed, Amenhotep added the comment,
"It's a marvel."
With this diplomatic marriage only one of many,
they were an effective way of securing peace and prosperity.
Amenhotep was able to utilize his key resource,
his gold, to kind of get everything he wanted
to maintain his status as the supreme monarch
in the ancient world at that time.
Gold brought Egypt peace with its neighbors,
with Amenhotep III's empire stretching from
what is now Syria, as far as modern Sudan.
But within Egypt itself, gold had a different use,
and could even guarantee a fast track to the afterlife,
emphatically expressed by a great treasure
in the Museum in Wigan,
a stunning golden face.
(solemn music)
Originally part of a woman's coffin,
her lifelike features were preserved
to allow her soul to recognize her in the afterlife.
Isn't this absolutely beautiful?
Clearly, the gold suggests to us that this was someone
of very special, very high status, very wealthy.
Although we can never know her name,
she had clearly spent a fortune in preparing
for her perfect afterlife.
Covered in gold leaf,
she stares out at us with eyes of alabaster
and black obsidian.
We can really see into the world,
into the thought patterns of the Egyptians themselves
because, as stunning as this face is,
it was simply buried in a tomb,
literally buried in a hole in the ground,
not for human eyes,
but to be seen by the gods and the spirits of the dead,
with whom this woman wanted to join,
and that's why her skin is gold,
because the gods had golden skin,
and she wanted to be recognized by them
as one of their own,
taken into their eternal care.
For the Egyptians, it was a special pact
between themselves and the gods
that made their country, made their empire
so very powerful, so very special.
In the golden age, this special pact shone more brightly
than ever before, with Egypt's wealth
poured into their faith in the afterlife,
and with increasing amounts of gold accompanying
the royal mummies, their tombs needed to be
kept secure at all costs.
So a secret burial place was established
for Egypt's pharaohs on Thebes west bank,
(ominous exotic music)
the Valley of the Kings.
It was essential that each royal mummy
was buried safely in their tomb,
in a custom dating back to the beginning of time,
because each one became a royal ancestor
whose cumulative souls form the very essence of Egypt.
The royal tombs had been desecrated once before,
breaking Egypt's spiritual link to its ancestors,
so to prevent this happening again,
the pharaohs of the New Kingdom chose burial
deep in this remote valley,
where they could lie undisturbed in rock cut tombs,
and this became Egypt's most sacred place.
Such elaborate preparations for the afterlife
also fueled a growing economy,
and just as in the pyramid age,
the industry of death shaped the lives
of many ordinary Egyptians,
for not only were there tombs to cut
and temples to build, but statues,
shrines, coffins, sarcophagi,
and all the paraphernalia of the afterlife.
And with this came all the ingenuity
of sourcing everything from alabaster
to granite to gold.
This is a copy of the world's earliest surviving
geological map, dating from around 1150 B.C.
and the reign of Ramses IV.
This map is a guide to the stone quarries
and gold mines of the 15 kilometer stretch
of Egypt's eastern desert.
It's almost as detailed as a modern geological map,
with different colors for the different rock types.
So over here, these large areas of black
are the sedimentary rocks.
Back here, where it turns pink,
these are the igneous rocks, like granite.
Other little features include areas of gold mining,
and then throughout, you have this very subtle speckling,
and these are the areas of gravel.
Known to be very accurate,
the map was made for one specific quarrying expedition,
when 8,000 men were send into a desert valley
130 kilometers from Thebes
to mine stone for royal monuments.
But what's special about this map
is that it leads us to the ordinary people
who were employed by the pharaoh to build the tombs
in the Valley of the Kings.
It was discovered by archeologists
at the worker's village of Deir el-Medina,
a purpose built settlement to house the tomb builders,
architects, artists, and scribes,
together with their families.
This would have been a bustling place,
its streets full of children playing,
deliveries being made,
and all the colors, sounds, and smells of everyday life.
It's one of the workers who lived here who made the map.
Now, we even know the identity of the map maker,
the scribe Amennakhte.
His distinctive handwriting is well known
from a range of other literary works,
from poems to prayers, maps to tomb plans,
and it's thanks to one particular little inscription
with his name on that we even know where he lived.
Amennakhte lived here.
This is the scribe's house.
Amennakhte was one of the many skilled workers
that rose through the ranks of society
in the generations following the reign of Amenhotep III.
He became the head scribe of this entire village,
so a very, very important man.
And yet, it's a very sad tale as well,
because as he gets older,
we know that his eyesight started to fail,
because a prayer of his has survived,
in which he makes this very personal address
to the local goddess, Meretseger,
who lived at the top of the mountain up there.
He's imploring the goddess.
He's saying my eyesight is failing.
I see darkness by day,
and for a scribe,
for a consummate draftsman like Amennakhte,
how sad that would have been.
Here, Amennakhte prays to Meretseger,
both of them symbolically portrayed without their eyes.
It's hard not to resist this image that,
as he got older and more infirm,
he would have gone up the steps to the flat roof
and, with failing eyesight,
try to focus on the job in hand,
trying to mix his paints,
apply the lines and the words and so forth,
and needing the full sun on a day like this
just to get through the working day.
But just like his predecessors who built the pyramids,
Amennakhte would have felt a sense of greater purpose.
We can imagine him and his neighbors in Deir el-Medina
working towards a single aim, creating the royal tomb.
(solemn music)
The New Kingdom pharaohs had created
a new image for themselves,
elaborate building schemes requiring new towns
full of workers,
a strong economy supporting an ever grander vision
both of this world and the next.
But the spiritual convictions that had brought Egypt
to its zenith had also created a serious threat.
(ominous music)
In the New Kingdom, much of the Egyptian state
centered on Thebes.
While its west bank was mainly dedicated
to its city of the dead,
the east bank was where most people lived,
and the site of Egypt's main state temple, Karnak.
As Karnak was rapidly becoming the largest religious complex
of the ancient world, its influence grew exponentially,
and likewise, the power of its priests.
To get a real sense of what was going on,
we need to go behind the scenes.
(speaking foreign language)
Thank you.
I'm being allowed through an ancient passageway,
once only accessible to Karnak's clergy.
- It was a tall, more and more and more wonderful sight.
- It leads to the top of the temple's main gateway
and gives a view of Karnak not many get to see.
(light exotic music)
Just look at that.
You could fit Notre Dame and Saint Paul's Cathedrals
in here and still have acres to spare.
It is immense.
Within Karnak, a series of chapels,
shrines, and sacred precincts covered a total area
of more than 250 acres.
This was Egypt's religious heart for almost 2,000 years.
The reason why Karnak is so vast
is that every pharaoh poured so much of their wealth
into this temple.
Their gold and their spoils of war
all filled the temple's coffers,
and each pharaoh also wanted to build their own halls,
shrines, and obelisks
in an attempt to outdo their predecessors,
and yet all to the greater glory
of Karnak's chief god, Amun.
Over the course of centuries,
Amun had risen from a local Theban god
to Egypt's state deity,
and his worship was the engine that fueled the nation,
so every pharaoh had to keep Amun content,
offering him their wealth and tending to his every need,
and this privilege fell to Karnak's high priest,
and was performed in the temple's inner sanctum,
secret ceremonies at which the only others permitted
were the royals.
Here we are, in the very heart of Karnak temple.
This is where the god lived.
The god himself lived inside
a sacred statue.
The original wouldn't have been much bigger than this,
would have been solid gold,
and it would have lived inside a little golden shrine,
sealed by a pair of small doors,
and each morning, the high priest would come in.
He would awaken the god's spirit.
He would greet him,
he would wash him,
anoint him with perfume,
apply his eye makeup,
and then dress him in various linen outfits,
apply the small pieces of jewelry to the god's statue,
and then the god would proceed to enjoy his day.
Amun received daily meals of the finest foods,
roast meats, bread, fruit and vegetables,
accompanied by wine and beer.
Clouds of incense would drive away evil forces
and musicians and dancers entertained him.
And by keeping their most important deity content,
it was believed that Amun would, in turn,
make the Nile flood each year,
make the sun rise each morning,
and maintain Egypt's supreme status.
(ominous exotic music)
The high priests' direct access to Amun
made them the greatest beneficiaries
of Karnak's growing prosperity.
This tranquil lake is where
the male and female clergy bathed twice each day and night
to maintain their ritual purity before the gods.
Known as the Purer Ones, they set themselves apart
from the rest of society
with their distinctive appearance
achieved through their own set of daily rituals.
Parts of this process of ritual purity involved
using an array of implements on a daily basis
to transform their appearance,
and one of the most important things they did,
they had to remove all body hair, male and female clergy,
using razors like this,
so every day, having to shave their heads
and their entire bodies,
keep them free from lice and all these kind of things
which would have inhibited their sense of cleanliness.
It was essential that they also had a very clean mouth,
because they'd be speaking the words before the god,
and so they used something which is quite a modern thing.
Basically, natron salt, a kind of bicarbonate,
rather like a modern bicarbonate toothpaste,
which would get their teeth nice and clean.
Scrupulous not only with dental hygiene,
they wore reed woven sandals and robes of pure white linen.
And having transformed themselves in this wonderful way,
they also had access to these polished metal mirrors.
They could then admire their transformed appearance,
because it was important to distance themselves
from the great unwashed.
For the ancient priests,
cleanliness really was next to godliness,
and they were the gods' chosen people.
(regal exotic music)
As the wealth and power of Karnak's priest grew,
their authority over Egypt began to rival that of the king.
Karnak's priests had far-reaching influence,
active not only by day, but also by night.
One of these priests was called Nackt.
He was a priest of the hours of Amun,
which basically means he was an astronomer,
and he would sit by night on the flat temple roof,
which was effectively an ancient observatory,
and he'd be able to chart the progress
of the stars and planets in the sky,
watch the movement of the heavens,
and by doing so,
the priests of Egypt were able to work out
when to celebrate specific events.
But of course, what this meant is that Karnak never closed.
It was a 24 hour a day concern.
It meant the priests were always there.
It meant the priests were always watching.
Fully aware of the potential threat posed
by the Karnak clergy,
Amenhotep III employed his own relatives in temple
to guarantee their loyalty,
but such subtle means of control were about to evaporate.
Enter the new pharaoh, Akhenaten.
(mysterious music)
Son and heir of Amenhotep,
but unlike his father, Akhenaten was no diplomat.
His zealous ambitions would soon plunge Egypt
into an age of political and religious extremism.
Early in his reign,
Akhenaten found a swift way to stamp his authority
on the priests by building a controversial
new temple complex at Karnak.
Now, what we're looking at here
is something very, very unusual.
It's part of a wall from Karnak temple,
but not the traditional part of Karnak temple.
It's a section that was built a little way beyond,
and it was a new revolutionary building.
It wasn't built like the old style Karnak
in huge, big, monolithic blocks of stone,
but these small, easier to handle blocks,
which meant, of course, it could almost spring up overnight.
But most shocking of all were the images
that this new temple portrayed.
Akhenaten had begun to dismantle
Egypt's traditional religion
and replace its many deities with a single god.
If you look very carefully,
the images are very different to what went before.
Amun is nowhere present.
The god of Karnak himself
isn't represented in his own temple,
because the god shown here
is a form of the sun god, called the Aten,
and you can see the multiple rays coming down,
ending in human hands, giving their blessings
to the main figure here,
and it isn't the high priest of Amun.
For Amun's priests were no longer in control at Karnak,
and Amun himself was now replaced
by the Aten sun god.
In fact, life in Egypt was turned on its head,
and whereas, previously,
courtiers would bow very low before their monarch,
now times had changed.
These people have their faces in the dirt before Pharaoh.
They're lying prostrate before him.
This marked the beginning of a new age.
It was an age when the only way to reach god
was through his intermediaries, twin monarchs,
Akhenaten and his wife and co-ruler, Nefertiti,
and when the priests objected,
the royal couple closed Karnak, sacked its priests,
and seized its treasury.
They then moved their whole court
400 kilometers down river from Thebes,
and in less than 10 years, built a brand new city.
Known today as Amarna, its palaces, temples, and tombs
were filled with images of the Aten, the sun disk god.
(exotic music)
Gone were the multiplicity of gods to worship.
Now it was the sun that was celebrated each day
with hymns, prayers, and offerings presented
on a truly lavish scale.
But the couple's vision of utopia came at a price,
and when Akhenaten died after a 17 year reign,
Egypt was bankrupt.
His son became king of Egypt,
and although he reigned for less than 10 years,
he still became the most famous pharaoh
from the whole of Egyptian history,
Tutankhamun.
His treasure, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922,
was the most famous archeological find of all time.
Tutankhamun's mask is the epitome of ancient Egypt,
so very familiar, yet, like so many of his treasures,
holding a long-standing secret.
I've come to Oxford University's Griffith Institute
to examine the most detailed records of his burial.
- So, in this first stack
is all Carter's notes, diaries,
journals, and then right at the bottom down here
we've got all Harry Burton's original glass negatives.
- [Joann] Captured on delicate glass slides,
these are the original negatives
taken by Howard Carter's photographer at every stage
of the 10 year excavation.
- So, this shows the very first view they had of the mummy.
- They reveal Tutankhamun's burial
in a way not usually seen,
for this is the linen shroud
over his third innermost coffin.
This is as if the embalmers have just finished.
The family have laid their wreaths and floral tributes
before the lid finally went on.
What a privilege to actually see this in black and white.
Wow.
That's pretty profound, huh?
For all his fabled wealth, Tutankhamun was, in life,
a fairly insignificant pharaoh,
but his premature death after only a decade as king
offered Karnak's priests the perfect opportunity
to obliterate all trace of Akhenaten,
Nefertiti, and the Amarna period.
And these wonderful photos of his burial treasure
reveal how they did it.
(ominous exotic music)
On his famous golden throne,
Tutankhamun and his wife, Ankhesenamun,
are depicted together,
but all is not what it seems,
as recent research has discovered.
We look at the back of the queen's head,
where here wig originally was.
It's been slightly cut down there,
the same with Tutankhamun's crown.
A new crown has been added here,
so it's little things like this,
because headgear regalia was crucial
in identifying these royal individuals.
By altering the images,
the throne had been customized for Tutankhamun,
but the biggest giveaway as to whom this once belonged
is in the deity that looms large about the king and queen.
So, although Amun is also named on this throne,
it's the Aten sun disk that does take center stage
and really does cement this piece
as a royal throne from the Amarna age,
so it seems that the two figures once believed
to be Tutankhamun and his wife
were originally Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
Another clue comes from the most famous artifact
from ancient history, the golden mask of Tutankhamun,
or is it?
Recent research has zoned in on one long overlooked feature,
and that is the decidedly pierced ears,
because it's been suggested
that this mask was originally made for someone else.
The research suggests that Tutankhamun
would have worn earrings beyond childhood,
so by the age of 20, when he died,
he would not have been portrayed with pierced ears.
This mask was not made for an adult male pharaoh.
Indeed, when the gold has been compared,
the face is made of completely different gold to the rest.
Evidence of soldering is clearly visible on the mask.
It now seems as if Tutankhamun's own face
was effectively grafted on to the mask of a previous ruler,
a previous ruler who had pierced ears for earrings,
a previous ruler who may well have been a woman,
who may well have been Nefertiti.
In fact, it's estimated that around 80% of the objects
found in Tutankhamun's tomb originally belonged
to either Akhenaten or Nefertiti,
and with all of it dumped together like this,
it was a kind of spiritual decluttering.
As far as the priests were concerned,
all this was tainted gold,
and so the burial of Tutankhamun was the perfect opportunity
to bury the unwanted past forever.
(intense music)
While the city of Amarna had been abandoned,
then demolished, the memory of everything it represented
was likewise being erased.
Egypt's state religion was restored.
Karnak's priests were back in business,
and Thebes was once again the seat of sacred power.
And now, the next dynasty of the New Kingdom
was in control.
Having died without an heir,
Tutankhamun was succeeded by a line of militaristic rulers,
the 19th Dynasty.
With no direct royal ancestry,
the new dynasty needed to reconnect
with Egypt's illustrious past,
so it reinstated traditional beliefs
in a renaissance led by one of its most influential rulers,
Seti I.
His tomb in the Valley of the Kings
is the largest pharaoh's tomb ever created here.
Currently closed to the public,
I've been given special permission to explore
this labyrinthine treasure.
The tomb's inviting us down,
further down into the underworld,
and it's just drawing us into the darkness.
It's a really, really deep tomb, this.
(ominous music)
It's 174 meters of corridors and chambers,
all chiseled out by hand
and covered from floor to ceiling
in some truly spectacular scenes.
Whoa,
what an amazing chamber,
absolutely filled with little golden twinkly stars.
But the walls of Seti's tomb carry a clear message,
demonstrating the return of Egypt's traditional deities
in full force.
And here we see him, Seti, with the gods.
This is a brilliant chamber.
It's repeated images of the pharaoh, Seti, with the gods.
The gods are back, and he's keen to show that,
and so we see him here
with Anubis, the elegant black jackal god
of embalming and the dead.
Here, Seti is making offerings to Hathor,
the maternal goddess of love
who takes all dead souls into her care,
and Horus, the god of kingship,
wearing the joint crowns of upper and lower Egypt.
Then, Seti makes the strongest connection
with Egypt's past in the portrayal of the ultimate deity
in the tomb, Osiris, god of the underworld.
He represents every single pharaoh that's gone before Seti.
He represents the accumulated powers of the royal ancestors,
and Seti is keen to show himself in the company of Osiris.
He's tapping into that greatness
that made Egypt such a strong nation.
Every image, every hieroglyph in Seti's tomb,
harks back to the golden age of Amenhotep III,
and continuing with this golden legacy,
Seti's reign was a true renaissance of art and culture,
with the ultimate jewel in his tomb, his burial chamber.
That is absolutely superb.
This is really incredible.
He's taking that night time sky motif
and really, really running with it.
This is the night sky as seen through the eyes
of the astronomer priests,
and this is where the royal mummy would have lain,
in its alabaster sarcophagus,
allowing Seti's mummy, Seti's soul,
to look up at this spectacular ceiling.
Egypt's traditional belief system is here,
writ large, covering every surface.
Egypt was back.
Seti had brought back the days of glory.
It's as if the Amarna period had never been,
and for the average man and woman in the street,
that was a wonderful thing,
because order had been restored.
Chaos had been brushed away,
and everything was all right with their world.
The golden age had been restored,
but not just for the larger than life pharaohs
with their glorious tombs and vast monuments,
but for the majority of Egypt's population, too.
This included the inhabitants of Deir el-Medina,
the tomb builder's village near the Valley of the Kings.
At the edge of the village was a great pit,
the community dump,
inside which were discovered tens of thousands
of pieces of pottery and stone,
covered in pictures and words.
Written in hieratic script,
a kind of hieroglyphic shorthand,
these are the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Post-It notes,
shopping lists, and text messages.
- This is the kind of stuff that speaks to everyday life.
- Yeah, yeah.
- What's going on underneath the surface.
- With the help of hieratic expert, Dr. Glenn Godenho,
we can catch a glimpse of this intimate world
far away from kings and gods.
Which is your favorite amongst these ones?
- I always go to this one.
This is really nice, because this one's basically
a list of stuff you'd take to a party.
What you've got is tabulated information,
so you've got vertical and horizontal lines,
and in each of those spaces,
you've got a name and the stuff they brought
to that particular event.
I mean, this person here, the name's missing from this,
but this person brought the most stuff, about 11 items.
We've got bread, for example, being brought along.
Next down, we've got some beer, so one jug of beer.
- As well as beer and bread,
it lists a veritable feast.
Fruit, 20 pieces.
Beans, one jar full.
Fish, meat,
and even a cake.
The thing I like about this is the idea of
a community coming together.
It really does make the ancient Egyptians
that more real, because we can relate to them.
We all like a good party.
But of course, life isn't always a party,
and people fall on hard times.
This fragment begins with a story of a breakup.
Hesisunebeth divorced the Lady Hell,
and then it goes on to record a heartwarming story
of support from its anonymous author.
- He seems to have wanted to look after this Lady Hell,
and so the text goes on,
and it says that the author of this spent three years
giving one measure of emmer wheat to Hell every month,
but it doesn't end there.
So, she gives to the author here a sash,
so a piece of clothing, and she says in this line here
to offer it at the riverbank.
The riverbank is where the market was, right?
And she says that she'd like
one measure of emmer wheat for it,
but no one wanted it,
so here, the text goes on to say that
the author tried to offer it down at the riverbank,
but he gives a customer review.
It's right here,
one word, bean, which means bad.
Yeah, yeah. - Oh, that's really sad.
- So it wasn't even worth one measure of emmer,
so that is sad, but the author's such a good egg
that he says that he buys it off of her
for well over the market value of this thing that
wasn't even worth one measure in the first place anyway.
- Nice guy.
Pity we don't know his name.
- Yeah, it's a real shame.
It's a real shame.
- But at least we have his words,
one of the many voices from Deir el-Medina
which still speak to us across 3,000 years of history,
telling us of the highs and lows of lives
familiar to us even today.
(exotic music)
For most people, the New Kingdom had been an age of plenty,
but it wasn't to last.
The golden era of wealthy pharaohs was becoming
ever more superficial.
(solemn music)
Seti's son, Ramses II, was Egypt's most prolific builder,
overspending on ever more ostentatious monuments,
the best known of which was his temple at Abu Simbel.
But such over the top building projects
emptied the royal coffers,
as did a series of costly foreign wars,
so by the time of Ramses III,
the cracks had certainly begun to appear.
As inflation increased,
supplies in the state granaries ran low,
so the grain which formed the monthly wage rations
of state employees like tomb builders and artisans
was no longer paid when due,
and it sparked the first recorded labor strike in history.
It happened in 1155 B.C., when the tomb builders
began to complain that their food supplies
hadn't been delivered,
and when it happened again the following month,
they simply downed tools,
marched to the nearest temple,
and shouted, "We are hungry."
To make sure their grievances were heard,
they staged a sit-in at the temple,
but the state's response only added insult to injury.
Local officials could only hand round
a delivery of pastries, not much use to anyone.
The indifference of the authorities
provoked many more weeks of protest.
Their grievances only increased,
and soon, the striking workers had taken to shouting out
at passing authority figures, including the mayor.
The workers were finally fobbed off with enough supplies
to shut them up in time for
the pharaoh's jubilee celebration to pass by,
unhindered by trouble.
But the striking workers had highlighted
the waning power of the monarchy.
With the pharaoh now served by an increasingly inefficient
and corrupt bureaucracy, the glorious bubble
of royal extravagance finally burst,
and the pharaoh's rivals were waiting in the wings,
the priests of Karnak.
Having grown powerful through the revenues
given to the gods they served,
the writing for the royals was quite literally on the wall.
And you can see what I mean
in this little known part of Karnak temple,
(ominous exotic music)
Where the high priest is making a very bold statement,
but only if you know how to read the footnotes.
Now, this is a fascinating scene.
We have the pharaoh, Ramses IX,
and he's facing his high priest, shown here,
but there's something extraordinary about this scene,
because for the first time,
the pharaoh and the priest are shown
on exactly the same scale.
They are the same height.
That's why the priest is looking so pleased.
He has his arms raised, as if in triumph.
Because these guys are so clever,
they've actually got the pharaoh standing on a box,
so he's a fraction higher,
and yet, in reality, they're the same height.
This really shows that the priests are in power.
They're basically saying to the king,
we are the same size as you.
Therefore, we are as important as you are.
(ominous music)
Priests had become full time politicians.
Vying with the throne for power,
the destabilized the balance between church and state,
the relationship on which Egypt's entire culture depended.
So great were their ambitions
that by the end of the New Kingdom,
the priests took control of the entire south,
and with the pharaoh ruling only the north,
the country was split into its two ancient halves.
But even worse was to come.
It's at Medinet Habu,
Ramses III's funerary temple,
that we can find out just how little interest
these politician priests now had in the royal afterlife.
They were only concerned with their own status
and their own wealth.
Now, this next disturbing part of Egypt's story
not only spelt disaster for its core belief
in the royal afterlife,
it left a tortuous puzzle for Egyptologists,
which we are still trying to piece together.
(solemn music)
It's an extraordinary story
that begins not in the temple,
but in a small house, built later within the grounds,
because the priests' corrupt ambitions
will be put into practice by the man who lived here.
His name was Buthamun,
and as a Necropolis scribe,
he worked in the nearby Valley of the Kings.
This is the man himself, Buthamun,
with his shaven head,
his starched kilt,
and his arms raised in prayer.
He's praying to the great god of Thebes, Amun himself.
Although Buthamun's story doesn't quite live up to
this image of piety, because it was here that he received
a letter of instruction from his boss,
the high priest of Karnak.
This is a copy of that letter,
and its contents are mind blowing,
because the high priest is telling Buthamun,
"Go and perform for me a task
"on which you've never before embarked.
"Uncover a tomb among the ancient tombs,
"and preserve its sealed door until I return."
And although this language is quite euphemistic and cryptic,
both the sender and recipient knew exactly what it meant,
and it would have a profound impact on Egypt.
Buthamun had been promoted.
His new title was Opener of the Gates of the Necropolis.
(intense exotic music)
So he and his men set out for the Valley of the Kings,
taking with them tools and bundles of linen.
Their mission, nothing less than the systematic dismantling
of the royal cemetery in search of gold.
It was an order to accumulate wealth.
Tomb robbing itself was nothing new in ancient Egypt,
but what's different about this looting
is that it's an order from the ruler of upper Egypt,
the high priest himself.
This is looting sanctioned by the state.
(ominous music)
Knowing the secret location of the royal tombs,
Buthamun began what was euphemistically referred to
as restoration work.
The final taboo was about to be broken.
So, Buthamun and his men set to work.
They break open the seal of every royal tomb.
The move the lid of the sarcophagus,
take out the royal mummy and its nest of gold coffins,
and proceed to unwrap each one.
Next, they stripped them of anything of value,
gold masks, jewelry, and amulets,
all taken for the temple treasury.
As for the mummies, they're rewrapped in fresh linen
and all buried together.
For the cash strapped priests,
these royal tombs were no longer enviable,
but little more than a series of dead bodies
resting amidst the gold they needed
to achieve their political aims.
So, for 20 years, this very tomb
became one of Buthamun's rewrapping workshops,
where archeologists found fragments of the gold
prized from royal coffins, traces of the lost treasures
of numerous pharaohs.
(light exotic music)
And Buthamun's handwriting was discovered
on the rewrapped mummy of Ramses III.
With no regard for the sacred,
even the great Pharaoh Amenhotep III
ended up repackaged in the coffin of Ramses III,
covered with the ill fitting lid of Seti II.
Only one tomb, hidden by rubble,
escaped the wholesale plunder.
Yet the ultimate violation of ancient Egypt's soul
was now complete.
Clearly, the priest kings of Karnak
had got what they'd always wanted, absolute power.
No longer interested in the royal ancestors,
who were simply a source of revenue
to be robbed and discarded,
the devout had become cynical,
and the royal afterlife, nothing more than an illusion.
(intense music)
From now on, Egypt's story would be written by invaders
from far beyond the valley of the Nile.
Cambyses was sending a very clear message to the Egyptians.
I am now in charge.
But Egypt's secret weapon was its captivating culture.
Wow, look at that.
Look at that.
Oh, that is so beautiful.
Seducing its new rulers from far flung parts
of the ancient world,
and ancient Egypt's final flowering
lay in the hands of another great empire.
Enter the Macedonian super man.
Enter Alexander the Great.
(adventurous exotic music)