Egyptian Journeys with Dan Cruickshank 1of6 Secrets of the Tomb Builders

The great civilisation of ancient Egypt, with its dramatic spectacle and mystery, has always fascinated me. I've been travelling the country to explore some of the intriguing stories that have emerged from this historic land. In this programme, I'm off to find out about the mysterious people who've built the spectacular underground tombs of the pharaohs. I'm about to fly over the Valley of the Kings, the place where, for 500 years, pharaohs and the nobles of Egypt were interred, along with their most precious things, things precious in this world and essential, they believe, for their journey through the underworld to rebirth. Right, shall we? The Valley of the Kings has long haunted my imagination, and on this journey I'm going to discover more about the secret lives of the tomb builders who actually built this sacred place. The magnificent tombs of the later pharaohs lie on the desert hills on the west bank of the Nile, and there I've discovered a hidden story even more intriguing than the tombs themselves. It's a story that, for me, unlocks the past, bringing me closer than ever to the real people of ancient Egypt. The valley is, of course, very arid, but for the Egyptians it was a place of life, of rebirth, a great womb framed by these sacred mountains, a place where the dead would continue on their journey to another world, to rebirth. Around 3,500 years ago, the pharaohs decided to hide their tombs down there, in the desert rocks below. It was a more secret place to bury themselves and their treasures than the ostentatious pyramids that were the tombs of the earlier pharaohs. The treasure now for us, really, is the information locked into the tombs, information that allows us to understand and reconstruct that fascinating world of the pharaohs. There are over 60 tombs packed into this valley. Tunnelled into these limestone cliffs is a labyrinth of underground vaults and passageways, branching in every direction. Down here, on the ground, you can understand more easily why this valley was chosen. It's all to do with security. The exits and entrances can be guarded. Tomb robbers kept at bay. It wasn't just treasure that had to be guarded from tomb robbers, but the body of the pharaoh itself. Ancient Egyptians believed the soul could survive death and that the dead could influence the living. But this depended on keeping the body safe, and that's what made tomb building so important, particularly for pharaohs. It was believed that their well-being after death was essential for the prosperity of the nation. Most of the treasures that once packed the underground chambers have long since been plundered by tomb robbers, but we've been left with the spectacular monuments themselves, and the stunning work of the master craftsmen who built them. But it's only when you look at a map of the valley that you really appreciate the great feat of engineering that went into creating this place. Incredible looking at it, the complexity of the tombs. Some run under and over other tombs, some almost bash into each other. Incredible really, this strange sacred world, apparently in a state of disorder and disarray. But of course the overwhelming impression is what a respect, incredible engineering skills of these ancient workmen cutting these tombs, these straight passageways, underground chambers, multi-columned halls, very difficult to achieve, an amazing piece of work. To get a sense of the remarkable engineering skills of the tomb builders, you have to go to a tomb known as KV5, the biggest and most complex tomb in the valley. Only recently rediscovered, it's still closed to the public, but I've been offered a rare and privileged glimpse inside. This vast mausoleum was built by Rameses II for some of his 50 sons. This is a main hall, it's roughly worked ceiling, supported by these great columns, square piers really, and around here are arranged 120 or so corridors and smaller chambers in all directions. Astonishing piece of work, massive scale. Sadly this tomb complex was severely damaged by floods in ancient times. You can still see the remarkable design and construction in this maze of chambers and passageways. The tomb makers were engineering geniuses. They exploited the strengths and weaknesses of the rock, cutting through the weak areas while leaving the strong to act as supports. Well a single chamber or column has collapsed in thousands of years. Vast quantities of rock had to be chiseled out with simple copper and bronze tools, and yet this intricate geometric design was achieved with remarkable precision. There could be 150 chambers or more. The excavation is still going on. Down there I can see yet another room, it's ceiling and wall, and beyond that could be other rooms, other chambers. Amazing, perhaps great discoveries yet to be made. Recently, tantalizingly, I'm told one ancient skeleton and three heads were found in this pit. I'll have a look. I'll be very careful. Oh, it's a newspaper, and my goodness me, the skeleton's still here. The legs are amazing. In here this rough tool surface left really at a workman would have seen it 3,200 years ago. Incredible, so direct, would have been covered with plaster that's now gone. We see it through the eyes of the men that made it. Almost hear their chisels echoing in this space. So who were the people who created these remarkable tombs? The anonymous men who spent their entire lives toiling away so the pharaohs could pass safely into the underworld. These are my unsung heroes. These are the people I want to know more about. It's not just the builders and engineers I'm interested in, but the great artists who decorated the tomb so beautifully. And in the tomb of the pharaoh Horemheb, you can actually see these master painters and sculptors at work. The amazing thing about this tomb is that it gives us a snapshot into the construction and decoration of tombs. The body of a pharaoh took 70 days to mummify, and after that the body had to be interred in the tomb, whether the tomb was ready or not. And that's what's amazing here. Horemheb's tomb was not ready for him, but he had to come in anyway, and the place was sealed up to get this amazing world, a tomb in progress of construction. Gosh, what an explosion of colour of the bare walls up there. This chamber has been finished and gives an idea of what the whole tomb would have looked like. The colours are so intense, so fresh. The thing that's beautiful about this decorative scheme is that the figures are raised, giving a very three-dimensional, very dramatic, very beautiful quality. Now, if you go down deeper into the tomb, we can see how this amazing sacred art was made. Beautiful as these finished reliefs are, the unfinished work has even more power. Even in the burial chamber, with its great sarcophagus, the scheme of decoration is incomplete. Just a few red tracings and some of the red figures covered in black. No colour. But something is wonderful here, actually. The very incompleteness of the tomb gives it incredible power. Through these simple outlines, we have a rare insight into how this sensational art was created. It's like peeling back the layers of a masterpiece to find out how it was made. There's an immediacy in these sketches, directness, a freshness. One can connect with the workman in a wonderful way. These walls are an instruction manual left by these ancient craftsmen. They reveal the secrets of age-old techniques passed down through the generations. Now, this is fascinating. Clearly, the work teams were divided up into more skilled and less skilled men. I suppose the young chaps, the apprentices, did the basic work. The first thing was to dip some string in red paint and using that string to make these straight lines, which divide the wall up into various registers, various zones, which were to be decorated. And, again using the red paint, the first team put the rough sketch of the figures on the wall. Here you see very clearly the red figures. Then, slightly more skilled chaps come along and correct or sometimes trace over the red in black paint. There are corrections quite clear, so this second team is more skilled. They get it all set out properly, but mistakes can be corrected. The third team, the highly skilled chaps, come along and their job is to cut the decoration into the plaster surface that's over the limestone. For me, I've seen nothing like this. Here's a figure just emerging from the plaster and you can imagine the team of chaps here. Think of the atmosphere, stone dust everywhere, not nice. Just being in here now is a and no light. They had little simple sort of torches, I suppose, or little lamps burning vegetable oil with linen wicks. Incredible conditions and in these difficult conditions, these men are doing this really precise work and they get here. Look, here's the moment the work stops. The chaps down tools. I suppose the pharaoh's body has been sliding down the ramp into the burial tomb over there and that's it. The tomb has to be sealed and these chaps are out. So what about these chaps, these tomb makers? I've heard of many myths and legends about them, most famously that they were slaves forced to use their skills in honour of the pharaoh against their will. I'm off to find out the truth about these remarkable people. And I can find the answer in a remote place on the other side of the valley. For me, the place I'm heading for is a treasure trove, packed with information that has transformed our understanding of Egypt three and a half thousand years ago. We know much about the pharaohs buried in the Valley of the Kings, but what about the humble workmen who would, over 3,000 years ago, have walked and ridden along the path that I'm riding along now? It's incredible. Those are the people that I want to know. They're the people that haunt my imagination. I want to get into their minds and see that ancient world through their eyes. Come on. This place is a hidden gem where all the extraordinary and intimate details of the lives of the ordinary people of ancient Egypt can be uncovered. When first discovered, the site raised lots of questions. It was a bit of a mystery. People couldn't work out who on earth would have lived here. The site's so arid, sun-baked hills around it, the Nile a long way off, there's no water here. So what was going on? Well, recent excavations have revealed that this was the centre of a very fascinating world. This was clearly the home of a special community, kept separate from the rest of the world. And as more and more evidence emerged from the rubble, it became apparent what this place was. This is the permanent home of the tomb-makers. Their village, founded around 3,500 years ago, now known as Deir el-Medina. It's where generations of builders, painters, sculptors and engineers, as well as all their families, lived for 500 years. They lived within these walls, guarding the secrets of the tombs, passing on their skills from father to son. From the wealth of archaeological evidence, scraps of cloth, fragments of wood, even traces of paint, archaeologists have built up a detailed picture of the tomb-builders' lives, what their homes were like, and they even know the names of some of the people that lived in them. I'm in one of the streets in the town, houses on each side, and they would have been whitewashed. It would have been lovely, charming, sort of mellow light flooding through the town. The front door was painted red. Ah, here, I've come to a front door, just here. The door belonged to a rather important fellow workman called Senegem, and the house itself ahead of me. So I'll go inside and see Senegem's world. This is the main reception room, and what a room it is. Square, probably a big cube actually, ceiling up there, flat ceiling with ventilators, air intakes. And here, a storeroom with a cellar. That's where the family treasures were kept, really. Oh, this is good. The stairs up to the flat roof, and you can imagine the family going up these stairs in the evening to sit on the roof, looking at the sunset or the stars. Very lovely. And in this corner, a piece of built-in furniture. A sort of bed or a couch, I suppose. Little recesses here, I suppose these would have contained sacred writings, images of the gods. Good Lord, sitting here is an amazing experience, sitting on this couch, inhabiting the world inhabited by this family of workmen, tomb builders. Over 3,000 years ago, this is the world they'd have known. And in the hills surrounding the town, there are places that give us an actual picture of these people as they worked in the Valley of the Kings. Being tomb builders, they were, of course, able to build tombs for themselves. This is high-quality work, and here is something very marvellous indeed. Here we see workmen constructing a shrine within a tomb. Wonderful details. Look at this. It's a chap with a saw, a bronze saw. Here, a man painting a sarcophagus. Down below is a shrine scene, and here's a man with a chisel, a bronze chisel and a mallet. And here, there's humour in this, it's incredible. The chap's clambering up a wall, hammering away, and this fellow has dropped his mallet, and his friend, looking alarmed, has moved his foot away in time, saying, what on earth are you doing? Incredible, incredible, this world of the workmen. And here it is, forever, going about their earthly tasks, but in the underworld. These paintings give us a picture of the tomb builders, but something else about these people has been discovered here, and it's extraordinary. The people of Deir el-Medina could read and write, unlike almost all the other workers in ancient Egypt. And thousands of examples of their writing have been uncovered by archaeologists. These are the most detailed, intimate writings and drawings of everyday life ever discovered in ancient Egypt. They're like pages from a notebook, ancient text messages. Reading them is like eavesdropping on conversations 3,000 years ago. What is it with you? Write and send me the thoughts of your heart, so I can enter into them. I've been with you since I was a child, but I can't understand you. He bought me a donkey, but it's no good, so I returned it. Let him bring me a good donkey, or give me my money back. Peneb the foreman, my father, slept with Kenny's wife, Tea, and with Pendia's wife, Honro. He even slept with Honro's daughter. For the carpenter with his chisel, life is utterly vile. Covering the roof ten cubits by six, to cover the roof in a month after laying the boards. Because papyrus was so expensive, the people of Deir el-Medina wrote on bits of limestone and pottery, which they could literally just pick up off the ground. It meant they wrote and wrote and wrote. The originals, known as ostraca, are kept in museums around the world, but I've got some exact replicas here. There's lots of things here. I mean, some are simply lists of goods, some are legal documents, private letters. There's a lot of humour. You get the idea that people come here, come home after a hard day toiling in the tombs and let off a bit of steam. They obviously get fed up making images all day, glorifying the pharaohs. Here is a wonderful little bit of satire. In the tombs, we see pharaohs in their chariots, smiting their enemies. Here we see not a pharaoh, but a mouse in his chariot, driving a dog. Obviously, the chap who drew this was probably the same chap who had to paint the glorious pharaoh. He's had enough of it. When he gets home, he takes Mickey. Now, this one's really interesting. This is actually to do with love. It's a spell trying to make a woman fall in love with a man. The chap says that if the woman of his heart doesn't desire him as a cow desires fodder, he'll go off and burn images of the gods. That seems a bit daring to me, but there we are. Now, this one is almost my favourite, actually. It's a bit abstract, but what it is is a laundry list. Here we see items, drawings of items. I suppose this was for someone who couldn't read. And it's sort of things going off to the laundry. A loincloth here, I suppose. Here's a shirt without sleeves. And these are the number of items gone off. One pair of pants off to the cleaners. Isn't it absolutely amazing? The ostraca give us revealing details about life here that otherwise would have been lost to us. For instance, they tell us these workers had rights. They had two days off for every eight days worked, and they were prepared to go on strike if their rights were ignored. We know the women could own property. They could sue for divorce and even prosecute their husbands for domestic violence. We even have their school curriculum and know the myths and legends they read to their children. The ostraca also helped to solve the miles from the life-giving waters of the Nile. The laundry from that list had been taken down to the Nile to be washed by launderers paid for by the state. And all their water was delivered by water buoys, also paid for by the state. What's clear from the ostraca is that the state provided the tomb builders with everything they could possibly want. These workers, these tomb builders, weren't slaves. They were highly regarded state employees. They may have been kept in isolation in the arid mountains, but the pharaoh made sure they led a comfortable life. As the builders of the royal tombs, the people of Deir al-Medina were, in a sense, privy to state secrets. The fate of the nation was linked to the preservation of the pharaoh's body after death, and the people of Deir al-Medina knew the secrets of the royal tombs. And in that sense, the fate of the nation was in their hands. Through the people of Deir al-Medina, I see the different side of ancient Egypt. Ordinary people are so often forgotten by history, but this journey has given me an insight into what everyday life must have been like in this land thousands of years ago. It's history from the bottom up, so different from that written by the pharaohs. The pharaohs were so concerned with their place in history that much of what they've left us is merely propaganda. But the humble people from Deir al-Medina, with their humour, scepticism and satire, give us a refreshingly truthful view of the past. But there's one final twist to the story of the tomb builders, which links the craftsmen of Deir al-Medina to legendary tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings. Many, indeed perhaps most, tombs were robbed in antiquity, and it's evidence to suggest that the tomb makers were also often the tomb robbers. Even priests were involved. There's also some contemporary legal documents which show that two makers from Deir al-Medina was caught in the act found with bags of booty containing plunder from tombs. Amazing, really. It does sort of suggest that ordinary people weren't too worried about the great Egyptian gods, weren't worried about curses on the tombs, and indeed weren't worried that the vengeance of the pharaoh, divine in death, would be visited upon them. How ironic that some of the people who dedicated their lives to building the spectacular tombs here should have returned to rob them. A shocking revelation, perhaps, but just one of the many hidden stories that I've discovered about this valley. This journey has completely transformed my understanding of the Valley of the Kings. Before, I thought of it as a place of death, of afterlife, of ritual and religion. It is that, but much, much more. Now I see it contains stories about daily life in Egypt three and a half or so thousand years ago. There's evidence here of ordinary working people. The stories of the people that created these great tombs are all there waiting to be explored and unravelled. The connections are amazing between the humble people and the great people. The humble people, of course, are the ones that created the monuments to the high and mighty. And that, I suppose, is what one now sees, one contemplates this view, not just the story of the kings and their families, but the stories of the ordinary people of Egypt. That's what echoes from the valley for me now. Next time, I follow in the footsteps of the great archaeologist Howard Carter, the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.