Exodus Mysteries (Full Episode) | Lost Treasures of the Bible | National Geographic

In the east of Egypt's Nile Delta, investigators unearth treasures hidden for more than 3,000 years. They're uncovering the remains of a mega city that some believe matches a city in the Bible's book of Exodus. We have to secure it first, then we can take it out. It might be a high official, maybe even palatial building. Abandoned in ancient times, its true location was lost for millennia. I think we are really lucky here to have this preserved. These newly discovered wall paintings bring the forgotten city to life and could help decode the origins of the Bible's epic story of Exodus. We have properly excavated half a percent. There's still a lot to be explored. The stories in the Bible are famous across the world. They tell of great battles between good and evil, earth-shaking catastrophes, and iconic heroes. Now, new archaeological discoveries buried in the Middle East for thousands of years are shedding light on the real events that may have given rise to these legends. In the story of Exodus, the prophet Moses leads his people, the Israelites, out of captivity in Egypt. They flee across the sea, chased by the Pharaoh's army, and into the safety of the promised land. It's a story of triumph over hardship and adversity that people all over the world can relate to. This season, international teams of archaeologists dig through centuries of earth and piece together millennia-old mysteries. Could discoveries in Egypt help unearth the truth about the world of the Exodus? In the south of Egypt, on the banks of the River Nile, is Luxor, the capital of Egypt during its golden age, the New Kingdom. Here, archaeologist Jay Silverstein is on a mission to ground truth the biblical legends. He wants to explore if there's any archaeological evidence for an event like the Exodus in Egyptian history. When you're able to correlate the material evidence, the facts, the artifacts that you find, to the events described in these ancient texts, to me, that's very satisfying. The Old Testament story of Exodus begins nearly 4,000 years ago. It tells how a people called the Israelites travel to Egypt and live here for over 400 years. One pharaoh feels threatened by their growing numbers and forces them into slavery. He orders them to build the great cities of Python and Ramesses, which will serve as store sites. If the Israelites don't work hard enough, the pharaoh has them beaten. Recent archaeological evidence has cast serious doubt on the idea that Egyptian pharaohs enslaved people to build their pyramids. But did later ancient Egyptians ever use foreigners as enslaved labor? Jay travels across the Nile to search for clues. Built into the sandstone rock cliffs, the Valley of the Nobles was once a burial site for the elite in Egyptian society. Jay investigates the tomb of a powerful official called Rekhmara, the second in command to one of Egypt's great pharaohs. He was the CEO of the Egyptian corporation. These walls capture that whole range of activities. His tomb records one of his greatest achievements, the construction of a temple to the god Amun. So here we have an inscription that says the captives that his majesty, the pharaoh, has brought back to work in the construction of the temple of Amun. And so quite literally saying that these are prisoners who have been brought back in servitude. The enslaved figures represent people from neighboring countries. And you can see that there are different types of representations here, whereas the Egyptians have the long kilt looking at their haircuts and their stance and the fact that they're in positions of authority as opposed to laborers who have shorter garments, different types, their skin colors vary a little bit. Archeologists think some of the figures in this painting depict captives from as far as Syria and Canaan. Canaan appears throughout the biblical texts as a location to the east of Egypt, the original home of the people that became the Israelites and the land where they hope to return. Canaan represents one of these spots that has its own really important geography because it's a crossroads between Asia and Egypt. And so we see a lot of geopolitical activity happening in this area, a lot of migrations of people moving back and forth. These paintings are evidence that foreigners, possibly from Canaan, could have been enslaved by the Egyptians. Was a group called the Israelites among them? And if so, where and when did they live? A clue to another part of the story could lie 350 miles north in Egypt's Nile Delta at Pi Ramesses. In one of the most groundbreaking missions in recent years, a team of German archeologists led by Henning Franzmeier investigates this mysterious ancient site. Abandoned in ancient times, Pi Ramesses' true location was lost for millennia until archeologists confirmed its location in the 1960s. Amongst the big and important ancient Egyptian sites, Pi Ramesses is probably the least explored. Pi Ramesses was once the capital of ancient Egypt. Some believe it is the location of one of the cities named in the Exodus legend. So what archeological evidence is there for these biblical cities? Today, Henning is on a mission to unearth the real city buried beneath the soil here. Directing a mission like the Pi Ramesses mission is actually fulfilling a kind of childhood dream. Wherever we work here, we might find something completely new. So you were speaking about this area, right? That we have to have a look there. Henning scours the site for any evidence of ancient structures beneath the ground. I think at least here one can see it and one can actually see it all the way down. Yeah, and then also here. The team's excavation reveals faint outlines of foot-long mud bricks. They are really hardly visible. This is why we are working with very experienced workmen. They can spot these mud bricks better than I could ever do. The earliest Egyptian pyramids, constructed more than 1,000 years before the believed date of Exodus, were built of stone. The walls of Pi Ramesses are made of mud brick. Though quicker and easier to build with, this construction method causes problems for archeologists trying to understand the past. The humid, waterlogged conditions of the Nile Delta have destroyed much of the mud brick evidence here. This kind of line between the bricks that we have here, I think is really relevant. The team pieces together the pattern of bricks to reveal a series of walls nearly seven feet wide. This clearly shows that we are not talking about some normal habitation. The team carefully measures the dimensions and uses the latest technology, like results from magnetic scans, a technique that was applied across the site. The damp conditions have led to the widespread disintegration of buildings and organic artifacts. So gleaning every possible clue from what does remain is vital. Bringing all their information together reveals the outline of a remarkable structure. The archeologists believe they've unearthed a long lost royal palace that covers more than 240,000 square feet. A wide road flanked with statues leads to this grand building. Hundreds of similar scans reveal the palace is part of a large city, once considered the greatest in Egypt. Spanning over six square miles and flanked by waterways from the River Nile, it includes storerooms, bustling marketplaces and sacred temples. This magnificent royal city was one of the largest in Egypt, home to over 300,000 people. We know now, thanks to the magnetic measurements, the site was huge, but we have probably excavated half a percent. So there's still a lot to be explored. The mud brick walls discovered here are clear evidence of a vast and important city, and there's a potential connection to the two in the Exodus story. We can quite clearly tell that there's a lot of storerooms. We have these longitudinal rooms and a lot of them in a row, and this is typically storeroom architecture in ancient Egypt. The resemblance between this metropolis and the city of Ramesses in the Bible are intriguing. Could this be one of the two store cities the Israelites were forced to build in the story of Exodus? As the team at Pi Ramesses continue excavations around the palace walls, it's not long before they find evidence of more than just the city layout. The soil has a very distinct color here, and it's totally different from the normal clay that we have. Just a few inches down, the team hits the jackpot. They unearthed belongings of the people that lived here. Henning and the team peel away the plaster of the ancient palace floor in Pi Ramesses. It's not been disturbed for more than 3,000 years. The organic matter and objects could help to reveal exactly who lived here. Were there Israelites from Canaan enslaved within these city walls? It's garbage. It's ancient garbage, so exactly what we archaeologists like. And already, just having taken away these few centimeters, we have quite a lot of pottery, and I guess by the end of the day, from this small area, we'll have three or four full baskets of pottery. This layer contains the rubbish discarded by the ancient inhabitants of Pi Ramesses. It gives archaeologists a unique insight into the lives of these people. In the pit, Henning finds an object that doesn't appear to be Egyptian. This is a shirt of a so-called Canaanite jar. Canaanite jars were the standard container of the late Bronze Age. They were made all over the eastern Mediterranean. The name Canaanite means from Canaan, the land where the Bible says the Israelites came from. Pi Ramesses was the gateway to Egypt for neighboring civilizations who visited for trade. They would have brought in resin or wine or oil and would have taken goods such as glass, for instance, out of Egypt. These Canaanite jars may have arrived at Pi Ramesses as cargo. On its own, the shirt doesn't prove that people from Canaan lived in the city. Henning heads to the team's dig house to sift through more evidence from the site. Thousands of fragments of pottery line the shelves. They include beautiful vases originating in Greece and Cyprus. Henning analyzes an intriguing piece from the stores, a sculpted figurine. It's a head made of clay and it represents most likely a non-Egyptian god. This figurine has a cap and large ears mirroring images of a god called Baal. Baal was a Canaanite deity. This is strong evidence that people from Canaan were trading and living in Pi Ramesses. Not only Egyptians lived in Pi Ramesses, but also foreigners coming from all around the Mediterranean, maybe. This object, along with others found previously, hints at a bustling city with a population made up of many different cultures. I think in this period, there's no other Egyptian city where you have so much of this foreign pottery. If people from Canaan were treated badly and enslaved in Egypt, what might have tempted them to come to the country? In Manchester, bioarchaeologist Ivona Kozyradska-Oganmakin is an expert on the movement and health of ancient people. She investigates a relief from a temple complex in Egypt carved more than 1,000 years before the construction of Pi Ramesses. It shows what appear to be Bedouin tribespeople from the desert regions, not Egyptians. It's a very unique scene, showing individuals with incredibly emaciated bodies. I think particularly striking is this gesture here, someone who's resting and is just really exhausted. We can very clearly see those grooves which were made to accentuate the bone structure of those people's faces. This is not something that we would normally see in reliefs or paintings in ancient Egypt. Why would a pharaoh want to immortalize these people on his temple? It is believed that it was maybe commissioned by the pharaoh to sort of demonstrate his generosity, maybe in welcoming those people into the Nile Valley and potentially supporting them. It's evidence that foreign people sought sanctuary in Egypt in the 24th century BCE. It is not surprising that people would be seeking refuge along the Nile. It was and still is the most important river running across the country. Water means life, quite simply. Land irrigated by the Nile provided an abundance of food. Archaeologists have discovered vast brick silos across Egypt, some carried up to more than 3,500 cubic feet of grain. In the Bible, Joseph comes to Egypt and becomes an advisor to a great Egyptian pharaoh. He encourages his family to move here because Egypt has stores of food. Reliefs like this suggest the idea of people escaping from Canaan to Egypt draws on real events. Periods of famine and suffering did happen. Canaanites may have taken refuge in Egypt and been enslaved. The Bible tells of a champion who appears to save the Israelites. Exodus describes how a pharaoh grows so afraid of them that he orders all male Israelite babies to be killed at birth. One desperate mother floats her infant son down the Nile in a basket. The pharaoh's daughter finds him and names him Moses. After growing up as her son, he ends up killing an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite. The pharaoh orders Moses killed for his crime, forcing him to flee Egypt and live in exile. So what evidence is there at the ancient city of Pyramuses for the living conditions of ordinary people? At the Pyramuses site in the Nile Delta, Henning and the team continue to excavate the rubbish pit to look for clues that help to understand what it was like to live here. Unlike many places in Egypt where the sand preserves evidence, here, water from the surrounding fields destroys archeology. Very little is left, and organic remains such as bone are rare. The team tirelessly hunts for microscopic remains that could provide clues. Everything has rotten away, basically, so we need really these things, these small fragments, to also really reconstruct history. Pieces of animal bones can reveal the diets of the population, but analysis of even fragmentary human remains could reveal markers of disease and malnutrition. The finds could shed light on one of the most famous chapters of the Exodus legend. When Moses returns to free his people, the pharaoh refuses to release the Israelites, prompting God to punish the ancient Egyptians with a series of deadly plagues. At first, the waters of the Nile turn to blood, killing all fish and making it impossible to drink in all of Egypt for a whole week. When the pharaoh refuses to back down, swarms of locusts block out the sun, devouring all the plants and every last bit of food the Egyptians have. When a pestilence kills all the Egyptians' livestock, sparing the animals of the Israelites, the pharaoh will still not let them go. It's only when God kills every firstborn son in Egypt, including the pharaoh's own child, that the king agrees to set the Israelites free. Historians think these stories might not refer to a series of specific events, but rather what the world of the new kingdom was like. So what other archeological evidence is there of the threats that the ancient Egyptians faced? In Manchester, Ivana and museum curator Campbell Price searched the stores for clues. These two, I think these are exactly the kind of thing you would find at Piraeus' seas. These miniature limestone blocks were carried by ancient Egyptians to call upon the gods in prayer. This is the name of the god at the top, the signs, and then who hears, and then prayers. So the god who hears prayers. So literally, you pick it up, you've got a problem. A hotline to the god. A hotline, like a smartphone. These objects offered forms of protection and could be kept close by. The Egyptians also wore glazed ceramic amulets around their necks. It's a fantastic illustration of a human desire to be safe. This is the goddess Sekhmet. Her name means she who is powerful. And the idea was that Sekhmet was a protector of human beings against famine, plague, and pestilence. You would gain the protection of the goddess for yourself and for your family. There's no archeological evidence of the fantastical 10 plagues from the Exodus story. Campbell thinks they reflect the experience of people living in Egypt and across the ancient world. So when you hear stories like the 10 plagues, these are ways of discussing big issues in the ancient world. Not knowing what tomorrow will bring made the Egyptians want to be prepared to have insurance policies. Evidence of disease has been found throughout ancient Egyptian history. The story of the 10 plagues may be a remnant of folk memories from periods of disease and unrest. Back at the Pi Ramesses excavation, the team continues to excavate. Although the Exodus story names the city of Ramesses, biblical chronology suggests events took place before any of the 11 pharaohs named Ramesses came to power. What's more, the biblical account doesn't actually name the pharaoh who ruled at the time of Moses. Archeologists here hope their research will give greater certainty about who built the palatial residence they've uncovered. Conservator Alexandra Winkels finds something extraordinary in the palace. I think we're really lucky here to have this preserved. She's discovered that these fragments of wall plaster are painted. Maybe we should make it wet from the back a little bit, right? It may provide clues to when this huge ancient metropolis was built and by whom. In the southeastern corner of the Pi Ramesses palace, Alexandra carefully brushes away soil from the rare plaster wall painting. How is it going with the plaster? It's still stuck to the exposed wall of the more than 3,000-year-old palace. What might this wall painting reveal about the founder of this city? Okay, I will call Ahmed. The painted wall has cracked into hundreds of tiny fragments. They are scattered in the disintegrated remains of a mud-brick wall. Alexandra hopes to use her expert knowledge of plaster conservation techniques to reveal an intact section of the fragile painted wall. Now, then we take away first this part here, just this remains, then you can remove the remains. We will also apply the Japanese paper on this area to keep the fragments in place, because if we don't, everything will crumble. Alexandra uses a special paper covered in adhesive to strengthen the fragments and keep them in position, whilst the rest of the team applies fabric soaked in plaster behind the relief to make it strong enough for them to remove. We have to secure it first, and then we have to remove the surrounding clay, and then we can take it out and work on the fragments in more detail. Alexandra and her team of conservators take the plaster pieces to the dig house to clean them for closer inspection. The traces of magnificent colors are hard to see and could have been easily missed in the dust of the excavation site. Alexandra and her team carefully wash away the earth, a job for only the most expert conservators. They are the first people to set eyes on these painted decorations in more than 3,000 years. The fragments we are working on right now, they are the top plaster layer. This type of plaster is a rare find. It's made from lime. You have the mud brick masonry, then a clay plaster layer, and the top layer was decorated with a very thin lime plaster. And this lime plaster is, for Egypt, a very special material because it hasn't been used in so many places. Artists painted these decorations on top of the freshly applied lime plaster while it was still wet. It's a technique perfected in ancient Greece, which enhances the paint pigments. The use of lime plaster is another sign that it might be a high official and maybe even palatial building. Few people other than a pharaoh could afford to employ such skilled foreign workers to decorate the magnificent palace. The dig house contains clues to who this ruler might be. Henning analyzes small pieces of carved stone fragments. This little tiny object is one of the most important object that we have found in the past years. This small plaque is in the form of a cartouche. It is carved with a royal name. Items like these were buried in the foundations during construction to preserve the name of the king that had them built. This is a pretty small fragment of stone, but we can see here traces of the so-called cartouche. And we have here a couple of hieroglyphic signs that give us the name Massassu. And this, in this period, can only be Ramses II. This Ramses II carving is strong evidence that he is the pharaoh that built this palace and the city of Pyramuses. Some believe that because of the name of this city, Ramses II is one of the pharaohs in the Bible's Exodus story. Ramses' skills as a general and self-publicist cemented his reputation as a great warrior king among the Egyptian people. He erected more monuments than any other Egyptian pharaoh. He even passed off other temples as his own by putting his name on them. He left such a legacy that even today, he's remembered as one of the greatest pharaohs of Egypt. Could the fame of his name explain why he became attached to this legend, even though he lived long after the Bible suggests Exodus took place? In the south of Egypt, across the Nile from Luxor, Jay heads to the mortuary temple of Ramesses' son, Pharaoh Monepta. Inside is the replica of a 10-feet tall relief, or stelae. Jay thinks it could be key to helping piece together the historical setting of the Exodus story. If there were a smoking gun for the biblical tale of the Exodus, this would be it. This is our historical reference, the written record of the pharaoh referring to the people of Israel. This is the earliest written reference to the kingdom of Israel ever found. The inscription says that the seed of the Israelites is no more, that it's been laid to waste. Jay suspects the stelae could describe Monepta's defeat of their homeland. Some think that this inscription confirms that Ramesses was the pharaoh of Exodus, the persecutor of the Israelites, who are first recorded as living in Canaan during the rule of his son. But Jay believes this conclusion is far from certain. We have to be careful when we read something like this about implying too much of it as the exact correlation to the biblical text. There was this interaction going on between the Israelites and the Egyptians, and that conflict may have lasted for hundreds of years. One possibility is that the biblical story of Exodus is not an account of a single event. It's a collective memory of historic figures and places. Ramesses the Great is the sort of famous figure that the scribes may have had in mind when first writing down the biblical tale. His image as this great pharaoh sort of epitomizes the type of opponent that you expect Moses to be facing off with when you talk about the great pharaoh. If the legend of Ramesses the Great did influence the Exodus story, what other light could his city shed on the biblical tale? Back in the north, Henning travels from Pyramuses to the secure storerooms at Tarnis. They contain many of the larger and valuable finds from Pyramuses. He searches for clues to Ramesses' reign. This is our storeroom. This is the storeroom where all the most important and best finds of the mission from the past more than 40 years are being held. Hidden among the large stele and limestone blocks are smaller, unique artifacts that Henning wants to study. These objects are very difficult to identify what they are. In fact, they are the only remaining pieces of chariots, chariots that were also produced in the same workshops as the arrowheads or the shields. Chariots played a key role in Egyptian warfare during Ramesses' reign. The Egyptians bound leather straps around these limestone yokes to attach each horse to the chariot. One soldier commanded the horse, while another was armed with a bow and arrow. The team also found strange stones at Pyramuses with a hole pierced through their upper half. Henning believes they were used to tether horses. Archaeologists found several of these stones in one specific area in Pyramuses, evidence that there was once a huge stable complex in this city. Spanning over 180,000 square feet with space for nearly 500 horses, it is the biggest ancient Egyptian stable ever found. And the chariot pieces are evidence this may well be the headquarters of the royal chariot fleet. Pyramuses was not just the residence of the king. It was one of the most important military bases for the Egyptian empire. Chariots were very lightweight and very, very fast and efficient. Ramesses II commanded a lethal chariot army that helped him to conquer many of the surrounding nations, even as far north as Canaan. A pharaoh leading his chariots into battle was a recognizable scene in ancient Egypt, one that also appears at a critical moment in the Exodus story. After the plagues, the pharaoh allows the Israelites to leave, then changes his mind and orders his chariot army after them. With the Red Sea blocking the Israelites' path, God orders Moses to raise his staff. Miraculously, the Red Sea parts. So Moses and his people flee to freedom. As the sea crashes back down, it sweeps away the pursuing Egyptian army. This scene is one of the most famous and fantastical in the biblical story of Exodus. In the south, Jay Silverstein journeys across the Nile to Luxor. And the monumental temple of Karnak. He wants to investigate this dramatic scene from the Exodus story. From a religious perspective, what the story does is it demonstrates how strong God can be. God can directly intervene with the laws of nature, the laws of physics. Could there be historical truth in elements of this legendary event? We see chariots occurring in the pursuit of the Israelites. That resonates as something very historically accurate. So what did happen? Jay thinks one of these walls within Luxor's Karnak Temple could provide clues to the legendary location of the Bible's parting of the waters tale. Here we are looking at the release of Seti I, the predecessor to Ramses the Great. And as we get over here, we get to something that's kind of key when we think about the Exodus. What you see is a sea or a river surrounded by reeds. Although today many associate the Israelite escape with the Red Sea, the actual Hebrew account uses the words Yam Suf, which literally translates to sea of reeds. The translation became the Red Sea and that became fixed in our mind as we know the geography and that's obviously the largest body of water that we can think of between Egypt and the Sinai and Canaan. If we go back to that Hebrew text and think of the sea of reeds, that changes our perception of what's going on. Jay thinks it's possible that the Israelites crossed a waterlogged area to escape a pursuing Egyptian army. There are shallow lakes throughout the northern part of the Nile Delta. I would take my people to a shallow swampy area where I know chariots are useless because they're gonna get bogged down. The reliefs and statues in the heart of the Temple of Karnak document the history of the Egyptian kingdom. It was built over a period of 1,500 years with 30 successive pharaohs adding to it. Geopolitics in the ancient world were fluid. Even in a period of 100 years, you might see the boundaries of Egypt dramatically change from one extreme to another extreme. The pharaohs and battles remembered within these walls may have influenced the writers of the biblical story. Tradition says that Moses himself recorded the events of Exodus after receiving the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai and escaping Egypt. But many historians believe Exodus was written down hundreds of years later in the 9th century BCE. At this time, Egypt was still a potentially dangerous neighbor for the Israelites. There's a lot of evidence for the Exodus as long as you're not trying to make it some sort of literal story that's word for word what's in the Bible. I think it's pretty difficult to put an absolute date on the Exodus. It's really covering a period of a couple hundred years where events are related to the development of the Israelites as a people. And it has a lot to do with the relationship to Egypt. We're really getting this composite story. Jay thinks the story could be a compilation of historic events which reflect centuries of the Israelites' experiences. It also delivers a moral lesson of redemption for those who trust in God's plan. At Pyramuses, Henning and his team reached the end of the dig season. We're doing a few last drawings, few last photographs here on the site. We got a lot of nice finds. So many archeological contacts on top of each other that can tell us so much more about what happened here. This is a very nice example from the Ramesside period. We're very lucky that it's still preserved and even the colors are preserved comparatively well. We hope to return next year to dig deeper into this area and to answer more questions. Slowly, the city of Pyramuses is beginning to reveal its secrets. You see basically nothing today on the surface, but the memory of it was preserved through the monotheistic religions, as there is this place called Ramses in the Bible. Founded by one of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs, this immense metropolis could have influenced one of the Bible's greatest stories. The Exodus legend is not only the origin story of a new nation. It highlights the experiences of a people living in the mighty shadow of their neighbors, the conditions in which they lived and the power of the Egyptian rulers. The story of Exodus is a valuable reflection of the world in which it was written. The Exodus story, I think, resonates with all sorts of people who have had to face oppression at various times in their history. So it's about overcoming overwhelming odds. It's about God favoring you, God giving you a chance to succeed.