The Pharaoh Tombs: Inside The Lost City Of The Pyramids | Private Lives Of Pharaohs | Real Royalty

The pyramids at Giza were, until the 20th century, the largest structures in the world. For over 4,000 years, they've aroused awe and speculation in all who've seen them. How were they built? And who built them? There have been many extraordinary theories. But now, for the first time, archaeologists are able to give clear answers to these questions. Discoveries made in the shadow of the pyramids are overturning many long-held beliefs and rewriting the history of ancient Egypt. The people who built the pyramids have now been found and reveal an astonishing insight into an ancient past. What we've been doing so far is opening small windows onto this ancient reality. It's this information that brings the people back to life, that allows us to reconstruct their lives. This is reconstructing history. When we write about this in the history book and the archaeology book, it will be the most important chapter in this book. The three pyramids at Giza represent the peak of the pyramid-building art in ancient Egypt. All were constructed in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, over the lifetimes of just three kings. Khufu's pyramid, the Great Pyramid, is the largest and was the first to be built. The other two were built by his son, Kafri, and his son, Menkaure. Although it's still vast, Menkaure's pyramid is the smallest. But it was to be the last pyramid built on the Giza plateau. Such an awesome feat would never be attempted again. And how the pharaohs succeeded in building their massive pyramid tombs has remained a mystery to this day. Most of what we know about ancient Egypt is based on what has been found in the tombs and temples of the pharaohs and the nobles who served under them. Even rituals have been recorded, like this foundation ceremony, marking the spot where a pyramid would be built. But the people who then built the pyramids themselves, and the secrets of how they did it, have been lost to history. Until recently, all excavations have produced no sign of who these people were. And as a result, our most enduring beliefs about the pyramid builders come from ancient hearsay. It's long been a common belief that the pyramids were built by slaves. That's what the Greek historian Herodotus claimed when he visited Egypt 2,000 years after the pyramids had been completed. And it's a view that has persisted right through to Hollywood. Sign up now for a free trial. And real royalty fans get 50% off their first 3 months. Just be sure to use code REALROYALTY at checkout. But that belief was to be shattered by a series of extraordinary discoveries which began 10 years ago. Nuzlat el-Saman, a small suburb of Cairo, was the unexpected site of one of the most important finds in Egyptology of the last hundred years. In 1990, a mechanical digger being used in construction work on the edge of the town hit a large block buried in the sand. The construction stopped, and archaeologists moved in. The block unearthed by the digger turned out to be the wall of a large building. As they dug through hundreds of tons of sand, a team of archaeologists began uncovering signs of a vast settlement dating from 2,500 years before Christ. It stretched for half a square mile, but there were signs of it extending much, much further. Could this be where the people who built the pyramids had lived? What's been called the Lost City of the Pyramids. The team was led by Egyptologist Mark Lehner. We have some things here that look like workers' houses, but most of what we're finding looks as though it's geared towards production. One of the first things we found were intact bakeries, where they made bread in these enormously large pots. These could be massive things, sometimes weighing up to 25 kilograms. Big, thick pots. They have these ledges, they look like bells when they're upside down. Each one of these pots is kind of like a portable baking machine. Hundreds of bread moulds and many baking pits was evidence of food production on a vast scale. It was the first clue that they might be getting close to the pyramid builders themselves. Then one day, a chance discovery was made in the dunes just above the site of the town by the chief archaeologist of the Giza Plateau, Zahi Hawass. The chief of the guards came to me and he said, Sir, a lady was riding a horse and the leg of the horse fell down and it showed a small mud brick wall. I came here, I looked at this piece of mud brick, I said, that's it, this is the tombs of the pyramid builders. Archaeologists have so far discovered over 600 tombs, positioned on two levels. At the lower level, there are a large number of simple tombs and raised above them, a collection of more ornate and better built tombs. There were no mummies inside, just bones buried with simple items, tools and pots. Almost every day we discover a tomb, or a statue, or a skeleton, or a piece of pottery. When we excavate here, we were very lucky because thieves in antiquity were not interested in this cemetery because there is no gold. And that's why they left every tomb intact. Not only were they intact, but the tombs of some individuals bore inscriptions which related to working at the pyramids. Inscriptions that confirmed the picture that had already started to emerge from the excavations below. I believe that this man was in charge of the bakery that Mark Liener found down here. And if you look here, you have very unique scenes. These people are making beer. And now, some scenes here are baking bread. There could be no doubt as to who these people were. These were indeed the tombs of the pyramid builders, overseers and workers. As well as tombs of people who ran the food facilities, there were tombs that seemed to belong to people in much more important positions. Inscriptions showed that they organised different parts of the pyramid construction, or were chief workmen. We have a title of some who say that this was the overseer of the west side of the pyramid. Titles such as sculptors, artists, inspector of building tombs, director of building tombs, all of this confirmed that those were the workmen and the overseer who built the pyramids. Taken together, the details emerging from the tombs and the evidence of food production began to suggest a larger picture. The archaeologists now knew that this was a site where many hundreds, perhaps thousands of people had lived and worked constructing the pyramids. But who were these people? Then came the first evidence which threw into doubt the generally accepted theory that they were slaves. The evidence came from the food production areas down in the pyramid town. In a lab by the pyramids, archaeologists have collected thousands of bone fragments, the remains of preparing or eating food. And they came from what to ancient Egyptians were very high quality foods. When we found evidence of fish, we found curious troughs and benches. They're very long and they're very low, they're only about ankle height. I hadn't seen anything like this before working in Egyptian archaeology. Alongside these benches we found fish bone embedded in the floor. The team discovered that many small rock-like deposits of ash on the ground contained fragile ancient fish bones. And the only way to really get it up intact without it just crumbling is to actually drip consolidant on it. And then we actually take up a piece of the floor with the fish bone in it. And the bones were not only from fish, there were also fragments of meat bones in enormous numbers. When we analysed the bone that we so meticulously recover, every scrap of animal bone, our animal bone specialist tells us there's an awful lot of cattle. And cattle was very expensive meat. It came from the provinces. And a lot of the cattle that we're finding here is prime cuts and under two years of age. So everything about our site suggests it's expensive. Meat and fish seemed like an unlikely diet for the pyramid builders if they were slaves. What was emerging was a picture of a large and well-fed workforce provided with the best foodstuffs available at the time. But the full truth as to who exactly these people were was to come from the workers themselves. From the workers' bones, the first ever profile of the pyramid builders was painstakingly pieced together. More than 600 skeletons have been unearthed so far from the workers' tombs. One by one, as they are found, scientists in Cairo have been examining every bone. From the very first, there were surprises. The first thing we met with was a female skeleton. And then we found males and females and children as well. When we made the demography of this material, we found that between the adults we have 50% are males and 50% are females. And the percent of the children, it was about 23.6%. And this is a very high percentage of children. The equal numbers of men and women found and the proportion of children with babies as young as a year old indicated to the Egyptian scientists that they were finding families. And families living and working at the pyramids didn't suggest a slave workforce. The only way to know for sure if these were families would be to look at DNA from the bodies. But extracting DNA from bones this old is incredibly difficult and fraught with problems of contamination. Very few labs around the world have ever succeeded. Even when it's been possible, the normal success rate for obtaining uncontaminated DNA from such bones is around 40%. But scientists at the Cairo University Medical School have been getting success rates of nearer 80%. The extraction of the DNA of the bones are difficult. And especially if the bones are old. But they were not contaminated. They were well preserved. They were preserved by the sand and they were not exposed to light or winds. And that's why our DNA yield is good. If these were indeed families, as the bones suggested, then DNA analysis should find genetic links between the adults and children, confirming they were true family groups. Really it was very, very nice to see that there is a relationship, a very close compatibility in the genes. So we classified them as a family. The evidence from the DNA of complete families was the strongest indication so far that the pyramid workers were not slaves. Or if they were, they had a very different way of life from the one suggested by Herodotus. But there were more surprises to come. When further analysis was carried out on the bones of the workers, it was to lead to an astonishing revelation. One that was not only to give an important insight into the life of the pyramid builders, but to disprove the slave theory once and for all. After four and a half thousand years, the people who built the pyramids had been discovered. But who were these people? Their skeletons were starting to throw doubt on the belief that they were slaves. They had been well fed and they lived in family groups. But there were more extraordinary discoveries about their lives to come from the bones. You can squeeze many, many information about their life and how they looked during life. This is our aim. When they died, were they young? We can think about the diet. We can think about the workload. There are many things which can be squeezed from the bones. And now, the bones were to show not only who these people were, but even how the pyramids had been built. Some of the 600 skeletons discovered were broken or crushed. But intriguingly, those bones had features that suggested they had received medical care. Now, for the first time, scientists were able to compare the injured bones of the workers with the only other bones displaying medical treatment that had ever been found from that period. Bones from the tombs of nobles discovered over 50 years ago. This is from the nobles. And we see here this part of the bone. It shows us that it was affected by a fracture and it is healed. You can see that the alignment of the bone is in a very good way. And I'll show you now another one from the workers. You can see the same alignment of the bone. You can see this part also of the bone. It is affected by a fracture and it is healed in almost a normal alignment. This means that these people are taking medical care like the nobles. If the workers had been slaves, it seems very unlikely that they should receive the same medical attention as the nobles of the period. A papyrus dating from a thousand years after the time of the Giza pyramids shows just how much time and skill was needed for medical care. Experts believe the workers' bones themselves suggest that the same methods described in the papyrus might well have been followed during the pyramid building at Giza. The ancient Egyptian doctor approached sitting fractures in a very similar way to the way we approach them as well today. The first point was to observe the fracture, to lay on the hands to actually look at the fracture. The doctor's assistant would have taken hold of the opposite arm, the healthy arm which wasn't fractured, whilst the doctor himself actually took hold of the fractured arm. And both of them would have pulled at the same time. Once the fracture had been reduced, the instructions here are quite unusual and quite particular because it then tells the doctor to apply this unknown mineral to the arm and also honey. Then these linen splints were applied to either side of the fracture and it was wrapped in bandages. And honey is then applied daily until the patient recovers. The bones went on to reveal more signs of medical care that have astonished scientists around the world. One of the most remarkable finds was evidence of amputation, among the earliest examples ever found. To survive an amputation in an age without drugs or medical equipment was nothing short of extraordinary. The high standard of medical care that the labourers at the Giza plateau enjoyed makes it quite unlikely that they were slaves to start off with. For instance, spend time and effort looking after slaves. If this was simply slave labour, then another slave can be brought in. All the evidence emerging from the discoveries now seemed conclusive. These people were not slaves. In fact, based on the food and medical care they received, they could even be described as privileged. But the bones also showed that the life of a pyramid worker was by no means an easy one. When scientists examined backbones, they found that most of them showed indications of extreme stress. This is one of the vertebrae, lumbar vertebrae, of one of the workers. It shows signs of stress. These signs appear in many ways. We can see this bone. It is compressed. We can see the curvature here. And also the edges here and the lower edge show these are the signs of stress that we see. The spinal compression resulted in backbones that were severely distorted, bent to an enormous degree. Comparison with the bones of the nobles showed that the workers were dying on average ten years earlier. The signs of stress and early age of death weren't surprising. After all, building a pyramid was a colossal undertaking for these mere mortals. Each of the blocks in the Great Pyramid of Khufu weighs up to ten tons and measures more than a cubic meter. To cut, transport and place just one block like this would have been a feat in itself. But the Great Pyramid contains 2.3 million such blocks. How could mere humans have built something like this? This pyramid was made like a stairway with tiers or steps. When this, its first form, was completed, the workmen used levers made of short wooden logs to raise the rest of the stones. They heaved up the blocks from the ground. In his account, the Greek historian Herodotus was clear. He had been told when he visited Egypt that it took 100,000 slaves 30 years to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu. But a very different picture was emerging from the excavations at Giza. The discoveries had proved Herodotus wrong once. The pyramid builders were not slaves. Could they now shed any light on how the pyramids were built and test the numbers that Herodotus had given? Based on inscriptions found in the tombs and the number of skeletons discovered, Zahi Hawass was coming to the amazing conclusion that there were just 5,000 core workers, skilled artisans and overseers, and a mere 15,000 labourers. I can say 20,000 workmen. 15,000 who come in rotation and they work for 12 hours, but rotation. Every three months they go to the villages, another group they come back, another gang they come back. But the 5,000 are the permanent technicians who work for the king. Dr Hawass' figures were an astonishing 80% lower than those of Herodotus. Could they be right? It was an American construction expert who provided the answer. As they were making discoveries at Giza, Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner began working with Craig Smith, who planned huge modern structures, airports and subways. When he looked at Herodotus, he wasn't convinced. 100,000 workers would have been 10% of the entire Egyptian population of that time. It didn't seem plausible or likely that it really took that many people for so long. And that kind of intrigued me and spurred me on, so to speak, to look further into how we would actually build it with the technologies that the Egyptians had at hand. With the new information emerging from the discoveries at Giza, Smith set out to apply the techniques which he had used in planning modern projects to Khufu's Great Pyramid. But in order to calculate how many workers would be needed to build the pyramid, he had to determine how the pyramid itself could have been constructed. More discoveries on the site at Giza were bringing to light the techniques which had been used. Mark Lehner had found workshops for making copper tools, and inside the workers' tombs were implements made from stone and flint, which had been used for cutting the limestone pyramid blocks. So the next question was how quickly the workers could have quarried the blocks using such rudimentary tools. One of the constraints that one faces is how many blocks can you produce in the quarries and move up to the site with a work crew of a few thousand people, which is what we anticipated would be available for that function. One of the things that really was spectacular was being able to see the quarry marks, the blocks, where they were going to be cut. I was able to verify a number of the assumptions that we made about the time it would have taken to do that. Using fairly simple tools, stone tools and small copper chisels, they would have cut around each block that they wished to extract. When they reached the bottom of the block, they would have started undercutting, and then finally, using large wooden levers, they would have prized each gigantic block free. And you can just imagine the conditions in a quarry like this. Smith's calculations showed that a pyramid block would have to be cut, moved to the site and set in place at a rate of one block every two to three minutes. So now he could begin to work out how many workers were needed. But how would they have moved the stones to the pyramid site? We have a clue from a tomb of a high official of the Egyptian government, a few hundred years after the pyramids were built. And in that tomb there's a scene of a colossal stone statue of the tomb owner being transported. And it's being carried on a wooden sledge, dragged along by teams of men. And the passage of the sledge is being eased by the pouring of water just in front of it to lubricate the ground surface. The problem of how the builders could have transported the blocks to the site had been solved. But a bigger question remained. How did they then raise them up the pyramid itself? And when you think of it that the top of the Great Pyramid, Kufu's Pyramid, is almost equivalent to a 50-story building, it sort of puts it in perspective. And moving stones that weigh a tonne or more up to that height becomes a central issue of construction. Mark Lehner attempted lifting enormous blocks with levers, just as Herodotus had described, and concluded that building a pyramid this way would have been difficult, if not impossible. But on the Giza Plateau there are the remains of parallel walls used to enclose ramps leading from the quarries to the pyramid sites. And he believes that similar walls would have enclosed the ramps which were used to take huge limestone blocks up the pyramid itself. The space between them was filled with debris, and the walls retained the debris. And this formed a roadway upon which they dragged the stones that they were quarrying into the south to the north for building the monuments. They're made out of limestone chips, gypsum, and tuffla. And in fact, the area to the south of Giza, the area of the quarries, is filled with millions of cubic metres of this kind of material. And a lot of this is the remains of the Great Pyramid ramps, I believe, that were taken apart and pushed back into the quarries at the completion of the big projects. Which were the big Giza pyramids. But Craig Smith needed to establish exactly what type of ramps would have been used. Clearly, you would not have a single ramp to the top of the pyramid. A simple calculation that you could make would show that would take more material, more work than building the pyramid itself. So we believe the Egyptians were like you and I. They were rational people. They didn't want to work any harder than they had to. And so they would find a way to do that with the minimum amount of effort. The team tested a range of ramp designs using 3D computer animation. After many months, they had developed the most likely design. Our model showed us that if you built a ramp up to where you're roughly at a third of the height of the pyramid, that enabled you to put half or more of the blocks in place. And so we envisioned a big ramp that would get to that level. And then after that, a smaller ramp that wrapped around the pyramid, built off the pyramid itself. Because at that point you're handling smaller blocks and there are far fewer blocks to be placed. And so that struck us as a rational way to do it. The ramps themselves would have been attached to overhanging layers of limestone on the pyramid blocks and then removed from the summit down. But that wasn't the end. Today, only at the very top of one of the Giza pyramids, that of Kafri, is there any trace of the final stage of construction. Well, the pyramids look impressive enough today as they are. But if you imagine that when they were first finished, they would have been coated from top to bottom in smooth white limestone from Tura across the river, then the effect must have been truly dazzling. Most of this casing has been stripped off many centuries ago to build the city of medieval Cairo. But if I hold up a piece of Tura limestone and let the sun reflect on it, you can see just how dazzling the pyramids must have first appeared. The limestone facing would have been applied to the pyramids as the ramps were removed. Having shown how the Great Pyramid was probably built, Craig Smith could finally address the question of how many workers it had taken over how long. Could the apparent evidence on the ground that a mere 20,000 people were involved be right? Or was Herodotus closer to the truth when he said it took 100,000 workers laboring for 30 years? Smith drew up a detailed work plan. Every activity was accounted for in terms of the number of people required to perform it and the time it would take. Studies indicated two to three years to prepare for construction, five years to actually construct the pyramid, and two years or so to remove the ramps and clean up and finalize the site. We found that the peak workforce occurred in the fourth, fifth, and sixth year of construction when a lot of laborers were required to move the blocks up the ramps onto the pyramid. And that was about 40,000 people. At first sight, Smith's figure of 40,000 workers appeared to contradict both theories. But it was based on the number of workers required to build the Great Pyramid in the shortest amount of time, 10 years. Yet the historical evidence suggests that each of the pyramids was built throughout the reign of each king, approximately 20 years. And over 20 years, Smith concluded, it could be done with just 20,000 workers. His maximum workforce for the Great Pyramid was something on the order of 40,000. But perhaps it could have been done for somewhere as low as 20,000. And that's getting right in line, first of all, with Egyptologists' assumptions. And they're coming at it from another point of view. But the evidence, the data that we're finding, yeah, I think is pointing to an order of magnitude of 10,000, 20,000 people altogether. Craig Smith's calculations were consistent with the archaeological findings. All the evidence indicates it took 20,000 people to build the Great Pyramid in about 20 years. The discoveries at Giza had proved Herodotus wrong. The workforce was not made up of slaves, and they numbered far fewer than 100,000. But they raised a big question of their own. How were 20,000 free men and women organized into the construction of the pyramids? And why did they do it? Further discoveries were to suggest a totally new theory about the building of the pyramids. I'm almost more interested now in how the pyramids built Egypt than in how the Egyptians built the pyramids. The discoveries made at Giza had proved that the builders of the pyramids, far from being slaves, were treated as something of an elite. And they had shown that they numbered 20,000 people, not the 100,000 claimed by Herodotus. But now the bones of the workers were to suggest a remarkable new theory about where these people had come from, and why they had come to the pyramids. Many bizarre theories about the pyramid builders have been based on the conviction that the Egyptians themselves could not have built such enormous structures. It's very important to know that they were Egyptians. They were not people who came out of space. They were not, came from lost civilization as we hear these days. Many stories that do not really have any truth in it at all. But would the bones of the workers support Zahi Hawass' contention that the workforce were Egyptian? Before the discoveries at Giza, scientists in Cairo had been analyzing the DNA of modern Egyptians. The workers' bones were now providing ancient DNA. It meant that the scientists could compare the two sets of samples, and the results were compelling. People who are living here, they are the same as the people who had been living 6,000 years ago. And now the moderns are the descendants of these ancient Egyptians. The DNA research confirmed that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the people still living in the Nile Valley are closely related to those ancient Egyptians. It proves for no doubt that the builders of the pyramids were Egyptian. And you know, if they were not Egyptians, they would never be buried here. They would never be buried in the same method as the ancient Egyptians. You do not have any doubt to tell us that those people were not Egyptians at all. They were Egyptian by blood. The DNA had proved that the pyramid workers were Egyptian. But their bones were now to reveal more, and something quite unexpected. During her research, Bomina Karmel had obtained DNA samples from modern Egyptians, which showed genetic variations around the country. When she compared these with the DNA taken from the workers' bones, there were startling correspondences. From our preliminary studies, we can see people coming from the whole Nile Valley, coming from the very upper, the Aswan, to the Nile Delta. And so I can say that all the Nile Valley citizens at that time, they were participating in the building of the pyramids. At a time when the world's first cities were being founded, people had come to Giza from all over Egypt. But why did they come? There were clues in the design of the workers' tombs. Some of them were mounds of stone or mud, which looked like miniature pyramids. If workers were building their own pyramids, it began to suggest that pyramid building was a widely shared ambition. And the king's pyramid was simply the most important example. They say in the old kingdom, pyramids were only for kings and queens. And they say later, in the new kingdom, from 1550 BC or 3000 years ago, pyramids became for everyone. But now I can say that pyramids from the old kingdom became for everyone. If pyramids were for everyone, then perhaps building the king's pyramid was also for everyone. Perhaps people came together from around the country to build a pyramid for their king, who was also their god. Not because they had to, but because they wanted to. There was evidence that the food provided for the pyramid builders was also coming from all over Egypt. From the animal bones recovered at the excavation site, Mark Lehner was finding that cattle had been brought into Giza from all around the country. The fact that we have such a preponderance of cattle suggests that this was a kind of national project that's being provisioned and supported by all of Egypt and its provinces far and wide. To be very flip and short about it, these pyramids were like Amish barn raisings in the United States. Now in an Amish barn raising, the families all come out. The young people, the teenagers in the family, the young men, probably don't have a choice. It's obligatory that you come out to the barn raising. But it's not something they are totally adverse to, because there's feasting and there's socializing. Communities would come together to create something for a kind of father figure. Zahi Hawass was forming the same view of the building of the pyramids as a national project, a grand scheme in which Egyptians from all over the country volunteered to come and work towards a common goal. We have to understand that the Great Pyramid was a national project of the whole nation. The one million individuals who lived in that time, for 23 years, they get up in the morning. Every individual in Egypt thinks of building the pyramid. Hawass and Lehner were forming a picture, a picture of the pyramids as a great socializing force. Young people came from villages, perhaps, numbering several hundred, a few thousand. And you can imagine them coming here and seeing something that probably looked a little bit like a Cecil B. DeMille epic. And they saw people numbering in tens of thousands, and then they were spun off. There's evidence from ancient Egyptian texts that you served a period of time in the grunt labor. There were specialists who were here full time. And then the grunt labor was spun off, perhaps back to their villages. The advances were not in tools, techniques, and technology. The advances were in social organization. To organize 20,000 people from all over the country to work on one huge building project had never been attempted before. At the workers' tombs, Zahi Hawass was finding inscriptions which showed how the workers were arranged into teams, or files. Each gang was 1,000 workmen. And each gang, it changed to five files. Each file consisted of 200 workmen. Each file had a name. And that's really the organization of building the pyramid. There was now evidence of tens of thousands of people being drawn from all over Egypt and organized by a sophisticated and complex bureaucracy. Some believe that with this process, the pyramids laid the very foundations of modern government. Quite clearly, in order to mobilize a large workforce to build a pyramid such as the Great Pyramid at Giza, the court needed to have absolute control of resources, both manpower and other economic resources. And so what we see at the time of the Giza pyramids really lays the foundations for Egyptian civilization later on. When a sickly King Menkaure came to inspect his pyramid nearing completion on the Giza plateau, it marked the end of an astonishing era. Pyramids would never again be built on this scale. Menkaure's predecessor had died before his Great Pyramid was finished. To avoid the same fate, Menkaure had planned his own pyramid to be smaller, but he also died before its final completion. It was a lesson to every king who was to reign after him. Now, an unfinished pyramid is absolutely no use at all if you're an Egyptian king. And so perhaps the lesson that was learned over the generations was that unless you came to the throne at a very young age, it was safer to begin a much smaller pyramid in the secure knowledge that you might finish it before your death and therefore it would be effective for you in the afterlife. In a period of under a hundred years, one of the greatest achievements in civilization had been completed. And although such structures were never attempted again, the legacy of the pyramids in terms of national organization is arguably still with us four and a half thousand years later. We are now in the beginning of the 21st century, but we still learn from these people because these people, they left us a civilization that always clear our future. This excavation will continue for another 30 years, but I always believe that you never know what the sand of Egypt might hide of secrets. The pyramids have always provoked awe and wonder. Now the discoveries at Giza have added another dimension to our understanding and rewritten history. The pyramids were the achievement not of a hundred thousand slaves, but of 20,000 ordinary men and women.