How the Great Pyramid Was Built? | Lost Secrets of the Pyramid | Episode 1 | Full Documentary

Egypt's Great Pyramid. The tallest structure on Earth for thousands of years. It all started with the quest to make a gigantic pyramid that was perfect. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted before. The Great Pyramid wasn't just a building, it is where the king would have lived eternally. For four and a half thousand years, how this super-sized burial chamber was built has been an enigma. But could archaeologists now finally solve the mystery, thanks to amazing new discoveries? From a pyramid worker's journal lost for thousands of years... This is a very new way to see the building of this pyramid. ...to a mysteriously entombed boat being excavated right now at the pyramid's base. Will these ancient clues and a pioneering new experiment... ...help bring the incredible secrets of the Egyptians back to life? And reveal what it was really like for the people who lived and died... ...creating the greatest monument the world had ever seen. The Pyramids of Giza. A towering series of giant tombs built by the ancient Egyptians. The oldest and largest is the Great Pyramid. It's the only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This was the dream of the pharaoh Khufu, who wanted the grandest tomb of all time. But exactly how such an ancient civilization could build this colossus has been a mystery for millennia. And archaeologist Mark Lehner is still looking for answers. There are 2,300,000 stones in this pyramid. And when you look closely you can see the marks of the human hand. Chisel marks. Nothing like this had been seen before in the history of Egypt. What makes the pyramid even more of a mystery... ...is how they managed to build it in this unforgiving desert. 4,500 years ago, the Egyptians completely transformed this sandy plateau overlooking the river Nile... ...by building the biggest monument known to man. The base covers an area the size of ten football fields. Builders found and transported so much stone here... ...they could have built a wall half a meter tall around the entire planet. But their mission was a monument over 140 meters high... ...that would become the tallest building in the world for millennia. Building the Great Pyramid, achieving this, seems impossible. This is not something that was done by a primitive society. So how did the ancient Egyptians manage this incredible feat? Could a phenomenal new discovery 250 kilometers away reveal the answer? Wadi al-Jarf is a remote desert settlement... ...that the men who worked on the pyramids used as a supply hub. During excavations, archaeologists unearthed the most ancient papyrus manuscript ever found. Pierre Tallet is decoding the text and searching for answers... ...that could finally reveal how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. Since the very day of the discovery, it was quite evident... ...that we had the oldest papyrus ever found in the world. Pierre wants to see if this document really is about the Great Pyramid. Does it tell of the pharaoh Khufu? Pierre thinks an ancient symbol, known as a cartouche, could give him the answer. The cartouche is kind of a circle... ...in which the Egyptian people used to place the name of the ruler. You have the phonetic script of Kh, Hu, Hef, Hu... ...which is spelling the name of Khufu. It's an incredible breakthrough... ...as this is the only papyrus from the time of Khufu that mentions the pharaoh. But Pierre also needs evidence that it relates directly to the Great Pyramid. This small triangle is the shape of the pyramid. The name of the pyramid is Ahet Khufu, the Horizon of Khufu... ...and we have hit, I think, at least 20 times on those papyri. Pierre is in no doubt that this document was written by someone working on Khufu's incredible building. But the big question is who. Pierre manages to decode the author's name. It's a man called Mera. The papyrus reveals that Mera was an inspector in charge of a cargo boat... ...and 40 elite workmen. He describes how his team's daunting job... ...was transporting thousands of tons of stone along the River Nile. And Pierre now knows that Mera's destination... ...was the construction site of the Great Pyramid. Pierre is revealing that the River Nile and cargo boats like Mera's... ...played a bigger role in building the pyramids than many experts imagined. This is a very new way to see the building of this pyramid... ...because we don't know so much about the way it has been built. And those documents are providing very precious information... ...about the way the workers were able to build such a big construction. Pierre wants to analyse Mera's incredible journal in forensic detail... ...to see if it can unlock even more secrets... ...about how the Egyptians constructed Khufu's giant tomb. But in Cairo, one archaeologist wants to go even further. I have a lot of questions on the navigation on the Nile... ...for the working boat carrying stones. I'm really excited. Mohamed Abdel Maguid and his team think the best way to learn more... ...about how Mera transported stone from quarry to pyramid... ...is to recreate every step of his journey. Mohamed's plan is to build a wooden cargo boat using Mera's techniques... ...and cut a stone from the same quarry that he used. He'll then attempt to sail the stone block up the Nile... ...before dragging it to the foot of the pyramid. Mera added very good information for us. Maybe experimenting this will help a lot to get a step forward in the field. Mohamed's first challenge is to rebuild Mera's boat. The papyrus reveals the vessel was strong enough to carry giant rocks. But Mohamed needs more clues about how it was made and what it looked like. He thinks the answers may lie 20 kilometres from the Giza pyramids in Saqqara. This is an ancient underground tomb that was built just after the Great Pyramid... ...for a man called T. It's the grandest and most highly decorated tomb for any non-royal in this area. Showing that T must have been very important. This is the statue of T. T was one of the high officials. We have a lot of descriptions of his jobs. One of them is the royal headdresser. But it's not T's hairdressing that Mohamed is interested in. He hopes some extraordinary wall carvings will reveal the secrets of Mera's rock-carrying vessel. This tomb is very famous for its scenes of boat construction. On only one boat you can count 13 people. Everyone is busy with something. There are no written accounts from Mera's time of how they built their cargo boats. So deciphering these scenes is Mohamed's best chance of getting his vessel right. First, he sees what tools they had. Here you can see them. They were using the saw. Here we have them just using the small blade of the axe. Mohamed can tell that the Egyptians made their boats strong enough to carry huge rocks... ...through the precision and strength of their joinery. Everything had to fit exactly. They put the plank and they start to push it into the hull to make one unit. Here you can see between the two planks we have a tenon. They have to hammer them to force them inside. There is a lot of things to learn according to what we know from the old times. But most importantly, Mohamed can finally see what these boats really looked like... ...and the exact shape they took. At the boatyard, the team is starting to build. Just like the carvings showed, in places the team will use long and very thick planks... ...that run the entire length of the boat to give strength and stability. The tomb helped a lot in the development of the construction of the boat. The shape of the planks, the method of the assemblage, the importance of the beams. It will be interesting for us in order to understand... ...how the ancient Egyptian man has all this trust in his skills. Mohamed's boat will carry an average-sized pyramid block. To cope with this two-and-a-half-ton stone, Mohamed's vessel will have to be incredibly strong. Transporting rocks by boat was much easier for the ancient Egyptians... ...than hauling them large distances over land. But there's a mystery. Today, the pyramid is over eight kilometers from the river. So how did Mehra get his boat and massive cargo closer to the construction site? In the desert of Wadi al-Jarf, Pierre thinks he may have found the answer in Mehra's journal. He has discovered that Mehra didn't just ferry rocks. His team was also employed to overcome this huge access problem. What we can see from the logs is that Mehra is not working all the time... ...about bringing the blocks to the pyramid. It's only one of the different missions he has during the year. The season that Mehra's team worked was important... ...because the Nile acted very differently through the year. Experts have discovered that the course of the Nile has changed. In Khufu's time, it flowed about two kilometers from the pyramid site. This was still too far away for Mehra's boat. But every year in summer, rains would swell the Nile. And a heavy flood could mean the water came to within half a kilometer of the pyramid. But this floodwater wasn't deep enough for heavily laden cargo boats. So how could Mehra's team exploit the flood to get closer? The papyrus shows that Mehra ferried men to the pyramid for this specific task. On the first part of the document, we have just two way trips going very quickly... ...to transport people that are doing something in the area of Giza. And the date would indicate that we are probably in July or August... ...the beginning of the flood of the Nile. Mehra was racing against the clock to put his team in place for the start of the flood season. Their task was an engineering mission that was vital to the success of the pyramid. The papyrus reveals that Mehra and his team of 40 men... ...were working on a dyke, a vast bank of earth that holds back water. They were engineering the landscape. Mehra writes that the team pulled up wooden pilings. What he's describing is the opening of the dyke... ...and sudden release of floodwater. Mehra was deliberately channeling water to get his vessel much closer to the pyramid. If Pierre has decoded the papyrus correctly... ...there must have been a huge man-made channel to contain the vast amounts of floodwater. But if that's true, where's the evidence? At the Giza plateau, Mark Lehner and his team are trying to figure out... ...what route Mehra's mysterious waterway might have taken. What we're essentially trying to do is find the floodplain of his time. To locate the hidden channel, Mark needs to see which land was flooded occasionally... ...and which land was underwater most of the year in Mehra's canal. The key is silt. You can't ask for a clearer difference. You have sand from a period of perhaps wind-blown sand... ...and then the Nile is coming back and depositing this thick silt. This is the normal profile. Sand from the desert, silt from the Nile. This silt shows Mark that this area was just a floodplain and not a waterway. But he's not giving up on the hunt for canals yet. Because this silt was deposited long after the building of the pyramid. These upper silt layers are from the Greek and Roman periods. We actually know that from some analysis, but also from some pottery. And you still see some of this late Greco-Roman pottery embedded in these silt layers. Mark needs to find the silt that was deposited during the reign of Khufu. And he's tracked down samples from much deeper in the earth. For many meters, the drill cores came up with nothing but dry sand. And then suddenly they came down onto very concentrated, thick silt. The contrast couldn't be more stark. And the several meters of this concentrated clay told us that there must be an ancient waterway. So we knew Nile water had to be there, filling an ancient waterway with that clay and silt. We've outlined the central canal basin, which we think was the primary delivery area to the foot of the Giza Plateau. By analysing core samples from right across the pyramid site, Mark is able to solve one of the biggest riddles of the pyramid. How huge blocks of stone were transported so efficiently to the construction site. Four and a half thousand years ago, ancient engineers had to transform the landscape on a titanic scale. They built a series of canals, connecting large ports. When engineers opened dikes during the annual flood, water filled these cuttings to the brim. They allowed cargo boat crews like Merers to dock within just a few hundred meters of the growing pyramid. The Nile's water was brought to the construction site through an artificial, man-made port. It's ingenious engineering like this that finally explains how the pyramid could be built at all. Khufu started something that must have been truly a very complex port city. It's the largest port city of its kind. And that's why I'm more interested not in how the Egyptians built the pyramids, but how the pyramids helped to build Egypt. Water was key to Khufu being able to construct his great pyramid. And archaeologists now think that the Nile wasn't just essential for transporting materials. Khufu could have used it to get workers to dedicate their lives to his monumental tomb. Now, on an island in the Nile, Egyptologist Salima Ikram is investigating the link between the river and the pharaoh's power. She thinks that the Nile was the secret to Khufu's authority, and reveals why people like Merer were prepared to devote themselves to constructing his monument. The Nile was key to Egyptian civilization. Without the Nile, Egypt wouldn't have existed. Floods were vital to irrigate the land, so the Egyptians built nilometers like this to measure the inundation. Water would come in and it would climb and climb and climb as the flood rose, and you can see all of these markings here that measure the height. When the flood reached a midpoint in this building, the ancient Egyptians knew a good harvest would follow. About here is where it would have been an ideal flood situation. Too far below, people would have been starving to death. Too far above, they would have been washed away so there was no one left to starve. The ancient Egyptians didn't think of the annual flood as a natural phenomenon. It was something controlled by the gods. And that made the divine Khufu incredibly powerful. For the ancient Egyptians, the king was Egypt, the land of Egypt, and that also meant the Nile. So if the land was fertile and strong, it meant that was because the king was strong and good. If the Nile was failing, it clearly meant that there was something wrong with the king. So the king's success and his strength as a ruler, in fact, was also very much tied to the strength and power of the Nile. Khufu's masterstroke was to exploit the widespread belief that he controlled the flooding of this mighty river. Pyramid workers wanted to construct his giant tomb, as they knew that pleasing this powerful pharaoh would mean that the land would be watered and they would not starve. Farmers would also happily work for him, and their taxes helped finance the giant build. From what we know from the few texts that are available to us, it seems that the floods were quite regular. So clearly, everything was working well, the country was rich, the land was flooding regularly, the pharaoh was in command, and he was able to collect a very good revenue in taxation. It is through the wealth that he accrued that the great pyramids could be built, and his workers could be paid. So in fact, the whole taxation system is really linked to the pyramids and their construction. Khufu's divine control over his workers was essential, as many of the construction jobs were extremely dangerous and gruelling. So what was expected of labourers by their ruler? Mark Lehner wants to see how far workers were pushed by Khufu, and is heading to an area deep under the monument to find out. This is the descending passage. It goes down more than a hundred metres. From here, we have to crawl on hands and knees, making the access even more difficult. This hidden passageway leads to the subterranean chamber. This is where Mark thinks he can find evidence of the extreme demands that Khufu made of his workers. You come in to what is essentially an unfinished artificial cave. Somewhere, you're probably about seven metres this way. Dead centre, under the centre axis, is the Great Pyramid, 30 metres below its floor level. Some archaeologists think this chamber was planned to be filled with offerings, but was abandoned when the pharaoh died. Whatever its purpose, Mark is starting to discover just how gruelling a job it was to carve out this space. Men were down here bashing the stone away, to hollow out the chamber. And we can even see, all around us, how they went about it. And here, like in all unfinished projects, you can definitely see the human hand, and maybe some of the human misery behind pyramid building. Workers had to labour in extreme conditions, and it definitely wasn't a job for the claustrophobic. These lead channels, you can still see the chips that the last workers left behind when they put down their tools. Now the dust must have been just awful. These conditions must have been the hardest, but Khufu clearly didn't care. Or if he cared, he cared enough about his pyramid to insist that they complete the job. Khufu was prepared to push his workers to the limit for this giant tomb that would take him to the afterlife. Everything had to be on a massive scale. So the Great Pyramid is formed from more than 2 million blocks of stone. Underneath, 30 metres down, is the subterranean chamber drilled into the bedrock. This is one of three chambers in total. Within the body of the pyramid is a small room known as the Queen's Chamber. Just above, a sloping hallway called the Grand Gallery leads to the focal point of the pyramid, the King's Chamber. This room holds a heavy sarcophagus at the very centre of the pyramid. The pharaoh could only thrive in the afterlife if his mortal body was kept safe. And the bigger and more intricate this giant tomb, the better the chances that nobody would ever make it in and find his corpse. But the larger the design became, the bigger the number of rocks that had to be brought here by ship. At his boat workshop in Cairo, Mohamed Abdel Maguid is trying to construct a wooden vessel like the one Mera used in Khufu's reign. But he's concerned that his vessel may not cope with the heavy rocks needed to build a giant pyramid. We want to be sure that the boat is strong enough to hold and support the weight of the stone. I don't think that Mera had these fears or thinking about the problems of weight and so. Because we are not experienced, but he had experience. Mohamed's team have assembled the eight metre long boat using techniques learned from ancient tomb carvings. But they're still not sure what they should use to keep all the pieces together. Can Mohamed find the answer from one of the most remarkable new discoveries in Egypt? It's an incredible find at the foot of the Great Pyramid itself. This is the number one project, not only in Egypt, but in all over the world. Essa Zidane oversees work here. His team are recovering artefacts from a deep pit carved into the rock. What they have found here is astonishing. These are pieces of a dismantled ship. This dismantled vessel was an offering for Khufu that he was supposed to reassemble in the afterlife. The team now needs to try and find out what he would have used to hold it together. So far, they have discovered nothing that suggests metal or wooden pegs were used. Will, working out how the pieces slot together, give them the answer. The challenge for the team trying to reassemble this boat is that time has taken its toll on the wood. As you see, it was in very bad conditions, very deteriorated. The humidity and temperature is very, very high. This was the main factor of this deterioration. Investigators inject resin and fill missing areas to restore the plank's original shape. This plank represents one of the larger planks that we've worked on. So far, there will be bigger ones, I'm sure, but this one is about eight and a half metres long. Presumably one of the deck planks near the edge of the boat. If I can make this plank strong and stable, then we can learn a lot from the material, from the boat itself. It's like a giant but incredibly fragile jigsaw puzzle. So the best way to get answers is with the latest technology. The 3D scans reveal that there are holes in many of the planks. Which all line up. This suggests that the boat was never intended to have nails. Holes like this would have been used to loop rope through. Incredibly, the team has discovered that this boat was literally sewn together. We found ropes like this in the pits. They used this rope to join the wooden pieces together, to fix it together without any nails. The construction and layout of Khufu's ship provides vital clues about the techniques that must have been used to assemble boats at the time. But this was a ceremonial vessel that the pharaoh may never have even used on the Nile. Could rope really have been used to assemble cargo boats carrying heavy stones? In Wadi al-Jarf, Pierre Tallet is looking for clues that could reveal if Mera used rope to sew together his cargo boat. And Pierre thinks he's found the place where Mera stored his vessel. A set of caves that have lain undisturbed for thousands of years. What is strange here is that the place has been completely forgotten for more than four millennia. And it's very rare in Egypt to start excavation in a place which is absolutely not known before. So far, his team has uncovered 31 caves. They are known as galleries and are carved deep into the hillside. Mera used this one himself. When we excavated this gallery, it was completely filled up with potteries wearing the name of the team of Mera. It's about 23 meters long. It's one of the longer caves that we have here. The main purpose was to store the boats, so you had to have a cave that was very dry to avoid the entrance of water inside. Pierre's team have found fragments of the boats that Mera stored in these caves. And the evidence suggests that he did indeed use ropes to fix them together. Here it's really exceptional because we have found some very long pieces of wood. We have a large amount of ropes. So we also discovered that they dismantled the boats, took off the ropes between the pieces of wood. This means that Mohamed will have to use just rope to hold his entire vessel together. So back in Cairo, Mohamed's team now know what they are up against. But will their sewn-together boat ever be strong enough to take a huge rock? We have around 1,000 holes to cut. And the ropes will do the job of maintaining the shape and the hull form and also give strength. The team thread over 5 kilometers of rope in total, through holes carefully looped through the wood. After months of planning and construction, the cargo boat is finally ready. But exactly what kind of stone was Mera carrying? Mera's papyrus reveals that his cargo was a very special rock, glistening white limestone from the Tura quarry. But what were these white blocks needed for? And why was Mera transporting so much of this heavy stone, when there was plenty of other rock at quarries far nearer the pyramid? In Giza, Mark Lehner is investigating. So this is the fine white limestone, the kind Mera was bringing from Tura. It's some of the last remaining casing stones here at the center of the North Bay. That's what they used to cloak the outer pyramid, making joints so tight you can't get a knife blade in between. When the pyramid was complete, this would have been a blinding landscape. In fact, it must have been hard on the eyes. What you see today, though, is not the glittering pyramid as Khufu's engineers designed it. Unfortunately, out of more than 920 meters of casing stone at the base, only 50 meters are left. In the Middle Ages, builders plundered the valuable casing stones. So the pyramid now is mostly what lay behind them. The stones visible today are poorer quality limestone quarried from close by. Khufu only managed to get his record-breaking pyramid built by taking shortcuts wherever possible. The entire pyramid might look like it is built from just piled up rocks, but Mark is discovering this is far from true. Now, from a distance, this just looks like another block. But it's one solid piece of bedrock that the Egyptians left in the core of the pyramid as they quarried away the outer perimeter and leveled it. Ancient engineers left a bedrock mound under the Great Pyramid like a huge raised foundation. This meant builders had to haul hundreds of thousands fewer tons of stone here. But this was just one of the time-saving measures that helped Khufu's engineers get the tomb built on schedule. They worked out that blocks in the center of the pyramid didn't need to be carefully cut and squared off. Gaps between them could simply be filled with rubble and mortar. Only the outer few layers had to be laboriously squared off by hand to allow Mera's casing stones to be fitted precisely. And so here clinging to the pyramid are these very irregular pieces set in great globs of mortar just as fill. And you can see it. You can see the slop factor in the pyramid. So what may look like shoddy workmanship is, in fact, another secret that helped the Egyptians succeed with their monster build. But it was only Mera's brilliant limestone that would give the pyramid its perfect appearance. So this had to come from faraway Tura. But what was involved in getting the huge quantities of stones needed using manpower alone? With Mera's manuscript as a guide, Egyptologist Adel Kalani will quarry an average-sized casing stone as cargo for the reconstruction boat. The new discovery of the papyrus of Mera, that's extremely important. That's because its evidence gives us information about the life of the workmen for cutting and splitting the blocks. That before impossible to understand. The limestone casing for the pyramid had to be as close to perfect as possible. It's quite important to have very little cracks, one color. Outside Cairo, Tura limestone is still quarried today. But Adel and his team, led by veteran stonemason Fatih Ali Salama, will use ancient methods. Adel wants to cut a block over a meter and a half long. Almost a meter wide, it will be impossible to cut. And a meter deep, it will weigh about two and a half tons. This is a chisel with a pointed edge, and this is actually one of the main tools that ancient Egyptians used. The sound actually with hammering, and also the sound with this kind of chisel working with the stone, it was kind of like music for the workmen. It keeps them active. Murray would be very familiar with this kind of sounds, very familiar with this kind of scenes of the quarrying activities. The ancient Egyptians did this back-breaking work all year round, despite the extreme heat. Any delay in supply would have brought the construction of the pyramid to a standstill. The team first cuts deep channels to carve out the sides of the block. If you go for the quarry faces in ancient times, you will find more or less the same dimensions. The same techniques that are used right now, it's also the same one used in old times. As the trenches get deeper, the quarrymen find it more difficult to reach the bottom of them. The workmen almost finish from this first part of the trenches here. But they have a problem. The tools cannot reach the area just far away from their hands. They cannot get further to finish these trenches from this point. Evidence uncovered in ancient quarries shows that pyramid builders hit a similar problem. And to solve it, they would widen the channels so they could reach deeper. This space is enough for the workmen to continue with their tools, so they can keep continue working with the trench to finish it. It takes 12 men 90 minutes of gruelling graft to hack out the shape of the block. The stone is completely free from the whole side, but the bottom, which is really the most important and also the most difficult part. If they damage the rock as they cut it free, they'll have to start from scratch. So they carefully use wedges, trying to get the stone to splinter along the joint. They've done it. But now they need to lever the huge block off the quarry face and roll it onto the flat ground below. It's job done, but only if the rock hasn't been damaged. Mehra would have rejected any that were cracked. Mehra, if he would have a very, very close look for the blocks like this, very carefully investigate the blocks before transport to his boot. Otherwise it would be a big problem for him. Today, this block passes Adel's inspection and will now be used to test Mehra's reconstruction boat. But how much stone like this did Mehra carry on his vessel? Over at Wadi Al-Jarf, Pierre is looking for the answer in Mehra's journal. It is a place where Egyptians were searching for fine limestone blocks. And we have two different positions that are recorded by the papyri. Tura of the south and Tura of the north. So they are in fact extracting the blocks from two different positions. I think everything is perfectly planned for the most impressive efficiency of the work. The papyrus reveals that Mehra and his boat team sailed upriver to the quarry at Tura south. There, he spent two days hauling stone with his men. Each boat might have carried 30 stone blocks, weighing 2.5 tons each. Mehra alternated between Tura north and south every 10 days. To deliver all 68,000 casing stones, needed four teams like Mehra's, working for 25 years. When he switched from Tura north to Tura south, I think Inspector Mehra is expecting the blocks to be ready to sail as quickly as possible. This was a massive and efficient production line, with no room for error or delays. But how will Mohamed fare with his reconstruction vessel? In Cairo, Mohamed first needs to check his boat is watertight, before he can even think about loading the rock. I am anxious. This is the day of the truth. All of this will be examined in these five minutes, when it will be in the water. The launch of a boat would have been a big event in ancient times, too. Mehra, he would come to see his boat launch, to be sure that everything is safe for his mission. The boat weighs in at over 2.5 tons. They will take the truck out. The ancient Egyptians would assemble their boats on the shore side and slide them to the water on wooden rollers. I am not sure if it will float or not. The boat holds the weight of people. But Mohamed needs to check how watertight the hull is. It is looking well until now. There is no water here. But Mohamed soon spots a big problem. We have some water. The question now is how much water the boat will take on. And Mohamed is getting worried. They will search from where the water comes and they will try to stop it. Most of the water is coming from the middle part of the boat. But the team is in luck. The water has made the joints swell and the boat is now watertight. It is a trick the ancient Egyptians knew well. They sometimes submerge the whole vessel. In the time of Merah they had to put the boat in the water and leave it to swallow. This is a very important phase for the waterproofing. Also it helps with the lashing because the ropes will be thin and will bring all the planks together. The boat is finally ready for its massive load. But will it ever cope with a two and a half tonne rock? Mohamed thinks Merah would have been pleased with their progress so far. What was interesting for me was how the scientists, how the Egyptologists were interpreting these texts and even the direct evidence, the planks and fragments that were found. I think this interpretation will be near the truth. The discovery of Merah's manuscript, hidden waterways and a giant boat buried as an offering to Khufu are finally revealing the secrets of how the ancient Egyptians really constructed this giant pyramid. It may be in an inhospitable desert but archaeologists are discovering that water and ships played a bigger role than ever imagined. In fact, Khufu used the power of the Nile to ensure his workers never gave up. But as the team takes on the Nile and tries to get the rock to the pyramid face, they will unlock even more surprises about what it took to build the biggest tomb the world had ever known. Next time, there are more mysteries to solve. How did the Egyptians control a boat with a massive rocky load? There is some water, you know. How did the pharaoh feed and house his giant workforce? Are we on the spot where Merah and his men stayed overnight? And how could manpower alone drag the huge stones over land? It's stuck somehow.