Mysteries of the Pharaohs: Changing Our Understanding of the Ancient World

Cairo, a city of faith and ancient stone, and at its heart a museum filled with secrets dark and strange. Tales of golden treasures, shattery crypts, unexplained murder, the quest for eternal life. Secrets hidden in plain sight inside the Egyptian Museum. Egypt. Here the towering monuments of the pharaohs stand silent. Amid the roar of a modern city is the largest metropolis in Africa, home to more than 20 million people. But at its center is a refuge from urban chaos. This is the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, the treasure chest of an ancient civilization, and one of the most spectacular museums in the world. Visitors flock here by the millions to gaze into the eyes of long-dead pharaohs and marvel at their dazzling sarcophagi of silver and gold. This wooden sarcophagus looks dull and plain by comparison. You might think it was made for a commoner, but you can't always tell a coffin by its cover. This coffin, it has the cartouche of Ramses II, and the two cartouches are the given name of Ramses II and the throne name. Ramses II was the great pharaoh of ancient Egypt. As a family man, he married eight wives and he had 100 children. As a military man, he was a great man. Why would such a great man choose a coffin made of wood? You might suspect he was frugal or modest. In fact, he was anything but. Ramses the Great built grand structures all over Egypt on an unprecedented scale. Here at Thebes, he spared no expense on his ramesseum, a temple dedicated to his own greatness. It seems strange for such an egotistical pharaoh to be buried in a simple casket. This cannot be the coffin of a great builder like Ramses II. And instead of him building temples everywhere, the first thing that he will care for is building his tomb and his coffin and his burial chamber. And this is why I don't think that this great King Ramses II could really leave to us a coffin like this. If you go to the Valley of the Kings and you look at his tomb, I really believe that his mystery is hidden in the Valley of the Kings. In this sun-baked valley, 650 kilometers south of the Egyptian Museum, we hope to uncover the mystery with the help of Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick. The Valley of the Kings is probably the most famous archaeological site in the world. It's probably, after the Great Pyramid and the Cairo Museum, the most visited destination in the whole of Egypt because it has this magic, this wonderful atmosphere. If you could imagine, you could see an x-ray of the whole Valley of the Kings. It was honeycombed with passages and chambers everywhere. And where we're going to go now is to one of the biggest of all of them, the tomb of Ramses II. This tomb is probably about the biggest or the second biggest in the valley. Probably after that, his father, Seti I. And it goes into the rock. It's no less than 180 meters. Historians believe that after Ramses' death, his mummy was placed in this underground chamber, surrounded by a treasure of gold and precious objects. But when European archaeologists entered the tomb in 1817, it was empty. So we've got now to think about, why was he not found in it? Some people say, was the tomb damaged by flooding? So it's possible that the tomb was flooded and they may have had to move the king out of it, but I somehow or other don't believe it. I'm sure that in the new kingdom, they made some sort of precaution to try and prevent these floods. So what are the possibilities we've got? A really good possibility is tomb robbery. Not long after Ramses' death, thieves plundered the tombs of several lesser pharaohs, stealing treasure and desecrating crypts. Many historians believe that the high priests of Thebes responded by evacuating all royal mummies from the valley, including Ramses the Great. To thwart tomb raiders, they were moved to a secret location. The final resting place of the royal mummies would remain a mystery for 3,000 years. In the mid-19th century, some archaeologists began to suspect the mummies might be hidden here, not far from the Valley of the Kings, in the cliffs surrounding Deir el-Bahari. There's no water. We're about 70 meters or so above the ground level here. It's hot, it's June. I was guessing we're in sort of 50 degrees centigrade, something like that. And it's only sort of mad people and archaeologists who like wandering around up here. There is a lot of evidence that the ancient Theban priests were coming up here looking for places to bury people, to make hidden tombs where they could hide various important burials for eternity. Deir el-Bahari continued to guard its secret until one day a local herder watched one of his goats disappear into a hole in the ground. He followed it down a vertical shaft to discover much more than a wounded animal. Word of an amazing find reached German Egyptologist Emil Bruch. Nigel intends to retrace his journey. It's an absolute sort of sheer funnel of rock going down at the bottom, and this shaft is something about 15 meters, 50 plus feet deep. Now this is something I've, ever since I've been interested in Egyptology, I've always wanted to see this because the royal mummies have always been a fantastic fascination for me. I never forget the first time I found out about them. To get to see where they came from is just, for me, amazing. But not an ancient one. This wall was built recently to thwart 21st century tomb robbers. We are now only steps away from the find that rocked the world of Egyptology. Now at this point, Bruch and Kamal had already been in that entrance corridor there. They'd already found a load of coffins lying there, various other bits and pieces. They turned this corner to where I am now, and then as far as they could see, down this corridor, there would have been more and more mummies. And they were stopping and looking at the names on the coffins and seeing royal cartouches and all sorts of other things. They turned out to be the bodies of the great pharaohs of Egypt. The discovery of what became known as the royal cache was an international sensation. It marked the first time Egyptologists had discovered a royal mummy. And here, incredibly, were 50 kings and queens. There's a small niche on the left, just in front of me, that contained loads of mummies of the kings of the New Kingdom, but particularly also the famous mummy of Ramses II. The royal mummies were arranged haphazardly, suggesting they were transported here in haste to avoid drawing the attention of tomb raiders. Their burials consisted of their body and a coffin, and the coffin may not even have been theirs originally. It might have just been reused from somebody else's just to throw the king in it and get it in here. It's done very, very hurriedly. There is evidence that Ramses' coffin went on more than one hurried journey. These inscriptions list several locations with a final entry for the high place. And perhaps that's why this great pharaoh was found in a wooden coffin and not a gold sarcophagus. His bearers required a coffin sturdy enough to survive several moves, yet light enough to haul up these steep cliffs and down into this dark shaft. And as for Ramses' empty tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the treasures that may have once surrounded him have never been found. Or perhaps we should say, not yet. This Egyptian museum, the secrets of the pharaohs are etched in stone and sometimes in human flesh. This is the royal mummy room. This is one of the most popular rooms in the Egyptian museum. It's constantly full of people, and generally they try to keep a certain level of respect. One of the great things about Egyptology is that you can walk into a room like this, having read the great exploits, read the history books, and actually see the faces of these pharaohs. If you observe their faces closely, you may notice that one of these mummies is not like the others. So many of these great pharaohs that we can look at today are great warriors, but none of them at all show any signs of scratches and cuts that could be attributed to war wounds. King Second Enre Tao II was not so lucky. No one knows for sure how Second Enre died, but one thing that is sure is that he lived in violent times, a period of great warfare between Hyksos in the north and the Thebans in the south. The Hyksos were an Asiatic tribe that swept into Egypt and settled around the Nile Delta. Around 1560 BC, tensions between the Hyksos and the Egyptians erupted into war, and King Second Enre died violently. So there are no wounds whatsoever upon the body of Second Enre, apart from these very obvious ones on the head. So very clearly at the top here, you have a very long upper frontal wound that has clearly smashed the skull. Below that, we have a further wound caused by apparently another axe. You can see that the center of the face here is quite depressed. The right eye socket is completely being destroyed, and this appears to have been inflicted by either a mace or perhaps the handle of one of the axes that formed one of the other wounds to the head. We know this king was brutally killed, but the unresolved question is how? With the help of combat expert Rob Mason and some exact replicas of Hyksos weaponry, Gary Shaw will explore three possible scenarios. Theory number one, Second Enre died a warrior's death, fighting bravely on the battlefield with his troops. So in this theory, Second Enre was standing on a chariot, and the first blow came to the left-hand side of his face. Well, I can certainly hit him there, but it's a very uncomfortable position. The actual way you're wielding the weapon, the way that you're having to stretch your arm, you wouldn't think that would be the best position to actually attack someone from. So by this point, Second Enre would certainly be on the floor. He's been hit twice, he's fallen off his chariot, he's lying on his back. So that certainly would have penetrated the brain. I think it's a little overdramatic. I can't really see this being how it happened. It's just so Hollywood, so over the top. First of all, at the beginning, we have the king standing on his chariot. He's being attacked by people who are not on chariots, who are below him, who are charging a sort of machine like this with horses and large wheels. It just doesn't seem at all likely. The first thing you would do if you were actually under attack is try to defend yourself if it was like the last moment. There's nothing on the arms here. In fact, there are no wounds whatsoever to the body apart from to the head. Theory number two, Second Enre was nowhere near the battlefield. He was assassinated while sleeping in his palace. We don't know how many assailants attacked him. We don't know the order of blows. So it's completely up to you how you want to go about doing this. Well, that would have killed him. Well, I'd have to say he's thoroughly dead again. But it's just such a violent attack on his head when it's unnecessary. It just seems overkill. You only need one person with one of these weapons. You don't need multiple people. You could have just smacked him with the mace straight over the side of the head. He'd be dead. He would be dead immediately. But if he wasn't assassinated or slain in battle, how did Second Enre die? We need a third theory, one that not only explains the multiple head wounds, but also the lack of defensive injuries. So our third hypothesis is yours. That's right. We've created a scenario in which the king was captured. And so there's going to be a spectacle. The exodus commander is going to show up, show his dominance and power over the Egyptians. He's going to do this, first of all, in my opinion, with the blow above the right eye here. That's great. This wound really does match what we see on the body of Second Enre. It's really quite perfect. We can imagine that this probably didn't kill him, but it certainly would have knocked him back. The Hyksos King certainly hadn't finished his work yet. He was going to dispatch him to the afterlife in front of his troops. Okay, that's great. So again, these two wounds now match up with the mummy really well. They're actually quite perfect. These are the two wounds that were certainly inflicted by this type Asiatic weapon that the Hyksos King might have used. This is the point where I see him making a coup de grâce, the blunt blow to the right side of the face that destroyed the right eye and the nose. Yet again, you've done a fantastic job. I'd have to say it is a very effective use of the butt of a weapon like this. So that is perfectly plausible to smack him in the face with it. And you can see it's very consistent with the mummy. The right eye socket has been completely demolished. The nose is damaged, just as we see on the actual body of Second Enry. Defeated in battle, forced onto his knees, and brutally executed. The best evidence suggests that's what happened. And the facial wounds tell us something else. At the moment of death, Second Enry did not look away. Perhaps that's why, even though he lost in battle, he became known as Second Enry the Brave. His son, perhaps inspired by his example, would one day vanquish the Hyksos forever. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Millions flock here to discover the secrets of an ancient civilization. But let's face it, some come for the gold. The gleam of King Tut's gold sarcophagus whispers of untold wealth and power. Visitors to his treasure room can't get enough. Many come here without realizing that just down the hall is another room they won't want to miss. These are the treasures of a lesser-known pharaoh, King Susenys. His gold harbors a museum's secret. The secret of how he got it. For while King Tut's empire was rich, Susenys ruled during a period of economic collapse. So, where did his gold come from? We hope to unearth the secret here, amidst the ruins of Tanis, the city where Susenys ruled. And if the name Tanis rings a bell, there's a reason for that. Tanis briefly entered the popular imagination in 1981 as the place where Indiana Jones fights the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Nazis have discovered Tanis. Just what does that mean to you, Tanis? Well, the city of Tanis is one of the possible resting places of the Lost Ark. The Lost Ark. As it turns out, Indiana had it wrong. No real Egyptologist believes the Ark of the Covenant is here. And Tanis was not discovered by the Germans, but by French archaeologists who've been digging here since the 1860s. Dr. Philippe Brissot has been team leader of the French dig at Tanis for over 30 years. He's hoping to make a discovery to rival that of his predecessor, Dr. Pierre Montay. When he ventured into the darkness, Montay encountered a web of deceit and misdirection. This discovery now resides in the Egyptian museum, a dazzling coffin of the finest silver. But when Montay opened it, he found the remains of a lesser king. So where was the mummy of Sucenis? Inscriptions identified this chamber as his tomb. But as Montay would soon discover, there was another secret chamber. A treasure of gold now on display in the Egyptian museum. Which brings us back to our question. How did King Sucenis amass so much gold during a period of economic collapse? A clue to this riddle was discovered in the secret chamber. Sucenis' name is inscribed on the coffin, but a portion of the stone has been scraped away. Analysis reveals this was originally the coffin of an earlier pharaoh, Merneptah, son of Ramses the Great. The name Merneptah is also visible on items of Sucenis' gold. Evidence that his treasure was taken from the tombs of earlier, richer kings. So perhaps Sucenis was not only a great pharaoh, but the greatest tomb raider of all time. Today, Brissot continues to dig in the ruins of Tannus, patiently sifting through the sands of time. His excavations have unearthed buried buildings and passageways, but he has yet to find what he's looking for. The lost tomb of Sucenis' queen. In the Egyptian museum, every mummy has a story to tell. And when a coffin is opened and wrappings are unwound, we marvel at the Egyptians' astounding ability to preserve human remains. But not all mummies began their existence as human beings. In fact, millions of animals, birds, dogs, baboons, and falcons were mummified in ancient Egypt. Animal mummies were very common in ancient Egypt, and they progressively over time became increasingly more common. It probably started out quite gently with pet mummies, because people who loved their pets wanted the pets with them in their afterlife. And so you wind up saying, okay, when I die, or after I die, bury my pet with me. And of course, the pet has to be mummified in the same way as the person does. And so we have these pet mummies being made. And they were often made in as fine a way as human beings. And sometimes even more care and attention was lavished upon them. And what's extraordinary is the amount of fur that is still visible on them. Because especially with the dog, with his tail that curls up, it looks as if he's about to open up his eyes and start wagging and barking. So he is really a very lively looking creature. And the quality of mummification is superb. Another kind of animal mummy are food mummies, or victual mummies. And these are pieces of food that are generally meat and poultry. They are wrapped up and put into their own coconuts and then put into the tomb so you can snack on them whenever you want to. And you can see that we've got ribs here. So barbecued ribs were a specialty of ancient Egypt. And we have poultry here. So you have geese and ducks. And what's really quite nice is they're prepared as if they were ready to be eaten. So they're plucked and they're sort of semi-cooked. They cut off the wing tips and the feet. And then they put the sort of liver and gizzards inside. So if you want gravy in the afterlife, you have everything you need for that. The ancient Egyptians loved their pets. So it isn't surprising that a pharaoh might take a four-legged companion into the afterlife. But pets represent only a small fraction of all mummified animals. Millions of wild creatures were mummified for another, more powerful purpose. The Valley of Saqqara is home to Egypt's oldest pyramids and a colossal underground animal necropolis. Ashraf Muhyiddin of the Supreme Council of Antiquities has been entrusted with the key to the sacred tombs. Over there you can see the entrance of the temple. It was built in front of the baboon's galleries. But there's a new wall was built over there to protect from robbers. We have to seal the entrance by some seals and we have to build a wall like this to be hard for robbers to break it to go inside there. So we're going to remove these blocks and to break the seals to go together to see the galleries and to see some skeletons, mummies or baboons. This dark passageway is the beginning of a maze of tunnels that stretches for miles beneath the desert sand. The crumbling corridors are lined with crypts and lead to countless burial chambers. We have here a burial of a baboon. Baboon is a sacred animal because he's representing the god Jehoti. We have a piece of food here, it was for the coffin. So the mummy was placed in the coffin and the coffin was placed inside the sarcophagus there. You can see the mummy, it was wrapped with linen and you can see the bones of the baboon over there. So we found loads of skeletons here, loads of mummies of baboons. Okay, can you believe all these numbers of baboons were in Egypt? Of course not. Hunters traveled throughout Africa to bring back species that represented Egyptian gods. Animal importation and mummification became a big business with profits going to the priests. Millions of creatures were slaughtered so that pious Egyptians could make sacred offerings to the gods. We are inside a sacred place. We are inside the falcon galleries. We have millions of pottery jars, had loads of mummies of falcons and each one has a mummy of a falcon like this. The falcon was wrapped with linen and you see the mummy of a falcon but you believe it, six millions of mummified falcons found here in this place. The numbers suggest that animal mummies were not just for the rich. In fact, Egyptians of all social classes purchased animal mummies as offerings. Much as today Catholics purchase votive candles. Believers would choose an animal corresponding to their personal god and pay a priest to mummify it. A process thought to give the animal eternal life and thus curry favor with the divine. It was very important for everybody to make a mummy for his god but I cannot believe we have all these numbers of real falcons because it's not easy to get a falcon. Sometimes you can see linen and nothing inside there, just an empty linen there. He just wrapped it as the shape of a bird or an animal to deceive the people. That's it. In markets everywhere, including here in Egypt, what you are sold is not always what you get and even when the object is holy and the salesman is a priest. Studying mummies I found sort of a sub-category of mummy which is ancient fakes and we found those by x-rays as well as sometimes by unwrapping mummies and what happens is there's a bundle that looks absolutely beautiful or sometimes it's falling apart but inside instead of actually containing an animal it holds either a few feathers or a bit of fur that has been wrapped up and that it looks like the animal it's supposed to be. For example falcons and raptors of all sorts are relatively rare while ibises are more common so instead of having a whole raptor you'd say I can only make one with this but if I divide it into several and wrap them all up and make them look like real mummies or even better than real mummies they will do because a part can symbolize the whole or also you can say that they were just being cheap. Making a fake mummy was much faster and easier than making a mummy because both human and animal mummies were supposed to take a total of 70 days whereas a fake mummy would take you half a day or a few hours so I can show you how a real mummy should have been prepared. Once you have your dead animal the Egyptians would take a knife and make this incision over here and then remove the internal organs and they have various you know things to and then what you have to do is wash this out first with water and then with palm wine you've squished it around and rinsed it out you can dry it or you have to dry it with these pieces of linen and make sure you dry it as much as possible and the outside you basically bury it in this powdered natron which defats as well as desiccates and this whole process is supposed to take 40 days and once 40 days are over you take out your animal brush it off make sure all the bugs are out and at that point you bring in the seven sacred oils in the last 30 days you massage the body with them now these 30 days are when you are turning the body into something that really is the mummy because this time is a transformation between something that is of this earth into something that is divine then you would start wrapping it and you use linen bandages all sorts of old bandages are used and then you just wrap the mummy well as you can tell this process was fairly long and complicated and very expensive considering all the different exotic items that had to be used so it's really no wonder that corners were cut and fakes were made so you could take a piece of stone or just a random bone and wrap it up put a large piece of of cloth around it here you have your fake mummy bundle and then you can tie it up and then depending on what it was you could maybe even put a more elaborate exterior on it which is in fact quicker to make than a real mummy and you have got thousands and thousands of quick easily made mummies even in the egyptian museum i have x-rayed all the mummies there and we have a substantial percentage of fake mummies fake or real the existence of millions of animal mummies reveals the ancient egyptian obsession with death and a fervent belief that offerings to the gods are the paths to eternal life the egyptian museum harbors many secrets of the pharaohs but one secret is too big to be confined within these walls it is the secret of the pyramids monuments constructed with the sweat and toil of ancient egyptians and in our time restored by their descendants the great pharaohs chose these structures as tombs for their mummified remains the question is why to uncover this secret we must start at the beginning of everything the ancient egyptians believed the world was created out of a massive sea of bubbling water called new out of this water emerged a hill or pyramid shaped mound called the benbenem rose out of the ocean to greet the sun god ra pharaohs reenacted this moment of creation whenever they built their own pyramids but why did they locate their burial chambers inside we hope to discover a clue here at the pyramid of amenemhat the third with the help of egyptologist ramadan hussein his pyramid in antiquities used to be called amenemhat is mighty but the fact is we know it in egyptology right now as the black pyramid and this name came from the fact that the core of the pyramid was made entirely of mud brick amenemhat made the mistake of building with mud too close to an underground spring when seepage caused his pyramid to tilt something important fell from the top into the sand below the pyramid's capstone one of the rarest artifacts in the world is now on display in the egyptian museum what we have here is a what we call a promedium a promedium simply means um a small pyramid in ancient egyptian is called a benbenet and this is pretty much the capstone that would be put on top of the pyramid at the end of the construction of the royal permit so what we're seeing here is one example of middle kingdom promedium it was found in a very fragmented way and this is a reconstruction but the most complete promedium from the middle kingdom we have is a promedium of king amenemhat 3 from dynasty 12 it's made of dark gray granite with inscriptions on the four sides the inscriptions here make clear connection between the sun and the promedium and what it talks about is opening the face and opening the face is a metaphor of clearing the vision of somebody so clearing the vision of the king of upper and lower egypt so that he may see the lord of the horizon being the sun god while he crosses heaven so that he being the sun may cause that the son of ray amenemhat appears as a divine as a god this inscription once sat atop a pyramid which suggests the pyramid itself plays a part in a divine transformation but why does a pharaoh need a pyramid to become a god perhaps this crumbling pyramid can tell us if we see it as it looked 4 000 years ago clad with a layer of smooth stone so when this pyramid finished in construction what you would see is this triangle shaped structure that is cased with bright fine white limestone the rays of the sun falls on top of it and reflects back to the universe for the ancient egyptians the pyramid was a kind of solar powered resurrection machine riding on reflected sun beams a pharaoh's spirit would rise straight up into the celestial realm to take his place as a god among gods it is the domain of the sun god himself the people believe that their king lives there as a sun god so what you're seeing here is a mutual relationship between the people and their king they're participating in creating a domain for the next sun god and in return the sun god will constantly repeat creation and what they're gaining here is fertility and continuity for their life the halls of the egyptian museum are filled with giant statues intended to convey the giant stature of the pharaohs these were men with huge ambitions and egos to match none more so than king kufu a man who fought big and built even bigger the great pyramid of kufu is the largest pyramid in egypt we have all the evidence that kufu built this pyramid when the arabs came to egypt in the ninth century a.d. they said that man fear time and time fears pyramid people thought that the great pyramid was immortal it cannot be killed it stay all the time to show the power of kufu this pyramid reigned as the world's tallest structure for 4 000 years kufu built it to trumpet his glory and so it's surprising that the pharaoh with the biggest pyramid has the smallest statue this is the only statute of this great king it's about seven centimeter and a half long it's made of ivory it shows the king seated with the crown of lower egypt this is the only depiction of kufu ever found he appears gentle and kind and that's surprising considering his reputation when the ancient greeks came to egypt they heard stories about kufu the tyrant a man who worked thousands of slaves to death building his great monument over the centuries the tyrant label stuck so which is true the stories passed down to us or the impression the statue conveys the face and the art is not the art of this powerful dynasty dynasty four if you go and you look at the statue of his son kifrin you see the powerful king with a powerful face it's not the same like this king i really believe uh with this evidence that this statuette is actually dated to dynasty 26 which is 500 bc if hawass is right the statue was carved 2 000 years after the death of kufu so while rare and ancient this tiny relic isn't a reliable depiction the search for the real kufu continues and hawass thinks he knows where to look he has spent years searching the interior of kufu's great pyramid for a hidden burial chamber hawass believes such a crypt may contain a statue of kufu or perhaps even his long lost mummy this chamber contained the mystery of the pyramid this tunnels this one and this one could be actually the tunnels of the mystery of kufu in 2002 during a live television event broadcast around the globe hawass directed his team to send robots into these shafts deep inside the pyramid's core they discovered a concrete block affixed with two copper handles the door to be discovered in front of my eyes live in front of the whole world was amazing hawass has plans to open this mysterious door using a more powerful robot capable of prying the stone loose to reveal what lies beyond to discover anything inside the great pyramid it's big the discovery of what is hidden behind these doors will be big for everyone the public because the public are fascinated with the great if we rewrite another page in the history of kufu and his pyramid who knows what treasures are still waiting to be found within these walls and what they might reveal about the true nature of kufu history's most infamous tyrant or perhaps egypt's greatest king every mummy every statue every treasure in the egyptian museum conceals a mystery that's what draws people here for every secret we reveal far more remain unspoken because even a vast museum can only contain a tiny fraction of the history of a proud and ancient civilization in the land of the pharaohs the secrets are still out there