Archeologists Investigate Egypt's 7,000-Year-old 'Stonehenge'

Every civilization needs a story, a shared narrative to believe in. And the most potent narrative is religion. But how and why did religion become so powerful? What part did it play in the birth of civilization? If you want to pray, you've got to come to this space. This is the beginning of religion as we know it. Religion brought people together. This leads to the feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Religion helps create a cohesive society that allows a civilization to form. Glory and praise forever and ever. We didn't always live this way. For 99% of our time on Earth, we had no organized religion. But then we settled down, grew food, built cities, fought battles, wrote stories, sold goods, and worshiped gods. This is the story of that transition. Stepping stones on the road to civilization. It's a story set across the globe. In the Middle East, Central America, Southern Asia. All of them seedbeds of civilization. Here, our ancestors designed the blueprint by which we still live our lives. This is where the modern world began. The longest lasting civilization in the history of the world was in ancient Egypt. For 3,000 years, the pharaohs ruled, and their people believed. It was here civilization and religion became fused as one. Every major civilization since has adopted the same formula. Religion is the glue that binds us together. But how did ancient Egyptians come upon this realization? Archaeologist Jeff Rose is headed for an ancient watering hole in Egypt's Western desert, Nabta Playa. Nowadays, this is all just dry desert. But 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, this would have been rolling grassland with elephants and giraffe. You would have had groups of herders with cattle moving around this landscape, following the water sources that became available. So here at Nabta Playa, when the summer rains came, it would fill up this basin with water, and all those herders would come and congregate here around the lake just for the season. The herders built something sacred. It's been described as Egypt's Stonehenge. In reality, it's 2,000 years older. Begun over 7,000 years ago, it's one of the oldest religious sites in the world. It may now look like a jumble of rocks, but this is where the building blocks of religion began to emerge. For over 2 million years, we were hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers typically practiced a religion called animism. Animism is when you see the divine, you see the spirits of nature all around you. It's in the sand, it's in the rocks, the wind, and the water. It's everywhere. But when they switched to herding, this changes their worldview. While hunter-gatherers roamed freely across the landscape, herders settled for weeks at a time wherever they could find pasture. This led to a new kind of religion. The first thing that happens when people start herding, they start building sacred spaces. If you want to pray, if you want to worship, you've got to come to this space. And what this does is it brings people together from all over the place into this one area to worship together. The site is huge, 26 square kilometers of stones. Arranged into circles and mounds, the largest rocks, the megaliths, were stood on end and placed in lines across the desert. So this giant megalith here, I mean, this thing weighs several tons. It would have been carried a few miles just to get it to this point. And that requires organized labor. That requires people working together. We can surmise that they would have had some kind of spiritual significance to these things to put that much effort into this. And if that's the case, we're looking at some sort of prototype church. The first monuments were all inspired by religion and often were aligned in a specific direction, just like the stones at Napta Playa. This megalith would have been standing up straight. And there's a whole line of them. And they're all pointing to the north. So if you think about it, they didn't have compasses back then. They had no way of knowing which way was north except for the North Star, the fixed point in heaven that never moves. That's interesting, because in later Egyptian religion, we know that the North Star is the entrance into the afterlife. So what we could be looking at here is the very beginnings of the Egyptian belief in life after death. All religion is the search for meaning, for order, to explain why things are the way they are. So this stone circle could very well be the world's oldest calendar. We have here two alignments of stones. One points north toward the fixed point toward the North Star. And then the other alignment here points 70 degrees to the east. So on the solstice, on June 21, the sun would have come up and shown straight through this line. And it would tell them right when the summer rains were about to start. For us, a calendar is a scientific instrument for predicting the seasons. But for the ancient Egyptians, it had a religious significance. They didn't have this distinction between religion and science. The stars, the gods, the seasons, the sun, they were all linked together. So for them, they were just trying to understand how their world worked. The calendar has been moved from Nabta Playa to a museum 300 kilometers away to preserve it, along with Egypt's oldest religious sculpture. This giant rock is no ordinary megalith. It's been sculpted by the inhabitants of Nabta Playa. Some have suggested in the shape of a cow. So we can see the head here and then the torso here. What's really strange is it was found buried beneath a series of collapsed other megaliths. To the inhabitants of Nabta Playa, the cow was the center of their world. These are herders whose life, whose food, whose milk, whose meat comes from the cow. One of the astonishing things we find at Nabta Playa are young cows sacrificed and buried beneath the ground. Why would you sacrifice something that is so essential to your livelihood? And it's possible that these could be ways of offerings to the gods to control nature, to bring the rains, to ensure that their livelihood continues. What we're seeing here at Nabta Playa, this is the beginning of religion as we know it. I mean, now these people have to appeal to the gods to make sure nature does what they wanted to do in order to survive. This is exactly how religion operates today. Religion seems so fundamental to the human experience, it may be hardwired into our brains. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg is researching the impact of prayer on religious believers. OK, go ahead. Our fathers who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is. We're looking at a variety of different areas of the brain to see what areas seem to be turned on or turned off during intense religious or spiritual experiences and practices. And what you can see here are two scans that are done, one during the prayer state, one during the resting state. And during the prayer state, you can see that there's a lot more red activity here than what you see over here. This sort of increased blood flow in the frontal lobe shows up in any mental task requiring focus and attention. But the act of prayer also affects the back of the brain, the parietal lobe. This area of the brain normally takes all the sensory information that comes into us and helps us to construct our sense of self and how that self relates to the rest of the world. And so what we have found a lot of evidence for is that when people have very intense spiritual experiences, this parietal lobe that normally helps you to establish your sense of self actually starts to shut down. And so what we see here is that during the resting state, it's mostly in this red activity, whereas during the prayer state, it's been shut down. It's almost all in the yellows here. And as that area starts to quiet down, we lose our sense of self. So we feel that sense of connection, that sense of communion, that sense of becoming one with the universe, becoming one with God as part of that practice. And so it certainly seems like our brains are built in such a way that facilitates religious and spiritual ideas, enables us to have them fairly easily, and makes them a part of humanity's belief systems, at least for the large majority of people. In evolutionary terms, we seem to need religion. Pretty much every civilization, from the dawn of civilization to the present moment, has had some type of religious or spiritual elements that are a part of how they think about the world, how they construct their ideas about humanity, how we should behave, our moral systems, and so forth. And all of those things kind of come together to help create a cohesive society that allows a civilization to form. For religion to spread, it needs to be shared and communicated to others. The most powerful form of communication is imagery, pictures, symbols. The eastern desert of Egypt is full of wadis. A wadi is a streambed that gets occasional storm flow running through it. Now, 6,000 years ago, there would have been a lot more rain in this area, so the herders living in these parts would have been attracted to places like this for the grazing, for all the animals, and for the water itself. They left their legacy here, but unlike Nabta Playa, where they were building stone circles and erecting megaliths, they etched their art onto the canyon walls. Here at Wadi Baramaya, there are hundreds of images carved onto the rocks. An insight into the world of the people who gathered here. Most of the depictions of what we're seeing in this canyon are animals, things like giraffe, and gazelle, and cows, and goats, and ostrich, even a falcon, which is interesting because in later Egyptian religion, the falcon is so central. You see a lot of hunting scenes. Some have suggested this is to ensure a successful hunt or perhaps to celebrate a successful hunt. But for me, what it means, they're trying to control nature and bend it to their will. You look at this panel right here, and this says it all. So here we've got some cows, we've got goats. We actually have the herders depicted on here. And now they've actually physically, they've domesticated the animals. They've imposed their order on the natural world. In all emerging civilizations, religion was called upon to impose control over the environment and bring good fortune. Religion also gave hope of eternal life. So here, what we're looking at are these 50 tiny little stick figures on this boat, and then this one figure who's towering overhead. Now, what we know from ancient art all over the world is that when you see somebody that much bigger, he's a god or some kind of a demigod. So what we can interpret from this panel is that this god is ferrying these people off into the afterlife. And this is the seed that we see blooming fully in later Egyptian society. There are other oddities among the rock art, strange looking humans with sticks on their heads. Perhaps they are the horns or feathers of a shaman. A shaman is an intermediary between the gods and the people on Earth. So they were the people whose specialized job it was, was to commune with the divine. Some have suggested that these pictures were made by shaman when they were in a trance state. By that same logic, then this is this entryway. It's almost a portal into the other world for these people. So what we're seeing here for the first time are people whose sole job it is, is to communicate with the gods, with the divine on our behalf. In a sense, this is the beginnings of the priesthood. Psychologist Ara Norenzayan is an expert on the role of religion as a cornerstone of civilization. The emergence of the priesthood class is an important development and plays a role in the rise of early civilizations. These are individuals who have power. They have a power to unite the faithful. To you be honor, glory, and praise forever and ever. Amen. This is an important job in civilizations where individuals are living in increasingly large and anonymous groups. That's where the priesthood class comes in, where they can provide rituals and ceremonies that tell people this is something that we all share and believe in, that's why we're part of the community. And priests and shamans have done that since the rise of civilization. Religion arose alongside civilizations, but I would say that religion also enabled civilizations by facilitating social solidarity, by creating social communities around core, sacred beliefs that makes things easier for communities to develop and expand. Since ancient times, religion has always provided a common sense of purpose. In any religion, priests have always had the power to shape the way we think. But power is meaningless unless you can bring your people with you. And that is the role of ritual. Every week in Istanbul, Islamic mystics known as Sufis are led by their sheikh into a trance-like state, hoping to get closer to their god and each other. Anthropologist Dimitris Zigalatis wants to record the effect of the ritual on the Sufis' bodies. These devices are physiological activity monitors. They measure heart rate, breathing rate, and they also measure the speed at which they're moving. And the idea behind using those in the context of this ritual is that we want to see what happens in their body during this event. The physical experience of moving as one is a form of team bonding. Human beings have an extraordinary ability to coordinate their behavior. In a ritual like this, we see a lot of coordinated activity, a lot of synchronous movement. As they move together, the Sufis' heart rates start to align. This is known as synchrony. We have found that going through a ritual that involves a lot of energy and arousal and even suffering can result into a feeling of euphoria. This is similar to this experience of the marathon runner who feels euphoric after several hours of suffering. At the same time, this hormonal effect has very important social implications. This leads to a feeling of oneness with the group, a feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. And this has tremendous consequences for their loyalty to the group, their behavior towards one another. This brings them literally closer together. Rituals would have been one of the fundamental mechanisms that brought people together, contributed to the formation and the maintenance and the cohesion of the first large-scale societies. You could say that we are the ritual species. 5 and 1⁄2 thousand years ago, the Sufis The climate of Egypt became hotter and drier with dramatic consequences. As savannah turned to desert, the herder life was over. The Nile Valley was now the only habitable place in Egypt. This was the start of a settled existence, a farming life lived at the river's edge, dependent on harnessing the summer floods. And with farming came the first villages and towns. This new way of life would have a profound effect on the course of civilization. Nekken was one of the first new towns built along the Nile, a home for farmers, traders, and artisans. But now there was also a ruling elite who claimed they had a right to govern. These rulers were to learn a crucial lesson. Their hold on power would be stronger if endorsed by the gods. Archaeologist Reni Friedman has been digging at Nekken for over two decades. Her team is currently excavating one of the cemeteries. Here we're working on the excavations of tomb 72, which was the tomb of a young man between 18 and 20 years of age. And we were quite surprised to find that it was almost intact. And it's set up within this huge complex, which it took us a number of years to uncover as well. So it was a gradual process of discovery. The young man who was buried here is thought to have been a ruler, perhaps the king of Nekken. He died young, but his journey to the afterlife had the splendor of a royal funeral. All around the edges of the tomb, we found the whole entourage of followers, both human and animal. He had an ostrich, elephants, wild cattle, and he also had domestic animals. So he's taking his whole world with him to the next life. But this ruler was not allowed to rest in peace. When we excavated the tomb, we realized that there were very little bones of the owner left within it. When we started to work more around the surface, we started to pick up bones. And what we noticed is that many of them were burnt. We think there might have been something like a revolution. So it became clear to us that these bones had been forcibly removed from the burial. The person had been disinterred, and that was the purpose. They weren't interested in taking his objects. They were interested in taking him, preventing him from having a second life in the afterlife. Why did the people of Nekin want to desecrate the skeleton of their ruler? We see from our cemetery there how very, very wealthy the elite were. The ability to keep a crocodile, baboons, leopards, and feed them, we know, with the food that was meant for people. So they were really showing off their wealth. And we can see also from our non-elite cemeteries how actually pretty poor, impoverished the regular people were. And they may have just had enough. In any civilization, rulers need legitimacy, a reason to rule. At Nekin, that came by way of religion. To prevent further revolutions, the rulers of Nekin would claim their power came from the local god, Horus. The falcon god. At the site, we found some of the earliest falcon statues from ancient Egypt. And this is, in fact, one of them. Made out of green malachite, beautifully carved so that the wings are separated from the body. It was a very masterful piece of carving because this is very hard, brittle stone. The Egyptian falcon, it's one of the fastest animals on Earth. It can go up over 250 miles an hour. So imagine seeing that coming down and striking. So you wanted to have the powers to be effective, quick, and deadly. The next step is to become the gods, to become the living embodiment of the god. To say, look what I've done for this god. Now the god is living in me. And that was a way of cementing their power because you had to go through the king to get to the god. He became the interface. He became the living god. The great age of Egyptian civilization began 5,000 years ago when Lower and Upper Egypt were united by one of the first god kings of Neckin, King Narmer. His military campaign of conquest is commemorated in an artifact found at Neckin, but now on display in Cairo. It's known as the Narmer parrot. This is the first time we have an object that actually shows a king of unified Egypt. What we see up at the top is actually the name of Narmer. So this actually does identify it as belonging to King Narmer. And then we see Narmer wearing the crown here of Upper Egypt. And he's smiting his enemies using essentially this stick with a round mallet, which is called a mace. Beneath this register line, we see some other cacti that are beneath the feet of the king that has now conquered them. So the other side, we have Narmer now wearing the crown of Lower Egypt. And he seems to be quite victorious as he has his procession. And then you see a lot of decapitative, presumably captives from Lower Egypt that he has now conquered. And we have the god Horus essentially giving his approval. Horus, the falcon, who had been the favorite god at Neckin, now became the leading god of all Egypt, a patron and partner of the kings. Egypt was now a fully-fledged civilization, a state united under a god king, a pharaoh, complete with organized government, social hierarchy, writing, art, and architecture. And linking it all together was religion. Ever since the Egyptian pharaohs, connecting political power with divinity has been an important idea in human civilizations. Even today, Christian queens and kings claim supernatural power from God. And it's a smart thing to do. It's a smart way to hold power. How can you challenge a king if that means challenging God? Another smart idea was fusing divinity with watchfulness. You can see that in the god Horus in ancient Egypt. With his all-seeing eye, he was watching over people. The idea of a moral god became a new idea. With the rise of more complex and larger civilizations, this idea started to spread and worked its way into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Christian churches, the very same all-seeing eye watches on. Like Horus, God sees everything. So God is watchful, omniscient, but also morally concerned, sits in judgment, and rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. As a result, that could have effects on how people treat each other. So we can say that watched people are nice people. Psychologists can do experiments to test how being watched has an impact on our behavior. Here, a fundraiser tries to raise money for a charity. He stands outside a restaurant and over the course of an hour raises $25. He then does the same thing outside a church and makes $70. The results of these studies show that people are more cooperative and generous when they're near a church, for example. The feeling is that you think of moral agents who are watching you and judging you. You're also thinking of certain moral standards of what's right and wrong. And so people become more cooperative and give more to the good cause. I think that's one of the powerful reasons why religion has such a sticking power in human history and for human civilizations. To the extent that these religious icons and beliefs and reminders allow people to scale up their cooperativeness with more and more people, then that becomes an essential part of how human civilizations can function. Religion at the service of civilization, part inspiration, part judgment, part fear. Of course, policing is never effective unless there is the threat of punishment. We find that in many studies, these kinds of belief in supernatural punishment seem to be more potent than the promise of reward. So hell is stronger than heaven. When civilization and religion are fused, one priest can be more effective than 100 police officers. If God is all around us watching and judging, there's one problem. He's invisible, so it's easy to forget about his presence. For ancient Egyptians, the solution was architecture, to make visible the invisible. Saqqara is a huge complex of tombs south of Cairo. It was here, 4,700 years ago, the Egyptian pharaohs began to build big and proclaim their divinity. Instead of being buried underground, they wanted to be seen in death, above the surface. Archaeologist Louise Bertini believes this single idea drove the expansion of Egyptian civilization. First type of monumental tomb that was built here at Saqqara was what's called a mastaba tomb. Mastaba coming from the Arabic word for bench, which means a rectangular superstructure that was constructed over the burial chamber. They were constructed out of mud brick. These mastaba shapes had possibly evolved from what's called a tumulus, a circular mound that would have been constructed over to mark the burial beneath. These mounds possibly evolved out of the belief in this primeval mound that emerged from the waters of noon that used to cover the earth, according to the Egyptian creation myth. And then these mounds are essentially a reference to creation. So you have rebirth and resurrection in the afterlife. As their power grew, the pharaohs wanted tombs that would last forever. The royal architect, Imhotep, was the pioneer of a new divine architecture, fit for a god king. Imhotep decided to essentially continue the traditions of building a mastaba tomb. But what changed monumentally here is now the use of stone. So he's making sure that you have your house for all eternity in a new architectural medium that will hopefully last. This was the first time anywhere in the world people built from stone on such a scale. This was the material which would underpin so many great civilizations. But Imhotep didn't stop at stone. His other great breakthrough was to think big. Divine architecture would reach up to the heavens. Imhotep originally started building a mastaba tomb. And then it was expanded a number of times. And then essentially, a second mastaba and a third mastaba was built on top of it to where you actually have essentially almost seven layers of mastabas on top of another to the final step pyramid. We do know from various texts that this was seen to actually be an extremely imposing construction. They had never seen anything like it in history. And not just because of the size, but because of the construction material. In fact, it was well thought of even in later in history where we actually have various pilgrims coming here, kings being buried at the site, and other various elites that are buried in the area, essentially to try to have that connection to this really first great pyramid. Many global religions adopted this idea. Build big, build tall. We see it in Christianity. We see it in Islam and their offshoots. Spires, minarets, temples, pyramids imposing themselves on the landscape. They make us feel a sense of grandeur. They give us a sense of awe and the connection to something larger than ourselves, something that's powerful and divine in our lives. Throughout history, up until the 19th century, the tallest buildings in the world were all religious structures. Then in 1888, the Washington Monument was built right here. It became the first secular structure that was the tallest building in the world. Even then, it adopted the religious design, the obelisk that stood at the entrance of all ancient Egyptian temples. So even secular monumental architecture borrows religious symbolism to make a statement. The most recognizable monuments of ancient civilization are the Pyramids of Giza, giant tombs for god kings. Each of them was built from 2 million blocks of stone, crafted and put into place by thousands of workers, without pulleys, wheels, or iron tools. Archaeologist Ashraf Moui believes the blocks were moved using a system of ramps. They make a ramp from sand. And this ramp goes up in a circular way around the pyramid. And they start to build the pyramid from inside. They make the passages, the chambers, from inside to outside, or going up course by course, level by level, until they reach the top of the pyramid. What they did, they start to case the pyramid from outside. It was fine and white limestone. And it was so flat, so smooth, so white. Why? Because when the sun rays went to the pyramid, we got reflection. And the pyramid was shining. More than a technological achievement, the building of each pyramid was a religious act, a divine duty. If you are going to build a house for your god, everyone's participating, because this is very holy for them. This is the workers' village. And we just passed by the wall. It's called the Wall of the Crue. There's a big gate. And the workers, every day in the morning, they went to work in building the pyramids. In the night, they came here to the village. We found here houses. And we found factories for making salted fish, bakeries for baking the bread. We found some wives weaving the clothes for their husbands, the workers. It was previously thought these workers were slaves. But when their tombs were discovered, archaeologists had to think again. Slaves would not be afforded the luxury of a tomb. One of the amazing thing here, we found a tomb for a doctor. Doctor for what? To treat the workers. To treat these workers as workers, not slaves. It's thought tombs were conscripted from all over Egypt to work on the site, attracted by the prestige of working for the glory of the god king. In winter, River Nile flooded all Egypt with water. And the majority of the Egyptians were farmers. They stayed in their houses. That would work. The king brought them, used them, and built the pyramid. And he gave them salaries. And they were working to build the pyramid, the most important project in this time. It's easy to imagine the pyramids as a drain on civilization. But the opposite is true. Building big for the gods generates its own rewards, growth, cohesion, identity. Little wonder the grand religious monument is a feature of so many civilizations, today and through time. It's a shining example of social cooperation between all the Egyptians, between all the nations, to do a project by the name of religion. All the Egyptians participating because they want to do something for their god. Some modern day civilizations separate church from state to show that ancient superstitions have been replaced by the secular values of reason and science. And yet, our past is not so easily forgotten. Take Washington. It's filled with secular monuments that enshrine America's creation story. For example, the Lincoln Memorial celebrates freedom. The Jefferson Memorial celebrates independence. And the Washington Monument memorializes the life of the first president of the United States. But even these monuments that are secular, they look religious. They are secular shrines. In many ways, these secular monuments serve the same purpose that religious monuments served in the past and even today. They provide the social glue that connects a wide range of people into one large moral community. That's the nation state in today's example. Take the dollar bill, the most secular of inventions. You see the all-seeing eye, the eye in the sky, watching over us. On top of all things, a pyramid. And next to it, the words, in God we trust. You can't get more religious than that. The lesson of civilization is clear. Those who believe together stay together. It doesn't matter so much what we believe, just that enough of us share the belief. This was true for the first civilizations. It's true today. Religion, the soulmate of civilization.