Original subtitles

Deep beneath Egypt's eastern desert...

Here we go.

That's so narrow!

...archaeologists discover a section of an ancient emerald mine,

untouched for 2,000 years.

It could be like a kind of photograph

a mining workday inside the mines.

The team follows the perilous trail of miners

who risked their lives to find precious resources

made Egypt wealthy and powerful.

Hola!

What is it?

Look, Joan.

It's perfect.

Oh, oh!

Over 2,000 years, Egypt was ruled by dynasties

of native-born Egyptian pharaohs.

Khufu, Tutankhamun,

Ramesses the Great.

For centuries, these pharaohs also controlled

the resource-rich lands of their southern neighbors,

the Nubians.

Then, everything changed.

A Nubian dynasty, the Kushites,

took control of Egypt for a hundred years.

Today, archaeologists hunt for clues to how these Nubians wrested power

from the mighty Egyptian pharaohs.

Look at that. This is really cool, actually.

They investigate the complex relationship

between the Egyptians and their southern conquerors.

So here's my treasure.

And explore the legacy

the Kushite kings left on this great civilization.

Unbelievable.

Deep in the Eastern Desert, in an area known as Wadi-Sikait...

Spanish archaeologist Joan Oller Guzmán and his team

are just beginning their dig season.

I am in love with this desert.

It's an amazing, amazing place.

They're driving up into the mountains,

to a vast warren of emerald mines

that were on the border between Egypt and Nubia.

In the mines, the idea is to continue

increasing our knowledge to how they extracted the emeralds.

Any stuff that we can find inside the mine is interesting.

Joan wants to understand what life was like for the miners here,

and what it took to supply the Egyptian empire

with the vast quantity of emeralds it demanded.

To the Ancient Egyptians,

the vivid green of emeralds symbolized fertility...

allegedly making them a favorite of Queen Cleopatra.

The richest source was Emerald Mountain in the Eastern Desert,

which was riddled with hundreds of mines...

like the one Joan has come to explore.

Are we ready?

-Yalla? - Yalla.

This area has at least 150 mines.

Their shafts stretch for miles beneath the mountains.

Joan is mapping each mine one by one.

The view is amazing as you can see.

It's totally amazing because you have all these mountains, all these wadis.

So it's worth it to come here, I think, for sure.

In the largest mine they've found so far,

it's taken two full seasons to document half a mile of the winding tunnels.

Today, they will enter a completely unexplored section.

In the mines it's always exciting,

because you never know what will you find inside.

What we need to do is...

First, we throw the stones to one side.

In 80-degree heat,

they begin by digging out the 10-by-5-foot entrance to the mine.

Hey, hold on, hold on, hold on!

This one! This is an inscribed papyrus.

An inscribed papyrus!

Look!

We just found here in the rubble

two fragments of papyrus with some letters,

which is really, really amazing

because we haven't anything like that in all the area.

This confirms that this is a really special mine.

Here it is.

Oh, it's amazing.

Wow!

In Luxor,

Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian is traveling across the Nile

to the Theban Necropolis.

He's searching for clues

to how the Egyptians ruled over the Nubians.

Tomb TT40 dates to Egypt's golden age, the New Kingdom,

a period of total domination over their southern neighbors.

Look at this place!

The preservation is remarkable. The colors are so vibrant.

And so many cool details.

The walls of the tomb

depict stunning scenes of life in the Egyptian Royal Court.

And for Arto, one scene stands out.

In Ancient Egyptian art,

you can always tell who's Egyptian and who is not.

And these guys are clearly not Egyptians.

And they are bringing gifts,

the products of their lands, including cattle...

shields...

a chariot.

Very prized kind of possession indeed.

The procession appears to end at the feet of the king.

And that king is none other than the famous Tutankhamun.

These are all clearly tribute bearers. And right here,

look at that.

The inscription reads "Nbw."

That is the Egyptian word for gold.

Who are these foreigners

bringing gold to the feet of the Egyptian king?

Arto searches the ceiling for clues.

Look at that!

Oh, absolutely beautiful.

And we have here the name of the deceased, the tomb owner,

Amenhotep-Huy.

And right there, his most prominent title. "The King's Son of Kush."

In other words, he was responsible for the governance of the land of Kush

on behalf of the king.

So the tribute bearers over there, therefore,

they're Kushites.

Kush was a small but highly developed kingdom south of Egypt

in the region known as Nubia, modern-day Sudan.

Rich in gold and the highly valued products of inner Africa,

Kush was ruled by the Egyptian pharaohs,

who demanded these resources in return for peace.

As viceroy to Kush, Amenhotep-Huy was the pharaoh's diplomat in Nubia,

a physical reminder of the might of Egypt.

In the time of Amenhotep-Huy, Kush was the main source of Egypt's gold.

And it was part of his job to make sure it stayed that way.

These images depict a time when the Egyptian pharaohs

were at the height of their power.

But they were right to keep a close eye

on their neighbors to the south because, well,

500 years later, they would be the ones in charge.

So how did the smaller kingdom of Kush

manage to turn the tables on the mighty Egyptians?

Next, Arto wants to explore

how the pharaohs lost their grip on power.

The island of Elephantine, close to Aswan, on the River Nile.

It is pharaonic Egypt in a nutshell.

Privileged to work on such a site

because compared within Egypt, it is unique.

German archaeologist Martin Sählhof

is investigating a settlement on the island

that sits on the southern border

between Ancient Egypt and the kingdom of Nubia.

His team is excavating a massive 13-foot-thick mudbrick wall

that dates to the earliest pharaohs, 2,000 years before the Kushite takeover.

The wall might be comparable to medieval town walls in Europe.

It is defining a space,

and also controlling the space inside and also outside.

The island of Elephantine would have been highly prized

by both the ancient Egyptians and the Nubians.

Trade routes up and down the River Nile could be controlled from here.

A forensic examination of the perimeter wall

could tell Martin's team more about how the relationship

between the Egyptians and the Nubians developed.

They plan to investigate the materials used to build the wall.

We're just taking one mudbrick out to analyze its recipe.

In Luxor,

Arto wants to find out how the Kushites who ruled Egypt's southern neighbor Nubia,

managed to seize control of the land of the pharaohs.

He's come to Karnak temple complex in the ancient capital of Thebes.

Over the course of the thousands of years of history here,

every pharaoh who could,

would add to this place in a show of wealth,

power, and piety.

Although most of this temple was constructed during the New Kingdom

when pharaonic power was at its height,

there is still astonishing evidence here of how this power began to crumble.

In the small Temple of Khonsu, built towards the end of this period,

he finds a clue.

Look at that.

This is really cool, actually.

The figure on the right, that's the god Amun.

The one with the tall, twin plumes on his head.

In front of him, normally you would have the king presenting offerings,

coming into the presence of a god.

One of his peers, essentially. But that's not what we have here, in fact.

A different figure is depicted where the pharaoh usually stands.

It reads,

"the Chief Priest of Amun, Herihor, the son of Amun."

Herihor, by placing himself in these scenes here,

being portrayed as the one physically giving the offerings to the gods,

he is portraying himself as king.

In 1069 BCE, Pharaoh Ramesses XI,

facing declining harvests and famine in Egypt,

was losing his grip on power.

A high priest called Herihor,

leader of a cult called the Priests of Amun,

challenged the authority of Ramesses, vying for control of the kingdom.

Egypt was now ruled

by the pharaohs in the north and the priests in the south.

The split threw the empire into three centuries of chaos.

And this instability gave Egypt's oppressed southern neighbors,

the Kushites, an opportunity to take control.

Around 750 BCE, for the first time, a Kushite king took southern Egypt

without a fight.

Soon after, his successor, King Piankhy, marched his army further north,

all the way to the Mediterranean.

A six-foot-high victory stele

reveals the many Egyptian rulers he vanquished.

Djedamuniuefankh,

Sheshonq,

Osorkon,

and finally here...

Tefnakht.

It was by exploiting this sort of division

and having his own allies as well, that Piankhy,

this Kushite ruler, a non-Egyptian ruler,

managed to step in and claim the title of kingship pharaoh.

Quote...

"I am the king, the representation of God."

Piankhy, the Kushite Dynasty, was now the one in control.

Piankhy was one of six Kushite kings

who ruled over Egypt for almost 100 years.

So how did an invading foreign force hold on to power in a kingdom

as steeped in ancient tradition as Egypt?

To find out, Arto needs evidence of how the Kushite kings ruled

once they held the Egyptian throne.

In the Eastern Desert at Wadi-Sikait...

Joan and his team are clearing an entrance

to this vast emerald mine.

This is a really good start.

Analysis of the papyrus fragments they've discovered

shows they are inscribed with Greek letters,

the language of Roman Egypt.

The team has uncovered evidence that the Romans held these mines

sometime after the fall of the last Egyptian pharaoh,

Queen Cleopatra.

This is one of the questions we had in there,

was there some kind of recording system for the emerald extraction there?

Well, it seems that probably yes. So hopefully, we will find more of those.

The mine entrance is clear

and the archaeologists venture inside for the first time this season.

Here we go.

That's so narrow!

They squeeze through holes, some as tight as 15 inches in diameter,

dug by the ancient miners.

In the tunnels, they find small ledges chiseled into the walls.

This is a "lucernario."

Where the Roman miners balanced their oil lamps as they worked.

Joan's team reaches one of the main chambers.

From here, tunnels lead off in all directions.

There's all these veins of mineral,

which are where the guys were actually trying to find the emeralds.

The tunnel walls reveal the working methods of the miners.

Scrape marks are left where they used iron chisels and picks

to carve out the rock as they followed the veins.

The miners were digging through schist,

a flaky stone that's easy to split,

so it's inherently weak and prone to collapse.

-David? -Yes?

We'll wait for you, David.

Come up and that's it.

After almost an hour of crawling through the narrow tunnels...

Joan reaches a blockage.

Okay.

I can see the veins that they were following in there.

They dug too much, and the ceiling collapsed.

The tunnel behind the collapse

may have been sealed off for almost 2,000 years.

If this is the case, the team wants to see what the miners may have left behind

if they escaped the collapse.

We have everything untouched inside.

It could be like a kind of photograph of a mining workday inside of the mines.

They've worked over two seasons documenting this vast mine.

This is the first sealed section they have discovered.

Oh!

-David? -Don't worry, don't worry.

Yes, yes.

Hola!

What is there?

Look, Joan.

It's perfect!

Oh, oh!

Whoo!

On the island of Elephantine, at Egypt's border with ancient Nubia...

archaeobotanist Jessica Izak

is removing a mudbrick from the vast perimeter wall.

Her analysis of mudbricks on this island so far

suggests the materials used could indicate the status of a structure.

I'm looking for the organic material in it,

and also the inorganic ones

so I know what kind of a mixture it was.

The recipe changes in mudbricks, depending on the structure.

For smaller buildings like houses,

ancient Egyptians mixed mud from the Nile with sand,

straw, and small pieces of ceramic.

As this mixture dried in the molds, it could shrink and crack...

weakening the bricks.

Bricks made with extra organic material like dung and grass

were more flexible so produced fewer cracks.

These bricks were stronger and more durable,

ideal for military or royal structures.

Thank you. Shukran.

Jessica's analysis of the brick

could tell her more about how the resources on this island

were used in the construction of this wall.

Okay, that's enough. Perfect.

What we do is we just soak it in water.

The island of Elephantine had limited organic resources.

It's founded on granite,

making it hard to grow crops on most of the island.

It's possible that the island's precious organic material

would have been prioritized for larger state-run building projects,

like a city wall.

Okay.

So the mudbrick dissolved now.

They sieve the mud,

separating it into two grades of material, heavy and light.

I'm trying to also figure out how did the landscape look,

because the mudbrick captured like a little time capsule,

all the information from the environment around it.

For me, it's information about how people lived,

how the environment looked,

how they managed and adapt to the environment.

Tomorrow, these bags will be dry

and Jessica can analyze the brick recipe which might give clues

to the purpose of this settlement on the frontier with Nubia.

In the Eastern Desert at Wadi-Sikait...

Whoa! My goodness.

...Joan and his team

are the first to enter this area of the emerald mine

on the border of Egypt and Ancient Nubia for almost 2,000 years.

Look, Joan, a Roman basket.

Oh!

I told you it must be some basket.

It's perfect. It's totally preserved.

And there are three more in sight.

Three more, yes.

Two of them are in a pretty good state,

but this one is the best one of all.

The best one. Look at that.

The team has uncovered

a cache of stunning handwoven baskets from the Roman period.

There are no skeletons, which suggests the miners escaped,

hurriedly leaving their baskets as the roof collapsed.

Ooh!

Extracting these fragile

2,000-year-old baskets will take great care.

Need to be very careful.

It's very fragile.

But it seems also intact.

Basically, it's perfect.

You can see the handles and everything.

Unbelievable.

This is clear that they were made not to carry heavy things.

You see, thin handles,

just to carry precious things like emeralds, for instance.

Not to carry the debris or stones, of course.

The veins of mineral containing the emerald were too hard

for the miners' hand tools,

so they dug out the softer schist around the veins

to extract the emerald carried in these baskets.

The three baskets are too large and too fragile

to safely maneuver through the narrow tunnels to the surface.

The team has no choice but to carefully document them in situ

and leave them in this safe, dry environment.

Wow!

There are names here.

Amazing. It was clear that they were attaching

these tags to the baskets.

It was the property or the work of Elis...

Elis...

and Phibis.

Even the miners' lunch

has been preserved in these dry conditions.

Remains of onions.

They find the stopper of an amphora

for water or wine,

and a harness for carrying the amphora.

This is a photograph of a mining day.

Exactly.

This is what they were using while they were working.

It's everything in there, untouched.

It's like mining Pompeii,

you know, because they left all as was one day 2,000 years ago.

This undisturbed area

of the emerald mine is shedding new light, not only on the ancient working practices,

but also on the people who worked here.

And the incredible finds keep coming.

Whoa!

-What happened? -It's a ring!

Whoa!

In Luxor,

Arto is searching for evidence of how Egypt's new Kushite rulers,

having overthrown the great pharaohs, held on to power for almost 100 years.

He's come to the vast temples of Medinet Habu,

where the Kushite kings might have left clues.

Now you might think that an invading force

would want to erase evidence of past glories.

But that's not what the Kushite kings seemed to have done.

Ramesses III built Medinet Habu around 1175 BCE

as a temple to the god Amun.

A maze of giant halls and spacious courtyards...

it featured monumental gates adorned with scenes

of the king's victories in battle.

Instead of demolishing this monument to the Egyptian god,

the Kushites added to it,

building chapels...

and dedicating them to the wives of Amun.

The god's wives of Amun were not themselves goddesses.

They were real people with real economic power.

Kind of like a female equivalent to the high priest.

The office of Wife of Amun had existed since the beginning

of Egypt's golden age.

But by the time of Kushite rule, their influence had increased to the point

where they were almost on a par with the king.

Look at this one right here.

This is the God's wife of Amun, Amenirdis.

Even though she's depicted as an Egyptian,

we know that she was the sister of King Piankhy.

So she was, in fact, Kushite.

And she was installed into this position by her brother as a power play.

The invading Kushites

did not want to destroy Egyptian traditions.

Instead, they worked inside the structures of Egyptian politics,

seizing power from within.

They didn't want the Egyptians

to see them as conquerors,

but rather as the rightful inheritors of power.

From her position of power,

Amenirdis could wield influence on Piankhy's behalf.

But with Egypt secured,

what did the Kushite kings do with their power?

On the island of Elephantine,

at the ancient border between Egypt and Nubia...

This is fine.

...the mud from the brick is dry

and ready for Jessica to analyze.

So, here's my treasure.

The lightest sediment is most likely to contain organic material.

We have fragments of straw, grasses, and little seeds.

Chard seeds, also. It's a lot.

This mudbrick was very rich in organic material.

They used the processed chaff from bakeries

and from also... Um, we have dung.

It's clear this was no ordinary mudbrick.

The plant material allowed the brick to flex as it dried,

reducing cracks and strengthening the wall.

The limited organic resources on this island

appear to have been prioritized for this wall,

suggesting it was part of a state-run building program,

perhaps to protect against attacks from Nubia to the south.

What I love about working in Egypt

is that the material is so perfectly preserved

due to the dry conditions.

I sometimes find onion skins, 3,000-years-old onion skins.

But they look like the ones that I threw away

in my apartment two weeks ago.

It's breathtaking, in my opinion.

If this was a military outpost on the frontier with Nubia,

what can the other buildings here tell them

about what went on within the fortress walls?

-Martin! - Yes, I'm coming.

Oh, wow.

On the island of Elephantine,

the ancient gateway on the Nile between Egypt and Nubia...

If we open the ground, we don't know exactly what will come out.

...the team is now digging down to the bedrock

to investigate the earlier structures here.

This is like the goal of this season,

to find as much as possible

for the first building phases in this area.

Martin's team has uncovered the bases of two grain silos,

built to store barley and emmer,

to make bread and beer for the inhabitants of the town.

The silo, which is already founded

on top of the granite over there,

we can say, okay, this is the first phase of building.

Just wanted you to see what we've found.

What do we have?

Embedded in these earlier structures,

archaeologist Fernanda is finding pottery

that allows the team to date the beginnings of the settlement.

Seems we have a marred clay vessel.

-Storage vessel. - Oh, wow.

The rim and other bits of the vessel

tell us about the form, the type, and thus the dating.

So it is, for us, like the safest way of how to date within a layered.

The earliest structures date to shortly before

the oldest sections of the wall,

confirming the wall was built around a preexisting settlement.

They also uncover the base of an ancient furnace.

At the bottom, there was not so much heat.

It started somewhere from here,

it's getting to orange color.

This here is probably reworking.

You have old copper tools,

and you melt it again to make a new copper tool.

These discoveries seem at odds with the theory

that this was a fortress.

The furnace could not produce heat high enough to forge weapons.

And they can only find two grain silos.

Not enough to feed an army.

Although the thick perimeter wall

appears it might have had a defensive function...

inside the perimeter,

Martin has found no evidence of military activity.

Instead, he thinks this was a place of trade

between Egypt and Nubia.

A lot of objects which came from south of Egypt.

Ivory, ebony wood, pearls, and also ostrich feathers.

They must have been traded here through Elephantine.

The wall and settlement inside

date to the earliest years of a unified Egyptian state.

The fortified wall is likely to have been a royal effort

to distinguish an Egyptian border,

laying claim to the island of Elephantine as a trading post.

Both sides benefited from that exchange.

But the pharaonic culture taking here the island of Elephantine,

in order to have the control of what is going in and what is going out.

Martin's work is adding valuable evidence

to our picture of this ancient border.

Over 2,000 years from the earliest pharaohs

until the reign of the Kushite kings,

the Egyptians dominated the Nubians, using diplomacy and trade

to exert control over their southern neighbors.

In Wadi-Sikait,

150 feet below the Eastern Desert...

I can't believe it!

It's a ring!

- A ring? - No way.

No way. You are kidding.

The ring is here, it's here.

Whoa, a ring!

Be careful, there's a chain attached.

OK.

Look at that. Unbelievable.

Joan's team has found a stunning silver ring

in this untouched area of the emerald mine.

It's amazing. Never found anything like that.

This is typical for miners

to work with these tools.

With a ring, it's dangerous. So it was hanging on a tiny rope, you see.

The ring was clearly precious to the miner,

unable to stop to find it as they escaped the collapsing tunnel.

There is like an inscription.

To understand the significance of this find,

Joan will make a close analysis of the objects back at camp.

It's the most amazing find we've made in a mine so far.

All these things together in the same spot,

because probably they were running away and leaving everything.

This opens a whole new prospective in this area, of course.

Unbelievable.

In just one morning,

Joan and his team have made their greatest discovery

in the seven years they have been exploring these mines.

A mining moment, frozen in time.

The increasing in the knowledge

of how these people work and live in there,

it's completely astonishing.

So, yeah, for sure we will dedicate the rest of the season

just in this part of the mine, for sure.

I have enjoyed so much.

That was hard.

In the team's research tent,

Joan and his wife Delia are logging and analyzing

the mining treasure trove they have uncovered.

Okay, so this is an amazing piece.

It is a silver ring.

It was found just, uh, close to the baskets.

And at some point, he lose it.

Uh, and, of course, probably this was at this moment

where the ceiling collapsed,

and this guy had to run out from-- For his life.

And he left the ring in there and never came back.

The detail on the ring is exquisite.

At the beginning, we thought it was some kind of horseman,

but now that it's cleaner, we think it's probably a lion.

A lion eating someone or some animal.

And this is interesting because it's not a typical ring

that you should expect on a guy working on a mine.

It's a silver ring. It's a good ring. So it gives some ideas about that.

Maybe another general idea of poor people as slaves

working in the mines, and maybe it's not the case.

Joan and Delia

hope the ceramic name tags found with the baskets

can tell them more about the individual miners.

They have written names on them.

So we think that those were kind of tags attached to the basket

to know who was the person that was extracting these emeralds

and taking them out.

And this is extremely interesting

because it is showing that it was a strict register

of all the work that they were doing inside.

So they can get paid in relation with this amount of emeralds.

The discovery of these name tags

challenges modern views of this type of work.

We have here Phibis, and these two are from Elis.

We think that maybe this could be a female.

In the Eastern Desert at Wadi-Sikait,

these name tags suggest women once worked in the emerald mines here.

If we can confirm that, that would be extremely interesting

because it would help to break another of these typical ideas

about the people working in the mines, that they could only be men.

Until today's discovery, it was generally assumed only men

braved the harsh conditions in these emerald mines.

But it looks like women also came here to get their share of the riches.

It's a remarkable find.

We could show that, in fact,

there were female working inside of the mines.

Joan thinks these finds date to after the last great pharaoh,

Queen Cleopatra, when the Romans ruled Egypt.

Now, he wants to find out

if the Nubians ever challenged the mighty Roman Empire

for these valuable borderlands.

So he's come to the Temple of Sikait,

a huge complex of chapels and shrines carved into the rock.

It was important for them to have the protection of the gods,

so they created his building.

One of the most impressive religious structures

probably in all the Eastern Desert.

We have materials coming from the Egyptian tradition,

we have materials from the Greco-Roman tradition,

and we have also materials from these Nubian Blemmyian tradition,

which means that these Blemmyes arrived here,

and they reused this temple again as a religious base.

The evidence here shows it was a Nubian tribe called the Blemmys

who finally conquered this region

after a power struggle lasting hundreds of years.

The Blemmys were nomads from Lower Nubia

who took over the emerald mines from the Romans around 400 CE.

While the Romans had greatly expanded the mines,

the Blemmys continued to mine emeralds from the existing tunnels.

They wanted to control probably the economic resources

of the area, which were huge.

Probably still with an important relationship

of trading with Romans for sure.

But being, let's say, the bosses in the area.

The Blemmys patiently waited until the Roman Empire weakened

before claiming the riches of the Eastern Desert.

Just as a thousand years earlier, their Nubian cousins, the Kushites,

had taken on the Egyptian Empire and won the throne.

Back in Luxor...

Arto has returned to Karnak Temple in his search for evidence

of the Nubian Kushite kings' approach to ruling Egypt.

Deep in the heart of the temple complex, he finds an immense column.

This here is both beautiful and awe-inspiring in equal measure.

This gigantic column of stone is shaped like a graceful papyrus plant.

It was built by King Taharqa, and I can see his cartouche right there.

Taharqa was the fourth Kushite king to rule Egypt.

By building this here,

Taharqa was showing his reverence to Egyptian gods.

So clearly, the Kushite kings were very big

on respecting Ancient Egyptian religion.

During Taharqa's reign,

Karnak was the most sacred temple complex in Egypt.

And it's here that he decided to make his mark.

The Kushite king erected two rows of columns

shaped like papyrus plants, symbolizing youth, life, and vigor.

He paved the area with luxurious rose-colored granite.

In the center, he placed a polished calcite shrine,

perhaps to support the boat of Amun...

part of an Ancient Egyptian religious ceremony.

This was quite possibly all part of the Kushite's grand plan.

Egypt was in crisis for most of the 300 years

since the collapse of the New Kingdom.

So when the Kushite kings came in, they did not see themselves as conquerors,

but restorers.

Rather than impose Nubian culture on their Egyptian subjects,

the Kushites chose instead to reboot Egyptian traditions,

breathing new life into the kingdom.

The Nubians have come to adopt Ancient Egyptian theology.

They had begun to worship Ancient Egyptian deities.

It was a renaissance.

One question remains.

If the Kushites brought back stability and tradition

to Ancient Egypt,

why have they been so overlooked by historians?

There was this prejudice by early archaeologists.

How could these black pharaohs from the south of Egypt,

how could they possibly match the Ancient Egyptians?

But here's the thing.

The more that people have studied Nubian culture,

the more of an appreciation

has evolved for these great kings.

So maybe it is time to give them a bit more credit.