All language subtitles for Lost Cities of the Ancients (2006) - S01 E01. The Vanished Capital of the Pharoah.EN

Of all the wonders of Ancient Egypt,
Ramesses the Great's capital,

the City of Piramesse, was
one of the most spectacular.

The pharaoh lavished a fortune
on building his capital.

But long ago, the whole city and
all its treasures vanished...

off the face of the earth.

The lost city of Piramesse
became the stuff of legend.

Until, 3,000 years later,
its rediscovery opened up

one of the most bizarre puzzles
in the history of archaeology.

Because when Piramesse reappeared,

it was in the wrong place.

A place where Ramesses the Great
could never have built it.

A place that didn't even exist
at the time Ramesses was alive.

This is the strange story of how
an entire city could vanish,

only to reappear thousands of
years later in the wrong place.

3,000 years ago, Egypt was
ruled by a master builder,

a pharaoh determined to leave
a permanent mark on history.

Ramesses II was born a commoner, but became one
of the greatest kings of the Ancient World.

He ruled Egypt for over 60 years
and fathered 100 children.

Across his empire he built
temples and monuments.

But his masterpiece, the
place closest to his heart,

was the city he named after himself...

Piramesse.

A vast citadel of white and azure,
Piramesse was filled with monuments

designed to inspire awe in all who entered.

The city was one of Ramesses'
most ambitious creations,

built on the Nile as a gateway
between Ancient Egypt and the sea.

This was a thriving port, a
hub of the Ancient World.

Up to 300,000 people lived here.
The very rich and the very poor.

Nobility, craftsmen and slaves.

Merchants came from far
and wide to trade here.

At the heart of the city, Ramesses
built a massive army garrison,

housing thousands of soldiers,
charioteers and horsemen.

His garrison would have had stabling for hundreds of
war horses and chariots and it was from Piramesse

that the pharaoh rode out
to his greatest battles.

Ramesses the Great never
stopped adding to his capital.

Year after year, new statues of the pharaoh
were erected all through the city.

A production line of skilled
craftsmen and workers was employed

throughout his reign to add and
embellish new statues and monuments.

As home to the king and the seat of power, Piramesse
must have looked as if it would last for ever.

But, just a couple of hundred
years after it was built...

the entire city vanished.

For thousands of years,
Piramesse was utterly lost

and the fate of this great city
became the stuff of legend.

The quest to find it again
would baffle experts

and provide one of the strangest
twists in the history of archaeology.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

Egyptologists were puzzled.

Most of the great cities of the
pharaohs had already been discovered.

All except the famous Piramesse.

It would become almost a
holy grail of Egyptologists

to actually try and find
this fabulous city.

Everyone knew from the ancient texts that
Ramesses II didn't build his new capital

near the great temples at Karnak and Luxor, the
traditional seats of power of Ancient Egypt.

Nor did he build it ancient Memphis, near
present day Cairo where the great pyramids lay.

Instead, he built it
where he'd been raised.

The lush Nile Delta, where the river fans out into
branches that flow down to the Mediterranean Sea.

The texts were clear.

Ramesses had built his city on the eastern
most branch of the Nile in the Delta.

You might think this would make
the search for Piramesse easy.

But you'd be wrong.

One of the big problems with
finding Piramesse was the problem

that the eastern branch of the Nile,
which we know it lay on, had gone.

Over time, the branches of the Nile
in the Delta often change course,

so it's impossible to know where the
easternmost branch was in Ramesses' time.

This ancient branch of the Nile has
silted up and disappeared long ago.

Without this knowledge,
finding the lost city

would mean scouring the whole
eastern side of the Nile Delta.

The absence of this single
most important clue

was a crucial obstacle to
finding Ramesses' capital.

Luckily, archaeologists knew
exactly what remains to look for,

because ancient texts had given a
detailed description of Piramesse.

First thing we knew about Piramesse
was that it was a military garrison.

It was the place from which King Ramesses II
launched his campaigns into Syria Palestine.

Therefore, the presence
of soldiers, chariotry...

would clearly have to be something which any candidate
for the site of Piramesse would have to have.

One would certainly expect in
Piramesse to have a lot of statues

and other monuments of Ramesses II.

Ramesses had a production
line of workers in quarries,

churning out statues of himself,
carved out of the living rock.

Piramesse was filled with hundreds of images
of the pharaoh, some as big as 28 metres high.

Next, Ramesses II's personal
mark, his cartouche,

would have been carved into
the city's great monuments.

Each cartouche was like a brand, placed
on objects as a stamp of ownership.

Looking at the cartouche here of
Ramesses, this little seated figure

with a hawk's head and a sun disc
on its head, is the Sun God Ra.

We then go down to this
sign here which reads "mes"

and the following two signs read "su".

So we have "Ra-mes-su".

This is "mery" or "beloved".

And then the sign in the top left
hand corner of the cartouche

which is the great God Amun,
the King of the Gods.

So we have the whole thing
reading "Ra-mes-su-mery Amun".

Or, "Ramesses, beloved of Amun".

Piramesse we know had major temples.

Particularly dedicated to the god Amun.

Any site which is claimed to be Piramesse
must have evidence for temples.

And finally, there'd be the
home of the pharaoh himself.

We know very little about the
palaces of the pharaohs,

but you'd expect them to be very
large with great open courtyards.

The floors would have been of
painted plaster, the walls as well.

So that's the sort of thing one would
expect to find in Ramesses' palace.

So once you'd found a site
you believed was Piramesse,

you'd have to find the remains of these key markers
to prove you'd really found the legendary city.

And they'd all have to be conclusively
dated to the time of Ramesses II.

Find all of these and you've found
the lost city of Piramesse.

The story of how Ramesses' lost capital was
finally discovered began back in the 1920s,

when archaeologists were scouring
Egypt's desert landscapes,

looking for the lost
treasures of the pharaohs.

Somewhere out there lay Piramesse,
still waiting to be found.

At the time, few wanted to take on
the challenge of searching the vast

and remote far eastern Delta, in
search of Ramesses' lost city.

But if anyone wanted to find Piramesse,
this was where they had to go.

And one man was prepared
to take on that challenge.

Pierre Montet was one of
France's leading Egyptologists.

He assembled a team to
embark on an expedition

that he hoped would secure his
name in the history books.

He'd heard of a strange ancient
site deep in the Nile Delta

that had gone largely unexplored and
he thought it might be significant.

It was just possible that this
site could be a lost treasure.

Montet's destination was Tanis, in the
north-eastern corner of the Nile Delta.

Tanis was a very remote site at
the end of a very long track

set in a landscape that looks
like the surface of the moon.

When Montet eventually reached the remains, his hopes
were high of finding a spectacular lost world.

What do you think, sir?

Looks promising.

Tanis went beyond Montet's wildest dreams.

Though the ancient Nile
had long since gone,

everything else about the site fitted the
clues for Ramesses' lost city, Piramesse.

Everywhere he looked he found half
buried monuments of Ramesses the Great.

"Ra-mes-su mery Amun."

"The one born of Ra, beloved of Amun."

We've been here five minutes, I've already seen
his cartouche in what, three separate places?

Incredible.

This was one of the vital clues needed to
confirm whether this truly was Piramesse.

Montet's initial trip to
Tanis left him in no doubt

that Ramesses II's lost city
lay buried beneath his feet.

Better send word to Cairo.

We've got an awful lot of work ahead of us.

But this site would become famous for reasons far
stranger than Montet could ever have imagined.

The remains at Tanis secured Montet's
name in the world of Egyptology.

Within a few years, he'd established
a full-time excavation site

and, under his leadership, the
work became an obsession.

He published journals and identified the remains
of a massive temple dedicated to the god Amun.

As Montet's work progressed, his fame
and reputation spread across the world.

The more his teams excavated, the more statues
and obelisks of Ramesses they unearthed.

All the evidence went to confirm that this
had to be the lost city of Piramesse.

Another one.

40 found already.

In Piramesse we know that Ramesses constantly erected
new statues of himself throughout his long reign.

There was a workforce employed across his
city to build and decorate his image.

Eventually, there were over 100 statues
of the pharaoh throughout Piramesse.

So it was no wonder Montet dug up so
many beautifully preserved specimens.

Many of these statues were colossal.

Some weighed over 1,000 tons.

Carved from granite,
they were built to last.

As Montet uncovered more and more monuments, it
all confirmed to him that Tanis was Piramesse...

allowing him to imagine what this
great city must once have looked like.

Pierre Montet was probably the great
French excavator of his generation,

and was very keen on
producing the big picture.

But there's something not
quite right at Tanis.

It's true.

There really is something
not quite right at Tanis.

Something about the stones and
statues that doesn't add up.

Something that Montet
refused to acknowledge.

Here you are.

Pity he's not all with us.

Well, we've found plenty
of others that are.

Look, over thousands of years there's bound
to be some displacement to be expected.

- But the rest of him will turn up somewhere.
- Hm...

You don't agree?

Well, some displacement is to
be expected, of course. But...

It's just that the more we excavate,

the more we find structures with pieces
missing or that don't fit together at all.

It's just seems a little... odd.

It was not unusual for parts of 3,000-year-old
statues to break off and go missing.

It was just that at Tanis, everything
seemed slightly out of place.

With nothing quite as it should be, it was
turning into a very peculiar dig site.

And then, other strange
anomalies began turning up.

Puzzling finds from other places,
suggesting Piramesse might lie elsewhere.

Show me.

He says it was dug up about
30 kilometres from here.

He claims it's from Piramesse.

Well, the cartouche is
certainly that of Ramesses II,

but, er, can anyone seriously compare
a wall tile with what we have here?

If it's proof of Piramesse he's
after, he's standing in it.

It's written in almost
every stone around us.

We have a temple of Amun the size of Karnak,
more obelisks than any other site in Egypt.

We've only just scratched the surface.

THEY LAUGH

Now, come on, back to work. That's enough.
Back to work.

Montet spent the rest of his career convinced he had
found at Tanis the great lost capital of Piramesse.

And the truth is, he had.

These ARE the ancient monuments and
buildings of Ramesses' magnificent city.

But there was a bizarre
twist to his discovery.

Because this is NOT where
Ramesses built them.

Montet had unwittingly stumbled
upon a baffling mystery,

one that would take science
another 60 years to unravel.

Pierre Montet died in 1966.

That same year, an Austrian
archaeologist, Manfred Bietak,

set off on a journey of investigation that
would turn Montet's discoveries on their head.

In doing so, he would finally solve the strange puzzle
surrounding Ramesses the Great's vanished city.

What Bietak discovered is so strange that
it appears to defy the laws of logic.

These are the monuments of Piramesse.

However, they are found in the wrong place.

What's more, he has absolute proof of it.

Manfred Bietak was interested in the role
played by the Nile in ancient times,

when he stumbled upon the
strange truth about Piramesse.

He was trying to trace the lost
riverbeds and waterways of the Nile

in order to map out what the Delta would have
looked like at the time of the pharaohs.

Today there are only two branches
of the Nile in the Delta.

But we know that in the past the river
branches have switched course many times.

Through history, the Nile would have
had different branches all across

the Delta - branches that have
long ago dried up and disappeared.

The reason for this is that each branch of the Nile
in the Delta carries so much silt from upstream

that its riverbed keeps building up until
the water can no longer flow through it.

At that moment, the river branch will switch
course, finding a new route down to the sea

and carving out a new path, sometimes
far away from the old riverbed.

The only way to trace these ancient
waterways is to study a contour map.

All lost rivers leave tell-tale
signs in the contour lines on maps,

signs that an expert can trace to find the
ancient path of the old dried-up river.

By studying contour lines, Bietak
finally came up with a single map

charting every ancient silted up branch and
waterway of the Nile through the eastern Delta.

There were many lost channels and each had been
active at some time in the past 5,000 years.

On this reconstruction map,

with the help of the study of the
contours of the Delta landscape,

I was able to reconstruct the variety
of Nile branches in antiquity.

This one map held the truth about Piramesse,
because it would reveal where the city should lie.

The ancient texts said it lay on
the Delta's easternmost branch.

So all Bietak had to do
was to work out which was

the easternmost branch of the Nile
at the time of Ramesses the Great.

To do that, he had to date
all the ancient branches.

And he did that with pottery.

In Egypt, cities and settlements were built

along active branches of the Nile, which supplied
them with drinking water, sanitation and transport.

Like all ancient settlements,
Piramesse's busy streets and markets

would have left behind tons of
rubbish - above all, pottery.

That pottery can be dated and so tell
you the date of the city itself.

By dating the pottery
of all the settlements

along the ancient lost branches
of the Nile, that will tell you

when each settlement was inhabited and therefore
when that particular branch of the Nile was active.

Every kind of pottery or ceramic has a
unique signature that dates it in time.

The type of clay, the way it was
made, the techniques of firing

and glazing can all be
pinpointed to specific periods.

Our days it is possible to date within

approximately 30-50 years
accurately by ceramic alone.

So, by combining his map of ancient waterways
with his knowledge of dating pottery,

Bietak was able to pinpoint where and when the Nile
flowed through the Delta at each moment in history.

What's more, the amounts of
pottery along the old riverbeds

would tell him where the biggest
ancient settlements were.

Just as Montet would have predicted, Bietak
found that one of these branches of the Nile,

known as the Tanitic branch,
ran directly past Tanis,

where Montet had found Piramesse.

The problem came when Bietak dated
the settlements along this branch.

Here is Tanis,

and this is the course of the
Tanitic branch of the Nile,

with numerous sites along its banks,

but no site dates from
the time of Ramesses II.

Which means this branch of the Nile

didn't even exist at the
time of Ramesses the Great.

This eliminates the Tanitic branch

of being active in the time of Ramesses II.

Also it rules out that
Tanis had been Piramesse.

What Bietak had discovered
was extraordinary.

There was no pottery at Tanis from
the time of Ramesses the Great.

All of it dates from at least
200 years after his death.

This meant that despite all of
Pierre Montet's genuine finds...

the Great Pharaoh couldn't possibly
have built his capital city here.

Tanis contained lots of ancient pottery,

and Montet assumed that, like the
statues and obelisks at the site,

it also came from the time of Ramesses II.

So he had never painstakingly dated it all.

If he had, he would have discovered
the bizarre truth about Tanis -

that there was no city here at
the time of Ramesses the Great.

Not a single pottery shard has been collected
from the time of Ramesses II or before,

but everything is post Ramesses II
and this is a very important point.

And yet, the monuments, statues
and buildings here are,

without doubt, those of Piramesse,
built by Ramesses the Great.

It was a bizarre paradox.

How can a magnificent city turn up in a
place where it could never have been built?

And where on earth should it
have been in the first place?

Bietak was intrigued.

He felt compelled to solve
the puzzle left by Montet

and find the real site of Piramesse.

And, thanks to his map, he
had the means of finding it.

By using pottery to date the lost
eastern channels of the Nile,

one immediately stood out -

the ancient Pelusiac branch,

stretching over 180 kilometres in length.

Along the course of this ancient branch,

pottery had been discovered dating
from the time of Ramesses the Great,

which meant that it had to be the active, most
eastern branch of the Nile at the time of Ramesses.

So Piramesse must lie somewhere
along this lost Pelusiac branch.

At this point, Bietak teamed up with German
archaeologist Edgar Pusch to find the city.

Here, we have Tanis,

which we know is not Piramesse.

And then over here,

we have the Pelusiac Nile branch,

running something like this.

And along it we do have evidence of settlement
remains of Ramesses II and his followers -

but here, at Qantir,

we have an incredible concentration
of settlement remains of Ramesses II.

There had been clues suggesting
Qantir was the site of Piramesse,

going back to the time of Montet.

Yeah, he says it was dug up
about 30 kilometres from here.

He claims it's from Piramesse.

This is Qantir -

30 kilometres south of Tanis.

Could this be the site of
the lost city of Piramesse?

When Pusch first arrived, there
was nothing to see at Qantir.

No statues, no obelisks, no temples -

nothing to suggest this could once have been
home to the ancient world's great lost capital.

When I came first to this area
and to the site, I was shocked.

Nothing was to be seen at the surface,

no clue where to dig and where to excavate.

The region around Qantir is one
of the most fertile in Egypt

and has been so intensively cultivated,

all evidence of ancient worlds on
the surface has been obliterated.

It's the archaeological
equivalent of a scorched earth.

When we started to work in this area, every
colleague told us, "You won't find a thing."

"Everything is destroyed,
nothing is there."

And yet, somewhere here,
amongst these fields,

so Pusch and Bietak proposed, lurked
the Holy Grail of Egyptology -

Ramesses II's spectacular
lost city of Piramesse.

And so they began to excavate.

They were after any clue, however
small, that might prove them right.

Miraculously, just three days into the dig
and only ten centimetres below the surface,

Pusch's team found some
tantalising evidence.

These odd carved objects would ultimately turn
out to be the first crucial piece of evidence

suggesting that Qantir, this unprepossessing place,
might just be everything they were hoping for.

But, at the time, no-one
had a clue what they were.

We didn't have the slightest
idea of what they could be,

so they were called something
like "broken fragment of a vase",

"broken fragment of a dagger
handle" or something like this.

They kept digging and finding more and
more of these mysterious objects.

And then they found
something rather wonderful.

Now, this is a real surprising find.
A complete set of horse bits.

Made from bronze, locally produced -
the only one ever found in Egypt.

It is in such a condition that it
looks like it was made yesterday.

When they unearthed the floor of the buildings
within which the objects had been found,

they discovered another surprise.

We found a special set of stones consisting
of a tethering stone up front here,

then an opening in the ground
surrounded by limestone.

Now, the size of all this is in such a way
that a horse of that time, a male horse,

would be tethered to those two stones,

that it would be urinating
directly into these openings,

giving us the possibility to say
that we do have horse toilets.

And a little archaeological experiment
shows this and proves this.

We took mules, which have about the same
size as the horses in ancient times,

and one of these mules did us the favour
of urinating directly into the openings.

Six rows of ten rooms each

and in each room several
positions to tether horses.

It meant the complex must once have
been home to at least 460 horses.

Stabling on such a large scale could
only mean some kind of military complex.

Horses were the mainstay
of a pharaoh's army

and the site certainly dated to
the time of Ramesses the Great.

But stables were not unique to Piramesse.

It was the continued discovery of
hundreds more of the mystery objects,

some of them completely intact, that
finally proved the most significant.

Only by chance we found out
what these objects were.

I was going through the Cairo Museum

and I suddenly saw that
there are knobs like this

immediately connected with the yoke
of the state chariots of Tutankhamen.

Thousands of these stone knobs
would have held together

the harnesses of Ramesses the
Great's many war chariots.

When combined with the number of horses stabled
here, this could only amount to one thing.

As ancient texts spoke of Piramesse
as having a large chariot garrison,

it was exactly the size of
complex you'd expect to find

at the lost site of
Ramesses II's capital city.

But it had taken Pusch and Bietak years of
excavation just to unearth the garrison.

At this rate of digging, it
would take hundreds of years

to prove if they had truly
found the site of Piramesse.

And so they turned instead to a new
technology that, without lifting a stone,

would conclusively unlock the secrets of
what lay beneath the fields of Qantir.

But when it arrived, the
electromagnetic scanner

was hardly the piece of cutting
edge technology they'd expected.

Nobody believed ever that it would work.

Just the same, we said, "OK, you took the trouble
of coming here, now let's set up the device."

The walls and foundations of ancient settlements
all leave tell-tale traces in the ground.

The electromagnetic scanner can penetrate
the ground to read those traces.

If the foundations of Piramesse
were beneath these fields,

the scanner would reveal traces
of the roads, walls and buildings

hidden there without the need to dig.

At first, no-one thought for a moment that anything
of any interest would be revealed in the scans.

But they were wrong.

There it was.

Absolutely incredible.
None of us believed it.

There was the layout of a building.

We were literally crying and I can...

I must admit it, I'm still close to
crying remembering these things.

Laid out before him were
the outlines of a building

hidden just a few centimetres
beneath the ground.

We could see the wall is going like this.

And there it is destroyed
and so and so and so.

We said, "OK, immediately back out to the field.
Continue the magnetic measurements, this is it."

"It really works."

Since that first day, they have scanned an
area of two square kilometres around Qantir,

the largest study of its kind in the world.

Exposed, for the first time in thousands
of years, beneath the fields of Qantir...

are the foundations of the
vast ancient city of Piramesse.

The most wonderful part
of all this huge area

is a building in the middle of
our scan, one huge structure,

covering more than 41,000 square metres,

the centre of which is a building
which shows a sequence of rooms,

all of them with symmetrically
arranged columns.

The function of this building
is most probably a temple.

Temples were central to
life in Ancient Egypt.

Their huge columned halls
and cavernous interiors

deliberately designed to inspire
awe as much as to intimidate.

This is the western part of our scan.

A villa area with long stretching,
straight running streets

branching off at right angles.

The estates themselves surrounded by white
lines, which are the surrounding walls.

The southern edge of this settlement and
villa area is denoted by a black line

and giving the shoreline of
the Pelusiac Nile branch.

Laid out along avenues
in a distinctive grid,

these were the homes of the wealthy.

It's in this area of the site
that large inscribed door lintels

have been found bearing the names
of Egyptian generals and royalty

and looking out across
the banks of the Nile.

The eastern part of our scan shows
a much denser building area,

also divided by streets,

but they are neither straight
nor on a clear grid.

This area of very small houses

might be an area where not only socially
lower-ranking people were once living,

but also workshops might
have been in operation.

This other sizeable neighbourhood with
its haphazard, tightly-packed layout

has all the characteristics of a more workaday
part of the city, both residential and trade.

In contrast to the villa district, people here lived
cheek by jowl along packed, twisting streets.

So you have a clear distinction
between the west and the east.

With the layout and style of architecture forming
a strong sense of the scale of Piramesse,

one structure, perhaps the
most breathtaking of all,

is out of the reach of even the
most high-tech scanning equipment.

The modern day town of Qantir is a jumbled
collection of ramshackle buildings,

typical of a delta town today.

Judging by its central
position on the scan,

it is almost certainly sitting slap-bang
on the top of Ramesses II's palace.

According to accounts of the time,

Ramesses the Great's palace was vast,

the heart of the city, adorned with monuments
celebrating his rule and longevity.

The outside walls would have dazzled,

painted white and decorated
with glazed tiles.

As incredible as the scan of Piramesse is,

all it provides us with is the footprint of
the city's once impressive architecture.

But we can get a glimpse of what
it must once have looked like

from other sites where Ramesses
the Great's influence was felt.

The vast majority of the temples of
Ramesses II's time are now lost.

However, when one looks at the great
pylon he erected at Luxor temple...

when you look at his
constructions at Karnak...

and also the slightly later
temple at Medinet Habu...

one gets a flavour of what
the buildings that once

dominated the city of Piramesse
may have looked like.

With such a large expanse
of the city laid bare,

the scan had one more secret to reveal.

These bare areas showed where
lakes, canals and waterways

ran through Piramesse, fed by the Nile.

This final piece of the
jigsaw completed the picture

and showed just how unique
Piramesse truly was.

It contained huge temples...

palatial riverside
villas of the wealthy...

winding cramped streets of
less well-heeled neighbourhoods

and the site of the palace
of the pharaoh himself.

But it was Ramesses the Great's choice
of location within the Nile Delta

that made the city so unique.

With canals fed by the waters of the Nile,

Piramesse was quite simply...

the Venice of its day.

But if Bietak and Pusch had
indeed found Piramesse at Qantir,

what was it that Montet
had discovered at Tanis?

Once you've recognised that
Piramesse is indeed at Qantir,

you start wondering, "Well,
what on earth is Tanis then?"

There are buildings there which really any
detached observer know must come from Piramesse.

So what are they doing there?

Is it a hoax?

Have aliens dropped them there?

Piramesse had been found, but it
seemed to be in two places at once.

The buildings were in Tanis, but the
foundations are beneath Qantir.

How could this have happened?

The answer is intriguing.

Ramesses the Great had chosen to locate his capital
on the ancient Pelusiac branch of the Nile

and the river was its lifeblood.

But the city was also at the mercy of the river
and one day it would spell doom to Piramesse.

That moment came around 150 years
after the death of Ramesses II.

The Pelusiac branch of the Nile silted up.

It dwindled away until the river
finally switched course altogether,

leaving the Venice of
its day without water.

What happened was that the
Pelusiac branch of the Nile,

which passed Piramesse here, was
blocked in its lower reaches.

The Pelusiac branch of the Nile lost its
waters to the Tanitic branch of the Nile,

which became the main
artery of the Nile traffic.

For Piramesse, this spelt disaster.

Now isolated from the world, it looked as though
this magnificent city would have to be abandoned.

But instead, after the death
of Ramesses the Great,

his successors decided to
do something extraordinary.

The clue to what the ancient Egyptians
did to Piramesse 3,000 years ago

lies hidden in the middle of an
unassuming field in modern day Qantir.

Here are the feet of one of
the many colossal statutes

that Ramesses the Great built at Piramesse.

The rest of the statue is somewhere else.

Pity he's not all with us.

There's bound to be some
displacement to be expected,

but the rest of him will turn up somewhere.

The feet of some statues at Tanis
had been left behind at Qantir

when the ancient Egyptians
did something incredible.

They moved their city.

And they moved it to where the new
branch of the Nile now flowed.

Piramesse was abandoned

and a new town, new residence

was built up along the Tanitic
branch of the Nile. This was Tanis.

It was at last possible to solve the mystery
at the heart of the story of Piramesse -

how it ended up being
in two places at once.

About 150 years after Ramesses' death,

when the river around Piramesse silted up,

the city ceased to function.

Unwilling to abandon this splendid place,

the ancient Egyptians decided to move the
entire city to where the Nile had moved to.

Slowly Piramesse was disassembled
block by block, statue by statue.

It was a monumental feat,

undertaken to keep alive one of
the greatest cities ever created.

The largest statues
weighed up to 1,000 tons.

Moving any single piece would have
taken a workforce of hundreds,

using sleds to transport the
pieces through the city.

Monuments, like statues and obelisks,

would have been taken down
and transported whole.

Temples and other buildings,
a single piece at a time.

With no surviving accounts
of the actual event,

we can only wonder at how long
such a move would have taken...

and how many lives may have
been lost in the effort.

But, like the pieces of
a giant jigsaw puzzle,

the monuments of Ramesses II's
great city were reassembled

on the banks of the new
easternmost branch of the Nile.

Piramesse dies

and the new north-eastern
capital of Egypt, Tanis,

rises using the stones
taken from Piramesse.

Built with the very statues,
temples and obelisks of Piramesse,

Tanis became the seat of power and
home to a new dynasty of pharaohs.

Until, like all great
cities and civilisations,

Tanis too one day crumbled
and faded into history.

When it was discovered 3,000 years later,

it started a mystery that
archaeologists have only just solved.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006.

E-mail subtitling@bbc. Co. uk