Original subtitles

In September 2002, an extraordinary event happened at the Great Pyramid of Giza,

the biggest, the grandest, the most mysterious of all the pyramids of ancient Egypt.

Teams of archaeologists and engineers were conducting two remarkable explorations,

while the whole thing was also broadcast live on television.

In the ancient cemetery of the pyramid builders, the

oldest sealed coffin ever found in Egypt would be opened.

It was thought to belong to the most important overseer of the whole pyramid project.

At the same time, an exploration was underway deep inside the Great Pyramid.

A robot crawled up a secret shaft to see what lay beyond a mysterious door.

New spaces in the pyramid discovered by the robot would help Egyptologists

understand the purpose of the pyramid itself.

We're trying to reconstruct what was in the minds of builders

in an archaeological instant more than five millennia ago.

You have your expectations, you have your mental

models, but what you actually find is a surprise.

And that's the way it was with this little shaft.

It's a very important moment for us.

That door was one of the most important discovery before the end of year 2002.

It's astonishing how little is known about the Great Pyramid.

How was it built?

What exactly was it formed?

Might there still be undiscovered chambers hidden inside?

These are questions archaeologists have spent years trying to answer.

It's always been thought that the Great Pyramid was built for

the pharaoh Khufu some four and a half thousand years ago.

But so far as we know, nothing of Khufus has ever been found inside the pyramid.

Khufu had spent his whole life on Earth, preparing for his funeral and his death.

Khufu was the king of all Egypt, supreme ruler of the world and a living god.

And his destiny was to join the other gods in the heavens.

By day he would be the sun god.

At night one of the northern stars which never set in the night sky.

As Khufu's funeral barge crossed the Nile, leaving the land of the living for the

land of the dead, he took with him the trappings

of his earthly life for the next world.

What happened to all this treasure is unknown.

Almost certainly it was interred with him in the Great Pyramid,

which Egyptologists are now convinced was Khufu's tomb.

The pyramid provides a secure resting place for the body of the king,

where it can remain undamaged and whole for eternity.

But it's more than that, because it's like a machine which actually gives the king

the energy to be transformed into the next life

and to live as a god in the celestial sphere above.

But exactly how the Egyptians thought the pyramid would help the king reach the

celestial sphere has never been properly understood.

Archaeologists hope that answers may still be hidden inside.

Every small thing that we find out about the Great Pyramid is important because

everything functions together in this one machine

whose soul aim is to get the king to the next life.

In September 2002, scientists planned to send a robotic camera into a completely

new and unexplored part of the Great Pyramid and all of it live on television.

This is the entrance to the Great Pyramid.

It's not the original one.

That was blocked off after they buried the pharaoh.

Now, this tunnel was cut through the stone about a thousand years ago, and eventually

it leads to what's believed to be Khufu's burial chamber.

But to reach the chamber where our team are busy working, I'm going to have to

make my way through a series of tunnels and shafts

right through the very heart of the pyramid.

I'm just about reaching the first one.

I'm going to make it up these steep stone steps to where the

team is working on solving the mystery of the secret shaft.

The mystery shaft was first explored in 1992

by a German engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink.

But when his robot had gone 65 metres up the

shaft, his team was stunned by what they saw.

The shaft was blocked.

The stone looked as though it had been carefully cut to fit the shaft.

But what were those things that looked like handles?

Could this be a door?

And was it a clue to the pyramid's function?

Fascinated by this mysterious shaft and stone, Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of

antiquities for Egypt, had a dream of looking beyond it.

I've been waiting for this for my life.

In 2002, a new robot was commissioned, an ingenious

device that could carry a range of tools and cameras.

And a new team were given the special access to the pyramid they needed.

By September, they'd been testing the robot for several weeks.

It wasn't easy.

Not only is the stone 65 metres up, but the shaft rises extremely steeply.

Now the team was ready to launch the robot on its final mission of discovery.

Well, that's the first part of the journey, John.

I'm a bit out of breath.

I've just made it 120 feet up these steep steps here.

But, you know, it was worth it because I'm now

right inside the heart of the great pyramid.

I'm standing in what's known as the Grand Gallery.

You can see this impressive high stone ceiling here.

And the staircases on either side of that gallery lead

to the place where they've found Kufus sarcophagus.

That's what's known as the King's burial chamber.

But I'm not going in there.

I'm going to head down this tunnel you can see

behind me to what's called the Queen's chamber.

Now it's called the Queen's chamber, but Kufus Queen was never actually buried here.

So we don't really know what it's for.

That's just one of the mysteries that we're hoping to solve tonight.

Inside the Queen's chamber, Dr. Zahi Hawass and the robot team were waiting for Laura.

So they could send the robot on its final journey into the

shaft and the first view ever beyond the blocking stone.

The robot, which would have to climb the steep shaft before it reached the blocking

stone or door, was carrying a tiny camera at the end of a long probe.

Tonight, but look, that is a camera that's going through the door.

It's got to fit inside this, what, seven or eight square inches of a tunnel.

One question I have to ask you Zahi, because people

at home are going to wonder, has anyone had a peak?

No, but I have some ideas we'll talk about tonight.

Sending a robot into the unknown wasn't the only excitement that night.

Just a mile away from the pyramid, another unique event was happening.

Dr. Hawass had given permission for a recently discovered tomb to be opened.

The hieroglyphs said that it belonged to a senior overseer called Nesut Wessert.

It was a rare discovery.

This was the oldest sealed sarcophagus ever found in Egypt.

Nesut Wessert's tomb was the latest discovery in a remarkable cemetery that

has transformed our understanding of how the pyramids were built.

Dr. Hawass only discovered the tombs in the early 90s.

While there are hundreds of tombs near the pyramids, tombs of queens of princes and

princesses of nobles and high-ranking officials, no

one had found a single tomb of the pyramid workers.

It was my dream to find any evidence of the people who built the pyramids.

This is really the first tomb that we found.

It's beautifully vaulted.

It was covered with plaster.

When I looked at her, I could see the name.

It's written hieroglyphic.

I looked at the other side.

I could see a niche for the people to bring

offering during the feast to give it to this man.

Next to the man's name was a key title, acquaintance of the king.

This is the beginning of this major story.

The title and other tomb details suggested that this was a worker.

Over a thousand new graves have now been

found, each one belonging to a pyramid builder.

Most were simple, small mouths.

Higher up the hill, they found bigger tombs, the graves of the overseas.

This was a huge find.

The overseers' tombs told them not only the names, but most important,

the titles of the dead men.

Fascinating details of how the pyramids were built began to appear.

The overseer of the workmen who dragged the stones.

The overseer of the west side of the pyramid.

Each new title revealed how the Egyptians had organized themselves.

Like the pharaoh, the workers took with them the essentials for their eternal life.

In their case, dozens of beer jars, presumably full.

They also took more practical things, their tools.

This is the kind of tools that an artist will use in carving the face of a statue.

To make it smooth and make the chest of the statue or the legs of the statue.

And if you touch it, you can feel the hand of the workmen

who actually used it since four thousand years ago.

Treasures from the tombs at Giza kept in a special storeroom.

A place where television cameras have never filled before.

But for Dr. Hawass, the most amazing things in here are

the statues that show what the workers really look like.

This statue here is a very important statue for me because

this is the first statue that we found in our excavation.

The lady grinding grain because she's working to make food and a bit for the

workmen who are working very hard in building the pyramid.

What's important is that if you look at the faces of each one here, each person

can tell us the story of the great Egyptians who built the beds.

The latest and possibly the most exciting of all the tombs they've

discovered in the Worker's Cemetery is that of Nesut Wesson.

He was the most important overseer of the whole pyramid project, and on the 16th of

September 2002, his sarcophagus was about to be opened.

It was the oldest sealed sarcophagus ever found in Egypt, and the hope was that it

would provide new insights into the building of these astonishing structures.

Nesut Wesson seems to have been an overseer in charge of supplies for the builders.

Just what that means was being discovered right below the tombs of the Workers in

another archaeological gold mine by Egyptologist Mark Lainer.

When Mark started mapping the entire pyramid plateau in the 1980s, he found the

quarries where the stone for the pyramids was cut,

but there were no traces of where the workers lived.

Somewhere, Mark knew a great city was hiding, the lost city of the pyramids.

When we first started excavating, we didn't know quite what to expect.

We had many pyramids and tombs, but we didn't know how the people lived.

So when you gather people together in tens of thousands for building a pyramid,

what imprint does it leave?

Less than a mile from the great pyramid, at the edge of a Cairo suburb,

he found that imprint.

In one of our first excavation seasons, a backhoe, a machine dug a hole through

the site and narrowly missed three large vats of pottery.

These pottery vats first appeared above a surface of black-consistent ash.

We knew we must be on to an ancient bakery.

Because of tomb scenes where they show mixing dough in big vats, but we had never

found a bakery where they actually did this.

Mark became even more intrigued when they found more and more bakeries.

Finding it replicated on the scale of hundreds of bakeries

basically gave us an insight into how the pyramid was made.

In a very early period of Egyptian history, they didn't have wonderbread factories.

They just took the way they did things in their homes, in

their houses, and they repeated it many, many, many times.

This was baking up an industrial scale, not some household kitchen.

But he soon discovered they weren't just baking bread.

They were preparing other foods, and on a scale

that would put an army field kitchen to shame.

In our excavations of the ruins of the city of the pyramids,

we find thousands and thousands of pieces of cattle bone.

In fact, along Main Street of the city, we find those kinds of bones that would

have been left behind in butchering, jaw bones and teeth and knuckle bones.

This made us wonder, was a large part of the street and the city given over to the

slaughter of cattle in the preparation of meat.

Meat was a food for the well-off, and Marx's discoveries apparently

contradicted the conventional story still being told to

tourists that the pyramids were built by thousands of slaves.

Marx was finding that the workers were being extremely well looked after.

We have enough cattle bone to feed thousands and thousands of people if they

ate meat every day over the better part of a century.

In fact, just about the time it would have

taken to build the three giant pyramids of Giza.

As the search continued, Marx discovered just

how rich in protein the builders diet was.

Looks like the spine of a little fish.

It's one of millions of tiny fish bones he's found littering the site.

So in addition to meat, the workers of the lost city were

being provided with vast quantities of fish from the Nile.

These weren't slave rations.

These workers were being fed like Olympic athletes.

Now Marx had a good idea about what they ate,

but where was all this feasting taking place?

Then he found the remains of a unique building with a strange

arrangement of troughs and benches running its length.

We began to find underneath these benches limestone column bases like this one.

And from halls in the bench just above the base we realized

that slender wooden columns rose every five Egyptian cubits.

We were in fact in Egypt's oldest columned hall.

And hidden in the sand, Mark found some small clues to what it was for.

As we excavated these troughs and benches and looked really, really close,

we found little tiny fish bone embedded throughout it.

So were these table scraps from the world's first and oldest canteen?

Maybe this was the place where groups of workers came to eat a feast every morning.

Being fed a high protein diet was the ideal preparation for

the day ahead and the phenomenal task they were undertaking.

And this whole enormous supply operation would have

been controlled by stewards of the King's estate.

People like Nesut Wesett who must have died at Giza in the course of construction.

In September 2002 his sarcophagus was to be opened in the hope that the burial of

such a key worker would provide fresh insights into the building of the pyramids.

And at the same time another mission was underway to

reveal more about the meaning of the pyramid itself.

A robot was inching its way up a small long shaft towards a door.

The purpose of the shaft and what lay beyond the door were unknown.

As the thousands of pyramid workers laboured to construct a tomb for the

man-god who was their king, we now know the structure

they were building was the most complex ever attempted.

As Kufu's new pyramid rose from the ground,

the builders were creating a labyrinth inside.

As each layer of stone was laid down, the chambers, all

the tunnels and the small shafts were also being built.

At any stage of construction, looking down on the pyramid

would reveal just how complex this arrangement was.

Some of these interior spaces are huge.

The great gallery is a massive sloped shaft that leads to Kufu's burial chamber.

At the entrance to the burial chamber, the pyramid

workers built a device to stop any tomb robbers.

After they put the mummy of the king inside the sarcophagus, the workmen and

the priestess and the son of the king, will push this slab to close the entrance

of the burial chamber and the king will be buried safely for the afterlife.

But the blocking stones failed to protect the king.

They disappeared a long time ago.

On the other side is the inner sanctum, the burial chamber.

This is where the king's body would rest in the giant sarcophagus.

And just as in the queen's chamber below, there are

two small shafts here pointing upwards to the sky.

The purpose of these shafts is still not understood.

Even some of the large chambers are still a mystery,

like the subterranean chamber underneath the pyramid.

It sits almost 30 metres underground and can only be reached by a steep shaft.

This vast space was cut out of the bedrock, but it was never finished.

No one knows how all these different shafts and chambers combined to help the

king's spirit achieve his divine destiny in the afterlife.

At the heart of the puzzle is the queen's chamber itself.

Despite the name, it wasn't for Kufu's queen.

She has her own pyramid just outside.

So what was it for?

It's been suggested that the chamber contained a statue of the king.

The statue which could be a home for the king's soul.

Egyptians thought that it was important that the spirit had to be able to come

back to the corpse, to the body, to receive nourishment and energy.

In the cult temples offerings were made to provide food in the morning and in the

evening for the spirit so that it could live in the afterlife.

But the spirit could also occupy a statue which could act as a sort of reserved body.

Might that be a clue to the purpose of the small shaft, which the robot team were now

exploring, and the function of the pyramid itself?

Earlier Dr. Hawass and one of the robot team, Meg Watters, climbed to where the

shaft from the queen's chamber should emerge, about halfway up.

There are two of these shafts, one on the north side and one on the south.

The exits from both these shafts have never been found.

We are near that shaft now.

Okay.

But the archaeologists here at Giza looked everywhere in the surface, on the south

here, and they could not find any evidence

at all of this shaft that has a hole outside.

The shafts must have been important because building them was incredibly difficult.

They weren't an afterthought.

They were very carefully constructed as the pyramid was built up, layer by layer.

No one had any idea what these shafts before,

and they've always been called our shafts.

But despite carefully searching, Meg and Dr. Hawass, like everyone before

them, also failed to find any exit for the shafts.

I think they're not there to allow air into the pyramid.

They have something to do with the belief system of the

Egyptians and what they thought the whole building was for.

Can you tell me what were the shafts for?

My theory that I believe that the south shafts functioned.

It's a symbolic corridor for the soul of the king as the sun got round.

Then, symbolically, in the mind of the Egyptian,

the soul of the king will go through that shaft.

The northern one, it's also a modal corridor for the

king as the God Hawass to join the northern stars.

It's possible that these shafts provide the means by which he can do that.

He can get out of the spirit, up to the

skies, and he can come back and join his body.

It's a dual carriage way for him to leave the earth return when he wanted.

Was this the secret of the shafts?

Were they avenues to point the king's soul towards the

celestial sphere in the northern and southern skies?

Everyone was pinning their hopes on the robot, solving the mystery.

Maybe there'd be an answer behind the secret door.

But when the robot team first came to the Great Pyramid in the summer of 2002,

they found their task was far more difficult than they had imagined.

They planned to send the robot, armed with tiny cameras, up the small

shaft in the queen's chamber, to investigate the

mysterious door or blocking stone at the far end.

At first, they were optimistic.

The shaft was smooth and easy to climb.

And 60 meters up, they got their first glimpse of the blocking stone.

That's the door.

Look, you can see the tabs.

Look at that.

But there was a problem.

Just in front of the robot, the shaft surface

was extremely uneven, almost like a step.

So, we're still getting a lot of slip.

It's a very high step.

It's an uneven step.

It's at an odd angle.

It's very difficult for me to steer and get traction.

They finally made it, but then disaster.

The robot

fell nearly 60 meters.

Luckily, it survived and went on to make its first successful trip up to the stone.

Dr. Hawass and the team got their first good look

at the stone, with its intriguing copper handles.

Look at how smooth the stone is.

It's gorgeous.

Yeah, it's very smooth.

That's a beautiful picture.

These were the most detailed images ever, and

already they've made a tantalizing discovery.

So from this chip at the bottom corner, you can see the shadows, and you can see

very clearly that this stone is sitting in a vertical shape.

It's a vertical groove in the side wall.

And that's very good news, because that is what you would do if this were actually a

door that was slid into the place from above.

Learning new details about the stone made the team even more

determined to see behind it, perhaps into a new chamber.

But the robot wasn't working properly.

It would need some major improvements before they returned in September.

The hope of finding secret chambers inside the pyramid is not that far-fetched.

Hidden chambers had already been discovered by early explorers.

In the 1800s, when dynamite was used to hunt for the missing treasure of the

pharaoh, one of the most amazing discoveries ever was made in the great pyramid.

Several secret rooms were discovered, stacked above the king's burial room.

There are five, and they were built to spread the

enormous load, bearing down on the king's tomb below.

Dr. Hawass had to crawl through the channel, blasted by the dynamite,

to reach these secret rooms.

And it was here that something sensational was found.

Ancient hieroglyphs showing that the pyramids were built by work gangs.

Each gang consists of 1000 workers, and they divide the gangs to small units.

They call them file.

A file is a Greek word.

It means a tribe.

Each tribe consists of 200 workmen.

The files were further divided into smaller gangs.

Each had a name, great one, green one, endurance, even one called perfection.

But Egyptologists were even more fascinated by what they found in the very top chamber.

There, amongst the graffiti left since the chambers

were discovered, were more of the ancient hieroglyphs.

But these were different.

This is the name.

The first time that you can see the name of Kufu written inside the pyramid,

Hufu inside a cartouche.

And after that, we have the word the hapiru.

And simso means the gang.

And this is the name of the gang who built the pyramids called Friends of Kufu.

Amazingly, this is the only known place in the whole pyramid with Kufu's name.

Signing their work in this holy place also

gave the workers their chance for immortality.

The graffiti were almost all that was known about the pyramid

builders until their tombs were discovered by Dr. Hawass.

Now, tantalizing details of their lives were emerging.

And not just from the artifacts in the tombs,

their skeletons have also helped rewrite history.

Before Dr. Hawass found the tombs, he had been haunted by

the claims that the pyramids were built by an army of slaves.

But new discoveries by bone expert Dr. Azam Ahmed Sari Eldin were leading her to

the same conclusion as Mark Lainer in the workers' town.

The workers were too well cared for to be slaves.

Building the pyramids without using wheels, pulleys or winches

was punishing work, and accidents must have been common.

But the workers' bones suggest that many survived

injuries, thanks to an astonishing level of medical care.

When

the weight of a crushing stone virtually destroyed a worker's lower arm,

there was only one medical solution, amputation.

Amazingly, there's evidence that not only was

this performed, but that the patients survived.

These are the two bones of the arm, and they are amputated about this level,

about one-third of the arm.

For this individual, we have also the upper arm,

and we can see which is this part of the bone.

And you can notice that this individual was having this amputation at this level,

so he used to use his hand like this, and this causes the curvature in the bone

as we see here, and this means that this person

lives for many years after this amputation.

Until now, no one ever thought such surgery was survivable at the time when

the pyramids were built, and the workers received such intensive medical care.

So, far from being slaves, it shows how the workers were highly valued,

and just how important this royal building project was to ancient Egypt.

The discovery that the workers were well-treated, and that they were divided

into gangs, revealed how the pyramid planners organized their men.

It also gave Mark Lainer clues to help him solve his latest problem.

He was finding the streets of the pyramid town maligned with

strange big buildings featuring long gallery-like rooms.

Mark was puzzled.

So, at first, we thought, well, we don't know what this is, it's quite

alien, and it doesn't fit our expectations at all.

Were these long rooms also for food production?

What could the pyramid builders have been doing here?

Then one morning, Mark had an idea.

These galleries, which are more than 20 metres in length,

could have been where a whole crew of workers slept.

Maybe this was the dormitory for the perfection

gang, or even the gang like the Friends of Khufu.

But Mark thinks it took about 25,000 workers to build the pyramids.

There's only room for about 2,000 in the galleries,

so where did the rest of the workers sleep?

It's a good chance that the entire work site, the entire construction yard,

was in fact a campsite.

It's a very reasonable assumption that people were camped all over the quarry and

on the pyramid itself during the time it was being built.

So maybe some of the hard labourers, the workforce that was probably brought in

seasonally, lived closer to the pyramid, and were cared

for with good quality food by people from the city.

But overseers like Nesut Wessert, the man whose tomb was being opened in

September, and the school workers on the job, were not campers.

Where did they live?

Mark was still missing key parts of his picture, but that was about to change.

Towards the end of their digging season, as Mark's team pushed the edges of the

site further than ever before, they uncovered a critical part of the puzzle.

There was only in the last few weeks when we moved this far east, that we began to

find these little chambers and these little houses.

The city of the pyramid builders was now making a lot more sense.

Here in this corner were the houses for the more

permanent pyramid workers and their families.

The craftspeople, the overseers, the potters, weavers and carpenters.

Based on these new discoveries, Mark Lainer was now able to create the

most comprehensive picture of the Giza Plateau ever seen.

The world's first industrial city surrounded by houses for skilled craftsmen

and their families, an extended campsite of seasonal workers.

It was an incredibly well-organized operation for an extraordinary building project.

And one of the key workers behind this organization was the overseer, Nesut Wessert.

On the 16th of September, 2002, in the search for further insights,

his sarcophagus was ready to be opened.

We're going to do our best here to bring a camera in.

There it goes.

I think there is a skeleton.

There is a skeleton.

Oh my God.

Tell us what you see.

I'm seeing this man.

It's resting beautifully.

And he had a skeleton.

Inside was a perfectly preserved skeleton, lying on its side like all ancient

Egyptian burials facing east towards the rising sun.

But was there anything buried with the skeleton that

could tell us more about Nesut Wessert, the man?

Do you see any artifacts, Zaiya?

Any amulets?

You know, Jay, right now, I don't want to disturb this.

Every piece of this.

Curfry will be taken to the lab for x-ray.

Then we found out his age, when did he die, any kind of diseases.

This skull seems to be completely intact.

What is my brush?

I can clean this beautiful face until this man, to tell the

world that the Egyptians were the builder of the planet.

It's really a message from Nesut Wessert, and I'm glad that this man saved his body.

The day after the opening of Nesut Wessert's sarcophagus, bone expert Dr.

Azar arrived to examine the body.

As soon as she picked up the pelvic bone, a

few things seemed clear to her experienced eye.

He's a male.

He's not so old.

I think he's about 30 years old.

And when she looked into his face, she could see that he'd been a large, strong man.

As we can see, the skull is big.

And the teeth are large teeth, and also this angle between the nose and the forehead.

All this can tell us that he is a male.

But an intriguing question remained.

Nesut Wessert had the grand title of overseer

of administrative district carved on his tomb.

What could his skeleton tell us about the role he had played?

The clues were in the bones from his back.

Dr. Azar immediately noticed the thickening of the edges of the backbone.

This damage was evidence that he had spent a few

years hauling stones or carrying heavy loads.

So this man, whose title suggests would have had direct contact with the pharaoh,

had also once labored for him too.

Is this evidence that men could work their way up to become the boss?

That the ancient Egyptians had a far more mobile society than anyone imagined.

It's a fascinating new development in the

emerging story of the building of the pyramids.

But the most significant discovery was yet to come,

as the robot inched its way towards the secret door.

The mystery of what lay beyond would soon be solved.

Early in September 2002, the robot team returned with a new robot and battled with

the problem of reaching the stone and working out how to see beyond it.

The robot was carrying a ramp to get over the troublesome step.

If it had difficulty here, the whole project was doomed.

The ramp worked.

Now the team wanted to find out as much as possible about the stone.

Did it move or was it a big solid block?

They were unable to move the stone.

So on this trip, the robot was carrying a device to measure its thickness.

They were surprised when they got the results.

The stone was only about 3 inches thick.

This is very... you cannot drill in a stone 3 centimeters like this.

You've got a stone with a very thick... a stone like this.

This should be sharp.

After much debate, the team was authorised to drill a small peephole in the stone.

Armed with a suitable drill, the robot moved up

the shaft for its most important mission so far.

They knew they had to avoid cracking the stone.

A perfect hole and no other damage.

So what was on the other side?

And why was there a stone at all if the shafts in the queen's chamber were there

to point the spirit of the king towards the heavens?

The answer may be linked to magic.

A blocked passage would be no problem for a king's soul.

It didn't have to be open for the king to ascend.

The principle means of going into the other world in any normal Egyptian tomb

was what we call a false door, a dummy door.

But when they make a simulated door out of stone, then

it's magical and then it can commune with another world.

But what about the copper handles?

It's important for the Egyptians that they have each of their areas of existence

marked out and shut off by barriers or doorways.

When the king's spirit comes to the blocking stone, he'll then say the magic words.

He might have to give the names of the individual copper handles.

He might have to take away the bolt through the copper handles.

And once he's through the doorways, then there's no doubt that he is a divine being.

So if the blocking stone is a kind of magical

false door, would there be anything beyond it?

The robot was about to find out.

On the night of September the 16th, the robot was poised in front of the

stone, ready to poke the tiny camera through the small

hole and see for the first time ever what was beyond.

This really is the moment of truth, isn't it Zahi?

What we've all been waiting for, the camera is now lined up against that

three quarters of an inch hole in the stone door.

We are now going to follow its progress through the hole with that camera there,

and we're going to find out if and what is behind that stone door.

Let's have a look at what's happening.

Let's see.

Okay, the lights are on.

You can see the camera making its steady progress towards the hole there.

Now Zahi, talk us through what's happening.

Just the camera is getting in the hole now.

Okay.

Now, oh my goodness, look at that.

We're hearing shrieks inside here.

I've got to tell you, this team of archaeologists has

been waiting for this moment for months and months.

This is incredibly exciting.

What are we seeing Zahi?

We can see another sealed door.

Another sealed door?

What are these markings on the door?

It's cracks, it's cracks.

In another sealed door.

We are here in front of a discovery.

And I'm really happy that we got this.

We found a space.

We found another sealed chamber.

This is incredible.

This is the first time a space has been found.

The small sealed chamber was the first new space to

be discovered in the Great Pyramid for 130 years.

I was very excited when it went through, and I was very

surprised when we saw the white face of this rock right up front.

It was a surprise, something in front of you,

that no one had never seen since 4,500 years ago.

The next day, they went back to the Queen's

chamber and had a good look at their discovery.

And by using the camera probe as a measuring

stick, they worked out the size of the new space.

We took a measurement, so we know that the space between the back end of the stone

and the front end of the new stone is about 7 inches tall.

So this strange new space in the pyramid was just 7 inches deep.

But this was not their only discovery that day.

The team decided to send the robot into the other shaft in the Queen's chamber,

the unexplored northern one.

It was unexplored because of a major obstacle.

The northern shaft isn't straight.

The builders were forced to make it bend around the Grand Gallery.

And no one has seen beyond the first quite sharp corner.

After what seemed like endless manoeuvres, the robot eventually

got around the tricky corner and set off into the unknown.

As it crawled up the shaft, it had to avoid a rod

which had been inserted by explorers in the 1920s.

They too had been trying to solve the riddle of these shafts.

The team didn't know what to expect, but they knew what they wanted to find.

And there it was.

At exactly the same distance as in the sudden shaft, there was a small blocking door.

It was the twin of the door in the sudden shaft.

For Mark Layner, the discovery of the blocking stone on the

northern side adds even greater significance to the shafts.

The fact that there's a blocking stone with two mysterious copper pins on the

south, and then in the shaft going from the north, there's another blocking stone

with two mysterious copper pins, makes it all the more

an act of meaning on the part of the pyramid builders.

If in fact somehow these copper pins were seen as bolts, they could be symbolic of

the bolts to the doors to the sky, to the northern sky, into the southern sky.

If they symbolized that, the secret chamber is nothing

other than the celestial vault of the sky itself.

I certainly have always had a problem with the

fact that you have a king in his burial chamber.

Then you have the king in the stars.

How does he get there?

And here we have the answer.

And in a very logical and completely Egyptian pragmatic way, they provide a

passageway for him with doors, which is exactly what is needed.

There's this security built in to allow the king, and only the king to get

through, and it's a direct route out for him.

The discovery of one secret chamber raised the intriguing

possibility that there'd be even more secret chambers in the shafts.

Well, the fact that there's a space and then another slab could indicate that

these are little model port-coloured slabs, such as they blocked the passage

into the king's chamber, little sliding doors, as symbolic closure of these

passages going down into the queen's chamber.

So perhaps in each shaft, there will be a series of

blocking doors for the king's spirits to negotiate.

But these are magical doors.

The mystery of why the shafts don't appear on the outside of the pyramid was solved.

These doors and the mystery shafts lead only to the afterlife.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were more, because getting into the afterlife,

it's not an easy process.

There are lots of stages, so the king has to go through one doorway, another

doorway, and who knows perhaps more doorways,

before he can actually get into the next life.

It's a very important moment for us.

That door was one of the most important discoveries before the end of year 2002.

And I believe this is the beginning of the revealing chambers inside the pyramid.

It will continue.