Original subtitles

This is the entrance to the pyramid.

It's really very exciting.

Archaeologists are on the brink of the

discovery of a lifetime.

Nobody entered here.

It's a really important moment for all of us.

Ahead, the burial chamber of a mysterious ancient queen,

untouched for 4,000 years.

We will see if this wooden beam is really stable enough.

We will remove this part.

Let's hope it's safe.

Egypt.

The land of the pyramids and mighty monuments.

Built by all powerful Pharaohs

great kings like Khufu, Ramses and Tutankhamun.

But now archaeologists are revealing new evidence of

rulers of a different kind who could wield great power and

even become Pharaohs themselves...

the Queens of Egypt.

How do these women rise to power in a world

dominated by men?

To investigate American Egyptologist Colleen Darnell

explores a temple built by one of Egypt's greatest queens...

Hatshepsut.

This temple is fantastic.

A row of imposing statues lines the temple.

Oh, my goodness, this is amazing!

These statues are images of the pharaoh in the form of Osiris,

but we know it's a king because of the double crown

of upper and lower Egypt.

This is the temple of Queen Hatshepsut,

but there are statues of kings everywhere.

The king wears a divine beard,

and holds a crook and a flail,

typical symbols of royalty.

Even though she was a woman,

Hatshepsut portrayed herself as a man.

Colleen investigates why...

I would like to find a cartouche that has a royal

name written in hieroglyphs.

A cartouche is an oval-shaped box used

in Egyptian inscriptions.

Only kings or queens could put their name inside one.

Colleen hunts inside the temple.

It's a difficult task.

Many car touches here have been hacked out or destroyed.

Aha!

This is the cartouche I've been looking for.

Hat-shep-sut.

Over here is the word "saat" for daughter.

Now this is a big clue...

The daughter of Re, of his body, Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut's cartouche identifies her as

a daughter, not a son.

It's clear she was not hiding her gender.

But the only way Hatshepsut could project her power as a pharaoh,

was to portray herself as a man...

As a king.

Hatshepsut was a queen of Egypt and one of only

a few women ever to rule as king.

She restored broken trade routes with foreign lands,

bringing a wealth of luxuries like gold, myrrh,

and ebony into Egypt.

In the capital, Thebes,

she erected colossal monuments,

signifying the power, riches,

and order she brought to her country.

And her mortuary temple is one of the grandest ever

built in Egypt.

Its splendor is a monument to Egypt's success under

Hatshepsut's rule.

But how did this famous and celebrated queen become king?

Colleen investigates.

This is a really interesting wall.

The name of Thutmose III is here and these would have been

the car touches of Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut was the daughter of one pharaoh and

married to another.

When her husband died,

her infant nephew Thutmose the Third became king.

Thutmose III was just a child,

so Hatshepsut essentially ruled Egypt as queen,

but then she transforms into Pharaoh herself,

into a co-regent, with Thutmose III.

Hatshepsut ruled as co-regent for

20 prosperous years.

The magnificent temple is testament to her rule.

But why is it so hard to find evidence of her here?

After Hatshepsut's death,

Thutmose became sole pharaoh,

and later on in his reign he hacked out

the names and images of his aunt, Hatshepsut.

Thutmose wanted to erase the memory of Hatshepsut

and her children to secure the throne for his son.

Yet, Hatshepsut's name survives as evidence of the

power women could attain in ancient Egypt.

She was a spectacular pharaoh.

From monumental building campaigns,

to expeditions to far off lands,

but I want to know more about how she ruled as a woman.

Archaeologist Patryk Chudzik is also

exploring the temple of Hatshepsut.

Like Colleen, he's on the trail of how she

ruled as a woman.

From 22nd-23rd dynasty.

Patryk always dreamed of becoming an Egyptologist.

Now he leads the Polish mission at one of Egypt's most

famous monuments.

His team excavates ground beside the temple.

The old pathway leads to an ancient tomb.

100 years ago, American archaeologist

Herbert Winlock excavated here.

But he left a secret hidden beneath the Temple:

a tomb that he recorded but never fully excavated.

Hatshepsut could have destroyed the tomb to

build her temple here, but she didn't.

Patryk hopes that the mystery of the tomb might

explain why Hatshepsut built her temple here and reveal

something of how she ruled as a pharaoh queen.

At Saqqara, Mohamed Megahed is also investigating

the queens of Egypt.

He is exploring the remains of a pyramid built for a queen.

I like our work because it's not boring,

every day you have a change, every season you come here you

have something new.

Mohamed, who lives in the Czech Republic,

has been returning to his native Egypt for 12 years

to excavate this site.

He sees archaeology as a forensic investigation.

This is our crime scene, every piece of sand,

every piece of limestone it gives us an idea of how the

site looked like.

Mohamed heads up to the top of the pyramid.

The core has collapsed,

forming a deep crater in the center.

But he plans to search for the original entrance tunnel.

Today we will start digging and finding the

entrance of the pyramid.

This is the biggest pyramid ever built

for a queen.

She must have been extraordinarily powerful.

Who was she?

For hundreds of years,

we knew that this pyramid was a mystery.

The last attempt to excavate it in 1952 failed

to find the burial chamber.

We knew that it was built for a queen,

but we never knew who was buried inside.

We used to call this pyramid, 'The pyramid of the unknown queen.'

Mohamed discovered the identity of the owner

two years ago.

We found the granite column lying in this area and on the column,

we have the name of the queen and her titles.

Now we can say that this pyramid belonged

to Queen Setibhor.

Setibhor was the wife of King Djedkare,

a powerful Old Kingdom Pharaoh who ruled

4,400 years ago.

Djedkare built a pyramid 170-feet tall,

cased with white tura limestone,

and capped with a stone pyramidion...

plated with gold.

Around his pyramid sprawled a vast complex of columns,

statues, and temples.

To the northeast is a second pyramid for his wife,

Queen Setibhor, with blocks weighing up to 30 tons,

rising 110-feet from the desert sand.

Clad in brilliant limestone,

it had a burial chamber at its heart to keep Setibhor's

body safe for all eternity.

Queen Setibhor's pyramid is the largest remaining

with an unexplored burial chamber in Egypt.

Discoveries in her burial chamber could explain

her importance and why she has such a huge pyramid.

But today, large parts of the pyramid are missing and

filled with sand.

Mohamed has to dig deep to find any remains.

A metal scraping catches Mohamed's attention.

We have here for the first time today some

nice white limestone.

The high-quality limestone block could be a

sign of the entrance.

We have to still go deeper.

After many hours of hard digging,

Mohamed feels he is getting close.

I'm so excited.

Underneath here, I'm definitely sure that we will

have the entrance of the pyramid.

No one in the modern era has entered

Queen Setibhor's burial chamber,

but Mohamed has discovered an ancient passage.

He could soon be the first person to step inside the

chamber in over 4,000 years.

But ahead, a wall of sand blocks the way.

A team excavated here in 1952.

They built a wall and propped up a collapsed ceiling before

they abandoned their search for the burial chamber.

We will see if this wooden beam is really stable

enough and if it's not stable, we have to build here a small

wall to support this.

Thousands of tons of rubble and stone are

directly above their heads.

Mohamed must make the corridor safe immediately

or risk a collapse.

At Deir El-Bahari near Luxor,

Colleen is investigating the reign of the pharaoh

Queen Hatshepsut and how she ruled a society dominated by men.

See, this is interesting.

Hatshepsut is being breast fed by goddesses and this is

something that we know kings claimed.

That they were consuming the milk of various goddesses.

The engraving reveals that Hatshepsut

claimed kingship as her divine right.

She was the choice of the gods.

This is the god Amun, and he's seated,

his legs are, are slightly overlapping those of Ahmose,

the mother of Hatshepsut.

Amun is handing an Ankh sign, the sign of life to Queen Ahmose

and what this means is that Amun is

impregnating the queen.

This is the moment of Hatshepsut's conception.

Hatshepsut claimed divine birth,

that she was the daughter of the god Amun.

It was a powerful claim.

Hatshepsut is being very clever here.

Only the king can claim to be of divine birth.

She's using as propaganda the divine birth,

claiming her right to be a pharaoh.

Egyptians expected the pharaoh to be male.

Hatshepsut's royal birth and marriage were not

enough to claim the throne.

She had to invoke the will of the gods.

She was the daughter of a king,

and the wife of a king, but the divine birth scenes

enabled her to become king.

Hatshepsut relied on clever propaganda

to legitimize her revolutionary rule.

From the beginning of Egyptian history,

queen mothers could rule when pharaohs were very young.

But Hatshepsut does something different.

She becomes pharaoh herself, co-regent with Thutmose III,

and here in Hatshepsut's temple,

we see her remarkable rise to power.

Hatshepsut was the firstborn of a pharaoh.

She married the next pharaoh, her half-brother.

But when he died, the next male heir was her

infant nephew Thutmose.

When the child took the throne,

she ruled by his side for seven years,

but then she made a power grab,

declaring herself a true Pharaoh.

As Pharaoh, Hatshepsut launched a campaign of propaganda.

Painting scenes showing the great god Amun as

her father and of her birth, in the presence of the gods,

legitimizing her as the divine heir to

the throne of Egypt.

Ooh, this is incredible!

This is Hatshepsut as a sphinx and you can see her

long curling tail and what's awesome are the legs of the

enemies flying up in the air, as she tramples them.

Even though Hatshepsut was a female king,

this depiction of her as a trampling sphinx indicates the

ferocity of her rule.

Hatshepsut had to project a carefully crafted

image of physical strength and divine right.

She was a prototype for ruling queens throughout history.

As a female pharaoh Hatshepsut had tremendous power,

but what I want to know is did other queens exert

the same authority?

Colleen wants to find out if more ancient

Egyptian queens followed Hatshepsut's example.

Or if there was another way to be a powerful Queen.

At Saqqara, Mohamed's team races to reinforce the

entrance to queen Setibhor's ancient pyramid.

While Mohamed waits, the rest of his team excavates

the strange ruins next to her pyramid.

They have found huge stone blocks buried in a deep

sand-filled pit.

They could reveal clues to the role and power of Setibhor.

But first they have to dig them out.

It was a very simple calculation: The block weight

is six and a half tons.

For moving heavy stones like this you don't need muscles,

you need brain.

As the men get started,

Mohammed spots ancient hieroglyphs carved into the granite.

The hieroglyphs suggest Setibhor is not just a

royal wife.

Also, the block itself could be part of an

important structure next to her pyramid.

And could reveal the extent of her power and importance.

The men roll the block again,

until it sits precariously on the rails.

Six ton and a half,

any mistake it could cause an injury.

The block is finally moving...

The wrong way.

The men struggle to move the granite block

from the pit.

But Mohamed has a new plan to get it out

using a chain block.

We will see if it will work or no.

So finally, it's working!

It's slow but it's working.

At last, the men move the block and

set it aside.

Wow they did it.

So Mohamed can examine it in detail.

It's so beautiful.

This was the door hinge, so the door socket was here.

Mohamed discovers the block is a lintel that

would have sat above a grand doorway.

Now we know exactly the width of the door.

In the future, we can reconstruct it.

The lintel bears Queen Setibhor's name

a clue it's part of the mysterious structure

built next to her pyramid.

She's using very special granite,

which was only used for kings, not for queens.

Was Setibhor acting as a king?

What will this mystery building, and her pyramid,

reveal about Queen Setibhor's power?

At Deir El-Bahari near Luxor,

Patryk is also investigating a queen, Hatshepsut.

Strangely, she preserved an ancient tomb beneath her

magnificent mortuary temple.

Patryk wants to know if it can shed light on how

Hatshepsut ruled as a pharaoh queen.

The original occupant of the tomb remains a mystery.

A hollow in the floor once held a mummy

in a wooden coffin.

They are both long gone.

But Patryk's uncovered some significant clues.

Their excavations confirm that the tomb

pre-dates Hatshepsut's temple by hundreds of years.

Hatshepsut built her temple with three huge,

layered terraces carved into the rocks and parades

of 22 columns.

She adorned the walls with scenes that proclaimed her

divine right to rule Egypt.

But in the far corner she left a small entrance

to a corridor that led down to a plain burial chamber.

Patryk's team excavated rubble containing thousands of

ancient artifacts including pottery and

mysterious wooden figurines.

Why did Hatshepsut build her temple on top of

this hidden tomb?

Pottery expert Ania Wezranowska is working

through the thousands of finds from the tomb.

She thinks she's found something important.

Even the smallest find could help reveal the

secrets of the tomb, and what significance it

holds for Hatshepsut.

In Saqqara, deep inside the pyramid,

Mohamed's team has built an extra supporting wall.

Now, he can resume the search for

Queen Setibhor's burial chamber.

We have measured above the pyramid,

and we are almost in the middle of the pyramid here.

If Mohamed can reach her tomb,

it may answer vital questions.

Why did Setibhor have the biggest pyramid ever

built for a queen?

What was the extent of her power?

But to get any further,

Mohamed faces his toughest obstacle yet.

The end of the corridor is blocked by an unstable wall of

sand and rubble.

It could avalanche down at the slightest touch.

The foreman, the Rais gives a cautious go-ahead

to continue the search for the burial chamber.

From the top of the pyramid,

Mohamed can see the problem.

A hole is forming in the crater.

The rubble is falling straight through to the

men in the tunnel.

The bad sign is part of the ceiling is not preserved.

The good sign?

We are not very deep, so we are very close to the burial chamber.

Down below, the rubble just keeps on coming.

The dust slows the work of Mohamed's men.

But finally, they make a breakthrough.

For the first time, we have daylight inside the

burial chamber of the queen.

We have to continue removing the rubble

and limestone chips.

Mohamed checks the pyramid core.

But he must tread carefully where the tomb ceiling has collapsed.

Part of the north wall of the burial chamber of

Queen Setibhor which is fantastic to see from

the other side.

There's still a lot of ancient rubble to

remove before he can investigate inside.

He only has one week left on his permit for the site.

Will it be enough time to reveal the secrets of

Queen Setibhor's burial chamber?

At Abu Simbel, near Egypt's southern border,

Colleen visits one of Egypt's most remarkable monuments.

She is investigating how women wielded power as queens

in a world dominated by men.

Hatshepsut turned herself into a King.

But was there another way for queens to exercise power?

Colleen has come to the temple of one of the most

exalted queens of all to find out.

I want to investigate one of the greatest

queens of history.

Her name is Nefertari and she's the wife

of Ramses the Great.

Ramses the Second ruled Egypt for 60 years.

He expanded the empire and built more monuments

than any other ruler.

His achievements earned him the title,

"Ramses the Great."

This is a statue of Queen Nefertari

to either side are images of her husband, Ramses the Second.

But what's remarkable is she's almost of equal height

to the pharaoh himself.

In Ancient Egypt, size meant power.

Nefertari was portrayed as having virtually equal power

as Ramses himself.

But Colleen finds an inscription revealing

something even more impressive.

Here's an inscription that tells us

Weben-Ra en Mirit-as, "Ra Rises for love of her."

Ra was the ancient Egyptian sun god.

This column of Hieroglyphs means that

Nefertari was one of the few queens to achieve

the status of a goddess.

Nefertari was honored as a goddess even

though she was not a pharaoh queen like Hatshepsut.

What did she do to deserve this exalted status?

So now I want to know,

is this just propaganda for a favorite wife or did she

actually wield power?

This is the queen.

Nefertari is incredibly beautiful,

but I think there's more to the story than that.

This is a clay tablet found in modern day Turkey.

It's a letter written in ancient Acadian.

It shows the queen of the Hittites writing to Nefertari

before the two empires completed the world's first

recorded peace treaty.

This means that she was really involved in

diplomacy between the two greatest empires of

the ancient world.

It shows that Nefertari was an influential figure.

She helped broker a treaty that kept peace between the

great empires for 40 years.

Ramses acknowledged his queen's importance on the

walls of her temple.

This is Ramses smiting an enemy.

It's a brutal, but this is how ancient Egyptian kings

express their power.

What's unusual is that Queen Nefertari is behind him.

Kings rarely shared the glory of military

victories with their queens.

It suggests Nefertari played a significant role

in Ramses' reign.

It's possible that this is propaganda,

but it's also likely that this shows Queen Nefertari had real

political power.

The evidence suggests Nefertari and Ramses

formed a royal power couple,

each vital to the success of the other.

Ancient Egyptian queens,

whether they were married to a pharaoh or ruled as pharaoh in their own right,

they truly wielded authority.

While Hatshepsut ruled as a king,

Nefertari exercised a different sort of power.

From behind the throne, her astute diplomacy and political

influence helped change the course of Egypt's history.

At Saqqara, time is running out for Mohamed to discover

the secrets of Queen Setibhor's burial chamber.

His team has finally cleared a path.

Now Mohamed can get through to see the chamber for himself.

But they face a new danger from above.

The roof of the burial chamber has completely collapsed,

and the crumbling, overhanging walls could follow

at any moment.

This is the area which we need to support.

If the walls are only propped up by the

loose rubble underfoot, the slightest move could bring

them crashing down in an instant.

But if they can find solid stone foundations beneath the wall,

they can be more confident that the overhang

won't collapse as they dig.

We have here parts of the large stones,

and he's looking for the continuation of the stones.

They search for the massive stone slabs that once

supported the structure above.

Until they find them, their only protection is to patch

the walls with mortar.

Outside Setibhor's pyramid,

Czech archaeologist Hana Vymazalova helps Mohamed

investigate the mysterious ruins.

If she can discover what they were,

it might reveal the source of Setibhor's power and

how she ruled as queen.

She finds an important clue.

Yep...

So, we have here the typical pattern of the ceilings,

like a night sky with stars.

The stars would have originally been

painted yellow on a dark blue background.

They help Hana identify the structure.

This is a roofing block,

which came from the portico of the queen.

It's part of a huge portico,

a ceremonial entrance to what must have been a temple.

This was the portico, and here is an entrance into

the temple which was just opposite to the stairs and if

you measure the width of this entrance,

it actually fits very nicely.

Hana's discovery proves this mysterious

building was Queen Setibhor's funerary temple.

Where priests and worshippers spoke her name,

and according to Egyptian belief,

ensured her soul lived for eternity.

It is very exciting to see it all coming together.

It's a puzzle, 3-D!

It's a significant find,

and its size is more evidence that Setibhor was

a powerful woman.

The funerary temple is the biggest funerary temple

built for a queen in the Old Kingdom.

What more can these ruins reveal about Setibhor and

the queens of the Old Kingdom?

Could she have paved the way for powerful New Kingdom queens

like Hatshepsut and Nefertari?

At Deir El-Bahari, Patryk wants to know why Hatshepsut

chose this location for her temple,

and how she ruled in a world dominated by men.

He hopes that the thousands of finds from a tomb

beneath it might yield clues.

One new discovery intrigues Patryk and his colleague Ania.

The pieces look like religious charms.

Patryk has a hunch that he's seen these features before.

He heads up to a shrine that Hatshepsut built in her temple.

It could reveal why the pharaoh queen built here.

Hatshepsut dedicated this shrine to the cow goddess Hathor.

It's directly above the tomb.

The matching finds confirm a theory Patryk has,

that the tomb was used by a religious cult that worshiped Hathor.

Hathor was the mother of the gods and their representatives here on earth,

the pharaohs.

Ancient Egyptians worshipped Hathor in the form of a cow or

as a woman with cow horns, holding the sun disc.

She was the powerful goddess of motherhood and fertility...

who breathed new life into dead souls and guided

them to the hereafter.

In some myths, Hathor gave birth to the sun each day,

bringing life and banishing the darkness.

She was particularly revered by pharaohs.

By feeding them her divine milk,

Hathor bestowed on them the power to rule.

The tomb was built long before Hatshepsut.

But the Hathor amulets discovered in it date to her era.

They're powerful proof that the old tomb was used in the

cult worship of Hathor in Hatshepsut's time.

Patryk believes this is why Hatshepsut

built her temple here.

This entire valley had ancient links with the Hathor cult.

And the sheer quantity of discoveries in the tomb prove

the cult was very active during Hatshepsut's reign.

Hatshepsut was one of the few queens ever

to become pharaoh.

She used masculine images all over her temple to

project her power.

But Patryk's new evidence shows that she projected

feminine powers too, promoting Hathor here,

ahead of all the other gods.

Hathor, the powerful goddess of femininity,

motherhood and women, helped Hatshepsut become the

mother of her nation.

At Saqqara, in Setibhor's burial chamber,

Mohamed's team is searching for solid limestone

foundations beneath the overhanging walls,

so they can be sure they are safe.

He hopes the chamber will hold clues to how Setibhor

ruled as a queen.

Was she a ruling pharaoh like Hatshepsut,

or a powerful wife like Nefertari?

Finally, a worker sees a smooth limestone face.

Mohamed confirms it's the stone he's been looking for.

Solid stone foundations underpin the overhang,

so digging can safely resume.

It's the last day of excavation inside the pyramid.

Hana joins Mohamed in the burial chamber.

But will they have time to excavate all this rubble and

find any traces of Setibhor?

They've discovered she built the largest pyramid and

funerary temple of any queen of the Old Kingdom.

She was a great Old Kingdom Queen...

But how did she rule?

Was she pharaoh herself, or part of a royal power couple?

Mohamed hopes that he might find answers in the burial chamber itself.

It seems everything was smashed.

This very small, tiny, small pieces of limestone,

it means that stone robbers came here and smashed everything.

Stone robbers plundered valuable

white limestone from most of Egypt's ancient tombs,

just as tomb robbers took their treasures.

But Mohamed still sees a treasure trove of clues.

The exposed limestone reveals an

important new discovery.

A serdab was a chamber usually reserved for

a statue of the pharaoh.

Later queens had serdabs, but Mohamed has discovered

Setibhor was the first queen to build one.

Why was Setibhor able to claim this, and other,

privileges of kings?

All the clues show that Mohamed and Hana have

discovered one of the most illustrious queens

of Ancient Egypt.

Setibhor was wife of Djedkare,

one of the great pharaohs of the Old Kingdom.

She was powerful enough to build the largest pyramid and

temple complex of any Old Kingdom queen.

The size and design of her mortuary temple,

looks less like a queen's and more like a king's.

Could this mean that Djedkare's mysterious queen

may have ruled, as king?

Hieroglyphics expert, Hana, thinks that the answer might

be hiding on a column they discovered by her pyramid.

It's inscribed with her name, Setibhor.

The last part of it, "Hor" stands for Horus,

the falcon god.

The name of Horus is written with the individual letters

not with the sign of the falcon,

because if it's written as a falcon then that would

be the king's name.

The Horus' inscription reveals the true

extent of Setibhor's power.

They are features which scream I'm the important queen,

but at the same time, they are features which show

that she is not a royal person, she's not the ruler,

she's not the king.

Setibhor was not a pharaoh queen,

the supreme ruler of Egypt.

She didn't have the power of Hatshepsut.

But the evidence uncovered here suggests she was a

powerful royal from a powerful royal dynasty,

and perhaps reigned more like Nefertari, 1,000 years later.

Everything that we are uncovering here.

They all seem to indicate that she might have been

related to the kings.

So maybe she was the link between those kings and

Djedkare himself.

Maybe that's why she was so important because she was the

one who helped him to the throne of Egypt,

and she was the power behind the throne.

Their discoveries reveal that Queen Setibhor was

one of the most powerful and influential figures

of Ancient Egypt.

And in a society that venerated its ancestors,

perhaps even a role model for

the great queens that followed her.

Finally, the team's excavated enough rubble for

Mohamed to see the dimensions of Setibhor's burial chamber.

Maybe this is a line of the height of the room.

The ceiling reached up until this line all the way we have

the line in the room.

All the way here.

The discovery of the ceiling line means there

is still ten feet of rubble to clear to reveal

the entire tomb and time is running out.

Today is the last day on his permit for the site.

I'm not sure we will reach the floor today,

actually, I'm not sure even if we will have a floor.

But Mohamed has achieved his goal,

he's found Setibhor's burial chamber and

will return to excavate it fully.

I hope in the coming season we will come again,

and we will continue and will finish the work.

Mohamed and Hana have rediscovered a long-lost

queen that towered over Egypt, 900-years before Hatshepsut.

A queen ahead of her time,

inspiring queens for centuries to come.

Like Hatshepsut, who projected masculine power

but drew on the feminine goddess Hathor...

And Nefertari,

who wielded her formidable power alongside one of the

greatest kings of all time.

Perhaps Setibhor was the trailblazer for both.

Now she can be restored to her rightful place

alongside them and be recognized amongst the

greatest queens of Ancient Egypt.