Original subtitles

In a 4000 year old tomb.

Definitely it's something very strange.

We have the mortar sealing the tiles and then, here the sound is different.

Archaeologists search for a grand burial chamber.

If we have here something below. Wow!

That would be a fantastic moment.

And treasures fit for one of the most powerful men in Ancient Egypt,

who lived and died on the banks of the River Nile.

This could be the most important find of my career.

The Nile. The longest river in the world.

It cuts through the Egyptian desert, running south to north,

through Africa, up to the Mediterranean.

Its waters sustain life wherever it flows.

Along its banks, Ancient Egyptians built remarkable temples,

tombs and monuments.

Today, archaeologists search for the secrets of the Nile,

how it powered every aspect of life

and death in Ancient Egypt, and transformed it

into one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world.

In Aswan,

Spanish archaeologist Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano

is on his way to the tombs of Qubbet el-Hawa,

cut high in the cliffs above the west bank of the Nile.

The tombs Alejandro is excavating there,

were used by nobles who ruled from a fortified city

on Elephantine Island in the middle of the river.

The west bank was the necropolis, the city of the dead.

Although in this area, the population was mainly settled on an island,

it continued having the same meaning:

the east is for the life, the west was for the dead.

Five seasons ago, Alejandro

and his team uncovered a lavish tomb here,

dating back to 1800 BCE,

in between the golden age of the pyramids

and the time of Tutankhamun.

It is a magnificent tomb with marvelous decoration,

reliefs and paintings.

Alejandro identified the tomb's owner,

Sarenput, and discovered the key details about his life.

Sarenput was appointed governor of Elephantine

by the pharaoh Senusret the First.

He commanded the Egyptian army against Nubia, its enemy in the south.

From the island of Elephantine, he controlled trade on the Nile,

importing great wealth for the pharaoh,

including gold, ebony and ivory.

Sarenput was all powerful in the South, second only to the pharaoh,

he was the ruler of the Southern Nile.

I've been working with Sarenput and other members of

his family during the last 20 years.

In reality, I know his family, better perhaps than mine.

But Sarenput's tomb is missing one key feature a burial chamber.

This season, Alejandro wants to try and track it down

and perhaps find the body of the man himself.

We are going to continue the excavation of the shaft

of Sarenput, perhaps his burial chamber is still intact.

The tomb is made up of a network of at least nine shafts,

stretching 50 feet below ground.

Alejandro's team has made a promising discovery

at the bottom of a 30 foot deep shaft.

Bilal has just begun the excavation of what we consider,

by now, the antechamber.

He's excavating in that side because if there is a burial chamber,

we should find in this part.

He believes that this antechamber

could lead him to the entrance of Sarenput's burial chamber.

Alejandro's team has to carefully sift through the sand

and debris, looking for clues.

They collect any fragments of pottery

and human remains for further examination.

The heat and dust is taking its toll.

You can see the working conditions here are very hot.

We call, joking, the sauna to this place because there is a lot of humidity

and we do not have fresh air.

Nice sauna.

Yeah,

We are going to try and breathe a bit.

The team works in one and a half hour shifts,

winching the spoil to the surface, bucket by bucket.

It's painstaking work, but finding Sarenput here

would be a dream come true for Alejandro.

And the fact Sarenput had such a deep shaft here is a promising sign.

So much effort has to have a reason,

and the reason might be an intact burial chamber.

At the island of Philae,

American Egyptologist, Colleen Darnell is travelling the Nile.

She wants to unlock its secrets, starting with

why the Ancient Egyptians so venerated its annual flood.

Her first stop is Philae Temple,

one of the most sacred sites in Ancient Egypt.

This was the border between Egypt and Nubia,

where the Nile in Egypt really began.

This is such a beautiful area of the Nile,

particularly when we get close to the temple, if you like.

You get a sense of what it would have looked like in antiquity.

The temple, known as the Pearl of Egypt,

was built up over hundreds of years with each ruler making their own additions.

It's dedicated to ancient Egypt's most revered gods and goddesses.

In its prime, this island on the Nile was hallowed ground.

On the southern side, a courtyard lined with columns,

led to an imposing gate carved with huge

reliefs of Egyptian kings and gods.

Beyond it, a small chapel honoring the birth of the god Horus.

And the gate to the temple of his mother, the goddess Isis.

Amongst Egyptian shrines, a temple built by the Romans centuries later.

Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors alike

were drawn here to build monuments by the Nile.

Vintage clothing fan Colleen is an expert in hieroglyphs

and has spent her career decoding them

to discover the secrets of life in ancient Egypt.

She wants to explore the temple here to find out

why this Nile island was so important to the ancients.

She searches for clues to help piece together the puzzle.

It's really so exciting to see this inscription

because it's unique.

It lays out on a single wall the foundational myth of the Nile flood.

Every year, the Nile broke its banks

and flooded the land nearby, fertilizing it with rich river mud.

The ancient Egyptians conceived the story

to explain how this annual flood was created.

What we have is a serpent that forms the shape of a cavern.

That cavern is the burial of Osiris on an island very close to Philae.

Ancient Egyptians believed the Nile flood

was created from the death of their god Osiris,

husband of Isis, father of Horus.

On this other side, we see the boulders of the first cataract

of the island where the body of Osiris is buried.

There is a crocodile, in fact, a falcon headed crocodile

that represents the god Horus,

Osiris's son, and he is carrying on his back,

the mummy of his father, Osiris.

Egyptians believed Osiris,

god of regeneration and the underworld,

was responsible for the yearly flood cycle of the Nile.

In their myth, his brother Seth, the god of chaos,

murdered Osiris in a fight for the throne.

Seth dismembered Osiris and scattered his body parts across Egypt.

The bodily fluids seeping from Osiris caused the Nile River to flood,

giving the Nile its divine power to make plants grow.

The Nile flood was worshipped by ancient Egyptians.

And Philae was where they believed the river began.

This is a really special area because

the Egyptians could assign this as the origin of the floodwaters.

Symbolically and in their religious beliefs,

this was the source of the Nile.

The Nile had great mythological importance

for the ancient Egyptians.

Now Colleen wants to unlock more of the secrets of the great river

and how it helped create Egyptian civilization.

In Deir el-Bahari, Polish archaeologist Patryk Chudzik is at a revered site

on the west bank of the Nile.

Patryk has been excavating the tombs

in this important section of the Nile for five years.

His love for archaeology started when he was just eight years old.

He promised himself that one day he would become an archaeologist.

He made one of the most unusual discoveries

of his career on the hillside below the tombs.

Several crocodile skulls.

Crocodiles are sometimes found in ancient Egyptian tombs,

but finding disembodied skulls in this way is unique.

This season, he wants to try and find out who brought

the mystery crocodile skulls here and why.

And what it reveals about ancient Egyptians attitudes towards

the deadly creatures who thrived in their sacred river Nile.

Patryk and his team face an unusual challenge.

Early archaeologists first discovered

and excavated these tombs 100 years ago.

They took the treasures, but piled the rest of the contents

onto huge spoil heaps on the hillside below.

Patryk thinks that the skulls came from one of the tombs,

but he needs to find out which one and who it belonged to.

He and his team must painstakingly work their way through all the spoil.

The discovery of an engraving or inscription

could reveal the name of a tomb owner

and tell Patryk which tomb the crocodile skulls originally came from.

But the combination of steep slope

and loose rubble makes work here hazardous.

In Cairo, in the Egyptian Museum,

Egyptian Conservator Eid Mertah is investigating

an enigmatic statue of Osiris.

Eid is a specialist in ancient metals who has been restoring

some of Egypt's finest treasures for the last ten years.

He wants to find out when the statue was made

and what role these statues played in the worship

of the powerful god associated with the Nile floods.

The museum has dozens of Osiris statues on display,

but hundreds more like this one, are held in storage.

Most are unlabeled, and any clues

to their origins have long since disappeared.

Eid and French archaeologist Simon Connor,

have been working through the statues in the museum's stores.

To date the statues, they have to restore them

and examine their distinct features in their former glory.

Some of the statues like this one are bronze, gilded in gold.

Many are heavily corroded, having spent millennia

buried in damp soil and sand.

Eid has his work cut out.

One slip could damage the precious statue forever.

In Aswan, Alejandro is looking for the burial chamber of Sarenput,

who ruled over the Southern Nile and the land surrounding it

4000 years ago.

It could help him unlock the secret of the Nile's role in the lives

and deaths of ancient Egyptians.

After weeks of hard work, the team has successfully

cleared several tons of debris from the antechamber.

They've revealed a very unusual floor.

It's the first time that we find a pavement

in all the necropolis.

Definitely is something very strange.

Paving slabs like these aren't found in any nearby tombs.

Alejandro thinks they could be a clue to where Sarenput was buried.

It is very exciting because as you can see,

we have the mortar sealing the tiles and then,

here the sound,

it's different.

The sound suggests an open chamber beneath,

perhaps an entrance to the burial chamber itself.

So, if we have here something below,

we will have an intact chamber. So wow.

Before Alejandro can begin to remove the paving stones,

he needs to agree on a plan with the team.

The first thing that we can do is

to remove some stones just to test what we have below.

The team needs to be careful.

I should begin lifting this stone.

We check what we have underneath.

If there is a burial chamber underneath,

removing the wrong paving stone could collapse

the structure below, destroying priceless artefacts.

The main idea would be to remove

the stones that are on the edges of the chamber

and hopefully find something so.

The following morning, the team head back down the shaft

to put their plan into action.

What we are going to do

is to begin the lifting of these stones in order.

Colleen leaves the island of Philae and heads up the Nile.

She is on her way to Elephantine Island.

This is Elephantine Island in the middle of the Nile River.

This island has been inhabited for thousands and thousands of years.

She's travelled just five miles north from the temple of Philae.

This is the gateway between Egypt and Nubia.

And here, more than almost any other place in Egypt,

we can see the drama of the Nile.

Colleen wants to investigate

how ancient Egyptians used the power of the Nile.

She believes a mysterious structure carved into

the riverbank here may hold the answers.

This is an ancient staircase

that leads all the way down to the Nile River.

So every few steps there are these strange markings

as we go down the staircase.

Colleen notices an intriguing feature.

One thing that I can see here

is that they're all very consistent.

These markings are to measure the height of the Nile flood,

and we can see the river, here the water would come up

and then each individual measurement they could take.

This monument is a Nilometer,

and it was crucial to understanding the patterns of the river.

This Nilometer, this measuring device,

and others on the island of Elephantine would have been the first place

where the flood was measured every year.

This was one of the most significant events

that happened in ancient Egypt every year.

The Nile couldn't be tamed.

But ancient Egyptians developed a sophisticated irrigation system

of dikes and channels to harness its immense power.

During the yearly summer flood, they siphoned water into enormous basins.

Here, it sat for about a month, soaking into the earth

and leaving behind rich deposits.

Crops thrived in this fertile soil, leading to bountiful harvests.

This life giving cycle sustained the Egyptians

and allowed their grand civilization to flourish.

The Nile flood began in late July or early August of our calendar.

For the ancient Egyptians, that was the new year, when the flood began.

As the flood waters started to rise,

they continued to do that through October.

Then would be the planting season and finally harvest.

The Nilometer meant the Egyptians

could forecast the size of the harvest, food supply,

and the amount the pharaoh could raise in tax.

This Nilometer is monumental and it shows us how important it was

to measure the Nile flood here at Elephantine.

If you knew the height of the waters here,

you could essentially predict where it would be

in the rest of the Nile Valley.

The ingenious invention of the Nilometer meant the ancient Egyptians

could fully harness the power of the Nile.

What made the Nile so special

was that it had a predictable annual flood.

That was the magic, that was the secret to the Nile

that enabled ancient Egypt to flourish for thousands of years.

Colleen's mission to unlock the secrets of the great river

doesn't stop here.

Next, she wants to explore how Egyptians used the Nile

to help them build their mighty monuments,

the hallmarks of their civilization.

On the west bank of the Nile, at Deir el-Bahari,

Patryk is trying to solve the mystery of the nine crocodile skulls

found in a spoil heap below a series of tombs

next to the temple of Hatshepsut.

He is looking for clues that might lead him to the tomb

the crocodile skulls likely came from.

But his team faces a problem.

Patryk thinks the crocodile skulls were once in the tombs above.

He wants to find out who might have left them in a tomb and why.

And what that reveals about how the ancient Egyptians perceived

the dangerous animals that shared their sacred river.

As the team carefully works through the dust and debris, Patryk notices something.

This crocodile jaw looks smaller than those he's already found.

It must have come from a different crocodile

and suggests that more than nine crocodile skulls were placed in the tomb.

Patryk also uncovers evidence to confirm

this heap of rubble and the skulls, do come from a tomb.

Now, to work out why the crocodile skulls are here,

they need to identify the tomb they came from and its owner.

In Aswan, Alejandro's team are searching for the entrance

to the burial chamber of Sarenput.

An intact chamber could contain a treasure trove

of information about ancient life and death on the Nile.

It is bedrock. It is the bedrock.

The first stone slab they lift

sits on a bed of sand with only bedrock underneath.

Okay, let's try this one.

This one? Yes.

We have more sand here.

There is no ramp. There is nothing.

Alejandro has left the most promising stone until the very end.

This tile has a different sound from the others.

Might be something behind this.

We will see if the last chance is here.

We have the bedrock again, we have the bedrock.

So this is archaeology.

You never find what you're expecting to find.

We have just removed four tiles and it is always the same.

We have sand and immediately after we have the bedrock.

I feel quite frustrated because it seems clear now that

we are not going to have the burial chamber.

But Alejandro has been rewarded with something else.

We are taking samples of sand.

The sand from the Nile is more of a pale color compared

to the one of the desert sand.

Alejandro believes that the sand beneath the slabs

was specifically brought from the banks of the Nile to this chamber.

Probably this special sand

was chosen because it was coming from the Nile.

The Nile means the life for Egypt.

So basically it was easily related to the sacred world

and can be used in the funerary spaces.

So anything that could help the deceased to gain the afterlife was used.

In the minds of the ancient Egyptians,

the Nile would help them reach their ultimate destination.

Most of the people of this region

were living in the East bank or on the island.

So when someone died, they have to make not only a physical trip,

but also a symbolic trip over the Nile

to take the deceased to the West bank, to the land of the dead.

The Nile connects these two worlds, the worlds of the living,

the Nile is alive and with the world of the dead.

The Nile was as important to Sarenput in death, as it was in life.

Alejandro will continue the search for his burial chamber.

He is convinced it's somewhere overlooking this all powerful river.

In Cairo at the Egyptian Museum,

Eid is removing centuries of dirt and corrosion from a statue of Osiris,

the powerful god associated with the Nile floods.

He's hoping to uncover distinct facial features that will help him find out

when the statue was made.

A date will shed light on how long Osiris statues

were important objects of worship.

Eid uses an ultrasonic pen.

It generates high energy sound waves to blast through tough layers of corrosion.

It's the best tool for the task,

but he must work carefully not to damage the statue itself.

Eid's work on this statue alone will take months.

Eid can only properly analyze a statue

when it's completely clean of dirt and other corrosion like this one.

Clues to this stunning statue's origin lie in the metal itself.

Bronze is an alloy, a mixture of different metals.

Eid will compare the bronze in this statue to a database of statues

whose dates they do know.

He has a high tech scanner that will tell him the exact alloy composition

without damaging the statue.

The scanner blasts the bronze surface with X-rays

and records the energy released by the atoms.

The metallic fingerprint could help Eid and Simon match the statue

with one whose date is known and solve

the mystery of the statue's age.

On the west bank of the Nile, at Deir el-Bahari,

Patryk inspects pieces of sarcophagus he's found in the hillside spoil.

They originally came from one of the tombs high above.

He's hoping fragments of sarcophagus will reveal the identity

of its owner and lead him to the exact tomb that the skulls came from.

Finally, a large section of sarcophagus gives him the hieroglyphic clue

he's been searching for.

Khety was an important high official in the royal court.

He lived about 700 years before Tutankhamun

and served a pharaoh called Mentuhotep the Second.

It's the final proof the crocodile skulls did come from Khety's tomb

in the cliffs above the spoil heap where Patryk was searching.

Now he can investigate why Khety would have wanted them there,

and he knows precisely where to look.

Khety's tomb was first excavated by American archaeologist

Herbert Winlock, 100 years ago.

Winlock and his team must have removed the crocodile skulls

and left them in the spoil heaps below

while searching for more valuable treasure.

Tombs containing whole crocodile mummies are rare enough,

but a tomb with just crocodile skulls is unique.

Patryk's theory is that Khety believed he needed the crocodile heads

in his tomb for his journey to the afterlife.

At death, his spirit would navigate through the underworld

and the crocodile heads would give it the strength of this fearsome reptile.

With this enhanced power, Khety believed he could overcome enemies

and demons facing him along the way,

so that he could travel safely to the Field of Reeds,

to live on in eternity.

The ancient Egyptians both feared and venerated the crocodile.

They considered it a living symbol of the Nile's fertility.

In Cairo, Eid and Simon have finished scanning the statue of Osiris,

the powerful god associated with the Nile floods.

They are hoping the exact composition

of its bronze alloy might be a clue to its date.

Simon and Eid search a global database to find any other Osiris

statues with the same distinct alloy composition.

They find a match with a statue known to date from the 21st dynasty.

It's evidence that their statue dates to around a thousand BCE,

between the reigns of Tutankhamun and Cleopatra,

1500 years after Osiris first appeared in Egyptian mythology.

To confirm this date, Simon and Eid will cross-check their findings

using a very different Studying Osiris's face.

In ancient Egyptian art, statues of gods were model led on the reigning pharaoh.

So a statue's face contains clues to when it was made.

And the face of this statue is also characteristic

of depictions of gods and pharaohs during the 21st dynasty.

Eid and Simon have solved the mystery of when this statue was made.

They have shown that Osiris had a firm and continued hold on ancient Egypt,

1500 years after he first appeared in Egyptian myth.

Their analysis of the remaining statues in the museum

could reveal more about how Osiris, the god of death and the renewal of life,

and the god associated with the annual Nile flood,

was worshipped in ancient Egypt.

Near Aswan,

Colleen's investigation of how the Nile powered ancient Egyptian

civilization brings her to a mysterious,

colossal structure carved into the riverbank.

I've seen a lot of monuments in Egypt,

but this is one of the most impressive.

I mean, the pyramids are huge, but as a single block of stone, this beats all.

In all her years exploring Egypt,

Colleen has never properly examined this strange structure.

This is the first time I've ever been this close.

It's huge. I can't even see the top from here.

Up close, Colleen can trace its outline and understand what it is.

This would have been the biggest Obelisk ever attempted.

This colossal obelisk has been partially cut

from the granite bedrock and left unfinished.

These monuments were carved as a pyramid shaped pillar.

Pharaohs would erect obelisks adorned with inscriptions,

glorifying their name and their rule to stamp their authority across Egypt.

This obelisk would have stood 140 feet high,

nearly 40 feet taller than any other.

What's most astounding to me is that it's a monolith.

We're talking about a single, uninterrupted piece of stone from the tippy top

all the way to the bottom.

It was commissioned by the female pharaoh, Hatshepsut,

who ruled 150 years before Tutankhamun,

and was intended for a massive temple in Karnak 150 miles downriver.

This is absolutely extraordinary.

There is nothing else like this.

Obelisks were vital for the pharaohs,

but they needed the Nile to get them to their pyramids and temples.

Egypt was incredibly lucky to have this sort of stone wealth,

but without the Nile River, they couldn't have taken it very far.

The river was a conduit between south and north,

acting as an ancient highway.

Egyptians relied on the Nile for transportation,

using prevailing winds to sail south and the current to help them row north.

To carry light loads, Egyptians used small boats of papyrus reeds.

For heavier loads, they used strong wooden ships.

During the annual flooding of the Nile,

they moved around 8000 tons of granite from the quarries in the south

to the pyramids they were building hundreds of miles north.

They even designed huge cargo ships to transport giant 160 ton obelisks

from Aswan to their temples further north.

All of ancient Egypt's monuments from obelisks and temples,

to the pyramids themselves, would not have been possible without the Nile River.

Think about how different ancient Egypt would look

if they couldn't have used the river to transport

these massive monuments.

Colleen investigates why Hatshepsut's

colossal obelisk, the greatest ever commissioned, was left abandoned.

She spots a clue left right under her nose.

This is really neat.

This is one of the pounding stones.

This diorite pounder is actually one of the stones they used

to carve this obelisk.

This stone was used to pound the rock into its obelisk shape.

These depressions show us the process

that they used to carve bit by bit by bit.

It was manpower and just chipping away piece by piece

that this giant obelisk was carved.

Colleen spots a problem caused by the carving.

Here are some very large cracks that developed in the obelisk.

This was a problem that could not be fixed.

The obelisk would have split into pieces as soon as it was moved.

These large cracks is why this massive project was abandoned.

The pharaoh's project proved too ambitious.

Hatshepsut's colossal obelisk was doomed to stay stuck in the bedrock.

It never made the journey downriver, to adorn Karnak, Egypt's greatest temple.

The ancient Egyptians relied on the mighty River Nile

for every aspect of their lives.

It allowed them to build the pyramids,

temples and monuments that came to define them.

It fertilized their crops and enabled their cities

to flourish in the dry desert landscape.

In ancient Egypt, the Nile was life itself.

Its annual flood, worshipped as a god.

It's impossible to think of Egypt without thinking of the Nile.

We know that civilization started here because of the Nile River that enabled

ancient Egypt to flourish for thousands of years.