Original subtitles

In the shadow of the pyramids,

a team of archaeologists is zeroing in on a discovery

that could rewrite ancient history.

33 years ago,

I started looking for the lost city of the pyramids,

and everywhere we put down one of these excavation trenches,

we saw big walls.

Alongside an abandoned soccer field,

they found evidence of royal architecture.

Something really big is lurking down there.

What is this building? Is it a palace?

Dating all the way back

to the legendary pharaoh Khufu,

this buried structure could be linked

to the Great Pyramid itself.

According to all the hints that we have,

the building should be right here.

We're about to see something

that no one has seen for 4,500 years.

Giza,

today a district of Cairo,

home to over four million people.

4,600 years ago,

the site of the ancient world's greatest wonder,

the iconic Great Pyramid was the final resting place

of the game-changing pharaoh, Khufu.

When Khufu commissioned his tomb,

nothing on its scale had ever been attempted.

At 482 feet high, the Great Pyramid

was the tallest structure on Earth for 4,000 years.

Dr. Mark Lehner has been studying it

his entire professional life.

It's hard to believe I've been here for 50 years.

Now the pyramids are really kind of familiar.

I mean, I probably know the pyramid plateau

better than I knew any place where I ever lived.

For Mark, the Great Pyramid's

extraordinary engineering is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are greater questions to answer on the Giza Plateau.

The story of the stones only takes us so far.

Archaeologists already knew there was a city here at Giza,

the City of the Dead.

And to really understand the pyramids,

you have to understand the people who built them.

Where was the city of the living?

If it took 20,000 or 30,000 people, where did they live?

How were they fed? Where were they housed?

Those were the questions that I started with.

We knew that if we could find their city,

its footprint would tell us something about how the king

used the social organization of his time to get this job done.

I had to turn my back to the pyramids

and look out to the surrounding site.

In search of a lost city,

Mark chose to excavate a patch of waste ground

just over half a mile from Khufu's Great Pyramid.

In 1988, he hit the jackpot.

Once we found it, it gave us something to do

for the next 35 years.

And we're still at it.

Southeast of the pyramids,

Mark made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries

of modern times:

the city of the pyramid builders.

Dozens of mud brick homes for high-status administrators,

and at the center, rows of long, thin galleries

with vaulted roofs; a giant dormitory building

where workers lived, cooked and slept.

At the excavation's southern edge,

the team has found mysterious stone walls, six feet wide,

so large they could only be part of a royal building.

For 20 years, Mark has been waiting to expose the rest.

Mark's discoveries have transformed our understanding

of the people who built the pyramids;

not slaves as once thought, but ordinary Egyptians,

well-fed and paid.

But how the greatest construction project

of ancient times was organized has long been a mystery,

and the role played by the legendary pharaoh

who built the Great Pyramid, unknown.

In an area surrounded by mud brick,

the thick stone walls of the building stand out.

They could be the key that unlocks Khufu's secrets.

What is this building?

Was it a palace?

If so, what kind of a palace?

For now, most of it is covered

in at least a foot of modern soccer field mud.

We like to be careful,

but we're anxious to get aggressive.

Go medieval on it.

A geophysical survey shows an anomaly

under the soccer field.

Mark thinks it could be the structure's buried corner.

If he's right, this would be the largest building ever found

in the lost city.

There's no doubt there's a building here.

I'm almost certain;

I mean, not almost certain, certain as certain.

It's just a question of how big is it,

where does it go, and what is it?

Mark decides to dig

several trenches

in line with the previously

excavated stone wall.

This should give the team the best chance

of hitting the ancient building.

Within an hour, a crew guided

by Mark's long-term collaborator, Dr. Mohsen Kamel,

has broken through the thick soccer field layer

into the sand below.

Mohsen, I think we should be seeing it by now,

and we're just seeing clean sand.

We'll give it another 20 centimeters or 30,

and then we'll see.

A man of faith!

Mark wants to hit the building

before the end of the day,

but Pit 1 is getting dangerously deep.

We don't have any long tape.

Oops!

Uh-oh.

Alright, I think we should get everybody out.

The side of the square collapsed,

so it's beyond being safe, so we have to stop it here.

The team has dug far deeper

than the building's expected depth.

It has Mark worried.

Now we're more than a meter below the level

where the wall is running strong.

If anything was there, we'd be hitting it.

That's the thing, there's nothing here.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe the geophysics anomalies

aren't positioned right on the map.

The giant building should extend

well into the soccer field,

but the corner suggested by the geophysical survey

is not where Mark expected.

Perhaps it's not a palace at all.

He decides to focus efforts on test pits two and three.

Mark authorizes some demolition work

to check the trench's alignment

with the building's previously excavated wall.

The line looks good.

If the wall continues that far, we should pick it up.

As the team prepares the ground for Pit 3,

the news coming out of Pit 2 is also not good.

Only 32 meters there, wall, big buildings, lost city!

Here, pbbbt! Just clean sand.

Once again, they've dug beyond the expected depth

of the stone wall and found nothing.

So, we're at the water table.

That means we're more than two meters underneath the level

of the building wall just 32 meters to the north.

All the clues point to the stone wall

being right beneath them.

Its absence makes no sense.

After 20 years of waiting to dig,

Mark now faces the possibility

that his search for a royal palace might fail.

There's pottery!

Oh, my god!

See?

Well, that's highly intriguing.

There's no doubt this is good 4th Dynasty pottery

from the time of the pyramids.

Only moments of ago, I was saying, "We have nothing!

Not even one shard,"

and now it's just popping up everywhere.

It's not a lot, but it's a little that says a lot.

It's the top of a jar.

The pottery is evidence of human activity

on this spot while the pyramids were being built.

Perhaps the rest of the royal building

is down there after all.

As Mark's number two, Dan Jones,

supervises the delicate work on Test Pit 2,

energy levels are ramping up in Pit 3.

Mark watches with anticipation.

Mark!

They've located a wall down in the bottom in the second trench.

A wall?

My god!

Wait, are you serious?

Yeah, no. Come and have a look.

Mark's search for an ancient royal building

within sight of the pyramids has had a major boost.

His previous excavations suggested

the structure extended well into the soccer field.

Now they finally found stonework

in the second test pit,

but it's much deeper than expected,

right down at the level of the groundwater.

Oh, oh, we got a wall!

That's amazing.

Am I on the alignment, though?

Yeah, I think it's pretty much

where we thought it would come.

So, we have the wall there, only 32 meters away,

something like 90 feet.

Between there and here, we have some kind of ramping down

by about two meters.

Everything we see from here on out,

no one will have seen in the previous 4,500 years.

Mark has located the giant building

beneath the soccer field,

but it's six feet deeper here than at its northern end.

Its western wall seems to slope downwards.

The only way to explain why

is to clear the rest of the soccer field

and figure out whether this building really was a palace.

To help him understand what might have gone on

in the pyramid builders' lost city,

Mark heads for Khufu's Great Pyramid itself.

It's still the case that every time I come,

I see something new that I hadn't seen before,

and I've been here for 50 years.

He's searching for evidence of the human effort

required for the pharaoh's immense project.

Almost the entire pyramid is built with stone

quarried from the surrounding plateau.

Most of the stone that we see on the pyramid today

was never meant to be seen.

But the base is clad in a different type of rock.

If you imagine the entire acreage of the pyramid

covered with this beautiful polished white limestone,

that's what the pyramid looked like

when it was brand new and complete.

Geologists have worked out

that this fine white limestone comes from a quarry at Tura,

eight miles away.

The ancient Egyptians were good geologists

in their own right and knew where to go

to get the best stone for the right purpose.

Inside, Mark explores

the pyramid's closed-off interior.

Even the internal passages are lined with high-value material.

So, the Grand Gallery is

one of the ancient architectural marvels worldwide.

The laid-in stone of the internal passages and chambers

is from Tura.

Every surface bears evidence of the craftsmen

who worked it smooth, with chisels made of copper,

mined more than 100 miles from the pyramids.

The human story, the story of the human hand

that created the Great Pyramid,

is there in details like these chisel marks.

150 feet up, in the center of the pyramid,

is the king's burial chamber,

a protective cocoon of solid granite,

shipped all the way from southern Egypt.

This is where the king was buried as a god

that had ruled the Egyptians on Earth.

It was meant to be the darkest,

most inaccessible place in the universe.

Everything we're finding in the lost city of the pyramids

was all about building this room.

The Great Pyramid

was an unprecedented engineering marvel,

but it was also an extraordinary logistical feat.

Egyptologists have long wondered how an ancient society

organized a project that required resources

from all over the country.

In 2013, archaeologist Pierre Tallet

chanced upon some astonishing evidence.

In a cave on Egypt's Red Sea coast,

he unearthed a cache of decaying papyrus documents.

Unique and priceless, they're now kept secure

in the archives of Cairo's Egyptian Museum.

We knew that we had the most ancient papyri

ever found in the world, in fact.

It is the first real documentation that we have

about the building of the pyramid.

You have the cartouche of Khufu here,

and here, for example, we have the pyramid.

We got really excited when we were reading it,

because it was evident that it is a logbook

of a team of sailors

that were supposed to bring material for the construction

of the Giza complex of Khufu at the very end of his reign.

The papyri were written by the crew's overseer,

Inspector Merer.

The entries describe the team's movements

as the final touches were applied

to the pharaoh's giant tomb.

Inspector Merer is traveling by boat, sailing,

towards the pyramid of Khufu,

loaden with stones.

Merer's records reveal his workers

shipped limestone eight miles from a quarry in Tura

to Khufu's pyramid site in Giza.

His team may also have collected copper ore

from mines on the Sinai Peninsula,

which was used to produce vast quantities of chisels

for smoothing the pyramid's fine casing stone.

Merer was just one of many overseers

keeping detailed logs of their work.

Why the records were sealed in a cave is unclear,

but the arid soil ensured the script survived

for 4,600 years.

I think one of the interests of these papyri

is that they are beautiful, in fact.

I'm in love with them.

The way they kept their records, it's really impressive.

The building of the pyramid of Khufu

is a great project of the reign.

You can see that all the resources of the country

are concentrated to build the pyramid.

Here you have the most impressive pieces,

but we still have about 500 fragments to study,

and we have to extract all the valuable information from them.

It will take Pierre years to decipher

every last fragment of text,

but each tiny scrap could help piece together

how the pyramid project was run.

On the dig site, Mark's plan is to find out

whether the building he's waited 20 years to uncover

played a role in the pyramid's construction,

and whether it's a lost royal palace.

Under the supervision of Mark's long-time friend and colleague

Sayed Salah, the team has shifted a 10-foot-thick layer

of sand and mud, massively extending the lost city site.

It means he's exposed another 15-foot section

of the mysterious stone building at its heart.

The secrets at the center of the lost city

are just beneath their feet.

The team has spent days

shifting 4,500 years' worth of mud and sand

from what they hope might be a pyramid-era palace.

They're searching for evidence of the structure's purpose.

With any luck, it will hold clues to the role

this lost city played in turning the pyramid project

into a reality.

Immediately, they begin to unearth clues:

the compacted mud seems to contain

an unusual amount of stone...

not building material; something more valuable.

There's just a tremendous amount of granite.

Then we have alabaster, which is imported.

The granite is imported from Aswan,

600 kilometers to the south.

The alabaster's probably imported from Middle Egypt,

maybe 200, 300 kilometers to the south.

The question is why so much granite, why so much alabaster?

Ah.

So, yeah, we're starting to find pieces

that show worked surfaces.

That's quite nice.

The fact that it's got a flat, worked surface indicates

they were making things out of this hard stone here.

Is this a moment of discovery?

Yeah, looks like we have a corner.

It looks like a base, like of a statue?

Whole mounds of stone are accumulating

as we move in and under the soccer field.

They went to great length to get this,

whole expeditions going down to Aswan

and out into the western desert.

The fact that we're finding so much of it,

it's telling you a story.

I think it's very possible that this whole part

of the lost city of the pyramids could well be the industry

for providing statues for the temples.

Think of the clink-a-chink of hammers cutting this stone.

It must have been truly an amazing experience

to be here at that time.

A few yards away from the buried cache

of imported stone, Mohsen is working on a fresh find.

Inside the giant building's perimeter walls,

the team has come across a number of circular structures.

Mohsen recognizes their form immediately.

The Egyptian archaeological record is full

of similar cylindrical structures

used for storing food.

But these silos are giant.

The silos are enclosed

by the thick stone walls of the royal building itself.

They could hold clues to how the pharaoh managed

the resources needed to get the pyramid built.

Archaeologist Claire Malleson specializes in studying

the site's most minute evidence: Plant matter.

In the team's storeroom, Claire sifts through the soil samples

taken from all over the excavation.

She's trying to work out how an army of workers hauling stone

could be kept alive.

In the samples of dirt from the dig site,

she looks for anything that appears to be burned.

The burned plant remains will float,

because they're light, they're organic...

and then we collect them in the sieve.

Yeah, there's some little bits of charred remains in here.

Fire turns the plant remains into carbon,

preserving the shape of seeds, husks and straw.

By far the most common plant species Claire finds

on the dig site are wheat and barley.

What we can tell from the plant remains

that's really exciting

is that they were provided with ready-prepared grains,

probably by the pharaoh,

because they're working for him, they're building a pyramid,

and he doesn't want them distracted

by having to do lots of work on their food preparation.

And grain wasn't only food in ancient Egypt.

So, we know that some points of history in Egypt

this is how people were paid,

they were provided with grain as their salary.

What the plant remains can tell us about our site

is that it was a very important central place.

There was a big supply chain from all over Egypt

to the pyramid building site to support the workforce.

Nile floods gave bountiful harvests of wheat,

a staple crop on which the entire country depended.

It was turned into bread and beer,

sustaining the people of Egypt's farms and villages.

But if kept cool and dry in silos,

wheat grain could be stored for months,

guaranteeing a supply of food during times of drought.

Since grain was needed all year round,

it was the ideal currency to pay the laborers

working on the pharaoh's eternal tomb.

The most secure place for the king's vast grain reserves

might have been within the walls

of the city's giant stone building.

People were actually paid in grain, bread and beer,

so this is like the central bank that bankrolled the pyramids.

You've got to keep that in mind with your pick.

Mark believes the row of silos continues

beneath the soccer field,

exactly how many is still unclear.

But what is certain is that the royal building protected

huge quantities of Egyptian wealth.

On the other side of the site, the team is searching

for the end of the building's stone wall.

Yeah, Sayed, is the wall still going, still further?

Oh, my god, look at that!

The wall just keeps going and going.

There's really big architecture down there.

But work is hampered by an insurmountable problem:

the wall continues to slope downwards,

and although the area above ground may be arid,

with winter approaching, groundwater levels are rising.

The team can't excavate underwater,

but Sayed continues to search

every square inch of ground he can.

Yeah, just a little bit of a corner of a hieroglyph.

Sayed found this because he's got a really good eye.

He's been doing archaeology for more than 30 years.

What looks like an ordinary pebble

turns out to be a small lump of hardened clay.

They would block a door, or a box, or a bag, with cloth,

and they would tie string.

And then they used this kind of clay to seal the string.

So, when somebody wants to open the bag, open the box,

they have to break the clay.

They are like our old-fashioned wax letter seals; Same thing.

There's a vertical element and two little arms going up,

and I think what we have is half of a sedge plant,

which is the hieroglyph for nisu, king...

possibly.

Found inside an apparently royal building,

in sight of the pharaoh's pyramid tomb,

even tiny clues like this

unlock the secrets of ancient Egypt's greatest monument.

So little is known about Khufu

that every scrap of information is vital.

In the team's storeroom,

Claire combs through the hundreds of sealing fragments

unearthed in 20 years of digging at the lost city.

Those pieces found around the giant building

could be a rich seam of information.

They appear to belong to people in the service of the pharaoh.

What we've got is each sealing belonged to one person,

and on it we have the job title, basically,

and the name of the pharaoh he's working for.

That's why they're so important for us.

So, this one is a particularly nice one,

and it belonged to the keeper of royal instructions,

scribe of royal documents.

The pharaoh surrounded himself

with high officials and advisers

who ran the Egyptian government.

These officials had unique hieroglyphic seals,

like signatures, which they used to secure

important documents, boxes, even doors.

They were responsible for collecting taxes,

monitoring the all-important grain supply,

and managing the pharaoh's building projects.

The top official was the vizier,

effectively a prime minister,

who oversaw the design of the king's eternal tomb,

the pyramid.

The sealings suggest dozens of different officials

roamed around the royal building,

doing the pharaoh's bidding.

Troublingly, the team has never found Khufu's name

among the sealings until now.

Hey, Claire.

Hi, Mark.

So, Ali tells me we have Khufu.

Yeah. It looks like it.

Wow, look at that!

And there it is.

You have the cartouche, then you have the "chuh" sign,

or kind of like our K-H, so Khu-fu.

Pretty clear.

So, this is the first time we've had a mention of Khufu

in the sealings.

Keep picking away, and suddenly there's a clue,

and then another one and another one,

and pretty soon it adds up.

And this little daub of mud has so many implications.

Khufu's cartouche among the debris

of the royal building is yet more solid evidence

that the city was key to his project.

At its center seems to have been a multipurpose structure.

Mark's evidence suggests not only was the royal building

a vault storing Egypt's wealth,

it was a hub for the pharaoh's powerful officials.

Could this have been

one of the most important buildings in Egypt?

Pierre has come to Giza to meet Mark.

Among the scraps of papyrus he excavated on the Red Sea coast,

he's found what may be critical new information

for understanding the lost city of the pyramids.

So, Pierre, this is Papyrus D,

but it just looks like a series of very small fragments.

Yeah, unfortunately this papyrus

was not so well-preserved,

but it is probably the most interesting for the Giza area.

Within the workers' diaries,

recorded in this papyrus, Pierre has discovered

references to a special building

near the Great Pyramid.

We have mention of the khenu,

the royal residence, somewhere.

Whoa! So that's interesting.

You actually have the mention in a document of a palace of Khufu?

Yeah.

Ancient Egyptian pharaohs had multiple palaces,

including both private homes

and administrative headquarters.

If Pierre's translations of the fragmentary papyrus

are correct, Mark's giant structure could be

one of the royal buildings mentioned in the text.

And more details seem to support the theory.

What we have also in this papyrus

is mention of other administrative structure,

like, for example, here you can see the granary.

What we have actually found are a series of big silos,

so we have a granary.

Is it possible our granary is the granary mentioned here?

It's quite possible.

It's very interesting when you can find a connection

between archaeology and those texts.

Absolutely!

I mean, really for the first time,

these texts are bringing people to life,

the people who built the pyramids.

The giant building beneath the soccer field

bears all the hallmarks of a center of power:

thick walls and high security

protecting valuable grain and stone;

adjoining buildings, bustling with high officials.

Could it be that it was an administrative palace,

like an ancient West Wing of the White House,

from which the pyramid-building kings

oversaw the construction of their giant tombs?

On the dig site,

another season is moving towards a close.

In the shadow of the pyramids,

Mark and the team race to uncover

as much of the giant building's footprint as they can.

So...

Ah! I see it.

I see a turn here.

I see a corner out there.

But there's no doubt there's beautiful line of a wall.

You can even see the plaster render on it.

Some people might think this is like watching paint dry.

It's kind of like watching mud dry,

but, you know, it's like just identifying little corners

like this, walls, corner by corner,

that we came up with the whole map of the lost city site.

The mud brick homes and workshops of the settlement

sprawl some seven hectares beyond the royal building,

but Mark's quest to understand the people

who built the pyramids

has taken him all over the plateau.

In 2015, the team discovered more buildings

to the southwest of the city.

Curiously, they're cut off from the rest of the site

by a wide gap.

By uncovering the full extent of the huge building

beneath the soccer field, Mark hopes to find out why.

The team has shifted hundreds of tons of sand

in search of the royal building's southern limit.

But for now, they can go no further.

The wall dips continuously downwards

in a series of terraces.

They've followed it all the way to the groundwater.

But what at first seemed like an obstacle

has given Mark an idea.

Sayed, are there any walls in here?

So, now we've arrived at this big rectangular enclosure,

filled with groundwater.

As chance would have it, the groundwater is just where

we think the level of the Nile flood was

in the time of the pyramids.

If the building ramps down to the ancient level

of the Nile River,

it could mean that the structure fronted onto water.

That would explain the location of the cut-off buildings

compared to the city:

they were separated by a harbor.

It's known that Khufu diverted the west branch of the Nile

and built a harbor to receive the heavy Tura limestone,

but this would be a previously unknown dock.

We're going to take an elevation on the wall,

as far as we've traced it into the groundwater.

Alright, Dan, if you can give me an elevation on the wall,

I want to know for it the level of the Nile flood

during the time of Khufu.

Okay.

It should be about 14, 14.5...

meters above sea level.

What's the elevation?

14.51.

14.51.

The wall's height above sea level suggests

that 4,500 years ago,

this area would have been filled with river water.

It would have been an ideal dock for receiving

the most valuable goods, and perhaps the king himself.

There's a whole series of little ramps going down

into this rectangular enclosure that's now filled with water.

I mean, the whole structure is starting to appear.

It's a sophisticated port structure.

When people were thriving in the city,

men were carrying baskets of grain and other commodities

up into the enclosures and the compartments.

It's all really coming together.

The building's thick stone walls and the sealings

belonging to the pharaoh's administrators

prove to Mark that the giant structure

dominating the lost city was royal.

It seems the building also had its own harbor,

built to receive precious goods and powerful people.

To find the last wall of the building,

Mark now has to wait for the groundwater level to retreat.

Nearly four months after Mark closed up

the lost city site,

the groundwater has finally dropped.

Sayed and the team scrape away the overlying mud

to expose the ancient archaeology.

Mark hopes it will reveal the rest of the giant building

he's waited 20 years to unearth.

As soon as the men clear the surface,

walls just pop out, asking to be mapped.

Where Sayed is brushing, you can see the bricks showing,

brick by brick.

And what it seems to be is the frame of a doorway

coming into this unexcavated part of the royal building.

All this is new, nobody's seen it for 4,600 years.

This morning, Sayed has been delicately cleaning

what appears to be the last of the stonework.

Where the stonewall peters out,

he finds a telltale area of compacted mud.

The royal building changes from stone to mud brick,

and so the mud brick kind of fuses

with all the disintegrated mud brick around it.

But taking away the last of the sand,

there's unmistakable,

the southeast corner, the end of the royal building.

Having established the structure's limits,

Mark and Dan can finally compare the building

to the palaces and temples of later pharaohs

and get a true sense of its importance.

First time we've measured the north-south length

of the royal building.

By pinpointing the coordinates of each corner

on their citywide archaeological grid,

Dan can work out each dimension with millimeter precision.

99059.

Point 644.

So, we're talking around 51 meters in length.

Ooh! That's interesting.

That's interesting,

it's a standard 100 ancient royal cubits,

or very close.

The building's east-west measurement

is equally impressive at 140 feet.

42 meters, 75 centimeters, and 1 millimeter.

It's as big as the biggest palaces

that we know from ancient Egypt.

Anyway, I happen to know the White House

is 52.5 meters wide at the front.

It's just comparable. It's a really large building.

Thank god some of it's left for us to find.

After half a century of searching,

Mark has exposed one of the largest

non-funerary stone buildings ever found

from the time of the pyramids:

the administrative palace

on which the pharaoh's entire pyramid project depended.

Mark's excavations have revealed the royal building

covered a huge area of 23,000 square feet

flanked by storehouses and workshops

for master craftsmen working valuable stone.

Inside, there were at least 30 silos that stored grain

to pay the workers,

accessed from above and below.

The building backed onto a stone dock,

giving it direct access to the Nile,

making it the perfect hub from which the pharaoh

and his officials could manage construction

of the greatest monument on Earth.

Today, Mark is closer than ever to understanding

how the great pharaoh Khufu and his successors

transformed the Giza Plateau and Egypt itself.

To build the pyramids, you know,

it wasn't just stonework, it was far, far more than that.

You needed to feed the people; you needed granaries;

you needed fine craftsmen to work the granite.

Egypt at this time, all evidence indicates,

was largely an agrarian society.

When Khufu came here to build the Great Pyramid at Giza,

it required a whole infrastructure

that was new and different.

And a city like this was unprecedented.

It set that society on a whole new spin like a gyroscope,

and that resulted in the next 3,000 years

of Egyptian civilization.

50 years after starting his quest

to understand Khufu's Great Pyramid project,

Mark has exposed the buried secrets

of the last surviving wonder of the ancient world.

We're putting the light on the people

who built the most gigantic structure in the world

until the turn of the 20th century.

This material, this pottery, these sealings,

this is the real treasure,

the lost treasure of ancient Egypt.