Original subtitles

On the outskirts of Alexandria,

once Ancient Egypt's greatest metropolis...

. ..archeologists search for bodies.

Any clue could shed light on how an ancient megacity...

vanished almost entirely.

Wow!

Alexandria,

a city of legends with a history

stretching back more than 2,000 years

to the era of Egypt's final pharaohs.

Once Ancient Egypt's greatest metropolis,

today little is known about the lives

and deaths of its earliest inhabitants.

Now, archeologists are finding new ways

to get under the city's skin,

to discover how Alexandria was born from almost nothing

and then disappeared into near oblivion.

Thirty miles west of the city center,

at Taposiris Magna,

Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez

is in her 15th season of excavations,

trying to unlock Alexandria's secrets.

Kathleen believes you can't understand a city

until you understand its people.

She thinks Taposiris Magna's ancient temple complex

is a key place to find evidence of ordinary life in Alexandria.

Chief among Kathleen's discoveries

at Taposiris Magna

is a huge burial ground not far from the temple walls.

She believes any bodies in these shallow graves

could help her uncover the clues she's looking for.

The cemetery contains dozens of graves,

but many have been robbed or destroyed

by 2,000 years of storms.

This season, Kathleen has found a collection of burials

that may have escaped the ravages of weather and greed.

Ah.

Kathleen believes

ordinary Alexandrians had good reason

to be buried close to this temple.

Taposiris Magna wasn't just a religious site.

It was a multi-purpose hub.

Positioned strategically on the coast

just west of Alexandria, the temple at Taposiris Magna

was a prime point of access to Mediterranean trade.

An 1,800-yard long causeway

gave the temple access to the sea,

providing a place for the city's pilgrims and merchants

to mingle with traders.

Inside, priests conducted religious ceremonies,

ministering to the needs of Alexandria's dead.

But they also oversaw trade to and from the city,

making Taposiris Magna a hive of activity

for Alexandria's ordinary folk.

Archaeologist Linda Chapon has helped Kathleen uncover

more than 100 tombs in the necropolis.

Her experience tells her this one

could hold precious clues to how Alexandrians lived.

Finding an intact plaster seal is a good sign.

It's the first thing tomb raiders would break

when robbing a grave.

It suggests there may still be a body inside.

Kathleen needs to prise open the seal,

but she can't just start digging

if the grave contains human remains.

She needs to bring in an expert tomb excavator.

In downtown Alexandria,

Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian

has come to investigate the origins

of this ancient megacity.

He begins at one of Alexandria's

last remaining ancient sites,

the Serapeum.

Just look at this place!

I mean, everything is truly on a magnificent scale.

You can tell that this place was a very significant site.

Dating from the 3rd century BCE,

this temple is one of very few ancient structures

not covered by the modern metropolis.

The temple's tallest monument

is known as Pompey's Pillar.

This was, in fact, a much later Roman period addition

to the city of Alexandria's skyline.

But what is interesting is that rock down here.

It's very clearly some kind of reused element

from something else that's been incorporated

into the construction of the base.

The otherwise plain black granite block

contains inscriptions that suggest

it was once part of an earlier pre-Roman structure

when Alexandria was capital of Egypt.

Look at that,

there's Greek writing on it.

This is a dedication by,

it's a little unclear,

but here it very clearly says, "Alexandrius, the Alexandrian."

So, although Alexandria was the capital of Egypt,

what we have here is Greek writing,

Greek dedications, it was very much also a Greek city.

The Serapeum,

with its pillared temple and colonnades,

is a clue to Alexandria's heritage.

The vast ancient city looks far more Greek than Egyptian.

Buildings bristling with columns

are set along grid-like streets,

a design pioneered by the Greeks.

Near the waterfront is the Museum,

a vast institution of learning.

It sits alongside the city's famed library,

and a classically Greek-styled amphitheater.

And overlooking it all,

the towering lighthouse of Alexandria

is a true wonder of Greek design and engineering.

Okay, this is decidedly not Egyptian tradition.

This column capital is of the Corinthian order

of... Greek tradition.

Why was Egypt's most celebrated city

so steeped in the architecture of Greece,

hundreds of miles away across the Mediterranean Sea?

To help answer that,

Arto wants to explore how the city was founded.

In the ancient settlement of Philadelphia,

140 miles to the south,

Egyptian archaeologist Basem Gehad

is exploring a necropolis.

This site is outstanding

because Philadelphia was, uh, built on fresh lands

by people from Alexandria.

This was proved by papyri and text from the 3rd century.

The same way of building,

with the same people, with the same mindset.

Unlike ancient Alexandria,

Philadelphia has never been built over.

Beneath the sand,

its archaeology is near pristine.

In this desert, Basem hopes to unearth clues

to the culture of the legendary lost city.

This is the only living example that mimics,

uh, ancient Alexandria.

Evidence of Alexandrian customs

and traditions

could be just below the surface.

The excavation has got off to a strong start.

Basem's team has uncovered wall footings

indicating the presence of a mudbrick structure.

Spanning an area of 35 by 40 feet,

it's large.

But what excites Basem

is not so much the building's size

as its decoration.

You can feel the brush strokes of the artist.

I have never seen this before in this site,

this is quite a special moment.

The vivid-colored artwork

doesn't stop at the floor.

Frescos seem to cover every surface.

There was paintings all over the walls.

This is beautiful, just amazing.

As Basem's team

continues to haul away the sand,

they begin to reveal the structure's architecture.

A series of square platforms suggest a porch or walkway.

So we can see remains of columns that give us an indication

of that this building was standing high.

From what I see here we can say

that we have the first mausoleum

to be found in Philadelphia.

Ancient Egyptian mausoleums

were structures built by Egypt's wealthiest families

to allow the living to visit the dead.

Across this is a huge discovery.

The person this structure was built to honor

could be close by,

perhaps even entombed beneath the building itself.

In Egypt's Mediterranean

city of Alexandria,

Arto is investigating the city's earliest days,

trying to explain why the ancient buildings

appear so Greek in style.

The oldest known surviving reference to the site

where Alexandria now stands,

appears on a slab of carved stone

dated to 311 BCE.

I'm here looking at an image of the Satrap Stela.

This is a monumental decree bearing a fascinating text.

The stela refers to a coastal fort

at a place called Ra-Kadet.

And what is basically translates into is "The place of building."

In other words, the construction site.

Right there is the word that indicates "construction,"

that is a man building a wall, right there.

The stela was carved just 20 years after

one of the most seismic events in Egyptian history,

the arrival of the legendary Greek Empire builder

Alexander the Great.

In 332 BCE,

having already taken control of much of Persia,

he conquered Egypt and set about constructing a new city.

Legend says the philosopher Homer

visited Alexander in a dream

and told him of a site where he could locate a new capital.

Alexander's architect used grain

to map out the city's plan,

as a way of blessing the great conqueror's new venture.

As they laid their outline,

birds descended to feast on the seeds,

an omen Alexander took to mean his city would feed the world.

Alexander died before his capital was finished,

leaving a line of Greek kings all called Ptolemy

to complete the work.

Surrounded by water,

Alexandria was easily defendable

and had prime access to Mediterranean trade.

But by building a brand-new capital on the coast,

the new Greek rulers had taken a gamble.

It meant asking the native Egyptians

to abandon 2,700 years of tradition.

When you think about

where the Ancient Egyptians lived,

you instantly think the Nile Valley.

And that is absolutely true.

They had to be convinced that this was not only

a nominal capital but a real, true capital,

connected to their ancestors, to their places of worship,

to their deities, to their traditions.

So how did the Ptolemies pull this off?

At Taposiris Magna,

Kathleen is preparing to break open

what she believes is a rare, intact tomb

of an ordinary Alexandrian.

The body inside could reveal clues

to day-to-day lives in the Greek-Egyptian capital.

Any human remains inside the grave

will be extremely fragile.

Breaking the seal is a job

that requires one of their most experienced burial excavators.

With the plaster removed

from the three stone slabs covering the pit,

Kathleen is ready to open the grave.

It's the most delicate of heavy lifting jobs,

one slip could lead to serious injury.

Instantly, Kathleen has cause for concern.

Exposed to the elements for millennia,

the grave appears to have suffered water damage.

Kathleen needs to find out if the body has survived,

or if the evidence of Alexandrian life

that it may carry

has disintegrated into dust.

In Alexandria,

Arto wants to explore

how Egypt's Greek rulers persuaded the native Egyptians

to get behind them and their new capital city.

To learn more,

he's come to the city's largest archeological site,

Kom El-Dikka.

Among the rows of monuments, some objects stand out.

This is the quintessential symbol of the power of the king.

The head of a human being, the king himself,

and the body of a regal, powerful lion.

An image that is traditionally Egyptian.

The sphinx had been a symbol of Egypt

ever since the age of the pyramids,

2,000 years before Alexander and the Ptolemies arrived.

The inscription here identifies the king

who commissioned this beautiful work of art,

King Psamtik II of the 26th Dynasty.

This object was commissioned about 300 years

before Alexandria was even founded.

Many of the monuments lining the site

appear to have been sculpted hundreds of years

before Alexander conquered Egypt.

Now this can only mean one thing,

these monuments were actually brought at some point

to Alexandria,

well after they were first commissioned.

Arto believes the Greek pharaohs

were not simply repurposing existing statues

to speed up building work in the new capital,

they were seeking to prove to the Egyptian people

that they belonged.

This was a clever strategy by the Greek rulers

who found themselves reigning over a land

that was very foreign to them.

These monuments were brought here,

granting these Greek rulers legitimacy in the eyes

of the indigenous Egyptian population.

If the Ptolemies plan

was to use ancient statues

to prove their Egyptian credentials to the locals,

it seems to have worked.

In just 50 years Alexandria was catapulted

to the forefront of the ancient world,

becoming the most powerful, prosperous,

culturally flourishing city

the world had ever seen by that point.

Egypt had a thriving new capital

where Greeks and Egyptians lived side by side,

ruled by a Greek pharaoh,

and surrounded by Greek culture.

Today, the glorious capital of Alexander,

Ptolemy I, and Cleopatra

has all but disappeared.

So much of Ancient Egypt survives,

the pyramids,

the tombs in the Valley of the Kings,

all these magnificent temples.

But why is it that so little survives of Alexandria?

In ancient Philadelphia,

Basem's team has almost finished

clearing the sand from the painted mausoleum.

The walls were completely painted with colors,

yellow squares, frames of white,

red and blue.

We call it the Egyptian blue.

This kind of blue is really, really expensive.

Historians believe Egyptian blue

to be the very first artificial pigment.

Manufactured by hand,

its presence confirms the mausoleum owner's wealth.

With a footprint of nearly 1400 square feet,

this was a funerary house of impressive size.

Two large rooms were likely covered

by a shallow vaulted roof.

A columned portico surrounded the main structure,

offering shade and a private entrance for visitors.

Inside, lavish painted decorations

covered the floors, walls, and ceilings

with geometric patterns.

Grand and opulent,

it was a mausoleum fit for a wealthy Philadelphian,

emulating the glories of Alexandria.

Linked as it is to the ancient capital,

Basem knows this funerary house could hold clues

not just to Alexandrian architectural traditions,

but also to Alexandrian mortuary practices.

The most enigmatic thing is that we didn't find yet

any of the mummies inside this place.

The only missing clue is finding the mummy.

The plaster mausoleum might have a substructure below it.

If Basem is to uncover any human remains,

he has to find a way under the precious painted floor

to see if there's a crypt below.

At the temple site of Taposiris Magna,

Kathleen's team of tomb excavators carefully brushes

the loose sand from the shallow grave.

This could be her first chance this season

to study the body of an ordinary ancient Alexandrian,

if there's anything left of it.

The body appears to be

in its original burial position.

This confirms the tomb is undisturbed.

The skeleton is very degraded,

but to expert eyes,

it may still yield valuable evidence.

Alexandria's population

had strong ties to Greek culture.

But in Ancient Greece, nobody mummified their dead.

This grave suggests even less wealthy Alexandrians

fully embraced the local Egyptian death rites.

But the Greeks also seem

to have brought their own burial practices to Alexandria.

If Kathleen is to learn any more,

she'll need to exhume what remains of the body.

But 2,000 years of desert storms

have taken their toll.

At Alexandria's sister settlement

of Philadelphia,

Basem is searching for the final piece

of the grand mausoleum's puzzle.

He's on the hunt for the owner's body,

he thinks it could lie beneath the precious painted floor.

This morning, his team has had a lucky break.

Just when we excavate this part of the mausoleum,

we just found a broken part

that might have been a hole that was made by the looters.

Now we can look below the painted plaster.

This could be an entrance to the crypt

Basem's been looking for.

Within minutes, archaeologist Mohammed Kamel

exposes something in the sand.

Mohammed and Gehad is cleaning

and they have just dropped into a mummy

that was placed in this grave.

This job has to be done really carefully.

The first thing to emerge from the sand,

wrapped in linen,

is a face.

I can see now the head of the mummy,

it is placed in the grave cut below the floor level,

this painted plaster.

As Mohammed clears more debris from the void

below the painted floor,

he's faced with a surprise.

So it seems that Mohammed found two mummies,

not only one.

It's more than Basem could have hoped for.

But if these are the owners of the tomb,

identifying them is going to be a challenge.

The mummy is not in the really good condition,

however the wrapping is... looks really nice.

The poor state of the mummies is a concern.

And so is the condition of the plaster floor.

The mudbrick beneath is fragile,

it could collapse at any moment.

We still don't know yet the information we need

about these two mummies.

Who are they, the age, whether they are male or female.

If Basem is going to learn

any more about the bodies,

he's going to have to examine them

right here, right now.

At the Alexandrian outpost of Taposiris Magna,

the weather is hampering Kathleen's efforts

to excavate the body.

Beneath a protective windbreak,

bone specialist Linda

delicately extracts the crumbling fragments

one by one.

The smallest clue could add to Kathleen's understanding

of ordinary Alexandrian life.

The work is painstaking,

every stroke of Linda's brush could damage the remains.

As evening approaches,

Linda and Kathleen can finally transfer the bagged bones

to shelter for analysis.

It's not going to be easy.

Even identifying such degraded bones

requires patience and an expert eye.

The bones' size suggests

they belong to a fully grown individual.

But the best-preserved remains offer more detail.

Almost all Ancient Egyptians

had poor teeth,

worn down by the grit present in their bread.

The tooth's otherwise healthy condition

suggests this Alexandrian had a good diet.

Even those buried cheaply in shallow graves

seem to have benefited

as the booming city of Alexandria prospered.

Kathleen's evidence suggests

that the lives and deaths of ordinary Alexandrians

were different from anything that came before.

Mummified like Egyptians,

but buried in tombs pioneered by Greeks,

these two ancient civilizations were fusing,

to create a population altogether new.

But Kathleen's journey to understand life in Alexandria

is only just beginning.

Today, Kathleen is one step closer

to completing the picture.

In the ancient necropolis of Philadelphia,

Basem hopes the mummies he's discovered

beneath the Alexandrian-style mausoleum will reveal

how wealthier Alexandrians dealt with death.

He needs to confirm who they are,

but he can't extract the bodies without them falling apart.

His only option is to examine them cramped up in their crypt.

The grave that we have found in this painted structure

contains two mummies.

However it's so fragile,

so for the safety of the mummies

we have moved a portable X-ray machine.

A well orientated X-ray

will see through the mummies bandaging

and give Basem clues to their age and sex.

But the mummies' positions are causing problems.

It's difficult because the,

the tight space that we are working in,

condition of the mummy,

and also unstable electricity.

Using the machine itself is a skill,

but also using it in a desert is another skill.

Basem's radiographers

must slide the X-ray plate behind the mummy's head.

To create an image,

they need to blast the head with radiation

but avoid exposing themselves to the rays.

Any false move with the plate,

and the mummy could simply disintegrate.

We are almost there.

In ancient Philadelphia,

Basem is hunting for evidence

of Alexandrian mortuary practices.

In the excavations field tent

he is finally able to analyze the tomb's occupants.

He's looking for any clues that could confirm who they were.

The mummy was wrapped with a very thick linen wrapping,

especially in the head area.

So, almost 8 centimeter of textile,

but we can clearly see

image of what we call the mastoid process,

which is this bone,

it's slightly larger in the male.

So we know from the X-ray that this is an adult male.

He also lost one tooth which is the, uh, right canine.

But the, the degree of the wear, we can estimate the age

between 35 to 37 years old at death.

Life expectancy was low in Ancient Egypt.

But elite classes stood a better chance of surviving

to their late 30s,

and accumulating the wealth needed for an elaborate tomb

built by the best Alexandrian craftsmen.

Basem's attention turns to the X-ray images

of the crypt's other occupant.

The mummy that was placed on top of the second one

was for sure a female.

The grave appears to contain a couple,

perhaps husband and wife.

This habit was proved in many places in this area,

all around this mausoleum,

and it become like a,

let's say the fashion of being buried together.

I would assume that this male and female was the owners

of this mausoleum who built this painted structure.

Not only has Basem

unearthed Alexandrian architecture,

he's found first-hand evidence

of how the wealthy treated their dead

in Egypt's Alexandrian age.

After mummification,

the body was taken to its final resting place

with priests, mourners, and grave goods

accompanying the coffin.

The mummy was interred beneath the mausoleum floor,

and mourners would hold vigil over the tomb.

The family met regularly to honor the dead.

And shared food with the deceased above the tomb.

The mourners would smash plates

at the end of the meal...

a classically Greek custom,

deep in the heart of Egypt.

For me this is special, because we have solved

the mystery of this, uh, mausoleum.

Basem's painted structure

is a vivid portrait of Alexandria's lost culture.

We have been gifted in this site.

It's a cutting-edge information

that makes everything that you could read in history

comes to the reality,

so you can touch it by your hand.

These people were so important,

they played a very big role in the history of Egypt.

Basem's discovery proves

wealthy Philadelphians adopted Alexandria's fusion

of Greek and Egyptian cultures,

ushering in a new era of prosperity in Egypt

far beyond the capital.

But the legendary city where it all began

was destined to disappear.

In Alexandria,

Arto has come to the waterfront

in search of clues to explain the ancient city's downfall.

Where the famous lighthouse of Alexandria

once towered over the harbor,

now stands the Citadel of Qaitbay.

Now, this is an impressive structure.

The fort was built by an Islamic sultan

in 1477 CE.

But Arto thinks its stonework could contain evidence

of the Greek city's fate.

Look at this doorway!

It's very different from everything else,

most of the majority of the masonry of this structure

is made of limestone.

But this here, this is very clearly pink granite.

Pink granite

was a popular material in the time of the pharaohs,

used to decorate both buildings and monuments.

For Arto, the fort's location,

right where the lighthouse once stood,

can only mean one thing.

I believe that these blocks are actually from the site

of the lighthouse of Alexandria.

The granite doorway

is one of very few ancient blocks visible in the fort.

The fate of the rest of the lighthouse could be a clue

to how ancient Alexandria disappeared.

Below the fort's walls,

marine archeologists have taken the search underwater

to the floor of the harbor.

There, footage shows the silty seabed covered

with what appears to be ancient stone.

This is just fascinating stuff.

These are very clearly rectangular blocks,

these are dressed, cut, stone blocks from a structure.

It looks like granite too, it really does.

Oh yeah it's granite, it's granite, it's granite.

The ancient granite blocks

are not stacked or carefully arranged.

This isn't a drowned building.

Instead, the structure seems to have suffered

a cataclysmic destruction.

According to contemporary accounts,

on July the 21st, 365 CE...

a powerful earthquake

shook Alexandria, damaging buildings all over the city.

Shortly after, the water receded

leaving fish and other sea life high and dry.

But the sea returned in a towering wave.

Thousands were caught in this unstoppable flood.

The tsunami swept ships onto the roofs of buildings

and reduced much of the city to rubble.

The lighthouse would have been directly in the wave's path,

and so were the rest of the jewels in Alexandria's crown.

We know the area very close to the shore

was in fact where the royal palaces were,

where a lot of the most monumental,

uh, iconic buildings of Alexandria were located.

Over the following centuries,

Alexandria suffered more disasters,

leveling the Greek buildings that made the city famous.

The glorious capital

constructed by Alexander the Great's successors

may have been wiped off the face of Egypt.

But today, archeologists are discovering

that its very existence had helped establish

a new hybrid Greek-Egyptian way of life,

with the living enjoying a fusion of artistic styles

in their architecture,

and following the traditions of both civilizations

when burying their dead.

Alexander the Great didn't just found a city.

His conquest gave birth to a new Egypt

and its legacy survives to this day.