Original subtitles

Less than a mile from the legendary

Valley of the Kings, in a forgotten valley...

Ah, that the stone I like.

Archeologists sift through desert sand.

They are trying to solve the mystery

of why 11 of Egypt's

greatest rulers were found here,

all together, in an abandoned tomb,

far from their original burial place.

More. One more.

Okay, well, I'm speechless.

The Theban Necropolis,

home to the world-famous Valley of the Kings.

Pharaohs from the New Kingdom, Egypt's golden age,

built their lavish tombs here for close to 500 years.

But the mummies of many of the era's mightiest rulers,

like SETI I and Ramesses The Great,

were discovered by archeologists

in a different valley,

all together in a single unmarked tomb.

Archeologists named this location the Royal Cache.

Why they ended up here is a mystery.

Now, across Egypt, experts are uncovering new evidence

about the origins of Egypt's golden age.

And why so many of its most powerful rulers

were buried together in this forgotten valley.

Archaeologist José-Ramón Pérez-Accino

is the co-director of a Spanish-Egyptian team,

excavating the valley beneath the Royal Cache Tomb.

So the idea today is Carmen and Cruz,

you will continue cleaning.

Antonio, Paco, Shaimaa, good luck.

Thank you very much, let's go.

José has been working in this valley

for the last seven years.

He has long been fascinated

by the mystery of the royal mummies.

Archeologists first entered the Royal Cache in 1881.

They discovered a roughly hewn tunnel

carved over 230 feet

into the limestone rock of the mountain.

Unlike most other royal tombs, it had no decoration inside.

But it was crammed full of grand coffins

and over 40 mummies,

including 11 famous pharaohs and six queens,

along with evidence

that Ancient Egyptians moved these mummies here

from their original tombs in antiquity.

Despite its famous inhabitants,

there has been little excavation in the valley

surrounding the Royal Cache tomb.

Archeologists thought they knew why the Ancient Egyptians

brought so many of their royal mummies here,

to a tomb which was repurposed to hold them.

At the end of the New Kingdom,

Egypt fell into economic ruin.

Tombs in the Valley of the Kings

were robbed for their treasures.

Most archeologists believe that to keep them safe,

the mummies were moved to this valley,

as it was a secret site.

But José has a radically different theory.

José's controversial new idea

is that the Ancient Egyptians moved the New Kingdom royals

to this location, not because it was secret,

but because this apparently featureless valley

was actually an important sacred site.

Now he's on the hunt for proof.

T his season, José and his 60-strong team

will be excavating the huge drifts of windblown sand

at the base of the valley cliffs

and analyzing the rocky walls that surround them.

It's not an easy task.

The valley is remote

and the team has to shift the sand by hand.

They are appearing, some big stones.

Good, good.

They hope that these big stones

can provide clues to human activity in the valley.

In Cairo...

Egyptologist Aliaa Ismail

has come to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

She wants to examine the mummies

found in the Royal Cache,

to see what clues they hold to the origins of the New Kingdom,

and why they all ended up in one tomb.

It's amazing seeing these mummies up close.

They're basically my ancestors,

and they have played a great role in Egypt's history.

In the period just before

the rise of the New Kingdom,

Egypt was in chaos,

fractured into territories held by rival warring dynasties.

Aliaa wants to examine a mummy

that was found in the Royal Cache,

of a pharaoh who lived in this tumultuous time.

Wow! That looks painful.

This is Seqenenre Tao's mummy.

There is a slash going through his skull.

The markings on the head are very deep

and this kind of wound you would only get from an axe.

It makes it obvious that he has been to war.

It's likely the head wound

caused Seqenenre's death

and it also reveals clues to who killed him.

Experts have matched the wound to West Asian weaponry.

While Seqenenre Tao

controlled land in central Egypt,

a group called the Hyksos ruled in the north.

They were originally from western Asia.

The Hyksos and Seqenenre went to war.

Many archeologists believe Seqenenre

led the offensive himself.

But the war went badly

and he was captured by his enemies on the battlefield.

Experts believe that his killer

aimed lethal blow to Seqenenre's face,

and he died from his injuries.

Looking at the mummy of Seqenenre Tao,

he's very different from the other royal mummies

that are here,

which are very pristine and well preserved.

It looks like he was on the front line of the battlefield

defending Egypt from the Hyksos.

The Hyksos ruled in the north for 100 years.

Despite his bravery,

Seqenenre was unable to defeat them and reunite Egypt.

But he laid the groundwork for the pharaoh who did.

Aliaa wants to understand more

about the ruler who reunited Egypt

and ushered in a new era of peace and prosperity.

So she decides to travel 350 miles south

to search the tomb of a common soldier.

In Saqqara...

Archaeologist Mohamed Megahed

is excavating a set of intriguing new tombs.

It's always very nice to drive in the mornings,

the air is fresh,

you are still fresh, you are not tired yet.

And you keep thinking about what you will do during the day.

Mohamed has spent the last 15 years

digging at Saqqara.

Five years ago,

he made a remarkable discovery:

the ornate tomb of Khuwy,

a high-ranking official who lived around a thousand years

before the rise of the New Kingdom.

He believes there are also New Kingdom graves

hidden nearby.

He's on a mission to find them,

and understand who was buried here, and why.

We believe we have here a series of tombs,

we can see that they are built in line with Khuwy,

and perhaps they are dated from the New Kingdom.

Mohamed's team begins digging

at the westernmost tomb in the row.

They start by clearing windblown sand

from the entrance to the tomb.

We will do number one

and then we will proceed to the east.

Those are like watermelon, you know, you never know

if, what is inside,

you will never know if it's sweet or it's not sweet.

So we have to dig, and we will see underneath,

perhaps we are lucky

and today we'll have something interesting.

I can see Old Kingdom pottery, New Kingdom pottery,

so it's mixed fill.

This could be a sign that the tomb was robbed.

The mix of pottery makes it much harder

for Mohamed to date the burial.

Before long, the team is close to entering the first tomb.

We are trying to be as gentle

as we can with working with mudbricks,

but sometimes these vaulting ceilings like this,

they don't hold so much. Then it might collapse.

We could see some, some holes, some cracks.

Emptying the tomb could cause

the weakest central point of the ceiling to disintegrate.

Mohamed decides to document the tomb now

before the team continues excavating.

When it's small areas like this, we do 3D scanning.

It's much faster, it's, it's very accurate.

Archaeologist Hana Vymazalová

uses an app on her smartphone to scan the tomb.

It takes hundreds of photographs,

stitching them together to create a 3D model.

Now I'm looking at the 3D model of the tomb.

We can actually see very nicely here how it was constructed.

The team has photographed the chamber

just in time.

Yes, as we, as we expected

it cracked and it's two more, two more crack here.

So I'm thinking even we take it by ourselves before it,

it collapse on somebody.

In the Theban Necropolis...

the Spanish Egyptian excavation team

is pulling more white limestone blocks out of the ground

in the valley where the royal mummies were found.

Ah, that the stone I like.

They store all the stones together

on the dig site.

But look at that, that corner,

that is a corner, that is a corner.

They show constructional features

like corners, like angles.

So they belong to a structure that was destroyed.

The white limestone

doesn't match the natural rock in the cliffs above.

It suggests that a manmade monument

may once have stood here.

But José needs more evidence to be sure.

They may have been either fragments of a statue,

fragments of a shrine, but it's early days.

The dig team has a long day ahead

extracting the blocks from the sandy landscape.

But music lover José has a way of motivating the workers.

Hello, good morning, everybody,

here Radio C2 wishing you a very good day.

And we're due a new musical choice for today,

have a good day.

Every day at 8:00 in the morning,

we play some music.

It's a way to cheer up the day for everybody.

Dedicated to Carmen.

José believes other evidence

of structures must exist in the valley...

alongside the limestone blocks.

So while the workers carry on digging,

José turns his attention to the cliff face above them.

When we started this project,

a member of our team

had already observed the peculiarities

of the rock formation that they have behind myself.

José has another controversial theory.

He thinks the Ancient Egyptians carved an enormous face

into the rock of the valley walls,

like an ancient Mount Rushmore.

He knows humans have a natural tendency

to spot faces in objects.

It's called face pareidolia.

So José needs hard evidence to prove his theory.

As well as the large white blocks,

José's team has found smaller fragments of rock

from the cliff face scattered below.

He thinks that this could be evidence

that the carving was torn down in ancient times.

To prove the effigy existed,

and to find out more about why it might have been destroyed,

José wants to examine the cliff in detail.

But he can't do it from the ground.

So today, he's taking to the air.

Drone image at the same level,

close up, high definition, well help us immensely.

Okay, let's go.

In Saqqara...

Mohamed and his team are excavating a row of tombs

that he suspects dates to the New Kingdom.

They found nothing inside the first tomb,

but Mohamed has discovered another lead.

We found something promising.

To the north side of the tomb, we found another shaft,

and this shaft lead to another, another tomb.

And it seems they are leading

also to another level of, of tombs.

We have level one now and we have level zero underneath,

so most probably each tomb we have on the top,

underneath there is another tomb.

So we are clearing the bottom to the bottom of the shaft,

we'll go inside and we'll see.

Ancient Egyptians often built double-Decker tombs

like this where space was scarce.

Mohamed takes a first look inside.

Wow, there is a nice vault here.

The tomb consists of a simple

eight-foot-long burial chamber.

Both upper and lower tombs are built out of mudbrick,

and have similar vaulted ceilings,

indicating that they were built around the same time.

I saw it only in New Kingdom

and in the Sixth Dynasty,

but here in this cemetery, we don't have

such a situation before.

The tomb design is characteristic

of New Kingdom burials at other sites.

But without grave goods,

it's impossible to tell exactly when they were built.

This tomb is completely finished, documented,

photographed, and we'll back fill

and continue to excavate the other tombs.

Mohamed decides

to start excavating the next tomb in the series,

to search for hard evidence

that these tombs date from the New Kingdom.

The team checks for debris and small finds as they go.

Even a tiny piece of evidence

could unlock the secrets of the site.

We have just found this amulet, and it was part of a necklace

and perhaps it was hanging on the chest of the deceased.

And it shows a king from the New Kingdom

and you can see he is wearing the crown

and he is holding a staff in his hand.

It's a promising lead,

but Mohamed needs more evidence to be sure of the tomb's date.

The workers hunt for further clues nearby.

Here is a scarab beetle, and it's a kind of amulet.

Scarabs were very important for us because they bear names.

This one is having the name of Amun-Ra on it

and Amun-Ra was the main god of the New Kingdom.

Together with the amulet,

the scarab dates this tomb conclusively.

And because the tomb's architecture

is so similar to its neighbors,

Mohamed believes all the tombs date from the same period.

It's amazing because this is what we are looking for.

We are looking for something to date those people,

and we just found out that they are from the New Kingdom

thanks to those small finds.

Now that Mohamed has proved

that the tombs date to the New Kingdom,

he is faced with another mystery:

Who was buried in these tombs?

And why did they choose to be buried alongside an official

who lived a thousand years earlier?

His team continues excavating

to see if there is anything more hidden beneath the sand.

In Edfu, Southern Egypt,

Aliaa is continuing

her investigation into the origins of the New Kingdom.

She wants to explore a tomb

at an ancient settlement called Elkab

that contains clues to who united the country

and led Egypt into an age of prosperity.

I have studied this site so many times,

but being here in person, that's totally different.

I can't believe this text has survived.

Wow!

This must be a figure of the owner of the tomb.

He's holding a staff and a scepter

and we can see a necklace around his neck.

We can see that he is a soldier.

The inscriptions tell the story

of the soldier's life,

and document the war with the Hyksos,

the rival group who ruled in the north of Egypt

just before the rise of the New Kingdom.

When the town of Avaris was besieged,

I fought bravely on foot in His Majesty's presence.

I brought spoil from there, one man, three women,

total four persons.

And His Majesty gave them to me as slaves.

The text says that the soldier

helped to sack Avaris,

the Hyksos capital,

and drive the Hyksos from Egypt.

The walls also contain a clue

to the identity of the pharaoh who led this victory.

Ah here, this is a cartouche.

It says nb-phtj-r.

This is the royal name for the King,

the throne name of King Ahmose I.

Ahmose I became pharaoh at a young age

after his father was killed by the Hyksos.

Guided by his mother,

he continued the assault on the north.

Ahmose adopted the Hyksos's own technologies

of horse-drawn chariots and bronze weapons,

to strengthen his forces.

With his mighty army,

Ahmose conquered the capital of the Hyksos.

And after years of blood-soaked campaigns,

he finally defeated the northern rulers.

Ahmose united the country

after around 200 years of chaos,

and led Egypt into an era of peace and stability.

Right above the cartouche,

Lord of the Two Lands,

and that means that Egypt was once again united.

Ahmose I was the founder of the 18th Dynasty,

and that was the start of the New Kingdom,

the golden era for Egyptian pharaohs.

Ahmose's victory laid the groundwork

for a 500-year-long period of prosperity,

that saw the reign of famous pharaohs

like Ramesses the Great and Tutankhamun.

Next, Aliaa wants to visit another stunning tomb

to find out more about the founders

of the New Kingdom,

and why their mummies and the mummies of the kings

that followed them were found in the Royal Cache.

At the Theban Necropolis...

José and a drone crew are documenting the rock face.

He's looking for evidence to support his radical theory

that this empty valley was once an important religious site,

with a huge effigy carved into the valley walls.

These images are going to be a treasure for us.

The drone crew

forensically photograph the cliffs.

No, the angle is okay but couldn't you get us closer?

Now, if I may point to this,

you can probably see part of a chin,

one of the ears is very clear.

This is the top, the headdress. Okay.

And you can see the difference

between the top and the front.

The top is eroded by nature,

but the front has been like hacked.

Come fly with us, they say!

José's colleague, Antonio Gómez Laguna,

specializes in aerial archaeology.

He will use the high-resolution images to help José

search for any signs of carving on the cliff.

I'm about to see the drone images.

I'm really excited about this.

Antonio has been working with them,

I hope that we can see something we didn't know before.

Hey, show me.

Excellent. Whoa!

Antonio has combined the images

into a detailed photomosaic.

But look at the markings.

Oh, my God, this is... Yes, and so...

It's a game changer. Yeah.

In the Theban Necropolis,

José and Antonio inspect the photomosaic.

Hey! Look at the two parallel lines.

What do you think, is this natural or am I?

Maybe not natural.

You see that this looks like

somebody has been hacking.

Maybe. Yes. Please.

He thinks the photomosaic

clearly reveals the outline of a face carved by humans.

It's impossible to tell for sure

who might be depicted in the rock.

But the evidence that the effigy

was purposefully destroyed,

means that José thinks he knows who it might have been.

Hatshepsut was a female King of Egypt

who ruled as Regent in the New Kingdom,

until her stepson came of age.

A master of propaganda,

Hatshepsut commissioned carvings of herself

in male headdresses all across Egypt

to assert her position as pharaoh.

Hatshepsut's reign was an era of peace and prosperity,

and when her stepson finally succeeded her,

he had a tough act to follow.

He sought to destroy his stepmother's legacy

and erase all evidence of Hatshepsut across Egypt.

That makes her a very, very good candidate,

but we have to be very cautious.

Although José can't name the face

carved into the rock,

he is more convinced than ever that it did exist.

At the base of the cliff the team is still hard at work

hunting for more limestone remnants

of the building he thinks once stood here.

The workers have found a new block

that looks different to the others.

They want José to examine it.

In Saqqara,

Mohamed's team has found a coffin

in a grave dated to the New Kingdom.

This is what we was looking for, a tomb with a coffin.

Over the millennia,

many Egyptian tombs have been robbed.

So, although its wood has disintegrated,

an undisturbed coffin is a unique opportunity

to understand who was buried here,

and why they chose to be buried in this place.

The team searches for any human remains.

We have found the skull inside the coffin.

This guy was buried his head to the north.

Usually the north is a very good orientation

for Ancient Egyptians.

All the pyramid entrances were to the north,

because in the north side of the skies are stars,

they never disappear.

Mohamed asks experienced anthropologist

Zeinab Hashesh to examine the skull.

Dr. Mohamed, what do you have today?

So, we have cleaned the skull and the coffin,

and we would like to discuss how to document it, take some notes.

Okay.

And if you can tell some information

about this individual.

Okay. Let me have a look.

Please. Okay.

If you look at this area we call the glabella,

it's pronounced a little bit, so he looks like a male.

Zeinab needs to transport the skull

back to her laboratory

to analyze it further.

So now we can move it and take it to the study room.

Yes, please. To continue our work.

To continue our documentation. Yes, yes.

Moving a millennia-old skull

is delicate work.

I was very worried,

and we removed it hopefully in one piece,

and now it will go to the lab.

In the Theban Necropolis...

José is investigating the large white limestone blocks

his team found at the base of the valley walls.

More. One more!

It's the same kind of limestone.

These are chisel marks probably.

They were buildings, they were buildings with decoration,

and these buildings with decoration

have to be brought and built by somebody up here.

'Cause it means that there was a structure here,

probably a structure of worship.

The carved blocks are a breakthrough

for José's revolutionary theory.

They are a first step to proving

that the Ancient Egyptians

did build a monumental structure in this valley.

This is a big, big day.

This may mean not much for the untrained eye,

but it's extremely important for us.

This is changing the,

the history of the whole of the Theban Necropolis.

José's evidence is groundbreaking.

It may confirm the importance of this valley

as a sacred place

and could help to rewrite

centuries-old archeological interpretations

of one of the most significant discoveries

in Egyptian history.

And for José, it also sheds new light on an old find.

When we started working, one of the big, big moments

was the discovery of this graffiti.

It was found by an Egyptian member of the team, a lady,

who realized that there was a human head carved in the rock.

José and his team

think that the graffiti is a drawing of the valley

with a tomb, possibly the Royal Cache,

represented by a pyramid on the left,

and the pyramidal peak of a natural hill to the right.

It's like a nice, beautiful snap

taken by an Ancient Egyptian on this wall,

which gave us the clue that this area was extremely important.

José's new finds,

together with the graffiti,

mean that he is piecing together

the full significance of this sacred valley,

and why the mummies of New Kingdom pharaohs

may have been placed here.

José believes that in ancient times,

there was a monumental effigy

carved into these sheer cliffs.

The head of a queen or goddess 100 feet high

that looked down on the entire valley.

Below it, a large niche was hewn into the rock

and contained an enormous statue.

Several royal tombs cut deep into the rocky Cliffside.

Buildings may have provided a focal point for worship.

José thinks this was no hiding place,

but a very important religious site.

José's excavations

are revealing priceless new information.

But there is one mystery still to solve.

If the Royal Cache Valley was important,

the tomb that became the final resting place

for so many New Kingdom pharaohs

must have been significant too.

So, who was the tomb's original owner?

In Saqqara...

Dr. Zeinab. Hi, Dr. Mohamed.

What is new?

Mohamed and Zeinab

are analyzing the skull they uncovered

in a New Kingdom tomb.

They want to find out more about who this person was,

and why they chose to be buried next to an official

who died a thousand years before them.

Oh, now I am sure about his age, between 20 to 25,

according to his teeth, he live in very good health

because he don't have any evidence

about anemia on his eyes.

I thought so because the tombs also are for not poor people.

Really? So their tombs are

for middle class or higher middle class group.

Yeah, so that's perfect, it's matching with his teeth

and with his skull.

Very nice.

He has, he has no evidence of malnutrition.

It's nice that the tomb condition

with the health condition can, can fit, can fit together.

Yeah, yeah.

The evidence from the skull confirms

that the row of tombs belonged to wealthy individuals,

perhaps even a wealthy family.

Mohamed now wants to understand the significance

of why these people were buried next to a much-revered official

who lived and died a thousand years earlier.

The Ancient Egyptians chose the specific locations

beside important people.

Ancient Egyptians remembered the legacy of other people.

Ancient Egyptians believed

that to live on in the afterlife,

it wasn't just their body that needed to be preserved,

it was their name.

To make sure they were remembered,

this New Kingdom family chose a burial location

next to the high-ranking official Khuwy,

so that anyone visiting this famous site

would see their tomb.

It's a tactic that is still working 3,000 years on.

Every time we come to dig, we found a piece of this puzzle

and we inserted it in, in its right place.

Altogether, they complete our picture about Ancient Egypt.

In Deir el-Medina near Luxor,

Aliaa is visiting one final New Kingdom tomb.

It's from the opposite end of the social spectrum

to the mummies in the Royal Cache.

This is the workmen's village.

These workmen built the Valley of the King tombs.

Aliaa has been granted special access

to this sealed tomb

to explore clues in the inscriptions on its walls.

Wow, what an adventure it is to get here.

How deep does this tomb go?

The tomb dates

to when the power of the New Kingdom

was it its height, 300 years after it began.

This is Ahmose-Nefertari,

and we know that from her cartouche,

here it says Ahmose-Nefertari.

Ahmose-Nefertari was the wife of Ahmose I,

the pharaoh who reunited Egypt

at the beginning of the New Kingdom

and brought about a great renaissance

of Egyptian culture.

She's wearing the Atef crown and holding the Ankh,

eternal life in her hand.

Ahmose-Nefertari is here because the tomb owner is honoring her.

In this area,

Ahmose-Nefertari is mentioned in at least 50 private tombs.

The tombs here were founded long after the death

of Queen Ahmose-Nefertari.

And therefore, when we see her here,

we see her in a different light.

She is not represented as a queen but as a deity.

Following Ancient Egyptian tradition,

King Ahmose the first married his sister Ahmose-Nefertari,

who was known as King's Daughter,

King's Sister, and King's Wife.

She also gained the title of God's Wife,

and she played an active role in religious ceremonies

to ensure the fertility of Egypt.

Ahmose-Nefertari lived to see her son

and his successor become pharaohs

and became the mother of Egypt's new golden age.

Even after her death,

Egyptians continued to worship her

as a goddess of fertility, resurrection, and rebirth.

Ahmose-Nefertari was a deity,

the mother of the New Kingdom and 18th Dynasty.

She was venerated because the New Kingdom was not any era.

The New Kingdom was an era of stability,

it was the time of the golden age.

The prestige tied to Ahmose-Nefertari's name

and her role as Mother of the New Kingdom,

held significance for the royals

and rulers who came after her.

Archeologists disagree over where she was buried,

but some believe that it was Ahmose-Nefertari

who was the original owner of the Royal Cache tomb.

I think the mummies of the New Kingdom pharaohs

were placed in the tomb of Ahmose-Nefertari,

because of her significance as the founder

and mother of the New Kingdom.

That kind of significance made her tomb a very important place.

At the Theban Necropolis...

José's time with the Royal Cache Valley

is coming to an end.

There's just time to enjoy one last sunrise.

Oh, my God, this is beautiful!

It's the winter solstice.

This is a day which was celebrated in Ancient Egypt.

From this day onwards, days will be longer,

nature will return to life.

Everything will go back to brilliance, to fertility.

José believes that the solstice

marks a natural phenomenon in the valley,

as the sun rises directly between

two peaks on the horizon.

We think that the royal bodies ended up in a place

where this phenomenon can be observed.

It's yet more evidence

that the valley was a sacred place

and a fitting end to his dig.

This is a campaign

which has been extremely rich in information,

particularly in understanding how the different parts

of the site are inter-related.

José's investigation

could rewrite the history of the Royal Cache.

It suggests that when the Ancient Egyptians moved

the royal mummies at the end of the New Kingdom,

they didn't hide them in a secret valley.

Instead, they chose a sacred valley

that was well-known with deep religious significance.

And 500 years after her reign,

José believes they chose to bury the mummies in the tomb

of one of the founding figures of the New Kingdom,

to honor her legacy and keep their names alive.

Being able to point to something that had not been seen before,

whether it's an object, whether it's a phenomenon,

whether it's an explanation, is a thrill of a, of a lifetime.