Original subtitles

In an ancient necropolis

in the heart of Egypt...

Archeologists are hunting for tombs

from the era of Tutankhamun.

They will be the first to set foot inside

for thousands of years.

They're hoping to unravel the mystery

of an ancient religious revolution.

Tutankhamun, Egypt's most famous pharaoh.

Known as the Boy King,

he came to power when he was 9 years old

and ruled until his death aged 19.

But during his short life, he oversaw a transformation

in how the Ancient Egyptians worshiped their gods

that had far-reaching implications

for the rest of Ancient Egyptian history.

Today, archeologists across Egypt

continue to hunt for clues

to this spiritual upheaval.

They unearth evidence of mysterious religious rituals,

investigate how some gods were banished

and others rose to power,

and search brick by brick to understand

how the Boy King's far-reaching religious reforms

had their roots in the chaotic reign of his father.

Near Luxor at Dra' Abu el-Naga...

Egyptian archeologist Bahaa Gaber

is excavating an ancient necropolis

that contains burials from the era of Tutankhamun.

It's a very rich area.

The number of the tombs,

more than 2,000 tombs have been discovered until now.

The burials here

could contain valuable information

about how Tutankhamun shaped Egypt's religious customs

during his reign.

This season, Bahaa and his team

are focusing on an area of sand

near the base of the necropolis.

They have a meticulous system

to make sure they don't miss anything.

When we start from the beginning, we have

to divide the area into the squares.

For us, this is the first square,

and that's the second one and this is the third one.

We are looking for the bedrock.

In each 16-by-16-foot square,

the workers dig all the way down to the bedrock

searching for any structures hidden in the sand.

We've found a border of a courtyard.

You can see the corners around the area.

It means that this is the courtyard of a tomb.

It's a promising start.

The New Kingdom period is the era of Tutankhamun.

Now that the team has found the courtyard,

they're on the lookout

for signs of buried grave goods.

Ah.

On the West Bank of the Nile, near Luxor...

American Egyptologist Meredith Brand

has come to Tutankhamun's tomb

to explore which gods the Boy King revered.

This is so exciting.

So this is the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb.

It's wonderful to go to the place

where the greatest

archeological discovery in Egypt,

and probably even the world, took place.

Tutankhamun's mummified body

lay sealed in this tomb for over 3,000 years.

Meredith has special access to examine

the burial chamber's walls up close.

This is my first time getting to go

into the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.

This is fantastic.

Oh, wow!

Look at that.

You can see every single detail,

all the individual strokes, the lines.

The Ancient Egyptians honored

over 2,000 deities,

and the pharaohs were seen as a divine intermediary

between them and the gods.

Over the centuries, the popularity

of individual gods waxed and waned,

and some gods even combined into hybrid deities.

Meredith studies the painted reliefs

to identify which gods Tutankhamun chose

to surround himself with.

Here is the god Osiris,

the god of the underworld,

embracing Tutankhamun.

Over there is the goddess Nut.

This is somebody who worshiped

the full pantheon of the Egyptian religion.

When first discovered,

Tutankhamun's tomb was crammed

with more than 5,000 lavish grave goods,

many of which honored the gods.

A shrine bore a statue

of the jackal-headed god Anubis.

His sarcophagus was decorated with images of four goddesses.

And on the royal chariot, an image of the solar falcon

representing the sky god Horus.

But one object poses a mystery.

Tutankhamun's golden throne

was emblazoned with a strange sun disc

and a different name for the Boy King, Tutankhaten.

The golden throne is highly decorated

with imagery of the young pharaoh.

Meredith wants to examine it more closely

to see what clues it holds.

This is an image

of the golden throne of Tutankhamun

and when I look at it, I see there's something

a bit unusual.

I don't see any other gods, but I do see a sun disc

with arms coming down holding a key to life.

This is the god the Aten.

The mysterious Aten,

unlike the other Egyptian gods,

didn't take the form of an animal or human.

It was represented as a simple sun disc.

The throne with its alternative version

of Tutankhamun's name

suggests that at some point during his life,

the god Aten was very important to him.

But in the young pharaoh's tomb,

the throne is one of the few traces

of this mysterious deity.

In Tutankhamun's tomb,

we don't have the image of Aten.

It's not painted on the walls.

To find out more about why

the Aten wasn't featured in the tomb,

Meredith wants to explore the site

of a cataclysmic religious upheaval.

At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna...

archeologists Basem Gehad

and Ann-Kathrin Jeske

are excavating a huge temple complex

that was in use during the New Kingdom...

the era of Tutankhamun.

We are expecting

that we could find more information

about these temples that nowadays you can't see

clearly at the site because of the destruction.

The buried temple is located

in the fertile ground close to the River Nile.

Digging here is difficult

for even the most experienced archeologists.

It's a kind of challenging site.

The landscape here is completely different

than any other place that I have worked,

because I'm used to working in the desert.

Now we are working in mud and silt,

and everything is just, like, buried

into these compact layers.

But if it's easy, it's not fun.

That's what makes a very good archeologist.

Among the ruins

of the temple's ancient gateway,

the team has already uncovered something special.

We can see here one of these blocks

which was in the core of this building,

and it bears the cartouche and the name of Akhenaten.

Pharaoh Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father.

Akhenaten was the second son of the Great Amenhotep III.

He never expected to be king,

but when his older brother died,

the crown fell to him.

Akhenaten married the legendary Nefertiti

with whom he had six daughters.

But his son Tutankhamun would be his successor.

This season, Basem and Ann-Kathrin hope

that this site can tell them more

about the religious regime

during Tutankhamun's early life.

Ann-Kathrin oversees excavation of a smaller secondary temple

that sits in the grounds of the main Hermopolis site.

We excavate with seven

to eight workmen

in each square.

Some are moving the soil.

Today, I hope we manage to excavate 20 more centimeters,

and I hope to find here

more information about this temple.

As the workers painstakingly scrape away

at the compacted soil,

Ann-Kathrin watches for any signs

that there's a structure below.

Here it's just the soil, it looks a bit different,

it's a bit more sandy,

and our foundations are filled with sand,

so it might be an indication

that we've come closer to the foundation.

It's a promising sign

the team is digging in the right area.

A.K.

One of the workers spots something

buried in the soil.

Oh!

It seems like we have limestone blocks.

170 miles north

of the Valley of the Kings,

Meredith is exploring the ruins of the ancient city of Amarna

to find out more about the mysterious god

the Aten and the role it played

in Tutankhamun's early life.

This is the best place to find out about the Aten.

It was here that Tutankhamun was born and raised

back when he was known as Tut-ankh-aten.

The city of Amarna was built from scratch

by Tutankhamun's father, Pharaoh Akhenaten.

He intended it to be the new capital of Egypt.

Oh, this is so beautiful!

Meredith examines an impressive

inscribed boundary marker known as a stela.

It is one of 16

that delineates the ancient city limits.

This is a lovely stela

and at the top, there's this sun disc Aten,

and its divergent rays are coming out like arms

and they're shining on the king and his family.

This stela reveals a lot

about the Aten and its role during the reign of Akhenaten.

This text says that the Aten is his divine father.

It shows that the Aten is the only god

that Akhenaten is worshipping,

and it makes it clear that his wish

is for all of Egypt to follow this one god.

This is a remarkable text.

It's a huge departure from thousands of years

of Egyptian history.

Ancient Egyptians took religion very seriously.

Many houses had their own shrine

for everyday worship.

When Akhenaten came to power,

Ancient Egyptians worshiped a pantheon

of more than 2,000 gods.

But a few years into his reign,

the pharaoh banished all the gods except one,

the Sun God Aten,

creating one of the world's first monotheistic religions.

For many Egyptians, this would have been heresy

but they had no choice but to follow

their pharaoh's new god.

It's hard to overstate

how huge of a change this was for Ancient Egyptians.

The gods were in every single part of their life.

So, if their baby was sick, they prayed to the gods.

If they were worried about the harvest,

they prayed to the gods.

So what Akhenaten did was tell the Ancient Egyptians

you can't practice your religion anymore

the way you want to,

and that must have been very hard.

The consequences of these unpopular changes

had far-reaching implications for the entire country.

Akhenaten's reforms were not just a radical religious change,

they were a huge political and economic power grab.

The priesthoods and the temples held huge amounts

of the country's resources and wealth,

and by closing them and firing everyone that worked for them,

he fundamentally changed

the political and economic structure

of the entire country.

Akhenaten's changes even extended

to how the pharaoh was depicted in reliefs.

He and his family appear with slim torsos,

wide hips, and long spindly arms,

breaking with longstanding traditions.

The young Tutankhamun, born Tutankhaten,

grew up in this radically different world

surrounded by the cult of Aten.

Tutankhamun would have grown up indoctrinated

in his father's religion.

And his entire life was mapped out for him.

He would have ruled from here in Amarna

and then been buried here,

but that obviously didn't happen.

Next, Meredith wants

to explore Akhenaten's tomb

to find out why Tutankhamun later abandoned

his father's new capital and its heretical religion.

On the west bank of the Nile

at Dra' Abu el-Naga...

Bahaa is inspecting an object

that he hopes dates from the era of Tutankhamun.

Ushabti figures are typically placed

in the burial chamber of a tomb

as part of the deceased's funerary goods.

Foundations of a courtyard

and an ushabti statue dating from the New Kingdom

are encouraging finds.

If they discover a tomb from that era,

it could offer valuable insight

into the area's religious customs

during the time of Tutankhamun.

We're still working on that courtyard.

Bahaa is hoping the courtyard leads

to the entrance of a tomb.

It's another one, yeah?

So this is not just one coffin.

I think that that's more than one.

This one is smaller. It's a smaller?

I think from the size of those coffins

they were for, uh, just small children

who we can say that between 1 and 3 years at least.

It's something different, this is the first time

that I see something like that in, uh, in our site.

The team searches for any grave goods

around the coffins.

Oh, wow, that's a ancient one.

Oh, be careful, Ahmed, be careful.

At Hermopolis Magna...

Ann-Kathrin and Basem

are investigating the promising limestone blocks.

We might found here now

the foundation trench

of the outer wall of the temple.

They're searching for more information

about Akhenaten's religious regime

during Tutankhamun's early life.

Here it's really where we can expose them,

and then we start slowly removing the structural support

and then we take out the stones.

After chipping away the surrounding mud,

it's clear that these aren't ordinary building blocks.

It's very likely that this is a talatat block,

and in this part of the temple

we don't find talatat blocks very often.

It's a rather rare find.

Talatat blocks

are small sandstone bricks

designed to a standardized size

that first appeared during the reign of Akhenaten.

Smaller than the traditional limestone blocks

used to build temples and pyramids,

they were light enough for one man to carry

making construction faster and more efficient.

Akhenaten managed to quickly build

his new capital of Amarna

thanks to this revolutionary block design.

We know that these blocks are from the time of Akhenaten

simply based on the dimensions.

The same dimension was only used in his period,

not before and not, uh, afterwards.

The discovery of talatat blocks

is a crucial find.

It shows that parts of the temple were built using

this Amarna period stonework.

The team now needs to remove the blocks from the trench

to properly inspect them for any signs of decoration.

The moment I see decoration,

I'm happy because when I find

something like a representation of the king

or even god or some scenes, this would be really exciting.

The team ties the talatat block together

with string to prevent it

from falling apart when they move it.

They are going to lift it now,

and you have to imagine it's not super easy

because this block is about 70 kilos

Are you ready?

Finally, everything is set.

Basem gives the go-ahead to lift out the block.

The team rotates the block

to inspect what's underneath.

Oh!

This is a nice find.

At the Dra' Abu el-Naga Necropolis...

Bahaa and his team are inspecting

the intriguing object they found

next to the series of children's coffins.

This is a bag.

You can see the handle, you can see the bag inside.

When he died, his parents actually took his bag

and put it next to his coffin,

because he was a child, he loved to have his bag,

he loved to have his bag with him in his second life.

The Ancient Egyptians believed

that objects they were buried with

would travel with them to the afterlife.

This child wasn't old enough to own elaborate statues

or golden treasure.

Instead, they were buried with their most prized possession,

a humble bag made from reeds.

It's beautiful.

That's such an amazing excavation

we found something like that.

In total, the team uncovers

three wooden coffins and two children's bags.

The coffins is not in good condition

so we have, uh, to move them safely

from here to protect them.

The team transports the coffins and bags

to the storage magazine to preserve them.

Now they can get back to searching

for the Tutankhamun era tomb.

In Amarna...

Meredith has come to investigate the tomb

of Tutankhamun's father, the Heretic King Akhenaten.

She wants to find out more about what happened to Atenism

after Akhenaten died.

This is the Royal Wadi.

It's where Akhenaten built several royal tombs,

and this is where Tutankhamun would have been buried.

Akhenaten decreed that the city of Amarna

would be the final resting place

for himself and his dynasty.

This was to be his new Valley of the Kings.

Oh, wow!

The walls of Akhenaten's burial chamber

have been badly damaged by floodwater,

and little remains of their original decoration.

Meredith searches for any evidence

of the pharaoh's heretical religion, Atenism.

This is a sun disc,

and it shows that this tomb belonged to Akhenaten.

For him, the Aten was everything.

His tomb must have been covered with Aten sun discs everywhere.

But very few inscriptions

now remain inside the tomb.

And in several of them,

the names of those depicted have been hacked out,

making them illegible.

At the time of his death,

Akhenaten was still a true believer

in his new religion.

But Atenism was wildly unpopular

with the Ancient Egyptians.

It disrupted the economy,

shattered family's religious beliefs,

and left the former temples and their priests in disarray.

Once Tutankhamun took the throne,

everything changed.

This is the Restoration Stela.

It was found in Karnak Temple

where Tutankhamun would have placed it prominently

for everyone to see.

And this is an important document.

The stela records

the ruinous state of the former temples,

and that Tutankhamun restored them

so the old gods would return.

This stela, it makes it very clear

that Tutankhamun had completely rejected the Aten

and the religious revolution.

It shows that he wanted to put Egypt

back to the way it was

and forget the entire Akhenaten, Aten,

and the Amarna episode.

In the wake of Tutankhamun's

great declaration,

workers tore down temples and sacred sites

dedicated to the Aten.

All mention of the heretic Akhenaten

was erased,

his statues and paintings destroyed.

Tutankhamun even abandoned his father's new city, Amarna,

leaving it to crumble into the desert.

Tutankhamun would have been a young boy

when his father died,

so his earliest memories

would have been the cult of Aten.

And despite his father being a true believer,

when he ascended the throne, Tutankhamun,

and his advisors probably,

decided that the stability of the country

was more important

than the religious revolutions of his father Akhenaten.

The once-powerful priests

who had lost their jobs

when Akhenaten banished the old gods,

may have pressed the young Tutankhamun

to reinstate the old ways

and hand back power to the priesthood.

But Akhenaten had spent a lifetime

establishing his monotheistic religion.

To find out how the Boy King restored the old gods,

Meredith wants to explore

one of Ancient Egypt's greatest temples.

At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna...

Ann-Kathrin inspects the Tutankhamun era

talatat block from the trench.

Wow, we have here a cartouche

and even fragment or residue of paint,

so here is some blue paint.

The team wants to investigate

what information is inscribed on the block

and work out how it ended up here

in Hermopolis Magna,

10 miles from Akhenaten's Amarna city.

So here, I can see the outline of one cartouche,

and here is the outline,

it seems like a second one.

A cartouche is a hieroglyph

that represents the name of a pharaoh.

It's a significant discovery for the team.

We haven't discovered such a block in the temple before,

so this is something exciting.

We have here evidence of a secondary carving.

This cartouche is not the cartouche

of any Amarna king but Merenptah.

So yeah, on this Amarna period block

is now a cartouche of a much later king.

This block shows that King Merenptah,

who came to power decades after Akhenaten,

took talatat blocks from Amarna

and used them to build part of this temple.

He made this block his own

by putting his own name on, um,

Akhenaten's, um, building material.

This is really an exciting finding,

and this helps us a lot to understand

more about how the kings of the 19th Dynasty

dealt with, um, Akhenaten's heritage.

Next, the team wants to study the blocks

to understand how and why these later kings

used Akhenaten's talatat blocks here.

Now we are going to transport them to the magazine.

In Luxor...

Meredith has come to the ancient temple complex

of Karnak.

Some of the monolithic structures here

pre-date Tutankhamun's reign by centuries.

I've been here so many times

but every time I come back,

I'm blown away by the sheer scale of this place.

It's enormous and so beautiful.

Before Akhenaten,

Karnak was the main center of worship

for some of Ancient Egypt's most important gods,

including Amun.

Meredith wants to explore how Tutankhamun,

having turned his back on Atenism,

restored the old gods to Karnak

and the rest of Egypt.

Tutankhamun would have come here to Luxor

and Karnak Temple after he abandoned Amarna.

It was here in Luxor that he changed his name

from Tut-ankh-aten to Tut-ankh-amun.

Amun, the Creator God,

was one of Egypt's most popular deities,

believed to have saved Egypt from foreign invaders.

Amun was king of the Egyptian pantheon

and considered to be father to the pharaoh himself,

bestowing divine authority on the pharaoh's earthly rule.

Tutankhamun wanted to honor

the most important god,

and by putting the God's name back into his own name,

he made a personal connection with that god.

After reaffirming his commitment

to the old ways,

the young pharaoh needed to show the rest of Egypt

that his father's legacy was no more.

Tutankhamun began by making his mark on Karnak.

Outside the complex,

he started work on a glorious processional avenue.

He took statues of sphinxes that bore Akhenaten's image

and replaced their heads

with those of rams representing Amun.

Hundreds of sphinxes lined Tutankhamun's avenue,

which stretched nearly 1,000 feet

between the temples of Amun and Mut.

Meredith heads to the south of Karnak Temple

to inspect the monumental avenue

of sphinxes herself.

Ah, this is fantastic.

This is a criosphinx.

It's later than Tutankhamun

but it shows what his sphinx would have looked like.

This has the head of the ram and the body of a lion,

and this is a protective god associated with Amun.

Tutankhamun's criosphinx

would have had a statue of the Boy King

between the lion's paws,

a sign Amun was protecting the pharaoh.

The message is very clear from Tutankhamun,

the God Amun is back, the old gods are here to stay,

and the Aten is no longer the main god of Egypt.

Tutankhamun had to completely rebuild

Ancient Egypt's religion.

The Boy King re-established Karnak

and its priests' religious statues

in an attempt to restore his honor among the population.

It was a complete religious counter-revolution.

But the young pharaoh ran out of time.

Despite Tutankhamun's efforts

to restore the old gods of Egypt

and undo what his father did,

he died when he was only a teenager

and couldn't achieve everything he set out to do.

Although Tutankhamun died young,

the religious reforms he had begun

swept across Egypt.

The priests regained power,

state resources were diverted away from Amarna,

and the old gods returned to sacred temples like Karnak.

At Dra' Abu el-Naga...

We are very close to the entrance of the tomb.

Bahaa is unearthing

a series of funerary cones.

Made of clay, stamped with the tomb owner's name,

they typically mark the entrance to a tomb.

Families, when they visited the tombs

they left those cones in front of the tomb

or above the, the tomb itself.

He hopes the tomb could provide clues

to the area's religious customs

during the era of Tutankhamun.

I can see that the wall had been cut

so I can see, it's a hole, this is the hole of the tomb.

We must clean it layer by layer.

The team races

to clear sand and debris from the tomb entrance.

Eventually, the opening is big enough

for Bahaa to squeeze inside.

I think we are ready to go in.

At the Dra' Abu el-Naga Necropolis...

Bahaa is investigating the new discovered tomb

for the first time.

When I discover something new,

it's such a beautiful feeling.

You are the first one who enter to the tomb.

You are the first one who touch it, the mummy,

the vessels, the statues, it's an amazing feeling.

It's not a small tomb.

I can see it's a big hole and another room,

and we have a room here too.

Some of the skulls.

Wow! The linen around it.

He examines details in the tomb

to try to figure out the era it was constructed.

The walls so rough, that was a style

of the Middle Kingdom period tombs.

The people who were buried here,

the nobles who lived during the Middle Kingdom period.

The style of the tomb

and the characteristic rough walls

means Bahaa now thinks the tomb was built 500 years

before the reign of Tutankhamun.

It's a setback for the team.

But the date does offer a clue

to how this tomb would have been used

and why it is here.

It was during this time

that a major religious festival in honor of Amun,

the god Tutankhamun restored, was founded nearby.

The Festival of the Valley

was a joyous celebration of the dead,

where crowds gathered at Karnak every year in May.

A statue of Amun was carried on a ceremonial boat

across the Nile, from east to west,

symbolizing the journey to the Land of the Dead.

Worshippers piled masses of flowers onto the statue

to imbue them with the god's essence.

Families then took these flowers to the tombs

of their loved ones,

feasting and drinking all through the night.

Tombs in Dra' Abu el-Naga

were very important,

because they are on the way of the procession

of the Festival of the Valley.

So the relatives of the dead people,

they stopped first here.

The Festival of the Valley was celebrated

right up to the time of Akhenaten.

But he probably banned the festival

as he would have considered the occasion heresy.

It's a vivid example

of how Akhenaten's revolution disrupted

ordinary lives as well as religious practices.

It would have torn apart the bond between families

and their deceased loved ones.

When Tutankhamun came to power,

restoring the old gods opened the way for his grateful people

to celebrate these popular religious events once more.

The Festival of the Valley returned back,

and the families came again to the West Bank

and they visited their relatives' tombs.

At Hermopolis Magna...

Basem comes to the team's magazine,

where all the talatat blocks unearthed

from decades of past excavations are stored.

He has a hugely ambitious plan.

He wants to work out how all the fragmentary images

on the talatat blocks originally fitted together.

There are thousands of blocks, of the talatat blocks

that came originally from Amarna.

These talatat blocks once formed

elaborately decorated walls of palaces, temples,

and monuments in Akhenaten's city of Amarna.

But following Tutankhamun's restoration of the old gods

and the dismantling of Amarna, the stonework was reused.

The scenes originally inscribed on the walls were lost.

It's a big mystery.

No one knows what was the original scenes

that were composing

the main stories on these walls.

Basem hopes the scenes

will reveal more about Akhenaten

and the religion Tutankhamun so firmly rejected.

But with around 3,000 talatat blocks

discovered to date,

it's like piecing together

the world's largest 3D jigsaw puzzle.

Basem's first step is to digitally record

every talatat block unearthed at the site.

What I'm gonna do now is ask

one of my team to do a proper professional photograph

for this talatat block

so we get an image

that could be calibrated to the software.

The team photographs

each talatat block several times

using different lighting setups

to ensure they capture the tiniest of details.

Basem has a hunch this block

and one other belonged to a typical

Amarna period royal boat scene,

so he uses a similar scene

already pieced together from a different Amarna site

as a reference.

Using the software and the images

that Mahmoud took, we've managed to identify

the exact location of these two blocks

that relates to part of the royal boats.

It's a complete boat with these, uh, long beams

and signature of the royal palace.

It's a great result for the team.

Using this innovative process,

they have managed to identify the location of two pieces

from this ancient wall relief puzzle.

But with thousands of blocks still to document

and more being unearthed each season,

it's a hugely ambitious project.

This is one small part of the story

of this huge, uh, jigsaw puzzle game

that we are trying to solve.

Hopefully, by this initiative

we would be able to compose more

and more of these talatat blocks

so that we would be able in the future

to display them in a proper museum.

And then everyone could see the daily life scenes of Amarna.

The era of Akhenaten

and his religious revolution remains

one of the most mysterious periods of Egyptian history.

It seems that every kind of evidence

that proves, or tells, the story of Akhenaten

was completely either erased

or reused as foundation

so it would be completely for centuries hidden,

no one would see it.

But at sites like Hermopolis Magna,

archeologists are slowly piecing

the story back together,

one block at a time.

Today, archeologists across Egypt

are uncovering more

about Tutankhamun's religious counter-revolution.

How he and later pharaohs

tore down buildings and statues

to abolish his father's heretical religion.

And how the restoration of the old gods

would have delighted his people and restored peace

and stability to Ancient Egypt.