Original subtitles

DALLAS CAMPBELL: In 2011, as angry crowds gathered

in the streets of Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution,

in the Valley of the Kings to the south,

a team from Basel University made two discoveries

which were to prove momentous.

When the team was allowed to continue digging at their site,

they realised they had discovered the first tomb containing a mummy

in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of Tutankhamun.

The tomb owner was a princess

from the time of the great Pharaoh Amenhotep III.

Here we have the inscription.

It is clear, it says, "The daughter of the King Satja."

And right next door was another tomb,

looted and badly damaged,

but with the remains of several dozen mummies.

Here too was evidence that dated the tomb

to the time of Amenhotep III.

It's a very rare piece.

We hardly know socks from ancient Egypt.

So who were all these people?

And might they be related

to the newly-discovered princess right next door?

The shaft rims are only 1.20 metres from each other

so the two tombs must be in a kind of relation.

I don't think this just happened,

that they dig this one beside the other one.

This was probably planned.

Both the new tombs in the Valley of the Kings

appear linked to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III,

a king many consider to have been Egypt's greatest ever pharaoh.

Amenhotep III was grandfather to Tutankhamun,

and though few have heard of him, he ruled for some 40 years,

when ancient Egypt was at the peak of its wealth and power,

around 1400 BC.

Amenhotep III was really the most important pharaoh

in all of Egypt's history.

He was the wealthiest, most powerful ruler

in the entire ancient world.

With the gold which flowed in from his empire

he built many of the monuments which can still be seen today.

Foreigners addressed him as "The Sun",

and he called himself "The Dazzling Sun".

Now the team from Basel have identified two tombs

apparently linked to his family - KV64 and KV40.

In one, a princess.

In the other, a tangled mass of looted mummy parts.

The fact that we have so many individuals,

roughly 30 people, buried in this one tomb

is absolutely unique.

And it is, of course, one of our aims

to get closer to this puzzle

of how these people were related and who really they were.

The monumental task of sorting out who these people are is complicated

by the fact that they are also finding fragments of cartonnage.

This is a material a bit like papier mache

used for burial masks in the 22nd Dynasty,

four hundred years after Amenhotep III.

The tomb was clearly reused at a later date.

Their detective work to identify the people inside

begins with the pottery.

The floors of the tomb are littered

with broken and charred pottery fragments.

The team sets themselves the task

of reassembling every one of these pots.

It's a labour of love.

I look for the colour and the shape of the pot,

and I go round and I collect all what's the same,

what's the same thickness, the same shape, the same colour...

They realise the pots are all from the period of Amenhotep III

so would have been buried with the original owners of the tomb.

And some of the pots are inscribed with names -

the names of the person they were buried with.

SUSANNE BICKEL: Some of the sherds revealed the identity of individuals.

It says "royal daughter".

Royal daughter, we're dealing with a princess.

And then comes her name, this one is called Nefer-u-nebu.

Assembling these pots is like the hardest of all 3-D jigsaw puzzles.

And deciphering the names inscribed on the pots is almost as difficult.

We've found this little piece adjoining with this piece.

Now, it completes the title of princess, of royal daughter.

Because we here have traces that very nicely fit

with the signs for king - king's daughter.

And then we have the beginning of a name in black.

She was called Henut-tau, "mistress of all countries".

Gradually, they're able to build up a picture

of at least some of the people who are in the tomb.

They were all unknown until now.

This is an interesting piece.

We have the title, again royal daughter Khaitem-tapet,

"the one who appears in the sky".

Wonderful name.

We found a good dozen princesses whom we did not know at all before.

There is another group of women, I think it's this example,

just inscribed with her name, no title.

Interesting, and this lady, Tatjuia, she has five jars,

and there are several ladies we have just their name.

It would be interesting to know why they found their way into this tomb.

And a third, although smaller group,

which was quite a surprise.

This is an interesting example.

And what's very intriguing is this sign

because it indicates that this name,

and probably also the lady who wears it,

are foreign, not Egyptian.

Every foreign name has this sign.

We don't know exactly what she's called here,

but we can probably relate her to another jar where...

..her name is indicated.

And what is interesting, there was another foreign woman,

the Nubian woman.

It's the Nubian woman of this lady, Tabascha,

with the foreign name.

So our speculations, of course, are -

Who were these foreign women?

How did they come into an ensemble of palace women,

of royal daughters, of princesses?

It takes several seasons to assemble all the pots,

but when they've finished they have more than 30 named individuals

from the time of Amenhotep III.

At least 27 are female, and just four are male.

One thing is clear from the writing on the pots -

they were not written by the same scribes at the same time.

They were not all buried following some event like a plague,

they were buried over an extended period.

These ladies were buried in stages over several years.

This is our hypothesis now.

In the search for more information about the women in the tomb,

the archaeologists seek the help of an X-ray team from Zurich.

The team is led by world-renowned physical anthropologist

Professor Frank Ruhli.

They start by building a frame to make it easier

to move their heavy X-ray machine into position over the mummies.

I think it's a great find, it's a very important excavation.

We have a lot of questions to answer.

We don't know who these individuals were,

how old they were, you know,

whether they were related or not to each other.

It's important to see, you know,

how many people were buried in there.

I think this makes it even more fascinating.

It's a bit of a puzzle - a puzzle of human remains -

and that's something which is always very challenging,

particularly in this unique setting of the Valley of the Kings.

They hope that by examining and taking X-rays

of the mummy parts in the tomb,

they'll be able to build up a picture of the people who were buried here.

We are very optimistic. It looks good.

We have everything here.

Now the machine needs to get started

and then I think we can get things done.

It's a great feeling.

They should be able to discover just how many people altogether

were in this tomb.

And they also hope to learn how many of them were women.

I think it's something beautiful that we have here,

that we can work with the mummies.

I enjoy it very much.

You don't get every day the possibility

to work in such an environment,

to see such beautiful things.

Some parts are so complete and so nice,

nicely mummified, it's really an exciting job.

I always think it's touching, seriously,

to have a mummified head or body part in your hand

and think about the individual.

They also need to find out, if they can,

how many of the bodies might be later burials from the 22nd Dynasty.

And how many are women from the time of Amenhotep.

Could this be Tabascha?

Or perhaps Khaitem-tapet, "the one who appears in the sky"?

They plan to take these X-rays back to Switzerland and analyse them

to find out as much as they can about these individuals -

their age, and sex, any family connections,

and also the diseases they may have been suffering from.

On this particular screen, we see a lateral view of a skull.

We see the teeth which are still there

which can give us quite a lot of information

about the health status of this individual.

So overall it gives you a quick assessment of the person.

Very likely a female individual.

Their first assessment is that there are at least 60 mummies here,

and most are female.

But what might be the link between all the women in the tomb?

The archaeologists make a number of other finds

which confirm that many of the burials

are connected to Amenhotep III.

This ring, for example, shows the name of Amenhotep III

and it was quite small,

maybe from a child or from a younger person.

Here's, for example, a lid of a vessel

showing the name of Amenhotep III.

And some wooden tags they find name more of the occupants.

They probably belonged to wooden boxes or chests

and were attached to them by cords

which were ripped off by the robbers.

Here we have one female, title 'sat-nesut', princess.

Her name is Sat Hathor, daughter of the Goddess Hathor.

Here's a princess, 'sat-nesut',

and this time it's not written with ink but it's incised in the wood.

The inscriptions on the wooden tags

name several more previously unknown daughters of the king.

And one of the tags identifies a woman

with a completely different title.

So here we have a wooden label of one person with two names.

Her official name is Tuiay

and her unofficial name, written on the back of the label,

is Anu-Nebet-Neher.

Anu - "mistress of eternity".

And she was 'khekeret nesut',

"royal ornament" or "ornament of the king".

We're still trying to find out which position

this was in the hierarchy of the royal entourage.

So in the time of Amenhotep III

dozens of women were all buried together,

some daughters of the king, some non-royal women,

and some who were foreigners.

And at least one so-called "ornament of the king".

Why would they all have shared a single tomb?

Trying to make sense of this means understanding

why Amenhotep III has been described as the pharaoh with a thousand wives.

Shortly before he became pharaoh, possibly when he was still a boy,

he was married to a girl called Tiye.

Tiye married Amenhotep III when they were both very young

and so she was there throughout his long reign,

and indeed afterwards.

She was one of the most powerful women in Egypt

because he and she ruled side by side,

really almost as equals,

and you can see this in the statuary.

Because as you can see here,

Tiye is the same size as Amenhotep III

which is very unusual for a royal wife.

So there must have been something very special

about their relationship.

Throughout his 40-year reign, Tiye remained at his side as a wife,

companion and trusted adviser.

Amenhotep was devoted to Tiye,

but this did not prevent him from taking other wives.

Amenhotep III chose a very novel way

of showing important events in his career.

This scarab was made to celebrate the wedding with Gilukhepa,

who in fact came from the Kingdom of Mittani.

On this scarab he writes how he, and Queen Tiye,

welcomed Gilukhepa when she came from Mittani.

And she didn't come alone.

She brought with her 317 women,

all of whom wound up being part of the court of Amenhotep III.

Many Egyptologists refer to the women in a Pharaoh's court

as his harem.

And Amenhotep III appears to have used his gold

to fill his harem with beautiful women,

including numerous other consorts.

In a remarkable series of finds at the end of the 19th century,

an archive of nearly 400 clay tablets was discovered in Egypt at Amarna.

The tablets are written in cuneiform,

and reveal the extensive network of communication

which existed between states,

and what was on Amenhotep's mind.

These clay tablets are an amazing source of information

about Amenhotep III's reign.

The Amarna letters are diplomatic correspondence.

And these letters talk about his diplomatic tactics,

and basically that meant marrying well.

So he married the daughters of a lot of the princes

from Babylon, from Mittani, all throughout,

and these letters, in fact, talk about him, saying,

"I would like one of your daughters as my wife," and someone saying,

"Well, I believe that in Egypt gold is like dust,

"so if you send me some of your gold dust,

"you can certainly have my daughter."

So, ultimately, Amenhotep III wound up

with at least six foreign wives and all of their dependents

in his harem.

So really he maintained peace in the region,

not by warfare, but by very clever manipulation and marriage.

From Milkilu of Gazru, Amenhotep asks not for a wife,

but for 40 beautiful women,

and sends 40 pieces of silver for each one.

"In view of the price," he instructs Milkilu,

"they had better be beautiful without blemish."

If a man has great taste, he has great taste.

And if he's very demanding for beautiful things,

he's going to be very demanding for beautiful women.

Amenhotep III chose the most beautiful women for his harem.

Why not?

He's the richest, most powerful man in the world.

SALIMA IKRAM: Many of them would have been foreigners,

and there would also have been Egyptians,

but they were not all there as concubines,

because a harem palace was really

for female family members and their children.

So there were a lot of dependents

which might not have all had a sexual role to play.

But certainly there were lots of women there.

So, is that the answer?

Was it some of these women from the harem,

perhaps his favourites,

who were buried in the newly-discovered tombs

in the Valley of the Kings?

SUSANNE BICKEL: We have in KV40

a mixed population who was buried there,

presumably related to these diplomatic marriages

Amenhotep III made.

So they probably lived within the palace,

perhaps with their own servants.

In some way, they must have composed a community,

and were buried here.

The women's titles seem to support this idea.

Several royal daughters from the tomb were said to belong to an institution

that has been little understood.

The text indicates the institution to which this lady belonged -

the House of the Royal Children.

FARIED ADROM: Here we have 'sat nesut', princess,

and she was a member of the House of the Royal Children.

She was called Sachmet,

and then she belonged to this group

from the House of the Royal Children.

No one's quite sure what House of the Royal Children means.

But some experts on the Egyptian harem

think that Royal Children might have other meanings.

Marine Yoyotte has made a study of the Egyptian harem.

We have here two different scenes

where you can see the king each time

with one different young lady.

In one scene the pharaoh is seen with a young girl

with her arms entwined.

In another, he's tickling a girl under the chin.

Both girls are described as "royal children".

So it's quite intimate scenes.

It's not something that you can usually see

and they are involving women called the royal children,

and in fact it seems that they were not all

really king's daughters or if they have a more intimate link.

SALIMA IKRAM: The term "daughters of the king" is a tricky one.

It could mean people he was close to physically in a variety of ways,

by blood, by intimacy,

but we are really not very sure about that.

One of the women in KV40 had a different title -

"ornament of the king".

In the tomb of Menna, one of Amenhotep's nobles,

there is a clue to what this might mean.

Two of Menna's daughters are described

as ornaments of the king.

They're shown with elaborate headdresses

which indicate they're part of the royal court.

In the inscription regarding these two ladies

this one is royal ornament,

so this title is the same as one of the women discovered in KV40,

and here they have in addition to the title -

"beloved from the King of Egypt."

So this is really interesting.

ARIELLE KOZLOFF: Royal ornament can just be a pretty girl

who was the daughter of a courtier who's chosen.

It's a tremendous honour to be chosen as a royal ornament,

and then joined the pharaoh's fleet of beautiful women,

because he wants the best stock to breed the next generation.

The women of the king's harem would have lived in special areas

of the royal palace.

Almost nothing remains of ancient Egyptian palaces,

except here at Malqata, outside Luxor.

This was one of Amenhotep III's huge construction projects in the area.

Marine Yoyotte is being shown around the palace

by the joint leader of the excavation, Peter Lacovara.

Like all palaces, this was built of mud brick,

not stone, as used in temples, which is why so little remains.

It's a huge construction.

It's bigger than Buckingham Palace, bigger than the White House.

It's quite something.

The floor plan is clear,

and they've found enough of the decoration

to know how luxurious it would have been.

So here's the main hall and it would have had column emplacements.

You can see the column bases here.

16 columns and they would have held up a ceiling

and everything was painted, so floor, walls, ceiling.

It would have been incredibly brightly painted.

You can imagine the shock from going from the barren plain brown desert

to this riot of colour.

We'd have a row of flying vultures across the top,

and then it would come down a bit

and so you'd have little clearstory windows,

and then the side aisles with geometric patterns.

Very elaborate kind of textile patterns, chequerboards,

and running spirals and all kinds of very elaborate painting.

The walls would have had figural scenes.

They're not so well preserved, so we're not quite sure

what they looked like.

Perhaps, kind of, banqueting scenes.

And then beautiful floor painting with flying ducks.

You'd have a marsh, so you'd have flying ducks here

and probably a pool here.

And then probably down the centre

would have been a row of bound prisoners

so the king would ritually stomp on them

as he goes to his throne off in the distance.

It would have been very luxurious, so a riot of colour everywhere.

And not so much furniture.

We find probably just thrones and beds and things like that,

but very lavish.

Quite imposing as these are supposed to be for visitors.

There is a section of the palace

which is thought to have been used by the harem -

a series of smaller rooms off the main hall.

The harem suites are off to the sides.

So both this side and that side.

In all, there are eight of these harem suites.

There's the little vestibule out here with two columns.

They probably all had a little bathing installation in the corner.

So it was sandstone and then they plastered it

and it would be a big rectangular basin,

probably for people to wash their feet or whatever

before they get presented to the royal woman

who would have sat on a throne here.

In the centre of the room along the back wall is the throne platform

so there's a little raised dais there

which would have been painted

and then a flight of stairs going up to it.

This was used for what?

Each of the important royal women whoever they were,

king's daughters, wives,

would have had their own little reception suite,

and then they would receive visitors.

Probably the foreign wives would receive envoys

from their respective countries.

Whole sections of the ceiling's paintings have survived.

The ceilings had paintings of songbirds and butterflies

and things like that.

We're still not sure about the wall decoration

because some of it is figural.

What happened when the palace was destroyed, it kind of pancaked,

so we have a lot of the ceiling decoration left

and a lot of the floor decoration,

but because the walls fell and were exposed,

not so much of the wall decoration.

Some of the furniture has survived too.

This chair belonged to Amenhotep's daughter, Sitamun,

who was also one of his wives,

and was preserved in the tomb of her grandparents.

And then in the back are smaller rooms

maybe for storage or dressing...

The palace was luxurious.

This was arguably the best life a woman could have in ancient Egypt

with the finest of everything.

This was the luxury enjoyed by the women of the harem.

But not all the women would have been the pharaoh's consorts.

SALIMA IKRAM: That is where, of course, your princesses,

your daughters, your wives,

your aunts, your third cousins twice removed,

who are your dependents and female, would be living.

So if you are a daughter of a king, you would be in the harem

but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex.

It's just where you happen to live.

But in many ways the sensuality we associate with the word harem

does seem appropriate.

The Turkish harem, it's still the closest institution

from what we had in ancient Egypt.

Inside the harem, we are supposing that most of the foreign wives

coming form the diplomatic weddings were inside it,

and obviously some concubines.

ARIELLE KOZLOFF: The women were there to entertain the pharaoh,

but I think the primary purpose was

to produce the next generation,

and the generation after that,

to keep repopulating Egypt, and he needed a lot of women to do that.

But, these women, they were cultivated themselves.

Some of them were daughters of courtiers,

and they were well-raised and well-educated,

and they memorised poetry, and they knew how to sing,

and they knew how to play instruments,

and what's a pharaoh going to do when he wants some relaxation.

He's not going to the movies.

He doesn't have an iPad to play.

He doesn't have cable television.

So he's going into the women's quarters,

and they're singing, and they're playing music for him,

and they're dancing.

It was the great arts centre of the antiquity.

But he was the only one who could enjoy it.

So there is a close association between the harem

and the playing of musical instruments.

And in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings,

archaeologists have found another intriguing clue.

In KV64 and KV40, we found fragments of green leather

which might have belonged to harps.

Those harps were made of wood

and leather was attached to it for decoration.

You see harps like this in the tombs of the 18th Dynasty

being played by young female musicians,

holding the harps on their shoulder or in front of them.

And this might have been one of those objects,

and fitting quite well in the archaeological context

of those princesses here.

So these favoured women from Amenhotep III's harem

seem to have been buried in these tombs with their instruments.

KV40 is an archaeological first,

a collection of princesses, noble women, and attendants,

who would otherwise have remained unknown.

They were buried here because they were one group

within the entourage of the king.

Looking on their title, and their names,

and their institutional information, they belonged to the royal harem,

the group of the House of the Royal Children.

They give us a completely new group of people

which have been totally unknown so far,

and this is always very exciting

because here we have a new field which opens to us,

a new research field.

Those people are unknown so far,

and here they come to light for the first time.

And it's not only Amenhotep III's harem which is coming to light.

Nearby, his greatest building project of all,

his own funerary temple, is re-emerging from the fields.

Fronted by the so-called Colossi of Memnon,

this was the largest temple ever built in Egypt.

Amenhotep called it his "mansion of a million years".

But some 200 years later it was demolished by an earthquake.

Starting some 10 years ago,

archaeologist Hourig Sourouzian and her team

began patiently digging out the statues and stonework

from the mud and re-erecting them in the right position.

As with many of the statues,

at the moment this newest one is just a foot.

The foot needs to be carefully aligned

with all the other statues of the pharaoh

just as it was originally.

Salaam...

(APPLAUSE)

(LAUGHTER)

Now it's in a good position, it's correct.

We have all the feet in the same line.

This is the line of the Peristyle Court.

And we go to the next piece now.

The Peristyle Court, surrounded by statues of Amenhotep III,

is gradually taking shape again.

The statue bases record Amenhotep's extensive trade

and diplomatic contacts.

His vassal states,

but also places way beyond the empire,

places which may also have provided consorts for the pharaoh.

This supports the evidence of the Amarna letters

that Egypt was at the hub of a remarkable Bronze Age network,

with Amenhotep at the centre.

NAIRY HAMPIKIAN: So once past this Peristyle Court,

we have to imagine that we are going into the sacred of the sacred areas.

Hippostyle Hall, and then the Sun Court,

and eventually to the sanctuary

where the gods are - like all other temples.

These are the areas they are now excavating.

And they're still finding more statues.

But over the last few years,

their most remarkable achievement

is to be found off the main axis of the temple.

Where we're standing now is 350 metres away

from the original axis.

And I think this vastness you can imagine by just looking

how far we are from the Memnon Colossi.

They realised that in the fields just here,

there were more pieces of two large statues of Amenhotep III.

There were a lot of big chunks of pieces

and very small quartzite pieces and they were lying in the fields there.

But they couldn't erect the statues on the farmer's land.

So they asked for permission to move them.

In 2013, we got the permission

and we got all the parts out from the fields,

actually to the land owned by the Antiquities.

Piece by piece, the fragments were all erected

one after the other, and here you go,

we have a new landscape on the Theban mountains.

I think this is again another resurrection of Amenhotep III.

A part of his own temple is living again.

Amenhotep's III's temple of a million years

moves ever closer to being rebuilt.

Back in the Valley of the Kings,

their focus is on what appear to be Amenhotep's thousand wives -

or at least some of them.

Frank Ruhli and the team now turn their attention

to the single princess who had been found in KV64.

What was the relationship between the women in KV40

and the royal woman in the tomb next door?

As these tombs are so close,

we can assume that there was a relationship,

that she was an important lady,

somehow connected to at least part

of the individuals buried in KV40,

who kind of sought to be close to her.

So it must have been like a mother or somebody more...

..older person than this,

because in 40 I think they are more younger.

Ruhli's team want to confirm that the 18th Dynasty mummy

found in KV64 was indeed a woman,

and how old she was at the time of her death.

There are some smaller bones missing but it looks quite complete

and I think we can end up with a few nice analyses.

As they X-ray the skull,

their first impression is it probably does belong to a woman.

They hope that by studying the jaw and teeth

they can get an idea of her age.

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

She appears to be an adult over 25.

And in general, her joints appear healthy,

consistent with a younger woman.

But there's an inconsistency.

The degeneration in her spine suggests she's middle aged.

In ancient Egypt that means in her 30s or 40s.

To confirm this is after all the mummy of a woman

they want finally to X-ray her pelvis.

It's most likely a female body,

and we can clearly see that the body has

some pathologic changes, so it's not a very young individual

but it's certainly a grown-up person.

Probably would be somewhere in their 30s, 40s,

but that's really a wild guess for the moment

and we have to do a more proper analysis.

The suggestion that this princess from KV64

is a woman in her 30s or 40s

is consistent with the team's theory

that she was a senior member of the harem.

And together with all the women in the adjacent tomb, KV40,

she's likely to have lived in the harem palace at nearby Malqata.

Even Queen Tiye is known to have lived there -

at least part of the time.

There were probably similar palaces all over Egypt.

Amenhotep III travelled a lot around the country

moving from palace to palace.

Here at Malqata, he had an enormous harbour built.

It was called Birket Habu.

So these are the mounds of the Birket Habu harbour,

so we're on one of the outer mounds,

and there's a row of inner mounds there.

A massive amount of earth was moved when the harbour was dug out,

still visible as two long series of mounds.

Thousands, millions, of baskets of earth were dredged out

of the harbour and tipped in to make these mounds.

So, an incredible feat.

The amount of earth taken to create the harbour, they say,

is equal to the volume of three great pyramids.

In order to see the full extent of this harbour,

you have to climb the far ridge.

I knew the scale from the papers and everything,

but it's really different when you're able to see it.

We have to imagine the ancient landscape,

and that here you had only water.

We know from the texts that the king was travelling a lot,

and of course he was not travelling alone.

He was coming with the queen,

but also some of his favourite people from the harem.

The king and his retinue was coming,

and then he was able to go to the palace of Malqata.

When Amenhotep had been pharaoh for 30 years,

he chose the palace at Malqata to stage a huge festival.

The festival, called the Heb Sed, was intended to rejuvenate the king.

Images of these festivities can still be found in the tombs from that time.

This is the tomb of Kheruef, Tiye's high steward,

who was permitted to depict both Amenhotep and the Queen in his tomb.

Here you can see the cartouche of Queen Tiye,

and you can see Amenhotep III

and Queen Tiye represented just near.

In Kheruef's tomb are depictions of some of the great events

of the festival, like the raising of the pillar.

This pillar is said to represent the backbone of the god Osiris.

And raising it represents the rejuvenation of the king.

The festival lasted many months with dancing and other activities.

The reliefs here show a number of different dances,

and people clapping, and playing instruments.

They're also engaged in sports like wrestling,

boxing

and stick fighting.

As well as the King and Queen Tiye,

there are numerous princesses in attendance.

You can see a series of younger women.

They are depicted in the text

as "children of the great ones".

We don't know exactly what it means,

but it can be, of course, children of the foreign rulers.

Their hair is styled in ways that identify them as foreigners,

and they're generally taken to be the daughters of foreign kings.

These were his foreign wives, now helping to rejuvenate the king.

Could these princesses be amongst those buried in KV40

in the Valley of the Kings?

Frank Ruhli has reached some conclusions

about those who were buried here.

There were even more women than they had thought.

We have done the whole sexing, ageing,

the minimum number of individuals, so we matched different body parts.

We are probably talking about 90, up to 100 individuals.

So it's really amazing to see that we have such a large crowd

in this small room.

We have a majority of adults

but we have about two dozens of younger individuals as well.

Then we looked at obviously the two sexes.

We have a majority of individuals are females.

So most are indeed women.

But it's time to work out how many might have been buried

at a later period, and were not part of Amenhotep's harem.

We try to see the whole way of mummification, different sub-groups,

and see whether we can actually then sort of group them

and have an idea about different periods.

They hope the methods of mummification

will help them identify those that reused the tomb later.

Ruhli has asked Salima Ikram to help.

She's an expert in mummification

and can help sort out the 18th Dynasty mummies,

those from the time of Amenhotep III,

from the later ones of the 21st or 22nd Dynasty.

They quickly establish that there are different types of mummification.

We basically see two different types of mummification here.

It's a very nice case where you can see that under the skin

there was some stuffing, this brownish material,

which was all over.

It's a massive amount of stuffing material,

which probably could point towards a later mummification period,

like the 21st, 22nd Dynasty.

Whereas in this case you have a different situation.

You clearly see that there is not stuffing underneath of the skin,

and you clearly see that there is the regular tissue down here,

but we have bandages being pushed into the thoracic cavity.

They think these differences in mummification can be linked

to the date when the individuals were mummified.

18th Dynasty, more likely. Yes.

And this is more likely 21st Dynasty.

But it's really nice to find this in this tomb

where we're having a very clear differentiation

between the different groups.

They hope to analyse all of the mummies in this way.

Most of what they examine seems to be type one mummification -

18th Dynasty.

You can see in the very bottom of the head

there's a lot of stuffing inside of the throat cavity.

This is still type one. Yes.

There seems to be something with type one.

It is very interesting

because having looked at some of these mummies

we can tell that there were in fact probably two burial events,

because they fall basically into two groups.

It seems quite possible that we're looking at an 18th Dynasty group,

and a 22nd or 21st Dynasty group with it.

But I think there are probably many more

of the 18th Dynasty, type one group,

than there are of the 21st Dynasty, type two group.

A lot of the preserved heads seem to belong to the 18th Dynasty.

I think if they're found in the Valley of the Kings,

and they're of the 18th Dynasty,

then clearly it speaks of a close relationship with the pharaoh.

So, most of the many bodies here are from the time of Amenhotep III

and probably from his harem.

And Frank Ruhli has made a surprising discovery

which suggests many of the people in this tomb

really did have a family link.

An example which I wanted to show you,

we are here in the elbow region,

there is a small lesion here, a small hole,

which is called the supratrochlear foramen,

which is an epigenetic trait, a variant,

but it's an indication of probably kinship among people

if it's in a frequency which is much higher

than what you would normally expect which is here the case.

We have quite a lot of these cases.

It's a sign towards some sort of familial relationship

because it's higher than what you would expect normally.

So some of these women may well be relatives of the pharaoh.

Others might be wives,

or some of Amenhotep's many women without blemish.

But they believe that the majority of these heads

are women from the harem.

And they would like to reconstruct the face of one of them.

By taking a series of photographs,

it's possible to build up in a computer

a full three dimensional model of the head.

From this, here at the Centre for Human Identification

in Dundee, they're attempting a reconstruction of her face.

The first task is to combine the image of the mummy

with an X-ray so they can see the bone structure underneath.

The Zurich team have said they think this is a girl of about 15.

Here they want to build up her face by restoring her features.

For the mouth they need to fill out her lips

which are still visible on the mummy.

The nose is more of a problem.

There is a shape based method of estimating the shape of the nose.

I can see the nasal aperture,

you can see the bone's uncovered on the mummy

because the tissue's gone,

so we can say the nose is going to be approximately here.

Now adding the facial muscles will define the shape of the face.

It's weeks of work, but gradually the face of this young woman emerges.

Now they're ready to start adding skin texture.

And the make up, wigs and jewellery

that no young woman of the time would want to be seen without.

Is this really what she looked like?

From doing forensic case work we know that this process

is accurate enough to be recognisable

by a friend or a family member.

This, I expect, would be recognisable

as this individual by people who knew her.

I feel like I met somebody.

Is she a daughter of the king?

One of the named princesses?

Mistress of all countries, perhaps?

Or the one who appears in the sky?

Or is she just one of those

very many women without blemish?

For now, there's no way to be sure.

Finding the tombs of so many of the women closest to Amenhotep III

has been a revelation.

We had good results, I think. We have the names.

This time we have really a lot of names.

It was my passion to do this project.

It has been a good time and we have seen a lot.

This project certainly rates very high in my life, in my career,

because it's something very special,

to find a new tomb in the King's Valley,

to find so much new information as in KV40.

Also remarkable is the astonishing re-emergence

of Amenhotep III's mortuary temple.

Our dream is to reconstruct all the statuary,

trying to explain how this court was decorated.

I think this will be our target now,

to finish the Peristyle Court

and maybe leave the rest for other generations to continue.

Through these projects, some small part of the splendour

that was the court of Amenhotep III is being rediscovered.

It has been exciting. I hope it will go on.

There are still other tombs waiting.

And as this work continues,

a pharaoh who was once the dazzling sun,

but has since been forgotten by many,

may once again become better known.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2018