Original subtitles

Sudan's Nile Valley is home to

some of the Ancient World's most magnificent pyramids.

We have here the biggest concentration

of pyramids in the world.

Early explorers assumed

they were the work of Sudan's more famous neighbours,

the Egyptians.

The archaeologists did not know anything about

Nubia and Sudan in that time.

But these are the monumental relics

of an entirely separate

African civilisation -

the empire of Kush.

Their kings would conquer

and rule Egypt for almost a century.

But many of Kush's secrets remain buried

in the desert sand.

What we know now about the ancient history of Sudan is less than 50%.

Working closely with the Sudanese authorities,

archaeologists from all over the world

are only now piecing together

the story of Kush.

This is the moment of discovery

that I've been waiting for all these years.

Our cameras were given a rare chance to follow

this cutting-edge archaeology.

I've dived down a lot of unusual sites,

nothing compares

to realising that I'm literally

in the burial chambers of a pyramid!

Seen as never before,

these astonishing ancient ruins

hold the key to unlocking

a lost empire.

This site could be an important crux

in our understanding of the entire Ancient World.

For centuries, Egypt was hailed as

Africa's only truly great

civilisation - partly because

the Ancient Egyptians themselves

told us it was so.

They depicted their southern neighbour

as a primitive backwater,

calling it "vile Kush".

But if that were true,

how were the kings of Kush

able to conquer Egypt

and rule the largest empire

the Nile Valley has ever seen?

EXPLOSIONS

To find the answers, archaeologists

must brave the civil war and political turmoil

that have plagued Sudan for decades.

EXPLOSIONS

While our cameras were filming elsewhere in Sudan,

riots in Khartoum led to the deaths

of protesters and the military overthrow of the President.

Against this backdrop, more than 30

international teams of archaeologists

are collaborating with Sudan's Department of Antiquities

to piece together 3,000 years of

untold history.

Being Manager of Antiquities

in this region, every day,

I receive notes from local people about new sites and, every day,

I see new sites, waiting for archaeologists to discover.

Located south of Egypt, Kush was

a vast region of the Nile Valley,

often referred to by its Greek name of Nubia.

The centre of Kushite power, which gave rise to

the Black Pharaohs, was its capital city of Napata.

Pearce Paul Creasman and his team from the University of Arizona,

have come to the Napata region

on an extraordinary quest.

Let's go. Let's get set up.

Their work has brought them to Nuri,

one of the two royal cemeteries

of this ancient capital.

I picked this site because I think

from an archaeological point of view,

the opportunity here is endless.

Thank you for today. Thank you.

The team is preparing to enter the burial chambers

beneath this 2,300-year-old pyramid,

the final resting place of the last of the Napatan kings.

This pyramid probably dates to around 320 or 310 BC.

It belongs to the Napatan king Nastasen -

the last of the line of these folks

who were buried here.

What little is known about King Nastasen

and the site at Nuri comes largely

from work done a century ago

by George Andrew Reisner,

a Harvard professor and early-20th-century explorer.

He was an archaeologist, he was the guy who excavated

most of the stuff at the pyramids at Giza.

And he came down here for a couple of months a year,

between 1917 and 1920, and excavated

the pyramids down here.

Many of the tombs were robbed soon after the royal burial,

but what remained in George Reisner's day

was still a historical treasure trove.

What he found in every one of

these individual pyramids would be

the greatest archaeological find of

the last ten years, today,

and he found it 25 times.

And he did a job roughly equivalent to the standard of his time -

go in, find all the pretty shiny things and take 'em home.

He published virtually nothing,

so we know virtually nothing about this site.

The left one is good.

Yours needs to pull some more slack.

Yeah. Almost there. OK.

Pearce Paul believes

that at Nastasen's pyramid,

the last of the three burial chambers,

where the King's body may still lie,

was left intact by Reisner.

He excavated the first chamber of three here. The second chamber

had a collapse. So, he was too concerned

and stopped.

Probably in 2,300 years,

there've been a total of two people

in this tomb before us.

Reisner sent one workman into

the far corner of the third chamber,

and that fella came out with

a couple of little statues,

and was petrified, and no-one wanted to go back in.

Other than Nastasen himself, we're it.

However, there's an equally unusual catch.

The entire burial site at Nuri

lies less than a mile from the River Nile.

When these tombs were built, the water table below ground

was considerably lower.

Sometime in the last 2,500 years,

it seems that the water level has risen about four or five metres.

It's substantial.

The entire tomb is underwater.

The only way to get inside now is to use diving equipment.

Gloves, check. Mask, check.

Accompanying Pearce Paul on this ground-breaking pyramid dive

will be National Geographic journalist Kristin Romey.

To be able to not only

enter a tomb that really hasn't been messed with

for 2,500 years, but to dive in it,

it's just an incredible experience.

It seems too absurd to be true,

but it is.

It's incredible. We come out here every day and say,

is this really happening?

This is pretty exciting. Underwater archaeology's

been around for 50 or 60 years, but as far as I know,

no-one's ever dived a tomb anywhere in the world, and no-one's certainly

ever dived a pyramid.

Looks like it's going to be a good time.

But diving an ancient monument

comes with a significant degree of risk.

In 1919, when Reisner was excavating

one of these, one of the walls fell in

and killed five workmen. So, don't touch the walls, please.

Hopefully, we can do the work safely enough,

to not put anybody at risk.

I'd really like to meet Nastasen.

Even as he begins this extraordinary dive,

Pearce Paul is aware that royal tombs can only tell us so much.

While it's nice to learn about the kings themselves,

because they help us anchor history,

we're really hoping we can learn about the people,

because then we can understand more about the culture as a whole.

To find out more about the ordinary

Kushite people, experts need to find and study

the settlements where they once lived.

Heading up a team from the University of Michigan,

Geoff Emberling has made this his personal mission.

HE SPEAKS LOCAL DIALECT

Archaeology in the Nile Valley has a long history of focusing on

the pyramid burials of the kings and queens, the big temples,

but attention to the way that

ordinary people lived, how they fed themselves,

what kind of food they made

and how they travelled round the landscape, those kinds of questions

have always been really interesting to me personally.

So, when I first came to work in Sudan in 2006,

I wanted to look for settlements.

Since Napata was the power base of the Black Pharaohs,

finding the homes of its ordinary citizens

would provide a wealth of new information.

Incredibly, however,

no-one knows the exact location of this major population centre.

We knew that there was this monumental royal

pyramid burial ground of the Kings and Queens of Kush,

and there should be a royal city somewhere.

One tantalising clue came from the work of George Reisner

who, a century earlier, had explored

the nearby modern village of El-Kurru.

I knew from the notebook that he

had found elements of a settlement

all over the village. There was a big city wall,

there was another fortification wall, a couple of temples.

My challenge was, in his notebooks, he didn't mention

where any of these things were. So, when I arrived here,

my first job - in looking for this ancient settlement -

was to try to find those remains.

We thought, OK, we'll look at satellite images and we'll use

multispectral analysis to try to pull out

where the ancient remains are.

None of that worked.

HE SPEAKS LOCAL DIALECT

What worked was, as it turned out,

asking the local people!

By tapping into local knowledge,

Geoff was able to locate

a 100 metre-section of fortified wall

mentioned in Reisner's notebook.

Believing this could be the first evidence of

the long-lost Napatan city,

Geoff's team began to dig.

We dug right down onto a big stone wall

and it looked exactly like Napatan-period stonework.

This looked like a Napatan wall.

We were really excited.

But no matter how deep they went,

the pottery fragments they found

came from a much later Christian period.

We realised that we had dug below

the bottom of the wall.

The pottery was still Christian.

And then we hit bedrock!

HE LAUGHS

So, we had this kind of puzzle,

that the wall looked like it was Napatan but, actually,

all the material that we were excavating

was 1,500 years later.

So, what happened? We finally, finally worked it out.

We found one piece of stone that was, er,

had a clean edge that was slanted, like this.

It was part of a pyramid.

The stones had come from the pyramids of Napata's

other royal cemetery, at El-Kurru -

part of a medieval recycling scheme.

The reason why there's only one big pyramid left at El-Kurru

is that the Christian population stripped them all, for use in

this construction project.

Geoff's search for

the Napatan city which supported the Kushite Black Pharaohs

would have to continue elsewhere.

As an archaeologist, you never know

what you're going to find and, yes,

this was not what we were looking for. Interesting,

but it was not the end of our search.

In what is today Sudan,

the birthplace of the lost African civilisation of Kush

lies not at Napata,

but more than 100 miles north-west and 2,000 years earlier.

This is Kerma.

Capital city of sub-Saharan Africa's first major kingdom.

Dr Elghazafi Yousif spent six seasons here,

helping to excavate this remarkable site.

I'm very lucky, because I start my fieldwork in Kerma,

one of the most important sites that represent all the history

of not only Sudan but also Africa.

The site, it still contains many archaeological sites and evidence

that showing the date of Kerma.

This is dated to 2500 before Christ.

Kerma owes its discovery to a lifetime of work

by Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet,

who began excavation there in 1973.

And step by step we understood that it was a huge town all around,

and we began to dig systematically all the town.

He discovered this huge city, and oldest town in Africa.

This is the origin of Kush civilisation.

What Charles discovered was a highly sophisticated metropolis of temples,

royal palaces, military fortifications, and workshops,

far more advanced than anyone then imagined

the ancient Nubians were capable of.

I was astonished to have so sophisticated organisation.

We understood that it was a complex state.

As a startling example of Sudan's many lost treasures,

in 2003, Charles discovered these astonishing granite statues

buried in a ditch near Kerma,

depicting five Cushite kings, including two of the Black Pharaohs.

These statues are over 2,000 years old,

and are now on display at Kerma.

At the centre of the city lies this huge mud-brick building

called the Western Deffufa.

Once the spiritual heart of Kerma, it is at least 4,500 years old -

one of the oldest monumental constructions in Africa.

It was first excavated by American archaeologist George Reisner

over a century ago.

This is the remains of the work of George Reisner.

He had hundreds of workers,

so they cleaned the deffufa itself very quickly.

Despite Reisner's frenzied excavation,

he still failed - or refused -

to understand the deffufa's significance

as a highly important Cushite monument.

He decides that this monument was Egyptian,

because so big and so impressive.

Well, Reisner was wrong.

Reflecting blatantly racist, offensive views common at the time,

in 1918, Reisner wrote...

The native negroid race had never developed either its trade

or any industry worthy of mention,

and owed their cultural position to the Egyptian immigrants

and to the imported Egyptian civilisation.

Reisner, he's Egyptologist, he studied Egypt civilisation,

but he didn't know that there is another kingdom south of Egypt.

Reisner simply refused to believe that Black Africans

could have built such a sophisticated empire,

spanning 1,000km along the Nile Valley.

Kerma's wealth came from harnessing the River Nile

as an ancient superhighway

to trade high-value goods with Egypt.

But like many closely matched neighbours,

these two superpowers also harboured a deep mutual distrust.

In the north-eastern corner, there is one of the military camp

surrounding by a big wall.

This wall is towards the Nile, and towards Egypt,

to protect the city from the Egyptians.

Around 1500 BC, during Egypt's 18th dynasty,

tension between the two empires reached its peak.

In an attack led by Pharaoh Thutmose I,

the Royal Kingdom of Kerma was destroyed

and its magnificent capital city burned to the ground.

Thutmose destroyed all the cities.

He burned the palaces and the deffufa and the rounded temple.

We can see clearly the mark of this firing,

it still exists in the building itself.

For the next 500 years,

Kush would be ruled by the new Kingdom of Egypt.

Back at Napata's royal pyramids, Pearce Paul Creasman

and his diving partner, Kristin,

are about to enter King Nastasen's burial chambers,

now submerged under the water table of the river Nile.

Underwater archaeology, in Sudan,

this is the first time it's been attempted.

As they prepare to enter the first chamber,

the small doorway serves as a reminder of the dangers.

Overnight, a little bit of the door collapsed.

So it required some protective efforts to just make sure

our way in and out is always our way in and out.

Because if something collapses,

there's only two people with a way to get us out, and that's us.

Cut into the solid rock beneath the pyramid

lie three burial chambers.

The first, just beyond the submerged doorway,

was explored by George Reisner a century ago.

Right from the moment you hit the water, it's cold,

and you go through the little entrance way,

and it's essentially a chute you get shot through,

into the first chamber.

It was just awe-inspiring.

The first chamber has a vaulted ceiling - you know you're in a tomb.

And then you peer off down into the tomb and shine your lights

and see exactly what Reisner described.

The second chamber is where Reisner had observed

a huge ceiling collapse,

which happened sometime in the previous 2,000 years.

It was a five-metre, or 15-foot collapse of material

down on top of the chamber and you walk into that

and you come out of the water up on a mound.

You get into the second chamber that opens up like a big cathedral

and at least there, you can kind of stand up and take a breath

and get your bearings a little bit.

Coming up out of the water onto a mound was surreal.

It's exciting.

And then you see that tiny black entrance

to the third chamber in front of you.

Looking in the third chamber, we're looking into the unknown.

The third chamber's a black hole - we know nothing about it.

We stood there and considered the possibilities

of what might be on the other side of the door under the water.

As keen as the team is to reach the third chamber,

where King Nastasen's body may still lie,

concern for their own safety

means that this time, they've stopped short.

So we didn't go into the third chamber immediately.

We had to set up a guide line.

With lights that are always active, it's very easy to get disoriented.

It's basically an underwater cave.

There is no light,

there's no air except what you bring in,

or what little bit might've been left in an air pocket,

so, first things first, safety.

And then, only then do you go and you peek in.

WATER GURGLES

The destruction of Kerma in 1500 BC by Egypt's 18th dynasty

heralded the beginning of the New Kingdom's rule over Kush.

The Egyptian conquest of Kush happen in a series of stages,

a series of battles.

They burned cities,

they took captives,

they pushed further south,

and under King Thutmose I,

they reached the southernmost limit of their conquest.

But it wasn't until Thutmose III that they actually built settlements

in the most southern parts of their conquest.

Ultimately, they were able to conquer

as far south as Jebel Barkal.

Marking the southern frontier of the 18th dynasty's territory,

this sacred mountain would become the focal point

of a new religious cult at Napata.

It would also play a pivotal role in the power struggle

between these two empires in the centuries that followed.

So this is Jebel Barkal. It's a 100m-high majestic sandstone mesa,

and on the right side is this strange rock formation.

We call it the pinnacle today, but to the ancient Egyptians,

when they arrived here, they thought that this looked like a uraeus.

A uraeus is a serpent who curls on the head of the Pharaoh,

and spits fire and poison at his enemies.

In Egyptian mythology, the cobra was a sacred serpent,

an emblem of supreme power.

Symbolising the authority of kingship,

it adorned the crowns of their pharaohs.

Because the uraeus serpent was connected

with Egyptian kingship, when the Egyptians came here,

they thought that this was a fitting place to establish

a temple, and the worship of their state god,

the god of their empire, Amun.

By linking the power of kingship through the symbol of the cobra

to the supreme god Amun,

who lived inside Jebel Barkal,

the pharaohs claimed the divine right to rule both Egypt and Kush.

Unwittingly, they had sown the seeds of their own downfall,

that would eventually lead to the rise of the Black Pharaohs.

3,000 years ago,

in what is today's Sudan,

Egypt's rule over Kush ended.

A new dynasty began to emerge

at Napata, whose kings would rise again

to become the Black Pharaohs of Egypt.

After the collapse of the Egyptian Empire,

you might very well expect Kushites to throw out

all the elements of the occupiers' culture

but, in fact, that's not what happened at all.

At Jebel Barkal, they revived the cult of Amun

and restored its centuries-old temple complex.

So, what we're looking at here are columns from the Temple of Mut.

Mut was the wife of the God Amun.

These columns are all that are left

outside the mountain. And inside the mountain

is the most important part of this chamber.

It's the key to understanding

the religious significance of Jebel Barkal.

Cut into the rock inside this holy mountain,

Mut Temple is adorned with

painted inscriptions,

currently undergoing painstaking conservation work

by an Italian team of experts.

But these images are not Egyptian.

They were created during the time of

the Kushite Black Pharaohs.

One in particular shows exactly how

the Napatan kings came to view

the power of Amun.

Here, you can see the god Amun,

which is inside the mountain,

and behind him, the goddess Mut.

The deities are shown inside Jebel Barkal,

with its pinnacle seen as a uraeus -

the symbol of kingship -

which, centuries earlier,

the Egyptians had used to justify

their right to rule Kush.

The presence of these two gods

inside Jebel Barkal was a way

for the Napatan kings to legitimise

their right to rule

not only in Kush, but also, in Egypt.

The paintings in the temple of Mut

show that the Kushites were able to

take the Egyptian idea of kingship,

that it was granted by Amun,

and they were able to turn it around

to their own purposes, in justifying

their rule over Egypt. It's a sort of an ironic twist of history.

By 750 BC, Egypt was in chaos.

No longer under the rule of a single monarch,

the remnants of power in this fractured

and weakened empire were held by its priests.

They looked towards Kush

and welcomed a return to order,

backed by the authority of Amun, of Jebel Barkal.

And that, in part, made it possible for the armies of Kush -

with their great training, their bowmen,

their horsemen, and their navy, actually - to conquer Egypt.

Kushite warriors swept into Egypt

and, with relative ease, took control.

As the vanquished became

the victors, the time of

the Black Pharaohs had arrived.

Five miles from Jebel Barkal,

beneath King Nastasen's pyramid,

Pearce Paul Creasman and his dive partner

have now accessed the third chamber.

Other than a fleeting visit by

one other George Reisner's workers a century ago,

they may be the first people to enter here

in almost 2,500 years.

I've dived on a lot of unusual

sites - in caves, in shipwrecks -

and there's nothing, though, that compares at all

to realising that I'm literally

in the burial chambers of a pyramid!

It was exciting and the adrenaline was pumping,

and we were both standing there grinning ear to air.

This is incredible.

You're sitting there with this beautiful arched ceiling,

with a little niche right at the far end,

and you can just imagine

what would've been sitting there

2,500 years ago.

For Pearce Paul,

this initial exploratory dive

has been a triumphant success.

So it was a great dive, had a really good time.

When you get your hand into the floor, there's this layer of

what feels like warm jello that you work through!

And then there's a layer of clay,

and that seems to have been preserving things well.

We found the skull of a small rodent of some kind,

and it's still got the teeth in it.

If this little guy preserved,

whatever else is in there that's organic should have preserved.

Including people, or other critters and such,

that might have been in there.

We found this, which I'm certain

is part of a shabti.

So, a shabti is the little blue and green

statues you see in museums all the time.

And we found this, this is a piece of a ceramic pot, a vessel,

and this is probably more valuable

than anything else we found on this dive,

because this is Napatan. This'll be

the thing that we can anchor other stuff that we find to

that we're not so certain about.

So, this is extremely valuable to us scientifically.

And then, of course, you can see

all the shiny bits in here.

Little pieces of gold.

Taking the first bucket out of the ground and finding that

makes for a really good day.

If we're working in the dirt of

somebody else who went in to find

only the pretty stuff, and this is what they left behind,

I'm pretty encouraged.

20 miles south, at his team's rented house in El-Kurru,

Geoff Emberling may be on the verge of a major breakthrough

in his years-long search for the lost city of Napata.

He's studying the results of a recent survey

carried out at Jebel Barkal by one of his team members, using

magnetometry equipment.

One of the techniques we use in archaeology is called magnetometry.

This is like a fancy metal detector.

It identifies differences between magnetic fields

in different kinds of materials that are buried under the ground.

So, it's a very effective way to identify

if you're looking at a settlement.

We had identified an area that we thought

might be a settlement, at Jebel Barkal.

And so, a University of Michigan graduate student named Greg Tucker

went there for just about two days.

And in just two days, he found an area of settlement.

The results were so encouraging

that Greg then spent a further month

surveying a much larger area at Jebel Barkal.

So, here's the image that Greg's work produced, and

this is the building that we chose

to test first, because its plan

is so clear. But when you look

more carefully at this, you can see

that there's structures all over the site.

And so, I could see these buildings emerging, you know, day by day. Er,

there's one, there's one,

there's one.

So, I've been looking for settlements

here in Sudan for ten years,

and when I saw these results,

I just moved Heaven and Earth

to start this excavation.

I know that this is the place where

I can get answers to these questions about Ancient Kush.

The Black Pharaohs' reign over Egypt

would span almost a century.

Known as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty,

a succession of five Kushite rulers

saw themselves as the sons of the god Amun...

..with a divine duty to reunite

his domain of both Egypt and Kush.

They adopted many aspects of

Egyptian culture, including

pyramid building and hieroglyphic writing.

But in death, they all returned to their native land, to be buried.

At Napata, the royal pyramids of

El-Kurru may have disappeared,

but Rachael Dann, from the University of Copenhagen,

is part of a team working deep underground

to conserve their magnificently decorated burial chambers.

This is an image of King Tantamani,

and we know that it's Tantamani

because his name is written here, in the royal cartouche.

It's also clear that he's a king,

and a king of both Egypt and Kush,

because he's wearing the golden crown

with the double uraei,

the two snakes, on his forehead.

The double cobra symbolised

the rule of the two kingdoms,

a power which they believed

survived the journey into immortality.

Tantamani, even as he heads out for his afterlife,

is still wearing this golden crown,

with the double uraei, and so

he's emphasising that even for

the rest of his eternal life,

he still has the divine right to rule both Egypt and Kush.

All but one of the Kushite kings who ruled over Egypt

were buried at El-Kurru.

The exception was the greatest

and longest ruling of all, Taharqa.

His was the very first pyramid to be built further north, at Nuri.

This is the pyramid of Taharqa,

and this seems to be his primary monument.

It's at least 50 metres square at

the base, possibly bigger than that,

which makes it not an insignificant thing.

I mean, this could be a city block in many places.

Taharqa's pyramid is the largest ever discovered in Sudan.

A fitting monument for a pharaoh

whose domain was the largest ever known in the Valley of the Nile.

He ruled everything from what is today Khartoum,

all the way down the Nile, to the Mediterranean.

The territory that we believe

he had actual control and power over

was probably more, by volume,

than at any time in Ancient Egyptian history.

Taharqa's reign would also witness

the beginning of the end of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.

In 671 BC, Taharqa was driven out of Egypt by an Assyrian invasion.

His successor, Tantamani,

briefly regained control,

but was again driven out.

This time, for good.

After almost a century in power,

the reign of the Black Pharaohs was over.

But Kush would rise again,

with a new capital city,

and an empire spanning a thousand years.

in what is now Sudan,

was followed by a shift of power in Kush,

away from Napata to a new capital 200 miles further south.

Meroe's royal cemeteries alone boast more pyramids

than all of Egypt combined.

But their condition today serves as a stark reminder of a time

when explorers were less concerned with preserving ancient monuments.

This pyramid, the upper part is completely missing,

and because the destruction of the people looking for gold,

they saw that it's similar to the pyramids in Egypt

and that the burial chambers located inside the pyramids there.

One of the main culprits of this destruction,

who came here in search of gold in the 1830s,

was Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini.

He's the one really started trying to look for gold,

and when he didn't get anything from the others,

he picked the biggest pyramid.

Ferlini did find treasure,

but at great cost to Sudan's archaeological heritage.

He destroyed the pyramid completely.

We think he used dynamite and he explode the whole pyramid.

HE CHUCKLES Yeah, we're missing one pyramid.

It's completely gone.

Back at Jebel Barkal,

Geoff Emberling has also found what he was looking for.

After a ten-year search,

he has finally located the long-lost city of the Black Pharaohs.

We've just started our work at the settlement site.

Already we can see that this settlement,

that's just five cm under the surface, is 2,000 years old.

Totally amazing.

Even for an archaeologist, you know, that thrill never goes away.

All of this that we're standing on is an ancient city.

It extends for about 100m this way

and about 200m this way - it's a big area.

This major discovery could provide valuable information

about the Kushite people and their way of life

dating back as far as 4,000 years.

The top level of this settlement is Meroitic period,

but we're finding Napatan material,

and if I were going to guess, I would say somewhere down here,

there's Egyptian material and there's material from Kerma.

It's so exciting - this is the moment of discovery

that I've been waiting for all these years, you know?

Potentially, this could go back even to 2,000 BC.

Not proven yet, but that's my guess.

At Nuri, Pearce Paul and his dive partner

have now had time to assess the condition

of the third burial chamber.

The third chamber's, uh, it's in the best condition of the three.

It looks to be essentially intact, structurally.

From everything we could see above water,

I mean, the preservation is excellent.

But the big question remains.

Does the third chamber still contain the body of Nastasen,

the last of the Napatan kings to be buried at Nuri?

We were looking around

and we think we see a bunch of large sandstone blocks.

We felt around the edges

and it feels like there's a really big slab,

with corners and chisel marks in it.

And it's perfectly cut, and it's enormous.

It's bigger then we would be able to deal with, just the two of us,

and we haven't found all four edges of it yet.

If I were a betting woman, I would say that's a sarcophagus lid.

That's very, very exciting.

But this is the last day of the Arizona team's time here.

Now they face an agonising wait to see if they can return next year.

Even then, they'll only be scratching the surface.

Oh, my gosh, people could be working here for the rest of their lives

at Nuri and never uncover all of its secrets.

This site could be an important crux in our understanding

of the entire ancient world.

But time may be running out

for Sudan's archaeological treasures

and the lost kingdom of the Black Pharaohs.

The really big threat is the plan to build a number of additional dams

right in the heart of ancient Kush.

When Egypt's High Aswan Dam was constructed in the 1960s,

it required major engineering work

to rescue one of the ancient world's most iconic monuments.

The world famous ancient Abu Simbel Temples of Ramses II and his queen

are removed to higher land

in one of the biggest moving jobs ever attempted.

But the effect on smaller,

less-celebrated sites is devastating.

I worked in a salvage project here in Sudan.

With the dam being finished in 2008, this beautiful, intimate landscape,

archaeologically very rich and very unknown,

and then just one day...

HE SNAPS FINGERS ..underwater.

And so the whole thing was lost.

Now an even bigger project

threatens to engulf much of the heartland of Cushite territory.

In fact, people proposed 12 different dams

around the Nile Valley.

It will be the destruction of the past of the Sudan.

Even without these dams, Sudan's archaeological treasures

are becoming increasingly vulnerable every year.

There are so many threats to our ancient heritage.

War is a constant threat.

We have all the time this conflict between development

and destruction of the archaeological heritage.

It's agriculture, it's people building houses,

it's all the normal things that people do in life.

All the archaeological sites are in danger.

Robbed of its place in history by the Egyptians,

overlooked by early explorers,

and obscured by decades of war,

there is still much to learn about Kush,

Africa's first Black superpower.

At every site, in every period, there's major new discoveries

being made every season.

Every year we discover a new site,

so that the empire is becoming larger and larger.

All this needs investigation.

Everywhere you turn, everywhere you put a shovel in the ground,

there's a question that needs to be addressed.

This is a complete chapter, a critical chapter

in understanding society in that time, in this region,

and we are just at the tip of the iceberg.

Just as it's being rediscovered, it's possible that soon,

the kingdom of the Black Pharaohs could be lost...forever.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media