Original subtitles

It is 2,480 years B.C.

and there is nothing to be seen in this part of the

Sahara desert, nothing but the shifting sand,

but that is all about to change.

When thousands of men are shipped here,

from all the provinces of ancient Egypt,

when they quarry millions of tons of stone,

and drag it to this desert plateau,

to construct a tomb for Khufu, their king.

Built, as they believe, according to a secret code,

with the power to perform a miracle.

For more than 4,000 years, humans have considered this

the oldest, and only one of the seven ancient wonders

to survive intact, as one of the greatest

mysteries on Earth.

Now we can unravel that mystery

in a way never attempted before.

By combining the latest historical research with the most

up-to-date visual technology, we can travel back in time,

and see the Great Pyramid of Giza through the eyes

of the men who built it,

and one man in particular.

He's not a real historical figure, but the events

in his life are based on real evidence.

From the journey he travels, and the clothes that he wears,

to the enormity of the work that he's given.

His name is Nakht.

This is his story, and the story of the monument

to which he devoted his life.

It's more than 40 years

since the king's men came for us.

They brought me here to labor on a task that mystified me.

My life's work has been an attempt to understand it,

and now my life's work is complete.

They came for me one evening, late in summer

in the village where I was born,

the only world I had ever known.

In the name of the King.

In the name of the King.

They'd always used those words

when they'd come for my father, and my grandfather before.

Now they had come for my brother Deba

and for me.

I remember my sister cried when we left.

My mother didn't.

"You're the oldest," she said, "Take care of Deba."

They'd have arrived ever summer

in the early years of Khufu's reign, royal officials

dispatched the length and breadth of the Nile

selecting able bodied men for the service of the King.

It was hard to leave.

We worried how the family would cope until we came back.

I wonder what I'd have felt if I'd known the truth,

that I was never coming back.

As we sat there, I had this sudden memory of stories

grandfather had told me

about great stone steps, he'd built into the sky.

I tried to imagine those steps.

I couldn't.

The official, a man called Kaem-ah, went to the

neighboring village for the others.

Everyone chatted about where we going

and what we'd have to do,

but no one really new, and Kaem-ah

said nothing to explain.

Just that we owed everything to the King,

and that now we would have the chance to repay him.

Young conscripts like Nakht and Deba,

had no reason to approach the start

of their journey with dread.

Contrary to popular myth, not one of the people

who built the Great Pyramid was a slave.

Egypt had no need of slaves,

and all because of the Nile.

We joined in the familiar prayer.

Hail to you oh Nile sprung from the ground,

who produces the barley and makes the wheat to grow.

You're eyes and the lands exalt,

and then everyone there is joy.

The river's annual flood, covering the land

in fertile silt, made Egypt's farmlands uniquely rich.

One of the first countries in history, where the work force

didn't have to spend all its time growing food,

but could labor on other things instead,

such as building pyramids.

Days passed and the boat became like home,

but it was strange to have no work to do.

Landscapes didn't look like it did near our village.

Cliffs, fields, and there was always the river,

a ruled line of blue.

You could almost believe we had come no distance at all

until one afternoon.

Twas the hottest part of the day,

set back in the desert high on the cliff,

was a great triangle of stone-like mountain,

but a mountain made by men.

Of course I immediately thought of my grandfather.

So, he had built his great stone steps.

I thought it's the same for they by me.

That's what we're being sent to do.

That evening we moored nearby.

I couldn't sleep.

The stone steps Nakht had seen, stand at Saqqara.

This is the oldest intact stone monument in the world,

and the first key to unlocking the mystery of the pyramids.

60 years before King Khufu, the Egyptians first constructed

this now familiar shape, by laying six great rectangles

of stone, one on top of the other.

This had enabled them to create a monument that they

believed possessed immense secret power.

At the beginning of time, according to Egyptian myth,

there was nothing but watery chaos.

From that chaos had emerged the first mound of dry land

in the shape of a pyramid.

It was a shape that symbolized life, but some impulse

had made the Egyptians choose that shape for a tomb,

the tomb of their King.

60 years later, in 2,480 B.C.,

the same impulse had brought

the new King, Khufu, out to the desert

with a carefully chosen retinue.

He was here to witness the first and most important

ceremony of his entire reign.

Contrary to some recent theories, the pyramids weren't

built by people from outer space, but they were built

by people obsessed with outer space.

The Egyptians measured everything by the stars,

their calendar, the Nile's flood, and they did so

by noticing that the stars all moved.

Everything in the night sky was in motion,

everything but for one dark, still point.

Around that dark, still point, two especially bright stars

turned in a constant circle.

When one star was directly above the other, a plumb line

could be held up against them.

It now passed through the dark, still point

with perfect accuracy.

The single most important act in the building

of the Great Pyramid had taken place

before a stone of it was laid, but of this,

Nakht and his fellow builders, new nothing.

Seeing the stone steps had made me

feel if we were nearing our destination,

and suddenly the river was busy.

There were boats loaded with everything you can imagine,

cattle and goats, pots, broad juice, timber stone, so much.

More than any person could use in a life time.

After 11 days, drifting north

on the Nile current, Nakht would have been

a matter of hours from his journey's end, Giza.

Today, a busy suburb, 10 miles to the south of Cairo,

it was then a loose, rapidly growing settlement

on the river's west bank.

There would have been boat loads of conscripts

arriving there every day.

In a Giza palace, Khufu's architects

had long been planning the perfect pyramid,

one that would dwarf all pyramids that had gone before,

or were to come after it, one that would remain

the tallest structure on Earth, until the Eiffel Tower

was built in 1889.

But first, they had to go back to basics.

The plan was to build upward from a level base

gradually laying more than 200 horizontal courses

of limestone blocks on top of one another,

each course a little smaller than the last.

The theory was simple.

Putting it into practice must have seemed almost impossible.

Preparations had begun in the first year of Khufu's reign.

On the Giza plateau, high above, the site had been

leveled and swept.

Then specialist masons had laid out the pyramid base,

the perfect square of finished limestone blocks.

Within that square was a natural limestone outcrop

which other masons had already cut into regular steps

to form the pyramid core.

The greatest of all building projects was ready to begin.

All that was needed, were the builders.

Late that morning, we arrived at Giza.

I didn't understand what I was seeing.

How could I?

We left the river behind us and started to climb

to the desert plateau above.

I was, I was uneasy.

The desert was where the sun died each night.

We all knew the stories of the ghosts that haunted it.

We'd been told there was a place for us up on the plateau

near the end of a row of.

No one took any notice of us.

It turned out we had to share a reed mat on the ground.

We didn't know what we were supposed to do,

or what would happen next,

but my real journey was just beginning.

In the morning, we were roused just after sunrise.

It was obvious we were going to have to earn our keep.

I thought that Giza could hold no more surprises.

I was wrong.

The thing I remembered most clearly, was the noise.

We were put to work at once, carrying water,

which was back breaking.

A quarry seems like (mumbles), but before long

I began to make it count.

It's very highly controlled, the King's work.

Everyone has a place, and a purpose.

Five million tons of stone would be needed

for the Great Pyramid.

The vast majority quarried on site at Giza.

It's currently estimated that it took around 1500 men

to quarry it.

There's was a skilled job, not one for royal conscripts

like Nakht and Deba.

Each quarry man was issued with a proper chisel.

Another specialist group in the quarry, was the scribes.

To ensure that it'd reach it's correct destination,

every block was marked with a different symbol,

ready to be transported to the pyramid itself.

The question, when an average block weighed

two and a half tons, was how.

Within a few days, we went from

bringing water to the sharpeners to serving a gang

who called themselves Khufu's Drunkards.

They were a tough lot, and their job was to haul stones

from the quarry face to the pyramid itself.

Our foreman had singled us out as quick learners.

Grandfather had always said, "If you want to get on,

keep in with the boss."

We soon worked out, there was a real knack to this work.

Without water the sledge would stick fast.

Add just enough, and it slid easily.

It's the tufra, the clay you get at Giza.

Once it's wet, everything will slide on it.

The best part of a working day was evening

when we washed and ate.

We'd work nine days and rest on the 10th.

I never felt lonely because of Deba.

At night we'd hear the lions out in the desert

and we would talk of our religions.

We may have said we were home sick, but in truth

we had become each others family.

We had all grown used to the rhythm of our backs

and our work.

Rhythms that never changed, until one morning.

We'd been at Giza a little less than a year.

Twas nearly noon and we had broken for something to eat

when Yunu came to us.

We were to report for a new job

away from our designated corner of the quarry.

The quarry at Giza was about half a mile

to the south of the actual pyramid site,

and because of strict demarcation, those working around

the quarry face would not have set foot

on the pyramid itself.

The site could only be accessed by means of two huge ramps,

one running up directly from the quarry to the pyramid,

the other running from the pyramid to the Nile.

They met at the pyramid's southwest corner.

I'll never forget climbing the ramp

for the first time.

I had never been so high in my life,

and it was the first time we had seen

the pyramid from close up.

Just took your breath away.

The pyramid already towered above the desert floor.

Without cranes or levers, the only way the pyramid builders

could of raised stone to such a height was on ramps

made of the desert Earth and compacted rubble,

and held together with gypsum mortar.

Each and every working day for around 16 years

a thousand tons of stone were quarried, cut and dragged

up onto the service of this immense construction project.

And constructing the outer part of the pyramid was not

the whole task that confronted Khufu's builders.

From outside, the pyramid looks like a solid structure,

but as a tomb, it had to contain a burial chamber.

Uniquely, the Great Pyramid was to accommodate

not one, but three.

One chamber was raised some 100 feet

up in the actually masonry, and directly beneath it

was another dug into the rock of the desert floor.

By 2,474 B.C. the third and most important chamber

was under construction, and so was a huge internal gallery

by which it would be reached.

The top of the pyramid in progress was a plateau,

roughly the size of 10 football fields joined together.

At its center was the internal gallery

where teams of specialist were preparing

for the construction of the upper burial chamber.

Yunu enrolled Deba and me

in a work gang hauling blocks in a great central passageway

for a chamber that was being constructed at the very top.

He explained that this chamber would be

the final resting place of the King.

The steep slope of the passageway made the work exhausting.

At the end of the day we longed to return to our barracks,

but Yunu had other ideas.

Of course we knew of the compound

where all the full-time workers and the supervisors lived,

but we'd never been there,

and who was there, but Kaem-ah.

He was as always at the center of things.

He told us to sit, and we did as we were told.

He tried to put us at all ease.

"Live life to the full," he said, "Live life to the full,"

and then he drank a toast in our honor.

We couldn't understand it.

We were all a little drunk by now, but gradually

it dawned on me, Kaem-ah had something in mind.

Even Yunu, old stone face, seemed pleased about it.

She is a fertile field.

A fertile field for her Lords,

and she was Yunu's youngest daughter.

Her name was Baratsa.

It was Deba who'd been chosen as her husband.

Gerget Khufu, the settlement of Khufu,

was the compound of the King's permanent work force.

These people were part of his court.

They were an elite far fewer in number than the conscripts.

They had special skills, and their children would've been

apprenticed here to masters

to ensure those skills were passed on.

Every aspect of their lives was taken care of,

from fabric weaving for their clothes, to the preparation

of wheat and barley for their stables of beer and bread.

A regular item on their diet was meat,

normally a luxury in the ancient world.

Khufu had established ranches all over Egypt

to breed animals for his workforce.

This was centralized organization on a new scale.

Khufu's workers were building a pyramid,

but to do so, they were also unifying their nation,

consolidating a true state, the first in history.

Deba and I were as happy that morning

as we had been since arriving at Giza.

I just felt so proud.

Me, Nakht, from a little village,

one of the King's men now.

No more work in the quarry.

Work on the pyramid, responsibilities, we belonged.

Preeminent among Khufu's master craftsmen

were the masons who worked up on the pyramid itself.

It was their responsibility to finish the blocks

that had been brought up from the quarry

before they were set in the pyramid's outer wall.

All the extraordinary precision of the Great Pyramid

is down to the craftsmanship of its masons

and was achieved with the simplest of tools,

the most important of which was the set square,

which enabled the all important right angles

to be laid out and checked.

Simple plumb bobs and wooden A frames would also

have been used to check that each block was laid level.

Once the stone was finished to the mason's satisfaction,

the setters could at last

fit in in the pyramid's outer wall.

They probably started this process

at the corner of each pyramid face and worked inwards.

Hand finishing over two million blocks was an immense task

even by the standards of the Great Pyramid.

How the masons did so in the allotted time,

long remained a mystery.

A clue, visible today on the Great Pyramid's south side

provides the answer.

There is a gash about 30 feet high, where a 19th century

explorer tried to blast his way in with dynamite.

It's the only place where we can see beyond the pyramid's

outer membrane, and it reveals that the core is much rougher

with blocks of different sizes jumbled together,

and some pieces so small, they're little more than

builder's rubble.

This was the means by which the pyramid builders

could keep up the pace,

but working in the central gallery

accuracy was required, and so too was caution.

Ahhh

All these years I had been working

on a tomb, but until now I had never thought of death.

When Deba died a vision came back to me.

Once, when we were tiny, we had seen a great glittering boat

sweep past our village.

Our mother told us it must have been the King,

and that we should have bowed because

we owed him everything.

But now it seemed, everything that mattered to me

had been taken away,

and all in the name of the King.

All this sacrifice for the sake of one man.

It is certain that Khufu himself would have been brought up

from his palace at Giza to observe the construction

of the pyramid.

It was certainly his greatest undertaking as a king.

In the desert, there is an outcrop of rock,

the only place at Giza from which the entire pyramid

landscape is visible.

The King would have been attended by his main architect,

his cousin, Hemiunu.

Beneath them, the King would have been able to see

some 25,000 workers,

conscripts, quarry men, stone haulers,

setters, masons, for whom he was responsible, whom he had

brought to Giza to collaborate as humans never had before.

What had driven him to do it?

To answer that question, long seemed

only a distant possibility

until just over a century ago, archaeologists working on the

pyramid of a later king called Unas,

unearthed a chamber whose walls were covered

in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The pyramid text provided tantalizing glimpse into

the minds of the men who built the pyramids.

From these spells, incantations, and riddles,

a story emerges, the story of a journey.

The King travels, and travels up.

His journey is described in many ways, as a falcon

or with the aid of natural storms of wind, and hail,

and lightening.

The pyramid text always describe the end of this journey

in the same mysterious way,

that the King can now go forth among the indestructibles.

To understand this mystery, is to understand the

very purpose of a pyramid.

But these mysterious beliefs were not widely understood.

They were the preserve of an initiated few.

Khufu's workers had more ordinary concerns,

ensuring that 1,000 tons of stone were moved each day

onto the pyramid's slowly rising surface.

Five years past after Deba's death.

I was one of the experienced men on site when Yunu

accorded me a special honor.

I had seen Hemiunu on the outcrop, but had never imagined

that I would be introduced to him.

He had a special task for me, one that could

only be understood with a special blessing,

words that but changed my life.

Some 10 years after work began

on the Great Pyramid, a barge approached Giza

with a special cargo.

It had come more than 500 miles,

from the quarries at Aswan.

On board was a single granite block.

The block was one of nine that were being brought to Giza.

Together the most vital nine blocks of all the millions

that make up the Great Pyramid.

Each one weighed upward of 50 tons, and 200 men would

be required to move it.

King Khufu's upper burial chamber was ready to be completed,

and the nine granite blocks would form its roof.

Each block had to be dragged across the unfinished pyramid,

and put in place above the chamber beneath.

I had the scribes draw a reference

in red ochre down the exact center of each block,

and I seated myself on top of the first block

at one end of the chamber.

I held up a plumb bob and I aligned it with both

the red reference mark on the incoming block,

and the center mark of post beyond.

That way I could keep the block exactly central

as it passed over the chamber.

Such a vast weight had to be perfectly distributed.

The words of Hemiunu's blessing were ringing in my ears.

So this holy chamber was the center, the purpose,

of the whole pyramid.

It had to be protected.

In order to protect it, the Egyptians

added four more roofs.

In the spaces between them, it is still possible to glimpse

the lost world of the pyramid makers.

Graffiti left behind by the workers spell out

the names of the gangs.

This is the mark of the strong boatmen of Khufu.

Here, simply, the pure.

It is even possible to see the red ochre reference marks.

The means by which four and half thousand years ago,

master stone movers, guided in the granite blocks

with such phenomenal precision.

The last third of the pyramid could not be reached

by the main ramp.

Instead a spiral ramp was used

supported on the stepped sides of the pyramid

and climbing up with it.

Up this spiral ramp the most experts,

stone hauling gang was dragged the final blocks

until the very top was reached.

It fell to my gang to lay the cap stone.

It had been prepared by the masons more carefully

than all the others.

Its sides were perfectly smooth, but beneath

there was a plug of rock left protruding.

We rotated the block until the the block fitted into

a groove carved in the block beneath.

All those years of labor seemed concentrated

in these final moments.

After the cap stone was placed

the ramps were stripped away,

and the stepped outer stones were cut

so that they all continued downwards at one perfect angle.

Each block was then highly polished and smoothed

to create four glittering triangles of stone.

The affect would have been blinding, quite different

from the pyramid we see today.

In about 2,463 B.C. Khufu set out once again

from his palace.

He crossed the desert along the very route he traveled

with his astronomers some 17 years before,

to look on the tomb that would immortalize him.

In the pyramid's shadow, there were also

three smaller pyramids for his queens.

To the east of the pyramid, a great stone causeway stretched

down to a temple, by the edge of the Nile.

This was the place to which Khufu's body would be brought

when the day of his death came at last.

It was in the early morning of a spring day

around 2,457 B.C., that it finally did.

The King's coffin was of aromatic cedar,

a rare and precious wood.

It's likely that little else would have accompanied it.

The extravagant gold and riches that we associate with

Tutankhamen, belong to a much later age.

The coffin was unloaded on the key side.

It was as if the last stone of the whole structure

was being put in place, and the most important stone of all.

According to the ancient ritual, the coffin

would almost certainly have been taken

to the subterranean chamber first, and then

to the chamber above it.

The final part of the journey, would have been

to take the coffin to the third chamber.

It would have passed up this soaring gallery,

once just a rough chasm of rock.

At last the coffin was brought into the upper chamber,

the King's chamber itself.

And beneath Nakht's great granite roof,

it was laid in the sarcophagus.

The Great Pyramid was about to fulfill the purpose

for which it had been built.

The King had finally gone forth among the indestructibles.

This was the reason for locating the dark, still point

all those years before.

Because it never moved, the Egyptians revered that point

as eternal, the location of heaven itself.

They also revered the stars that circled it.

Today we call them the circumpolar stars, but the Egyptians

awed by their constancy, called them the indestructibles.

The Egyptian's believed they had not just located heaven,

but constructed the means to get there,

and the proof of that fantastic ambition is built into

the very fabric of the pyramid itself.

In the north wall of the King's chamber is a tiny vent,

the beginning of a narrow shaft, that penetrates through the

mass of masonry, to the pyramid's outer wall.

It is trained, like a telescope, at just one part

of the night sky, at the circumpolar stars,

the indestructibles.

Khufu's builders believe they had constructed

a resurrection machine, a machine that secured eternity,

and not just for their king.

So Hemiunu's blessing has proven to be true.

The gang will rise again,

and any who shall cause his pyramid to be good and sturdy,

they too will rise with him.

They will share eternal possession of his crown.

In the name of the King.

It's clear now.

In the name of the King.

Through us, he became indestructible,

and we indestructible through him.

Yunu, Kaem-ah,

Deba, myself, all of us, Egypt.