Original subtitles

2700 BC. The Old Kingdom,

or the age of pyramids, begins.

This is Egypt's golden age. Its power is at its height.

No enemies threaten its internal security.

And yet, after five centuries of existence,

the kingdom is consumed by fire, bloodshed, and chaos.

A man, the scribe Ipuwer, relates this terrible episode,

how the pyramids were plundered,

and how as a result of this sacrilege,

Egyptian society collapsed.

"There are plunderers everywhere," he writes.

"Hearts are violent. Squalor is throughout the land."

The revolution reduces the pharaonic monuments to ashes.

Why did the people rise up?

Why did they suddenly attack what they held as most sacred?

Saqqara, south of Cairo.

In the necropolis of King Pepi I,

the last great pharaoh of the Old Kingdom,

French archaeologist Audran Labrousse

is investigating this revolution.

For the past 30 years he has excavated

and studied these ruins.

He knows exactly what these monuments looked like

before the course of history swept them away.

This is the king's pyramid,

surrounded by those of his eight queens

and his funerary temple, which would be burnt down

during the revolution.

Only an elite handful of priests

could enter this hallowed space.

Fewer still were allowed to go around these statues

and up to the offering table,

where the deceased sovereign took his daily meals.

This temple, to which the rioters never had access,

embodied the absolute power of a small group of Egyptians.

It is probable that it was set alight deliberately.

This is what the remains unearthed by the archaeologists

seemed to indicate.

It was a terrible fire.

This is obvious from the stone's surface.

These white stones turned gray.

The heat must have been sufficiently intense

for it to penetrate the stone.

These stones were burnt to the core.

You have to remember that we are in the temple storerooms.

These storerooms contain everything

used for the king's posthumous cult.

There were chests, fabrics, wooden objects, oils,

tallow for the temple's torches.

In other words, highly flammable materials.

And we can see that it was not an isolated fire,

but a widespread fire.

One storeroom did not burn down by accident.

All the storerooms went up.

This means the fire must have been started in several spots,

in several locations.

It's an indication of the violent nature of this revolution.

You have to imagine this gigantic necropolis

which stretches out over 50 kilometers

plundered, pillaged, destroyed.

This is what the Egyptians had feared

since the beginning of their history:

chaos, widespread chaos.

In 30 years of excavations,

Audran Labrousse and his team

have discovered the pyramids of eight queens:

the wives, daughters, and possibly granddaughters of Pepi I,

people who have lived in the century

leading up to the kingdom's demise.

In some of these pyramids the archaeologists

have found items vital for understanding the revolution

that put an end to ancient Egypt's golden age.

This is the case of the pyramid of Queen Behanu.

Our latest find is the burial chamber of a minor queen,

probably from the end of the Old Kingdom.

And yet, inside her chamber she has the Pyramid Texts.

These texts guaranteed their owner immortality

and a smooth passage to the afterlife.

Until then, the Pyramid Texts had only

been inscribed on the walls of king's burial chambers.

Here, for the first time, the archaeologists

have found these texts inside the pyramids of some queens.

Is there a link between these precious hieroglyphs

which gave those who owned them eternal life,

and the revolution that destroyed the Egyptian state

and its symbols?

Audran Labrousse hopes to find the answer to this question

in the remains of the age of pyramids.

Five centuries of history, and 14 pharaohs.

The pyramids of the Old Kingdom were built

on a strip of desert next to Memphis, the kingdom's capital.

The clues to the disaster are to be found here,

in this vast necropolis.

Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure.

To understand the fall of the Old Kingdom,

we have to go back to its height.

A time of excess.

The pyramid of Khufu.

146 meters tall, 230 meters wide at the base.

Khafre's pyramid is almost identical.

It is just three meters smaller than his father's.

When the pharaoh's mummy is placed inside,

his life force takes possession of the stone.

The pyramid becomes the sovereign's body,

and his immense power lasts forever.

The pharaoh is God's representative on earth,

and he alone has this extraordinary privilege

of being able to triumph over death,

and of having eternal life.

At the same time, he has other powers.

He can, if he so wishes,

bestow immortality on anyone he likes,

from the lowliest servant, to the queen.

Everyone is equal before the pharaoh,

but he can choose, and take,

whoever he wishes to the afterlife.

This stone slab from Khufu's time

gives us an idea of the sovereign's absolute power.

A man called Ra'ur describes how he inadvertently

knocked over the king's scepter.

He is convinced he will be killed immediately,

when the pharaoh gives the order to spare his life.

So death is the rule, even for a simple blunder.

52 meters high, Khufu's burial chamber

is located in the heart of the pyramid.

It is built entirely of heavy granite slabs,

weighing over 60 tons each.

Unlike what would soon be the case,

the walls are bare of inscriptions.

There is no formula here

to ensure the pharaoh's resurrection.

Probably copied onto papyrus, the text is read out

at his funeral by his son, or a priest.

Words were enough to imbue the king

with the formula's power.

It is a combination of prayers, practical advice,

and even magic formulas, designed to help the king

to overcome the countless difficulties

encountered along the way.

Having overcome these obstacles, having gotten around them,

having tried all the solutions, he will rise to heaven

and meld with the personality of the creator

and reign with him for eternity in the night's sky.

The king's soul, the ba, leaves his tomb

as a bird with a human head.

It undergoes another transformation and turns into the akh,

the energy of life, which becomes part of the starry sky

to achieve immortality.

It then returns to earth to dwell in a new pharaoh.

It's a perfect system.

But the great Khufu, the pharaoh with a fearsome reputation

has a moment of weakness.

He grants an immense privilege to three of his wives,

allowing them to have their own pyramids.

This is the start of the queen's ascension to power.

Over time, they strive incessantly

to obtain more and more privileges.

But here we have the start

of the loss of a pharaoh's privilege.

And not just any privilege, either.

For now, the consequences are probably limited.

The pharaoh, a living god, can afford to make

such concession without any real danger to himself.

All the same, by giving up the pyramid, the king

has just lost the absolute monopoly of eternal life.

A century later, King Unas comes to the throne.

A new clue reveals that royal power continued to weaken,

with consequences that would soon be very dramatic.

The pharaoh's name is carved

on the entrance to his temple.

It is inscribed in what is known as a cartouche.

It's a hare, the sign of water,

a folded hankerchief, and a reed.

It is very easy to read.

WU-N-I-S. Wunis, who is traditionally known as Unas.

Here you can see the pyramid's casing.

It has been destroyed by the sand,

by the action of man.

This pyramid has seen 4,000 years of history.

Its sides were polished and smooth.

The joins were invisible.

The entire pyramid was gleaming white.

It was almost ethereal.

And when the sun hit the top of the pyramid

it must have been quite magical.

Of course it was smaller.

It was only 52 meters in height,

nothing like Khufu's 146 meter height pyramid.

However, it had an extra something,

which has been preserved in the funerary apartments

that we're going to enter now.

What went on in King Unas' mind?

Which events made him revolutionize Egyptian funerary art?

This is what Audran Labrousse would like to know.

Something extraordinary happened here.

For the first time in the history of Egypt,

the Pyramid Texts were carved

on the walls of the funerary apartments.

This was a totally new thing, a new stage.

From then on, all the royal pyramids would have these texts.

227 incantations were chosen by the pharaoh

for his eternal resting place.

Each of these is a key to his resurrection.

"Oh Unas, you have not gone dead. You have gone alive."

"Sit on the throne of Osiris."

"Your scepter is now in your hand"

"that you may give orders to the living."

At any time the king can appeal to the Texts,

animate them, call them to him,

so that they can help him be reborn in eternity.

The miracle of rebirth is the same as for Khufu.

But Unas gives himself an additional guarantee.

If forgotten, the king's spirit absorbs magic words

so that his final transformation occurs smoothly.

So why did King Unas feel the need

to cover the walls of his apartment with the Pyramid Texts?

Before, these texts would have been recited at the funeral.

They were only recited once.

Then the tomb was closed.

Here the king's approach reflects his anxiety.

He wanted the text to act continuously,

to be arranged around him,

in order to help him join the cosmos

in the eternity of the afterlife.

Did King Unas doubt his ability

to achieve eternal life?

Did he have doubts about his divine nature?

Or simply about his entourage who could have, for instance,

neglected to read the Texts at his funeral?

Over 4,300 years after his death,

it is obviously impossible to know.

However, the archaeologists know a lot more

about his successor, King Teti,

whose pyramid is located a few kilometers away.

Here, Audran Labrousse is investigating

with another archaeologist.

Naguib Kanawati spent several years

excavating King Teti's necropolis.

The first anomaly is to be found inside the king's tomb.

Teti's pyramid, and particularly the funerary chamber,

it's rather exceptional because it is largely unfinished.

One gets the impression building work

came to an abrupt halt.

Even the sarcophagus, it's resting on planks.

It should have been placed directly on the stone floor.

So we have something here,

a kind of an abrupt end to the building work.

Of course, here, the star ceiling,

as is the case everywhere else, protects the pharaoh.

But the extraordinary thing about this vaulted ceiling

is that the grid was laid out, and the stars drawn,

but never painted.

It is exactly the same thing for the Texts.

They were laid out, clearly inscribed

in preparation for the sculptor.

They were partially carved, but never finished.

There can only be one explanation

for the state of this tomb: the king died suddenly

and his funeral was held immediately.

This makes murder a serious possibility.

The historian, the Egyptian historian, priest, Manetho,

who lived in the third century BC

and who was educated in both Egyptian and Greek,

and possibly had access to documents which are lost to us,

said that King Teti was assassinated by his bodyguards.

This is the first documented case

of a king assassinated in Ancient Egypt.

Manetho says nothing about the reasons

for the assassination, or the people behind it.

It was therefore necessary to find evidence of the murder

and identify the possible culprits.

Naguib Kanawati and his team

looked around the king's pyramid.

Before they died, men serving during Teti's reign

had their tombs built here.

The archaeologists found them

and so discovered some very valuable information.

Each of these tombs bears the marks

of the most terrible of punishments in Ancient Egypt.

It is no longer possible for the deceased soul, the ka,

to live in his image.

So the individual is doomed to wander for eternity.

When we look at the offering table

and the food that is really represented

in front of the offering table, they are all intact.

Even the color is very well preserved.

But when we look at the figure of the tomb owner,

all the outline inward have been chiseled out,

and also the name has been chiseled out.

And we can still recognize the head,

the arm stretched to the offering table.

This is not complete elimination,

this is damage to the figure.

You cannot really recognize his figures.

And that means he's finished completely, he executed,

and the ka cannot live in such a figure.

Remember that the king is a god,

and killing the king is like killing your God.

And that is not only criminal but shameful.

Two pieces of information escaped destruction:

the wife, probably innocent of the plot,

and a mention of the owner's identity.

Shanquipta, the king's doctor,

ostracized from society for eternity.

The second tomb discovered by Naguib Kanawati

and the second alleged participant

in the conspiracy against the king.

Here the sentence is not death,

but something equally terrible.

This man is called Mehri.

He's head of the bodyguards of King Teti.

His name is inscribed here,

and perfectly well preserved.

We noticed that his feet are cut,

and here once more.

So both legs were cut.

Plus the nose.

The nose here, here, here, and indeed,

also on the first door where he sits at the offering table

we notice that his nose is damaged and the feet are cut.

According to the Egyptian belief,

if you cut the legs off someone in life,

obviously he is crippled.

But his ka can live in his statue,

which is not really damaged,

or in an image like this one.

For the punishment to be perpetual

and to last into hereafter,

it has to be inflicted not only on his body,

but on all his statues and artwork.

This tomb belongs to a vizier, or prime minister.

At least that is what these hieroglyphs say.

They are remarkable in comparison

with those on the next column.

Hypothesis? The tomb had two owners.

The first, the vizier, was eliminated.

The figures have been removed everywhere.

Here, here, here. And very smooth.

Only the toe has just been omitted.

This hypothesis is confirmed inside the tomb.

The name of the new owner is inscribed

in hieroglyphs of poor quality,

and his image has been roughly carved.

There is nothing about his predecessor.

I became obsessed with this name.

Who is he, this person who, if there is a conspiracy,

he must be the leader of the conspiracy. This is a vizier.

But there was no hint in the tomb, until we blocked

this door in order to photograph it for publication

and here we found the name extremely well preserved.

You can read the name here, Hesi.

How the person in charge missed it,

possibly because of the light coming from the north

he was blinded and couldn't see this part of the tomb.

Hesi was probably executed on the orders of Pepi I,

the son of the assassinated pharaoh.

The head bodyguard and king's personal doctor

were also punished.

The fact remains that simple commoners

dared assassinate the king,

a first in the history of Egypt.

The pharaoh was God's representative on earth.

He maintains truth, law, and universal order.

If you kill the pharaoh, you unleash the forces of chaos.

Everything might collapse.

The pharaoh is universal balance.

If you destroy this balance, you release the forces of chaos

always lying in wait to destroy things.

And this can have disastrous consequences.

It can be, in a sense, the end of the world.

However, contrary to expectations, life continues.

So does the existence of the world

really depend on the pharaoh?

Back to the burial ground of Pepi I,

son of the assassinated king.

Audran Labrousse and his team have made some

significant finds regarding the demise of the Old Kingdom.

After our work in the mission, after the digs,

we obviously had to protect our finds,

especially Pepi's Pyramid Texts.

So we have a reinforced door, and we are building

a cement wall on top to protect this door.

The fact is this pyramid contains

the greatest number of Pyramid Texts.

It is the most complete sixth dynasty pyramid with Texts.

After a brief period of disorder following

Teti's assassination, Pepi I comes to the throne.

On the face of it, divine monarchy has been fully restored.

But we are actually less than a century away from disaster.

Audran Labrousse and his team have excavated

and restored the pharaoh's pyramid.

And the first thing they discovered

were the after effects of the revolution.

Here you can see the descending door

that blocks the passage.

This huge, seven ton door,

was raised during the pyramid's construction.

After the king's funeral,

when the doors were lowered to the ground,

which was also made of granite,

it would have been impossible to get through here.

It's obvious that the people who

got through these security systems

were perfectly familiar with the pyramid's layout.

They knew where the obstacles were,

and they knew how to get around them.

Instead of going along the entrance passage,

the thieves dug through the pyramid's limestone walls.

Limestone is much softer than granite.

When they reached the three doors they got round them

by tunneling through the slide slots in the ceiling.

They could then walk straight into the king's tomb.

What did the tomb raiders see

when they entered this pyramid?

The first thing they saw was all the gold in this chamber,

all the items the pharaoh took with him to the afterlife.

Gold statues, chests, fabrics.

But that isn't what interested them.

They were interested in the king's mummy,

that's what they headed for.

First to this granite chest

that contained the royal entrails.

There were four canopic vases in the bottom of it.

These vases were removed and destroyed.

Only one survived, and we were able to retrieve it.

This is all that remains of the king's mummy.

In the middle ages, the tomb's ceiling

collapsed onto the sarcophagus.

This pyramid actually served as a quarry

for the building of Cairo.

The archaeologists painstakingly excavated

this pile of stones, and found the remains of the carnage.

Two pieces of Pepi I's loincloth.

One of the king's sandals, and two pieces of the gold plaque

on which the pharaoh's mummy rested.

The royal dynasty was the target.

All the pyramids were plundered, all the sarcophagi opened,

all the mummies destroyed.

It's a bit like what happened at the time

of the French revolution in Saint Denis,

when the tombs were opened,

and the corpses were mutilated and thrown into a mass grave.

This was a time of unbelievable violence,

directed, one could almost say, at a royal caste.

Directed against all the pharaohs

who descended from a divine bloodline.

Of all the Old Kingdom mummies,

the only one to have been found almost intact

is that of Merenre I, Pepi's son.

The others were probably reduced to dust.

Why did the system collapse on itself?

Were the warning signs as early as Pepi I's reign?

The answer lies around the king's pyramid,

where Audran Labrousse has unearthed

eight small queen's pyramids.

The first piece of information revealed by the dig:

the plots continued in Pepi I's reign.

This is what the discovery of the anonymous pyramid

leads us to suppose.

No inscription has been found, but its size,

20 meters high, suggests this was a queen's monument.

Then there is the quality of the stone

found in her tomb.

This is granite.

A fragment of a sarcophagus, a queen's sarcophagus.

I am greatly tempted to say that she was the queen

involved in the conspiracy.

A man known as Uni

mentions the queen involved in the conspiracy

on this slab housed in the Cairo museum.

Uni says he organized the trial of the king's wife,

his favorite, in the utmost secrecy.

He does not say what became of her,

but there is no mention of her after this.

For all that, Pepi I still had time for ambitious women.

He even appointed one of his wives,

Queen Inenek-Inti, as prime minister.

French archaeologists have found her pyramid.

Despite its modest size, it is every inch a royal monument.

The large granite sarcophagus is also a sign

of her political importance.

And yet all of this is nothing

in comparison with its neighbor.

Queen Ankhesenpepi II.

Everything is bigger here.

The temple is huge, and the pyramid is 30 meters tall,

instead of the usual 20 meters for queens.

But the most important thing is inside.

Ankhesenpepi II, the king's mother

and regent of the kingdom of Egypt.

This sarcophagus is magnificent.

It's one of the finest examples from the Old Kingdom.

It is very evidently a king's sarcophagus,

and yet it was made for a queen, for a woman,

Queen Ankhesenpepi, whose name is engraved here

on the side of the sarcophagus.

You obviously have to imagine all these hieroglyphs

plated with gold.

And all around it, you have the Pyramid Texts.

Someone who is not a pharaoh has the immortality texts.

This person is Queen Ankhesenpepi.

One very interesting detail:

As in her husband's tomb, the texts are green.

It's the green of rebirth.

The queen will be able to leave the sarcophagus.

The mummy stays where it is, of course.

But thanks to a number of transformations,

the queen's soul will leave the sarcophagus,

fly through the room,

then go along the pyramid's entrance passage

which is rather like a launching pad

and will take this soul to the stars of the night sky,

to eternity.

At the time of the revolution,

the sarcophagus was opened and the queen's mummy destroyed.

What's left of the royal remains, a few bones,

and this very moving trace of embalming products

which ran down the side of the sarcophagus.

In a neighboring room, Audran Labrousse

has stored the reliefs found in the temple

of the cult of the queen.

One of these reliefs describes her extraordinary ascension.

Wife of Pepi I, she then married his son

and successor, Merenre I, to whom she gave an heir,

the future pharaoh Pepi II.

She was a woman who had power, it's obvious.

She was a powerful woman,

and she needed power in this man's world to govern Egypt.

Not only to govern the country, but at the same time

to be able to acquire immortality herself.

It was not at all certain at first.

And in doing so, she made a first breach

in this exclusive power of the pharaoh,

this power that gave him immortality.

And that's when it all started.

Many people, the Egyptian elite,

then stepped into this breach

and obtained the right to immortality too.

In other words, it was the end

of one man's exclusive privilege,

the pharaohs, all thanks to this woman.

When she had herself depicted with her son,

the queen is looking straight ahead.

Whereas the king, the incarnation of God on earth,

is in profile.

She also had him watched.

This papyrus is the report written by Jeti, her informer.

His revelations concern the most intimate details

of the king's life.

"Jeti notice his majesty,

"the king of upper and lower Egypt,

"who had set out by himself on a walk at night

"without there being any person with him.

"Then Jeti followed this god

"without letting his heart put blame on him.

"The king reached the house of the general Sesseneh.

"He threw a brick as a signal"

"for a ladder to be lowered to him."

"He climbed up, and Jeti waited until his majesty went away."

"After his majesty had done that"

"which he had wanted to do with the general,"

"he left for his palace, Jeti following behind him."

No one had ever spoken about the pharaoh in this way before.

With this text we witnessed the end of power,

the end of a power, the end of respect for this power.

50 years before the revolution,

did Egypt see the end coming?

Whatever the case, Egyptian art was at its height.

Rendering nature with so much life and expression,

sculpture had never been so fine before.

Nor had it ever so accurately portrayed daily life

at the pharaoh's court.

The queen organized hunts for her son.

Animals were caught and put in an enclosure.

What can we see in this enclosure?

A wild bull. An ibex.

Further away we can see two aurochs,

and a prowling lion.

What does this mean?

It shows that the pyramids were not in a desert environment

as they are now.

There was savannah here, African savannah,

and a huge variety of wild animals.

The climate changed. The wildlife disappeared.

In the century leading up to the revolution

the savannah gave way to desert.

And the animals needing the most water

disappeared from the kingdom.

Where's the proof?

Audran Labrousse believes he found it when studying

the texts in Pepi I's funerary chamber.

There is an important clue here, this elephant.

This animal is not at all realistic.

It's obvious that the Egyptians

were no longer familiar with this animal.

They had probably kept a sketchy model on a papyrus.

They knew that it had to have trunk and tusks,

but there was nothing realistic about this animal anymore.

And yet we know that the Egyptians

were masters of realism.

This is simply an idea of an elephant,

of something that had not existed in Egypt

for a very long time.

So here we have absolute proof of climate change.

The elephant was probably the first

to disappear, before the lion or the giraffe,

which were still part of the landscape.

But the question remains:

When did this climate change occur exactly?

A few kilometers away, a team from the

German Archaeological Institute may have found the answer.

These scientists are excavating the causeway

of King Sneferu, Khufu's father.

On studying the mud bricks used to make the causeway

they realized it had been restored

300 years after its construction,

during the reign of Pepi I.

That's to say, at the time climate change

is thought to have occurred.

This causeway which led to the pharaoh's famous pyramid

was originally open to the elements.

It was later turned into a long roofed corridor.

This is the oldest wall.

It dates from the time of Sneferu, from the fourth dynasty

from 2600 BC.

And this is the vaulted ceiling,

which was erected 300 years later, in 2300 BC.

Probably Pepi's first reign.

Here we can see the first phase of construction.

In the reign of Sneferu,

the king who built the blunted pyramid, the passage

was open between those two trapezium-shaped walls.

In the sixth dynasty, 300 years later,

this vaulted ceiling was built.

This figure here gives you an idea

of the scale of the covered causeway.

Why would Pepi I have restored the causeway

of such a distant predecessor?

And why would he have taken the trouble to cover it?

Because the desert was advancing,

and everything was in danger of disappearing under the sand?

This theory has been confirmed by the work of another team

that is studying the variations in the level of the Nile

during the Old Kingdom.

The yearly flood of the Nile is caused by summer rains

in the plateau region of Ethiopia,

where its main source, Lake Tana, lies.

British scientists have analyzed the lake sediment

and shown that it lost up to half its volume

during the last century of the age of pyramids.

In a country known for its rich agriculture,

where all the irrigated land is found in the Nile valley,

a drought of this kind could have contributed

to the decline of the pharaonic institutions.

Especially as the last pharaoh before the revolution,

Pepi II, does not appear to have been able to cope

with the major issues Egypt was facing at the time.

At least this is what Audran Labrousse believes.

He has detected several worrying signs in his pyramid.

Signs indicating a further weakening of the monarchy.

The Egyptians had mastered pyramid building

by the reign of King Khufu.

There were no major problems in their construction.

If you take the example of Pepi I, it's perfect.

But this pyramid was built for his grandson,

and it happened, was particularly serious, worrying,

almost tragic.

The support blocks you see here were arranged

so as to support the pyramids outer casing,

which is sloping and resting on them.

The support had to be perfect

for the casing to stay in place.

This isn't true here.

The stones were arranged any old how,

and this affected the casing.

Cracks begin to appear in it,

and the sides of the pyramid collapsed.

This was quite incredible, especially at a time

when this technique had been mastered.

Renovation work was undertaken

following this disaster.

Audran Labrousse has discovered signs of this.

A solution was found.

The casing was put back in place, and restored.

And a girdle made of huge blocks

was built around the pyramid's base.

You can clearly see, here for instance, how this girdle

compresses and supports the base of the pyramid.

When the king's body is placed inside,

the monument comes to life, it has a name.

Pepi is established and living, and this

prestigious monument is surrounded by a makeshift repair,

which really isn't worth of the monument's splendor.

Pepi II reigned for over 60 years.

It was a long reign. Too long, it would seem.

Anyway, towards the end of his reign, something happened.

His last wives left this necropolis

to be buried in the necropolis of Pepi I,

Pepi II's grandfather.

It's as if there was a disaffection,

as if they left the king's entourage to place themselves

under the protection of a far more prestigious pharaoh.

This disaffection was accompanied

by a deteriation of the pharaoh's image.

One simply had to compare this crude statuette of Pepi II

with the noble features of his grandfather, Pepi I.

Or the divine authority emanating from this statuette

of Khafre, his distant predecessor.

What link should be made between the depiction of the king

and the revolution that swept away the most powerful

dynasty of the day, after 500 years of rule?

In any case, the kingship lost its hold,

and the provinces broke away one after the other.

The papyrus of the scribe Ipuwer

mentions this terrible trauma.

"There are plunderers everywhere."

"The poor man seizes the goods of the powerful man."

It would take two long centuries

for Egypt to be united once more

and for a different kingdom to arise from the past.

Long after the revolution, a minor public servant was

put in charge of clearing up one of the ruined necropolises.

And with the blocks he collected, he built this pyramid.

And this pyramid

discovered by Audran Labrousse and his team

contains vital evidence about the post-revolution period.

Here the individual Re Arushef Nart.

Down here, a remarkable bit of evidence: the Pyramid Texts.

They have been written, as you can see,

very quickly with a brush.

It's slapdash work.

It's a bit naive, but that isn't important.

It still does the job.

Once reserved for the royal elite,

eternity becomes more democratic, if you like.

And sufficiently democratic for someone as simple

as Re Aruschef Nart to be able to enjoy it.

So this democratization went pretty far.

It affected a large number of people in Egypt,

who became immortal.

In just a few decades, the eternity texts

passed from the king to his entourage.

Then after the revolution,

to an even larger circle of Egyptians.

And so the triumph of life after death is the fruit

of the first known revolution in the history of mankind.