Original subtitles

Welcome to Egypt, land of the pharaohs.

We're in Luxor.

To tell the story of the most famous ruler of them all.

Tutankhamun.

And what an incredible story it is.

This 19-year-old boy king was laid to rest in his tomb in 1323 BC,

his mummified body hidden away behind that famous golden mask.

We're counting down the final days of Tutankhamun's life,

death and burial.

Revealing how in ancient history the pharaoh fell ill and died

and was then sealed in a tomb under the desert sands.

And we're also following the modern story of archaeologist Howard Carter

when he discovered and reopened that treasure-filled tomb.

We've got some real treats to show you.

Rarely seen artefacts, like the special kit used

in Tutankhamun's mummification.

Wow, look at that.

I'm holding something that's been in somebody's dead body, then?

WOMAN: Yes. Nice. (LAUGHS)

And some of his most personal possessions.

Ah, the make-up. The make-up.

The guyliner.

And we reveal the new science

shedding light on the secrets of his burial.

So kind of spits it out and there's this, like, perfect 3D model

of this entire tomb.

Yes.

Here's what's coming up.

This time, I use the latest technology to investigate

what could have killed Tutankhamun.

This is the most amazing tool I've ever seen in my life.

And get permission to go inside the high-security vault

where his treasures are stored, away from public view.

What a collection. Oh!

It's moving being here.

And I get a taste of the Pharaoh's life of pampered luxury.

It's brilliant.

Mmm. Well done, Tutankhamun.

While I come face to face

with the people who may have built his final resting place.

Wow, look at that!

And just a stone's throw away from Tut's tomb,

I head to an excavation never before seen on TV.

Blimey, it's absolutely huge! It's not too shabby.

Join us as we tell the story of Tutankhamun's final days.

Tutankhamun was one of the most powerful men on Earth.

Like all pharaohs, he died wanting his name to live forever.

It was his path to immortality.

But from the day Tutankhamun was sealed into his tomb in 1323 BC

until the time he was uncovered by Howard Carter,

the rest of the world pretty much forgot about him.

That's over 3,000 years of anonymity.

Not quite what he had in mind.

But everything was about to change and the teenage pharaoh

would become the most famous Egyptian of them all.

The events that rescued Tutankhamun from eternal obscurity took place

here in 1922 in the desert near the modern city of Luxor.

Luxor is about four miles that way on the other side of the Nile.

The city is on the eastern bank.

It was called Thebes around 3,500 years ago

and it was the capital of upper Egypt.

Very much a place of the living, very dynamic.

But over here on the west bank of the Nile, this was a place of the dead.

These mountains are one vast necropolis - a city of dead people.

There are hundreds of tombs packed into the desert rock.

At the heart of this vast burial ground is a sacred hidden valley...

..in ancient times only accessible along these precarious mountain trails.

Well, there it is. (LAUGHS) The Valley of the Kings.

For around 500 years, between 1550 BC and 1000 BC,

this is where the kings of Egypt were buried,

quietly hidden away among the mountains.

By 1922, 61 royal tombs had already been discovered here.

And while they don't look very impressive from outside,

when you head underground it's a very different story.

These royal tombs are absolutely astonishing.

Massive underground palaces that took years to build

and were dug out entirely by hand.

I'm exploring the stunning tomb of Ramesses IV.

Nearly every inch of these walls

is covered in the most startling murals and carvings, bright colours.

What isn't here now and what wasn't here when it was excavated

is any treasure.

We know that ancient Egyptian royals were buried with their most precious possessions,

but every pharaoh's tomb discovered before 1922

had been robbed thousands of years earlier.

The treasures and belongings were long gone.

The tombs of some pharaohs, though, had never been found.

It raised the tantalising possibility

that underneath all this sand and stone

there could be an undisturbed royal tomb with its treasure intact.

Now, Howard Carter was an archaeologist

who identified that one of the tombs that seemed to be missing

belonged to a relatively obscure pharaoh called Tutankhamun.

He had ruled for 10 years or so during the New Kingdom

when Egypt was astonishingly rich and powerful.

Very little was known about Tutankhamun.

One of the few places Howard Carter would have been able to find any sign of him

was in Luxor Temple, on the other side of the River Nile.

Raksha is heading there in search of the evidence.

This is the great Colonnade Hall

and it was built during the reign of Tutankhamun.

These vast pillars would have supported a massive roof.

This temple was the St Paul's Cathedral of ancient Egypt,

and Tutankhamun would have come here to take part in religious ceremonies

but few traces of his presence survive.

Helping me find them is Dr Arto Belekdanian.

Hey, Arto. (LAUGHS) Hey.

Very nice to meet you. How are you? Very good.

You're looking very thoughtfully at this statue here.

Yeah. As I should, because it's a very special statue.

This is one of the only three-dimensional figures

that bears the facial features of Tutankhamun.

Oh, so this is extremely rare, then? It really, really is.

We think that he came to the throne around 8, 9 years old

and reigned for as little as 10 years,

which means he died at 18, 19 years old,

so there aren't that many three-dimensional sculptures that preserve his facial features.

And who is this person on the other side of him?

She's got her right hand on his left shoulder.

It's all really rather sweet.

Well, that's the wife of Tutankhamun, Ankhesenamun.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the head's broken

but in other statues, like the one right there, the face is preserved.

They were married early on in his reign, which does mean

they were probably married already

by the time they were 11 years old or so.

Gosh, that young.

And how powerful was he?

Well, Egypt was a superpower.

He would have been one of the most powerful people in the world.

Tutankhamun's enormous empire

stretched from North Africa up into the Middle East.

This teenager ruled over 3 million people.

I want to know about the man behind the mask.

I want to know about his everyday life.

Everything was ritualised.

Everything was an event - so, the king waking up,

an official has to come in to witness this

and then after that he would have had manicures done.

People would have applied sweet-smelling perfumes on his body.

These were all ritualised events.

The tiniest events in a king's life, even getting a haircut.

Ideally speaking, kings were usually fully shaven,

because it was a sign of purity.

But doing that also meant that you can actually wear fashionable wigs,

so for one occasion you'll decide to wear your short hair wig

but then for this other occasion you can wear your long hair wig.

It was a whole fashion thing.

So there's lots of accessorising and grooming going on too.

Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Sounds exhausting. It would have been. That's for sure.

I'm sailing this beautiful boat down the Nile

with a nice little breeze coming from the south west.

The Nile is central to ancient Egypt -

it literally runs like this beautiful green swathe

through the Sahara Desert -

and the Egyptian Empire is formed around it.

John Sergeant has been off getting a taste of what life was like

for the people who worked on this land

and the pharaoh who ruled over them.

In the case of Tutankhamun and the ancient Egyptians,

there was one food that was all-important.

Grain. Wheat and barley.

They turned it into bread to eat and beer to drink

and that formed the basis of their diet,

whether you were a farmer or a pharaoh.

Across much of Egypt, families like the Kalsums still bake bread

using a method that's hardly changed since Tut's time.

I'm going to lend them a helping hand.

OK, how do I do the first bit? Right?

And then what do I do?

No? No.

I'm attempting to make sun bread,

so-called because it's left in the warm sun to rise.

I like the movement. It's terrific, isn't it?

Thousands of years of tradition.

You can't expect to do it in a few minutes, can you?

Egyptian tomb paintings show bread being made in just this way.

And like the ancient Egyptians, I'm pricking the bread with a reed

to help it rise evenly.

Do it all the way around, yeah?

You lift. OK, so here we go.

Look at that. I'm doing this really rather well.

(MAKES NONCOMMITTAL SOUND) (LAUGHS)

You don't...you don't seem to be very convinced.

I don't think I'm convincing you.

Once it's risen, the whole family take the bread

to be baked in a clay oven.

For ordinary Egyptians in Tutankhamun's time,

bread, along with beer, was their staple diet.

Money hadn't been invented, so workers were paid in bread.

A standard day's wage was 10 loaves along with two jugs of beer.

When my bread's ready I'm joined by archaeologist Dr Suzanne Onstine,

who's going to sample it with me.

Nice to meet you. Thank you very much.

I hear you made some bread so I brought the beer. Well, that's excellent.

She's brought beer that's been brewed using an ancient Egyptian method.

I baked this myself.

I'm proud of it. Yeah. It's a lot of work.

What do you think of it?

It's a bit tough? Yeah. It's very dense.

But I've worked on it. I don't want you to run it down, OK?

Very good.

It is good, isn't it? Mm-hm.

Now, is this exactly as it would have been in ancient Egypt?

This would have been more like the bread that elite people

would have eaten because the flour would have had a much better quality.

OK, well, let's have the beer. Where is the beer?

Yes. Alright.

So, the beer, the longer it ferments, the more alcohol it has,

which prevents any kind of bacteria,

which makes beer actually safer than some water sources.

Alright, let's try it. Let's.

We're going to use some straws like ancient people would have

because there is a heavy sediment at the bottom that will be kind of icky.

You want me to go first? Mm.

(LAUGHS) Alright, then, alright. OK.

Mmm. Wow.

It's got a very alcoholic strength but sweet as well.

But undeniably beer - well, beer plus.

Yeah, yeah, glad you enjoy it. Yeah, yeah.

Unlike most of his subjects, Tutankhamun wouldn't have lived on bread and beer alone.

Suzanne's also gathered together some food fit for a pharaoh.

Oh, gosh, this is terrific, isn't it?

This would be for a banquet or would it be for ordinary life?

A meal like this would have been an ordinary thing for King Tut.

An abundance of meats, duck, vegetables, some grain dishes,

like lentils or barley.

We are told that they would send to the palace several thousand loaves every day.

Right. The palace would have been a huge estate of people.

All of these people need to be fed, so when we have those kind of lists

that say 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 loaves of bread are being sent daily,

that industrial bakery working for the king

is really feeding a lot of people, not just the king.

How do we know about this variety?

There's a lot of information in tomb walls,

which have tables piled high with all the kinds of foods tumbled together

as if to suggest the abundance of a table like this.

All this talk of food's making me hungry.

Oh, that's very nice, thank you.

Yeah, a feast for a pharaoh.

At last I get to play Tutankhamun.

I'm sampling a luxurious honey cake.

They have been making cake like this for thousands of years.

This is my first time.

Better be good.

Mmm, that's brilliant.

Mmm. Well done, Tutankhamun. Excellent choice.

DAN: In the months leading up to his death,

Tutankhamun was living a life of luxury at the height of his powers.

But leading up to the discovery of his tomb 3,000 years later,

Howard Carter was still a little-known archaeologist

on what many thought was a hopeless quest.

In the 1920s there was a feeling amongst archaeologists

there was nothing left to find here in the Valley of the Kings.

Carter was seen as a little bit eccentric, bit of an outlier

for suggesting that there was another pharaoh's tomb somewhere here.

But one person believed in Carter's dream -

the wealthy aristocrat Lord Carnarvon.

He had been funding the search for Tutankhamun's tomb.

They identified a patch of ground

that sat between three well established, very well known tombs.

There are the entrances -

there, there, and there's one up there as well.

Now, to find out what led them to this spot,

I paid a visit to Lord Carnarvon's home in England.

Well, it's a classic rainy winter's day in England, a long way from Egypt.

I have come to a place now that has become familiar

to millions of people around the world,

not because of its links to the story of Tutankhamun

but because it is the location for Downton Abbey.

Highclere Castle.

I'm here to meet the current Lady Carnarvon.

That's the best knocker ever.

She's allowing me into their archives.

Has it worked? Oh.

Morning. Hi there.

Dan. Nice to meet you. I'm here for Lady Carnarvon.

Please come in. Sure thing.

Wonderful.

Hi there. I'm Dan. Very nice to see you.

Hi, Dan. Lady Carnarvon. Very nice to meet you.

Lady Carnarvon takes me to the archives, which is filled

with amazing documents chronicling Carter and Carnarvon's obsession with ancient Egypt.

So is it true that they complemented each other's characters nicely,

because Lord Carnarvon was a bit more easygoing, charismatic,

Howard Carter is a bit spikier?

I think Howard Carter was quite a taciturn,

quite a tricky man, but his passionate and intellect

was all directed towards his pursuit of archaeology.

The 5th Earl was passionate about Egypt but much more sociable.

Charismatic. So it worked.

He was a sort of leadership figure and Carter could get on with the hard graft.

Yes.

By early 1922, Carnarvon had been bankrolling Carter's search

in the Valley of the Kings for five years

without any sign of Tut's tomb.

But then Carter made an intriguing discovery.

He marked it on a map.

Is this the map? Phenomenal. This is the map.

At the top it's the Valley of the Kings,

drawn by Howard Carter.

Carnarvon excavations.

Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter exposed these workman's huts in 1921

and this is the tomb of the Great Pharaoh Ramesses VI,

which stretches all the way back, and when this was being dug,

the workmen who were building it lived in these huts just here.

Lord Carnarvon, Howard Carter thought if there were any place

that had not been excavated, it must be there.

Most believed every inch of the Valley of the Kings had been excavated

but the discovery of these ancient huts proved the ground under them

hadn't been touched for thousands of years.

Carter believed if Tut's tomb was anywhere, it would be here.

But Carnarvon had a cash flow problem.

Lord Carnarvon was struggling with his stately overdraft -

which is very familiar! -

and he said to Howard Carter, "We're going to have to stop."

Howard Carter came for a weekend in June 1922

and persuaded Lord Carnarvon to have one more throw of the dice.

One more gig. (CHUCKLES)

By the 1st of November 1922,

Carter had returned to the Valley of the Kings

and started to dig below the ancient workers huts.

Three days later, Carter found a step

and that meant that he'd found a tomb.

It was a momentous discovery

because he knew this ground hadn't been disturbed for over 3,000 years.

The step would have looked quite like this set of steps here.

This is a tomb from further up the Valley of the Kings

from about the same period as Tutankhamun's,

same size and scale, and if we go down here

we'll get a sense of just what Carter found.

As they dug down, 16 steps just like these were revealed.

At the bottom, Carter found the entrance to the tomb itself

had been bricked up and plastered over.

Now, what's very exciting for Carter is that on that plaster

the priests had put seals as they closed it up

and that meant it looked like this door had not been penetrated.

Carter was extremely excited - he immediately wrote to Carnarvon

and said, "At last I have made a wonderful discovery in the Valley,

"a magnificent tomb with seals intact.

"Recovered same for your arrival. Congratulations."

Imagine getting that telegram.

Lord Carnarvon caught a ship and headed for Egypt.

Three weeks later, on the 25th of November 1922,

he arrived in the Valley of the Kings.

Together, Carter and Carnarvon could now break through the sealed doorway.

This is the modern entrance to King Tutankhamun's tomb.

I have never been here before

so I have been looking forward to this moment

ever since I first heard about him as a child.

So, here we go. Very modern.

Steep steps going down and then... Oh, yeah, look down here.

This is it. This would have been the original entrance.

This archway here, that was the sealed door.

They still had their doubts but by this stage

they were sort of letting themselves just dare to believe

that this might be the tomb of King Tut.

So with what must have been extraordinary excitement,

they started breaking through.

Remember that very little was known about this mysterious pharaoh.

They hoped that what they would discover beyond this doorway

would alter all that.

At the time even the identity of Tut's parents wasn't certain.

But today that's all changed -

thanks to DNA tests carried out on the royal mummies,

most held here at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

I'm meeting Dr Ashraf Selim

to discover what's been revealed about Tutankhamun and his family.

We examined approximately 20 mummies

and we found that some of them

are really related to King Tutankhamun by the DNA testing.

Some of his relations are here in the museum?

Oh, yeah, sure. I can show you. OK, let's go.

So who have we got here?

OK, that's the Great Queen Tiye.

She is the grandmother of King Tutankhamun.

Sorry if it's being stupid, but is that her real hair?

Yes.

That's one of the most beautiful mummies in the Egyptian museum. It's astonishing.

So we've got grandmother here with all her hair. Very good. Yes.

Who's next?

The Great Pharaoh Akhenaten, the father of King Tutankhamun.

In here we have bones, just bones. Not a real mummy.

We don't know why it was that but that's what we have in here.

And who else have we got? Which other relatives have we got?

How exciting that you've found all these people. It's remarkable.

And who is this one here?

This is proved by the DNA testing

to be the mother of King Tutankhamun.

Really?

And she's not only his mother, she was his aunt as well.

Yes. Because...

So, Akhenaten's sister? Exactly.

No. Oh, yeah, yeah.

This was common in these days that brothers and sisters get married.

Really? Yes.

That explains the short dynasties.

Oh, yes, yeah.

And the many disease, why they died early in their age.

This incestuous relationship wasn't the only incredible secret revealed

when Tut's DNA was tested.

What other revelation could you glean about Tutankhamun himself?

This was an incidental discovery that King Tut suffered from malaria.

Malaria? Yes.

I'm interested in how he died. Is malaria a possible cause of death? Yes.

What he got was the malignant form, in a sense.

This is the more aggressive type of malaria,

and among the possible theories of cause of death of King Tutankhamun is malaria, yes.

So malaria is one possible explanation for Tut's early death at only 19,

after which he lay almost forgotten under these desert sands

for over 3,000 years,

until the 25th of November, 1922,

when Howard Carter broke through the sealed entrance to the tomb.

As he gets inside, what he finds is this - a gently sloping passage

leading down into the bowels of the earth.

It was filled right to the top with rubble to try and deter tomb robbers.

The techniques they used to clear this passage are still in use.

Now, today excavations in the Valley of the Kings are very rare,

but Raksha has got special access to one that IS happening.

RAKSHA: I'm heading down to one of only two known tombs here in the Valley of the Kings

that hasn't been excavated right back to the bedrock.

The work here has never been filmed before.

Hey! Hey, how are you? Hi, Salima.

Professor Salima Ikram is leading the dig.

So do you want to go in? Yes, absolutely.

Blimey, it's absolutely huge! Not too shabby.

Just as in Tutankhamun's tomb,

this entrance corridor was blocked with rubble.

It must have taken a really long time just to clear this out.

It has been taking a very long time because of course when we came in

it was filled and people were sort of wriggling in on their bellies

and crawling through on top of this debris that just choked the tomb

and, you know, the thinnest people got to go in first, of course.

Do you actually have to physically fill the buckets

and then wander all the way up to the top of the tomb

and then deposit the spoil at the top there?

Yeah. Yeah, we've got a little chain, a fireman's chain, going up.

The excavation is almost complete.

So, the last 20cm of undug dirt in the Valley of the Kings,

at least that we know of.

And then you will finally be stood on the same surface

that people were almost 3,000 years ago.

Yeah, yeah. It will be down to the bedrock. To the floor.

We will be able to see the floor as it originally was.

We know this tomb was originally built for the pharaoh Amenmesse,

who ruled about 120 years after Tut.

Like most other royal tombs, it was looted thousands of years ago.

But a few items were left behind.

You can see a nice bit of pottery coming up there.

It is, and here, see, I know that it doesn't look like much,

but this is one of these jars that are typical of this time period.

They've also unearthed some major finds.

Here is something I think you need to see.

We found a sarcophagus and we've been putting it together.

Good grief. It's absolutely littered with carvings.

Absolutely, yes.

Excitingly, this discovery is one that's rewriting the history of this tomb.

We've got a goddess over here with wings.

There is a snake here and then lots of text.

But the name inscribed into this sarcophagus

isn't that of the tomb's supposed owner, Amenmesse,

but that of his mother, Takhat.

It's now believed this tomb actually belonged to the pharaoh's mum.

So there we are. Gosh, that's fabulous.

Amazing artefacts like this can still only be found

by painstakingly clearing and searching the debris by hand.

I could almost be watching Carter's team

digging out the entrance passage back in 1922.

And that was when they found something disastrous.

As Carter and his team cleared the debris,

they made a very worrying discovery.

They could see broken boxes lying around,

shards of pottery and alabaster.

It became clear that the tomb had been robbed.

The objects seemed to be grave goods dropped by thieves.

Carter was devastated.

It wasn't the undisturbed burial he dreamed of.

Nine metres further down the passage, they discovered another sealed door,

a bunch of rocks with the plaster on the front,

again, with the priestly seals.

But, unfortunately, more signs of grave robbing.

There's a hole that had been made in the top corner of the door

and then had been resealed, replastered over.

Robbers had sneaked in through this hole.

It's now believed this break-in was probably an inside job.

It's possible, extraordinarily,

that the people responsible for robbing this tomb

were the same that actually built it.

Tomb builders were among the tiny number of people

who knew the secret location of the royal tombs

in the Valley of the Kings.

So, suspicion has fallen upon them.

Raksha is headed to a hidden village the tomb builders called home,

Deir el-Medina.

This village is special 'cause the very people who lived here

are believed to be the people who built Tut's tomb.

Dr Dominique Lefevre's excavations are revealing

how their lives compared to Tut's.

They spent about nine days

doing their job in the Valley of the Kings.

And after, they have just one day of rest here.

Gosh, that's hard work, isn't it? Nine days?

Yes. That's crazy.

The tomb builders were highly skilled and valued craftsman.

They lived with their families in large and comfortable homes.

Where are we now?

We are in the bedroom, where everybody,

all the families, can sleep.

Oh, they're huge.

I always thought that

the tomb builders weren't very well looked after,

but, actually, looking at this village,

this has a very high status.

They're quite posh, actually, aren't they?

Nice lifestyles. Everything they need here.

But this would have paled into insignificance

against the opulence of Tut's palaces.

And because of the secrets these villagers knew,

they also lived a very isolated life.

They work in a secret place.

The Pharaohs want to control everything.

That's why the village is totally surrounded by a wall,

because nobody has to know the location of the royal tomb.

It's a bit like having an SAS of tomb builders.

Nobody knows that they're here.

They're not allowed to really meet anybody outside.

Just regulated, I suppose. Yes.

Would you like to meet one of the workers?

Absolutely. So, let's go.

The hill overlooking the village

is peppered with the tombs of the tomb builders.

Dominique is allowing me into one

that's never been open to the public.

Oh, gosh, look at this place!

It's absolutely beautiful.

Yes, it's amazing.

They're building the Pharaoh's tombs.

Of course, they're gonna make their own tombs

really beautiful as well.

This is highly skilled work.

Gosh!

Goes on forever, this.

It's closed to visitors

because, incredibly, some tomb builders are still here.

Wow! Look at that!

Look at that. It's a proper mummy.

Yes. Just casually there.

Oh, there is another one in there. There's many.

There's many. Many rooms.

Good grief! Are these child sarcophaguses?

Yes.

So one of these tomb builders

could be a person who dug Tutankhamun's tomb?

Yes, maybe.

They could also have been the very people who robbed Tut's tomb...

Beautiful.

..maybe to escape their arduous life.

It's dangerous work,

and the average age of death is about 34 years.

So it's a hard life. It was a hard life.

Although tomb builders generally had short lives,

they lived longer than Tut himself.

No record survives

to tell us why the pampered and protected Pharaoh died

at just 19.

But thanks to Carter's discovery, we have his body,

which may give us an answer.

In recent years, modern scientific techniques

have given us a huge amount of new information

about the final days of Tutankhamun.

And all this is really transforming what we know

about this powerful, privileged, young Pharaoh.

Professor Ruhli is part of the team

that CT-scanned Tut's mummified body.

Incredibly, we can now dissect it

using this state-of-the-art virtual autopsy.

This is the most amazing tool I've ever seen in my life.

It's a great tool. It allows us to explore the whole mummy.

You can actually get rid of some of the tissues.

You can just show the bones, the more hard tissue,

and also you can actually cut through the body in different slices.

That's extraordinary.

First I want to know, did the real Tutankhamun

actually look like the beautiful young man

we know from his golden mask?

Let's start with the side of the mummy.

What we see here is that he has a sort of overbite

and also you see his quite special shape of his head.

So, very prominent teeth? Not quite how he's portrayed in his death mask.

This is his Instagram face he's showing the world.

(CHUCKLES)

What can we tell about his state of his health

in the last few days of his life?

There is one area where we should have a close look at,

that's his feet region.

You see here that on the left feet

you have, like, part of the toe missing

in comparison to the right one.

This might be so-called Kohler's disease, which is a bone necrosis,

which actually may have affected his way of walking.

He could have had some pain, some swelling.

Some sort of infections, maybe, related to it.

During his teenage years,

the bones in Tut's foot would have become increasingly weak

and may even have collapsed.

And there's also evidence of a second abnormality.

We also see that they have a bit of a different shape.

On the right hand side we see this one is more flat.

This one is more curved.

So you have this sort of club foot type of thing on the left foot.

So possibly a clubbed foot. And what...?

Again, that would be an issue around mobility, would it?

You basically have the wrist of your foot shown outwards

and that makes you a bit moving in a strange way.

I think if the theory is true,

and he would have had pain and this deformity of the left foot,

he may have been limping and using a stick.

Uncomfortable.

These serious conditions were probably congenital disorders

caused by his family's inbreeding.

That astonishing CT scan

suggests that towards the end of his life,

Tutankhamun was suffering from a number of physical impairments.

He must have spent the last few months, days of his life,

in physical pain.

Tut's life was ending,

but three millennia later

the glories of his tomb were about to be revealed.

At 2pm on Sunday 26 November 1922,

Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon were the end of the entrance tunnel

that they'd excavated, confronted with a sealed doorway,

behind which they thought lay the tomb itself.

Carter took an iron rod

and smashed a small hole in the top left-hand corner.

He took a candle and looked through the hole.

It flickered as the hot air left the tomb.

He peered in.

Lord Carnarvon beside him asked him impatiently,

"Can you see anything?"

And Carter replied, "Yes.

"Wonderful things."

The chamber was crammed

with mysterious and extraordinary objects.

A time capsule containing

everything a Pharaoh would need in the afterlife,

untouched for over 3,000 years.

Ancient tomb robbers had pilfered some small valuables...

..but everything else had been left behind.

It was, and it still is,

the most incredible archaeological discovery ever made.

And what's more, it was only the beginning.

Many of those treasures Carter glimpsed by candlelight

have been brought back together here at the new Grand Egyptian Museum,

where they're undergoing restoration

before they go on show to the public in 2020.

Which means Raksha and I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

to get up close to these archaeological wonders.

Right, Raksha, we're in the holiest of holies here.

We've got labs on either side.

You must be going crazy. What are you going to do first?

I'm champing at the bit, but I'm an archaeologist.

I want to see the organics.

I want to see a glimpse into everyday life,

so I'm heading in that direction.

That's crazy.

I'm going straight for the most precious objects in the tomb.

It's all about the bling with you. You better believe it.

I'm now in the most high secure area of this new facility

and it's incredibly exciting

because I'm about to come face to face

with King Tutankhamun's treasures.

They're in this room here.

It's known as the magazine, and I cannot wait.

Right - code.

Not going to let you see this. (KEYPAD BEEPS)

(DOOR CLICKS) Excellent.

Here we go.

Hassan. Hello, Dan.

Hi, there. I'm Dan. How do you do?

What...what a collection.

In this one store room

are hundreds of objects discovered in Tutankhamun's tomb.

I know it's a cliche

but this stuff looks like it's almost new, lots of it.

It's astonishing the quality of the craftsmanship

but also the nature of its preservation.

And yet it is thousands of years old.

It's actually, it's moving being here amongst these. Oh!

I recognise so many of these. I've seen them in books.

I've seen them in archives. Yes.

There's one of the sandals of the King Tutankhamun.

These are the sort of, the ceremonial sandals. Yes.

And you've got other objects. The head rest there.

Yes.

That's carved, obviously hand-carved.

So ornate, so meticulous. I love all that detail.

Oh, my goodness. This is extraordinary.

The boats! I mean, I'm a sucker for a boat, but look at those.

They are absolutely beautiful up there.

It's not just bling in here.

There are ranks of shelves and drawers

filled with extraordinary objects

that allow us a glimpse into the private life of Tutankhamun.

What have we got in here? You just don't know what you're going to find when you open them!

That's a pad for the writing. Wow.

And here...

..the pens and the colours. Yeah.

Wow. What's this here?

Can we look at this box? Yes, of course.

Is this his, uh...his cosmetics?

His wash bag?

That's what makes this collection so extraordinary.

It's the personal items, isn't it? Yes.

Would one of these be a razor?

So what is that?

Put inside here the colour, black colour,

and use this stick.

Ah! The kohl.

The make-up. The make-up.

The guyliner.

This is the object used to apply Tutankhamun's iconic eye make-up.

Each of these drawers, each of these boxes,

would be a...a lifetime highlight to discover as an archaeologist,

and there's thousands of them.

Lovely, Hassan. Thank you.

Over in the organics lab,

I'm seeing something even more intimate than Tut's make-up.

This piece, it's linen cloth,

is underwear for the King.

What?!

Hang on. This is King Tutankhamun's loin cloth?

Loin cloth.

That's unbelievable!

It's, like, such fine quality.

I didn't think that I'd be seeing his pants today.

This is very personal.

Very personal. Yeah.

We discovered about 145 piece.

145 loin clothes? Yes. Yes.

Wow. That's excessive. Some might say, yeah.

Conservator Manar Elkhial is working on something just as intriguing.

Do you want me to open this end?

Uh, no. Just wait because they are very delicate. OK, I'll wait. I'll wait.

We have to deal with them with very much care.

This is one of the most fragile discoveries from the tomb.

That's absolutely unbelievable.

It's a bouquet of leaves,

which astonishingly survived 3,000 years under the desert.

You can't really see that they're a bouquet anymore.

It just looks like a mass of leaves.

But for me, this is absolutely stunning,

because in the UK, if we have any organic materials,

which is very rare, it's normally in waterlogged things.

So for me to actually see this,

it's...it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Yeah. It's brilliant.

Yeah.

In yet another lab,

they're working on some of the most famous treasures of all.

This is the wood laboratory, and right here in the middle of it,

look at these extraordinary funerary beds.

These are iconic pieces of art,

which everyone associates with Tutankhamun's tomb,

supported by these beautifully carved

and covered in gold leaf gods from Ancient Egypt.

And this one here

is the first thing that Howard Carter saw

when he peered into Tutankhamun's tomb on that fateful day.

And I think I'm almost excited as he was at that moment.

And what's so special at the moment is because they're being conserved, they're all in here together.

And in just a matter of months,

these are going to be stuck in a glass box,

inches-thick bulletproof glass,

with about a billion tourists looking at them every day,

and yet I can get up close and personal to them,

and there's no-one else around, really.

What a privilege.

These incredible treasures were found by Carter

in just the first chamber of the tomb.

But there were yet more rooms to discover,

including the greatest prize,

the burial chamber itself,

filled with the most wondrous objects of all.

It was a huge privilege to get up so close to those amazing treasures.

Raksha, you were in your element.

I was like a kid in a sweet shop.

I couldn't believe that these were 3,000 years old.

It was like they were made yesterday.

How about you, John? It's fascinating.

And all that beer drinking - wonderful.

Some might think you're on holiday, John.

Certainly beats working for a living.

We will be continuing our countdown

to Tutankhamun being buried in his secret chamber,

but also to Howard Carter rediscovering it

over 3,000 years later.

All that to look forward to. Goodbye.

Bye-bye. Goodbye.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2020