Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Why were the ancients so interested in the motion

of the stars?

Why was cosmology sacred to the ancients?

Pondering the history of Ancient Egypt,

we typically think of the mysteries of the pyramids

and the grandeur of the temples.

But where did it all start?

Do we know how long ago the ancients

began tracking the stars?

Could there be lost worlds buried beneath the sands?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Cosmology is the study of the universe in its totality.

We think of cosmology as science,

whereas the Egyptians considered it sacred.

>>There's one thing we know about the ancient Egypt

for certainty, is that they observed the star Sirius.

We are sure when they speak of that star.

>>Everything that comes out of the ancient world

has to have a spiritual and metaphysical base.

>>The ancients-- and the ancient Egyptians,

in particular, but probably ancient civilizations,

more generally-- saw themselves-- humanity, us-- as

tied in with the bigger environment,

the cosmos, the bigger picture.

>>They built monuments in alignment.

But what for?

And do their belief systems have validity today?

>>If we want to decode Egyptian symbolism,

we should look for clues in the ancient language

that Hakim learned as a child from his elders

living along the Band of Peace.

Looking at the many images left by the Egyptians,

we have assumed that they were obsessed with death.

Turning to the ancient Suf language,

however, we learn that they didn't even

have a word for death.

They called it "westing."

>>We have no word the death in our culture-- no word "death."

And to express this operation of death,

we say "westing"-- going towards west,

like the Sun rise from the east, and westing.

So there is no word "death" here.

Well, they believe in resurrection.

If the Sun sets in the west, the resurrection

happen the next day, when the Sun rise in the next day.

So the deceased believe that it's just like the Sun.

>>The Egyptians obviously had a very different world view

from ours today.

They believed in the afterlife and the soul's immortality.

>>Was it possible at all that they

had found some sort of science of immortality, for example,

we call it.

As crazy as it may seem, they seem

to be very, very convinced that they

knew how to send the king to his cosmic world.

Those stellar gods-- of whom the king believed

that he, himself, would become one stellar god

after his death-- constructed monuments and performed rituals

that mimicked the events that they saw in the sky.

It sounds against all the tenets of our scientific beliefs.

But we have to see why they were so convinced.

The ancient Egyptians perceived the land

as a cosmic environment, that it followed

the activities of the sky.

Because they believed them to be running in parallel.

And they had reasons to believe that.

One of the main reasons was the cycles of the Nile.

The Nile was the lifeblood of Egypt,

and it performed a cycle, which followed

the cycle of the Sun and the stars.

It's not surprising at all that they associated

the reappearance of the stars with the rebirth of the Nile.

Essentially, this star religion, if you like,

boiled down to one important aspect--

that it somehow could help the king become a spiritual being

and return to the cosmic world in a specific place

with Orion, and so forth.

How they thought they were going to do

it is by looking very, very carefully at what

happened to the stars.

The stars perform a annual cycle that those

who've seen this in Orion give us

a curious cycle in that they disappear.

Or they appear to disappear.

But if you watch a star over the course of the year,

you'll find that there comes a time when

it is very low in the west at time of sunset.

So the Sun sets.

And as it gets dark, the star appears just

for a few seconds over the west.

If you come the next day, you would not see that star.

And for 70 days or so, the star has gone.

It seems to have gone under the Earth.

But after those 70 days, it appears by this time at dawn,

rising just before the Sun, which we call the heliacal

rising, whereas the Egyptian called

it the rebirth of the star.

So in their mind, something happened.

In their mind, the star went in the underworld, stayed

in the underworld for 70 days, and then, by magic, popped

up again-- was reborn again in the east.

That's the Pyramid Texts.

The Pyramid Texts mimic this cycle.

>>At the ancient site of Saqqara,

we find the Pyramid Texts, the oldest known religious texts

in the world.

Covering the inner walls of these small pyramids

are thousands of hieroglyphs showing knowledge

of celestial mechanics and cycles of time.

Although we've come a long way in our understanding

of hieroglyphs, it is possible that many layers

of meaning in the symbols remain hidden-- until now.

When we approach hieroglyphics, we

do so from our own point of view.

And we assume that the letters of our alphabet

correspond with certain hieroglyphs.

There are 4,000 Egyptian hieroglyphs, but only

26 letters.

In order to crack the code, we need

to open our minds to different levels of meaning.

>>I think it's just a familiarity with the way

modern languages work.

No one expects that a word would work differently.

Our mindset is that a letter is the carrier of a kinetic value,

and that a word is a carrier of a concept.

To understand the Egyptian words,

you have to start from the approach

that the letter is the carrier of the concept.

And the word is an extended sentence.

There are nuances of meanings to the words

that you don't get if you don't understand

what the individual glyphs mean.

For instance, there's an Egyptian word

that is translated as "diving duck."

But when you read the glyphs, it really

reads, "pool of water, place of diving duck."

>>In 1822, French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion

and British scientist Thomas Young

deciphered the hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone.

The stone was created in 196 BC.

It showed the same text in hieroglyphic, Greek,

and demotic Egyptian on the one tablet.

Scholars have used Champollion's translations

as the basis for deciphering hieroglyphs.

Could Champollion have missed subtleties or even withheld

some information?

>>One biographical study of Champollion

said that he delayed for a very long period of time

before producing his translation because

in the words of the study, he clung stubbornly to the idea

that an Egyptian glyph might mean something more

than just a phonetic value.

>>Laird Scranton is a computer software engineer

who has interpreted a new aspect of hieroglyphics.

His research is revolutionizing the way hieroglyphic

is understood.

>>Basically, Egyptian hieroglyphic words

work more like an acronym in English-- like the phrase FYI

or an acronym such as CIA or CBS--

where anyone who reads English understands

that you don't try to pronounce this word.

This is not a word that you're going to read for its meaning,

in terms of the letters all put together.

It's one letter at a time stands for one word at a time.

And you put the words together to get the meaning.

>>If we think of each hieroglyphic word

as an acronym, rather than having a phonetic value,

a new layer of interpretation appears.

Hieroglyphs reveal in symbolic terms the way

the ancient Egyptians thought the universe works.

>>I can show that certain key glyph shapes came out

of cosmology, which describes how the universe was created.

And because the shapes came out of cosmology,

it makes sense that the meanings that attach to the shape

are associated with cosmology, also.

They would have meanings related to the creation

of the universe.

Once you agree that the Sun glyph means what it means--

and that's all traditional meanings-- it's

hard to argue that the word "month" doesn't say,

the moon makes an orbit.

Or it's hard to argue that the word "year" doesn't say, time

of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

>>The ancient Egyptians were almost obsessive keepers

of records.

And one thing that they observed most was the celestial objects.

But we'd expect them to pay attention and record.

Now how far back-- that's a big question.

Well, we now have some sites that go at least 6,000

or 7,000 years before.

There's a megalithic site that has

been found in the early '70s, but not

understood until lately, that has astronomical language.

And strangely, the astronomical language that it has

are precisely the ones you find in the Pyramid Age.

So Orion, Sirius, the summer solstice-- they're all there.

It's no more theory.

We have evidence that they did it.

>>For decades, author Robert Bauval

has been studying the alignment of Egyptian monuments

to key stars.

>>Muhammad's out guide.

We've come here.

And what we're trying to do is get to the Nabta Playa.

The most important thing is we get there.

>>Yeah.

>>He is now planning an expedition across the desert

to a site called Nabta Playa, 100 kilometers west of the Nile

and 30 kilometers north of the Sudanese border.

It is the location of Egypt's oldest astronomical measuring

device.

>>And when we're there, how do you know we're there?

It's all desert.

>>Yes, it's desert.

Every place here in Western Desert, I know it.

>>If you can, we're going to need a GPS.

>>Yeah.

>>If you can get one.

>>Yes, I have one.

>>That makes me feel a lot happier.

>>The team finds out that permits from Cairo

have been delayed.

>>Now we wait.

You tell us we wait for the answer from Cairo.

So in the meanwhile, let's go and see the sights.

Let's go and see some of the temples here.

>>OK.

>>Let's do it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The key to decoding Egypt is in the alignments

of the temples, which changed in different epochs

to match the majestic drift of the procession of the stars.

>>We're now here at the Karnak Temple in Luxor.

On this wall, we can see the ritual

of the stretching of the cord.

On the right-hand side is the goddess, Seshat.

She's represented by a priestess holding a rope and a mallet.

On the other side is the pharaoh.

There's the cord looking between them.

And what they're doing is that they're

aligning the monuments to the stars.

>>We know from inscriptions at the Temple of Karnak

that they aligned monuments with the circumpolar stars,

principally, the Big Dipper.

>>They also aligned to the stars of Orion, very similarly

to what we also have at Nabta.

The Karnak Temple, the very center

of Egyptian religious activity, is

aligned to the sunrise at the winter solstice.

So as we look down the axis this way, on the winter solstice,

the Sun will rise along the axis.

And in the summer solstice, it will

be aligned with the sunset of the summer.

So as we have at the Nabta Playa,

and the circle of the calendrical circle, where there

is the summer solstice alignment,

here we have another example of the similar alignment

3,000 years later.

>>On the expedition into the open desert,

Robert Bauval hopes to see for himself

that these alignments exist in the remote region of Nabta

Playa.

The team prepares by mapping a route they will access via GPS.

Jeeps are equipped with supplies for the dangerous journey.

The team arrives at the first stop on their journey

through history.

In the heart of the El Kharga Oasis

lies a Christian settlement dating back

to the third century AD.

Original paint graces the ceiling of the chapel,

telling the stories of Adam and Eve.

>>What is important here is that at Nabta, we

have a settlement that is 6,000 BC, at least.

And here, we have a Roman settlement,

which is of the first-- second century.

Surely, the people here were aware of some sort

of origins in the desert.

They must've moved around here.

And this is a big world that anthropologists

have to get into-- cultural anthropologists-- people who

understand how to look for clues within a lost culture.

We're looking for a lost culture.

And it could be the origins of our civilization.

That's what we're talking about here.

>>Off in the distance, the Christian settlement

can be seen.

In the valley below, we can see the old riverbed

of the Nile, which has migrated over 60 kilometers to the east.

How many thousands of years would it

take to wind back the geological time

clock to when the Nile flowed here?

>>The Nile we know there was here.

>>Yeah.

>>Before, we didn't know.

Realize what this is.

Almost surely, the ideas of these people--

their beliefs, the way they look at the stars, the way

they look at the Sun, the way they buried people--

comes from here through.

Influenced the following civilization.

Imagine 2,000 years ago.

It was a Roman garrison, with Centurians walking about,

and priests, and Roman ladies in carriages.

And it's amazing to think that this was like this.

People have been here for thousands of years.

We know that.

But now you have to show us caves.

You're going to show us prehistoric caves, where there

are drawings that tell us that people were here

even longer than we thought-- maybe 10,000, maybe 15,000

years ago.

And that's incredible.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Now we're on a 30-40-meter-high dune,

right in the middle of the path of the road.

The old road, as you can see-- it's quite amazing.

The old road actually strikes a dune.

This is a new dune.

It's been formed, what, in the last 30 years or so.

It shows you how the sand moves fast.

>>The team test the Jeeps in the open desert

by heading off to an ancient desert monastery.

Along the way, the team stumbles across a large outcropping

of stone with obviously layers of stratification.

The guide tells the team that the area is an ancient ocean

bed.

There is water-like ripples, and seashells are still

embedded in the hard rock, indicating

a vast change in geology and climate

over the past several thousand years.

>>That is very petrified timber that's

from a much later period.

But you can see the shells here.

The shell is encrusted.

They're millions of years old.

We're walking on terrain that is millions of years old.

>>The Western Desert today is rainless.

But in the past, it received as much as 500 millimeters

of precipitation per year.

There were permanent lakes, large springs,

and seasonal streams.

The most recent wet period was between 130,000 and 70,000

years ago.

Then, it was thorn brush savanna.

At that time, the area supported many large animals:

gazelles, giraffes, buffalo, camels, and antelopes.

After that period, it was hyper arid until 12,000 or 13,000 BC.

Before 12,000 years ago, the summer tropical monsoons

reached southern Egypt.

Precipitation was limited and fell mostly

during the summer months.

It was sufficient to support small animals and cattle.

The small animals could live off the dew.

The climate resulted in highly mobile human populations.

There are ancient cave paintings in a remote location that

may provide clues to human settlements

from the distant past.

Is this crucial evidence being protected

by Egyptian authorities?

>>It's terrible.

It's priceless prehistoric evidence.

Look here.

What's this?

A dog or a gazelle.

A man-- do you see the man here?

He's wearing pharaonic clothes.

It's terrible what scribbles are over.

The evidence that we're looking for

is being destroyed by irresponsible people coming

here.

The site is unprotected.

And the irony is that people who are responsible

are prevented from coming here and driven crazy

with licenses, and papers, and-- look here.

Oh, there's a beautiful Hathorian cow.

Look at this.

This is an artist.

This is not a primitive carver.

>>Predynastic Egyptian belief systems

originated with cattle cults linked to the Nile.

A cow was seen as the mother of the the Sun.

Cattle were deified and were considered

earthly representatives of the gods, an enduring

ideology with Hathor as the center figure.

Images of bulls were shown with depictions of stars.

And this dates to before predynastic Egypt.

Cattle pasturalists were in the Sahara

several thousand years before predynastic Egypt.

Gilf Kebir, which means "large plateau,"

is another large ceremonial center a further 600 kilometers

west, near the borders of Libya, the Sudan, and Egypt.

The cave of the swimmers-- made famous by the movie,

"The English Patient," is located here.

Prehistoric rock art shows people and their cattle.

Since Gilf Kebir is 600 kilometers away,

it seems as though cattle cults were

prevalent throughout North Africa in ancient times.

Could this be another clue that the nomadic tribes

were connected?

Could they have influence the ancient Egyptians?

Arriving at the monastery, we can

see it has never been accessible by road.

Once occupied by Christians, it lies upon an ancient camel

trail, 40 days from its closest neighboring site.

It still shows evidence of having been an oasis,

with a huge acacia tree that is more than 800 years old.

The team has a picnic on a carpet of yellow acacia

flowers.

>>This is a wonderful oasis.

I'm very pleased.

We tested the cars.

Everything's working fine.

The drivers are fine.

And it was a good idea to come and rest here.

I needed the rest.

Because after all this tense of waiting for the permits,

everything is ready.

The permits are ready?

>>Yeah, but you must be to leaving now,

this place, to go to the hotel, and stay overnight.

And then we start tomorrow up early at 3 AM morning.

>>I'm ready.

>>Yes, I know you're ready.

But you don't know it's a hard way, hard, hard way

to arrive to Abu Simbel.

>>Let's do it.

We wait a long time.

Let's do it.

Let's have a good night's sleep.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>The team gets an early start, armed with long-awaited permits

granted by the Supreme Council of Antiquities

and the Egyptian Army.

They will enter the dangerous region of the Western Desert,

to the south of El Kharga Oasis.

>>Well, after days of waiting and of uncertainty,

we're finally on the road.

We've got the permits.

And we're ready to go out in the desert to Nabta.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

>>[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

>>After driving south for hours along an old road covered

by occasional sand dunes, there is nervousness in the air.

The team will be traveling blind in the open desert

for the last part of the journey, relying solely on GPS

equipment to locate the ancient site of Nabta Playa.

>>Yeah, I would--

>>No, this is very good.

This is going to tell us.

>>See, we can do this.

>>No.

>>I'm sure.

>>That's good.

>>What clues will be uncovered at Nabta Playa?

How have these influences drifted

across the African continent?

More than 3,000 kilometers further west in Mali,

there is a living culture with a surprisingly similar world

view to that of the ancient Egyptians.

The Dogon live in Mali, largely in isolation.

Studies of the Dogon culture mirror the ideology

of the ancient Egyptians with uncanny precision.

>>I realized through my Dogon studies

that there were relationships between Dogon words

and Egyptian words.

And I noticed that Dogon drawings turned up

as glyphs in those Egyptian words.

>>Laird Scranton's radical reinterpretation

of Egyptian hieroglyphs came directly

from his studies of Dogon cosmological symbols.

Their priests use cosmological drawings-- symbols

they have used for thousands of years.

While it is impossible to ask the ancient Egyptians

to explain their beliefs, Dogon priests

can explain their cosmology and how

their symbols are written and pronounced.

>>The Dogon lay things out in such detail

that it's like having the teacher's

copy of the manual of the book you're

studying, with the answers to the questions written down

in the back.

You can go to a Dogon priest, or you

can go to the anthropological studies that

were taken in relation to the Dogon priests,

and they flat out tell you what their symbol means

and what they're trying to talk about.

The general pattern I could say is that Dogon cosmology

tells us how a concept should be expressed--

how the words should be pronounced,

what multiple levels of meaning the word

should be associated with, and what kind of a drawing

it should be associated with.

That predicts for us what we ought to find in Egypt.

And so when I go to Egyptian studies,

I look at the Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary,

or go to a book about Egyptian cosmology,

sure enough, I find the same word

expressing the same meanings, written

with the same drawing or the same drawn character.

And I say, I've got a match.

>>How is it possible that the Dogon culture

in present-day Mali is connected to the ancient Egyptians?

What is the link?

>>The Dogon seem to have come out of a class of priests

who had very specialized knowledge

and who, for one reason or another,

were not happy with the way things were going in Egypt

and deliberately left.

I would say that sounds like it's true.

I can't prove it's true, but it doesn't

contradict anything I know.

The fact that there's a match between the Dogon drawing

and the Egyptian glyph in the context of the same word--

pronounced the same way, carrying the same meanings--

is just another level of validation

that I'm on the right track-- that these words really

do correspond to each other.

>>Using this new interpretation of hieroglyphic,

what can we learn about the ancient Egyptian view

of sacred cosmology?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>I had some concerns originally,

as I began writing some of the books,

about what right did I have to be revealing secrets that

had been kept for 3,000 years.

But when I realized that cosmology is about science--

it's about the creation of matter and things like that--

and I realized how close our science is right now

to being caught up with what the ancient cosmology seemed

to know, I realized that if anybody's going

to get any benefit out of it at all,

that it has to come out now.

It can't wait any longer.

We're only about 50 years away from discovering all the things

that I've found in the Dogon and Egyptian cosmology.

>>Is it possible the ancient Egyptian cosmology

was more advanced than today's science?

>>I'd say there is information in the ancient cosmology that

would be a benefit to the string theorists

and to the modern cosmologists if they'd pay attention to it.

I think the Dogon and the Egyptians

explain to us how it is that a mere act of perception

can cause the wavelike behavior of matter

to turn into particles, that scientists don't know.

When you ask Stephen Hawking how many fundamental particles

there are, he says, more than 200.

If you ask a Dogon priest, he says 266.

>>Science is on the verge of understanding things

that ancient civilizations seemed to know long ago.

How is this possible?

>>You're very, very close-- within a couple

of hundred meters.

>>The excitement builds for the real destination

of the expedition-- the ancient site of Nabta Playa.

>>Is that it?

>>Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>>Here we have this bunch of huge megaliths

that they dragged from God knows where and placed in a pattern--

a sort of center point of the whole area.

It's essential that we do not disturb

the stones-- we not touch anything.

We just look at them.

Because the alignments are there,

and they've been there for thousands of years undisturbed.

And we can use them to date this place.

>>A group of archaeologists led by Fred Wendorf, called

the Combined Prehistoric Expedition, by chance

found some pottery shards at Nabta Playa.

They thought that the megaliths were just outcrops of rock.

And then they started to realize, well,

these are sitting on top of playa sediments-- sediments

that were built up during the Neolithic time.

And so how did they get there?

So they had to get there from man.

These are man-made objects, these megaliths.

One of the possible links to Egypt before the pharaohs

is that Nabta Playa became climatically hyper

arid, like it is today, around 3800 BC,

and it has not been lived at or used since.

>>It has been assumed by historians

that Egypt borrowed its complex society from Mesopotamia.

However, it is now generally recognized

that a process of social complexity

is not diffused from one location to another

but, rather, develops locally.

>>3400 BC is when you see predynastic cultures building

up on the Nile Valley, just 100 kilometers east of Nabta Playa.

If that's the case, then a lot of

the great dynastic Egyptian stuff we're all familiar with

had some aspect of origin in the Nabta Playa people's

cultural development.

>>Dr. Nicole Douek is an Egyptologist

who lectures at the British Museum

and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

By strange coincidence, she happened

to be at Nabta Playa on the same day as our team.

>>From what I understand from her,

she also believes that this could

be the source of Egyptian civilization.

>>This is just amazing.

I've wanted to come here since the first publications came

out.

>>What are the odds of meeting on the same day?

>>None.

>>Exactly.

>>The coincidences, for me, are astonishing.

Last year, the same people-- we went to Gilf Kebir and Uweinat.

We spent two days roaming around Karkur Talh

and looking at the graffiti, and all the bovids, and the cattle,

and the people moving around with their animals.

And it's the same dates as here.

>>These people had what today we'd call a calendar.

They'd use the position of the Sun

to mark the specific days of the year.

And the main stations of the year, of course,

are the summer solstice, the winter solstice,

and the two equinoxes.

No doubts they tracked the Sun through the year.

And therefore, they had a calendar.

>>This structure may not appear significant above ground.

Looking beneath the surface reveals an enigma.

>>These complex structures are the most enigmatic remaining

aspects of Nabta Playa.

When they estimated the central one--

the largest one-- underneath the surface, down in the playa

sediments-- the playa sediment is about 10 feet deep--

they found this megalithic sculpture.

Some people call it the Cow Stone.

It has, perhaps, a vague resemblance to a cow.

But it also seems, maybe, to have an astronomical meaning,

because it's in this astronomical complex.

And then underneath the sculpted stone,

on the bedrock-- underneath all the sediments

that were laid down earlier-- they

found another sculpture sculpted out of the living bedrock,

sort of like the Sphinx is sculpted out

of the bedrock itself.

>>The bedrock sculpture was carved,

and sediment filled it in over thousands of years.

Then the Cow Stone was carved and placed there.

And then sediment filled it in again.

We are looking at three subsurface layers of sediment.

This is a clue to the extreme age of Nabta Playa.

>>What makes all this far more exciting

is that they also align to stars.

Now that's a totally different ballgame here.

Because aligning to stars means that they tracked the seasons.

The climatic conditions were very important to them.

There was the beginning of the monsoons.

And therefore, the stars would be the signal to them

that the monsoons had started.

They would start migrating here.

And they would arrive here when the water-- the monsoons,

the rainfalls-- had filled the lakes.

It was essential that they get here when the lakes have water.

It would have been a fatal mistake had they come here

20 or 30 days before the event.

From the central complex radiates

three series of lines east and a series of lines north.

According to Wendorf and the check-ups by Rophie,

we've got alignments to the rising of certain stars

here and here.

>>A double alignment of blocks 250 meters long

points to the brightest stars in the belt of Orion.

The second line points to the rising position of Sirius.

Another long line of stones aligns to the brightest star

of the Big Dipper, which later Egyptians represented

as a cow thigh or leg.

The stelli faced the circumpolar region

of the heavens, which the Pyramid Texts describe

as a place where the stars never die.

>>They've got Orion's Belt and Sirius.

What's interesting is that they seem to be tracking them,

not just aligning to.

But they seem to be tracking them over the movement,

over the long period of time.

>>So they knew the stars moved.

And they knew that the Sun moved the same every year,

on an annual cycle.

Maybe the whole ceremonial complex

had something to do with the Age of Gemini and transition

to the Age of Taurus.

>>The constellation of Taurus is represented by a bull.

If we are talking about the transition

to the Age of Taurus, was the symbolism

of cows in Ancient Egypt connected

to the nomadic cattle cults prevalent in the area?

>>So astronomy is telling us that there's a link.

Now we need the anthropologists and the Egyptologists

to find that link.

>>The problem is that most of these disciplines

are so entrenched in their own little world

that it's very difficult to move people one side or the other.

I don't know how it is in the United States,

but in Britain, everyone is in his own little world.

And people who deal with texts won't

talk to people who deal with sites in the same discipline.

>>It's becoming more than obvious now--

>>I think it is.

>>That there are--

>>There are connections.

>>Connections.

>>Of course there are.

And they're very, very important connections.

Because there are no other answers, for the moment,

anyway.

And this is as good as any.

>>Yeah.

>>Better.

[MUSIC PLAYING]