Original subtitles

Welcome to Egypt.

We're in the mighty temple of Karnak in Luxor.

Now, in Tutankhamun's time, Luxor was known as Thebes

and it was the biggest city

in the vast empire that he ruled over like a living god.

3,300 years ago, the teenage King

was sealed in his treasure-filled tomb

and there he laid undisturbed

until he was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter.

JOHN SERGEANT: We've been exploring how Tutankhamun died

and how Carter's excavations

revealed the greatest archaeological discovery ever made.

DAN SNOW: This time...

It's coming off, here we go.

..I discover there's something very suspicious

about Tutankhamun's burial treasures.

This coffin over here, this seems a bit different facially,

which suggests it wasn't intended for Tutankhamun.

RAKSHA DAVE: I examine the astonishing items

that may well have been used in his mummification.

WOMAN: We think that this was tied into Tutankhamun.

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

And I'm the first person to see brand-new 3-D scans

shedding fresh light on the mysteries of Tut's tomb.

WOMAN: Tutankhamun's burial was very much rushed.

Someone wanted him to be buried very quickly.

JOHN SERGEANT: While my Strictly days

are not over just yet.

No, no, John. (LAUGHS) What's wrong with that?

So, join us as we count down the final days

before the death, burial and rediscovery of Tutankhamun.

The Valley of the Kings -

for 500 years the sacred burial place of ancient Egypt's pharaohs.

In 1323 BC,

another would be laid to rest here,

because 19-year-old Tutankhamun was close to death,

suffering from malaria and bone necrosis.

Then, in this weakened state he broke his leg.

The broken bone never healed.

Tutankhamun simply wasn't strong enough to survive the trauma.

Chances are the wound would have become infected

and he was unable to fight it off.

Within a week of breaking his leg,

the teenage Pharaoh was dead.

It was a tragically early death.

The death of any pharaoh in ancient Egypt had huge repercussions.

They were an absolute monarch.

They had the power of life and death over their subjects.

They were a semi-divine figure!

And in the case of Tutankhamun, that would be particularly so.

Who could have expected the death

of this 19-year-old, in the prime of life?

And he was childless.

This lack of a clear successor

means there would have been a state of political turmoil

while preparation for Tut's elaborate mummification and burial began.

And it's thanks to that process

that over 3,000 years later, I can meet the 'Boy King',

because his body still lies in his tomb.

And here he is. King Tutankhamun.

It is astonishing

that I can come face to face

with a ruler who lived

more than 1,000 years

before Jesus Christ.

There are hints of individuality here.

You can see he seems to have slightly bucked teeth.

Perhaps I'm just fooling myself,

but you get a sense of what he might have looked like in real life.

He is still, after all these millennia...

..I think, recognisable as a real person.

That is thanks to the process of mummification -

a complex procedure devised by the ancient Egyptians

to keep bodies looking lifelike.

The process of preserving the body

would have started as quickly as possible,

and that's partly because here in Egypt, it's so hot

that corpses putrefy very fast.

The procedure would have begun within a few days of Tut's death

and taken up to 70 days to complete.

Now, extraordinarily, the materials used

in the mummification process for Tutankhamun

have actually been found in this valley.

Raksha has been given special access

to have a look at this astonishing discovery.

RAKSHA: In 2005, just a few metres from Tut's tomb,

archaeologists found a chamber.

It was the first new discovery in the Valley of the Kings

since 1922.

No-one has been into it for 10 years.

Hey, Salima.

So nice to see you again.

Lovely to see you again. How are you?

But Professor Salima Ikram is allowing me inside.

So, shall we go and explore? Yeah.

First foot on the rung.

I'm going down.

The chamber is at the bottom of a five-metre vertical shaft.

So, was this absolutely chock-full with debris, then?

There was debris in the shaft and then

all of this was filled in with objects.

So, it was a bit like what Howard Carter found

when he went into Tutankhamun's tomb,

except there was no bling here.

But it's quite a small place, so a body wouldn't have been in here, would it?

Actually, no. Although I'm calling it a tomb, it's not.

This chamber is really an embalming cache.

It was filled with coffins and jars, but none of them contained a body.

But they did contain materials used in mummification

dating to the time of Tut.

These items were so sacred they were buried here in the valley.

I thought you'd like to see

some of the artefacts that we found in KV63.

Amazingly, I'm getting to see them.

It's the first time they've ever been filmed.

All of the things in KV63 had something to do with mummification.

So, basically, mummification is all about desiccation.

So, you cut open the body from the left side,

you remove the internal organs -

the lungs, the liver, the intestines and the stomach.

The heart's supposed to stay in the body.

Then you wash it all out, dry it.

And then you bury it in natron

and that is a naturally occurring mixture

of salt and baking soda, basically,

which is found in the Wadi El Natrun in Egypt.

There were bags and bags of natron.

Oh, look at that! So, this is naturally occurring?

And it defats and desiccates.

So, it's just like you were, you know,

curing meat and you put it in salt.

So, you make these bags and you pop them into the body

and it desiccates you from inside.

So, it sucks all the liquid out.

Mm-hm. And then?

And then your body is entirely buried in natron.

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

Lovely, yeah?

What's interesting is we think

that this was tied into Tutankhamun's time period.

A lot of the materials,

like all the pottery jars and some of the coffins,

are all about the same date.

Could some of this belong to Tutankhamun?

'Cause KV63 is really linked in

to the Tutankhamun burial and time period.

It's incredible.

I could be holding something used in Tut's mummification.

Salima's going to show me how that mummification process worked.

Oh, it's so hot out here. Don't know how you do it.

Now, we're not going to do a real body.

Oh, that's a shame. I know.

No-one offered themselves up and so we have a bit of steak.

A rather whiffy bit of steak. It has become so.

We are going to bury the steak in natron.

It's soaking up my sweat rather nicely.

It's very good. Yeah, it'll dry you out really well.

Here's our steak. So, think of that as being...

The body. The body.

Do you want to? Yeah, I do.

Feel free. Feel free.

In your body, there's little bags of natron put in.

You are buried like the steak is buried.

Then it stays like this.

Now, of course, for a human being, it's 40 days.

The process for a steak only takes a week.

So we don't have to wait,

Salima has brought along one that's already dehydrated.

See? Oh, that is pretty cool.

It's really hard.

She can now show me the next stage of the process - the wrapping.

So, what is this? This is tree resin.

Sort of frankincense and myrrh

like the Kings brought for the baby Jesus.

But smells a lot nicer than the meat, right?

Oh, a whole heap nicer.

This sweet-smelling resin

was applied between each layer of wrapping.

During Tut's wrapping,

over a hundred pieces of precious jewellery

were placed on his body and between the bandages.

Now, while this was happening, there's incense burning,

priests are chanting and this is done slowly.

So, Tutankhamun would've gone through this process?

Yes, except he had so much resin,

more than his predecessors or his successors.

He had gloops of it and, in fact, the mask had so much resin,

the head was really well stuck in.

The quantity of resin used wasn't the only highly unusual thing

about Tut's mummification.

Tutankhamun had a completely wacko mummification.

In what way?

Most people have a small embalming cut,

and his is a large one, like a big slash.

Some people think that maybe he died away from home unexpectedly,

so they didn't have any of the embalmers,

so they tried to do a quick job and they had to redo it.

So, there's all kinds of stuff.

There we go.

So, a memento.

Your very own steak mummy. Why, thank you.

This botched mummification

wasn't the only strange aspect of Tut's burial.

As the Pharaoh's body dehydrated,

the vast array of goods that would be buried with him had to be gathered.

On the 27th of December 1922, nine weeks into his excavation,

Howard Carter started removing those same items from the tomb

and transporting them here to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Just like the mummification process,

there are some intriguing and unexpected anomalies

with some of Tutankhamun's grave goods.

Hi, Dan. Good to see you. Good to see you, mate.

Egyptologist Dr Glenn Godenho is gonna show me some of them.

First, we're looking at the jars which held Tut's internal organs

following their removal during his mummification.

Are they supposed to look like Tutankhamun?

'Cause they don't look like the King?

This is the point. That would be the logical thing.

You'd expect this being in Tutankhamun's tomb.

It's got his name on the sides of it.

You'd expect these to look like Tutankhamun.

However, when we have a look at these characters,

they're all similar, four of them originally facing each other.

Very slender features, very slim lips,

very high cheekbones.

Not entirely what we see when we look at images of Tutankhamun.

They look a whole lot more feminine.

And there are lots more objects like this

that don't appear to be original Tutankhamun pieces,

but appear imported into his tomb.

There's also an inconsistency with the most important burial items

of all, Tut's coffins.

He was buried in three, like a Russian doll.

The innermost is made of solid gold.

And amazingly we've been allowed to remove the case.

So, it's coming off. Here we go. Incredible.

Oh, my goodness. Here we go. The whole thing is coming off now.

Wow. That's incredible.

It is like nothing else I've ever seen in my life.

What an opportunity. No glass. It's incredible.

I never thought I'd be lucky enough to do this.

I just never believed I'd be up this close to one of the most precious

and recognisable objects in the whole of human history.

So, apart from just admiring it, what are you looking

at as a historian, as an Egyptologist?

What's it going to tell us?

This innermost one, the facial features agree quite well

with the outermost coffin.

However, the middle coffin looks slightly different.

It's just over here. This is the middle coffin. Oh, OK.

The features appear slightly thicker than this one.

Oh, I see what you're saying. The mouth is, yeah...

If you compare the mouths, they seem a little bit more downturned

on this one, in the corners.

The eyes essentially are a little bit larger as well.

As I say, the thicker features around the nose and the facial shape as well.

It stands out compared to the first coffin and the outer coffin.

Which kind of suggests that maybe it wasn't intended for Tutankhamun.

Could the face on this middle coffin be the same woman on the jars?

If so, who was she?

Me and Raksha are enjoying a little Nile cruise.

Tutankhamun, though, in our story, having a slightly less good time.

He is undergoing mummification, his body has been packed

in a kind of salt called natron and it's dehydrating.

But what about his tomb itself, Raksha?

Because there's some really unusual elements to it, aren't there?

For example, it's much smaller than we'd expect

for a royal tomb from that time.

It's absolutely tiny compared to other pharaohs,

and his mummification is a complete botched job.

It's absolutely rushed, not like what a pharaoh should be.

And what about these grave goods?

You know, some of the little statues produced in the tomb, for example,

seem to belong, well, to a mysterious woman.

Yeah, and we're going off to the Grand Egyptian Museum

to look at the treasures, and they might give us a clue

as to who that woman could be.

The Grand Egyptian Museum's conservation centre is home

to many of Tut's treasures not on public display.

Here, Glenn Godenho and I can examine up close

an object that may reveal the identity of that mystery woman.

Wow. Look at that.

The lid of this chest found in Tut's tomb

has only recently been restored.

Glenn, I think Christmas has come early for you.

Great.

It's the first time it's been seen in its complete state.

So, Glenn, this is really interesting, isn't it?

It is. It's just nice to see it all reassembled like this,

but the interesting thing for me are the hieroglyphs.

Burial items are sometimes marked with the owner's name.

On this lid, there's a list of royal names

which may help identify the mystery woman.

What we're looking for is the name of Tutankhamun

because it came from his tomb.

So, one thing we'd expect to see is Tutankhamun's cartouche somewhere,

which is like a name tag for a king.

That should look something like this.

Now, you'll have to forgive my hieroglyphs.

Oh, my hieroglyphs are terrible. You haven't seen mine yet.

So, we are looking for something like that.

OK.

If you have a look and see if any of these match up.

The first one is here, and that's not a match.

That reads Ankhkheperure.

But the next two cartouches, neither of those match this either.

They refer to Akhenaten. That's his father.

That's Tutankhamun's dad most probably, exactly.

And then a little bit further down,

we do have a match for that one up there.

So, this is Ankhkheperure again.

But we know a little bit more about this person.

It's Ankhkheperure-Neferkheperure

Gosh, that's a mouthful.

Yeah, that is possibly Nefertiti.

So, two of the cartouches meaning Nefertiti,

the beautiful wife of Tutankhamun's father Akhenaten.

She's thought to be Tutankhamun's stepmother.

So, there's everybody almost in his family apart from him.

Apart from Tutankhamun.

And that's really interesting, because this box

comes from his tomb, but it doesn't have his name on.

So, who does this box belong to?

Well, this is the most prominent cartouche here,

so if that's Nefertiti, then this box would have belonged

to Nefertiti's burial originally.

And it's interesting actually because thinking of those images

from Tutankhamun's tomb that look quite feminine,

could they be Nefertiti?

It just really adds to the mystery, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

It's now believed that 80% of the ritual items

found in Tut's tomb were not intended for him,

and some were made for Nefertiti's burial instead.

This is more evidence,

along with the comparatively small size of Tut's tomb,

that his burial was almost cobbled together.

Peculiarities that were apparent to Howard Carter as he continued

to remove the objects from the area of the tomb he'd found so far.

But the burial chamber itself,

the tomb's holiest of holies had not yet been found.

Or so Carter claimed.

He was sure another chamber lay sealed behind this wall

protected by two guardian statues.

But he said he didn't break through it

until he'd got permission from the Egyptian authorities.

But Lord Carnarvon, who was Carter's sponsor and business partner,

seemed to have admitted in a newspaper article

he'd never actually end up publishing,

that they did have a sneaky peek through the wall

into the next chamber before they'd got permission

from the authorities, and that's why Carter could never admit it.

This is the room they were talking about. This was the antechamber here.

This wall was completely blocked up here, bricks and mortar,

and beyond it lay Tutankhamun's burial chamber.

They knocked a small hole through the bottom of the wall.

By the time this photo was taken,

Carter had cunningly hidden it with a wicker bowl.

Now, it's believed that Carter, Lord Carnarvon

and Carnarvon's daughter, Lady Evelyn,

squeezed through the little hole into the burial chamber

on the very first night they entered the tomb.

And really who can blame them?

They came in here, went through the tiny hole,

then dropped down into the burial chamber,

and what they found was extraordinary.

A giant gilded box filled this entire space,

inside of which was Tutankhamun's sarcophagus.

They had just made the first discovery

of an undisturbed Egyptian pharaoh's burial site in history.

As they crawled around the edge of this room

with their electric torches, they shined them up on the walls

and they saw the first artwork they'd seen in the tomb.

But here were more abnormalities with the burial.

There were no carved decorations

and the painting was relatively simple.

Not what you'd expect in a pharaoh's tomb.

Some of them aren't even properly finished, which is weird

given the extraordinary care and attention

that the artisans lavished on these paintings in tombs.

Check this out.

There are black lines around all of the penises on the baboons...

..except this one here.

Someone was in a hurry.

In 2009, researchers made an ultra-high-resolution scan

of this artwork to allow it to be studied in minute detail.

The same team have now moved onto another tomb

in the Valley of the Kings, that belonging to Seti I.

Raksha has gone to visit them

to find out how these two tombs compare.

The vast tomb of Seti I is the longest and deepest

in the Valley of the Kings.

It's almost eight times the size of Tut's...

(LAUGHS) Wow.

..burrowing an incredible 137 metres into the mountain side.

Aliaa Ismail and her team have just begun 3-D scanning

every inch of the tomb.

I'm the first person to see their work.

So, what are you doing here? It looks all very high-tech.

So, basically you see this red beam that's on the wall,

it moves over the surface,

taking the shape of the surface through the cameras.

And then through that video we can actually obtain a 3-D model.

So, it kind of spits it out and there's this, like,

perfect 3-D model of this entire tomb.

Yeah.

I want to know how the decoration of Seti's tomb compares to Tut's

and what it reveals about the mysterious circumstances

of the young pharaoh's burial.

Aliaa has invited me to her 3-D scan centre to see their results.

It's a very cool office you've got here.

This is the data from Seti I.

You can see right away how intricate the details are

and you can see the outlines of every single figure.

It's very beautiful and stylised and very clean to look at.

Yes, you can see so much of the details

that you wouldn't be able to see with your naked eye in the tomb.

The amazing method allows the paint to be electronically stripped

from the wall, exposing the plaster underneath.

Seti's plaster is beautifully smooth and intricately carved.

But under the paint in Tut's tomb,

it's uncarved, rough and shoddy.

Right away you can tell, this is definitely Seti's.

And when you look at Tutankhamun, it was done very quickly.

Not enough time, not enough effort.

These high-resolution images even expose light impressions

left in the plaster by the artist's brushes as they painted Tut's tomb.

This proves the plaster hadn't dried out before it was painted.

I was quite taken aback when I walked into Seti's tomb

because the detail is phenomenal, it's quite exquisite.

Absolutely, and it's like Tutankhamun

is almost like child's play compared to the master in Seti.

You know, and you can imagine, like, how many people have worked on this tomb.

As opposed to Tutankhamun, it was a rush job.

And that's not all, there are more peculiarities.

When you enter, you see all this mould on the wall.

See how it's growing? Good grief. Yeah.

All these, like, really dark brown dots everywhere. So that's mould?

Yes.

This mould isn't seen in any other royal tomb.

It only grows in damp conditions,

indicating the paint was still wet when Tut was sealed in his tomb.

So, the decoration must have taken place in the last few days

before his burial.

One can only think of one thing,

Tutankhamun's burial was very much rushed.

It's not like he just died young, but rather it seemed that someone

really wanted this tomb to closed right away.

Someone wanted Tutankhamun to be buried quickly.

So many things just don't add up.

A botched mummification, a small tomb,

burial treasures not for him and now last-minute artwork.

I can't believe that all of these anomalies are down to the fact that

Tut died very young, very suddenly.

I think it was also to do with the fact that he was childless.

I think somebody was in a rush to bury his body

because they were in a rush to take the crown.

Despite Tutankhamun's burial here in the Valley of the Kings

appearing rushed,

his mummification, including the dehydration and wrapping,

would have taken around 50 days.

He was now ready to be placed in his tomb...

..along with the thousands of burial items

that had been gathered together.

A process that over 3,000 years later was happening in reverse...

..as Howard Carter carefully removed those same items from Tut's tomb.

All of those fragile, priceless treasures were carefully lifted out

of Tutankhamun's tomb just down there, carried all the way up here

and taken to the tomb just up there.

Carter had been allowed to use Seti II's tomb as a conservation lab.

The journey of the objects from the tomb down there,

up this valley to the laboratory here was like a carnival, like a parade.

The most trusted of his Egyptian workers carried the objects

closely supervised by Carter himself.

The hillsides, the edges of the valley were covered

in spectators and journalists,

so there were plenty of armed guards to ensure security and order.

It must have been an amazing sight.

Carter was understandably concerned about security.

The millennia-old crime of tomb robbing

was alive and kicking in 1920s Egypt.

Three teams of guards watched Tut's tomb and each other day and night.

The parade of objects from Tutankhamun's tomb

up through the valley was an uncanny echo of what had gone on

right here over 3,000 years before.

In Tut's burial chamber,

there is a painting of his funeral procession -

his mummified body being pulled to his tomb on a sled.

But this captures only one element of the elaborate ceremony.

Raksha has gone to investigate what happened

around three days before Tutankhamun was finally sealed into his tomb.

I'm heading to the tomb of Ramose,

a powerful noble who lived a few decades before Tutankhamun.

The reason why I'm here is because there's a beautiful frieze

on the back that shows us what funerals were like in ancient Egypt.

Ramose was a vizier, second-in-command to the pharaoh.

His funeral procession depicted here

would have been similar to Tutankhamun's.

So, right at the top you can see these golden shrines

being pulled on by a sled,

and then you can see this general funeral procession going past here.

You have these individuals carrying the burial goods and boxes of goods.

Not too dissimilar to the ones Tutankhamun had his clothes in.

And as we carry on, we have these wonderful scenes

of mourning and grieving.

These women, they have got their hands up to the sky

and they are wailing.

It's all very epic.

The grieving women would also crouch down

and sprinkle dust on their heads.

As with all funerals, there is a wake,

and you can see at the top there's some kind of party

where there would have been drinking and dancing and music.

And who better to show us what took place

than the star of Strictly, John Sergeant?

Oh, dear, I thought my television dancing days were over,

but maybe I'll prove better at dancing like an Egyptian

than dancing the paso doble.

My partner this time is expert 3-D scanner Aliaa Ismail,

a keen dancer who has researched ancient Egyptian dance.

Oh, that's good.

In funeral processions in ancient Egypt,

just like that of Tutankhamun's and any other pharaoh,

they would have had what we call the muu dancers.

Muu dancers wore strange headdresses made of papyrus reeds.

Their role is very important in the procession.

They help the deceased soul move from this world to the next.

So, do we know what moves they made, these muu dancers?

I would love to show you how they're done,

but to do that shouldn't we, like, change into the right outfit first?

The right outfit. OK, alright.

Aliaa has used tomb paintings to work out the muu dancers' moves.

What do you think, eh? Pretty good, eh?

Now, look, what about me doing it? Can I start?

Yes. Please start, John.

What about this one? (HUMS GRUFFLY)

No. No, John. What's wrong with that?

I thought it's... No, that's not how we do it. What do we do?

The muu dancers, they would have had, like, movements.

If you notice, their hands would have been more like this.

OK. Yeah.

And they would have had, like...

It's not very... You feel like, it's a bit of a sway.

Which way are we swaying?

Just go bom, bom.

They look like they are swaying. Like, you know, sway, sway.

I'm losing my voice.

It's too exciting.

Remember the hands.

Well, this is fine for a funeral, but a bit dull.

I'm ready for something more lively.

Like this one here. Oh, right.

See? Not too easy to do but we can try.

OK, put your leg up in the air.

Yeah, leg in the air.

Let me show you. So basically I would imagine it like that.

So, you'd be like, ah, and then you go down,

so that, you know, it looks like you're happy.

Ha! You're happy.

And then you go down.

John.

That's good, isn't it? It's fun, right?

(BOTH LAUGH)

BOTH: Whoo!

Whoa!

Wow, I think I'm getting good at this.

Three, two, one.

It seems Tutankhamun's funeral would be a strange mixture

of mourning and celebration -

wailing and crying combined with feasting, dancing and music.

It encapsulates the ancient Egyptians' ideas on death.

It was like waving goodbye to a loved one

on a long and luxurious holiday.

Sad certainly to be saying goodbye,

but assured that they'd be in paradise

and one day you'd see them again.

John will be pleased to hear the funeral festivities

would have lasted up to three days.

Afterwards, Tut's body would have been placed in his burial chamber.

This was complicated.

First, the golden mask was placed directly on his mummy.

The mummy was then sealed inside the three coffins.

These were then placed inside his stone sarcophagus.

Finally, everything was encased by four shrines,

huge gilded boxes that fitted over one another.

So, in total nine layers surrounded his body.

Back at the Egyptian Museum, Glenn Godenho and I have been given

rare access to the outermost shrine.

This is close to what it must have been like for Howard Carter

when he got up and saw this inside that final chamber.

It's incredible, isn't it? What a privilege.

But what is really interesting about these is they're massive,

and Tutankhamun's tomb is not that massive.

The actual chambers are not massive. Yeah, that's right, exactly.

When Carter broke through to the burial chamber,

he saw what he thought was just a golden wall.

That's how big this thing was and how much of the room it occupied.

The outer shrine was so big, it almost filled the burial chamber.

The only way to get the shrines into the tomb was in pieces,

then reassemble them like a flat pack.

But here is a hieroglyph, that reads Resi or Resu,

and that means south.

So that suggests that this panel is to face south for the south wall.

And it's not just that one, there's one on the door there.

But what's really interesting is that although these indicate

that this whole face should be the south,

actually this was the east.

So that kind of suggests that when they got these things

in there, they couldn't follow the instructions

because there just wasn't the space to do it.

Back at Tut's tomb, there's more evidence

of the struggle to squeeze everything in.

You can see a big section of wall here has been roughly cut out

and they had to do that because the workers were desperately

struggling to get the panels for the shrines

into this very small burial chamber.

Imagine how difficult that was.

They had to construct an outer shrine

around all the other ones already in place.

They also had major problems with Tut's stone sarcophagus.

Look at this, the lid is cracked right down the middle

and then has been roughly stuck back together.

Perhaps that occurred at the same time as they realised

the lid didn't fit on the sarcophagus.

We know that because look here.

They've had to shave the toes off the outer coffin,

so that the lid could go on and sit nice and snug.

And we know that happened at the last minute

because Carter inside the sarcophagus found all the wood splinters.

It's more evidence Tut was buried in a hurry.

But why?

I'm turning back to his burial chamber paintings for a clue.

This painting on the wall here depicts

the Opening of the Mouth ceremony for Tutankhamun.

There is Tutankhamun there, his corpse,

and his mouth is about to be opened.

This important symbolic ritual took place

just before Tut was sealed in his tomb.

It is astonishingly rare that this is depicted

on the wall of a royal tomb.

Usually, it is the son and heir of the departed pharaoh

who conducts the ceremony, but we know that Tutankhamun died childless.

So the question is, who's that?

Fortunately we know because his name is above him.

It's Tut's vizier, his second-in-command

and head of his government, Ay.

By showing himself performing

the crucial Opening of the Mouth ceremony,

Ay is attempting to legitimise himself

because his succession was by no means a foregone conclusion.

There was another powerful contender for the throne.

And it seems likely that this whole story,

the strange circumstances of Tutankhamun's burial,

the rush to get him into the ground, the repurposing of the treasure,

it's all connected with a power struggle

that had been raging in ancient Egypt for decades.

Across the Nile from Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings

is Karnak Temple...

..the largest religious construction ever built.

Many pharaohs added to it, including Tutankhamun himself.

I'm here to meet Dr Arto Belekdanian,

to find out what may have been the cause

of Tut's strange, rushed burial.

There was a lot of political struggle after Tutankhamun died

because he had no male heirs.

So what happened was, the two most powerful men in the country at the time,

Ay the vizier and Horemheb the General, they probably didn't get along.

Does this struggle between the civilian and military,

Ay and Horemheb explain why Tutankhamun was buried in a hurry?

Well, we do know that the Egyptians were fighting against

the other great superpower in the Middle East at the time,

the Hittites.

Potentially, Tutankhamun died at the same time as Horemheb

was off fighting the Hittites and conveniently Ay took over power.

So this explains why Ay was keen potentially

to rush the burial of Tutankhamun.

Exactly.

Given that Horemheb was abroad, if you want the throne for yourself,

you take care of the burial, make yourself appear

as the legitimate successor before Horemheb gets back.

But things didn't work out brilliantly for Ay.

He died only four years after seizing power

and General Horemheb finally became Pharaoh.

Possibly in revenge, he erased Ay and Tutankhamun from history

and tore down their buildings.

Here at Karnak, archaeologists have discovered thousands of fragments,

many from buildings Horemheb destroyed.

This is the block yard of Karnak temple.

A lot of structures that have been dismantled,

their individual blocks are placed here for study

and then potentially maybe reconstruction one day.

So this is actually one of the only places in Karnak

that you can still find the name Tutankhamun.

There is a lot of them around here. We just need to find it. OK.

Oh, this is it. I got it. Right here, look at this. How cool.

Oh, yeah, that's him. There it is.

Well spotted.

So, where do we think this may have come from?

Well, some people think that this is all from

Tutankhamun's memorial temple. OK.

So Kings used to build, along with their tombs,

a temple for their cult, for their soul after they die.

And some people think that these blocks

are all from that temple that was dismantled.

Wow, just taken apart brick by brick.

And who would have done that to him? None other than Horemheb.

Within a few years of his death,

Tutankhamun's name was being torn down off temples and monuments

right across Egypt - he was being eradicated from history.

And that is one possible reason why the tomb robbers

that scoured the Valley of the Kings hundreds of years later,

may not have been actively looking for Tutankhamun's tomb.

They may not have known that he even existed.

And that helps to explain why he was able to rest in peace -

for a few thousand years at least.

Tutankhamun's peace ended, officially, on 16th February 1923

when Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon broke down the entire wall

sealing his burial chamber.

Dignitaries were invited,

none aware the pair had probably sneaked in months earlier.

VIPs sat here in neat rows to watch the unsealing,

but it was said by many at the time

that the Pharaoh was protected not just by the guardians

but by deeper black magic.

And indeed, a tragedy occurred only two months later

that seemed to confirm the truth of this ancient magic.

John has bravely gone to find out more.

JOHN: When Carter first entered Tut's tomb,

it's reported he discovered a stone tablet near the door.

Written on the tablet was this curse -

"They who enter this sacred tomb

"shall be swift visited by the wings of death."

And sure enough, there were deaths.

Lord Carnarvon, Carter's dig partner

and the rich financier of the excavation,

was the first victim.

When in Luxor, he generally stayed here

at the rather swanky Winter Palace Hotel.

But here he was being plagued by journalists.

So, soon after the unsealing of the burial chamber,

Carnarvon set off on a Nile cruise...

..where he was bitten on the cheek by a mosquito.

And while he was shaving with his cutthroat razer,

he nicked the bite,

and it soon became sore and inflamed.

The infection spread throughout his body.

Raging with a fever, he was brought back here to Luxor,

and then he was rushed to Cairo to hospital.

But within a few weeks, he was dead.

It's said that at the exact moment of his death

there was a complete power failure and blackout in Cairo.

Simultaneously, at his home, Highclere Castle,

his faithful dog Susie howled and dropped dead.

This all seemed to confirm the curse of Tutankhamun had struck.

The story exploded in the press.

Hello.

Hello. Please enjoy, Mr John.

It was, of course, utter nonsense.

There was no cursed tablet - it was fake news.

This hotel was full of journalists

anxious to make headlines about Tutankhamun,

but Lord Carnarvon had sold the entire story

exclusively to The Times.

And so I can imagine, with my experience as a reporter,

all the journalists sitting around here thinking,

"What are we going to do?"

And someone would have thought up the answer,

"What about saying that there was a curse?"

And so that's how was born the famous Curse of Tutankhamun.

I'd have agreed to that.

The truth is, 26 people attended the unsealing of the burial chamber

and six died within a decade.

But many of them were getting on a bit, so it's not really surprising.

But surely if anyone deserved to be struck down by the curse

it would be Howard Carter,

but somehow he managed to avoid the wrath of Tutankhamun.

He lived on for many years in tip-top health.

DAN: But the excavation wasn't plain sailing.

At one stage Carter left the sarcophagus lid

hanging by ropes and went on strike in protest at what he thought

was interference by the Egyptian authorities.

It was almost three years after the discovery of the tomb

before Carter finally began opening Tut's coffins.

By November 1925, Carter had removed the body from the sarcophagus,

taken off those beautiful golden coffins and was preparing to remove

the final layer of the famous golden mask.

But it was difficult, it was stuck fast with so much resin on it

from the preparation, they had to use hot knives to prize it off

and only then could Carter see, as he described it,

"the beautiful and well-formed features of the King."

And they're here for us all to see today

because his body is preserved in his own tomb.

And finally, back in 1925,

Carter and the King came face-to-face.

Two men separated by more than 3,000 years.

The determined archaeologist

and the long-forgotten Pharaoh.

Together they secured their place in history.

Well, that brings our time in Egypt to an end.

It's been an enormous adventure

and it's been a huge privilege, of course,

going into all those tombs

and seeing all those iconic objects and treasures up close.

I loved learning about Carter.

The fact that he managed to discover that tomb

even though it had been lost for millennia.

Well, I think King Tut got what he wanted - life after death.

He is now one of the most famous people in history

with a name that echoes down through the centuries.

And that's not changing anytime soon.

There are so many mysteries to solve,

the story of Tutankhamun is not at an end.

But this program is, sadly.

So, thank you for joining us in Egypt.

Bye-bye. BOTH: Bye.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia