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Narrator: The glory days of ancient Egypt lasted for over 3,000 years.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

During that time, a love of gold consumed its pharaohs.

While its military might dominated neighboring kingdoms.

But a proud people from the south rose up to defeat their overlords.

-And became the Black pharaohs of Egypt. -This is not the stable,

stately old kingdom Egypt that you generally read about in history books.

This was a time of turmoil.

Precious little is known about their 100-year reign, until now.

Archaeologists unearth fresh clues from burial crypts.

-Amazing! -Isn't that incredible?

And newly explored watery graves.

Kristin: I realized that there was just like gold lying around... [chuckling]

...that this is an untouched burial.

The constellation of things that are happening at this site is insane.

The discoveries shed new light on the Nubians who used gold, gods,

and grit to conquer all of Egypt.

The Nubian Desert in northern Sudan.

In ancient times, this was the center of a golden civilization

called the Kush empire.

These aren't hills rising from the sand.

They are the ruined tombs of Kushite kings and queens

who once ruled over all of Egypt, but are now almost completely forgotten.

This is the royal cemetery called El-Kurru.

It's one of a handful of places where scholars can dig for clues

about the mysterious culture

and the elusive history of the Kush people.

That's what attracted archaeologist. Geoff Emberling.

At a pyramid called "Ku-1," Geoff's team is moving 100 tons of earth,

hoping to expose a royal tomb beneath.

At one time, hundreds of workers toiled to construct this monument

stone by stone in honor of a single powerful man.

Today, no one even knows who he was.

Geoff: We want, first of all, to find out the name of the king.

And second of all, we would hope that there would be additional information

in material left in the pyramid about where they fit in history

over 2,000 years ago.

Geoff doesn't have a lot to go on.

Over hundreds of years,

the Ku-1 pyramid has been worn down by wind-blown sand,

and picked apart by looters in search of Nubian gold.

What looks today like a pile of bricks once stood nearly four times as high.

[indistinct chatter]

In modern times, this particular tomb has proven

to be the toughest to crack, even for the man

who first began excavating here.

About 100 years ago,

American archaeologist George Reisner excavated many Kush monuments

and discovered the tombs of its most important kings.

Geoff: George Reisner was an amazing pioneer of archeology in Kush.

He started in 1908. He worked into the 1930s,

had very difficult conditions,

and yet he managed to establish a basic chronology,

not only of the broad archaeological periods,

nut of all the kings of Kush. He put them all into order

and it's an order that we still basically use today.

At El-Kurru, Reisner got to the bottom of every pyramid,

except Ku-1.

The ceiling of the pyramid had collapsed, locking its secrets inside.

Having just lost five men in a cave-in nearby,

Reisner decided not to tempt fate any further, and returned home.

Sometimes, Geoff Emberling has thought of doing the same.

Geoff: When you read Reisner's notes from his excavations at El-Kurru,

at the end of the season, he took about two weeks off.

And he has a little note

that the doctor told him he had to stop worrying so much,

and I can kind of appreciate this now,

even just excavating one of the pyramids because there's inherent risk.

There's no such thing as no risk.

Of course, without risk there's no reward.

And as Reisner discovered at other royal burial sites...

the payoff can be staggering.

In the other nearby temples,

Reisner recovered golden jewelry and stunning artifacts.

Long-lost masterpieces buried with the Kushite kings

to enrich them in the afterlife.

The Nubian craftsmanship was stunning. Intricate and innovative,

the artistry on display was sometimes even more impressive

than the ornaments created to the north, in Egypt.

To find even one surviving item would be a triumph for Geoff.

As an archaeologist, your dreams are often quite vivid

about what you can find in a place.

And so obviously, these kings' burials were once extremely rich

with gold and silver objects

and finely crafted beautiful expressions of their religious sentiments

as well as their status and prestige.

So we can imagine finding all of those things inside the burial chamber.

[indistinct chatter]

Geoff's first big revelation is not gold treasure,

but a giant staircase,

one fit for a king-size funeral procession.

You can see that the staircase is really monumental.

They've dug down through the solid rock to a depth of over 25 feet.

But at the bottom of the staircase, an ominous sign.

You can see just at the bottom there, the original doorway,

and above it, an irregular hole.

That irregular hole was dug by looters.

Geoff believes the tomb must have been looted long ago,

by someone familiar with its layout.

Unusually in this pyramid, the inner chamber is huge and high.

And so it was only the people who built that that would have known

that digging over the doorway they would break into the open space

of the chamber itself.

The question is, how far in did the looters get?

And what, if anything, did they leave behind?

Geoff is hoping he'll soon find out.

Already he's excavated to the site of the cave-in

that had blocked Reisner's path.

We're in the second room of the pyramid.

Its ceiling has entirely collapsed covering whatever was below.

I have a secret theory that the looters burrowed in here

and as they were digging the ceiling collapsed on them.

It was just such a collapse that foiled looters in another tomb,

keeping some of the treasure safe for centuries

until Reisner was able to dig it up.

Geoff's taking precautions

to ensure he and his team don't become the tomb's next victims.

He's installing a special iron scaffolding to make sure the ceiling doesn't collapse

as the team digs deeper and deeper into the pyramid.

If the structure holds,

they just might succeed where Reisner did not.

As today's archaeologists dig deeper into the past,

they are using new tools that allow them to go into pyramids

that have been off-limits, until now.

When the royal cemetery of Nuri was built on the banks of the Nile,

there were around 80 pyramids.

There are only about three or four hundred pyramids total

in all of Egypt and Sudan.

And for so many of them to be concentrated at this one place, that is incredible.

There's no site anywhere else on Earth that had more.

Nuri has been protected by something

usually considered rare in these parts--

water.

Pearce Paul Creasman is an underwater archaeologist.

He's one of the few people in the world

who could take on an exploration of this site

because the inner chambers of these pyramids are flooded.

In the time since the pyramids were first built,

the Nile River basin has risen, filling the burial chambers beneath.

In the last 25 years,

the water inside some of the tombs has gone up nearly four meters.

It's a big learning curve to understand how to do something

that no one has ever done before,

excavating tombs underwater in the middle of this desert.

Just as Geoff is hoping the ceiling collapse

has preserved treasure at El-Kurru,

Pearce Paul believes the water in Nuri may have kept looters away.

Being underwater makes it off limits to most of humanity.

To find out if his hunch is correct,

Pearce Paul has to gather just the right combination of people to pull it off.

He has a specialized team, including a professional diver,

and fellow underwater archaeologist Kristin Romey.

I said of course I want to come along and take a look at what's going on.

I mean, how often do you get to dive in a pyramid?

You know, and how often have pyramids really even been dove in?

Conveniently, a pyramid is a pretty big marker

that you've got something precious buried underneath.

The fact that these tombs were submerged, I think,

has been a huge source of protection for them

because we don't have people who are equipped

to go in and loot a submerged tomb at this point.

For his first excavation,

Pearce Paul picks a pyramid in the middle of the burial grounds.

Pearce: At Nuri, where there are so many wonderful standing pyramids

that are in really good shape and look great to--

to choose from, we of course, you know,

picked one of the worst, ruddiest, awful-looking,

you're not even sure it's a pyramid, pyramids.

We did this in part because it's such a big learning curve.

The tomb is believed to be

that of Nastasen, the last king to be buried at Nuri.

Pearce Paul hopes that once inside, he'll find proof that it's his.

Pearce: Walking down the stairwell into the waters

right outside the pyramid tomb's entrance is exhilarating.

You can feel your heart beat. Your feet touch the water

and outside the pyramid, the water is cold.

It's in the 40s. It's very cold.

And you have to tell yourself,

"I know it's going to be okay. We're prepared for this."

And actually be prepared for it.

Take a deep breath and go.

When you come up to the surface of the water inside the tomb

and you turn your lights off and you stand still...

you really know you're in a tomb.

There's this heightened state of awareness

like the minute that you kind of, your head goes underwater,

and you start pulling yourself through that steel chute into the chamber,

and you kind of realize the gravity of what's going on.

You have to kind of navigate your way through that first chamber

to get into the air pocket in the second chamber.

And it's just like every sense is 110 percent.

You are just wired and just trying to figure out what's going to happen next.

This is the first time anyone has ever entered a submerged tomb.

Occasionally you'd hear a little rock plop in the water,

and that would kind of bring you back to the reality of the fact

that you are several stories underground.

You know, in a stone chamber just tethered to a rope

that's supplying you oxygen from the surface. [chuckles]

In the pitch dark,

the team needs a way to get out fast in case something goes wrong.

Pearce: We run a line from down the middle of the tomb,

from the farthest point to the exit,

and we put these little flashing blue and green lights on them.

As long as they're in the water they'll keep blinking.

So if you have nothing else in this tomb, you have your escape plan.

With precautions in place,

Pearce Paul and Kristin get down to the business of exploring the tomb.

Each new discovery in Sudan provides opportunities to help right a great wrong

the famous but flawed archaeologist George Reisner committed

against the African people. [folk music playing]

Throughout his time in the country,

he excavated amid the rich local culture of his African hosts.

He was pulling African history from the ground.

[singing in native language]

But he was doing it at a time when racist delusions

of ethnic superiority clouded his scientific judgment.

[indistinct chatter]

Even as he was awed by the pyramids he excavated,

he refused to believe they could have been built by the ancestors

of the Black Africans he saw all around him.

Even when clear evidence of the truth was staring him in the face.

In 1916, Reisner's team uncovered beautiful granite statues

of the great Kushite kings

with features that strongly resembled Black Africans.

Reisner argued they were not accurate likenesses.

Instead, his scholarly articles asserted that the kings,

and the builders of all the Kushite monuments,

must have been light-skinned foreigners.

I think it just challenges so fundamentally

some of his personal views

about what people in the Sudan were capable of

and that he finds it really difficult to suddenly read the evidence.

It's such a huge challenge that he can't get over it.

Reisner wasn't the last or the first to underestimate the Kushites.

Until recently, most archaeologists portrayed Kush

as little more than a subject state within Egypt's empire.

A source for gold in peacetime

and workers captured and enslaved during war.

But a new generation of scholars is uncovering

a more accurate and fascinating reality.

The Kushite empire was far more advanced than anyone previously believed.

One of the key Nubian sites lies about 270 kilometers downstream

from the burial site of El-Kurru in the town of Kerma, Sudan.

Looming over the landscape

is an enormous and complex structure, called a "Deffufa."

It's a Kushite temple,

built around the same time Egyptians were creating their first pyramids,

and the Britons, Stonehenge.

According to archaeologist, Salah El Din Mohammed Ahmed,

that makes it one of Africa's oldest surviving buildings.

Salah El Din: The Deffufa stands in the middle

of the ancient town of Kerma,

which is one of the most ancient towns in Africa.

This town dates to around 2,500 before Christ,

more than 4,000 years ago.

The Deffufa's building blocks are not stone.

They're man-made bricks,

evidence that the Nubians knew as much about construction

as the Egyptians did at that time.

Also around Kerma

a vast cemetery preserving elaborate burial practices

points to a civilization that was already well developed in 2,000 B.C.,

when its better-known neighbor, Egypt, was uniting into a pharaoh-led empire.

At first, the two up-and-coming nations were peers

and forged a mutually beneficial relationship.

It was often a relationship based on trade.

And evidence from Egyptian tombs

shows depictions of people from the Sudan

bringing tribute, as it's always characterized, into Egypt.

So items like leopard skins, monkeys, precious stones.

Because of its location on the Nile,

Kerma grew into a thriving trade hub between sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt...

funneling ebony, ivory, and exotic animals north.

But Kush's rise to power was really fueled by one thing...

gold.

Their Egyptian neighbors had an insatiable appetite for jewelry,

gold leaf coffins,

and funerary masks of the kind made famous by King Tut.

Much of that gold was mined in Kush.

Salah El Din: Kush was traditionally known to the Egyptians

as the land of gold.

So most of the gold of the Egyptian state came from Nubia

and mostly came from this area

and also from the eastern desert to the east of Kerma.

The Egyptians also valued the Kushites' skill as archers,

calling them the "bow people," and employing them as mercenary soldiers.

And Egyptian instructions on fighting record the Kushites' prowess as wrestlers.

A tradition that still thrives in Sudan today.

The military skills the Kush honed

in the service of their Egyptian neighbors

were eventually turned on the great empire itself.

The Kushites started small,

with incursions across the border to expand their territory.

This angered the Egyptians.

In about 1500 B.C., Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose I

invaded Kush to eliminate the growing threat

and get direct access to the gold he coveted.

His army marched south until they reached a sandstone butte

called "Jebel Barkal" or "Pure Mountain."

This would become one of the holiest

and most disputed sites in the history of the world.

Jebel Barkal has long been a landmark on the ancient highway

following the Nile River.

But this mountain was much more than a milepost

to both Kushite and Egyptian people.

Much of Jebel Barkal's mystique comes from an unusual natural tower,

separate from the mountain, that rises nearly 76 meters into the sky.

For Kushites, the pillar's phallic shape

made it a symbol of creation and fertility.

And, according to archaeologist Tim Kendall,

the Egyptians attached several more layers of significance to the sandstone tower.

Timothy: What made this mountain so powerful

and meaningful to the ancient Egyptians was the fact that it had this gigantic

spire-like pinnacle on its south face

that reminded them of multiple things that had great religious meaning.

On the one hand, it looked like a rearing cobra.

On the other hand, it looked like a standing king, Osiris,

the mythical first king of Egypt.

The cobra is the key.

In Egyptian mythology, cobras have a powerful connection to kingship.

Goddesses take the shape of a cobra to protect the king.

That's why they appear on the crowns of pharaohs, including King Tut's.

Tim believes it was probably a high priest,

accompanying the invasion, who first saw the connection.

Jebel Barkal was declared to be the birthplace

of the god of gods, Amun.

And it provided moral justification to Pharaoh Thutmose I

for seizing the Kush territory.

Timothy: It confirmed the King's feeling

that he was the rightful ruler of this place.

Here was the center of the primeval god who had given,

that had started kingship here and he was the heir of this kingship

and he had an absolute right to rule Kush.

For the next 400 years,

Egyptian rulers honored Jebel Barkal by building temples in its shadow.

And many sought to capture the mountain's divine magic

by traveling the long road to Nubia

in order to be crowned at this sacred birthplace of Amun,

the holy father of the pharaohs.

We don't know exactly what happened in this temple,

but we think that the king came in here during his coronation.

Came into this inner chamber with the God Amun,

in an effigy, of course.

Here the two of them, father and son,

united with the God Osiris, the mythical first king of Egypt.

And then he went forth from the temple, climbed up the steps,

sat down on the throne,

and became king and got up and stood on the porch

and was greeted by the mob outside as the new living god.

In the beginning, the Kushites were forced

to accept the religion of their conquerors in order to survive.

They worshiped at the temples built by the Egyptians.

Eventually, they surpassed even their conquerors

in the intensity of their belief.

The Kushite royals began building their tombs

in the shape of pyramids.

And the gold jewelry found in those tombs

testifies to their devotion to the Egyptian gods.

Isis...

Hathor...

Amun in the shape of a ram.

All found by George Reisner in Kushite tombs.

They were adopting a world view that had been long established,

and they saw themselves fitting into it perfectly.

For 300 years, the Egyptians occupied Kush

and imposed upon them the cults of Amun.

Jebel Barkal was the epicenter of the fundamentalist fervor.

The mountain kindled the religious spark that in time would set Egypt ablaze,

and turn Kushites into pharaohs.

[speaking in native language]

At El-Kurru's Ku-1 tomb,

Geoff Emberling and his team have pushed beyond the rockfall

that stopped George Reisner a hundred years ago.

For the Sudanese team members like foreman Monsour Mohammed Ahmed,

this is truly sacred ground.

Monsour: [in Arabic] These are my ancestors.

My culture and civilization come from them. I am a part of them.

We're late.

We should have been looking and learning from them a long time ago.

They're at the very end of their dig season

and Geoff's funds are running low,

when suddenly they're confronted with a find that will change everything.

Geoff: We were wondering all along whether there was going to be

two burial chambers or possibly a third,

and we discovered a doorway to the inner third burial chamber.

You can just see the outline

of this perfectly preserved doorway that goes into the...

what will have been the final burial chamber of this pyramid.

A final chamber that could contain

a treasure trove of burial objects

or the bones of a king.

But getting to it will take time,

time Geoff and his team may not have.

The tomb's location reveals an important clue

about the unknown king who built it.

He wasn't humble about his place in history.

He built his memorial right next to the tomb

of one the greatest Kushite kings.

On this platform once lay the body of Piankhi,

the Black African king who conquered Egypt.

By 700 B.C., some 800 years after their invasion,

Egypt had withdrawn from Kush.

The new kingdom empires of Tutankhamun and Ramesses II had fallen to chaos.

Warlords from Libya fought for control of the north

while priests in Thebes tried to hold the south together.

The priests feared their cult of Amun would be destroyed.

They knew their survival depended on reuniting the torn nation.

So the Egyptian priests begged for help from a most unlikely source,

their former colony, Kush.

There the young king Piankhi heard their call.

A devout follower of Amun, he was eager to fight for his god.

He vowed to repel the Libyan kings, confident that with Amun on his side,

he could not lose.

His forces moved north on the Nile to Thebes.

He told his army, "String the bow, and let loose the arrow.

"Let the people of the northland taste my fingers."

-[grunting] -[screaming]

[screaming]

It wasn't long before Piankhi's enemies begged for peace.

"Be merciful!" cried one Libyan king. "I cannot see your face for shame.

"I cannot stand before your flame.

I tremble at your strength."

-[screaming] -[grunting]

The fact that Kush was able to conquer Egypt

is really a David and Goliath story.

Egypt has these huge cities, huge temples, lots and lots of people, and Kush,

the settlements are more dispersed.

So we're trying to figure out exactly how Kush was able

to amass that military power.

In one of history's greatest upsets,

Kushite King Piankhi and his successors became Egypt's 25th dynasty.

Their reign would be unlike any other before or since.

The Kushite pharaohs controlled more area

than any other dynasty,

stretching from modern-day Khartoum to the Mediterranean,

becoming rivals of mighty Assyria and Greece.

This empire, built on gold,

was now in power because of its religious belief

and its military skill.

Political power has always been connected with religious beliefs.

To convince the people that you have the right to rule over them,

you have to be religious

and they use this to control everything,

the gold mines, the trade routes and everything.

Piankhi ruled from Kush for about a dozen years

before handing the crown over to his younger brother Shabaka.

They both earned reputations as strong, merciful leaders.

Timothy: They were famous for their piety and their magnanimity.

For example, they didn't slaughter their prisoners, they forgave them.

They put them to work digging canals.

These are completely uncharacteristic features

of ancient kings.

Piankhi and Shabaka paved the way for another Kushite pharaoh, Taharqa,

who battled Egypt's foes far beyond the empire's borders.

Around 700 B.C., he even saved Jerusalem and King Solomon's temple

from an assault by the Assyrians.

For this act, recorded in the Old Testament,

Hebrew historians hail Taharqa as a savior of the people.

Like the Egyptian rulers,

Taharqa tied himself to the sacred mountain.

But he put his own stamp on the holy site,

an inscription that was once covered by thin sheets of gold.

It's Taharqa's declaration of his own divinity,

and a defiant jab at the Assyrians. He calls them Bedouin.

"I, Taharqa, the good god, the king of upper and lower Egypt,

"who lives forever,

"I have destroyed the Bedouin of Asia

"and I have cut down the desert dwellers of Libya."

Despite Taharqa's tough talk,

by the end of his reign he had very little of Egypt left under his control.

The Assyrians dogged Taharqa with invasions.

And ultimately rolled his borders all the way back to Thebes.

But Jebel Barkal stayed under Kushite control.

And there, according to Tim Kendall,

Taharqa chose a special place to be buried and spend eternity,

full of religious and astrological significance.

Timothy: If you're standing on the top of Jebel Barkal,

you can see Taharqa's pyramid in the distance.

And on New Year’s Day, which would be about July 31st,

the sun would appear to rise directly over the king's tomb.

Three and a half months later, if you're standing on the summit

of Taharqa's Pyramid looking to Jebel Barkal...

the sun sets right over the pinnacle,

and the pinnacle looks like the God Osiris.

The setting sun symbolizes the god's death.

It's exactly this time when the Nile falls, when fertility ends.

And the god is thought to die. So he's born on New Year's Day,

he dies three and a half months later when the Nile falls.

He's resurrected every year and he's reborn millions of times,

year by year.

After Taharqa was buried here, dozens of other Nubian royalty followed.

Eventually, Nuri became the largest site for pyramids in Kush.

The constellation of things that are happening at this site is insane.

You have pyramids.

You have burial chambers that are probably unexcavated.

You have dozens of kings,

dozens and dozens of queens and princesses and princes.

And we have virtually no understanding of them, of their time,

of their place, of this monument.

One pyramid at a time, Pearce Paul is starting

to chip away at Nuri's secrets.

Deep inside a burial chamber,

he's looking for any sign to confirm that this is the tomb of Nastasen,

a Kushite king who defeated an invasion from upper Egypt.

When Pearce Paul and Kristin enter the third,

internal burial chamber, they get the proof they need.

Pearce: I think that is painted ostrich shell.

Oh, no. It's a fragment of a shabti!

A shabti, a figurine meant to help the king in the afterlife,

bearing Nastasen's name.

Fortunately, the ancient Nubians and Egyptians

liked to put their names on things

because if your name was forgotten, it's like you didn't exist.

The team finds six shabtis with Nastasen's name,

but that's just the beginning of what his tomb still holds.

I think the big moment of realization

of what we actually had in Nastasen's pyramid

was when Pearce Paul led me to the third chamber in the back.

And we were just waving our flashlights around,

and he pointed to this little niche in the back wall,

and the flashlight caught on little bits of gold in the niche

left there for centuries and centuries and centuries. It was incredible.

And when I realized that there was just like gold lying around... [laughs]

...that this is an untouched burial.

The gold foil in the niche once clad figurines

that have since dissolved in the water.

But it's the water that likely ensured

that there was anything in the niche at all.

In general, when you find a niche in a tomb, it's empty,

someone's been there before you.

If anybody had been in that tomb to rob it, seems stands to reason

they would have taken the gold shiny stuff off of the shelf at eye level.

These precious specks may just be a hint

of something else in the burial chamber, something even rarer than gold.

Pearce: In the middle of the third chamber,

there's a large mound, and it's got stones all around it.

It is very conveniently about the size of a person.

It's about six feet long and about three feet wide,

and then a pile around it.

The sandstone mound is likely Nastasen's sarcophagus.

But the team will have to wait till next season to find out

if the pharaoh's mummified body is still lying within.

To have the hope,

the possibility of something like a tomb being intact

and the king being in it, that is an incredible thing.

Think about what was the last big untouched burial chamber

excavated in ancient Egypt.

It was Tut. That was the last big untouched chamber.

Now, just multiply Tut

by how many pharaohs you have buried at Nuri,

and the potential is staggering.

Pearce Paul is hoping Nastasen's tomb will help solve a mystery

that has intrigued researchers for decades.

Why was he last to be buried here?

After Nastasen,

after 400 years of burying kings at Nuri

and probably a few hundred years of burying kings at El-Kurru previously,

things change. They move where the kings are buried.

There's something going on there.

You don't just pick up and change for no reason.

So maybe we can learn about this change

and about the changes that are going on in the kingdom of Kush at this time.

It has been nearly 100 years since King Tut's tomb was discovered.

But archaeologists keep hoping and searching,

and in the process keep uncovering new revelations

about these ancient cultures.

Back at El-Kurru, the discovery of the third room,

the burial chamber, has gotten everyone excited.

But what they ultimately find inside is not what anyone was hoping for.

An empty tomb, unfinished and unused.

It's an indication that political feuds

may have been dividing the Kushite royal family.

This pyramid is quite a bit later

than all the other pyramids found here at El-Kurru

and so there's an interesting question

about how this fits into the history of Kush.

The unused pyramid could mean that power had shifted to another location

before the king was buried.

Finding treasure is rewarding,

but as much history can be told by what isn't there.

Geoff: It can be discovery in the sense of finding something spectacular.

It can be discovery in the sense of putting together pieces of a puzzle

that help you understand another time and another place.

Part of that puzzle is what happens after the move

from El-Kurru and Nuri.

Geoff has been invited to help out at a nearby dig site

from much later in the Kush empire.

And he's bringing along some high-tech friends.

This is Zuma village,

the site of a noble burial mound built around 1,000 years

after Pharaoh Taharqa died.

It was the twilight of the empire.

A rival African nation was about to wipe out the Kushites for good.

And Christianity would soon transform the region.

[horn honking]

-Hi, Geoff! -Yeah! Mahmoud!

-Hello Geoff! [laughs] -How are you? Nice to see you.

[both speaking Arabic]

Mahmoud: I have something here for you to see.

-Come along. -Okay.

At Zuma, Geoff's colleague Mahmoud El-Tayeb

has made an important new discovery.

Geoff, now we are approaching to the burial chamber.

-All right. -I will show you.

The layout of this white sandstone tomb is different from Ku-1.

Here a tunnel leads back to a shaft, with burial chambers below.

Geoff puts one of his robots to work.

There's no gold here.

Broken burial objects indicate this tomb, like most Kushite tombs,

has been hit by looters.

But for the archaeologists,

it's still a treasure trove of clues about this mysterious culture.

-Amazing. -Isn't that incredible?

Okay, so there is a long-necked jar in the back.

Is that another variety of beer jar?

Let's, uh, we'll pan over to the right.

It's a pot stand with a cup.

And what's that inside the cup there?

Mahmoud: It's a stone.

-Just fallen perfectly into the cup. -Yes.

Wow.

The brick and mortar wall looks like it could have been built yesterday.

But it's as old as the tomb,

protected from the elements for 1500 years.

I'm gonna just see if we can get a good view of the burial itself.

At last, Geoff lays eyes on the bones of a king...

or at least a nobleman, laid to rest in this tomb.

This is just the beginning.

It will take years of analysis to discover his place in Sudan's history.

I really dreamed to find something extraordinary.

And that was great really to have such a find.

A burial for kings.

If I could talk to him, I would ask him, "Who are you?"

"And what is the importance of this place in which you are buried now?"

Geoff: It's a find of a quality that we dream of,

so, you know, I was really glad that Mahmoud was sharing it with us.

And of course, I wanted it myself. [laughs]

So it provided a great model for what we could hope to find here at El-Kurru.

By the time the village of Zuma was created,

Egypt's influence had waned.

And the kings of Kush no longer built grand pyramid tombs.

Their zenith as pharaohs had lasted less than a century,

but in that short time, this small kingdom had toppled a giant.

And seized its place among the great empires of the ancient world.

And now, thanks to the science underway in Sudan,

the Black pharaohs' empire of gold is stepping out of the shadows forever.