Original subtitles

I'm Alice Roberts and I'm on an adventure

to look at the world's oldest and greatest civilisation.

I'm going to be travelling the length and breadth of Egypt by train

to discover its ancient past.

I want to understand how the tombs,

temples and pyramids came to be made

and dig even deeper to understand what life was like

for the ordinary people that made them.

Along the way, I'll be meeting archaeologists who are still working

to uncover the story of ancient Egypt.

I'll be looking at some familiar sights,

but also learning about brand-new discoveries.

TRAIN HORN TOOTS

I've left the Nile Delta and the Pyramids far behind me now

and I'm traveling further south, further upriver.

I want to get a wider picture of ancient Egyptian society.

I want to find out about everyday life.

But I'm also going to one of the most iconic landscapes,

the religious centre of Egypt for thousands of years.

The train from Min ya to Luxor hugs the Nile for 230 miles.

I'm excited to see if Luxor lives up to its reputation

as the world's greatest open-air museum.

Known to the Greeks as Thebes and the Egyptians as Waset,

this city was the religious capital of ancient Egypt.

The Nile, as it flows past modern Luxor, is thronged

with tourist boats, from little ferries to cruise liners.

Later on, I'll be taking a boat trip myself,

but first I have a meeting across the road here.

Lying in the north of the modern city of Luxor is Karnak Temple,

the biggest religious complex in the world

and in use for around 2,000 years.

I'm meeting Tayeb Gharieb Mahmoud, the temple's director.

Tayeb. Good morning.

Welcome. Sabah al-kheir. Sabah al-noor.

How long have you been here as director?

Actually, I started my work here as inspector in 2000... Yeah.

...until this moment. Really?

And now I am the director of Karnak Temples.

That's a nice job.

Which means that...more than 20 years working in Karnak.

Yeah. Yes, I think... I think it's amazing.

It's a huge complex. Yeah.

It's not one temple. It's more than 12 temples.

What's this over here?

It's shrines for the Triad of Thebes.

We had three main gods here. We have the god Amun

and his consort, the goddess Mut, the goddess of motherhood,

and their son, the god Khonsu, the god of the moon.

So they're not really worshipping individual gods,

they're worshipping a family group?

Usually, yes.

Every city in Egypt had this kind of triad.

This is the main concept in the Egyptian religion.

Yeah.

This statue belongs to the King Ramesses I,

one of the most important kings in all of the ancient world.

Who's the person between his legs?

We think this is one of his daughters. Right.

She was so close and he wanted to represent her with him...

Yeah. ..as a princess.

Look at those lovely lotuses. Yeah.

It's... It's papyrus flower.

Papyrus flower. Yes, this one. Ah.

So papyrus must have been an important plant?

Exactly, exactly. It's a kind of sacred plant, is it?

It was sacred because the god Horus was hidden

by his mother, the goddess Isis... Yeah.

...from his uncle, who wanted to kill him,

inside the marshes of the Delta to save him.

And the Hypostyle Hall,

it's a representation for the marshes of the Delta.

Egyptian temples typically have a monumental gateway

called a pylon, formed of two towers.

Inside, they have open courts surrounded by colonnades

and a roofed hypostyle hall full of columns,

the best room in the house.

Where we are right now, this is the Hypostyle Hall

and this is the biggest and hugest hall all over the world.

It's just... I mean... It consisted of 134 columns.

SHE GASPS This is unbelievable.

I don't think I've ever seen pillars as big as this.

This is enormous. It's the biggest, yes,

and tallest columns in the Egyptian civilisation.

Yeah. And look at the colours.

Yes, this is the original colours. Wow!

We are talking about more than 3,000 years.

I mean, they would have been so bright, wouldn't they?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're bright now.

Yes.

And we have this project to clean

the whole part of the Hypostyle Hall.

We started just about eight or nine months,

and we think that we will continue for maybe four years.

And these were holding up a ceiling, were they?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or was it open as it is today?

No, it had ceiling, it had roof.

The hall in general, it was completely dark

because this part of the temple, it wasn't open for anyone.

It was for the king and his family... Right.

...some...the most important persons.

The collection of temples and chapels at the Karnak complex

is architecturally impressive, designed to awe worshippers

to encourage that idea of the pharaoh

as not just close to the gods, but a god in his own right.

And there's no doubt that some of the pharaoh's power

came from military success.

This temple was built by the warrior-king Thutmosis Ill,

who ruled over a vast empire.

King Thutmosis built this temple as a festival hall.

It was for the festival after his victories.

This king, he was a warrior. Yeah.

And he was the winner of the famous battle

in the Egyptian civilisation, Megiddo,

between Egypt and the Palestines. Yeah.

And he made this victory. And this is his addition, then,

the part that celebrates his victories?

Exactly, his victory in Palestine.

Yeah. Exactly, yeah. And expanding his empire.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

The pharaoh's power was intimately bound up

with the gods worshipped in ancient Egypt,

and yet one revolutionary pharaoh would attempt

to change all that and create his own religion.

I'm exploring the Temple of Karnak in Luxor,

the religious centre of ancient Egypt.

But there was one rebel pharaoh

who didn't want to worship the gods here.

His name was Akhenaten.

So what happened with Akhenaten, then?

Because he doesn't attach himself to Ra.

He identifies himself with another god.

It's a very difficult and complicated era

in the Egyptian civilisation.

The King Akhenaten, he wanted to unify all the gods

under the umbrella of one god,

to be the controller of all the gods. Yeah.

And for 17 years, he tried to do that. Yeah.

Even he migrated Thebes to Amarna.

So Akhenaten comes along and says,

“No, actually. I'm leaving..." Exactly.

“I'm leaving all this behind..." Yes, exactly.

“I'm going to go and set up somewhere else,

“I'm going to have Amarna." Especially...

Especially because the priests of the god Amun,

they tried... We think that they tried to make some problems for him,

even maybe they tried to kill him. Really?

Yes. Yeah. Do you think he thought that the priests here at Karnak,

the priests of Amun-Ra were becoming too powerful?

Yes, of course. Yes, of course.

It's very clear it was the priests,

the high priest, he was the controller of everything in Egypt.

Even they became the rulers of Egypt.

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah.

So there's that very close relationship

between religion and royalty. Yeah.

And at that point, actually, it becomes the same thing.

Yes, exactly.

It seems that Akhenaten was attempting to wrest power away

from the high priests, but after he died,

Luxor was restored as the religious centre of Egypt.

Tayeb, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction to Karnak.

I mean, it's such an astonishing place to be.

I'm going to go and do some drawing, I think, if that's all right?

I thank you. It was brilliant. I hope to see you again. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye.

In 1873, Egyptologist Amelia Edwards visited Karnak,

writing about the temples, but also sketching them.

I think I've found the precise spot where she stood to draw this view.

I like just slowing down and sketching

cos it makes you look really hard.

It makes you appreciate this architecture even more.

I love the shadows that we've got coming through

and the way they play on these pillars.

Looking at Amelia's beautiful field sketches in her book,

we can see that obviously there's been more renovation since her time,

so it does look a little different,

but I think we're still looking in the same direction,

and I think that...

...is that crosspiece there, part of the ceiling.

But then it would have been really, really different

going right back into ancient Egypt,

when this whole place would have been roofed over,

so we wouldn't have had any of this sunlight streaming through.

It would have been a very dark, mysterious place

representing the marshes where the baby Horus was hidden

to keep him safe. And that's what these enormous pillars represent,

the papyrus reeds of the marsh.

I love the way the art and the myth are all bound up together here.

Leaving Karnak Temple, I find an extraordinary path,

a perfect straight line stretching a mile and a half

that will take me to the gate of another temple.

This is the Avenue of Sphinxes,

an ancient processional route that was built over 3,500 years ago

and was renovated through time, most recently in 2021.

So now it's possible, once again, to walk all the way

from the Temple of Karnak to the Temple at Luxor.

It's thought that this avenue would originally have been lined

with over 1,000 sphinxes. Many have been lost or damaged,

but some are in remarkably good condition.

It was created for a grand procession,

part of the annual Opet Festival when people would carry statues

of gods in boats along the route.

It's great to be able to walk the whole distance,

but I would not want to do this carrying a statue.

The festival would be held at the time of the Nile flood,

which was celebrated because it made the land fertile.

A year without a flood was a year of famine and suffering.

I think I've just passed the halfway mark

and I'm just heading under this road bridge,

and I can see the Temple at Luxor really clearly now in the distance.

Walking this sacred route means I'm approaching Luxor Temple...

...the same way as the worshippers at the Opet Festival would have done.

That is almost too impressive for words.

It's fantastic.

At the end of the procession, once inside the temple,

rituals would take place to emphasise the link

between the god Amun and the pharaoh.

And I'm meeting a friend here,

archaeologist Professor Sarah Parcak.

It was a festival to celebrate regeneration,

both to reinforce the power of the gods and their rebirth

and regeneration and also to celebrate and reinforce the power

of the kings and their life force and their Ka. Yeah.

So the kings always wanted to be seen as absolute legitimate rulers.

Yeah. They were connected to the gods. Yeah.

I think that's fascinating that the rulers,

the pharaohs were really kind of identifying themselves

with this natural annual cycle.

One of the principal duties of the king was to be

the guarantor of Ma'at, this...

So Ma'at was the goddess of balance, and they had to provide Ma'at,

they had to ensure that everything would remain in balance,

that it would flood not too much, not too little. Yeah.

You know, this Goldilocks perfect flooding that would allow for,

enough food to get them through the year and to put enough in storage.

If the soil-enriching floods didn't happen,

the harvest would be poor,

and the king would have failed in his primary duty

to provide for his people.

It's really interesting thinking

about how, actually, environmental catastrophes

can cause massive political destabilisation.

We have a lot of evidence throughout ancient Egyptian history

of droughts happening, and one of my own personal areas of interest

is the end of Egypt's great pyramid age, around 2,200 years ago.

And around this time we have a king called Pepi ll,

who rules for over 90 years, and what we think we see -

and we have a lot of environmental peer-reviewed evidence for this -

there's a sustained period of droughts

of a period of between 50 and 100 years.

There are no more foreign expeditions.

No more pyramids are built. There's great political instability.

Power starts flowing to the provinces.

And there's drought. You know, it's a big problem,

and people are probably thinking,

"Well, the king promised that it was going to flood

"and where's the flood? Why isn't it coming?" Yeah.

And, you know, even new evidence has just come out

for during the reign of Cleopatra,

in studying volcanic eruption in Alaska of all places.

And it probably let enough volcanic ash into the atmosphere

where it had a pretty significant impact on global climate,

and we have a series of sustained droughts in Cleopatra's reign

which led to a lot of instability and they're probably connected.

You know, a lot of this work is ongoing, but I'm fascinated

by environmental history and how it impacts Egyptian culture.

Sarah is a pioneer in space archaeology.

She doesn't dig on other planets, but she uses satellite images

to find new archaeological sites.

Analysing those multi-layered images,

she can pinpoint specific locations

where there could be exciting new archaeology to investigate.

How has Egyptology as a discipline been transformed by new technology?

The work I do with satellites,

allowing us to find previously undocumented sites

or features within sites. What have you got that you can show me, then?

Let's get out my computer and, um...

...which of the 9,000 images that I'm currently working on.

I might not have time to see them all.

Really? Just 8,4277 CHUCKLING

Let's look at the Great Temple of Ramesses lll.

Where's this, then? So this is on the west bank of Luxor,

so this is just across from us. Oh.

And when you have satellite imagery...

So this is just a visual image.

Oh, wow, look at that. So you have a pretty, you know...

...a pretty good understanding. We can see pretty clearly the temple.

So you can see the excavated temple.

You can see the excavated, and there's a little bit,

like there's a hint of some mud brick walls here. Yeah.

This is just basic visual imagery.

This is before using the multispectral data. Yeah.

And a lot of what I do...

Like, it sort of looks like a gobbledygook MRI image sometimes

and you're like, "Trust me, there's something there." Yeah.

There we go. Oh, wow.

So I just made it pop a bit. So it looks a lot clearer now.

A lot clearer. So when you order imagery, you can fiddle with

the bands to get the information to be much, much more clear.

Even, you know, looking at these images here

and we can see so much buried archaeology there. Yeah.

I often get asked, you know,

"How much of ancient Egypt is left to find?"

And it's like, "How long is a piece of string? How can we really know?"

But also I'm a nerd and so I did the maths. And?

In the Delta alone, we have excavated 1/1000th of 1%

of the total volume of sites. ALICE GASPS

Oh, my goodness.

And that's in the Delta, not for all of Egypt.

So we know this much. We see headlines all the time

of the amazing discoveries being made. Yeah.

And it's the tip of the iceberg. It's a tiny bit.

But it's why... I mean, I'm excited, right? I tell my students,

"I hope you all prove me wrong, then I've done a good job!"

I'm going on a day trip to the other side of the Nile.

If Luxor on the east bank is the land of the living,

over on the west bank, it's the land of the dead.

The Theban Necropolis is over there.

And this Nile ferry is the best way to get there.

Everything I've seen so far has been on the east bank of the Nile,

Karnak, the Temple of Luxor.

And now I'm headed over to the west bank

and I'm going to look at Deir el-Medina

and go to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

I'm in Luxor exploring ancient Egypt,

and this time, instead of traveling by train,

I'm taking my first boat trip on the Nile.

It's a kind of timeless scene, this, all these boats thronging the Nile.

And this would have been the main transport link through Egypt,

right from the Mediterranean all the way up to Aswan and beyond.

The flood plain of the Nile is full of life,

with trees and luscious vegetation.

Then suddenly you reach the dry and barren higher ground.

This is where the dead were buried.

Up and away from the banks of the Nile,

this is where the rulers of Egypt were buried around 3,000 years ago.

Still early, but it's hot already.

But before I go to explore the magnificent tombs

of the kings and queens,

I'm going to see a very rare archaeological site indeed,

one that tells us about the lives of more ordinary folk.

I'm really excited to be here.

I'm just approaching a site that I'm really desperate

to have a look at, because I think what I'm going to get here

is the best glimpse I've had so far of everyday life in ancient Egypt.

Deir el-Medina was a village for the artisans

who worked on the royal tombs, and their families.

It was in use for 500 years.

As you see, all the mounds around us are limestone.

I'm with Cedric Gobeil, who's worked extensively on excavations here.

Cedric, you excavated here at Deir el-Medina for many years,

so introduce me to the site. What am I looking at here?

Well, actually, what we have is the workmen's village.

It's almost unique in Egypt.

So it's roughly 68 houses and these people, their life was devoted

in digging and decorating the royal tombs

in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

This is really important to know about, isn't it?

You've got the amazing temples and you've got the fantastic tombs,

but, you know, you wonder where the population at large is.

And what do we learn about their lives?

I mean, who were they? Are they being treated well?

Are they effectively slaves? You know, what was going on here?

In fact, they were absolutely well treated.

They were a sort of lower-middle class elite. Right.

Because as they were engaged in working for the royal tomb,

they had to be super well treated.

Some of them knew how to write and read. Really?

Absolutely. Which was actually something,

you know, that only a few percentage of the people,

of the population was able to do. Yeah.

Thanks to that, we have almost on a daily basis their life.

It's called the archive of the tomb

and we can trace the delivery of goods that they were receiving,

their salaries, their absence from work. That level of detail?

Absolutely. We have also census,

so we know more or less who was living where and with whom. Yeah.

So we have a sense also of the family.

This is absolutely extraordinary. We can trace back their life

almost on a day-to-day basis.

What amazing resources for archaeologists!

To be able to come along and reconstruct life.

It's unique. Yeah. I dare to say it's almost unique, yes.

So what was their life like, then?

I mean, were they getting salaries? Yes.

Are we looking at that kind of arrangement? Yes.

They would receive a monthly salary

in the form, in the shape of goods,

so either, you know, you would have oats, you would have barley,

you would have, then, things to eat. Yeah.

All the products that you would need to survive and to live very well.

So we don't... It's not a monetary economy?

No, back then there was no money.

Yeah. Yeah.

Cedric has found evidence of not just how these artisans lived

day to day, what their houses were like, what they ate,

but something quite incredible -

the world's first example of industrial action.

In terms of worker's rights, do we know anything about that?

You're telling me that they received salaries.

Could they get annoyed about how much they were being paid?

Could they ask for more? Absolutely.

I would say the most explicit example of these rights,

work rights, is contained on a papyrus -

it's called the Strike Papyrus - and on this papyrus, it tells us

that during the year 29 of the reign of Ramesses lll,

these workmen were supposed to receive their monthly salary,

but the salary didn't show up.

So what they did, they completely put down... Downed tools?

...their chisel and mallets. Yeah.

They felt entitled enough to complain and to go on strike. Yeah.

Isn't that extraordinary? So more than 3,000 years ago,

we've got the first evidence in the world of workers' rights?

Absolutely. Yeah. And what about the tombs here?

I mean, just walking up on to the hill looking over the village,

we've walked past a few tombs. Whose are these tombs, then?

Of the same workmen. Right.

So this is also one of the reasons why this site is so particular.

They were living here, but they were also dying here. Yeah.

And I think thanks to your work here, it's now possible

to go into some of these tombs, so can we take a look?

Absolutely. Yeah? It would be my great pleasure. Absolutely.

Lead on then, yeah. Let's do so.

Cedric wants to show me the tomb of the family

of a local craftsman called Sennedjem.

He worked on the royal tombs nearby,

but for a lowly artisan, his own tomb is rather special.

The mini pyramid is a modern reconstruction.

But inside is the original tomb, more than 3,000 years old.

So as we go down, please mind your head.

It might be a little bit, you know, low.

Here as well.

And then we finally arrive.

And here again, please mind your head.

So we're quite deep here. Absolutely.

Oh, my goodness!

No! This isn't original? Isn't it fantastic?

It hasn't been... It hasn't been restored?

Not at all. Almost looks like it was made yesterday.

It really does. I mean, it's just amazing.

How old is this? When does this date to?

The reign of Ramesses II, 1280 BC.

More than 3,000 years ago?

Yes. And we have to imagine that

all the coffins were piled here, the furniture.

Just amazing. Yeah. So a whole family interred in this tomb? Yes.

Buried in all this fantastic, decorated tomb, yes.

These decorated artisan's tombs are highly unusual.

They don't show images of daily life

as we see with higher-ranking officials.

Instead, they're full of religious and mythological themes.

This is all magical iconography and magical text in order to ensure

the transformation of the deceased and his afterlife.

Yeah. So what's happening in this image here?

What we are looking at actually is a scene depicting the heaven,

the ideal world for the Egyptians once they were dead. Yeah.

And it's a place full of, you know, the harvest.

You have trees full of fruit

and also it's all surrounded by water,

so you will never lack water.

Here you have the god Ra, the sun god,

in his barque travelling in the sky.

As you see, he's presiding over heaven,

so it means this is a place that the sun will always shine on.

On this scene, you see the deceased and his wife

and they are receiving water and food

from what we call the tree goddess. Oh, she's wonderful.

Look, she's growing out of the trunk of a tree. Absolutely.

And we've got these eyes. Are they Eyes of Horus?

Wedjat eyes, exactly. Eyes of Horus.

And they are magical symbols right there

to ensure the protection of this whole scene. Yeah.

Something else that is quite nice to see

is Wepwawet and Anubis, two jackal-headed gods.

So they are protecting the ones who are opening the ways

to the necropolis, because this is the house of eternity

and, actually, his wish is to be able to walk from it

and come back to it for rest. Yeah. It's almost like a real house.

Yeah, yeah. And in this case, they are protecting him.

They're fantastic, aren't they?

Deir el-Medina, this fascinating workers' village, is tucked away

in the hills just out of sight of the place

where the people who lived here would have gone to work.

They'd have been able to do the commute on foot,

presumably carrying tools and food,

because just a kilometre away from the village

is the royal necropolis, the Valley of the Kings.

It contains 63 tombs that we know of,

including the resting places of some of the most well-known pharaohs

from the annals of ancient Egypt.

Each tomb was carved deep into the rock,

stocked with valuable personal possessions,

and after the mummy of the dead pharaoh was laid inside,

it would be sealed.

I'm meeting Dr Bahaa Gaber, director of the West Bank.

Bahaa! Alice, how are you? Hi.

Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you too.

So we're going to go into the tomb of SETI?

Yes, let's go and have a look at the tomb. Yeah? I'll follow you.

Bahaa wants to show me the biggest and most impressive tomb first,

belonging to the pharaoh SETI.

Oh, my goodness! Here we are. And immediately, as soon as you're in!

It's a beautiful tomb.

Descending the modern wooden steps,

I'm surrounded by incredible decoration.

The walls and ceilings are covered in painted reliefs

carved into the plaster.

Ah, look at that on the ceiling. We've got...

What is it, vultures flying there?

Yeah. The vulture actually was

the goddess of protection in ancient time.

And here you will see also the beautiful goddess Ma'at.

She was the goddess of truth. Yeah.

And she stretched the wings to give protection to the king.

That reminds me of the way that Isis is represented

on the foot of Tutankhamun's sarcophagus. Right.

She has wings like this. Right.

And that was a sign of protection for the boy king.

Yeah. Yes.

What I really like about this is the confidence of the line work.

It's absolutely beautiful.

I mean, these are consummate artists, aren't they?

Right, right.

It's... It's just so adept.

What I also notice is that some of the artwork seems

to have been a work in progress.

You can see how the artist sketched the design in red

before committing to black ink.

The next stage would have been to carve the relief and paint it,

but here they never got that far before the tomb was sealed.

This scene shows Seti's red sarcophagus as it's brought down

this very shaft, being taken to its final resting place.

Can you see the coffin? Oh, yeah.

It's coming through the green land to the desert,

and then suddenly the coffin will be inside the tomb.

He will cross from the first life to the second life,

from the earth to the sky.

They must have had a bridge across here?

In ancient time? Yeah.

No, they didn't have any kind of bridge. For security,

that was closed. Well, there must have been a bridge

when they brought his coffin in?

Exactly. THEY CHUCKLE

That's right.

And then the tomb carries on down here?

Yeah, such more and more and more. It just goes on and on.

Exactly.

Just imagine how many people worked on this tomb.

There's more over here. Such an amazing...

Look at the colours, still.

After 200 metres of stairs, we finally enter Seti's tomb.

And it doesn't disappoint.

Is this the burial chamber, then, do you think?

Yeah. Yeah. This is the last past of the tomb. Yeah.

So what are we looking at here?

It looks like gods and stars.

Is it constellations?

Yeah, yeah.

All those images which are created by solar discs, stars,

so that's the imagination of the ancient people about paradise.

This is absolutely beautiful and I'm...

I'm kind of overwhelmed by the whole thing.

I think it's extraordinary and stunning and...

And then the one thing which I'm looking at which is really kind of

speaking to me is the fact that there's this constellation up there

in the shape of a lion. Yes.

And we still call that Leo. Yes, right.

And that's a direct connection back to ancient Egypt,

the ancient Egyptian's understanding of the world,

the way they looked at the world, and that's amazing.

What incredible artists.

I am in awe of them.

Yeah, such an amazing tomb.

Yeah, it's all about SETI, but I'm just...

I'm just blown away by the artists.

Yeah. The artisans who made this.

And yet we are still not at the lowest level.

There seems to be another tunnel.

Now, what's this?

That's actually the tunnel, 100-metre tunnel.

Where does it go?

We did excavation on the tunnel itself because we are...

We dreamed one day that we will find treasures inside that one.

That there might be a sealed room?

Exactly, exactly.

The king cut this tunnel to link

between his first life and the second life.

Where does the tunnel go?

We walked until 100 metres and it never ended.

So the excavation is unfinished?

Yes. You haven't got to the bottom of that tunnel?

Exactly, exactly.

We finished the excavation because the oxygen not enough.

Right, OK. Yes.

So conditions became too difficult to carry on working. Exactly, yeah.

Who might be down there?

Until we finish the excavation, we can't say anything. Yeah.

Maybe the king was hiding something behind. Yeah, yeah.

And that's why we're still waiting to see what will be there.

That is the secret of this tomb. Yeah.

Keep looking, Bahaa. Yes. I'll come back next year!

OK, I'll be willing to do that!

Valley of the Queens,

called Ta-Set-Neferu in ancient Egyptian language,

which means "the beautiful place.”

I've come to Luxor and I'm on the west side of the Nile

with Dr Bahaa Gaber.

Tucked among these Theban hills are the Valley of the Kings

and the Valley of the Queens.

Valley of the Queens,

called Ta-Set-Neferu in ancient Egyptian language,

which means "the beautiful place.”

Whereas earlier pharaohs built immense pyramids

to contain their tombs, these valleys mark a change.

Here the ruling elite were making use of a natural landmark,

with their tombs hidden among these limestone hills.

In one of the 91 tombs here is Seti's daughter-in-law, Nefertari.

This is also a beautiful burial location,

and also the same, it's the colours,

amazing colour that you will see here on the tomb.

This is so beautiful, Bahaa.

Such an amazing tomb.

You see the colours still until now, more than 3,000 years

and the colours are still until now in a good condition.

That's just gorgeous, isn't it? Such a beautiful one.

So what are we seeing in these images?

Who are these gods and what does the writing tell us?

It's parts from the sacred texts which talk about the second life

and the gates, the entrances to the second life.

So it talks about the gods that will open the doors

for the spirit of the queen to live in paradise

on the end of the journey at night.

So they're letting her through those gates?

Yes. Yeah.

It's such an amazing feeling when you are here.

It's very beautiful, these kind of jewel-like colours.

I love the ceilings. It's...

You're closed in underground,

but you still look up and see the night sky.

It does defy belief, doesn't it,

that these colours are here more than 3,000 years later?

The tomb of Nefertari is lavish,

fit for the favourite wife of the pharaoh Rameses II.

The king loved Nefertari so much.

That's why he cut a beautiful tomb for her like that.

It's almost like a pharaoh's tomb, isn't it?

I think that he treated his wife like a pharaoh. Yeah.

Like she is a queen of Egypt.

Oh, look at this beautiful room.

This is fabulous.

The paintings in here are glorious.

We've got lots of gods around the place.

That's Osiris.

But we've also got Nefertari herself.

I can see this figure of a woman

and I can see her name in a cartouche.

So she's there, and there, and there,

and there, and over there, so five times.

And it's all Nefertari. And she's really beautiful.

Look at the combination of the painting on the relief.

So there's this sculpted ear and nose and lips.

And I love her headdress, so this vulture headdress.

Again, it's got a bit of relief to it,

but there's also some shadow here, so that's really weird

because there's no shadow on the rest of her body,

it's quite flat-looking,

but up here we've got this little bit of shading.

Suddenly this is leaping out as very three dimensional.

Look at her earring and her bracelets and her beautiful dress.

She's wearing an under dress

and then over the top of it, she's got this sheer, fine linen,

which is so, so fine we can actually see through it.

You can see her arm underneath there.

So we're getting a real insight into...

Well, fashion, I suppose.

High fashion. This is the queen, after all.

What's amazing about this is looking at these tombs and...

...there is obviously a standard way of doing things.

There are standard texts which are going to be on the walls.

You're going to have particular gods reappearing,

and goddesses. I love the...

I love the way in as you go past all those goddesses.

There's one point where there are no men in the room, it's just women.

But also what this is is the tomb of an individual,

and here she is.

So it's not just an idea,

it's not just a representation of a queen.

This is someone. This is Nefertari.

Before I travel back across the Nile to Luxor,

I've been given the chance to visit the tomb of Tutankhamun

in the Valley of the Kings on my own.

I've already seen the objects from his tomb

and his magnificent death mask and his decorated, empty sarcophagus

in the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

But this is where his stone sarcophagus still lies

and the mummified body of the young king himself,

brought back to the tomb in which it was placed almost 3,500 years ago.

English archaeologist Howard Carter first came to Egypt in 1891,

but it was 30 years later that he'd make the discovery of a lifetime

when he found the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Having discovered the steps down to the tomb,

on 26th November 1922, Carter opened the doorway

to find that the tomb inside was intact, unplundered.

He was surrounded by thousands of incredible objects,

furniture, jewellery and ornaments,

and everywhere the glint of gold.

And here is the great stone sarcophagus.

Inside that would have been the wooden sarcophagi gilded,

covered in jewels. And inside the innermost one of those,

the mummified remains of the pharaoh himself,

Tutankhamun.

And look how beautiful this is

with these four protective goddesses,

wings outstretched, protecting the pharaoh.

And here he is, the most famous pharaoh of them all

by virtue of the fact that his tomb was undisturbed

when it was discovered by Howard Carter in 1022.

And analysis of his remains reveal that he was young.

He was around the age of 19 when he died,

so he'd only been on the throne for ten years.

And there's been ongoing speculation about the cause of death.

It can be very difficult to determine.

Some said there's a head injury that could have been the fatal wound,

perhaps even he was murdered.

But recent analysis has ruled that out.

The damage was postmortem, it happened after his death.

But DNA from his mummy has revealed that he had malaria,

so perhaps that is what led to his early death.

And of course, there were all those extraordinary objects

buried with him in this tomb that are now in the Cairo museum.

But Tutankhamun, Tut-ankh-amun, is here, back in his tomb.

Here in Luxor, I've seen how religion and royal power

went hand in hand in ancient Egypt.

I've seen the tombs of pharaohs, but also learned about

the artisans who created those beautiful tombs.

But now I'm heading back to the station

to continue my journey towards Aswan, my final destination.

I'm continuing south, upriver,

and I'll be stopping off at a whole series of sites

that are strung out like jewels along the banks of the Nile.

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