All language subtitles for BBC.Ancient.Apocalypse.1of4.Death.on.the.Nile.576p.PDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.en

The Sphinx guards the only surviving
wonder of the ancient world -

the mighty pyramids at Giza.

They were built for the pharaohs
of the Egyptian Old Kingdom,

a civilisation
that lasted for almost 1,000 years

before mysteriously collapsing.

Archaeologists are now discovering that the
sudden end was one of most unimaginable horror.

We had a pile of three skeletons in this position
- an old man, over an old woman, over a child.

All of them in contorted attitudes.

The woman like this, the man with hands up,
and the child was too disintegrated to say.

5,000 years ago,
long before the time of Tutankhamen,

before Ramses,

before Queen Nefertiti,

the first great civilisation
was established in Egypt.

The Egyptian Old Kingdom's
lasting legacy is the Sphinx

and the great pyramids at Giza.

The pyramids are royal tombs
for the Old Kingdom! pharaohs,

protecting their mummified bodies
for eternity.

The pharaohs united Egypt
and the Old Kingdom flourished.

They developed a unique style
of art, architecture and literature.

It was a civilisation that was
remarkably stable and resilient.

The daily life of the average Egyptian
remained unchanged for nearly 1,000 years.

But then, 4,200 years ago,
the Old Kingdom suddenly collapsed.

The pharaoh's power crumbled.
Central government failed.

Egypt was plunged into a dark age,
which lasted for more than 100 years.

It's an episode in history
which has mystified Egyptologists.

For the last 30 years, Egyptian archaeologist Fekri
Hassan has been looking for his own explanation

of why Egypt turned
from stability to chaos.

I felt compelled

to find out why did it
happen when it did?

Especially when Egypt was doing so well.
We had the pyramids, temples, statues,

major achievements in arts,
literature and everything else.

Why did it end at that time?

So, I had to pursue that question.

I had to find out for myself the reasons for the
sudden, unprecedented collapse of the Old Kingdom.

Fekri Hassan has always
challenged orthodoxy.

The conventional wisdom is that the Old Kingdom
fell apart after the death of a pharaoh

and the battle for succession
caused a major political conflict.

For Fekri,
this just didn't ring true.

The first seed of doubt
was planted in 1971

when Fekri found evidence of something far
more devastating than political unrest.

This little-known tomb in southern Egypt
has an astonishing story to tell.

The tomb belongs not to a pharaoh, but
to a local governor called Ankhtifi,

who lived just after the collapse
of the Old Kingdom.

For me, personally,
it's an incredible find.

This is a remarkable tomb. This is one of
the most outstanding tombs in all of Egypt.

It's in Ankhtifi's writings
that Fekri found the vital clue.

The hieroglyphs tell of horrendous famines
and the sufferings of ordinary people.

It is rarely that we have a voice from the
past that gives us a poignant account

of what had happened, of the horrors, the
famines, that happened 4,000 years ago.

And to have them reported in such a concise
and clear fashion is unprecedented.

The entire country has become
like a starved grasshopper.

I managed it
that no-one died of hunger.

One small section is particularly moving - it tells
of the despair and atrocities during the famines

which were ravaging
the south of Egypt.

All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a
degree that they had come to eating their children.

For Fekri, the writing on the wall
was far too powerful to be ignored.

But taking Ankhtifi's hieroglyphs literally brought
him into conflict with most Egyptologists.

When Ankhtifi talks
about people dying out of starvation,

I would take it with a pinch of salt.

This is typical Egyptian rhetoric
which amounts to exaggeration.

There is no way that the statements
made here are exaggerations.

It is definitely a description
of actual events.

The text that we have here is not a folk tale, not
a mythological statement. It's an actual account.

It's an evidence that we can read
and interpret like anything else.

Like any observation, it's subject
to analysis and examination.

That text can be analysed
and examined and I find it credible.

Fekri felt compelled to prove
that these writings were true,

that Egypt had suffered
devastating famines.

But for years he was thwarted by the lack
of any hard evidence of the suffering.

Then, in 1996, archaeological
evidence emerged for the first time.

A new discovery in the far north revealed the
scale of suffering at the end of the Old Kingdom.

Archaeologists were excavating
in the Nile delta,

far removed from the glamorous tombs
and pyramids of the rest of Egypt.

The site is described as, "A place that only
dedicated archaeologists can get excited about."

Donald Redford is constantly excited
at what he finds here.

When we began to excavate,
I was surprised, and still am,

to find just under the surface poor burials
under reed matting, some so tightly packed,

that you almost literally
tripped over them.

They found a staggering number
of bodies - nearly 9,000.

And something else was unusual
about these burials.

Wherever we set pick in soil
was a burial,

supine, on the back,
or on the side, under a reed mat,

with very few grave goods, if any.

And so we must conclude in all cases, that these were
the very poor, and they all dated to the same period.

Donald and his team were amazed at the
sheer quantity of poor people buried here.

They'd found a community reduced to extreme poverty.
The date coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom.

I have not actually
run into this kind of thing before.

I think what we see here parallels
what is happening elsewhere in Egypt.

Everything is breaking down.

It's not just in one category of human activity,
but everywhere - society, art, religion, economy.

It's all breaking down. I think here for the first
time we have evidence of it in dirt archaeology.

Confirmation of that final and rather sudden destruction
of the Egyptian civilisation of the Old Kingdom.

Donald's discovery suggested that the descriptions in
Ankhtifi's tomb of widespread famine must be true.

Fekri realised that whatever had caused
devastation on such a large scale

must have been an apocalyptic event.

My hunch from the beginning was that it has to do
with the environment, in which the Egyptians lived

and on which they depended
for their livelihood.

That would have contributed to this sudden
event because I could not see any evidence

in the archaeological record that would lead me to think
that it would just suddenly break down like this.

Of all the forces in the natural
environment of Egypt, one dominates.

The River Nile.

The ancient Greek author Herodotus described
the Nile as "a gift from the gods,"

a belief that most modern Egyptians
cling to passionately.

The relationship with the Nile,
I think, is a love relationship.

I'm not the only one. I think all the
Egyptians have a love affair with the Nile.

The Egyptian civilisation is about the Nile - loving
the Nile. It runs in the blood, it's part of you.

You grow up with it. It's in you.

I've just been thinking that if you commit
yourself for a lifelong relationship like this,

it has to be passion.

Without the Nile,
Egypt would not exist

because it relied on annual floods
for survival.

Every year, rains in the south would
bring floodwaters to the Nile valley,

inundating the area
with rich, fertile mud.

Once the water had subsided,
planting could begin.

For Fekri, the fascination with the life and death
powers of the Nile floods goes back a long time.

One of the major turning points in my life was when I
came here with my mother when I was six years old.

I'd never seen a flood before. There was water
all over the place on the banks of the Nile.

I was terrified...amazed by it.

I think, from that point on, I began to think
that the Nile may not be that gentle river

that has always flowed in a steady
manner nurturing Egyptian civilisation.

That there may be another side to the
river, a dark side, a dangerous side.

So dangerous that Fekri believed
the Nile was implicated

in the catastrophe
that destroyed the Old Kingdom.

To many Egyptian historians, the very
suggestion was tantamount to heresy.

I've been reading history from the
very early beginnings of man in Egypt

and I can see a pattern

that's gone on
for thousands of years.

The regular thing
is that the Nile comes.

We know that the Nile is good, we
know that the Nile is always faithful

and we know that the Nile
will come next year.

I believe in that
as I believe in God.

Faced with such burning conviction,

Fekri knew that he had to find some proof that
the Nile was not always Egypt's faithful ally.

He decided to look back in time

to the 7th century AD
when the Arabs conquered Egypt.

Every year, they measured the level of
the Nile floods in Cairo on this column.

The meticulous records they kept for
over 1,000 years were a revelation.

When I began to look at the Nile
record, I was under the impression

that the Nile was a normal river with not that much
change in the amount of water it brings every year.

But I found that there are variations from year to
year, from decade to decade, from century to century,

and later found from millennium to millennium.
That shattered my ideas that were based on a myth,

that assumed that the Nile is a
steady river. It flows every year.

All people have to do is sow a few
grains and everything is wonderful.

That is not true at all.

When I found that one out of every five
floods was a bad flood, I was shocked.

And so I think that discovery
changed my views totally

about not only the Nile, but about how Egyptian
civilisation was developed and how it collapsed.

Alarmingly, Fekri had also discovered
that only a small drop in the Nile flood

could have disastrous ramifications,

a fact not lost on one of Europe's
greatest military strategists.

In 1791 and 1792, the Nile flood was
only a metre or two below average,

but people starved,
there were riots,

and the political consequences
were calamitous.

Hearing that the country was so debilitated,
Napoleon seized the initiative and conquered Egypt.

Fekri now realised that any failure of the
Nile could have far-reaching consequences.

But he was puzzled.

He'd found records of low floods for two to three
years, but the dark age had lasted for over 100 years.

It seemed impossible for the Nile
to fail for such a long period.

Maybe there was something far bigger
involved.

Fekri decided to look at the other natural feature
that lies at the heart of Egyptian life - the desert.

Fekri has come with his wife,
botanist Hala Barakat,

to the south of Egypt
to search for clues.

Today, this remote land
is an inhospitable desert,

but thousands of years ago,
people lived here.

Hala is scouring the desert
for traces of these ancient people.

She's looking for small piles of stones,
telltale signs of their campsites.

At night, they gathered wood for a fire. Fragments
of charred embers still survive under the stones.

Hidden in these tiny bits
of charcoal is vital evidence.

Back in the lab, Hala identifies
the different firewoods.

She finds traces of the acacia tree which
is no longer found in this desert.

We're looking at charcoal
of the acacia tree.

It's very distinctive
by the presence of the big vessels.

When we find the charcoal of acacia,

it means that, when it was
growing, there was underground water.

You only find them in depressions
or in oases where water accumulates.

They need water to grow.

Hala painstakingly collected and dated thousands
of pieces of charcoal from all over the desert.

The result was quite startling.

About 7,000 years ago,
there were trees growing here.

Not exactly a forest, but a dry savannah with grass
growing between the trees after the rainy season.

It was a place
where people could live.

Over time, vast swathes of North
Africa dried up and became a desert.

Poets wrote of the devastation
caused by sand.

Indeed the desert
is throughout the land.

The desert claims the land. The
land is injured. Towns are ravaged.

The sun is failed. None can live
where the dust storm fails it.

We do not know what will happen
throughout the land.

Could the change
from grass to desert

be the cause of the sudden breakdown
of the Old Kingdom 4,200 years ago?

Unfortunately for Fekri,
the dates didn't fit.

I personally do not think that the
gradual desiccation of North Africa

was the main cause for the collapse
of the Old Kingdom.

The deserts we know today, by 4,500 years
ago, were fully established by that time.

The change had abrupt events in it, but
it was in general a gradual trend,

lasting for several millennia.

So the slow desert encroachment was completed
well before the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

This had not caused its demise.

Fekri had to look for another culprit
which would strike more swiftly.

There HAS to be another cause

to explain the sudden
and dramatic event

that coincided with the end
of the Old Kingdom.

Then came a breakthrough.

A new discovery in the hills
of neighbouring Israel.

In these caves, Mira Bar-Matthews has
found a unique record of past climates.

All the water here
comes from rainfall.

As the rain filters down through the
rock, it dissolves the limestone,

forming stalactites and stalagmites.

As these gradually
build up over the years,

they trap ancient rainwater.

Mira has discovered a way of calculating
rainfall thousands of years ago

by taking tiny samples
of the stalactites.

The ancient rain contains two different types
of oxygen - a light one and a heavier one.

If there is more of the light type, it was a very
wet period. More of the heavy one means it was dry.

Analysing the samples in a mass spectrometer
gives the ratio of light and heavy oxygen.

Mira had been analysing stalactites
stretching back over thousands of years

when she got to one sample
4,200 years old.

As soon as she saw the results, she
knew something unusual had happened.

The striking finding was that
there is a very important change

in the amount of rainfall
that was in this area.

Mira had found
a staggering 20% drop in rainfall.

This suggested a sudden
and significant climate change.

This drop is dramatic.

This event is the largest event
over the last 5,000 years.

Even though Egypt and Israel have different
weather systems, this finding was very exciting.

Rapid climate change was the culprit
Fekri had been searching for.

He believed it was the prime suspect in the
catastrophe that destroyed the Old Kingdom,

the reason why this powerful civilisation
disintegrated at the height of its glory.

I firmly believe that in addition to
gradual changes on a millennial scale,

climatic change can also happen very,
very rapidly, suddenly and swiftly

with dramatic consequences
for people.

Because abrupt climatic events
happen very rapidly,

within a few decades they can
influence the livelihood of people,

causing famines and droughts.

They are of a magnitude and rapidity
that people cannot deal with them

in the way they would deal
with a protracted, long-term change.

Fekri now needed to know

if the sudden climate change discovered in
the Israeli cave was not a localised event,

but part of a larger weather pattern
that would have affected Egypt, too.

The evidence to back him up
came out of the blue...

from the glaciers of Iceland.

Geologist Gerard Bond is also searching
for clues about ancient climates.

He does it by looking at icebergs.

The particular ones he's interested
in are streaked with black ash.

Can you make out the black?

These are particles of volcanic material
from the volcanoes here in Iceland.

Some of it is scraped up
as the ice moves over the rock.

Some pours down the mountainsides
that the glaciers are moving through

and some is dumped on the ice
by volcanic eruptions.

Gerard follows the journey the
icebergs take after they leave Iceland

and drift south
in the North Atlantic.

When the icebergs reach warmer waters, they melt,
and specks of ash fall to the bottom of the ocean.

And that's where they stay,

embedded in the deep sea mud
which gradually builds up over time.

Gerard and his team have collected mud from the world's
oceans with deposits from the last 10,000 years.

As he searched the mud from the North
Atlantic, looking for traces of volcanic ash,

he was surprised.

He was finding ash
in some very strange places.

Some were so far south, it showed that the icebergs
had travelled a very long way before melting.

This could only happen
in periods of extreme cold.

And even more intriguing, there was
a pattern to these mini ice ages.

What we found to our surprise was
that not only were there suggestions

that the climate was not stable,

but every 1,500 years
was a distinct cold period,

lasting a couple of hundred years,
perhaps.

But what did a 1,500-year weather cycle
have to do with famine in Egypt?

One of these cycles
had an age of 4,200 years.

That means that the weather was cool enough at that time
for icebergs to have got as far south as off Ireland.

And it occurred at about the same time as the
event that you're interested in in Egypt.

So a mini ice age creating
freezing conditions across Europe

happened when Egypt was suffering
from extreme famines.

This could easily have stayed
as a mere coincidence.

But Gerard's work alerted
fellow geologist Peter deMenocal.

When he searched the climate records
for the rest of the world,

looking at everything from pollen to sand,
he found an even more dramatic change.

It was very exciting, something
that we were not expecting.

We were using techniques that were
meant to find small climate signals

in deep sea sediments.

When we found a whopping huge signal,
we were shocked. We didn't expect that.

It's as if you're going after a mouse and you
catch a lion. It's a very dramatic event.

Not only was this change sudden, but the ancient
climate data revealed just how far-reaching it was.

It seems that everywhere we look,
we find this event.

We see it in the Mediterranean and
then we see evidence off of Africa,

we see it in many locations
throughout the North Atlantic.

We also see evidence for it in Greenland.
We see it in the continental United States.

Most recently, there's been evidence now that
we actually see it in the Indonesian region.

That is a very important result. It
shows that it's truly a global event.

What we see is that the climate change event occurs
at the same time as the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

It's an event that in terms of
the change in climate was profound,

not only in how large the event was,
but also in how widespread it was.

Scientists were at last confirming
everything Fekri believed.

Severe climate change was causing
widespread human misery 4,200 years ago.

As colder and drier conditions swept the
globe, harvests failed and people starved.

They were victims of a weather cycle
out of their control.

It really is a very sobering thought to imagine what
it must have been like to have been these people

and to have been struggling with climate as they were
at the time and ultimately to have succumbed to it.

And nowhere was this human suffering
more acute than in Egypt.

Everybody has clustered here.
There's no way out.

Donald Redford and his team had already discovered
that this ruined city was poverty-stricken

at the end of the Old Kingdom.

But in 1999,
he made a macabre new find,

which showed in chilling detail
the extent of the chaos

that Fekri believes the sudden
climate change had triggered.

He found a group of skeletons
lying underneath the temple wall.

I found that the destruction
is everywhere.

Moreover, it's associated with
what I would consider a massacre.

That puts it right out of the...
realm of accidental occurrence.

Over the years, Donald has uncovered
thousands of skeletons.

But he was extremely distressed when he
found this particular collection of bodies.

There were 18 of them. In fact,
their position was rather dramatic.

We had a pile of three skeletons in this position.
An old man, over an old woman, over a child,

all in contorted attitudes, the woman
like this, the man with hands up.

On top of the wall were two adult
males, one sprawled over the wall,

with part of the wall
having fallen on his back.

At this point, there were two males with
a pig in the middle, of all things.

And in front of the temple, right on the axis, was a
fallen teenager, with a rat clutched in his hand.

Sprawled like that, as though he had been in the act of
running and he tripped and that was the end for him.

He lacked a head, as though
someone had decapitated him.

Donald will never know exactly what happened, but he
believes the 18 people who died had been murdered.

But most significantly, in a culture where
the dead were always treated with respect,

these bodies had not been buried.

It was a very grisly scene. The interesting thing is
that no-one ever came back to retrieve the bodies.

After an accidental conflagration
with people dying by accident,

their relatives would have retrieved the bodies
for burial. No-one was around to get them.

No-one was here and cared to get
them. There is a real caesura.

It's almost as though, with their deaths and the
destruction of the temple, the place was abandoned.

From stalactites in Israel
to icebergs in Iceland,

Fekri had compelling evidence that this traumatic
human crisis was linked to a global climate change.

But one piece of the puzzle
was still missing.

Would he be able to find any scientific
proof of climate disaster in Egypt itself?

He still needed to know if the country's lifeblood
- the Nile - had failed for decade after decade.

The crucial evidence
was to come from this lake.

It's an unusual place.

During the Old Kingdom, it was linked
directly to the Nile by a tributary.

When the Nile floods arrived every
year, the lake would get much bigger.

If Fekri can discover the size of the
lake at the end of the Old Kingdom,

he'll know if the floods failed.

He decided to search the mud at
the bottom of the lake for answers.

And what he found was intriguing.

Actually, it's more what
he didn't find that fascinated him.

They looked everywhere for sediments
dating back to the Old Kingdom.

They looked in the middle of the lake and
at the sides. It was a real mystery.

The huge surprise is that we can't find the Old
Kingdom sediments at the bottom of the lake,

where they should be.

They couldn't find any mud
dating back that far.

It was as if the lake didn't exist
during the Old Kingdom.

But Fekri knows from the ancient
records that there was a lake here.

He was quite bewildered, then one day it dawned
on him why they were failing to find anything.

There's only one explanation.

The lake must have dried up completely, then
the sediments have been blown away by storms.

So the Old Kingdom sediments
are gone. They are vanished.

The fact that such a huge lake could
vanish so dramatically was extraordinary.

The Nile must have been so low
it had stopped feeding the lake.

What's remarkable is that this is the only time in
its whole history that the lake completely dried up.

And it happened precisely
at the end of the Old Kingdom.

Here, at last,
was Fekri's clinching evidence.

A catastrophic global climate change caused a
series of low Nile floods year after year,

turning the land to dust.

This was the explanation for the severe
famines affecting the whole of Egypt.

Sandstorms smothered the land.

In one of the mightiest civilizations ever
known, people were starving to death.

And it was these scenes that were described
so vividly on the walls of Ankhtifi's tomb.

Although Fekri's quest is over, one
poignant section still puzzles him.

"All of Upper Egypt was dying
of hunger to such a degree

"that everyone had come
to eating their children."

It's an astonishing description.

Were people so desperate
that they resorted to cannibalism?

I was startled
when I saw Ankhtifi's account

of people eating children in ancient Egypt because
this is something we just don't think about.

We cannot imagine such events, such horrendous
events, as happened in ancient Egypt.

But I was not surprised

because I knew that this has happened
later in time

and that we do have
a first-hand eye-witness account

of a famine,
associated with a drought,

a low Nile,
that lasted for a couple of years,

and have led to atrocious activities by people,
including eating children, among other things.

The first-hand account came from a
book written by a doctor from Baghdad

who'd witnessed a famine in Cairo
in 1200 AD.

In his vivid description was a haunting echo
of the tragedy that befell the Old Kingdom.

He said that the poor
were so pressed by hunger

that they ate corpses, carrion,
dogs and filth...

"and that they even went beyond that
to eat children.

And so, at times, you can come upon
people with roasted and cooked children.

A frank, straightforward account
with no sentimentality,

but it reveals the...horrendous...
level. ..of depredation

that happened at that time.

If this could happen in a famine
that only lasted a couple of years,

the horrors of one spanning several
decades are truly unimaginable.

The collapse of the Egyptian
Old Kingdom was a hideous end

to one of the world's
great civilizations.

Subtitles by Dorothy Moore
BBC Scotland 2001