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.

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

and I'm travelling 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 Minya 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 el-kheir. Sabah el-noor.

How long have you been here as director?

Actually, I stated my work here as inspector in 2000,

until it's moment.

And now I am the director of Karnak Temples.

That's a nice job.

Which mean that more than 20 years working in Karnak.

Yeah. Yes, I think it's amazing.

It's a huge complex.

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 II,

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.

She was so close,

and he wanted to represent her with him.

Yeah. As a princess.

Look at those lovely lotuses.

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

Papyrus flower, ah. Yes.

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,

from his uncle, who wanted to kill him,

inside the marshes of the delta, to save him.

And the Hypostyle Hall,

it's 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 a hypostyle hall.

And this is the biggest and hugest hall all over the world,

It's consisted of 134 columns.

Oh, 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 original colours.

We are talking about more than 3,000 years.

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

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?

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

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,

some... the most important persons.

The collection of temples and chapels at the Karnack 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 Tuthmosis III

who ruled over a vast empire.

King Tuthmosis 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 owner of

the famous battle in the ancient civilisation - Megiddo,

between Egypt and the Palestines.

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, exactly.

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 Karnack 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 gods under the umbrella of one god,

to be the controller of all the gods.

And for 17 years, he tried to do that,

even he emigrated Thebes to Amarna.

So, Akhenaten comes along and says, "No, actually..."

Exactly.

"I'm leaving... I'm leaving... I'm leaving all this behind,

"I'm going to go and set up somewhere else. I'm going to have Amarna."

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.

Do you think he thought that

the priests here at Karnack, 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.

So there's that very close relationship

between religion and royalty,

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 Karnack.

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

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

I thank you. I hope to see again. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye.

In 1873,

Egyptologist Amelia Edwards visited Karnack,

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,

'cause 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 cross piece 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 Karnack 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 Karnack

to the Temple of 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.

Think I've just passed the halfway mark,

and I'm just heading under this road bridge,

and I can see the Temple of 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.

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

Yeah, yeah. They were connected to the gods.

I think that's fascinating, that they...

..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.

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 -

you know, this Goldilocks, perfect flooding

that would allow for, you know,

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 II

who rules for over 90 years.

And what we think we see,

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

there's a sustained period of droughts,

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 probably were thinking,

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

"and where's the flood, why isn't it coming?"

And even, 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. A lot of this work is on-going.

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 is Egyptology, as a discipline, being transformed by new technology?

The work I do with satellites,

allowing us to find previously undocumented sites

or futures within sites.

What have you got that you can show me then?

Let's get out my computer and...

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

I might not have time to see them all.

Really? Just 8,427.

Let's look at Great Temple of Ramses III.

Where's this, then?

This is on the West Bank of Luxor. So this is just across from us.

And when you have satellite imagery...

This is just a visual image.

Oh, wow, look at that.

So, you have 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.

This is just basic visual imagery.

This is before using the multi spectral data.

And a lot of what I do,

it sort of looks like a gobbledygook MRI image sometimes,

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

There we go. Oh, wow.

So, I just made a pop of it.

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 looking at these images here,

and we can see so much buried archaeology there.

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 math. And?

In the delta alone, we have excavated 1/1,000th of 1%

of the total volume of sites.

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.

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

But it's why, I mean, I'm excited, right, I hope...

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 -

Karnack, 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 travelling 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 the 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 mountains around us are limestones.

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

Cedric, you've 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?

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.

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?

Which was actually something - absolutely -

which was something that only

a few percentage of the population was able to do.

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 were living where and with whom.

So, we have a census 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. I dare to say it's almost unique, yes.

So, what was their life like, then?

I mean, were they getting salaries?

Are we looking at that kind of arrangement?

They would receive a monthly salary,

in the form, the shape of goods.

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

you would have things to eat,

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

So, 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 III,

these workmen were supposed to receive their monthly salary,

but the salary didn't show up.

So, what they did, they completely put down...

Down tools. ..their chisel and mallets.

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

Isn't that extraordinary?

So, more than 3,000 years ago,

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

Absolutely. Yeah.

And what about the tombs here?

I mean, just walking up onto the hill looking over the village

we've walked past a few tombs.

Whose are these tombs, then? Of the same workmen.

So, also, this is also one of the reasons

why this site is so particular.

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

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.

It would be my great pleasure, absolutely.

Lead on, then. 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 you 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 Rameses II - 1280 BC.

More than 3,000 years ago? Yes.

And we have to imagine that

all the coffins were piled here, and furniture.

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

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.

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 of 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?

Wadjet 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.

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 worker's 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 annuls 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, are we going to go into the tomb of Seti?

Yes, let's go and have a look to the tomb.

I'll follow you.

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

belonging to the pharaoh Seti.

Oh, my goodness!

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.

And she stretched the wings to give a 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.

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... 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.

And you see the coffin, it's coming. Oh, yeah.

So, 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?

Err, in ancient time? Yeah.

No, didn't have any kind of bridge, for securing. That was closed.

Well, there must have been a bridge when they brought his coffin in?

Exactly.

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 amazing... Look at the colours, still.

After 200m 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 were 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 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 Egyptians' 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, a 100m tunnel.

Where does it go?

We did excavation on the tunnel itself,

because 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 100m, and it never ended.

So, the excavation is unfinished? Yes.

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

Exactly, we finished the excavation because the oxygen not enough.

Right, OK. Yes.

So, conditions became too difficult to carry on working.

Yeah. He might be down there.

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

Maybe the king was hiding something behind.

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! I'll come back next year.

OK, I'll be waiting for you there.

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 was a beautiful, really, location.

And also the same, 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 colour's still in a good condition.

That's 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 part from the sacred texts

who talk about the second life and the gates,

the entrances to the second life.

So, it talks about the gods who 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.

You're closed in underground,

but you can 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 Ramesses 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,

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 a 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 way in, as you're going 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 November the 26th, 1922,

Carter opened the doorway

to find that the tomb inside was intact, un-plundered.

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 1922.

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 10 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 post-mortem, 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 his tomb that are now in the Cairo museum.

But Tutan-khamun... Tutankh-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.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2023