Original subtitles

Among the robbed-out pyramids of Ancient Egypt,

archaeologists explore

one of the last unexcavated burial chambers.

Beneath the rubble of the collapsed roof,

lie the remains of a tomb raid gone wrong.

This is the most dangerous part.

And perhaps the body...

...of a pharaoh himself.

If there’s any king still resting in his sarcophagus,

I believe that it will be King Sahure.

We are now very close to finding out the truth.

The West Bank of the River Nile.

Here, for 3,000 years,

the elites of Egyptian society were laid to rest in tombs.

From mighty pyramids,

to ornate chambers carved into the rock.

But throughout history,

Egypt's Land of the Dead attracted the attention of thieves...

on the hunt for buried wealth.

Now, archaeologists

are scouring these ancient cemeteries

trying to understand who robbed the graves

of Egypt's kings and nobles...

...and how they carried out their daring heists.

In the Royal Necropolis of Abusir,

Egyptian archaeologist Mohamed Ismail Khaled

has the rarest of opportunities

to excavate a pyramid burial chamber for the very first time.

Last season,

Mohamed's team dug deep into the collapsed interior

of the king's tomb.

He found oil lamps dating to the Ottoman Era,

and even human remains,

evidence of a robbery some 700 years ago.

But the dangerously unstable ceiling above

forced him to call a halt.

Now, with the ancient stone secured,

Mohamed is within just a few yards of realizing his dream.

What we are doing right now is to continue the excavation.

Everything is fine, everything is secured,

but you never know,

we have to be prepared for everything.

Yeah it's perfect, let's start.

Six years on from Mohamed's first steps

into the pyramid's entrance passage,

the potential reward for his patience is huge.

This pyramid complex

is the only pyramid complex in Egypt

that we believe

that was never robbed during the pharaonic time.

And we believe that the king was still in his burial place,

in his sarcophagus,

waiting, hopefully, for us to find him.

This pyramid was built for King Sahure,

a ruler associated with

the ancient lion goddess of healing, Sekhmet.

The pyramid's mortuary temple became a cult center

where priests received offerings to the king

and delivered medical treatments to heal the people.

The cult was so popular,

it lasted until the Ptolemaic Period,

over 2,000 years after Sahure's death.

The presence of priests watching over the temple for two millennia

could have protected the dead king and his treasures

from would-be thieves.

Mohamed knows the Ottoman Era tomb raiders

dragged the lid from Sahure's basalt sarcophagus

in search of riches,

shattering it into pieces.

But the fact that the sarcophagus was intact

when these robbers entered is fuel to his theory

that Sahure escaped ancient raids.

So, we are keeping, of course,

discovering small parts of the lid of the sarcophagus.

I hope that it all comes from the lid,

not from the body of the sarcophagus itself,

because we have a big hope

that we will find the body of the king.

So... I hope that our dream will come true,

but at least we are now very close to find out the truth.

If the king's sarcophagus remains unbroken beneath the rubble,

Mohamed could be the first archaeologist ever to see

a complete Old Kingdom pharaoh face to face.

At nearby Saqqara,

Egyptologist Chris Naunton has come to the ancient necropolis

of some of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs.

He wants to explore how kings like Sahure

sought to protect the vast riches they piled high inside their pyramids.

The pharaohs who built these pyramids

were fantastically wealthy

compared to the ordinary people in society.

So, pyramids like these full of treasure

would've been a massive temptation to a robber.

All the robber had to do was find a way in.

The perfect place to investigate

the pharaoh's defenses

is the pyramid of Sahure's predecessor, Userkaf,

where clues to the battle between tomb raiders

and tomb builders

can be found at every turn.

Today, the fine, white, limestone casing

that once concealed the pyramid's entrance

is all but disappeared.

But scattered among the rubble,

Chris finds evidence of the king's hidden security system.

This is red granite,

and it's a tremendously dense kind of stone,

it's much harder and much heavier than the limestone

that was used to build most of the rest of this pyramid.

And this is Userkaf's key line of defense.

If you think of the pyramid as being like a kind of

a bunker for the dead,

then this is the sort of reinforced concrete

that provides him with a plug

to stop the robbers from getting in.

The pharaoh's burial chamber and storeroom

were cut deep into the bedrock

and then covered up with limestone blocks.

Userkaf had the only entrance blocked with a large granite slab

that was lowered down like a portcullis to seal the tomb.

To secure the access corridor,

workers plugged it with huge lumps of granite,

and the nearly seamless layer of casing stones

completely concealed all signs of where to find the entrance.

Together, these defensive measures

were meant to keep Userkaf's body and treasures

safe for all eternity.

Despite the pharaoh's precautions,

a gaping hole in the pyramid shows raiders found a way in.

Unfortunately, every pyramid known to archaeologists

was robbed at some point.

This pyramid is particularly useful

in helping us to understand that process,

because the robbers left behind a series of clues

that allow us to play detective in this heist.

So, the question we want to answer

is how did they get past all the king's defenses?

To find out, Chris has gained special permission

to enter Userkaf's crumbling tomb.

And break down the thieves ancient smash-and-grab.

Wow.

In the city of Aswan,

Spanish archaeologist Alejandro Jimenez-Serrano

is back at the riverside cemetery of Qubbet-el-Hawa,

searching for southern Egypt's ancient elites.

And my point of view,

this is the most beautiful site in Egypt.

I've been here, working for 18 years.

Getting old.

This necropolis

has proven a rich archaeological hunting ground.

Across two decades,

Alejandro has uncovered dozens of burials,

some of them unrobbed.

Ooh! I never seen something like this.

But his investigations suggest

the nobles of Aswan were no less a target

than the pharaohs in the north.

Seven years ago, in this monumental tomb,

cut 130 feet deep into the sandstone cliff,

Alejandro's team dug into a series of shafts and tunnels

that led to a hidden burial chamber.

The sarcophagus of the tomb's owner,

Governor Sarenput I, was missing,

looted and destroyed.

This season, Alejandro is excavating pits in the hall

close to the entrance.

If he can find another burial,

it might hold clues to how this heist played out.

Sarenput's tomb is a crime scene.

Alejandro just has to hope the trail hasn't gone cold.

It's difficult to know

before the excavation what we are going to find.

This area was an exclusive burial ground.

What we would like to know is who was buried there.

It is amazing to know that you are going to find new things,

new pieces of evidence.

Today, Alejandro focuses on a shaft

in the hall's northwest corner.

A burial so close to the governor's chamber

should belong to an important elite.

The early signs are promising.

When a shaft has been severely looted,

you do not find so much concentration of debris,

you find more sand.

The presence of debris, in, in these levels,

means that the layers that are under

will be probably intact,

and there we can find

part of the burial equipment of the deceased.

If the shaft had been robbed clean,

it would be full of windblown sand.

This shaft contains exactly the type of loose rock

Ancient Egyptians used to seal burials.

The original occupant might still be inside,

just inches from Alejandro's trowels.

Now, it begins the exciting moment.

At Saqqara...

Chris is exploring the ancient struggle

over the pharaoh's afterlife riches.

He wants to see how robbers executed their daring raid

on King Userkaf's treasures.

The passage's granite ceiling is cracked,

but shows no sign of a breach.

At the end of the entrance passage,

Chris finds the king's final line of defense,

the solid granite portcullis.

A-ha!

Oh, wow.

This piece, which would've been suspended up there somehow,

would've been lowered down into position

to stop anybody getting through,

but, there's a great big hole in it.

In the cavity above here,

there's another hole in the wall,

which leads off into the core of the, the pyramid a-above.

I reckon that's where they came in.

Hmm... caught, just, um,

what, four and a half thousand years too late.

The robbers seem to have tunneled into the portcullis cavity

and broken in from above,

to gain access to and empty out

the king's storage chambers.

- Oh! Woah!

- What is it? - It's a bat.

Just flew very close. Wow.

Chris pushes deeper

into the pyramid's tight passages...

right under the structure's central point.

Ah, I think the light's gone.

Okay, thank you.

He finds Userkaf's burial chamber.

Wow.

Losing my big light makes this feel even more eerie.

The, uh, sarcophagus lid is still largely intact,

but otherwise it's just... fragments.

Though, of course, the robbers would probably have known

that, um, the king's body would have had jewelry,

amulets, placed on it.

The robbers did a very thorough job.

The robbers seemed to have known

where the hidden entrance was

and avoided its granite plug.

Instead of attacking the hard granite,

they tunneled through the soft limestone above

towards the void in the pyramid's center.

When they reached the granite portcullis,

they chiseled a hole in it

for a clean run to Userkaf's burial chamber.

They made off with the pharaoh's buried riches,

leaving the chamber entirely bare,

in a raid conducted with surgical precision.

Wow.

That was very interesting.

One thing that's really clear, really striking,

is that there's no way

that this was a kind of lightning strike,

couple of guys, middle of the night,

few tools, smash-and-grab,

you know, take the treasure and run.

This would've had to have had men working on this,

planning it,

executing it over quite a considerable period of time.

So, you've got to ask yourself,

how can this have been allowed to happen?

The burial chamber

was not only protected by physical barriers.

Like Sahure's pyramid, there was a temple attached.

Userkaf's treasures should've been safeguarded by priests.

It's impossible to think that all that could've been

happening while this temple was in use.

Much more likely that happened

only after the temple had been abandoned.

The precision of the raid suggests the raiders had some knowledge

of the interior structure,

and executed their heist once the pyramid lay unguarded.

So, how did later pharaohs deal with the possibility

that their tomb might become a target?

To find out, Chris travels to investigate

a very different type of pyramid.

In Abusir,

Mohamed's team carefully searches

for Sahure's sarcophagus.

If the pharaoh himself is still buried in the rubble,

he will be the first king ever found in his pyramid.

And now, the team has reached a critical point.

The pyramid's loose limestone core

is piled precariously above them.

If they dig out the chamber beneath, it will collapse.

If they're to reach the end of the burial chamber,

they have to remove the threat.

This is the most dangerous part

that we have to secure.

And once it's secured,

and it will take a couple of days,

then we will able to reach the sarcophagus.

The realization of Mohamed's dream,

to gaze upon the face of a 4,500-year-old pharaoh...

...could be less than eight feet away.

In Aswan,

Alejandro is ready to take his first look

in the shaft tomb inside Sarenput I's funerary complex.

But his hope of finding an intact burial has been dealt a blow.

Beneath the rubble of the original filling,

his team finds a layer of sand,

a telltale sign of robbery.

So, we have here in this level, sand,

which was--

which deposit after the looting.

And here, perhaps what we have here,

is the original filling.

It appears the looters

shifted the original filling to the entrance of the tomb,

obscuring their crime.

For us, this is not frustration

because it is always interesting

to follow the steps of the tomb raiders

and to try to see what they were looking for.

Alejandro's workers

must keep a keen eye on every shovel full of dirt,

looking for clues that could help them

piece together the robbers' methods and motives.

Here.

We have just found a fragment of a coffin,

12th Dynasty coffin,

and, uh, it means that we are in the level of the plundering.

It is exciting to, to know that

now we are going to work in an intact layer.

The coffin fragment proves Alejandro has found

an original burial from Sarenput's time.

And to an archaeologist turned crime scene investigator,

it offers a rough date for the robbery.

Look at the holes that are left

by the termites.

In this area, even today, the termites are very active.

Immediately after the burial,

they begin to eat the coffin.

However, they did not have time to eat all the coffin.

It means that the looting happened short after the burial,

a couple of years, three years later.

If the time between burial and robbery

was any longer,

termites would have fully consumed the coffin.

When the raiders moved the filling material,

they protected the fragment from further destruction.

It's vital evidence that the robbery was almost immediate.

The tomb raiders probably knew who was buried in the shaft

and potentially what the burial contained.

Alejandro may be closer to identifying the perpetrators,

but who was the victim?

Wow.

This is a clapper to make a clapping noise,

probably during the funerary ceremonials.

Typical from the 12th Dynasty.

And this piece is perhaps one of the best

that we have, uh, ever found.

Fashioned from cow bone,

the musical instrument is shaped like a woman's forearm,

its hand missing its fingers,

one half of an ancient set of castanets.

Now, clues are coming thick and fast.

In Abusir,

Mohamed's team have spent two days

shifting dangerous, loose rock from the top of the rubble pile,

looking for any hidden clues.

Their work has revealed a surprise.

Wow.

The west wall is completely intact. Wow!

Fantastic.

The intact ancient ceiling slabs

suggest this end of the chamber was protected

from the worst of the collapse.

The western wall is exactly where Mohamed hopes

to find Sahure's mummy,

in a giant basalt sarcophagus.

If it's still in one piece.

Ahmed!

We found another part of the basalt,

but unfortunately, this might come from

the body of the sarcophagus,

because this could be the inner part, smooth part,

and this could be the outer smooth part.

If this chunk of basalt

is part of the sarcophagus wall,

it could destroy Mohamed's hope of finding the king.

But the team's restorer, Ahmed Abdelnaby,

has been piecing together the shattered lid,

and he has another theory.

We are making one experiment, you can follow us if you'd like.

So, Ahmed is suggesting that this may come from this part,

you know, the continuation of the part of the lid.

That means that the body of the sarcophagus is intact,

and, of course, I'm hoping that Ahmed is correct.

Not only has Ahmed reconstructed the lid,

he's found evidence that could help solve the puzzle

of the Ottoman Era raid:

scars left by iron chisels.

They were using this kind of iron wedge

in order just to cut

and to completely destroy the lid.

For Mohamed, the abandoned tools

could be evidence that the raid was cut short

before the job was finished.

It's very clear that they were still destroying,

but something happened.

Maybe, the pyramid start to collapse

and they left everything and they ran away.

The question for Mohamed is,

if the Ottoman Era tomb raiders

were interrupted by the collapse,

had they already plundered the sarcophagus?

In Abusir...

...Mohamed is hoping Sahure's burial chamber

collapsed before the raiders

reached the king in his sarcophagus.

His team carefully searches the rubble pile for clues.

Oh!

Got some bad news?

Well, definitely yes, it's, uh...

...bad news because it's--

it could be a part of the body of the sarcophagus,

a large one.

Not only is the chunk clearly smashed,

it's several feet away from the back wall

where the pharaoh's sarcophagus should stand.

Ah! Oh my goodness.

So, it's almost one meter.

That means it's one-third of the original sarcophagus.

So, maybe we have only one part out

and the rest could be there.

We shall see.

With the body of the sarcophagus broken up,

Mohamed's dream of finding a pharaoh's mummy

now hangs by a thread.

There's still a chance Sahure's body lies hidden

in the five feet of rubble

between Mohamed and the chamber's back wall.

The sarcophagus chunk is too heavy to move,

so he decides to cover it and carry on.

This is archeology.

Archeology, it's ups and downs.

But we still have hope

that we will find the mummy of King Sahure.

And I hope that I will have the chance

to see the face of the king for the first time.

In Aswan...

Alejandro's workers scour the shaft

in Sarenput I's giant tomb.

Any clue the looters dropped,

could reveal the original occupant's identity,

and what the tomb raiders were after.

Amazing. This is the type of art--

artifact that we were looking for.

This is a miniature of a calcite vase...

that probably was used to contain something very precious.

This is only available for people belonging

to the high class of Egypt.

The quality of the work is amazing.

Outside in the light, Alejandro is able to take a closer look.

This miniature vessel,

it is very common to find in cosmetic boxes

and concretely, this one would contain the kohl

to paint the eyes, the famous Egyptian eyes.

The cosmetic boxes are common in the female burials.

So, I should say that 85% of possibilities

that the person buried there was a woman.

In Ancient Egypt,

imported cosmetic products were highly valuable...

precious enough to make them a prime target for tomb raiders.

As far as we have seen

during these last years,

the looters were looking for mainly perfumes,

oils, that accompany the mummy.

All the pieces of evidence that we have found

seems to point

that the original person who was buried here

was a woman.

The date is the 12th Dynasty,

we cannot precisely say if it's contemporary to Sarenput.

But, if so, it seems likely

that she might be a member of his family.

Alejandro has zeroed in on possible culprits and their motive.

He's even worked out who the victim might have been.

The only thing his crime scene is missing... is a body.

In Aswan...

...with his workers' safety his top priority,

Alejandro installs a winch

to help remove debris from the shaft tomb.

If he can recover the victim,

he might be able to reconstruct the raiders' crime.

As the workers clear the last buckets of sand,

the final clues emerge from the dust.

Most of the material that is

coming out now is, uh, part of the body,

of the skeleton of the original person who was buried here.

Instead of finding a carefully wrapped mummy,

Alejandro's team finds only scattered bones.

Well, we have just found the skull

of the original occupant of this chamber.

At the end, this is like a crime scene,

we do the work of the policemen.

So, now we begin to know how the tomb raiders act.

They were not interested at all in the head of the mummy,

so they keep it inside the burial chamber

and they took probably the rest of the body in the shaft,

perhaps because they could breathe much better,

and there would be less dust.

They open the bandages, trying to look for, uh, jewelry,

amulets, or whatever this person could have.

After plundering the dead woman's

cosmetics collection,

it seems the raiders pulled the body

from its degraded coffin and robbed it clean,

before throwing it back and refilling the shaft.

Imagine the conditions here

for the tomb raiders.

The quantity of dust. Almost no light.

Five, seven guys shouting,

"Get me more, get me more!

It's a woman. Take the money!"

I can feel how the process of looting should happen.

Unlike the organized raids on the pyramids,

this robbery was a lightning strike burglary.

An opportunistic attack

on a vulnerable elite tomb.

But like the heists on the pharaohs,

the evidence suggests the perpetrators here

relied on insider knowledge.

In Egyptology, we used to say,

always, uh, the tomb raiders were possibly those

who participated in the construction of the tombs,

so they know the structure of the, the tomb.

The excavation of this burial apartment

has provide us with another piece of evidence.

With his dig season winding down,

Alejandro will have to wait to excavate the rest

of the shafts in Sarenput's funerary complex.

Perhaps next time, he'll find one

the tomb raiders missed.

At Dahshur,

Chris wants to explore how the pharaohs reacted

to the constant threat of tomb raiding.

Priests only protected pyramids

as long as the king's cult was active.

What safeguards did later pyramid builders put in place

nearly 600 years after Userkaf's tomb was raided?

Today, the pyramid of Middle Kingdom Pharaoh Amenemhat III

is barely recognizable.

Reduced by weather and time

to a crumbling mudbrick core.

Okay.

The pharaoh sought savings above ground

with cheaper materials.

But below, he spared no expense.

Previous kings built simple substructures,

a single passage leading to a single burial chamber,

protected by a portcullis.

Wow.

Huh, and...

I have a choice to make...

Amenemhat seems to have chosen

a different strategy.

It's really not obvious which is the right way.

He didn't just dig one passage.

Up here...

His pyramid contains

around 440 yards of tunnels, dead ends, and drops.

The burial chamber of the king

must be here somewhere.

But every time you,

you turn down another kind of narrow, dark passageway,

it's harder and harder to hold in your mind where you've been.

And you've gotta think that if a robber was doing this,

it's all very well thinking that you could get the treasure,

but you've then gotta find your way out again, too.

So, let's try... this way.

Oh, wow. Hello.

That's not something I was expecting to see.

This is a canopic chest, um,

so it's a great big piece of really beautiful alabaster,

translucent alabaster,

which you can see through if I shine my light.

These would have received the mummified internal organs

of the deceased, somebody, perhaps the king.

Amenemhat's tight, maze-like passages

seem to have saved at least one valuable treasure from theft.

So, where's the burial itself, I wonder?

In Abusir,

Mohamed's team have spent several days

clearing tons of rubble

from around the broken chunk of sarcophagus.

But the king is nowhere to be found.

And the full extent of the Ottoman treasure hunters raiding

is now clear.

Oh, we have found another big piece

of the body of the sarcophagus.

Mohamed's job is no longer a search for Sahure.

It's to step into the shoes of an Ottoman looter

and reconstruct the raid.

What's really interesting,

that we have found the full, complete western wall,

except for this part.

This part, the tomb raiders were, uh, cutting it.

Maybe they were thinking that behind this part

they would find another secret passages.

Beside the hacked-out western wall,

Mohamed's team clears the ground where Sahure's sarcophagus once stood.

They cut the floor

thinking maybe that they would find

something under the sarcophagus

that leads them to some treasures or something like that.

That's why we have here this cut.

After six years of planning and excavation,

Sahure's story can finally be told.

When the Ottoman Era tomb raiders entered 700 years ago,

they found an intact sarcophagus,

perhaps even complete with the pharaoh's mummy.

They shattered the lid with their iron chisels...

taking what they could from the King's body.

Knowing little about the pyramid structure,

they destroyed the sarcophagus...

but found nothing beneath.

They attacked the walls in search of secret chambers,

but succeeded only in bringing down the ceiling.

He may not have found the mummy of a king,

but Mohamed has revealed a new chapter

in the history of tomb raiding.

It's a mix, actually, of feeling,

I have different emotions.

Really, they destroyed everything.

Frankly speaking, I hate tomb raiders,

but sometimes when they did some destruction,

they help us to understand the full story.

Sahure's enduring cult

might have protected his pyramid during ancient times,

but an unguarded tomb was vulnerable.

So, how did pharaohs adapt

if they couldn't rely on their priests?

At Dahshur...

Okay, it's not that way.

...Chris retraces his footsteps

deep within one of the last great pyramids

ever built by Egyptians.

This really is a, a very confusing place.

It's difficult not to think that

maybe part of the purpose here

is to deter or stop robbers.

When you think of the earlier Old Kingdom pyramids,

they were so much more straightforward.

It's an extraordinary place in here,

absolutely extraordinary.

It seems Amenemhat III's protective innovation

was to make his tomb as difficult as possible to navigate.

Ha-ha-ha!

Wow.

At the southern end of the last tunnel,

Chris finally arrives at the king's burial chamber

and Amenemhat's sarcophagus.

There's a pair of really exquisite

Udjat eyes, amuletic eyes.

The idea is that these eyes allow him to, to see out,

you know, perhaps to ward off evil spirits

or guard against robbers, even.

The eyes face east to the rising sun,

and Amenemhat's eternal afterlife.

But the king's eyes failed to deter raiders.

Like almost every chamber in the tomb,

the sarcophagus is empty.

This is, along with the alabaster canopic chest,

just about the only object that's still left inside this pyramid.

Too big, too wide, too heavy to move.

So, the sarcophagus is still here,

but just about everything else has been taken by the robbers.

Amenemhat's tomb

was one of the last pyramids ever to be built.

Perhaps their biggest weakness was not their security,

but their visibility.

The pharaohs of the pyramids' age

thought that their power would be everlasting, even in death.

But no amount of granite blockings,

portcullises, winding passageways,

would be a match for the tomb robbers

who just knew where to look.

The raiding of pyramid tombs

proved the final straw for the pharaohs.

The age of giant monolithic burial monuments was over.

Amenemhat's father, Senusret III,

chose to be buried not in a pyramid

but a tomb dug deep into a cliff face.

And pharaohs like Thutmose I went even further,

building their tombs in a top-secret site,

the Valley of the Kings.

For nearly 500 years, pharaohs believed their tombs,

deep inside the mountain,

would be safe from raiders for eternity.

Pyramid kings had relied on the visibility of their tombs

to project their greatness.

Vast, undecorated monoliths, signaling the pharaoh's power.

Now forced to hide their tombs,

Egyptian kings and nobles found new ways

to mark themselves out in death.

Instead of building big, they built beautiful,

transforming their tombs into

opulent, underground galleries,

recording Egyptian life in artwork and script.

A legacy more valuable to archaeologists than mere treasures.

Tomb raiders, in fact, changed elite burial practices

in Egypt forever.

So, maybe, we in fact have good reason

to be thankful to the tomb robbers.

Were it not for the raiders,

the stories of Ancient Egypt

might never have been preserved at all.