Original subtitles

[narrator] The Valley of the Kings,

an ancient burial ground...

for Egypt's greatest pharaohs.

[Sally] It never gets old.

It's truly a really special place.

And the most famous archaeological site

in the world.

[speaking Arabic]

Let's go.

Now, for the first time in over 100 years,

an elite team of archaeologists

will excavate the tomb...

of one of the most powerful kings to have ever lived,

Ramses III.

The story of Ramses III is sensational!

[Meredith] Even the tiniest clues about Ramses III's tomb

would be an incredible find.

[speaking Arabic]

With unprecedented access,

the team will dig for three months...

to unearth clues...

I'm very excited.

...and find lost treasures.

Wow -- this is a very incredible find.

Unraveling a 3,000-year-old murder mystery...

[gaps] This is terrifying. Wow!

...that exposes one of the most treacherous conspiracies

of the ancient world.

The idea that the pharaoh was assassinated is extraordinary.

In the burial chamber of Ramses III,

new evidence will be revealed,

and three-thousand-year-old secrets, discovered.

Only in Ancient Egypt

can you actually do this sort of thing.

[Salima] The Valley of the Kings is a place of promise,

of excitement.

It is silent.

It is mysterious.

It's like you're in another world.

The Valley of the Kings

lies in the very heart of Egypt,

hundreds of miles south

from the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Three and a half thousand years ago,

the pharaohs stopped building giant pyramids

to transport their mummies into the afterlife.

Instead, they moved to the valley...

to build incredible underground tombs.

[Meredith] The tombs are absolutely stunning,

and they served as this kind of resurrection machine

to help the king enter the afterlife.

In their tombs, the king's mummies were buried

in nested coffins with everything they would need

in the netherworld.

[Arto] Food, furniture, clothing,

little magical artifacts that are supposed to help you

and lots, and lots of gold.

The wealth of Ancient Egyptian kings was the stuff of legend.

It's the reason that archaeologists

have scoured this unique

and exclusive location for centuries,

and its secrets continue to be revealed.

[Brett] It's an extremely challenging place,

but the idea that archeology of the Valley of the Kings

is finished is not correct.

Now, an elite team of archaeologists

is beginning an excavation they hope will change history.

In charge of the mission is Dr. Anke Weber.

[Anke] For more than ten years, I always imagined

what could be below my feet.

This is the history of humankind.

It's an honor to become part of this.

Anke has negotiated exclusive access

to dig for three months

in one of the most prestigious tombs in the valley.

[speaking Arabic]

Beneath the valley floor

lie over 60 tombs, cut into the rock, rocky landscape.

In the center, the final resting place

of the legendary boy pharaoh, King Tut.

But just 100 feet away is the site of Anke's mission,

Tomb KV11.

Inside, decorated corridors plunge deep into the rock,

leading to a secret dig site piled high with debris.

This is the unexcavated burial chamber

of King Ramses III.

[Arto] Ramses III is one of the towering figures

from Ancient Egyptian history.

He defended Egypt at a crucial, pivotal time

of not just Egyptian history, but in fact,

the entire Mediterranean world.

Ramses III is considered

Egypt's last great warrior king.

Hieroglyphics reveal he ruled for 31 years,

building vast temples

and battling marauding armies

that threatened to destroy Egypt's empire.

Incredibly, Ramses' mummy exists today,

kept in a museum in Cairo.

He was found almost 150 years ago,

half a mile from his tomb,

high in the mountains, above the Valley of the Kings.

[Salima] It was really one of the most

earth-shattering finds.

You get to actually look at Ramses III,

not just a statue, but at him.

[Arto] The story of Ramses III is sensational.

Any sort of information, no matter how little

we can glean from all of this,

would be very exciting.

Now, for the very first time,

Anke's team will fully excavate inside the great king's tomb.

Its entrance has already been beautifully restored,

filled with hieroglyphic text

designed to transport the king into the afterlife.

But deeper down lies the tomb's secret.

An ancient scene of destruction,

off-limits for over a century

and never fully excavated before.

Ramses burial chamber.

[Anke] It's absolutely incredible

to be inside his burial chamber,

where Ramses III and the sarcophagus

once rested,

to revive him for the afterlife.

Anke's mission is to clear away the debris,

to unearth the tomb's lost artifacts,

and finally unravel the mysteries

of this great pharaoh's life and death.

[Anke] This is our task now,

bringing back the magic, uh...of the burial chamber.

The more we reveal and uncover from the sand,

the more we will know about the person himself

and find something that was last seen by our ancestors.

First, the team must haul out the surface debris

and search for any ancient artifacts that lie beneath.

Today we are very excited.

This is the day we were waiting for.

I hope that we are lucky.

The team works quickly,

but the burial chamber is a danger zone.

Massive chunks of rock have tumbled 20 feet

from the ceiling above,

leaving the tomb incredibly fragile.

Anke believes it's a result of violent flash floods

around 100 years ago.

We are looking to get more information

about the flooding event, but the area is very unstable.

To avoid further damage, the workers must wrestle

the 500-pound boulders by hand.

As they clear away the debris,

something begins to appear.

[Anke] It seems as if this would be a piece of metal.

Actually, it's very unusual, uh...to find metals.

We try our best to get it out in one piece,

uh...in order to see what it actually was.

But as the team clears away the sand,

there's a surprise.

[Anke] This is not, um...metal.

It's a piece of wood going into this direction.

What we have here, um...

are parts of the spine of a...living being.

So, for now, it looks as if it is covered

with linen, a little bit.

So this would tell us that some kind of

mummification took place.

A piece of mummified human spine

is an intriguing clue,

and a mystery because Anke believes

it shouldn't be here in Tomb KV11 at all.

The mystery is actually, why do we have

any kind of remains inside KV11?

We would never expect it here,

because we know that the mummy of Ramses III

is not placed in KV11 anymore.

Who does this mummified spine belong to?

And why is somebody else buried inside Ramses' tomb?

Clues could lie less than two miles away at Ramses Temple.

Egyptologist Meredith Brand investigates the site

to decode the mysteries of the king's reign.

It's one of the most famous monuments in Egypt,

Medinet Habu.

[Meredith] I love Medinet Habu Temple.

It's really It's stunning because it's so complete.

Inside, there's amazing colors. It's so well preserved.

This is one of my favorite temples from Ancient Egypt.

This temple was built for Ramses III

so that people could give him offerings

and celebrate him during his life and after his death.

So what was celebrated about Ramses III's reign?

On almost every facade is a scene of terror.

Spilled blood...

severed hands...

and captured victims glorifying the battles of the Pharaoh.

[Meredith] Looking at these walls,

it's clear that Ramses III wanted to show himself

fighting enemies, smiting everyone.

This temple says, "I'm Ramses III, and I'm a warrior king."

So who was Ramses fighting against?

On the side of the temple,

Meredith finds a fierce conflict at sea.

[Meredith] It's quite faint,

but I can make out this massive image

of Ramses III shooting a bow and arrow.

At this melee of a battle, we have ships and soldiers,

and everyone's falling over into the water.

It's pure fighting and chaos.

The chaos reveals a group of marauding tribes

known as the Sea Peoples.

And they aren't the only adversaries threatening

the borders of Egypt.

[Meredith] There's battles of him fighting the Nubians.

There's two separate battles fighting the Libyans.

Ramses III was enmeshed in warfare.

Ramses' temple records his astonishing victories

over the enemies of the Egyptian empire.

Ramses III was not a warrior pharaoh necessarily by choice.

This was thrust upon him,

he truly, truly lived at one of the most difficult times

in which a king could reign.

And the fact that he managed to make out of it

what he did is a true testament

to how great a king he was.

Ramses was a celebrated and successful warrior king.

So how did he die?

And why are the mummified remains of someone else

buried inside his tomb?

Inside the tomb of Ramses III...

[speaking Arabic]

...the team has unearthed a piece of human spine.

And soon, even more ancient bones emerge,

including what looks like a mummified limb.

We found here a large part of a mummy, very clearly.

We can see the layers of linen

that was soaked with, um, resin

in order to preserve this body for eternity.

So for now, we can't tell exactly

which part of the mummy this is.

However, it's very exciting,

um, because it's somehow like,

coming closer to all these people

uh, who once were part of the history of KV11.

Ramses III's mummy is no longer inside his tomb,

now preserved in a museum.

So who do these body parts belong to?

And why are they here?

Anke spots a new clue nearby.

What we have here are parts of an Ancient Egyptian coffin.

There are remains of a plaster on top of the surface.

You can see these dowels inside the dowel holes.

An expensive, plaster-covered coffin suggests the mummies

were once members of the elite.

Anke believes they were probably buried here

hundreds of years after Ramses's death,

when Egypt was weak and fractured.

They won't be able to precisely date the burials

until a lab analysis.

But Anke has a theory on why they were here.

[Anke] Everybody wants to be something special.

Everybody wants to become part of the history of something.

So it is most likely that the people,

high-ranking officials, decided, "Oh, yeah, why not

"be buried inside the tomb of one of Egypt's

most interesting and greatest pharaohs of all time?"

Ancient elites chose to be buried

in the valley's magnificent tombs

to pay homage to the kings that came before them.

And Ramses III

was one of the greatest kings of them all.

So what was it that killed him?

Meredith Brand has come to the National Museum

of Egyptian Civilization to investigate.

[Meredith] It's such a unique and special aspect

of Ancient Egyptian culture

that they preserve the dead, and that now, for us,

we can look into the face of some of the greatest kings

and queens of Ancient Egypt.

The pharaoh queen, Hatshepsut,

Ramses II,

and none other than Ramses III himself.

[Meredith] It's so remarkable to stand here

and see this very important and very powerful king.

This mummy is beautifully preserved.

You can see his facial features, even his teeth

and his hair.

The Ancient Egyptians mummified the dead

to preserve their bodies.

They believed it would allow their body and soul

to reunite in the afterlife.

And they strived for perfection.

A mummy like Ramses III was done

with such care and attention.

The embalmers would have removed his internal organs,

washed him with oils and perfumes,

packed his body with salt,

and then wrapped his entire body up in linens.

If something was wrong, the embalmers could fix it

so that when the deceased got to the afterlife,

not only would their body be there,

but it would be more perfect.

On the surface,

Ramses' mummy looks completely intact.

But X-ray scans reveal a different and shocking story.

Beneath the bandages,

six healing amulets are packed around Ramses's foot

that conceal a missing toe,

cut off with a heavy blade.

On Ramses' neck,

embalming resin fills a deep gash...

that splits the throat right down to the bone.

[Meredith] The cut on Ramses III's neck,

this severed the trachea and the esophagus,

and even nicked the bone in his vertebrae.

This is a mortal wound.

This kind of gash makes it clear

that his death wasn't some kind of accident

or a result of old age.

He met a violent end, and all the evidence points

to murder.

[Salima] The idea that the pharaoh was assassinated

and by something as violent as that,

is extraordinary.

It is an extraordinary and terrifying thought.

It would have been almost unthinkable in Ancient Egypt

to try to assassinate the pharaoh.

[Arto] Can you imagine how difficult

kind of an undertaking that would be?

First of all, it's not a one-man job.

You need allies in this sort of thing.

You also need a motive. Why are you killing the king?

Surely you must have a really good reason

to actually undertake something so incredibly risky.

Who killed Ramses III?

And why did they want him dead?

Deep inside Ramses' burial chamber,

Anke and the team search for clues.

But the surface of the tomb is a chaotic,

jumbled mess of finds,

making this mystery difficult to unravel.

[Anke] We have pieces of pottery

that belong to a larger vessel.

All these finds are mixed.

Both ancient robbers and Colonial-era explorers

have rummaged through the debris,

like a crime scene that has been revisited for centuries.

We know that this area is disturbed.

It's always puzzling for us to say what actually happened.

But step by step, we will investigate

what happened here in KV11.

But hidden within the debris,

Anke spots something that may have belonged

to Ramses III himself.

We have here the lower part of a wooden ushabti.

It's rather destroyed.

However, you can still see here,

this is the beginning of the lower part of the feet.

It could be over 3,000 years old.

Across the chamber,

the team finds the missing head.

[Anke] This definitely belongs together.

They must have been, uh, disconnected somehow.

That's amazing.

Ushabtis are ancient figurines,

often around a foot tall,

that were buried with the deceased.

A king like Ramses would have had hundreds.

They acted as servants,

inscribed with magic spells...

so that if the dead was made to work in the afterlife,

the ushabti will say, "Here I am,"

and do the work for him.

The team and the statue pieces, searching for inscriptions

that could reveal a name.

[Anke] We have the hope that they belonged

to the pharaoh Ramses III.

But hard evidence of its original owner

has been lost.

The team will need to keep searching.

It's a promising start that even among the chaos,

there are still incredible clues about Ramses' death.

[speaking Arabic]

At the monumental temple of Medinet Habu,

built to honor pharaoh Ramses III in life and death,

Egyptologist Meredith Brand

investigates the king's brutal murder.

She wants to establish a motive for his royal assassination,

and believes the sheer number of battle scenes

on his temple walls reveal a deeper story

than just Ramses' military prowess.

[Meredith] These scenes show Ramses III

as this victorious ruler who was indestructible.

In some ways, it is true,

but there was a larger issue.

Ramses III was surrounded by war,

and this war took a toll on Egypt

and its economy.

Ramses' never-ending battles

begin to drain the resources of the country,

and inflation spirals out of control.

-[distant shouts] -Strikes, civil unrest,

and even famine strangle the heart of Egypt.

Was Ramses killed because of the crumbling economy,

or were there other motives at play?

[Brett] Nobody ever blamed the pharaoh for anything.

He was theoretically perfect, a divine ruler.

What we do know is that he had a number of wives

and a large number of children.

And we don't think that he designated

an heir during his lifetime.

In Ancient Egypt, the firstborn son

would normally inherit the throne.

But with no designated heir,

the stage is set for a coup.

[Arto] Let's say you do have a motive.

OK, how do you do it? How do you find the allies?

How do you know where --

where people's loyalties stand?

So you have to sort of start, you know,

um...checking the pulse, as it were.

See who might have grievances, perhaps.

Once you have that in place, you need an entire network

of people, but also they need to be

close to the person of the king.

Meredith investigates a copy of an ancient papyrus

originally discovered near the site.

[Meredith] This is an image of an amazing papyrus

from the time of Ramses III.

It tells us about a conspiracy

to kill the king.

It reveals the proceedings

of a murder trial.

[Meredith] It's shocking the number of people involved

in this conspiracy.

It has everyone in the palace.

It has people involved with food.

It has security, army, and it has women of the harem,

including Queen Tiye, the wife of Ramses III.

This is a courtroom drama, playing out in front of our eyes

that tells us when and how Ramses III was killed.

One of Ramses's secondary wives, Queen Tiye,

leads the conspiracy to place her son,

a younger, more minor prince, on the throne.

Some believe that after a festival at Medinet Habu,

Ramses is steered into the apparent safety

of his harem.

Here, the attackers pounce...

and slice off Ramses' toe in the struggle,

before dealing the mortal wound. -[distant scream]

Here's the critical thing.

The assassination attempt, that plot certainly succeeded.

We know Ramses III died as a result.

But ultimately, the coup was not successful.

Over 30 perpetrators were caught, tried, and sentenced.

The punishments outlined in this papyrus

are quite severe.

Some people had their nose and ears cut off,

but those actually in the center of the conspiracy,

they were executed.

And Ramses' treacherous younger son

never made it to the throne.

He was examined. The judges found him guilty.

They left him where he was, and he killed himself.

Ramses' murder was a shocking family feud.

But his death makes Ramses even more important.

A vast funeral procession

leads his mummy into the Valley of the Kings

on a new journey...

to become a god.

How cool is it that we can talk about so much detail

around this historical event

that took place around 3,000 years ago?

Only in Ancient Egypt

can you actually do this sort of thing.

[dramatic music plays]

Inside Ramses' tomb,

Anke and the team want to investigate what happened

after the king's death.

How did his tomb transform Ramses into an immortal god?

[Anke speaking Arabic]

Hidden below the debris, they have unearthed

incredibly fragile pieces

of 3,000-year-old tomb decoration.

[Anke] So beautiful.

What we found here

is a piece of the wall decoration,

and it's the food of this god here in the middle,

and he's standing right on top of a snake.

It's very amazing and very touching,

because it's the first time that we have such a complete piece.

It's a very lucky find. Very happy about it.

The snake is a crucial clue that connects

with the decoration in the rest of the tomb.

[Anke] This is so impressive!

The paintings tell a story

of an elaborate mythological journey

Ramses must go on to achieve eternal life.

As night falls, Ramses follows the path of the sun god

as he voyages through the dangerous waters

of the netherworld.

To prove he is righteous,

he must navigate the flames of a lake of fire

and appease Apophis, the chaos serpent,

who threatens to plunge the world into darkness.

If he succeeds,

the pharaoh rises as the sun god Ra,

bringing order and safety to the universe.

[Brett] The king in Ancient Egypt

served an important cosmological role.

He was, during his lifetime and after his death,

the embodiment of the sun god.

[Salima] The tomb itself, it was really a machine

to make you go from this world to the next,

to ensure the king's safety,

to ensure that day followed night,

and the entire cosmos would continue to exist.

In the burial chamber, the team carefully glues

the fragile painted plasterwork.

It's so delicate, they must lift it out

with a stabilizing block of sand below.

[Anke speaking Arabic]

Thank God, we have it.

Uh...I'm quite relieved, actually.

Yeah, that's a very, very special object.

But hiding among the rubble

is something even more tantalizing.

[speaking Arabic]

With exclusive access inside the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses III,

Dr. Anke Weber and her team

are hunting for artifacts to unravel

how the king was buried after his brutal assassination.

From the debris, they unearth a mysterious stone.

[Anke] This is amazing.

We have found here a piece of rose granite.

I didn't expect that here.

So we are going to lift this object out now,

very carefully.

Rose granite is an expensive, high-quality stone,

far more precious than the surrounding limestone

of the chamber.

Inside the Valley of the Kings,

it would have been brought in from over a hundred miles away

to create one thing,

the Pharaoh's sarcophagus.

[Anke speaking Arabic]

Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. Please try to clean it.

Make all your notes.

I want pictures from before the cleaning

and after the cleaning.

And we will see. That's amazing.

The team keeps digging and reveals even more

of the precious granite pieces.

[speaking Arabic]

We have a very clear corner here.

I'm quite speechless.

There are many possibilities what this can actually be.

That it is most probably part of a foot,

but, um, one thing is clear, it is amazing.

If this is the foot of Ramses III's sarcophagus,

it's a huge discovery.

This pieces would be an incredibly rare clue

about how the king was buried.

But something doesn't add up

because the sarcophagus belonging to Ramses III...

already exists.

Removed from the tomb around 200 years ago

is a 10-ton granite monolith, and a colossal matching lid.

It's covered from top to bottom with religious texts

bearing the name of the king.

And the top is carved with Ramses as Osiris,

the god of death.

[Arto] The story of the sarcophagus of Ramses III,

the lid is actually in England,

whereas the box itself, it's in the Louvre in Paris.

It's very sad because when people excavate

or find things -- nowadays to keep everything together --

but in earlier periods, it wasn't the case.

The lid of Ramses' sarcophagus

now lies thousands of miles from his tomb,

but there are pieces missing.

Has Anke's team now found one of them,

among the sand inside Ramses' tomb?

Anke inspects a digital model of the lid for clues.

She finds the granite at the bottom,

around the pharaoh's feet, is missing

and has been reconstructed for display.

This is the exciting thing. The feet are missing.

It is most likely that this object here

is a part of this sarcophagus lid.

Anke has a missing piece of Ramses III's

3,000-year-old sarcophagus lid.

That's so incredible, and it would be my dream

to virtually reunite these pieces.

If they can unearth more pieces...

[speaking Arabic]

...the team might decode the most critical part

of Ramses' burial chamber.

The sarcophagus is the focal point of the burial,

containing the king's instructions

for navigating the afterlife.

If the king didn't make it to the afterlife,

the sun might not rise, the world might end.

It was so important to have sarcophagus

to protect his body, so his afterlife

maintained the cosmic balance of Ancient Egypt.

So the stakes were pretty high.

Inside pharaoh Ramses III's tomb,

the granite pieces keep coming,

and now, crucially, with inscriptions.

[Anke] We keep finding pieces of rose granite,

actually almost daily.

We can see that here on top,

the surface is sculpted with a snake.

And here on the sides,

we have hieroglyphs that tell us more

about the deceased person

and, uh, that he was actually, here, he's called a god.

Named as a god,

it is almost certain to belong to Ramses' sarcophagus,

and the pieces even fit together.

-[Anke] Oh, wow! -Wow!

That works very well. It fits exactly.

That's perfect!

It's absolutely amazing.

But something is strange.

[Anke] Great.

Can you check this piece, please?

These newest pieces of granite

don't match with any part of the lid

that is already known.

For Anke, it can only mean one thing.

[Anke] I guess that we have something

that is even more exciting.

So, it might be that we have here one or even two other lids

that probably belong to Ramses III.

It would mean that Ramses

didn't just have one sarcophagus,

but two or even three,

nested inside each other.

Why would the Ancient Egyptians

build such a difficult and complicated construction?

Outside in the Valley of the Kings, Anke investigates.

She explores a nearby tomb.

Its long corridors extend deep into the rock,

and open to reveal the burial chamber

of one of Ramses' predecessors,

a king named Merenptah.

His tombs actually worked like a template.

It's basically a clue of how in the tomb of Ramses III

it once looked like.

In the center of the burial chamber,

assembled from granite fragments,

is a gigantic box.

13 feet long and 8 feet high,

it's the largest sarcophagus in the Valley of the Kings.

Next to it, Anke finds a massive granite lid

covered in beautiful religious carvings.

The pieces are part of a set of four stone sarcophagi

that all once nested inside each other.

[Anke] It's unbelievable that they were able to lift

these tons and tons of massive material

inside the burial chamber.

And Anke has a theory why the Ancient Egyptians

went to such lengths.

[Anke] It was of religious significance

to protect the deceased pharaoh.

So nesting, and nesting, and nesting

until you come to the centerpiece

wrapped in his royal linen for the mummy.

Protecting the mummy of the pharaoh was critical,

but very few kings in history

had nested sarcophagi this large and elaborate.

Was this how Ramses III's mummy was buried too?

[Arto] Oh, it would be spectacular

if maybe, just maybe, Ramses III was in fact buried

in more than one sarcophagus.

It's such a rare find.

These tombs have been robbed in antiquity.

So to find extra evidence,

anything that lets us piece together

how these incredible figures from history

were buried, we'd all be all the richer for it.

Ramses III was one of the greatest pharaohs

to have ruled Ancient Egypt.

Could Anke's team be on the verge of a discovery,

kept secret for 3,000 years?

In Egypt's Valley of the Kings,

a team of archaeologists is excavating the 3,000-year-old

burial chamber of the murdered pharaoh, Ramses III.

They are now over halfway through a three-month mission

to unravel the mysterious happenings inside his tomb.

So far, they have unearthed sacred ashabti,

meant to help the pharaoh in the afterlife,

and the body parts of other ancient elites.

Now lead archaeologist, Dr. Anke Weber,

believes she has found pieces

of the most important burial artifact of all,

the pharaoh's sarcophagus.

So far, we have found around about 29 pieces,

larger pieces of a sarcophagus.

Anke is now sure there are at least two new sarcophagi

that have never been discovered or recorded before.

It's quite amazing, because, uh,

if we imagine what we have here,

this hill in front of us, there must be more below.

With enough pieces, like a giant puzzle,

the team could rebuild Ramses' missing sarcophagi

and reveal to the world how this great king

was supposed to rest for eternity.

In the heart of his tomb,

Anke believes that Ramses would have laid cocooned

inside at least two immense nested sarcophagi,

all encased by a gigantic outer box,

with the walls painted with religious spells,

and burial treasures, filling every chamber.

Ramses' tomb was designed to be the ultimate

resurrection machine.

[Salima] What Anke is slowly revealing,

square by square, painstakingly,

is an extraordinary insight into what was deemed necessary

for a king to reach the afterworld.

For any pharaoh, their tomb is your gateway to eternal life.

So, where your body is supposed to rest undisturbed,

where you are memorialized with the gods.

But Ramses III's body was not undisturbed.

What used to be a glorious tomb,

today, it lies destroyed.

The once nested sarcophagi have been smashed to pieces,

which would have left Ramses' mummy completely exposed.

[Arto] Here's the big mystery.

If you were to go, right now,

to Cairo, you would see Ramses III himself,

his mummy, Ramses III in the flesh.

So then, what gives?

If such a magnificent tomb

has descended into chaos and destruction,

how did Ramses III's mummy survive?

Inside the tomb of Ramses III,

Dr. Lutz Popko is in charge of deciphering

the hieroglyphic texts.

Just above the burial chamber are ancient inscriptions,

graffiti carvings that record visits to the tomb

after Ramses' death.

It's basically a list of names,

so one name and one title per line.

Lutz decodes the text.

[speaking Ancient Egyptian]

And one name stands out.

[speaking Ancient Egyptian]

Butehamun, scribe of the royal tombs.

[Lutz] It was a very famous person.

Butehamun was born

around 50 years after the death of Ramses III.

Um, but he was strongly connected to him.

Who was Butehamun?

And why was he in Ramses' tomb after the king had died?

Ramses III's death was a turning point

in Egyptian history.

He stewarded Egypt to this successful point.

But after him, everything seems to have caved.

Whether it was as a military power, economically,

it really started to crumble.

The result was a lapse in public security,

public safety,

such that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings

began to suffer grievously from tomb robberies.

Was Butehamun, whose name was written

in the tomb graffiti,

robbing the tomb of Ramses III?

Behind the great temple of Medinet Habu,

Meredith investigates the ruins

of a once magnificent pillared house

that could provide a missing clue.

[Meredith] It's vast. It has these huge columns,

and it's in this prime location.

It's clear the house belongs to a member

of the wealthy elite,

and Meredith finds the owner's name inscribed on the pillar.

It says here that his name is Butehamun,

an he's an overseer of the royal treasury.

A code for the king's tombs, hidden just over a mile away.

[Meredith] Ancient Egyptians didn't have coin money.

Rather, Butehamun's house was so close

to an underground treasury for Ancient Egypt.

The tombs of the pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings

had a vast amount of wealth buried under the ground.

With the economy crumbling

and the Valley's security failing,

the wealth is too much for the authorities to ignore.

Just 84 years after Ramses III is buried,

Butehamun is sent orders from the top.

"Inspect the royal tombs,

"unwrap the Pharaoh's mummies,

and remove all the treasures inside."

What better way of getting gold

than just going and digging up the kings

and taking what they could?

Egyptologists are still trying to work out

how Butehamun actually carried out what he did,

how much he left behind, what he took.

But for the most part, he -- he was

pretty thorough in what he removed.

Butehamun was no ordinary thief.

He was in charge of a government plan

to dismantle the Valley of the Kings

and take the Pharaoh's treasures from their tombs.

Butehamun is such a fascinating figure,

because we really don't fully understand his motivations.

We know he was in the Valley of the Kings.

We know he was rewrapping the mummies.

But one of the biggest questions is,

was Butehamun robbing the pharaohs?

Or was he saving them?

For 3,000 years,

Ramses' mummy was never seen again.

[Salima] Everyone thought that these mummies,

the kings and queens, had been lost.

Until 1881.

Authorities receive a tip-off from a local family

of goat herders.

They had come upon a secret hidden tomb

high in the mountains.

It was to become the greatest archaeological discovery

in Egypt's history.

[speaking Arabic]

Meredith has come to explore the secret tomb.

[Meredith] This is incredible.

This is so remote.

No wonder it was hidden for 3,000 years.

Today, the tomb is only open to those with special access

and a way to scale down the precarious 40-foot shaft.

[speaking Arabic]

This is such a rare chance to go down this shaft,

but it's a massive drop. I'm a little bit scared.

All right -- [laughing].

This is terrifying.

In the mountains, above the Valley of the Kings.

[Meredith laughs] This is so crazy!

Egyptologist Meredith Brand

is following the trail of Ramses III's mummy.

[Meredith chuckles]

I never thought in a million years I'd do this!

She's trying to uncover why his body wasn't found

inside his tomb.

[sighs]

Good job!

That was incredible!

It's so high up! I can't believe I did that!

All right. It's so dark in here.

It's a bit eerie.

This is hacked out of the mountain.

It seems like, in a hurry,

there's absolutely nothing even here.

There's no decoration. There's no -- no nothing.

It makes it feel like a cave,

not something that -- that a human

could have made.

200 Feet into the mountain,

Meredith finally reaches an opening.

[exhales] Oh, wow.

This is amazing.

It's the site of a secret cache.

Oh, this is incredible. Wow.

This was the hiding place of over 50 royal mummies,

including the mummy of Ramses III.

This tomb looks carved in a haste and a bit unplanned,

but the mummies were here for a reason.

The king was a living god. The mummy was vital.

This was an official program of removing the mummies

from the tombs in the Valley of the Kings

and hiding them here.

Although Butehamun, overseer of the royal treasury,

strips the kings of their burial goods

to rescue the failing economy,

he also leads a mission

to protect the kings and queens for eternity.

Eventually, the authorities hide over 50 mummies

in labeled wooden coffins

to save their sacred bodies from destruction.

[Meredith] They chose a perfect spot hidden from everyone.

And for over 3,000 years, no one knew

where the mummies of the pharaohs were.

The discovery of this cave

filled with the royal mummies of the kings

is probably the most important discovery

in all of Egyptology.

We can now look at Ramses III.

We have his mummy.

[Salima] To stand in front of the royal mummies,

it's sort of a game changer.

You are there with the most powerful people

in the ancient world,

but also you are being able to, on some level,

interact with them.

It is a telescoping of time.

It is meeting an Ancient Egyptian.

And for many people,

it changes their perception of the past,

of Egypt as a whole,

but also how you think of the past,

how you think of the dead.

The mummy of Ramses III lives on

and so too does his legacy

in the Valley of the Kings.

Anke now has one crucial question.

Could there be lost burial treasures

that belong to the great pharaoh

still hidden inside his tomb?

Finding something like this would be so rare,

it hasn't happened in over 100 years.

[speaking Arabic]

[Anke] Since the time of Howard Carter,

since they were working in the tomb of Tutankhamun,

no original burial equipment of an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh

has been found here in the Valley of the Kings.

It would be amazing to find some pieces

that belong to Ramses III.

Anke is relying on the expertise

and eagle eyes of her right hand man,

Rais Mahmoud Abu Diab.

[speaking Arabic]

[Rais continues in Arabic]

[Anke] Our Egyptian workmen are a great team.

Believe me, it's very challenging.

You have to lift very heavy limestones,

and on the other way around,

you're like brushing tiny pieces out of the sand.

It's absolutely incredible.

[speaking Arabic]

After almost a month of heavy lifting,

the team has now cleared the top layers

of limestone debris from the tomb.

[speaking Arabic]

But beneath is an even bigger challenge.

The entire floor of the burial chamber

is encased in a rock-hard layer of dried-out mud.

Anke thinks it's evidence of intense flooding

from around 130 years ago.

[Anke] The Valley of the Kings is a dried-out riverbed.

We have to imagine now, this heavy force of water

coming down from the hills and taking everything with it,

destroying everything in its way.

The team gives each clump of sediment an ID number,

before hauling them out of the ground.

They break open every single one searching for artifacts

and sift the sediment, so that nothing is missed.

But the flood destruction has left very little behind.

We have some older pieces, like this very deteriorated

piece of wood.

It's a massive blow.

With such extensive flood damage,

Anke faces the possibility

might be no treasure left at all.

But as the team finally breaks through the mud layer,

Anke spots something unexpected.

This is not normal.

Inside the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses III,

beneath the compacted layer of mud,

a strange type of sand catches Anke's attention.

It doesn't look like the same sand found

in the Valley of the Kings.

And the one-foot deep layer is smoothed out

across the entire floor of the burial chamber,

as if it has been filled up by someone on purpose.

[Anke] It's very intriguing and puzzling

what this actually is.

This is almost everywhere on the same level.

There's only a difference of a couple of centimeters,

and this is, uh, quite mysterious.

Anke takes the sand to the team for analysis.

Under the microscope,

the grains confirm her suspicions.

The sand doesn't come from the Valley of the Kings.

[Anke] We are very curious about the sand.

It's very clean and uniform,

not the typical, um, yeah -- sand that you would expect.

Now we want to try to find out where this originates from

and why it was brought there in this area.

Why would anybody bring over 20 tons of sand

into this burial chamber?

Anke has one outlandish theory.

It involves the most famous discovery of all time,

King Tut, and the man responsible...

Howard Carter.

[Anke] There are many rumors surrounding

the mystery of Howard Carter.

One of those describes that Carter actually hid

some objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun

in order to keep them for himself.

We know that Howard Carter was a chief inspector

inside the Valley of the Kings.

And we know that he worked inside the tomb of Ramses III.

We never know what we will find.

Still, there are mysteries, to solve.

Could this mysterious layer of sand

indicate that Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tut,

hid treasures within Ramses III's tomb?

[dramatic string music plays]

In the hills above the Valley of the Kings,

Egyptian heritage expert, Sally El-Sabbahy

is following Howard Carter's trail.

She hikes to one of the most sacred lookouts in Egypt.

[Sally] No matter how many times

I've come to the Valley of the Kings,

I'm still always struck by just the scale of the place.

It just -- it never gets old.

You just keep learning, you keep feeling humbled.

It's truly a really special place.

Sally examines photographs taken over 100 years ago.

They reveal the beginning of Carter's mission,

to find the lost tomb of a forgotten pharaoh

named Tutankhamun,

today known to the world as King Tut.

Carter would have been dealing with a much

uh, more barren environment,

much more complicated environment,

because at that point there was still a lot of debris

filling the valley.

From the valley floor,

Carter removes thousands of tons of rubble.

Ancient floods have completely concealed any sign of a tomb.

[Sally] Carter was dealing with what we could describe

as almost impossible circumstances.

You really get a sense from this photo

of just the immense amount of material

there was to work through as an archaeologist

searching for really anything in this valley.

After five years of digging,

Carter is still no closer to finding the tomb.

[Sally] By this point,

he had one last season with funding secured,

so it was make-or-break.

If he hadn't found the tomb

at that exact moment in time, he probably never would have.

On November 4th, 1922,

battling the heat and dust,

finally Carter finds what he's looking for...

a buried staircase that leads

to a sealed doorway.

[Sally] And, um,

that's when he kinda carved out a little hole and stuck

a candlestick through and looked through,

and he made that famous statement

that he had seen wonderful things

because he basically saw a full tomb

with all of its funerary equipment,

which is something that we had never seen

before or since.

Inside the tomb,

Carter finds a room crammed full of chariots,

thrones, and gilded statues.

In the burial chamber...

is an intricately carved sarcophagus

and a coffin made of solid gold

that housed the mummy of the king.

It's hard to understand now the magnitude of the discovery

of the tomb of Tutankhamun,

but in 1922, it was the biggest news story in the world,

and the gold, the glamour, the glitz,

it made everyone completely crazy

about Ancient Egypt.

[Arto] Finally, we actually got a tomb in which all that wealth

of Ancient Egyptian kings came to full display, like real,

actual objects reflecting the splendor of the kings

of the New Kingdom.

The discovery was a game changer

for the Valley of the Kings,

archeology, and modern Egypt itself.

Personally speaking, as an Egyptian,

this was such an amazing moment in our history,

because it was really -- it took place at a turning point

when Egypt was forming its own independent identity.

And Tutankhamun literally was the face.

He gave us that identity that was something of our own.

But despite the earth-shattering find,

Egypt's growing independence left Carter with a bombshell.

[Sally] Until that point,

what had dictated all of the discoveries made

by foreign nationals and missions in Egypt

was a 50-50 split.

And so Carter anticipated

that they would be able to keep 50%

of whatever they found here.

And literally just mere weeks, actually, before the discovery,

the Antiquities Department changed that law

and got rid of the 50-50 split.

I -- I think this was a tough pill to swallow

for a very long time,

and Carter did fight it for a while.

Carter had no treasures to call his own,

and he was suspected of stealing.

[Sally] There was always a concern

from officials that something could be taken

without their knowledge.

And so...

because of that, Carter had to tread

very carefully.

Would Carter read have stolen from the tomb of Tutankhamun?

And if so, could he have buried treasures

just a few hundred feet away

in the burial chamber of Ramses III?

Inside the tomb...

[speaking Arabic]

...Anke finds a clue,

a fragment of glistening blue pottery.

It's broken,

but its vivid color and decoration suggests

something ancient and royal.

Wow, that's beautiful piece!

What is this treasure?

And more importantly, which pharaoh

does it belong to?

Sally El-Sabbahy

investigates suspicions that Howard Carter,

discoverer of King Tut, stole royal treasures

and hid them in Ramses III's tomb.

Just outside the valley,

she explores his old dig house for clues.

[Sally] You really feel like you're in the home of somebody

with a very strong personality and character.

And I think that's such a critical part

of understanding who this person was.

Inside the house,

Carter's team had a darkroom

and created thousands of photographs of the dig

and its treasures.

Everything was photographed in excruciating detail.

That was unprecedented.

By all measures, I think that we can safely consider

Howard Carter a pioneer

in terms of how he handled this discovery.

And yet, despite his forensic approach,

Carter had a secret.

Rumors of stealing treasures have followed Howard Carter

for over a century.

Now, finally, hard evidence has come to light.

Shown for the very first time, are unpublished letters

from 10 years after the discovery

between one of Carter's colleagues,

Alan Gardiner, and other experts.

[Sally] It's apparently addressing an amulet

that Carter gave to Gardiner as a gift.

So this letter opens with this really interesting sentence

that reads, "The whm amulet you showed me

"has undoubtedly been stolen from the tomb of Tutankhamun

before the objects were sent to the museum."

The amulet, like this one, was a perfect match

with the others that were kept at the Egyptian Museum.

Gardiner confronts Howard Carter in a letter.

"I deeply regret having been placed

in so awkward a position."

The concern from Gardiner was probably to have

an object like that in his possession.

And I think there also must have been

a bit of, uh, embarrassment knowing

that he had also kind of outed Carter.

What's really important about these letters

is that this is the first, not just written, but hard proof

that objects had been taken out of the tomb of Tutankhamun,

apparently directly by Carter himself.

So why was the theft covered up for almost 100 years?

[Sally] What these letters really show me

is that there was really a concerted effort to

not tarnish this incredible discovery,

by revealing unsavory things about Carter.

Because at the end of the day, this was not about Carter.

He was the discoverer, yes,

but this was about Tutankhamun and his tomb,

and this incredible legacy of the Valley of the Kings.

Hero or villain,

the discovery raises a new possibility for Anke's mission.

[Meredith] There were over 5,000 artifacts

found in the tomb of King Tut.

Maybe Howard Carter took some of these small finds

out of the tomb, and who knows where they are?

Carter once worked in Ramses III's tomb,

just a few hundred feet from Tut.

Did Carter hide stolen treasures

beneath the unexpected sand that Anke has found?

At the team's dig-house headquarters,

Anke and her colleague, Lea Rees, investigate.

But as you can see...

They want to find out when the sand was dumped there,

and they find a clue in notes left by an explorer

from the late 1800s.

[Anke] Here we have one from the year 1891.

He is writing how vivid the colors are

in the burial chamber.

As of 1891,

the burial chamber was still in pristine condition.

And a couple of years later,

in 1895, he's writing here

that the rooms are "much damaged,

and need detain the traveler but a short time."

So this means that already something must have happened

and destroyed the rare compartments so heavily

that they were inaccessible.

In just four years, by 1895,

flooding must have already destroyed the chamber.

It means the sand must have been dumped

long before Carter worked in the valley in the 1900s.

It would mean that Howard Carter

is not the one who could have brought

the sand layer inside.

So the blue pottery doesn't belong to Tut.

But could that mean something even more intriguing?

Could it belong to Ramses III himself?

Back inside the tombs,

the team has now unearthed over 20 pieces

of the mysterious blue pottery.

[Anke] We have here some very dazzling blue shining

glazed fragments that came out of the bottom

from our excavation.

It could be the first burial treasure discovered

in a king's tomb in 100 years.

They begin the painstaking task

of trying to glue the fragments together.

Anke thinks they once belonged to a set of vases

that held sacred oils and perfumes.

[Anke] We are thinking that it must have been

in the realm of beauty,

making yourself fresh in the morning.

They are remarkable pieces.

But Anke hasn't been able to prove the owner.

Until now.

[Anke] We found a very, very special piece.

So we can probably compare that here on one of the pillars.

The writing almost perfectly matches Ramses III's name

on the walls of his tomb.

[Anke] The sign heka, means ruler.

Without any doubt, we have here

a part of the original burial equipment of Ramses III.

It's amazing.

An original artifact that brings Anke closer

to the great pharaoh and his spectacular burial.

The fragments reveal Ramses was buried

with at least four blue vases,

designed to hold sacred perfumes and oils.

Placed within his tomb,

they may be the last surviving treasures that belonged

to Ramses III.

It's, uh, simply beautiful

to have all these pieces here together,

to see them shining, and to know

that you actually hold something that was supposed

to be with Ramses III in his afterlife.

It's an incredibly rare find,

the kind of which hasn't been seen in the Valley of the Kings

for over 100 years.

To now be finding actual burial equipment of the king

whose tomb you're excavating is pretty damn cool.

And it really does add a huge amount of information

about what was being buried with these kings.

Could anything else lie inside the burial chamber?

On the floor of Ramses' tomb,

Anke spots evidence that could help explain

the lack of treasures.

Almost everything could have been burned to the ground.

In the tomb of Ramses III,

Dr. Anke Weber and her team have just two more weeks to try

to excavate the great king's burial chamber.

The last mystery to unravel

is why almost everything they have found so far

has been damaged or destroyed.

[Anke] We collect everything.

We take notes, pictures, to see the wider context of an area.

All the finds must be meticulously recorded.

[Anke] Once something is excavated,

it is gone forever.

This is why it's so important to do a decent job with that.

With the end of the dig approaching,

the team hits a major milestone.

[Anke] We are reaching parts of the original floor level

of the burial chamber.

This is absolutely amazing.

Some parts of the tomb's original floor

may not have been seen for hundreds,

even thousands of years.

But everywhere Anke looks,

she spots something odd.

These are burn traces.

It's a mixture of the burned wood, limestone, and ashes.

A fine layer of ash coats many stones

on the burial chamber floor.

We have actually a lot of evidence

for burning here inside the burial chamber

that tell us a story about,

like, large fires with immense heat.

The heat was so intense,

it's broken down the limestone

the burial chamber is carved from.

[Anke] As soon as you touch it,

it starts chipping from all sides.

You can, like, crack it open like a cake.

So, um, it's in a very, very bad shape.

It's puzzling, because nobody brought charcoal

or -- or wood from outside.

What has been burning inside the burial chamber?

The team finds small pieces of wood scattered around,

pieces of coffins,

including the bodies that were once inside.

[Anke] We didn't find a complete mummy.

All the remains that we find are only pieces.

This is quite suspicious,

but we also found traces of burning.

It leads Anke to one gruesome conclusion.

[Anke] We know that in the 18th and 19th century,

mummies is served as fuel.

We have to imagine that there was no electricity,

so the individuals who visited needed light

in order to experience the tomb

and to have a look at the artifacts.

We, uh...believe that these are firing places

that were used to enlighten, uh, the darkness

of the burial chamber.

Robbers and modern explorers

would have lit huge fires in the tomb,

burning everything and anything they could find.

[Meredith] Anke Weber's project in KV11

is cutting-edge and innovative.

Using modern technology to explore the tiny,

minute remains is telling us so much

about the Tomb of Ramses III.

The paintings and this kind of -- the sheer beauty of it

is just one part of the story.

It's really a 3,000-year history of activity

that begins with the king and ends with our modern time.

Layer by layer,

Anke and the team can now finally piece together

the complete story of the tomb.

Inside a nested sarcophagus,

Ramses III lay in peace for less than 100 years...

before his mummy was moved

into the safety of the mountains.

Now empty, others used Ramses' tomb for their burials.

Then came nearly 3,000 years of destruction,

fires, brute force, robbers, and explorers

all scarred the king's tomb.

Until finally, floods inundated the chamber

and brought its roof crashing down.

And the history of the tomb is still evolving.

After three months of nonstop digging,

the team has cleared two shipping containers

worth of debris,

discovered original burial treasures,

and opened a new chapter in the story of Ancient Egypt.

[Anke] It feels absolutely incredible

to have achieved so much.

We finally excavated it,

we cleared it from rubble and debris,

and we found so many amazing and wonderful things inside.

Now at the end of the field season,

I feel like I became part of the history of the tomb.

We grew closer to this ancient pharaoh.

It's a long-life dream that came true.

The last great pharaoh of Ancient Egypt,

who was brutally murdered,

came to be buried in a spectacular tomb

with an army of servants

and nested sarcophagi.

The tomb was Ramses' portal to eternal life

in the heart of the Valley of the Kings.

[Salima] There's still a lot of work to be done in the valley.

Even now, there are places where we don't know what lies

beneath the sand.

[Meredith] There is so much more out there to find.

There's so much more to excavate.

This is a never-ending quest.

Now Anke's goal is to restore and conserve the structure

of the burial chamber

and make it safe for visitors to enter,

so that the world can bear witness

to the greatness of Ramses III.

[Anke] We are the connecting point.

Everything that we excavate that tells us something

about our history will bring us

to a past that can shape a better future.

[speaking Arabic]

It's a quest that will fulfill the Pharaoh's ultimate wish.

Speak the name of the dead

and make them live again.

Ramses III lives on.