All language subtitles for The UnXplained s08e17 Buried Mysteries

A massive army, swallowed by a sea of
sand.

A lost city, believed to be buried by
the hand of God.

And a sunken man-made structure, older
than civilization itself.

It was not that long ago that the ruins
of the world's oldest known

civilizations lay hidden beneath vast
deserts.

Over thousands of years, the sands of
time blanketed an ancient land

stretching from Egypt to Mesopotamia,
entombing the world's first cities,

empires, and complex communities.

What's been discovered so far is
extraordinary.

It only begs the question, what secrets
will be uncovered as we dig deeper into

our buried distant past?

Well, that is what we'll try and find
out.

Today, more than 8 billion people live
in nearly 200 countries around the

globe.

But what are the origins of our
organized and complex modern world?

According to archaeologists, the answers
lie buried in the mysterious deserts of

North Africa and the Near East.

where thousands of years ago, ancient
societies laid the foundations of human

civilization.

Africa, Arabia, and ancient Mesopotamia
gave us some of the earliest cultures

that we have.

And so we'll see monumental
architecture, or we'll see evidence of

an organized religion, or diversified
trade or jobs among people.

Sometimes we'll see a single language.

These are what we begin to call the
markers of a civilization, as opposed to

just a bunch of people living together.

And all subsequent civilizations
basically rose from these earliest

cultures in the region.

There's a rich history of buried cities
under the sands.

So you have all these great temples,
forts, buildings, empires that are there

in the deserts.

It's a place of mystery.

We've uncovered many of these
civilizations, but there's so many other

places that are hidden, so many other
sites that are yet to be uncovered.

It's hard to imagine the devastation and
loss faced by communities who are no

match to powerful desert winds.

Some storms are said to be so strong a
massive army could be swallowed.

by a sea of sand.

Pelusium, Egypt.

This fortified border city once
protected ancient Egypt from invaders.

According to the famed Greek historian
Herodotus, in 525 BC, it was the site of

the Battle of Pelusium.

When the Persian Empire, led by King
Cambyses II, became the first, foreign

power to conquer ancient Egypt.

The Persian Empire has taken over most
of Egypt at this point in history, but

there are some holdouts. So one of the
holdouts is that this oasis city of

Siwas that refused to bend the knee to
the Persian king, this is in the very

western desert of Egypt, where there is
an oracle to the Egyptian god Amun.

The Oracle of Amun.

was a famous temple, renowned as a
center for prophecy, where priests would

interpret the divine will of Amon, the
most powerful deity in ancient Egypt.

And for a conquering king, a blessing
from this all-powerful god would justify

his rule over Egypt.

And so the great Persian ruler, Cambyses
II, He wants the oracle to confirm

his divine kingship. The oracle refuses
to do that. So we get this story from

the Greek historian Herodotus. Somewhere
around 525 BC, Cambyses II

sends his army out to say, oh, you're
not going to affirm me as divine king.

I'm going to destroy this oracle. I'm
going to send out 50,000 of my best

soldiers to go through, cross the desert
to the Oracle of Siwa and lay waste to

it.

According to Herodotus, 50,000 Persian
soldiers set out from the city of

Thebes, the former capital of Upper
Egypt, to defy the gods and destroy

the Oracle of Amman.

But first...

They would brave at 10 to 14 day march
across a vast wasteland known as

the Great Sand Sea.

The Great Sand Sea is a huge area.

It's about 400 kilometers long and
probably as many kilometers wide.

And it really looks like a sea. You can
hardly see any gaps between the dunes.

It's just row after row after row.

It's just very difficult to travel in.

because the dunes are extremely steep
and quite high, but the real difficulty

is sufficient supplies of water, and
there are no wells.

But you might also stumble into
quicksand.

You could be caught in a sandstorm. You
could be bitten by a scorpion or poison

a snake. So the whole environment is
really against you.

This is called the Great Sand Sea, and
sandstorms are real, and they are

something to be reckoned with.

At Siwa, they're obviously notably
nervous, because they know this army is

coming.

50,000 men, and according to Herodotus,
after several days marching in the

desert, they simply disappear without a
trace.

They're never heard from again.

And Herodotus assumes they are buried in
the sand.

and that somewhere under the dunes of
the Great Pantheon lies the lost army of

Cambyses.

Could 50,000 soldiers simply disappear?

For more than 2,500 years, historians
have debated the unknown fate of the

lost army of Cambyses, and whether it
even happened in the first place.

After all, Herodotus wrote about these
events.

nearly a century after they allegedly
took place.

Now this story comes to us from
Herodotus and his histories. It was

talked about this story already
existing.

Herodotus is known as the father of
histories, but he's also been called the

father of lies.

So how much can we trust Herodotus on
this? We don't have a lot of other

corroborating information.

Did 50,000 Persian soldiers succumb to
the great sand sea?

Or is the legend nothing more than myth?

Some believe the ancient desert is
slowly revealing the army's fate.

Bahrain, Egypt, 2009.

After excavating the area around a tiny
oasis deep in the Sahara, southeast of

the ancient ruins of Siwa, Italian
archaeologists Alfredo and Angelo

Castiglione

Make a remarkable discovery.

The Castiglione brothers went in search
of the missing army of Cambyses.

What they did was follow the caravan
routes through the western desert of

Egypt, and eventually they did actually
come across a large number of artifacts.

They came across bronze weapons, they
came across human bones,

They came across various water jugs that
had actually been planted into the

ground. And they also came across a
large amount of jewelry. And they were

able to analyze these and come to the
conclusion that they did indeed date to

the Persian period of occupation in
Egypt.

And it could well be that these Italian
researchers did actually find evidence

of this missing army.

There's a lot of people who are
skeptical.

Essentially, the argument is to say
those could have been by anybody. It

could have been by any visitor. And so
it's really not clear if what they found

was actually evidence of the lost army.

But whether that was the lost army or
not, the artifacts they found in the

sand tell us that there is stuff buried
in the desert still to find that can

tell us something about the past.

It's hard to imagine.

what it must have been like to lose
50,000 Persian soldiers in the

unforgiving desert.

But forgiveness might have played a
different role for a lost city uncovered

in southern Iraq, where some believe the
ancient ruins may be linked to the

Garden of Eden.

Southern Iraq, February 1854.

A British team, led by archaeologist
John George Taylor, excavates what

appears to be a series of barren desert
mounds.

But incredibly, they soon uncover an
extensive network of brick walls and a

massive ziggurat.

They later determine these structures
are the remains of a remarkable ancient

city buried by the sands of time.

John George Taylor, who also crucially
found bricks that actually were

stamped with the name of the city, and
that was Eridu.

Eridu is considered the oldest city of
the world. It dates back to about 5400

BC, and was actually constructed by the
ancient Sumerian culture.

The Sumerians themselves said that Eridu
was the most ancient city.

The Sumerians are an important
civilization for many different reasons.

First and foremost, that they invent
writing in a system known as cuneiform,

which is just the wedge-shaped
impressions that a reed stylus would

make into clay tablets.

Another important contribution that the
Sumerians give to us is the development

of urban lifestyle.

So the first cities.

In these cities, we begin to find the
emergence of political elites, religious

elites. Eridu is the first political
center of this region. And couple that

with writing, and we start to get a real
picture of a society, really the

beginnings of our knowledge of history.

Soon after the discovery of Eridu, the
ancient city drew the attention of

British Assyriologist Theopolis Pinchas.

And his 1908 book was responsible for
inspiring a provocative yet long

-standing theory that Eridu may have
actually been the most famous paradise

in human history, as described in the
Bible, the Garden of

Eden.

The Garden of Eden in the book of
Genesis first appears in chapter 2, and

it's placed right there at the
beginning.

of creation.

It's set up as a place where God creates
the human

and puts him in this garden.

And his job is to till it, to take care
of it.

And soon Adam and Eve are in this
garden, living together in this idyllic

life. The big question is, is the Garden
of Eden a real place, or is it a

mythological place?

Or is it a metaphor for humanity?

Was the Garden of Eden a real location?

A lush paradise where the first human
beings are said to have lived?

And if so, could Eden have been located
in Eridu, the oldest human settlement

ever discovered?

In 2025, researchers did this amazing
study where they discovered that...

200 irrigation canals and 4,000 branch
canals were situated in and

around the city of Eridu to bring water
to where they wanted.

And so what this tells us about the
environment is that it was much wetter,

much more productive than it is now.

The result of the irrigation engineering
was the abundance of fabulous, very,

very well-managed gardens.

very well-ordered, beautiful, lush,
manicured little paradises that

proliferated in Eridu.

It's incredible to think that this
desert wasteland was once home to

bountiful and vibrant life of all kinds.

But why would Eridu even be considered a
possible location for the Garden of

Eden? Well, some point to clues
mentioned in the Bible's Book of

Genesis. In Genesis, we're told that the
Garden of Eden has four rivers.

They are the Tigris, the Euphrates, the
Gihon, and the Pishon. We know what the

Tigris and Euphrates are. These are two
very famous rivers that essentially run

all the way down through Iraq and into
the Persian Gulf.

While many scholars think that the
Garden of Eden is a metaphor for a

utopian paradise,

Many people actually think it's in
ancient Mesopotamia.

I do think the Bible gives us a real
place when it's describing Eden. The

clues are the rivers.

We know where the Tigris and Euphrates
are. The more challenging ones are the

ones that have since disappeared, the
Pisan and the Gihon.

And so we start with what do we know?
Well, we know where the Euphrates River

is, and we know where the Tigris River
is.

And so if we're taking the text of the
Bible at face value, then... That's

where the Garden of Eden is.

And this is very interesting because
Eridu is right on one of these major

rivers that we're talking about. In this
case, it's the Euphrates River.

That's then very consistent with the
Eden story.

While Eridu appears to be in the same
region that Scripture describes as the

Garden of Eden, some believe another
clue can be found in ancient

Mesopotamian tales.

surrounding the Sumerian creator god
known as Enki.

One of the prominent figures associated
with this idea that Eridu was a biblical

Eden is Enki, patron deity of the city,
the god of wisdom, and the god of

underwater aquifers and fresh water.

Enki is a major figure in most of the
Sumerian creation myths. He has a very

important role to play in the emergence
of not just humanity, but really life

itself. He opts to create humanity.

And so what we find is early
associations of Eridu with a site of

creation, a paradise, a Mesopotamian
Eden.

The Garden of Eden story, it has to be
sort of thought of as this origin story,

as where we come from.

So maybe Eridu was one of the sources,
or maybe the main source for the Garden

of Eden.

We know Eridu was remembered fondly as
the birthplace of civilization, but the

Sumerian and Mesopotamian civilizations,
could this have been sort of what we

remember through the Garden of Eden
story?

It's possible.

It would be a remarkable discovery if
Eridu was indeed linked to the mythical

Garden of Eden.

The same can be said for another
legendary location, a place so decadent

it was said to be swallowed up by the
desert at God's command.

The Arabian Peninsula.

It's home to seven sovereign nations and
some of the wealthiest cities on Earth.

Dubai is a mecca of business and luxury
trade, and home to over 86,000

millionaires. And Abu Dhabi is
considered one of the richest centers

for global finance in the world.

Yet, surrounding these opulent,
money-soaked metropolises lies nearly

one million square miles of empty
desert.

And beneath this vast and scorched
landscape lies countless ancient secrets

lost to time.

One of the interesting things about the
desert in Arabia is that structures that

were once built get buried in sand,
meaning they're preserved from the

elements. They didn't rot. They didn't
get knocked down. They're still there

for us to discover.

There's thousands of years of things
being buried underneath those sands. And

there are a number of accounts of lost
cities in Arabia.

So if you go later in the Islamic world,
the Arabian Nights, they talk about

lost cities, buried cities.

But then we also know that Arab culture
is an oral culture. It's an oral

tradition. So for hundreds, thousands of
years, you have these stories.

of the cities buried underneath the
sands.

Of all the tales of ancient cities said
to be buried in the deserts of Arabia,

the most famous is the story of a
legendary lost realm known as

Ubar.

There are persistent legends among the
Arabic people in the Arabian Peninsula

of a great city.

That became incredibly rich from
frankincense.

Frankincense is a hard substance that
was used in funeral rites and all sorts

of things. It was incredibly valuable.

It would have made someone incredibly
rich to control that, and that's what

the city of Ubar supposedly did.

But no one knows if it's real or not,
just that it's a great, important city

that is lost in the sands of Arabia.

You have these stories of this ancient
city.

Uba, capital city of the frankincense
trade that grows rich and wealthy, and

that this wealth leads to corruption.

There's all sorts of immoral behavior.

If you look at the oral traditions, this
great wind from God literally buries

this city under the sands.

And the idea there is that even the
wealthiest, most powerful cities aren't

immune to divine retribution.

It has been passed down through oral
lore and legends by Bedouin tribes and

nomads in the Arabian Peninsula for
we're not quite sure how long.

And this image of a civilization sinking
beneath the sands really caught on in

popular imagination.

And so in the 1930s, Bertram Thomas
picked this up and dubbed this the

Atlantis of the Sands.

Famed British diplomat and explorer
Bertram Thomas.

had been travelling through the Arabian
desert in the early 1930s when he set

out to solve the great mystery of this
legendary lost city.

Bertram Thomas went in search of Ubar
and he spent time

with the Bedouin.

The Bedouin have been there for many,
many thousands of years. It's obviously

their home.

And they fully believed in the existence
of this city.

And Thomas crossed the desert, and he
got to a certain point, and they

basically said, that is the path that
will eventually lead you to it.

But unfortunately, due to the provisions
that he had, he couldn't deviate from

the actual course that he was on.

All he was able to do was record all the
stories and the folklore.

that the Bedouin gave him and continued
his journey.

So that was the end of that particular
third.

February 5th, 1992.

A bombshell article published on the
front page of the New York Times makes a

shocking claim that the fabled lost city
of Ubar may have finally been found.

An American explorer by the name of
Nicholas Clatt.

working with the British explorer Ranulf
Fiennes decided to use

satellite images to follow the different
Bedouin routes and see if they

could trace the actual location of this
lost city.

They used satellite technology and
declassified images from NASA to have a

look over that broad area and what they
found was that a number of roots

converged around the site of Shiza in
Oman.

The conclusion that they came to was
that this was ancient Ubar. They had

found the center of the frankincense
trade.

But a number of archaeologists aren't
quite sure about this conclusion.

Was the Atlantis of the Sands really
discovered in the southeastern corner of

the Arabian Peninsula and in a village
now known as Shiza?

While it remains a controversial claim,
local investigations have yielded even

more intriguing discoveries.

With Klatt's expedition, they were the
ones to discover that there's clearly

something quite extensive that was there
before at what we now call the village

of Schitter.

There's some rock walls, there's a well
that was accessible, so it did...

fulfill a lot of the criteria for a
settlement in the desert. And it wasn't

insignificant by any means.

They found evidence of a eight-sided
fortress that had collapsed in

on itself.

And this, of course, fitted very well
with the lost city of Ubar. The idea

that it had been quite literally
swallowed up by the sands itself.

Most of us think... that there are so
many of these cities that are buried

underneath the sands and waiting to be
rediscovered. It's possible that what

Nicholas Clapp found was Uba.

It's also possible that this was another
fort.

We don't know what happened for sure.

If a legendary lost city truly vanished
beneath the Arabian sands, perhaps it's

not the only mystery hidden there.

Because beyond the ruins of Ubar lies
the empty quarter of the largest sand

desert on Earth, where it is said that
powerful, supernatural beings known as

jinn haunt the shifting sands.

In southern Arabia, a giant ocean of
sand stretches across more than 250,000

square miles, an area about the size of
Texas.

This massive desert covers a quarter of
the Arabian Peninsula and is populated

only by nomadic Bedouin tribes and oil
field workers.

The region is almost completely
uninhabited, which is why it has come to

be known as the Empty Quarter.

The Empty Quarter Desert is a really
unique place. There's lots of deserts

all over the world, and many of them
feel vast.

and uninhabited and remote, but none of
them can match the empty quarter.

Humans have still been unable to tame
the wilderness of the empty quarter

desert. They can travel through, but
even that's a challenge.

There's nothing that matches the
intensity of that solitude and that

disconnection from the rest of the
world.

But according to those who have dared to
venture into this vast and harsh

wilderness, A dark secret haunts the
shifting sands, and the empty quarter

may not be as empty as it seems.

There have been lots of stories from the
empty quarter about people's encounters

with supernatural beings.

There have been people camping out who
have heard footsteps and crowds of

people gathering around their tent.

There have been oil workers who've seen
tracks.

in the deserts that have disappeared the
next day. All sorts of strange things

happen that can't be explained.

I've not had any experience myself, but
friends of mine, for example, have

expressed that lights go on and off,
that they hear voices at a certain time,

particularly at night, and other
phenomena like this.

Perhaps as listeners to these stories,
they might seem a little bit far

-fetched. But when you're actually
experiencing them, they can obviously

feel very real and very scary.

The only people that really occupy this
area is the Bedouin. And they see

the Empty Quarter as a spirit in its own
right. They believe it has supernatural

entities.

Are the hands of the Empty Quarter
inhabited by some kind of supernatural

presence?

And if so, exactly who or what are
people encountering in the desert?

The answer may lie in the pages of the
Koran, which describes a type of ghostly

beings known as jinn.

The Koran talks about the jinn as being
created from fire without smoke.

They can assume different forms, they
can take different shapes, and so...

You have places that are considered
haunted by the jinn.

One of the names for a person that is
considered insane in Arabic is Majnun.

This person is possessed by the jinn. So
you have all sorts of stories of people

who encounter these beings that may well
be jinn in the empty quarter.

From the mid-19th to the 20th century,
tales of mystical jinn haunting the

empty quarter were introduced to the
Western world in books by British

explorers like Bertram Thomas's Arabia
Felix in 1932 and Wilfred

Thesiger's Arabian Sands in 1959.

Bertram Thomas and Wilfred Thesiger
spent many years investigating

the folklore and traditions of the
Bedouin of the Empty Quarter.

The Bedouin would be...

highly respectful of locations where
they felt that the jinn were located.

They would make offerings, they would
appease them, they would know that this

was a place that was haunted by the
jinn, and they would not go anywhere

near.

Let the juror describe in his book,
Arabian Sands, where one of his

companions seems to be inhabited by a
spirit, and is...

acting very oddly all the way through
the night and goes through a process

that's almost like an exorcism. And the
next day is returned to normal.

And Fissinger writes about it quite
objectively almost, from a distance. But

for his companions, this seems
relatively normal. It's very much part

of the life that he's observing.

The thought of jinn possessing people in
the empty quarters is terrifying.

But in modern times, experts have
theorized that these...

Strange experiences are caused not by
supernatural beings, but rather

the desert itself.

A lot of the stories about djinns in the
desert might have their origin in

natural phenomena.

You get phenomena called the singing
sands, a sort of low-pitched...

groaning sound, coming from sound,
moving on sound, creating a really

strange noise.

You also get mirages that are very
unlike what you get in everyday

travelling. You get things that look
like mountains, which are usually

reflections of really small boulders
that have been reflected upwards, and in

fact is imaginary.

All of that taken together, that's
almost certainly partly the source of

some of those stories.

A number of these incidents can be
explained by extreme heat, dehydration,

feeling of disorientation that the
desert produces across the empty

quarter. But nevertheless, these can be
very powerful experiences.

And for a lot of people, it's something
much more complex than that.

I believe that the empty quarter is
alive because the Bedouin people tell us

so. And they've been there for thousands
of years.

They've seen it in every aspect.

They know every part of it. So if they
tell us that jinn exist, we should

adhere to their words.

Whether the strange experiences that
take place in the empty quarter are the

result of supernatural entities or
natural phenomena remains a fascinating

mystery.

But another intriguing enigma lies in an
ancient tomb.

buried in the sands of northern Africa,
which some believe was the final resting

place of ancient Egypt's most
controversial pharaoh.

The Valley of the Kings, southern Egypt.

From the 16th to the 11th century BC,
ancient Egyptians laid their great

pharaohs to rest in this royal cemetery,
including...

the extraordinary burial of King
Tutankhamun.

But in 1907, British archaeologist
Edward Ayrton discovered one very

mysterious tomb among the rest, and
whoever is buried here has been shrouded

in mystery for well over a century.

It is a small, roughly cut tomb with a
single, roughly

square burial chamber.

The problem is that items such as the
coffin and a gilded wooden shrine that

would go around the sarcophagus and the
body have been deliberately damaged and

at a certain point the names removed.

The single most glaring instance of this
is that down a short inscription along

the front of the coffin there is a
section missing. We just see the bare

wood.

This almost certainly was the name of a
king or another member of the royal

family that had been deliberately
removed at some point.

After opening the coffin on which the
royal name was surprisingly stripped

away, Edward Ayrton and his team exhumed
the mummified body inside and discovered

something even more shocking.

The right side of its skull appeared to
have been severely damaged.

It's hard to tell if this was a victim
of murder.

But what we can see is the tomb doesn't
seem to have had the same care as you'd

expect from a tomb in the Valley of the
Kings. The conclusion we can draw from

that is that this person was not well
loved and that he was supposed to be

erased from the collective memory.

Why did the ancient Egyptians abandon
centuries of sacred tradition and ravage

a royal burial chamber?

And who was the nameless occupant laid
to rest in this...

Bizarre tomb.

It's such a profound mystery that unlike
other tombs dedicated to identifiable

pharaohs, archaeologists can only refer
to this site by its catalogue number,

KV55.

Tomb KV55 is a real anomaly, and that is
because in most other Egyptian burials,

you would have the tomb, the coffin, and
the body.

The name on the coffin is the name of
the body.

So you have a coherent story told to us
by this evidence, in whom KV55, the

challenge for archaeologists is to try
and find out and untangle these pieces

of evidence to answer the question, who
is buried in KV55?

What's interesting is that around the
burial are four what they refer to as

magic bricks.

Now these are supposedly to protect the
person that's interred within the

coffin. And when they were able to read
the hieroglyphs on these bricks, it gave

the throne name of the pharaoh
Akhenaten.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh during the 18th
dynasty of Egyptian history in the New

Kingdom. He was extremely important
because one of the most radical things

in Egyptian history happened under his
rule.

What Akhenaten did was essentially take
the pantheon of Egyptian gods and he

shifted it towards a religion in which
the Aten, the Sundis, was the sole god

of ancient Egypt.

This was absolutely radical and unheard
of in Egyptian society until this point.

We also know that a very important part
of Akhenaten's story is that he was

deliberately forgotten.

very shortly after his lifetime.

Just as Akhenaten himself defaced
monuments devoted to the worship of

these old gods which he wanted to get
rid of, following his own death and the

end of his lifetime, his own name was
erased.

His temples were dismantled in such a
way that his image would be invisible.

For a civilization that is so concerned
with immortality, that is so concerned

with building shrines to these really
important beings, to erase them, to

destroy them, to alter them in any way,
tells you there's a huge turning point

there about who this person was.

But then we also know that the son of
Akhenaten is Tutankhamen.

Tutankhamen goes back to the old
Egyptian religions, defacing the kinds

of things that his father has done.

Does the fact that Akhenaten was erased
from history by the ancient Egyptians,

and even rejected by his own son,
Tutankhamen, suggest that the damaged

mummy found in tomb KV35 is, in fact,
Akhenaten himself?

In 2021, an Italian team reconstructed
the face of the individual

from KV55.

And eventually, this impression revealed
who could be inside.

The announcement was that this could be
the face of Akhenaten.

But of course, whenever a face is
reconstructed, there's always a certain

amount of bias.

So when we look upon that face, we can
only but speculate.

Beyond that, it's all a mystery.

March 2013.

A team of researchers exploring the Sea
of Galilee in northern Israel announced

an incredible discovery.

They have detected a large, cone-shaped
structure.

Buried on the seafloor.

Israeli scientists discovered this
massive mound of rocks underneath the

Sea of Galilee using sonar. They used
scanning techniques and they found this

230 foot wide, 60,000 ton round pile of
rocks.

Upon further investigation, a dive team
confirmed that this was not a natural

formation.

but a deliberate, man-made construction
of layered basalt stones.

You have this massive stone structure.
It's about 30 feet below the Sea of

Galilee. So it tells us that there's
clearly some kind of man-made monument.

Something was important enough that
people created this enormous mound.

This is a huge mystery.

Is this some kind of temple?

Is it some kind of burial mound?

We don't know what it's doing there or
how it got there. But there it is, lying

beneath the Sea of Galilee.

How did such a massive megalith end up
on the bottom of the Sea of Galilee,

where according to the Bible, Jesus
walked on water?

Archaeologists found an extraordinary
clue when they determined that this

mysterious ruin is more than 6,000 years
old, which means that it dates back

to long before the time of Jesus Christ.

It's such an extraordinary story. This
huge mound of stones found underneath

the Sea of Galilee, probably placed
there when it was on land, and then the

sea simply moved over it.

And it says a few things to us.

One of them is the stories from the
Bible. We think that's as far back as

you go.

And what we find out in the Holy Land,
history goes back much farther than we

realize. There's stuff still to find.

What's interesting is that there must
have been one hell of a sophisticated

society behind this.

And if that's the case, then who created
it? Who made this?

Before it was quite clearly drowned
beneath the waters by some kind of

tectonic... activity that actually
shifted the whole land that we still

don't understand.

But now the massive structure beneath
the Sea of Galilee remains an enigma.

But what's undeniable is that the Near
East and North Africa are home to

countless buried pieces of human history
that we have only begun to uncover.

This area of the world is really
interesting because

So much of what we have now in terms of
our modern civilizations, the groundwork

of that was laid all these years ago in
these places.

Despite the fact that the sand dunes and
the heat that make it very, very

difficult to work in, there's so much
there still to discover, particularly

because we find out so much about who we
are now from these investigations.

These are the oldest civilizations.

on Earth that have been buried, that
have been lost to time. And we are only

now beginning to rediscover these
ancient worlds.

And yet there are so many mysteries that
we still have not answered.

And the only solution is we have to keep
digging.

Could the mysterious monument beneath
the Sea of Galilee be the last trace of

a forgotten culture?

It's a stunning reminder that In these
cradles of civilization, some of

humanity's oldest mysteries may still be
buried beneath sand, stone, and water.

And while we continue to unearth lost
tombs, temples, and ancient cities,

it will take many lifetimes for the
deserts of Mesopotamia and Egypt to

reveal their secrets that for now remain
unexplained.