Original subtitles

We are ready to go inside the tomb.

Oh, my God, wow!

In a newly opened,

3,000-year-old tomb,

archaeologists investigate the last mystery of

the boy king, Tutankhamun.

Wow.

The Valley of the Kings,

an ancient desert necropolis and,

in the second millennium BC,

the final resting place of the pharaohs

of Egypt's new kingdom.

Here, 100 years ago,

archaeologists made one of

their greatest discoveries ever.

They found the most spectacular treasures ever

recovered from one of the most alluring civilizations in human history:

the lost tomb of Tutankhamun.

Tutankhamun became Egypt's pharaoh at just nine years old.

He died only ten years later.

The boy king and the treasures buried with him

made headlines around the world.

But compared to other pharaoh's tombs,

Tutankhamun's burial chamber is small and poorly decorated.

Why is he buried in such uninspiring surroundings?

What could it reveal about his life?

Now, at sites across Egypt,

we follow teams of archaeologists and investigators,

working to unlock Tutankhamun's last mystery.

Wow. It's wow, wow, wow, wow.

Egyptologist, Aliaa Ismail,

has worked in the Valley of the Kings since 2014.

At just 30, she leads a team of fellow Egyptians who,

for the first time ever, are digitally reconstructing the

valley's tombs, and recording them for posterity.

They're searching for clues as to how King Tutankhamun's tomb

was built that might explain the mystery of

his strange burial.

This tomb is very small and you notice that

once you get in.

Also, the figures, they look very different from other

tombs in the valley.

They're almost like child's drawing.

Immediately I can understand that there's something wrong

with this tomb.

Deep inside the valley of the kings,

tunnels burrow deep into the rock.

In the largest tomb, there are more than 100 chambers.

In the center of the valley lie the most famous tomb of all,

the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It was discovered full of treasures and with a coffin

made of over 240 pounds of solid gold.

But all this was packed into just four tiny rooms.

Archaeologists have studied the tomb for a century,

but it still hasn't given up all of its secrets.

There is certainly something not right

about this tomb.

It's very different from other tombs in the

Valley of the Kings.

To better understand the strangeness of

Tutankhamun's tomb, Aliaa compares it to a tomb created

less than 50 years after Tutankhamun's burial,

the tomb of SETI I.

Seti's tomb has ten rooms compared to

Tutankhamun's four.

Most of these rooms were likely full of treasures.

They are still lined with stunningly carved

and painted reliefs.

It's spectacular compared to Tutankhamun's.

Here you can see so much work,

so much effort has been put into making this tomb

what it is today.

Aliaa uses the world's most precise

3D scanner to map the walls of Seti's tomb.

She compares her results to the scans the team have

already made of Tutankhamun's tomb.

The scans allow Aliaa to analyze the tomb's carvings

and paintings and compare the level of craftsmanship

at work in each.

The comparison could reveal crucial information about

Tutankhamun's last days and may explain why he ended up

in such a tiny and poorly decorated tomb.

We are trying to get all the little details that

one wouldn't see with our eyes, out into the scanners.

What lost details will Aliaa's scans reveal?

Can they explain the mystery of Tutankhamun's tomb?

In Gebel el-Silsila, Swedish archaeologist, Maria Nilsson,

and her British husband, archaeologist John Ward,

are heading out to a dig for the first time since the

global COVID pandemic forced them off site.

It's gonna be an amazing day today.

I expect the same.

Maria and John are picking up where they left off.

They are following the lead of a 120-year-old archaeological

report that briefly mentions a now lost temple.

The report doesn't describe the temple itself,

but it does describe its location,

claiming that it once stood on the Nile's West Bank

where the quarry workers' village lies.

When they were last here, Maria and John dated the

quarry workers' village to the reign of Tutankhamun and

they suspect he built the lost temple too.

They are now searching for evidence that could

back up their hunch.

To get to their dig, they must cross the Nile.

The team's effort to board their boat bright and early

didn't go quite as quickly as planned.

It's one of those usual mornings,

when we go over to Tut's Village it's always chaos

because we've gotta get everything on the boat first.

The first day is always chaos because you need to move

all the equipment.

Alright guys.

On the West Bank of the Nile,

the team make the tough hike across open country,

toward the workers' village.

There's nothing easy about going up this hill.

Once there, Maria searches out

Tutankhamun's inscription.

So we know that this is the name of Tutankhamun,

based on the combination of hieroglyphs that

you have here.

There's lots of evidence of Tutankhamun in

this quarry workers' village.

Considering that we have Tutankhamun here,

we have it in, in the workers' village,

we do have a hunch that the temple was also constructed by Tutankhamun.

Before they set off to search for any ruins,

John and Maria check their bearings.

From here onward, everything they excavate is in

archaeologically uncharted territory.

If Tut's village is here.

Mm-hm.

And then our wadi is in here.

So we believe that the temple is somewhere

in this part here.

Somewhere in that area.

This is exciting.

It is indeed. We're finally here.

Finally.

The team gets to work, searching the landscape.

They scan the surface material,

hunting for evidence that the lost temple stood here.

I wanted to start from that big stone.

Yep.

And I want them to sweep,

as a line, taking in that edge,

and then we work our way up, okay?

But they have to look at every single stone.

A meticulous search across the valley floor

eventually delivers a result.

Team foreman, Ahmed Mansur, brings over something special.

What you got?

Oh, ooh!

Oh, yes, yeah!

Yes!

In Luxor, behind the Valley of the Kings,

lies the sprawling necropolis of Asasif.

An ancient burial ground for the elite nobles

who served the pharaohs.

Egyptian archaeologist, Ezz El Noby and his team are

excavating a giant tomb with an impressive pillared entrance.

Ezz was fascinated by Ancient Egypt as a boy and

has spent his entire adult life excavating the

tombs here at Asasif.

Can this huge tomb shed light on the mystery of

Tutankhamun's tomb and help reveal why it lacks

the usual majesty?

The workers labor beneath a hot desert sun,

to haul each 10 pound bucket of sand up and out of

the 20 foot deep tomb courtyard.

But soon the team uncover a clue.

The rope looks as good as new,

but it's over two-and-a-half thousand years old.

It's a big clue that inside the tomb,

there may be ancient mummies.

Ever since Tutankhamun's treasures were discovered,

unopened tombs have been a holy grail for archaeologists.

Ezz's team clears away sand to open up this tomb's entrance.

Expectations are high that there are treasures inside.

As they dig, they uncover more and more pieces of

fabric and bone.

The sheer quantity of finds is a good sign.

The number of artifacts coming out of the

sand suggests that this is a very large tomb.

Debris like this is strong evidence it was

raided in the past.

To drop this much material on their way out,

tomb raiders must have found a significant hoard inside.

The team works all morning to clear sand from the

tomb's entrance.

Finally, there's enough room for Ezz to take a peek.

At Saqqara,

Egyptian archaeologist, Ola El Aguizy,

is also trying to unearth a lost tomb.

Ola is looking for new evidence to understand how

tombs were built in Egypt in the generations

that follow Tutankhamun.

That evidence might shed light on the mystery of

Tutankhamun's own tomb.

Ola has been studying Egypt's tombs since the 1970s,

when she became fascinated with decoding and

understanding ancient hieroglyphs.

We are expecting to find something important,

so we are waiting in suspense, yes.

Three years ago, Ola discovered an intriguing

limestone lintel here, with a name engraved into it,

Ta Mwiyah.

Her investigations reveal this figure was born into a

military family.

He lived just 50 years after Tutankhamun.

What we found in this whole area are military men.

This habit of getting military buried here has began since

the time of Tutankhamun.

Ola directs her team to search for the tomb's

entrance, near where she found the lintel.

Soon, white limestone blocks emerge from beneath the sand.

Oh, I can see hieroglyphic texts here!

A wall!

Oh, my God, so nice.

To be sure this is the entrance to Ta Mwiyah's

lost tomb, Ola investigates the ancient inscriptions.

The great overseer of the stables in the temple

of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt and then the name

of the deceased, Ta Mwiyah.

The hieroglyphs confirm,

this is the entrance to Ta Mwiyah's tomb.

Now, Ola's team must excavate further.

They have to dig through several tons of sand and hope

the tomb and it's treasures are intact after 3,300 years.

Just inside the tomb's entrance,

they reveal something extraordinary.

You found something?

A beautiful painted artwork on plaster.

Wow. It's, wow, wow, wow, wow.

At Gebel el-Silsila,

near a quarry workers' village on the West Bank of the Nile,

Maria and John's search for evidence of a temple that

may have been built by Tutankhamun,

unearths a precious clue.

That is gorgeous!

Oh! Isn't that beautiful?

Oh, it's a typical Amarna ware.

Look at the lotus.

This pottery is so typical for what we know as

the Amarna period, so from Amenhotep III

through to Tutankhamun.

The pottery shard is painted with

blue lotus flowers.

A typical motif from the time of Tutankhamun.

This find confirms that the old reports of some kind of

permanent settlement here are accurate and that this

settlement dates to the era of the boy king.

It's easy to imagine that this was once part of a

massive water vessel that once stood in the courtyard

of the temple that once stood in this wadi.

And for us, that is a

beautiful piece of datable material.

To find conclusive evidence that a temple once stood here,

the team starts the first of several trenches.

If they can find pieces of an ancient wall,

it will be a significant clue that a large structure

once stood here.

As the workers remove the top levels of sand,

they make another discovery.

Amazing!

I love you.

Where? Where did you find it?

It's a piece of worked sandstone.

It's small, but that has now,

that's just made my day.

That is from the interior of the structure,

whether that be a temple, kiosk, shrine,

whatever it was.

It has plaster and then painted inscription,

relief over the top.

The team find more and more pieces of dressed

stone in the trenches and among the surface scatter.

This proves that there was something

here that was more substantial.

The dressed stone is evidence that the

team could have found Tutankhamun's temple.

You know, no one's ever documented this temple and

we're the first ones to do it and to me,

that's just amazing, it's awesome.

Less than a mile from Tutankhamun's tomb

in the Valley of the Kings,

Ezz is preparing to enter a tomb he has just opened.

The discoveries awaiting Ezz inside may have lain unseen by

human eyes for nearly 3,000 years.

By the end of the first workday,

the tomb's entrance is completely clear.

We are ready to go inside the tomb.

Oh, my God.

Wow!

Today's discovery is a once in a lifetime find.

It's instantly clear that the tomb is far bigger

than the burial chamber in Tutankhamun's tomb and

doorways lead off to more rooms.

To discover who this tomb was built for,

Ezz must investigate the far end of the chamber.

To get there, the team must remove each of the 100 plus

bones littering the floor.

It's likely that these are the bones of many

generations of the same family.

With clear access, Ezz finds further passageways

leading off the main hall and a false door.

A false door is a door frame carved into solid stone.

Those buried here believed their souls would pass through

this and into the afterlife.

The false door often carries inscriptions

identifying the tomb owner, but here there's no evidence

of their identity.

For a moment, it looks like the tomb may have

revealed all of its secrets.

But, in the corner, Ezz spots a mysterious

shape under the sand.

Wow!

Ezz's team work quickly to free the mummy from

millennia of dust.

Ahmad!

Please, come.

Now, the team must move the mummy to the site's

conservation area.

Ahmed Mohamed, the team's conservator,

prepares the linen to stop it from disintegrating.

Workers face a tough challenge to maneuver the

mummy out of the tomb and up a flimsy scaffold to the

top of the 20 foot deep courtyard.

The operation is fraught with danger,

for both the work crew and the mummy.

The workers deliver the mummy to the restoration team,

without it or them coming to any harm.

Analysis of the mummy will help the team uncover this

tomb's lost secrets.

Why did a servant of the pharaohs get a bigger tomb

than Tutankhamun himself?

Mummification was practiced for 3,000 years of

Egyptian history on pharaohs like Tutankhamun and

their servants buried here.

They believed it preserved the body for the afterlife.

Belief in this afterlife was constant and unshakable,

except for one brief and shocking moment in

Egyptian history when the pharaohs' faith in

eternal life vanished.

It was a revolution that shaped Tutankhamun's

short life.

Did it also shape his mysterious tomb?

At Gebel el-Silsila,

Maria and John have found evidence of a building on

the valley floor.

Their finds suggest the structure could be a temple,

dating to the time of King Tutankhamun.

This little shard, this little fragment is all

that I have left, at this present moment,

of what was once a highly decorated temple,

situated somewhere in this wadi.

Maria and John will continue their investigation,

but another mystery here could help explain

Tutankhamun's tomb and the religious revolution

that surrounded his life.

Previous generations of pharaohs,

including Tutankhamun's father,

built on the East Bank of the Nile,

but strangely,

Tutankhamun quarried and built on the West Bank.

When we look at the reasons why Tutankhamun had

his quarries on the West Bank,

we do think that it has a strong link

with the priesthood,

the priesthood of god Amun and that they wanted to

see him with a fresh start.

Tutankhamun's powerful high priests wanted a

fresh start because they were fighting for their survival.

When Tutankhamun's father,

Akhenaten, became pharaoh,

he led a revolution that transformed Egyptian religion.

He abandoned sacred temples and he banned belief in the

old gods and the afterlife.

He replaced them with a single god, the Aten.

Akhenaten built a new capital, Amarna,

abandoning the traditional home of the

pharaohs at Thebes.

When Akhenaten died, Tutankhamun faced a choice:

carry on his father's unpopular religious revolution

or restore the old gods to their temples

and their priests.

Tutankhamun's father, Akhenaten,

not only did he close the temples and reduce the

pantheon of gods down to just one, the Aten,

he created a chaotic system which, unfortunately,

Tutankhamun inherited.

Tutankhamun's father,

as a self-proclaimed god on Earth,

declared that he alone could communicate with the

sun god, Aten.

Neither the high priests nor Egypt's nobles were happy.

When the boy king, Tutankhamun came to the throne,

many of his most important advisors demanded he reverse

his father's revolution.

Tutankhamun was a young pharaoh and he would

have relied heavily upon his advisors and the

court around him.

Tutankhamun agreed to return to the old ways.

He quarried and built on the opposite bank of the Nile to his father,

to make clear his opposition to his father's reforms.

I think he was able to, in his short reign,

reestablish the power of Egypt.

Tutankhamun was able to revive Egypt like a phoenix,

out of the chaos that his father had left behind.

Did Tutankhamun's counterrevolution succeed?

And can this decisive moment in Egyptian history explain

the mystery of his unimpressive tomb?

Just four miles from Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings,

Aliaa and her team are using a 3D scanner to investigate

the tombs of Tutankhamun and Pharaoh SETI I.

SETI is buried in a majestic ten room tomb.

Tutankhamun's four room tomb is so small,

it hardly seems fit for a pharaoh.

At the team's headquarters, Aliaa compares the scan results

to reveal hidden details in each tomb's wall decorations

and investigates if they are connected to the religious

revolution that shaped Tutankhamun's reign.

So, this is our lab, where the magic happens.

Aliaa puts the scans of each tomb

side by side and investigates.

The difference between SETI and Tut is visible.

Seti's tomb, it has so many carved details,

it's so intricately done and very special.

But however, when we go into Tut's tomb,

it's just plaster and paint.

Her 3D scans reveal unique and

unprecedented details.

So Aliaa can see a remarkable flaw in Tutankhamun's tomb.

When you zoom in, you can have a look at the faint

outline of the brush marks.

It's obvious that the plaster was still wet when they

started painting over it.

The brush marks point to an extraordinary theory.

It seems that somebody wanted to rush Tutankhamun's burial.

Clearly someone wanted to close the tomb doors quickly,

not even waiting for the plaster to dry before applying the paint.

The rush to finish Tutankhamun's tomb adds to the mystery

of its small size.

Who was responsible for leaving the boy king in this

underwhelming tomb?

Was it revenge for his father's revolution?

Inside King Tutankhamun's tiny tomb,

Aliaa continues her investigation.

There is certainly something not right about this tomb.

A crucial clue to the identity of the person

who buried Tutankhamun in this unworthy tomb,

rests with a puzzling portrait,

painted onto the tomb walls.

Before Tutankhamun's body was taken down into his tomb,

a figure dressed in leopard skin performed

a sacred ritual.

He touched a serpent-headed blade to the eyes and lips of Tutankhamun,

believing it allowed the dead pharaoh's soul

to see and breathe.

His spirit could now take part in a feast with his mourners,

sustenance for the journey that they believed Tutankhamun

would make into the afterlife.

It was a ritual traditionally performed by

the heir to the throne.

Was the leopard skinned figure also responsible

for Tutankhamun's tomb?

Aliaa travels to the nearby Valley of the Monkeys to

investigate the mysterious man.

This tomb is the tomb of Ay.

This is my first time here.

Ay is the man who is depicted guiding Tutankhamun's soul

to the afterlife on the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb.

He was possibly the father of Tutankhamun's step mother,

Nefertiti, and a trusted advisor to the boy king

throughout his reign.

It's amazing how the background color is yellow,

which is the same as Tut's tomb and the drawing style is

also the same.

The same opening of the mouth scene exists in Tut.

Also, there is no carving.

The wall is just plaster and paint.

It's almost like the same person did the two tombs.

Tutankhamun died young with no heirs.

His premature death led to a power struggle among those

with a claim to become the next pharaoh.

Was Ay, and his battle to become king,

responsible for Tutankhamun's strange burial?

At Saqqara, Ola's team of archaeologists

is searching for the tomb of a man called Ta Mwiyah.

He was an important aide to the pharaoh who ruled Egypt

50 years after Tutankhamun's death.

Tutankhamun was intent on reversing his father's

religious revolution.

Did his plan succeed?

Ola's Egyptian colleague, Tarek Tawfik,

spots a piece of intriguing evidence.

Ta Mwiyah and his wife, on limestone,

this is good news.

And I think I will have the name of the wife now.

Married F, his beloved and then this is supposed to be

her name, Tubi.

Carved reliefs of Ta Mwiyah and his wife, Tubi,

fill the tomb walls.

We have the deceased and his wife.

Mm-hmm.

And they are going and being received by a god.

Uh-huh.

And it's not Osiris and it's not Ptah, so who was it?

Atum maybe?

This is significant.

Religiously significant.

The reliefs depict the couple's journey to heaven

and their eternal life in paradise.

Similar scenes adorn the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Ancient Egyptians,

just 50 years after the death of Tutankhamun,

still believe that carvings like these on tomb walls,

magically transform the afterlife into reality.

But to which gods were these paintings and reliefs dedicated?

Who do the Egyptians worship now,

after Tutankhamun's death?

And what does it mean for the mystery of his tomb?

Tarek and Ola continue their excavations.

They could shed light on whether Ancient Egyptians

still worshipped the sun god, Aten,

as demanded by Tutankhamun's father,

or had they returned to the older pantheon of gods.

On site, the workers continue to search for

this tomb's burial chamber.

It's always exciting.

Sometimes there is even, between the workmen,

a bit of competition, who will find first?

While conservators move the painted walls to the

store rooms for safekeeping,

Tarek spots something in the sand.

We have a pillar and I can see already,

there is a Djed pillar decorated on it.

It's an important find.

This pillar confirms the nature of Ancient Egyptian

religious beliefs in the years after the

Amarna Revolution and Tutankhamun's death.

The Djed symbol represents the god Osiris,

who arose from the dead to live again as king

of the afterlife.

Ancient Egyptians painted the symbol on the bottom of coffins,

and wrapped the mummy with Djed amulets to summon

Osiris and rejuvenate the soul of the deceased.

They also carved Djed symbols onto the pillars in their

tombs to follow Osiris to the afterlife.

In the time of Amarna,

they told them that there is no afterlife.

After there was a reaction,

then extreme worshipping Osiris.

The team has found inscriptions to Osiris and Ptah,

gods whose worship Tutankhamun'

father had forbidden.

It's more evidence Tutankhamun had abandoned

his father's revolution.

He has restored belief in the afterlife and the power

of all Egypt's gods.

The religious revolution, demanding the worship of a

single sun god, was over.

This was a feat that deserved a magnificent burial and a majestic tomb,

so why didn't Tutankhamun's mummy

get the tomb it deserved?

In the Valley of the Kings,

Aliaa is investigating this mystery.

Why did Ay banish Tutankhamun to such a small

and poorly decorated tomb?

Aliaa examines Ay's tomb to look for clues.

That's a baboon wall.

Both Tut and Ay opted for the same scene,

almost like the same person chose what goes in each tomb.

The uncanny similarities between the two

chambers suggests a common hand was at work on both,

but only Ay's tomb was fit for a pharaoh.

It's very similar to the tomb of

Tomb of Tutankhamun.

The style, the artwork, the sarcophagus.

But it's so much bigger!

The artistic style of the two tombs suggests that

Ay may have been responsible for decorating both.

Investigators now suspect that when Tutankhamun died,

unexpectedly young, the lavish tomb he ordered

for himself was not finished.

Ay seized the moment.

He ordered Tut be buried in a smaller tomb.

It was quickly decorated and sealed before the paint

had a chance to dry.

With Tutankhamun gone,

and before any challengers could oppose him,

Ay crowned himself Pharaoh and decreed that when he died,

he would take Tutankhamun's tomb.

Ay buried Tutankhamun in the smaller tomb,

so he could have the bigger tomb for himself.

This is the tomb that was intended for Tutankhamun,

the tomb of Ay.

Ay banished Tutankhamun to an unworthy

tomb to secure his place as Pharaoh.

Later pharaohs erased Tutankhamun from history,

smearing his name as the son of a heretic.

But 100 years ago, when his tomb was discovered,

Tutankhamun was reborn a superstar.

Now, experts use the clues to piece together

his true legacy.

As a boy king, dealing with the aftermath of his father's

religious revolution, Tutankhamun navigated a

royal court in turmoil,

but heeding the advice of his most trusted advisors,

he reinstated the priesthood,

he rebuilt Egypt's temples and he replaced the sun god,

Aten, with the Egyptian gods of old.

After his father's years of misrule,

the reign of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamun saw Egypt

restored to greatness.