Original subtitles

In Egypt's ancient sandstone quarries,

archaeologists search for traces of mighty Pharaohs.

Yeah!

The Holy Grail is hieroglyphs that shed light

on the mysterious kings who built the pyramids.

Oh!

Oh, this is wonderful.

Look at that!

The pyramids of Giza,

ancient Egypt's most iconic monuments.

Egyptian civilization spanned nearly 3,000 years.

But their great age of pyramid-building lasted

just over four centuries.

Some 20 huge pyramids date from this time,

concentrated on the desert plateaus of the Nile's west bank,

each built to house the body of a mighty pharaoh.

Now, archaeologists across Egypt are trying to unlock

the secrets of who these mysterious kings were,

how they persuaded the people of Egypt to build their giant monuments,

and how they influenced pharaohs for thousands of years after they died.

30 years ago, American Egyptologist, Steve Harvey,

excavated the very last pyramid built by an Egyptian king.

He has spent a career exploring these royal monuments.

Today he's come to the most famous one of all,

to investigate the legendary pharaoh who built it 4,500 years ago.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu here at Giza is the

culmination of hundreds of years of

trial and error in pyramid building,

but it's not only the perfect shape,

it's the largest ever built, and it's never surpassed.

The Great Pyramid was a fortress designed

to protect the pharaoh's tomb.

24 feet off center, the entrance would have been tricky to find.

At the top of a 130 foot passage,

a pulley system of ropes droppe three enormous granite slabs,

sealing off the entrance to the burial chamber.

Next, three giant blocks slid down the shaft,

closing off a grand staircase.

This pyramid was a masterpiece of engineering.

Capped with a layer of flawless white limestone,

it was an unmistakable symbol of the pharaoh's supreme authority.

The Great Pyramid was one of the first true pyramids ever built.

None of the Pyramid Age Kings that followed Khufu

would match it.

The incredible scale of his tomb suggests Khufu

wielded remarkable power,

but very little is known about the king himself.

Steve has been granted special access to explore the

restricted areas inside the pyramid,

to hunt for any clues to the life,

and death, of this mysterious pharaoh.

I'm gonna have to stop for a minute, guys.

Really is getting dark, hard to see anything.

It's not meant for coming and going, that's for sure.

Steve heads to the king's burial chamber at the

very heart of the pyramid.

There, mourners laid the Pharaoh's body for his eternal rest,

tightly secured behind giant rock barriers.

The chamber is almost entirely bare.

Even though this space was protected by blocking,

it was completely robbed out,

and when archaeologists came to the sarcophagus,

they found nothing inside.

For Steve, evidence of the king himself

survives in the only thing that does remain,

the chamber walls.

What really excites me is that you can see this

incredible granite that's been smoothed to a very high degree

and this one block is something like 100 tons.

Brought all the way from Aswan.

This is an exotic stone, it's not the natural limestone,

so really, we have this amazing box within this

huge mountain of limestone.

Ancient quarry men cut the precious granite in Upper Egypt,

then floated it 600 miles down the Nile.

Khufu spared no expense to ensure his resurrection to the afterlife,

not as a mortal, but as a god.

Steve heads deeper into the pyramid,

in search of a closed-off second chamber.

Legend has it, Khufu built this to hold his soul.

On the other side of the necropolis,

Archaeologist John Ward has come to Giza to explore

the monuments of Khufu's dynasty.

He's spent a decade unearthing the stonework of New Kingdom pharaohs,

who lived 1,000 years after the Pyramid Age ended.

Watch your toes, guys! Watch your toes!

His discoveries include an 11 foot tall Sphinx statue,

a representation of a god with the body of a lion,

an animal revered by Egyptians as a symbol of strength.

It echoes the famous giant sculpture guarding the Giza Pyramids.

John wants to know what was so special about these

kings that pharaohs 1,000 years later still mimicked their statues.

These iconic monuments are just shouting, screaming at us,

power, dominance, control.

I feel like this, I feel so insignificant.

Together these pyramids and the Sphinx and the temples create a landscape of power.

The huge sculpture protects the necropolis,

a giant symbol of supremacy,

believed by many to have the face of Khufu's son,

Khafre, owner of Giza's second largest Pyramid.

Despite many visits here, John has never been up close.

Today, he's been granted specia access to explore its enclosure

It's absolutely inspiring I mean it's just, jaw dropping.

I've waited 50 years to be here and now I'm here, it's just, wow.

66 feet high, the Sphinx gazes east,

toward the rising sun.

I know what it's like to work with the living rock

and how to carve it.

This would have been a monumental challenge.

They only had copper chisels, wooden mallets,

it would have been a harsh environment,

this dust would have been everywhere and yet the workmen,

the craftsmen, the masons, they were all willing participants

loyal to Pharaoh.

It would have taken thousands of people,

decades to construct the epic monuments of Giza,

but there's no evidence the pharaohs enslaved people to build them.

They didn't draw their power over the people from force.

John believes what stood these kings apart was that they inspired devotion.

The sheer volume of stone that has gone into building

this and each individual block,

represents the loyalty that they had for Pharaoh.

The huge monuments of Giza represent the peak

of the Pyramid Age.

So why was nothing built on this scale again?

At the height of Khufu's reign,

reliable seasonal rains fed the crops that ensured Egypt's prosperity.

For three months every year,

the Nile flooded and inundated the farmland,

so farmers couldn't work the fields.

The farmers were free to help build the king's enormous tomb.

They believed he kept the gods content and the country fed.

But soon after Khufu completed his pyramid,

Egypt began to suffer drought.

As crop yields crashed, so did the taxes coming into

the State's treasuries and despite the free labor,

the Giza monuments almost bankrupted Egypt.

The people's loyalty began to falter.

The kings' tombs that followed got smaller while

Khufu's Great Pyramid remained,

dominating the Nile's west bank.

The sheer power that he held.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

It was a power his struggling successors

were desperate to replicate.

At Abu Ghurab, Italian archaeologist Massimiliano Nuzzolo

wants to know how the kings of the Pyramid Age held on

to power as their wealth and status declined.

He's spent his entire career trying to understand a very

different monumental structure, an enigma whose mysteries

captured his imagination in his very first student course in Egyptology.

This enormous scatter of ancien rubble was once a Sun Temple,

dedicated to the most powerful god of the Pyramid Age.

The pharaoh, Nyuserra, didn't just want to become divine in death.

He built this temple because he wanted to be worshipped

as a god while he was still alive.

Rising from the desert was an enormous obelisk,

the centerpiece of the temple.

It was not a traditional stone needle but shaped more like a pyramid.

Monumental walls enclosed it, creating a courtyard,

where people could come to worship the sun.

The temple aligned perfectly on an east-west axis with

the path of the sun.

So on the Summer Solstice every year,

the sun rose through the entrance,

travelled directly over the obelisk,

and set at the western end.

This alignment is identical to that of the pyramids.

Records suggest that six of the pharaohs who followed Khufu

decided to build Sun Temples as well as their pyramids to

underline their divine status to the people of Egypt.

But almost all of these temples are lost.

Max hopes excavating this sun temple will shed light

on these kings' power, and perhaps help him crack

one of the biggest mysteries in Egyptology,

the location of the missing temples.

The problem is Max is not the first to decode

this structure's secrets.

Early Egyptologists excavated here more than 100 years ago

and left a mess of archaeological confusion in their wake.

Along with their discarded matchboxes,

early 20th century excavators left 4,500 year old pottery

scattered across the site.

If Max can find undisturbed artifacts,

they might reveal clues the first archaeologists missed.

Even the smallest of finds could be crucial in the hunt

for the lost Sun Temples of the Pyramid Age.

The team is excavatin an area of the Sun Temple

earlier archaeologists never touched.

The missing Sun Temples could hold the secrets of how

the later Pyramid Kings who followed Khufu held onto power.

Their location remains one of Egyptology's greatest mysteries

Untouched pottery here in Abu Ghurab could help solve it.

Mohamed Osman is a senior archaeologist here.

Wheat beer was a major source of nutrition for ancient Egyptians,

but they used the same ceramic containers in religious rituals

This could be an offering made in worship of a

Pharaoh or an ancient builder's discarded lunch!

Even after 4,500 years,

the answer could lie in its contents.

For Ancient Egyptians

mud was a symbolic replacement for food,

which they would offer to the gods.

The jar is buried not far from a curious row of stone basins.

Max and Mohamed believe they were all part of an elaborate ritual,

presided over by the pharaoh.

Priests filled the stone basins with water,

which flowed out across the temple's limestone floor,

along 28 shallow grooves.

The sacred liquid washed over jars placed in the channels,

purifying the offerings within.

The priests brought the symbolic offerings to the altar

and left them to be consecrated by the sun god's heat and light.

They then climbed through a passage in the obelisk,

to emerge on the platform,

facing east to bless the rising sun.

The purification basins have survived 4,500 years intact,

but the floor of Nyuserra's Sun Temple has disintegrated.

Mohamed and the team explore underneath

its fragmented remains.

Just inches down,

they find a mysterious layer.

Mohamed has found mud bricks in several places

beneath the Sun Temple floor.

It suggests a large building existed here before

Nyuserra's Sun Temple was built.

If they find evidence that the earlier mudbrick structure was sacred,

it could even be one of the missing Sun Temples of

another king of the Pyramid Age.

At Abusir on a desolate plateau within sight of Max's dig,

are the pyramids of the pharaoh who built the Sun Temples.

Little more than a century after Khufu had built his Great Pyramid,

the Egyptian state was weakened by drought.

The later pharaohs' treasuries were emptied by the cost

of the previous kings' giant tombs.

Czech archaeologist, Miroslav Barta,

has spent three decades stripping back the sand

from this necropolis.

20 years ago, he pioneered the study of pyramids as viewed from space.

Today, he's firmly on the groun in search of the secrets that

explain how the later kings of the Pyramid Age clung to power

as their wealth and status drained away.

On this spot in 2018,

he discovered the tomb of a legendary wise man, Ka-Irsu.

Ka-Irsu was a powerful royal court official and

close advisor to one of the later Pyramid Kings.

As "Overseer of Royal Works," he designed the king's pyramid,

and the temples that brought the pharaoh closer to the gods.

But he was also the head of the "House of Life,"

a philosopher bringing the king's message to the people of Egypt.

His writings preached the importance of complete loyalty to the pharaoh,

a message that was still being repeated 1,000 years later.

Miroslav is digging in the very heart of the cemetery,

in search of more elite tombs.

He wants to know how much the later Pyramid Kings relied

on powerful officials, like Ka-Irsu,

to improve their public relations and promote loyalty.

Test pits have revealed a tomb right next to the

pyramid of Neferikara, one of the later Pyramid Kings.

It could be exactly what he's looking for.

After three weeks of digging,

the team uncovers the exterior structure.

But a crucial clue is missing, the walls are bare.

Without inscriptions, Miroslav can't identify the tomb owner.

If he's to uncover the secrets of the Pyramid Kings' power,

Miroslav will have to dig deeper,

and find the burial chamber.

Archaeologist John Ward has returned to the

ancient quarry of Gebel El-Silsila,

to join the Director of the Swedish Archaeological Mission, his wife, Maria Nilsson.

Last season, they excavated an incredible monument,

a Sphinx similar in form to the Great Sphinx at Giza.

This year, Maria and John want to investigate the connection

between the kings who built the mighty monuments at Giza an

the pharaohs who carved out Sphinxes 1,000 years later.

Are you ready for some more fun, Carter?

They believe the site still hides stone monuments

that could reveal the Great Pyramid Kings' impact on Egyptian history.

A large pile of rock not far from last season's statue,

is exactly the right size to hide another Sphinx.

Today, they'll try to dig it up,

but they're off to a slow start.

It's now coming up ten to eight,

and I've got absolutely no men here.

Maria and John have just under five hours digging time to move

hundreds of wheelbarrows full of stone.

My hypothesis is that we've got another sphinx underneath.

But the team cannot afford to rush,

as they dig out the mountain of loose rock.

It's unstable spoil, and if that came down on you,

then you're just, you're just buried.

With time already against them,

the operation is a fine balance between risk and reward.

Be careful boys, be careful.

At Abusir, in between the pyramids Miroslav's

team has reached the bottom of the burial shaft.

The chamber below could contain the body of a

high-ranking member of a pharaoh's court.

Two years ago, he discovered the tomb of a wise man called Ka-Irsu,

an official whose job was to promote loyalty to

the King among the people of Egypt.

But was Ka-Irsu an anomaly, or did all the later kings

of the Pyramid Age have a dedicated official helping them cling to power?

It's clear that ancient robbers have ransacked

the tomb of treasures.

But though the tomb's been looted,

it may still contain evidence of how the Pyramid Kings

held their power over Egypt, even as their wealth declined.

The state of the sarcophagus confirms Miroslav's fears,

the robbers did a thorough job.

The mummy may be destroyed,

but Miroslav's team has alerted him to some faint red

markings on the back of the sarcophagus.

It's a crucial clue.

It could be the one piece of information he needs

to identify the owner.

Was he, like Ka-Irsu, an official propping up

a weakened Pyramid King?

The script is too degraded to read with the naked eye,

but to an Egyptologist, the general message is clear.

A title means the man was important.

He had a role in the Pharaoh's court, but what?

Miroslav can't brush the dust off the inscription in case

the paint flakes away.

Instead, he takes high-resolution photographs

of every character.

Miroslav must now process the images and determin

if enough detail survives to read the script.

The signs are promising.

This man was honored with a burial amongst the pharaohs.

So, could he have played a role in consolidating the

ailing Pyramid Kings' power?

To find out, Miroslav must decipher exactly what his titles were.

In Abu Ghurab Max and Mohamed's investigation

has thrown up surprising evidence beneath Nyuserra's Sun Temple.

The mud brick structure below its foundations,

could help them find the lost sun temples built

by the later Pyramid Kings.

It's a delicate task, just identifying the 4,500 year old

bricks relies on technique honed through years of experience.

They've uncovered bricks all over the site.

It suggests this older mud structure is far larger than expected.

At the edge of the site, the team foreman,

Reis Khaled, makes a discovery.

It's a huge breakthrough,

a column could be evidence that the mudbrick structure

had a grand entrance made of stone.

The column base goes down more than two feet,

suggesting it must have supported a huge entrance arch.

If there is a lost Sun Temple underneath

Nyuserra's Sun Temple, it would be a career-defining

discovery for both Max and Mohamed.

To prove the huge mudbrick structure is one of

the legendary lost Sun Temples of the later Pyramid Kings,

they still need more evidence.

On the Giza plateau Egyptologis Steve Harvey is trying

to reach a mysterious second chamber in the heart

of Pharaoh Khufu's Great Pyramid.

Oh, it's difficult.

He's hunting for clues to the mysterious

King's life, and death.

But deep in the Pyramid, the tunnels get tighter

and more treacherous.

What happened there?

I guess the power went out.

In an ancient tunnel riddled with pits,

the lack of light is a real threat.

The echo and the dark certainly really reinforce the

fact you're in a hidden tomb.

At the bottom of a tunnel little more than

three feet square, Steve finds the second chamber.

It's extraordinary.

Just huge ceiling with this vault.

You almost feel the weight of millions of tons of stones above you.

Like Khufu's burial chamber,

archaeologists found this room entirely bare.

It was designed with a niche believed to hold the giant

statue that housed Khufu's soul.

Even this stood empty.

But when archaeologists explore the finely polished walls,

they found small, secret passages that led out from the chamber.

These are really interesting features,

kind of mysterious features.

They go all the way to the exterior of the pyramid and head up towards the sky,

so what's most likely is that they have

some kind of symbolic connection to the night sky and to the stars.

Ancient Egyptians were dedicated astronomers,

who religiously charted the movements of the night sky.

Priests particularly revered two bright stars,

ever-present in the north,

whose permanence they associated with eternal life.

Khufu aligned his pyramid directly with these stars,

believing that's where the gods resided.

He may have built the shafts to allow his soul to rise

to the heavens to join the ever-present stars and become a god.

What still confounds archaeologists,

is the Pharaoh's final mystery, he didn't leave a single

inscription to celebrate his life.

They haven't decorated with images,

they haven't put hieroglyphs on the wall and that's a choice

and a decision they made.

And we have to think about why.

The greatest Pyramid King left no lasting clue to his life,

except his giant monument.

His plan was to put life behind him and become a god in death.

The weaker Pyramid Kings who followed him

needed the power of the gods in life.

At Abu Ghurab, Max and Mohamed are uncovering a vast mudbrick

structure beneath the foundations of the Pharaoh Nyuserra's Sun Temple.

If it is one of the four legendary missing Sun Temples,

it could help Max explain how the struggling

Pyramid Kings held on to power as their status began to fade.

But he needs evidence that the building was sacred.

In the northeast corner of the mudbrick structure,

workers have unearthed an astonishing find.

They delicately brush the pottery to free the jars

from the surrounding earth.

Ancient priests used jars full of mud as ritual offerings,

so these could be proof this structure was a sacred temple.

Even single ritual offerings in the foundations of

such old buildings are incredibly rare.

This is a huge cache.

For Max, they're crucial.

They show the mudbrick building was a religious site.

By building on top of a previous king's temple,

Nyuserra was making his Sun Temple all the more sacred.

Max's decade-long search has finally born fruit.

It's a huge discovery and unlocks a new chapter

in the story of the kings of the Pyramid Age.

The Pharaohs who followed Khufu were weak shadows of the man

who built the Great Pyramid.

But whichever king built this newly discovered Sun Temple,

did something Khufu did not, he ensured he was worshipped

as the offspring of the sun god while he was still alive.

His Pyramid may not have rival led Khufu's,

but with his Sun Temple, he claimed the power of a living god.

In the quarry at Gebel El-Silsila

Maria and John are searching for a new Sphinx to

match the statue they unearthed last season.

They're trying to understand the link between the legendary Pyramid Kings of Giza,

and the pharaohs who ruled 1,000 years after.

As a symbol of power, the Sphinx is everything.

And when I look at the sphinx, I can put myself into,

into the sandals of the craftsman chiseling this one away.

And he did it for the love of Pharaoh.

John's team strips away the top of a rock pile

beneath a quarried pillar of stone.

We're gonna clear this area, level off,

we'll keep on cutting into the sand because there's

a lot of sand here.

The mound of spoil has a core of ancient sand.

For John, it suggests the pile could hide another find,

perhaps a sphinx.

What happens is when sand is blown in as you can see now the wind is blowing,

coming from the north and when it hits something of course

it starts to build up and build up and build

up, and that's what we've got here.

Just moments after exposing the sand beneath the spoil,

the team hits something solid.

Yeah!

It's always the sand.

Wherever there's a sand build-up.

You always guarantee there's something there.

The team delicately works around the chunk of stone

It could be a Sphinx, or a precious part of another monument.

One has to be patient, that's archaeology at the end of the day,

we don't rush things, it's not a race,

there's no reward for coming first.

Isn't there?

We race to learn!

Knowledge is the key.

In the field lab,

near the necropolis of Abusir...

Miroslav's computer software ha sharpened the script from

the high official's tomb.

The inscriptions should tell him the tomb owner's name and titles.

If he played the same role as the wise man Ka-Irsu,

it could prove he was not unique,

and that other kings of the Pyramid Age also depended on

their officials to maintain the people's loyalty.

In Ancient Egypt, having a title meant power,

and sometimes, access to the pharaoh.

For Miroslav, it's a highly significant combination.

Not only was the tomb owner a close confidant of the Pyramid King,

but his name is similar in form to the legendary wise man,

Ka-Irsu, whose teachings of loyalty to the pharaoh lasted 1,000 years.

Miroslav believes the owner of the new tomb must be a direct descendent.

If so, Ka-Ires may have had the same role in the royal court,

spreading word of the pharaoh's power.

The pharaohs who followed Khufu may not have had his wealth,

but they masterminded ways to bolster their fragile power.

They used officials to promote loyalty,

and they cast themselves as living gods.

So what legacy did they leave t the Pharaohs 1,000 years later?

At Gebel El-Silsila...

Just a few feet from an unfinished sphinx statue,

Maria and John's search for more buried monuments has

turned up a stone, embedded in windblown sand.

They hope it will reveal clues to the legacy of the Pyramid Kings.

It's nicely in the sand so the sand is always a nice indication.

The flat edges and sharp corners suggest it's not another sphinx.

But it could be something even better.

Oh!

An inscribed stone could reveal more about the

pharaoh who carved the sphinx out of this quarry.

Oh this is wonderful.

Look at that.

Decorated with engravings,

the block appears to be a missing piece of a monument

John and Maria have been trying to piece together for nearly a decade,

a shrine to the, New Kingdom pharaoh who owned this quarry,

Amenhotep the Third.

This really is beautiful.

We've worked with this monument for years and when you find a piece like this,

it just, it makes your heart go.

This is the crowning detail,

it makes it all worth it,

the sweat, the tears, the hassle.

As the crew begins the clean-up after five solid hours of digging in the sun,

Maria and John begin to analyze their discovery.

Well, I have to say that with or without sphinx,

this has made my day.

It says the great god, and then you've got the son of Ra.

It is a real statement that Amenhotep III was the living god.

The shrine stood above Amenhotep's quarry,

proclaiming him an offspring of the Sun God,

exactly as the later Pyramid Kings had done to rescue their

status as supreme rulers.

By claiming to be the great god, and the son of Ra,

the sun disk, Amenhotep III is following a tradition

all the way back from the great pyramid builders.

I love it.

It's a major part of the jigsaw.

It's history. Wonderful.

By carving sphinxes and inscribing monuments

with statements of divine power,

Amenhotep III connected himself to his predecessors who claimed to be gods on earth,

The Pyramid Kings.

Every season, archaeologists draw these

ancient pharaohs further out from the shadows of history.

Mysterious figures,

whose power rested not on force,

but devotion.

Their officials promoted loyalty through teachings

that echoed down through the ages.

And their temples helped cast them as divine descendants of

the life-giving god of the sun. But they couldn't hold on forever.

But 500 years after they built the first pyramids,

Pyramid Age civilization collapsed.

When Egypt rose again,

the Pyramid Kings' extraordinary monuments remained their ideas survived

and their legacy inspired pharaohs 1,000 years later.