Original subtitles

Deep in the Egyptian desert,

a team of workers dig down through the sands...

We will keep our fingers crossed.

Then we will see.

In the hunt for Queen Cleopatra's Egypt,

they've found an ancient grave.

They are the most critical part of the job.

One of the dead is about to give up their secrets.

It's amazing. Unbelievable.

From the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt.

One pharaoh has become not just a name,

but a character that has captivated the world,

in history books and Hollywood.

Cleopatra.

She ruled Egypt for 21 tumultuous years.

The last of her murderous and incestuous dynasty of Greek pharaohs,

the Ptolemies.

A woman in a man's world, in a land and culture,

never truly her own.

She overcame it all to achieve greatness.

Today, archaeologists across Egypt are searching through the

remnants of her reign.

To uncover her path to power.

She had to make incredibly difficult decisions.

And how she became one of the most famous

pharaohs of all.

In Taposiris Magna,

next to a colossal temple from Cleopatra's era,

archaeologist Kathleen Martinez is

hunting for Cleopatra's tomb and she's fallen under

the legendary queen's spell.

When I study Cleopatra's life properly,

I discover she was the most charming lady in history.

I came to Egypt and I decided to search for her tomb.

I came here to Taposiris Magna,

and then the moment I entered this location,

this ancient temple, I knew it was here.

And then it changes everything for me.

17 years ago,

Kathleen was a qualified lawyer in the Dominican Republic,

but gave it up to search for lost treasures

in the land of the pharaohs.

I had to change my career because it's incredible

to be an archaeologist.

When you discover something, you can change history.

You can rewrite history.

Taposiris Magna is a temple to the king and queen of the gods,

Osiris and Isis.

Last season, Kathleen and her team followed survey data to

explore part of a tunnel running beneath the site.

The tunnel has been painstakingly cut through the

bedrock and even decorated,

so must have had an important purpose.

We can see clearly there are some

traces of painting.

Kathleen hopes it could lead to Cleopatra's tomb.

Cleopatra's tomb has never been found.

But every season I getting closer and closer

to make this discovery.

I feel the tunnels are the clue.

This season, her team returns to the

tunnel to resume the hunt for Cleopatra's final resting place.

What I'm looking for is to find out in the

network of the tunnels,

if there's any branch going to the temple.

Kathleen gets the report back from Mohamed Boghdadi,

her chief of workers.

Is the tunnel dry?

Yes.

No water. Okay.

And the electricity?

Yeah.

Okay, so it's ready for me to go down.

Okay, perfect.

Everything is in place for Kathleen to

investigate the tunnel herself.

Her biggest fear is the perilous 30 foot drop down

the vertical shaft.

I'm always very concerned about the

rope because if we fall there, that's it.

In Dendera, 500 miles to the south,

American Egyptologist and vintage fashion fan,

Colleen Darnell, has come to the temple complex,

one of the best preserved ancient sites in Egypt.

She's here to find out how Cleopatra rose to power.

It's hard to overestimate the majesty of

this place and to see buildings from all different periods.

This really is like a history book of Egypt told through

beautiful stone temples.

One structure dominates the site.

A vast stone temple 140 feet wide,

with an entrance hall boasting 24 gargantuan columns.

This temple has ancient roots,

but it was modified and added to throughout the millennium.

Dendera is a holy site that dates back to

Egypt's Old Kingdom

more than 2,000 years before Cleopatra.

This temple is literally covered with inscriptions.

Virtually every surface is decorated

with hieroglyphic texts,

scenes of deities and kings, and above all,

the goddess Hathor.

The temple complex sits on the west bank

of the Nile.

In antiquity, it spread over 48,000 square yards,

enclosed by a mud brick wall.

At its heart, Egypt's largest temple to Hathor,

the popular goddess of birth and motherhood.

To the south,

a smaller temple to the goddess Isis and to the west,

a sacred lake and more shrines built under

Greek and Roman rule.

For over two millennia,

thousands of worshippers would gather in this holy site each year

to celebrate a festival in honor of Hathor.

The temple is covered with inscriptions of pharaohs from

down the centuries.

Colleen ventures inside to look for evidence of Cleopatra.

This is the cartouche of Ptolemy the 12th.

We have a wonderful portrait of him here.

And this writes his name Pto-le-my, so Ptolemy,

"living forever and beloved of the god Ptah and

the goddess Isis."

Ptolemy Auletes was the 12th in a dynasty of

pharaohs in which all men bore the name Ptolemy,

and he was father to Cleopatra.

Ptolemy the 12th is on the walls in the crypt because

he's the one that started this temple that Cleopatra

would then add on to.

This grand temple to Hathor was built in

large part by Cleopatra when she was pharaoh.

I think this is amongst the most beautiful

Ptolemaic reliefs I've seen.

It's really incredible.

Women seldom ruled as pharaohs in ancient Egypt,

but when Ptolemy the 12th succumbed to ill health,

he made an unusual decision.

At the very end of his life,

Ptolemy appoints Cleopatra as co-regent probably because he

knew how difficult things were going to become for her.

When Ptolemy the 12th died,

the 18 year old Cleopatra was meant to share the throne

with her ten year old brother,

Ptolemy the 13th.

But Cleopatra had different plans.

She minted coins with her likeness instead of her brothers,

and she signed official documents as

Egypt's sole ruler.

The young Ptolemy's advisers plotted against her.

And eventually seized power in the capital, Alexandria.

Cleopatra was stripped of her crown.

Conflict breaks out between the supporters of

Ptolemy the 13th and those of Cleopatra,

and Cleopatra is forced to flee.

The young queen headed east to hide out in the

Roman province of Syria.

Cleopatra was now in exile and an enemy of the state.

Colleen wants to explore how she retook the throne.

In the ancient city of Philadelphia.

Egyptian archaeologist Basem Gehad and his team are

excavating a vast necropolis used during

the time of Cleopatra.

Basem has spent more than a decade digging in

his native country,

but his fascination with the age of Cleopatra goes

back much further.

When I was a child, there was a lot of books and

stories about Tutankhamun and different

tombs with these treasures.

Basem was more interested in the end

of ancient Egypt.

Now, as a director of a Ptolemaic era site,

he gets to try and answer all the questions he pondered

as a boy.

I was lucky because nowadays I'm working on

Philadelphia and it gives me all the,

the things that I was dreaming.

It makes my dream come true.

Basem and his team are searching for the

lost tombs of Queen Cleopatra's subjects.

So from the pottery that we have found with these graves,

we can date these graves to the late Ptolemaic period,

which might be corresponding to the reign of Cleopatra.

He believes their graves could be key

to understanding her power in Egypt.

We are trying to understand their life from

digging in their afterlife.

His skilled workers dig in several locations

to maximize their chances.

And it's not long before one team uncovers the rectangular

outline of a mud brick grave.

The bricks form a stepped roof,

concealing any grave goods below.

Removing the first bricks is a delicate job.

It can easily cause a collapse.

Before they risk going any further,

Basem uses a miniature camera to take a first look.

It's amazing.

It looks like the top of a coffin.

It's an amazing discovery.

At Deir El-Bahari, in southern Egypt,

is the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut,

a female pharaoh who was able to take the throne as

regent for her three year old stepson.

She lived 1400 years before Cleopatra,

and yet she built a monumental structure honoring the very

same deity Cleopatra honored at Dendera, the goddess Hathor.

When pharaoh Hatshepsut built her mortuary temple,

she added a shrine on the southern side.

In the entrance, 32 columns carved from sandstone,

featuring Hathor, goddess of maternity and symbolic mother

of all pharaohs.

At the back of the shrine, a statue of Hathor in the form of

a cow protecting Hatshepsut.

Something about this divine maternal figure appealed to

both Hatshepsut and Cleopatra.

Polish archaeologist Patryk Chudzik has been

exploring Hatshepsut's Temple for 12 years.

He believes the shrine to Hathor could

have influenced Cleopatra.

Patryk has been given privileged permission to

excavate inside the sacred Hathor shrine.

He's searching for areas where the stone flooring

doesn't match the rest of the shrine.

The strange slabs, could conceal a hidden chamber.

Patryk brings in his chief worker,

Ahmed Ibrahim, to help him lift the slab.

There is no bedrock, just sand.

This hole goes further down.

As Ahmed delves deeper,

the sand throws up an unexpected find.

Cartonnage is a material used in death masks.

It's a promising find for Patryk.

Patryk must bring the rest of his team in and

start a full scale excavation.

In Dendera, Colleen is investigating how

Cleopatra returned to power after her younger brother had

forced her into exile.

Cleopatra completed a lavish temple here when

she was pharaoh and dedicated it to Hathor,

making it a key place to look for clues.

It's incredible to turn the corner and see this

beautiful carving of a man and a woman offering to the gods.

Images of figures making offerings like this were

used by ancient Egyptians to depict royalty.

This is a monumental relief of Cleopatra and

a male figure.

Now, if we look at the cartouche,

it actually tells us this is Cleopatra's child,

none other than Caesarian,

the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

The cartouche,

an oval shape containing the royal name,

reveals Cleopatra's relationship with Rome's great general.

In 47 BCE, Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria.

Cleopatra stole into the city to meet him.

The two began an affair,

and she eventually bore his child.

Caesar waged war on Cleopatra's rival,

her brother Ptolemy the 13th,

and eventually got the upper hand.

A defeated Ptolemy pulled his army back to his fleet

on the Nile.

But in the chaos he drowned.

Cleopatra reinstated herself as pharaoh,

this time with the next male heir in line,

Ptolemy the 14th as co-regent.

The relief makes it clear that Cleopatra had returned to power.

But there was one more thing holding her back.

Sharing the throne left her and her infant

son Caesarion vulnerable.

Colleen investigates the hieroglyphs for clues to how

she seized total control.

Here we have Queen Cleopatra,

her son Caesarian.

The second cartouche then, the Horus,

represents the Falcon God of kingship.

She is proclaiming for the world to see that this

is her co-regent.

And this begs the question, where is her brother?

Ptolemy the 14th,

had ruled Egypt for just three years as

co-regent with his elder sister, Cleopatra,

when Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome.

It was a devastating loss for Cleopatra.

But she acted fast to consolidate her grip on power.

According to rumor, she poisoned her younger brother.

Then installed her three year old son, Caesarion,

as co-regent in his place.

At last, she sat unrivaled on the Egyptian throne.

Cleopatra was ruthless.

But then again, she had to be to maintain her power

on the throne.

She had to make some difficult decisions and

often violent ones.

The inscription here heralds her triumph and

proclaims her regal authority for all to see.

Even though Caesarian is technically king,

we all know that Cleopatra is the power behind the throne.

She is attaining her right to be king of Egypt through him.

Cleopatra had purged her palace of threats.

The only danger now was from the people she ruled.

At the ancient city of Philadelphia,

Basem is investigating a grave.

Inside, is what looks like an intact burial.

From the hole, we could see exceptional

large painted wooden coffin.

Basem is searching for the lost tombs

of Queen Cleopatra's subjects.

The unstable period of Queen Cleopatra drove us to

think about the question of how a young lady was struggling to

keep the throne with her people who are living in Egypt and

also to get involved with the Roman leaders.

It is a big mystery, and one of the keys to solve it is to

search for the people who were living during her reign.

His team needs to dismantle the mud-brick

enclosure without damaging what could lie beneath.

It's the most critical part of the job,

to remove the mud bricks carefully and safely from

on top of the coffin.

Otherwise, you can destroy it.

So it takes time and it needs a lot of patience.

We keep our fingers crossed, then we will see.

Hours of painstaking work by Basem and his team,

slowly reveals a 2000 year old coffin.

This kind of coffin and also the information behind it,

is the things that we were looking for since the beginning

of the season.

It is almost perfectly preserved,

with a gabled roof lid made from fine timber and

decorated with a painted black and white pattern.

Finding such a large coffin from imported

wood and painted.

It's a strong indication of the status of the owner

of this coffin.

He should be one of the elites.

The beautiful coffin is evidence the wealthy

Greek elite were not confined to

Cleopatra's capital, Alexandria.

They lived across Egypt helping Cleopatra and all the

Ptolemaic pharaohs maintain their power.

Now the pressure's on to extract this wonderful

find in one piece.

It is really tight and very well made and built in a

way that it makes things very difficult to maneuver even

around the mud-bricks.

We have to take it block by block, and it's really fragile.

Once the coffin is completely exposed...

The team prepares to lift it.

In Taposiris Magna,

Kathleen is set to continue her search for Cleopatra's tomb.

She makes final checks with the ladder crew as she prepares

to climb down the shaft to the tunnel below.

They walk in the edge, but for me, it's scary.

I can fall and that's it.

The shaft is 30 feet deep.

Piece of cake.

Oh my gosh.

It's really very exciting to be down here again.

It's not flooded, which is really important.

Kathleen has to check the conditions before

excavation can begin in earnest.

The tunnel runs in two directions,

south towards the temple and north, towards the sea,

where Kathleen heads first.

I'm very concerned about the condition of the

ceiling in this section of the tunnel.

You can see has been damaged seriously by the water effect.

Even the plaster is about to collapse and it's really

dangerous for us.

Kathleen heads back south.

She's searching for a concealed branch of the tunnel

heading under the temple,

and any clue that could lead to what may be

Cleopatra's tomb.

But the further along she goes,

the worse the conditions get.

You can feel the air.

It's so heavy, you cannot stay.

It's not that easy to breathe down here.

It's hurting all my body, my muscles.

It's only two men can start here.

And I have to change them every hour.

The air quality is so poor that each worker can

only stay down here for a limited time.

Kathleen needs to explore further.

But there's a problem.

The tunnels are blocked by a mountain of debris.

I'm going to go further a little bit,

but then I will bring the workers and they will start

cleaning this part of the tunnel.

The workers begin digging and Kathleen heads to

the surface for some much needed fresh air.

This is really hard.

But before she reaches the ladder,

she's called back.

They've found something.

Look at this.

Oh, full of surprises.

Wow, it's beautiful.

It's an ancient piece of pottery that could be

a clue to the tomb's location.

But right now, Kathleen is running out of time.

She'll soon start to suffer the ill effects of the poor air.

We'll have to take it to the surface because

we need to look at it outside.

But we have to go.

In Dendera, Colleen is searching the

temple structure for clues to Cleopatra's rise to power.

She had finally taken full control of the country,

but she still needed to win support from her

native Egyptian subjects.

Egypt was in a very difficult state.

There had been famine.

There had been all kinds of conflict.

So Cleopatra is facing an uphill battle.

And as a woman, it's going to be even harder

for her to rule successfully.

The continued expansion of the ancient

Dendera temple site was part of her plan.

By funding a temple for Hathor at Dendera,

by tapping into the beliefs of the Egyptian people outside

of Alexandria, Cleopatra was consolidating her power.

It made sense for Cleopatra to pour royal money

into a popular cause.

But she had greater ambitions than just funding the temple.

Colleen examines the carvings for clues.

In this scene, a king is making an offering

to the goddess Hathor.

In between the king and Hathor is the child god Ihy.

Ihy is the son of Hathor.

And what's remarkable about this,

this is the theological power that Cleopatra is

channelling for her reign.

She is the goddess and her son is the god.

Cleopatra was using Egyptian religion in a

way no male pharaoh could.

She was not just claiming Hathor's approval,

she was assuming Hathor's identity as a

divine mother figure.

Hathor was the goddess associated with maternity,

mother to the child god, Ihy, and other major gods.

She sometimes took the form of a cow,

nursing the young pharaohs or their heirs,

and legitimizing their rule.

Every year at Dendera, regular Egyptians worshipped

and celebrated Hathor with feasts and dancing.

It was a great use of propaganda for

the ruling pharaoh.

Cleopatra embraced Hathors's identity as divine mother figure

to legitimize her rule and her own son as

future heir to the throne.

On this wall and all throughout Dendera temple,

we see a goddess who is a mother as well as

her divine son.

This is what Cleopatra is tapping into.

This is why she chooses to elevate Caesarian

to be co-ruler.

That makes her the goddess and Caesarian the divine child.

Cleopatra took her vulnerability as a female ruler

and used it to her advantage, portraying herself as Hathor,

the supremely popular mother goddess.

She projected this message for all to see.

The exterior of the temple became her billboard,

advertising her divine makeover.

Cleopatra made the savvy decision to put the

largest relief, the largest we know of her,

on the wall of the temple of Hathor.

And by showing herself in monumental scale, she too,

could be worshipped as a goddess.

By very publicly supporting the traditional cults of Egypt,

Cleopatra is attempting to reinforce her power as queen,

not just as a Greek ruling from Alexandria,

but as an Egyptian goddess.

It was a PR masterstroke.

Cleopatra made efforts to connect with the Egyptian

people in a way that few of her ancestors ever did.

Egypt's last great pharaoh had proved herself to be one

of its shrewdest.

In the necropolis of Philadelphia,

Basem and his team prepare to lift the delicate

wooden coffin out of the ground.

The coffin will be analyzed for its contents later.

Right now, Basem and his team need to get as much out of the

ground as possible in the time they've got.

And as they continue their dig,

they make an unsettling discovery.

This is a child because of the size of the coffin.

Basem examines his team's latest find.

We have here, uh, pottery coffin in the

shape of the tube.

And it has a small burial of a small child.

And we are trying to maneuver around the pottery coffin in

order to safely lift it up from the grave.

Basem is investigating the graves of

Cleopatra's subjects to find out more about how she secured

her rule over Egypt.

A simple pottery coffin was common

amongst lower class burials,

especially for children and infants.

This child's remains are little more than dust,

but beside the body, there's a rare find.

A small cloth bag made brittle with time.

One miniature carving has already fallen out.

This kind of amulet.

I think this was one of the Egyptian deities, which is Bes.

Bes was a popular god in Cleopatra's Egypt,

seen as a protector of small children and pregnant women.

This seems to mark the burial as an Egyptian one.

Inside the crumbling textile bag,

there are other trinkets...

Earrings, seashells and a carved hand of the

Egyptian god, Osiris, that also gives protection.

Alongside these, there's an amulet that

Basem can identify as Greek.

This is the shape of the Ptolemaic altar.

And for me, this is pure Greek influence.

It dates to the late Ptolemaic period,

which is the Cleopatra reign.

Here in the grave of a small child,

there are Egyptian and Greek religious artifacts

side by side.

The Egyptian god Bes,

was there to provide protection

and the Greek amulet was to reunite mother and child

in the afterlife.

Such a things was a gift from a mother to a child.

Together, they are evidence of a blending

of Greek and Egyptian religious culture.

Such wonderful things during the Ptolemaic period

is really, really rare.

It's an amazing discovery.

Unbelievable.

We are lucky.

This was a lucky day today.

At the beginning of the Ptolemaic era,

there was a clear divide between the early Greek rulers

and their Egyptian subjects.

But Cleopatra embodied both Greek and Egyptian culture and

Basem's discoveries in Philadelphia,

show that her subjects were following her example.

Instead of two distinct cultures,

there was integration and harmony.

A hallmark of a successful reign and a successful ruler.

At Deir El-Bahari, in Hatshepsut's Temple,

Patryk's hunch that the floor beneath the Hathor shrine

conceals a hidden shaft, has paid off.

Patryk has spent three weeks excavating it.

A dig that started with the clue of a small scrap of cartonnage,

ends 13 feet below ground, where the team finds a chamber.

They are the legs and feet of a mummy,

more than 1,000 years old.

It's confirmation of the shaft's purpose.

The team has to work slowly,

bringing up these historical treasures.

One of the last things to come up is

the most striking find of all.

The team has safely brought the find to the surface.

Now Patryk can examine it properly.

The intact mummy completes a treasure trove of

objects beneath Hathor's shrine.

As the team excavates further,

more and more mummies emerge.

If the mummies can be dated,

they will show how long this tomb was in use.

Patryk searches for clues that will help

pinpoint when the mummies were buried.

It's an incredible discovery.

200 years after Cleopatra died and 1,700 years

after Hatshepsut built her temple,

people still came here to bury their dead

close to the goddess Hathor.

These mummies show that the goddess Hathor

remained popular for thousands of years and

long after Cleopatra's death.

This enduring appeal and popularity helps explain why

Hatshepsut and Cleopatra's strategy of portraying

themselves as the mother goddess,

gave them power during their reigns.

In Taposiris Magna...

Oh, I'm so tired.

A breathless Kathleen,

emerges from the temple's tunnels,

boosted in her search for Cleopatra's tomb by the

unexpected pottery find, down below.

It's so difficult to be down there.

But those tunnels are the most important features here.

I'm sure of that.

Kathleen examines the pottery fragment in the

daylight to try and identify what it is and when it's from.

It looks like the neck of a pottery wine jar,

beer jar.

And this is where the handles should be.

And this is the rim.

This style of wine jar dates to the late Roman period,

some three centuries after Cleopatra died.

In the minds of the ancient Egyptians,

wine was associated with the blood of Osiris,

and wine was often used during temple rituals.

To find it inside the tunnel means that

maybe they use the tunnels also to transport the wine jars

to the port, to the sea.

It's a crucial find.

If the tunnel was used to take wine jars north to

the sea for shipping,

then the south end could connect to the temple itself.

And it could lead Kathleen closer to any subterranean

tombs beneath the temple.

Egyptian royal graves were always well hidden.

But Cleopatra had a very compelling reason to

conceal her tomb.

Because she knew it was the end of Egypt,

and she was the last chapter of Egypt,

and she knew that she would be at the mercy of the conquerors.

The later Roman Emperor Augustus,

had Egypt in his sights,

and he was no friend of Cleopatra.

Her armies were overwhelmed.

Fearing public humiliation, she committed suicide.

Her final strategy to protect her legacy was

to make sure her tomb stayed hidden forever.

For Cleopatra, she was more afraid of

anonymity than death.

So she, she tried to do something to become a myth.

She died. And she disappeared.

All across Egypt, archaeological investigations

are revealing Cleopatra's path to power.

She outmaneuvered her brothers to claim the throne for her own.

She ruled a kingdom that was truly a blend of peoples and cultures,

cleverly using a link to goddess Hathor,

to secure her power and become a god in the eyes

of her subjects.

In death,

Cleopatra still evades an army of archaeologists.

What is remaining about Cleopatra?

It's her personality, her charm, and her name.

Leaving behind only myth and a name,

that has lasted for millennia.