Original subtitles

In a mysterious cave system, a few miles

from Egypt's Red Sea.

We have made 28 meters inside this cave,

but it's still not the end.

Tantalizing evidence, linking this site

to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Pyramids of Giza.

These mighty monuments stood as the tallest structures

in the world for thousands of years.

Built in the third millennium BCE,

over 1,000 years before Tutankhamun.

The pyramids were enormous tombs for

Egypt's early pharaohs.

Their iconic shape has long been synonymous with

ancient Egypt.

The largest is the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

Here, thousands of workers built a level platform on the

bedrock to create a flat square base.

They sunk slabs into each corner, cut with a socket to

lock the stone blocks above in place.

They laid over 2 million blocks in horizontal layers.

With gaps for the burial chamber.

Rough cut stones and mortar in the core.

And regular stones around the edges.

Finally, they added a white limestone casing,

smoothed and sloped at precisely 51 degrees to

complete the true pyramid shape

But the Pyramids at Giza weren't Egypt's first pyramids.

At least six others were attempted before.

And they looked very different.

Now archaeologists across Egypt are investigating the

mystery of how these iconic structures evolved.

Why smooth sides and the specific 51 degree angle was

so important, and how the pharaohs managed to build on

such a massive scale 4500 years ago.

At Abydos, over 250 miles south of Giza,

American archaeologist Matthew Adams and his team

are excavating a unique site.

We're working in Abydos, which is one of the

most ancient and one of the most important

of Egypt's early sites.

Abydos predates the Pyramids of Giza and was built

at the beginning of Egyptian civilization, before 3000 BCE.

It was the first great royal necropolis.

Like the Valley of the Kings later or the area of

the Giza Pyramids.

This is where generations of Egypt's first kings

built their tombs.

At Giza, the pharaohs had thousands of

workers assemble millions of limestone blocks to build

their supersized pyramid tombs over several decades.

It was an incredible mass effort, all to honor the

mighty kings and help them achieve an afterlife,

evidence of their immense power

Matthew hopes his work at Abydos can help uncover

how the first Egyptian kings and their building projects

led to the rise of the pyramids

How did Egyptian kingship become what it was,

with this all powerful ruler at the apex of society,

seemingly able to do things on an inhuman scale?

The pyramids certainly strike us that way today.

Matthew first came to work at Abydos

as a student when he was just 19.

I'm one of these archaeologists who knew from

about the age of eight, that not only was it archaeology,

but it was Egypt specifically.

A lot of young people become interested in Egypt

and pyramids and mummies and so on, but they outgrow it.

I never did.

Making sense of the ruins at Abydos is

incredibly challenging.

Uh huh.

So something like that.

The cemetery was used by kings and commoners

throughout the entire history of ancient Egypt.

This means nearly 3500 years of tombs and temples layered

over and mixed up with the monuments of the first kings.

It's impossible to get to that early material

without also encountering a lot of later stuff.

The only way to get down to Egypt's earliest

history is to go very slowly.

But the clock is ticking.

The excavation season at Abydos is only eight weeks long

before the summer heat makes working in the desert unbearable.

We have limited time on the ground, so we have to

push, push, push to get as far as we possibly can.

Three weeks into the dig, it looks like the hard

work might be paying off.

Under nearly ten feet of later remains, the team has

uncovered two long and narrow structures

built into one of the walls.

Look at that.

Wow.

Wow.

We have here a complete or near-complete pottery vessel

that's been used as part of the wall construction.

Intact vessels are a dream discovery for

any archaeologist.

It's really, really important because it helps

give us the date.

The vessel's shape and size can reveal

the date it was made.

If Matthew can date it to the beginning of Egyptian

civilization, he and his team will have reached

the monuments of the first kings.

It's sort of cone shaped.

Probably about this tall with a rim about this wide.

This is a very diagnostic shape.

It's diagnostic for the very, very end of the

pre dynastic period.

Right at the transition to Dynasty one.

The time of King Narmer.

Around 5000 years ago, King Narmer,

became ruler of the lands along the southern Nile,

known as Upper Egypt.

His distinctive white crown was called the hedjet.

In 3150 BCE, he conquered the northern Nile Delta,

Lower Egypt, and took their red crown as a

mark of his victory.

Narmer founded the first dynasty of kings to

rule over both Upper and Lower Egypt.

He combined the crowns of both kingdoms into one and

became the first king of all Egypt.

The pottery vessel is evidence that Narmer

built the two strange structures here.

They are unlike anything found elsewhere in the vast site.

Two long parallel strips filled entirely with

strange round pots.

We have a very mysterious structure that

doesn't look anything like a tomb.

It doesn't look anything like a chapel.

It's something completely different.

In Faiyum, in the remote desert,

American archaeologist Kerry Muhlestein is investigating

a mysterious pyramid ruin around 50 years older than

Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza.

The pyramid of Seila.

Sometimes I wake up realizing that for three

nights in a row I've dreamt about the Seila pyramid and

trying to figure out what's going on here.

Kerry thinks this unassuming ruin in the middle

of the desert may be the first true,

smooth sided pyramid ever built

When Egypt's pharaohs first built massive,

monumental tombs over 100 years before the Giza Pyramids,

they originally were smaller and tiered.

The first of these stepped pyramids was built by

King Djoser at nearby Saqqara.

Nobody knows for sure when and where the smooth sided

true pyramid was first attempted.

Now, Kerry's investigation at Seila could offer new clues

and even rewrite history.

For a long time, we weren't even sure if it was a pyramid.

But now we're starting to think that this may have been

the first true or smooth sided pyramid.

Kerry has worked as an archaeologist for 15 years,

13 of them trying to work out where the Seila pyramid fits

in the evolution of the iconic pyramid shape.

I was hesitant because it takes so much time away

from family, and family is very important to me.

But I love archaeology because it's just a way to discover

the past and to discover things that ancient

people like us did.

And they probably want their story known and told,

and we're not going to find it any other way.

The Seila pyramid was constructed by the

king Sneferu, a generation before his son Khufu

built the Great Pyramid.

Today, it resembles a stepped pyramid, but Kerry has found

some key pieces of evidence in the archives of earlier

excavations that suggest it might not always have

been this shape.

In 1988, they found this limestone fragment here

on the eastern side that has this drawing of a

pyramid incised on it.

The drawing seems to show a smooth sided pyramid.

It's an incredibly rare discovery.

A window into the construction of these magnificent monuments

over 4500 years ago.

This may be a scale drawing that someone had made

of this pyramid as they're constructing it.

And it may be a little clue for us as to what

they intended for this pyramid to look like.

Kerry has also found another piece of evidence in

the archives that suggests Seila was revolutionary.

Previous archaeologists discovered a chapel and

a passageway on the eastern side,

a feature not found in stepped pyramids,

but only in the later true, smooth sided pyramids.

So now Kerry wants to work out what this mysterious

pyramid ruin once really looked like.

A key factor is the angle of its sides.

Nearly all known, smooth sided pyramids rise at an angle

between 51 and 53 degrees.

If Kerry can find a similar angle for the Seila Pyramid,

it could suggest it was the first ever

true, smooth sided pyramid.

If we can really piece together and recreate the

structure of this pyramid and what it looks like,

that would be so exciting for us.

This would be a new way of thinking of the beginning

phases of the pyramid age.

This season, the team is digging a trench on

the pyramid's south side to search for the

original outer foundations.

Finding them should help reveal the original size of

the pyramid and help them calculate its original height

and angle of incline.

Archaeologist Kristin South helps supervise the dig.

This is our first kind of exploratory trench.

And then as we have time, we'll do a couple of other

test trenches along the entire length of it.

Carefully, the team searches through the sand.

A few inches down their trowels strike stone.

I just want to have you come take a look

at this for a second.

The ancient site of Wadi al-Jarf sits in the

desert near Egypt's Red Sea coast,

over 100 miles from Giza.

Deep inside the cliffs here, French archaeologist

Pierre Tallet and his team are excavating a series of

strange manmade caves in use at the time of the Great Pyramid.

We have made 28 meters inside this cave,

but it's still not the end.

They could reveal new information about how

the pharaoh Khufu evolved pyramid building to its

full glory and built his super-sized Pyramid at Giza.

Pierre's team made a groundbreaking discovery

here during a previous excavation season.

They unearthed a collection of the world's oldest known

papyri records at the entrance to one of the caves, described

as the biggest discovery made in Egypt in the 21st century.

The papyri date to the pyramid age, around 2500 BCE and are

the only surviving contemporary accounts of

how Khufu's Great Pyramid was built.

We found this huge batch of papyri.

It was probably the best discovery of all my career.

Amongst the papyri was the diary of an official

named Merer, who managed a team of workmen during the

later years of Khufu's reign.

His diary reveals he was tasked with collecting the

white limestone used to build

the king's Great Pyramid at Giza.

Merer and his team used boats to transport 70 tons

of limestone blocks down the Nile in one trip,

bringing up to 200 blocks to Giza per month.

The blocks were likely used to case the pyramid and

create its smooth sides.

The discovery of Merer's diary in these remote caves suggests

that he and his men also came here on their mission to

gather the materials for the Great Pyramid.

It's a clue that this unusual site was significant to the

construction of Khufu's monumental tomb.

Those papyri are clearly a link between the

building of the Pyramids of Giza and the Wadi al-Jarf site.

But the limestone for the Great Pyramid was not

quarried at Wadi al-Jarf, and the papyri don't explain why

Merer and his workers would have been here.

The 70 strong team camp out on site for

the entire six weeks of the excavation season.

It's a remote spot far from Egypt's more famous

tombs and temples.

It's nice to have a place like this one, which is

not known at all, so you can make interesting discoveries

of things that have never been seen before.

It's a time-consuming task to

excavate the mud that has washed into the caves and

filled them completely over the millennia.

But today, after three weeks of painstaking work

and removing 3200 cubic feet of solidified mud,

the team has finally cleared a new cave.

We are expecting to find things.

But we don't know what we will discover.

In Abydos, Matthew and his team are excavating

a set of two strange structures from the time

of Egypt's first king, Narmer.

We have a long, narrow structure with

built sidewalls, these brick like pieces here.

In the interior, we have pottery vessels,

and on the outside, they're supported by these vertical legs

that are attached to the exterior side of the vessel.

Like something inside is very heavy.

Matthew hopes discoveries at this site could

help reveal how the pyramids developed.

As they work, his team uncovers more and more

clues to what these long formations were for.

This plastered surface, it's almost like a

ramp that goes from the top of the sidewall of the structure

down to the original floor level.

And at the bottom, we see this deposit of wood charcoal.

The entire interior of this structure was

one gigantic firebox.

It seems that at the time of the first kings, the

Egyptians were operating huge ovens in the heart

of this royal necropolis.

In some of the pottery vessels, Matthew and the team

are finding evidence of what they were cooking out here,

a mixture of grain and water.

They were making beer.

This is the mashing or cooking stage of beer production.

Egyptians cultivated an ancient variety of wheat

for the production of beer.

They soaked the wheat grains with water in huge ceramic

vats and slowly cooked the mix to produce a mash.

They left the mixture to ferment into beer over

two to three days, then decanted it into jars.

Beer was commonly drunk at home by ancient Egyptians

as well as at religious festivals.

Beer was one of the staples of the ancient

Egyptian diet, bread and beer.

These are the most basic things that were the stuff of

life for ancient Egyptians.

In ancient Egypt,

every house had its own small brewery.

But Matthew has discovered six sets of mash ovens at Abydos.

It suggests King Narmer had a massive royal brewery here.

Matthew must excavate the entire site to find out why.

The critical question is how many are there?

What's the overall scale of the site?

With his excavation season ending in just

three weeks, the pressure is on

In Faiyum, at the pyramid of Seila,

Kerry inspects the ancient stonework just discovered

protruding through the sand.

If the limestone block is part of the original foundations of

the pyramid, its discovery here would help Kerry

calculate the structure's height and angle of incline.

This could help show that Khufu's father Sneferu,

constructed the first smooth sided true pyramid

here at Seila.

Smooth sided pyramids were a revolutionary development

from the stepped pyramids that had gone before.

Sneferu was innovating as he built this pyramid.

He was experimenting and doing things that hadn't

been done anywhere else.

The radical remodeling of the pharaoh's

monumental tombs was likely due to a shift

in religious beliefs.

In the middle of the third millennium BCE,

Egyptians developed the belief that the pharaoh

was the descendant of the sun god Ra.

The pharaohs started to build pyramid complexes

aligned east to west so they could rise in the afterlife

to join Ra in his journey across the sky.

Pyramids now needed smooth sides angled to about

51 degrees to brilliantly reflect the sun and

resemble a shaft of sunlight.

These true, smooth sided pyramids were no longer

just places of burial and worship.

They became powerful symbols of the pharaoh's

connection to the sun god.

Kerry believes that Sneferu had this inspired idea and

that his pyramid at Seila could have been the very first

designed and built as a shaft of light.

Sneferu is the father of the true pyramid.

His son, Khufu, builds the Great Pyramid and pyramid

complexes are kind of set from then.

Sneferu's builders might have used

angled limestone casing blocks to make these

perfectly smooth sides.

It's a transition pyramid as they start to

figure out how to do true pyramids.

But he needs to find the original foundations to

calculate the shape and angle of the pyramid.

The northern corner is 33 centimeters south.

Let's take a photo of it in situ with the North Arrow.

That's not very big.

Now fully exposed, it's clear the stone is too

small to be a foundation block, but it's a clue

Kerry is on the right track.

It is limestone, so it is from the pyramid.

While the dig team continue searching for the

pyramid's original base, Kerry has flown in another colleague

who will take a more high tech approach to the investigation.

Hey! Made it.

You've made it. So, so glad you made it.

Yes. Got the scanner okay?

Yeah, we got it.

Brent Benson is a forensic engineer who uses

high resolution laser scanners to capture and process

three dimensional data.

So how long do you need for each scan?

About 12 to 15 minutes.

He is joining Kerry's team to help calculate

the Seila pyramid's height and angle of incline.

They hope it will be between 51 and 53 degrees,

like in most smooth sided, true pyramids.

To collect data like this.

Reconstruct the structure that's thousands of years old.

Try to determine what it looked like back then.

It's exciting.

Brent gets to work straight away, scanning the

first side of the pyramid.

Okay, should I start?

Yeah. It's scanning.

The high res scanner analyses the

reflections of a precision laser to create

a three dimensional digital image.

Accurate to thousandths of an inch.

The machine we're using today has the capability of

a really fine resolution.

We could see individual insects if we wanted.

Brent can stitch together the scans to create

an ultra precise computer model of today's ruin,

which will then allow him to recreate the

eroded parts of the pyramid.

We're really, really hoping that we can reconstruct

the angles and the original size of the pyramid.

I'm so excited.

That's going to be fantastic.

While Brent continues to scan around

all sides of the four and a half thousand year old ruin.

And start rotating clockwise.

Kerry returns to the dig site.

If he wants to work out the perimeter of the pyramid,

it's vital he finds the original foundations.

Kerry and Kristin now search for the corner of the pyramid.

We're trying to get down to the very bedrock where

the two corners should meet to see if we can establish

what the outer dimensions of the pyramid were.

That will enable us to figure out the original

size of the pyramid.

The team is looking for a distinct

clue in the bedrock.

They would create a little lip so that the stones,

with all the pressure of the stones on top of them,

will continually push them out

and the pyramid could fall apart.

But if we get, they create a little lip in the bedrock

so that those stones can't move.

Then it holds everything tightly in place.

So when you find that lip,

then you know you've got the corner.

Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!

In Abydos, Matthew's team are trying to uncover

all of king Narmer's brewery.

He wants to trace the pyramids' evolution to the

very beginnings of Egyptian civilization,

and the building projects of Egypt's first kings.

Matthew has a hunch the brewery continues southeast

with more long beer ovens hiding below the sand.

But excavating here, the team faces a new obstacle.

You can see how deep the deposits are

that we're having to dig through.

This is a huge spoil heap, an archaeological dump from

old excavations more than a century ago.

And we've got to get through all of that.

Around 80 skilled workers, armed with shovels

and barrows, work tirelessly to move the mountain of spoil

before the excavation season ends in just three weeks.

Our time is limited, which means that everybody has

to really work as hard as possible to get us there.

But I'm confident that with this team,

we'll see what we're looking for.

As the dig continues, Matthew joins

specialist excavator Ashraf Zeydan Mahmoud at another

part of the site.

Ashraf and I are excavating the interior of

one of the pottery vats.

We're hoping that this vat might contain some residue

from the liquid that it once held.

If Matthew and Ashraf can find some residue

in this vat, it could reveal the composition of the beer.

They might then be able to recreate ancient Egyptian

beer brewed here 5000 years ago

For me, the idea of having a sip of the royal beer

of king Narmer, there's nothing better than that.

And it seems they could be in luck.

Wo ho.

This looks very promising.

This yellow sand on the interior is, this is blown in,

wind deposited sand.

But this darker material, this also is sand.

However, it's sand that has absorbed the liquid.

The beer is in there.

This residue should allow Matthew to recreate

king Narmer's 5000 year old beer.

That's the kind of thing that you live for

if you're an archaeologist.

It sort of puts you in the place of the

ancient Egyptians at that time.

Back at the main dig site, the team has shifted

tons of sand to expose more of the brewery below.

We found exactly what we've been hoping to find.

We have the remains of several of the vats.

These are the broken off bottom pieces of the vats.

The workers have revealed a new set of vats

just over 25 feet to the side of the two long beer ovens

they uncovered earlier in the season.

We have here brewery structure number seven.

34 meters.

Each of the seven beer ovens is as long as

110 feet and fitted with up to 80 vats.

Each one of these, when it was complete,

probably held about 70 liters or so, which means that

just this structure alone could produce close to

6000 liters of beer per batch.

If all of the ovens have the same capacity,

the brewery could have produced close to

90,000 pints of beer in a week.

That's enough beer to give every person in a

90,000 seat sports arena half a liter or a pint of beer.

But doing that 5000 years ago,

at the very beginning of Egyptian history,

it's almost beyond belief.

Brewing that much beer every week would have

been a massive task and suggests king Narmer used

vast resources and an industrial sized workforce.

Matthew wants to know why.

What is going on here 5000 years ago,

that they're producing beer at this, at this scale?

At the site of Wadi al-Jarf, Pierre inspects

the massive new cave they have just excavated.

He hopes it could contain more evidence of why Khufu's

workers came here on their mission to gather material

for his Great Pyramid at Giza.

We can see that we have those big storage jars.

The team has unearthed the remnants of

large storage jars covering the entire floor.

They have made similar discoveries

in other caves nearby.

Sometimes we are finding more than 300 to 400

of this kind of storage jar in one single cave.

They date to the reign of Khufu.

Pierre believes Khufu's workers used them to

store drinking water taken from the nearest spring

over six miles away.

The sheer number of jars suggests that the workers

needed a lot of water, a clue they didn't just

stop to rest in the caves but worked here.

Suddenly Pierre and colleague Severine Marchi spot

a faded red mark amongst the sherds.

These two sherds are working together and I can

distinguish something which is written in red here.

Kind of a big circle.

An inscription could contain vital information,

but it's difficult to make out on the dusty sherd.

I think that we will have to clean it to be sure of

what is inscribed on it.

Pierre and Séverine take the sherds to their

cleaning station on the desert cliffs above Wadi al-Jarf.

A faint inscription they have discovered on them

might help reveal the site's connection to the building

of Khufu's Great Pyramid.

Careful cleaning reveals more of it.

A red circle and line.

Pierre has discovered the same symbol in some of the

other caves and can interpret the ancient sign.

Here we can see that we have this big circle, which

is probably a shortened version of the inscription:

"The people who are known to King Khufu."

Pierre recognizes it's a team name adopted by

a group of Khufu's workers.

He has discovered three different team names

like this on water jars in the caves.

We know that the pyramids were built by teams

and each team is about 160 men.

Pierre wants to continue excavating inside the

new cave to find more evidence of what these teams were doing

at Wadi al-Jarf and precisely how, it's connected to the

rise of the pyramids.

Barely noticeable in the sand,

he and Severine discover what could be a clue.

It's a broken tenon, a rectangular piece of wood,

the ancient Egyptians used to join together

the planks of their boats.

Not far away, he and colleague Séverine

make another discovery.

Pierre and the team find telltale pieces of wood

and fabric like this in nearly all the caves they excavate

at Wadi al-Jarf.

In one, they've unearthed a plank as long as two meters,

six and a half feet.

Once we have found a frame of a boat, that could

indicate that the boats that were used here were about

14 meters long.

Pierre believes these discoveries are the

remnants of a lost fleet stored inside the cliffs here.

His team's investigations suggest that pyramid workers

used these 31 caves as a giant naval base for expeditions

across the Red Sea just three miles away.

After the expeditions, the boats that are used during

the expeditions were stored inside the caves.

They were dismantled and stored inside the caves.

And Pierre thinks the destination of their

expeditions lies just across the water.

From here, it's possible to see clearly

the coast of Sinai.

This is a place where the people of this harbor were

going and they were going there to fetch copper.

Copper at that time was metal that was used for the tools

that were given to workers to build the pyramids.

The pyramid builders used copper tools

to shape the stone, but the metal was quite soft

and quickly wore out.

They relied on a steady supply of copper ore to

forge new tools.

Overland expeditions from Giza to Sinai,

around 200 miles east, took about a week.

With boats, they could sail the copper across the Red Sea

from Sinai back to Wadi al-Jarf,

drastically cutting the journey to just one day.

The boats returned with supplies so the workers

could stay longer in Sinai and extract more copper.

In the winter months, they disassembled the boats to

store them in the caves of Wadi al-Jarf.

Pierre will continue his excavation of the boat

caves at Wadi al-Jarf.

But this year's season comes to a successful end.

We could say that we are the backstage

of the pyramid here.

In fact, this is from a place like this that we can learn

the way the work force was organized, and the way they

were able by logistical means, to build such

gigantic monuments as the Pyramid of Giza.

In Abydos, Matthew's team has uncovered another jar.

It could help explain why King Narmer built this

massive brewery here, and what the later evolution

of the pyramids owes to this ancient site.

This was almost certainly used to store beer

once the production was finished.

The team is finding thousands of beer jars like

this all around the Abydos royal necropolis.

With beer production on an industrial scale,

it's not surprising there are so many beer jars left behind,

but it's what Matthew hasn't found that

makes these pots so intriguing.

There are no cups found with them.

It's just the containers that the beer was transported in.

Matthew has found no evidence the

huge quantities of beer brewed here was ever drunk.

And there is another curiosity.

They're all found used.

They're unstoppered.

The contents have been poured out.

Matthew thinks the beer was poured out

in offering to the king.

It seems very likely that that was the purpose of

this brewery.

It's, it's brewing the beer that's being used in royal rituals.

Matthew's investigation suggests that

600 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza,

Egypt's first king, Narmer, mobilized hundreds of workers

to build and operate an enormous brewery in the

royal necropolis of Abydos.

It is this ability of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to

marshal mass labor that would later make the construction of

the enormous pyramids possible.

This is what they did.

This was their genius.

And here we see it already at the very beginning of

Egyptian history, 5000 years ago.

Narmer's brewery could have produced nearly

90,000 pints of beer in a week.

It was likely brewed to be poured away.

An unmistakable display of Narmer's power and the

prosperity of the Egyptian state.

They did it on a massive scale to make clear to

everyone exactly who the king was and what

he was capable of and what he was owed.

This is a foundational principle of Egyptian society,

and we see that expressed again and again and again

throughout Egyptian history.

It was a blueprint for the pharaohs to come,

demonstrating their power through their gigantic

The pyramids.

It became the hallmark of the ancient

Egyptian kings.

The ancient Egyptian state, for all of its history,

building big.

They just took this and grew it.

In Faiyum, Kerry and Kristin are searching for the

original corner of Sneferu's now eroded Seila pyramid.

It could help reveal the structure's original size

and whether this might have been Egypt's

first smooth sided true pyramid

You can see it right here.

Right here, because this is, that's the mountain right there.

And that's the mountain right there.

They've discovered a lip the ancient Egyptians

carved into the bedrock

to secure the corners of their pyramids.

This is exactly what they want in the corner.

They want to build a good niche where the stone can go

and it can't move anymore.

This is a piece of evidence we can be absolutely sure of when

we hit where the bedrock meets the bedrock.

You know, the pyramid didn't go out any further than this.

Kerry can now calculate the dimensions

of the base of the structure.

110 by 110 feet.

I'm thrilled to be able to say this is

how far out the pyramid went.

His next task is to work out how tall it was.

This should help him calculate whether the pyramid sides

were at an angle between 51 and 53 degrees,

the hallmark of a smooth sided, true pyramid.

Hey, Brent. You got some results for us?

Brent has completed 44 scans of the outside of the

pyramid and confirmed the dimensions of the pyramid base.

He has stitched the scans together to make a

stunningly detailed 3D model of the ruins.

Oh, right there.

Oh, that's so good.

Yeah, you can see that step right there.

Oh, that's so... look at those stones.

You can see the corner in perfect detail.

I had high expectations but this is even better

than I expected.

This is fantastic stuff.

Because the ancient Egyptians built symmetrically,

Brent can use the model to reconstruct the original

step shape and calculate the overall height of

the original structure.

That looks like it was almost eight stories tall.

Well, 24 meters, yeah.

Yeah, almost not quite.

Seven, between seven and eight stories.

Kerry and Brent have the pyramid's

height and perimeter.

Now they can calculate the angle of its sides.

Okay, so when we get this line laid on there,

what kind of an angle are we getting?

Just under 52 degrees.

So if we create a casing of a true pyramid across each tip

of the four individual steps,

turns out to be just under 52 degrees.

That's exactly what you would expect for this time.

Kerry and Brent's evidence confirms that Seila,

once formed a nearly 80 feet tall,

stepped structure with four levels.

On the north and east face were chapels used for worship

characteristic of later pyramids.

And his measurements show that the angle between the edges of

each step is just under 52 degrees, similar to the

inclines of all the later true pyramids, making it possible

that Seila's stepped core was transformed into a

smooth sided pyramid, clad with white limestone.

This reconstruction shows that there's a really

good chance this was a true pyramid.

We're going to be able to recreate history with this.

You've helped us recreate history.

Right on.

The team will continue to search for evidence

Angled limestone casing blocks would prove Seila's place in

the evolution of the perfect pyramid.

But Kerry is more confident than ever that he is

on the right track.

I think we now have pretty good evidence that

this was a true or a smooth sided pyramid.

Among the first, if not the first.

And it's so fantastic to be able to establish that with

this precision, both in combining archaeology

and the technology of scanning and the way we are able to

do things these days and it's fantastic results.

This season, archaeologists have unearthed

new evidence of the rise of the pyramids,

a massive royal brewery that led the way,

an ancient naval base for the import of essential copper

and what could be the first ever true pyramid.

All revealing how the ancient Egyptians built the world's

most iconic megastructures.