Original subtitles

Deep inside a rock-cut tomb

in Egypt's far south,

an archaeologist is searching for a missing mummy.

The surface is full of stones,

pottery,

human remains.

He's hoping to unlock the secrets

of a mostly forgotten age of vast megatombs.

We have bandages.

Okay, Cristina, are you there?

The Pyramids of Giza and the Valley of the Kings,

icons of Ancient Egypt constructed 1,000 years apart.

In between, Ancient Egyptians built other spectacular

but lesser-known tombs.

Today, across Egypt,

archeologists are exploring these tombs

to find out more about this mysterious period

of Egyptian history called the Middle Kingdom.

How its mighty pharaohs reunited a war-torn country,

transforming Egypt

and leading it into a new golden age.

They're also learning why these achievements

and incredible tombs have now been mostly forgotten.

Near Luxor...

Spanish archaeologist Myriam Seco Álvarez

has started her unconventional morning commute.

Myriam is excavating

a newly discovered Middle Kingdom tomb.

It's part of a sprawling necropolis

with a mix of rich and poor burials.

She's hoping it will tell her more about Egyptian society

during this lesser-known period.

To do that,

Myriam's team must remove several tons of debris

from the steep, narrow corridor

with a dangerously unstable ceiling.

Half a mile further north at Deir El-Bahari,

Egyptologist and vintage fashion collector

Colleen Darnell

is on a mission to explore the megatombs

of the Middle Kingdom's pharaohs.

She wants to learn more about their rise to power

and why they have been forgotten.

She begins at the tomb of the very first king

of the Middle Kingdom, a pharaoh called Mentuhotep II.

First looking at this structure,

it's quite ruined

but it's 4,000 years old

and when it was new, it would have been quite magnificent.

Colleen is exploring

exactly what sort of structure Mentuhotep built for his tomb.

These columns and the overall layout of the architecture

indicate that this is a temple.

Tucked up against the sheer cliffs

of Deir El-Bahari,

Mentuhotep built a vast terraced temple.

Inside, over 200 pillars

filled the immense hypostyle holes.

The question is, where is the king buried?

In the center of the temple,

a trench descends to a tunnel.

This corridor is cut out of the bedrock

and it's a rough vault shape.

And it keeps going.

The amount of work that went into this is quite stunning,

and I love seeing traces

of the original chisel marks right here.

This is a marvel of engineering.

Wow!

Absolutely unbelievable,

to be this far down into the mountain.

This is magnificent, the most costly stones

that you can use in ancient Egyptian building,

this is red granite and they would have come from Aswan,

that they've hauled all the way down this corridor.

This is the entrance,

this is the entrance to the burial chamber itself.

The burial chamber is 500 feet deep

inside the heart of the mountain.

This is astonishing, they went so far as to create

that perfect architectural form of a shrine.

And these holes here would have been for the doors

that sealed in the coffin of the king.

And to think, each of these pieces, and they're massive,

had to have been brought all the way down this same corridor

that I was just descending.

No Egypt pharaoh before

had ever been buried in a tomb like this.

This is a complete departure from tomb architecture

in the Old Kingdom.

This is not a pyramid.

He's signaling that something different has started.

During the age

of the great pyramid-building pharaohs,

a single king ruled over all of Egypt

from the northern capital of Memphis.

But when the last of these pharaohs died

the kingdom fractured,

and rival rulers from the north and south vied for power.

For decades, war raged

between the two factions until Mentuhotep II,

the ruler of Southern Egypt, ultimately prevailed.

He reunited Egypt, moving the country's capital

to Thebes in the south,

and ushered in a new era

now known as the Middle Kingdom.

Mentuhotep's unusual burial

is a nod to his southern heritage,

where terraced tombs,

cut into the desert, were popular.

Mentuhotep adapts an architectural form

of his local ancestors,

but builds it on a monumental scale,

adding this massive shaft,

making this a tomb fit for a king

who has just unified Upper and Lower Egypt.

Mentuhotep had led Egypt

out of a disastrous period of chaos and civil war.

But the country was still scarred

by decades of fierce rivalries and warring factions.

Next, Colleen wants to explore how Mentuhotep's successors

faced these challenges in their bid

to restore Egypt to its former glory.

In Aswan...

Spanish archaeologist Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano

is back for a new season of excavations

at the site of Qubbet el-Hawa.

I used to tell my youngest daughter

that I'm cleaning the desert as a joke.

And basically she used to tell me,

"Daddy, good luck cleaning the desert."

Alejandro and his team

are investigating the tomb

of a high-ranking Middle Kingdom official.

He's hoping to find out more

about how the Middle Kingdom pharaohs

governed their war torn country.

Sarenput I

was the governor of the Egyptian border

with the south,

so he was a key figure in the Egyptian state.

After the reunification

under first Middle Kingdom King Mentuhotep II,

Egypt started to expand, invading Nubia in the south.

Sarenput was charged with exploiting this new land

for precious resources and exotic goods.

He governed Elephantine Island,

a vital strategic outpost on this new frontier.

Alejandro has spent the last five years

trying to locate the tomb's main burial chamber and mummy.

It's become a bit of an obsession.

Last season, his team uncovered a monumental shaft

and chamber hidden below

the innermost chapel of the tomb.

We thought that he was going to be buried there,

and we were going to find

at least the remains of his burial.

Inshallah.

It is bedrock, it is the bedrock.

Now, Alejandro is back with a new theory.

We think that he was buried there,

but then removed some years after,

relocated in another part of the tomb.

And the team have just discovered

a promising spot in another corner of the chapel.

This is a trench that is in the same part

of where we were working last year.

And we believe that this might be the last place

where Sarenput I was buried.

So, we are now excavating this,

trying to find if we have a chamber, a shaft.

Several hours later,

the workers have removed enough sand

for Alejandro to take a first look.

Well, this is a very exciting moment

because we do not know what we have behind this sand.

Let's go.

Oh-oh-oh-oh!

It seems... ooh.

Ooh!

It's big. Ha!

In Abydos,

Colleen is investigating the tomb of a pharaoh

who lived 150 years after the Middle Kingdom was founded

to explore how he restored a war-torn Egypt

to its former glory.

Absolutely incredible.

Built by a pharaoh called Senwosret III,

it is one of the most innovative tombs

in the history of Ancient Egypt.

This is entirely carved out of the bedrock.

Here we have a massive shaft.

It gives you really an idea

of how far below the surface I am here.

Colleen investigates a series

of small chambers and tunnels.

Wow!

Giant granite blocking stones.

Two hundred and sixty feet in,

pieces of granite nearly six feet tall

block the path deeper into the tomb.

This is a way of symbolically sealing the royal tomb

from any outside influences.

It's a good indication

that we're on the way to the burial chamber.

Colleen explores a roughly cut second tunnel

that may have been dug by tomb robbers.

It allows her to bypass the sealed corridor.

Wow, this is the burial chamber and look at that sarcophagus,

at this totally tilted angle.

And it's massive!

The amount of work that it would have taken to get this,

this far deep, into the tomb, solid pieces of stone,

these are monolithic.

But the tomb doesn't seem to end

at the burial chamber.

The sarcophagus is here

but the corridors continue

for quite some distance, deeper into the tomb.

When the king died,

workers hid his sarcophagus

in a chamber 130 feet underground.

They then sealed the tomb

with bricks from floor to ceiling

and blocked the steep passage with over 300 tons

of highly prized red granite.

But strangely,

the tunnels continue beyond the burial chamber

for another 250 feet.

They trace a wide, sweeping curve

bending back on itself.

At nearly 600 feet long, it's a triumph of engineering

unique in the history of Ancient Egypt.

The complexity of the corridors,

particularly the snaking passageway

beyond the burial chamber,

is directly based on how the Egyptians

imagined the architecture of the underworld itself.

This entire tomb is a model of the underworld.

It's hard in the modern world to conceptualize how much effort

it would have taken to construct this tomb,

just the man hours.

The scale of this colossal tomb

shows that Senwosret was both incredibly powerful,

and able to command huge resources.

Records suggest he was a military genius

who consolidated his own power across the country

and massively expanded Egypt's borders.

He didn't just restore his country's former glory.

He turned Egypt into a regional superpower.

Senwosret III is one of the most

powerful kings of his era.

He rules over a time of prosperity,

strengthened foreign policy,

a highly organized administration.

His reign really is a golden age in Egyptian history.

But the Middle Kingdom pharaohs

weren't done yet.

Next, Colleen wants to explore an even more ambitious tomb

that contains clues to why these great kings

have been mostly forgotten.

In Aswan,

at the necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa...

Six meters and a half.

Hoo! Ha!

Huge, it is huge.

Alejandro is searching

a previously undiscovered chamber

for the remains of Sarenput,

a high-ranking Middle Kingdom official.

The monumentality of this new space,

this room, means that someone very important

was buried in this area.

Sarenput's burial could provide new evidence

on how the pharaohs governed Egypt

during the Middle Kingdom.

We need to open more

to see what is inside.

Yes!

Alejandro brings in his workers

to remove the rest of the debris

blocking the entrance to the chamber.

Basically the material

that we are excavating now is sand with mainly pottery.

They thoroughly check

every shovel of sand they remove.

Even the smallest of finds could hold valuable clues.

Near Luxor,

Myriam's team is trying to reach

the burial chamber of a Middle Kingdom tomb.

Workers are making steady progress removing rubble

from the dangerous sloping shaft.

Meanwhile, Myriam joins

anthropologist Victoria Peña Romo

to examine an intriguing new find

from a chamber near the entrance of the tomb.

They want to determine

whether it's the skeleton of the tomb owner.

It's unclear how this man's skeleton ended up here,

but their analysis suggests

it's unlikely he's the true owner

of such a large tomb.

The team needs to get to the burial chamber.

But back inside, the excavation has come to a sudden halt.

The team is working in a very tight

underground space.

They can't finish clearing the corridor

without removing the boulder.

The boulder weighs over 550 pounds.

It's tough work moving such a heavy object

in the cramped and steep corridor.

And yet this stone is only a fraction of the weight

of the sarcophagi and granite blocks

moved by the workers in ancient times.

Halfway up, the team hits a major obstacle,

an original wall built out of one of the Middle Kingdom's

most used materials, mud brick.

In Aswan, at the site of Qubbet el-Hawa,

Alejandro is inspecting a small object they found

just outside the newly discovered chamber.

We have just found an amulet made of irons.

Probably was part of a necklace,

and it seems that it has an inscription.

He is hoping to find any evidence

that the Middle Kingdom official Sarenput

was buried inside.

Beloved of the god Amun.

I need to see it under the sun.

Have you seen that? Yeah.

I want to see more carefully.

It's Horemheb.

Horemheb beloved of Amun.

The amulet dates from the time of pharaoh Horemheb,

who reigned more than 300 years after Sarenput.

It would have been a gift from the pharaoh

to someone of high rank,

who then took it with them to their grave.

It shows how important it is

for the team to sieve every single spade of sand.

It is special.

You know Qubbet el-Hawa is not a royal necropolis.

A find like this from a much later period

could be a sign the chamber was reused after Sarenput,

meaning his remains may now be lost.

Alejandro has to get inside to know for sure.

While the workers clear

the remaining sand from the doorway,

Alejandro joins the rest of his team outside.

They've set up a second excavation area

just in front of the main tomb entrance.

We've noticed that here we have some rubble.

What we are seeing here is the material,

the rubbish produced by the construction of the tomb

was deposit here.

Alejandro is hoping

this 4,000-year-old construction spoil

will help them learn more about how Sarenput's tomb was built.

It's something we have no information before,

how was the construction and the decoration process

of the funerary complex.

Workers sift through the sand hunting for clues.

Although we are in winter

this is 30 degrees.

It's hard.

Near Luxor,

Myriam's team is working out how to

safely remove the large stone from their Middle Kingdom tomb.

The mud brick wall blocking their way is a symbolic barrier

that separated the deceased from the world of the living,

much like the granite blocking stones

in the huge underground tomb of Senwosret.

Moving large stones

in these narrow tunnels is difficult and dangerous work,

just as it was for the original tomb builders.

One slip could result in a serious injury.

Oh!

In Dahshur,

Colleen has come to a pyramid field

20 miles south of Giza.

She wants to explore one of the Middle Kingdom's

most ambitious megatombs, The Black Pyramid.

It was built by a pharaoh called Amenemhat III,

the son of Senwosret who built the 600-foot-long

underground tomb in Abydos.

This is a truly amazing place

and although it doesn't look like too much today,

this was once a massive pyramid

just like we see out in the distance.

Today, only the core of the pyramid remains,

standing in a pile of its own rubble.

But it once rose 250 feet above the valley floor.

When first built,

The Black Pyramid was just over half the height

of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

It was finished in a smooth

outer casing of white limestone.

Underneath it, a mysterious maze of tunnels

crisscrossing through the ground.

Lined with huge stone blocks

and totaling around 900 feet in length,

they led to numerous storerooms

and the burial chambers

intended for Amenemhat's queens,

and the king himself.

The Black Pyramid was designed

to be one of the most elaborate tombs in Egyptian history.

Colleen wants to explore why Amenemhat departed so radically

from the rock-cut tombs of the Middle Kingdom's founders.

She looks for clues in the network of tunnels

beneath the pyramid.

Wow!

This system of underground passageways is unbelievable.

It's like a maze down here.

The only other pyramid with similar underground architecture

is the first pyramid ever constructed in Egypt,

the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara,

constructed nearly a thousand years earlier.

Djoser was revered as one of Egypt's

most powerful pharaohs.

His pyramid built around 2650 BCE

sat on top of three-and-a-half miles of tunnels

hollowing out the ground below.

No other pharaoh attempted to mimic Djoser's design

until Amenemhat.

This pharaoh was really trying to show himself

in relation to Egypt's first pyramid builder.

This was a hugely ambitious move,

but also a strategic one.

The young king had inherited a vast and prosperous kingdom

from his warrior king father.

With no need to mount further military campaigns,

Amenemhat needed a different way of projecting his power.

Linking himself to Djoser and the pyramid kings of old

was a way to do that.

Amenemhat III's ambitions with this monument

was to draw a connection between his reign

and the golden age of the pyramids.

Next, Colleen wants to investigate

whether Amenemhat's ambitious design paid off,

and he was able to match the achievements

of the great pyramid kings of old.

Near Luxor,

Myriam is finally entering the burial chamber

of the Middle Kingdom tomb.

As with most wealthy tombs in Ancient Egypt,

the burial chamber has been looted.

Myriam searches for any trace

of the person who was buried here.

Wood was scarce in Ancient Egypt

so a wooden coffin could be a clue

that the owner of the tomb was wealthy.

Myriam hunts for any human remains.

Myriam scours the ground around the skull

for any clues to what sort of man this was.

Myriam thinks this could be

a section of a ceremonial staff,

because of its distinctive shape and diameter,

similar to staffs found in tombs across Egypt.

Only a small section survives in this tomb,

but they were often made from expensive, imported wood.

They were only used by the highest echelons

of Egyptian society.

The wooden coffin, cane, and sheer scale of the tomb

now paint a picture of the sort of person who was buried here.

This lavish burial is evidence

that the success of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs

trickled down through Egyptian society,

and led to the flourishing of a new class of wealthy elites.

In Aswan...

It's difficult to say

but it seems an... a working tool.

Alejandro is studying the strange stone

that's come out of the construction spoil

outside Sarenput's tomb.

This is a stone that they use to polish

the surface of the rock to,

to smooth the, the façade of the tomb.

It's amazing.

The team searches for more artifacts

deeper in the spoil.

It seems that it's a test

from the sculptor,

probably trying to test the stone

before making the final reliefs of the main door

of the funerary complex.

It's very interesting because it show us

the process of construction of the, of the tomb.

These finds suggest that Sarenput's tomb

was constructed by highly skilled artisans.

This fits in with ancient texts from the same period.

We know from the texts that Sarenput receive a group of

royal artisans to build his tomb.

According to the story,

Sarenput supplied the pharaoh's army

on its way to conquer Lower Nubia.

The king sent his own artisans to help construct

Sarenput's tomb as a reward.

It was a huge honor.

So here what we have is made by the hands

of a royal sculptor.

Back inside the tomb...

The team have cleared

the entrance to the new chamber.

Alejandro can finally go inside.

In Aswan, the site of Qubbet el-Hawa,

Alejandro is entering the new chamber inside Sarenput's tomb.

He wants to see whether it contains

Sarenput's missing body.

Well, the surface is full of stones,

human remains, pottery.

We have bandages.

Okay.

Alejandro hunts for any clues

that will help him date the remains.

The pottery seems to

date to the New Kingdom.

Just like the scarab found outside the chamber,

the pottery inside dates to the New Kingdom.

This confirms that the chamber was reused

centuries after Sarenput died,

and his remains are nowhere to be found.

It's a real pity.

Okay.

It's a unique experience to get into an area

where nobody has been since thousand of years.

But I found no trace of Sarenput I.

But a mystery remains:

was Sarenput ever buried inside this chamber,

or was it built for someone else?

Now we have to explain which was the purpose in this chamber.

While his team

starts processing the material left inside...

Alejandro looks for clues in the faded inscriptions

throughout the tomb...

in the corridor leading towards the chamber.

By chance I pass by here,

and I notice that here there was the remains of an inscription

that actually is the name of one of the sons of Sarenput I.

So we know who these figures were,

and they were the sons of Sarenput.

It's a vital clue that Alejandro

has never seen before.

He now thinks Sarenput himself never used the chamber.

It was built for his sons.

It has some logic

that they were buried in the innermost part

of Sarenput I tomb, in a very privileged place.

The family wanted to be united in the afterlife.

The best option was to bury them in the same funerary complex.

Alejandro may not have found

Sarenput's missing mummy,

but he has uncovered a new piece

in the puzzle of this spectacular megatomb.

When Sarenput built his tomb,

the pharaoh gave him his elite team of builders,

and the finest royal artisans.

They built him a monumental funerary complex

with extra chambers for his family.

Ancient texts say it was fitted with an exquisite coffin,

a gift from the pharaoh himself

and precious grave goods

including furniture from the royal household.

The grandeur of Sarenput's tomb

is a testament to the way

the Middle Kingdom pharaohs governed their country.

The monumentality of his tomb

is telling us a lot of information

about the royal administration here,

the prizes the, the king give to the local elite.

During the Middle Kingdom,

the pharaohs developed

a sophisticated system of government.

They appointed trusted governors like Sarenput

to rule key territories,

and kept them loyal by rewarding them

with splendid megatombs.

For me, the Middle Kingdom is not only a golden age

of the Egyptian history,

it is the period in which Egypt gets its maturity.

In Dahshur,

at The Black Pyramid,

Colleen is exploring whether Pharaoh Amenemhat's

ambitious construction project paid off,

and if he was able to match the achievements

of the mighty pyramid kings of old.

The care that they took in the construction,

even in this long corridor.

And yet cracks emerged.

She hunts for clues in the network of tunnels

below the pyramid.

These are modern repairs to shore up the construction.

But you can see the ancient beams here,

those would have been added almost 4,000 years ago

because there was already subsidence

in the pyramid structure.

And what that would have meant is that there was instability.

Unlike the pyramids at Giza,

Amenemhat built on the clay of the Nile flood plain,

just 33 feet above sea level.

Here, groundwater could seep upwards

and soften the earth beneath.

As the pyramid took shape,

its tremendous weight pushed down

on its network of underground tunnels.

Cracks appeared in the ceilings,

and workers had to shore up the walls

with wood and mud brick.

Amenemhat had tried to build himself a megatomb

like the kings of old,

but he failed.

He abandoned his ambitious project

and the pyramid began to crumble.

One unfortunate result of the instability in this pyramid

was that the king was never buried here, only his queen.

The Black Pyramid

took many years and huge resources to build.

But ended up being a very costly failure,

and Colleen thinks the mistakes made on this pyramid

hold a clue to why so many of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs

have also been forgotten.

These are mud bricks, this is mud mixed with straw.

That is what this pyramid was constructed of at its core,

what is in the thousands behind me.

Only the exterior casing blocks were made of limestone,

which is a completely different situation from the Giza pyramids

where the entire pyramid is made of stone.

Mud brick was a popular building material

during the Middle Kingdom,

because it was easy to manufacture, cheap, and light.

But it has a fatal flaw.

Mud brick simply does not survive the same way

as a solid stone pyramid.

Colleen thinks this is a key reason

the Middle Kingdom pharaohs have been forgotten.

They either built their vast megatombs underground

where they remained hidden, or constructed mud brick tombs

that simply weathered away.

Kings of the Middle Kingdom built incredible monuments,

but many of them were not constructed in the same way

as either monuments before or after.

So, so many of the traces of this remarkable period

are lost to history.

Today, archeologists continue to unlock the secrets

of the megatombs of the Middle Kingdom.

How Egyptian civilization prospered

giving rise to a sophisticated new elite.

How it's pharaohs appointed powerful local governors

to run the country

and kept them loyal with lavish rewards.

And why, despite building

some of the most spectacular monuments in Egyptian history,

they have now mostly been forgotten.