Original subtitles

On the Nile's West Bank,

in a city of the dead...

archeologists have found a hidden tunnel.

Doctor!

Buried under tons

of sand and rubble,

a coffin could reveal clues

to how war made Ramses the Great...

Doctor! Into an icon.

Oh!

Ramses II,

the greatest pharaoh of Egypt's golden age.

Born some 20 years

after the death of Tutankhamun,

he ruled Egypt for nearly seven decades.

More than 3,000 years later,

hundreds of his monumental structures survive,

proclaiming him the everlasting warrior king

who brought glory and prosperity

to Egypt through battle.

Today, archeologists

are peering beyond the stonework,

investigating Ramses' military achievements

and his impact on the generations of Egyptians

that followed his reign

to understand how a king became a legend.

In the sacred ancient center of Abydos...

Egyptian archaeologist Sameh Iskander

is in his 16th year

exploring one of Ramses' most iconic monuments.

Working here for so many years

at the Ramses II Temple,

I feel this affinity.

I am fascinated by his accomplishments,

and I want to know more about him.

I am obsessed by him and his reign and his legacy.

Sameh wants to know

how this great warrior pharaoh was seen by Egyptians

in the decades and centuries after his death.

He's investigating the area surrounding

the very first temple Ramses put his name to.

Constructed using fine white limestone,

Ramses' temple at Abydos covered an area

half the size of a football field.

The king dedicated it to Osiris

and he placed 26 sandstone statues of the god

in its outer courtyard.

So far, Sameh's excavations have revealed

that the temple was also crowded on both sides

by 42 vaulted storerooms.

Sameh knows a temple this important

wouldn't have existed in isolation,

so now he's searching for clues beyond the enclosure wall.

Temples or tombs

don't just get built and out of an abstract

and, and empty space. There is life around it.

We're trying to explore this area here to the west

to see if there are any structures

that are connected to the temple.

Sameh has 150 men

shifting sand and rock

across an excavation of over 10,000 square feet

hoping to find ancient buildings.

Over here, we came across this structure.

We really don't know yet what it is.

It appears to be

a complete building entirely buried by desert sand.

The team's first task is to dig out the area

in front of the structure.

I see, I see pieces of a bone there,

a couple of, a couple of bones.

This is a burial site for sure.

We are here in a tomb.

In Egypt's extreme south...

Egyptologist Arto Belekdanian

has come to one of Egypt's most imposing temples

to investigate the origins

of Ramses II's fearsome reputation.

It is spectacular here!

The great temple of Abu Simbel

with its four imposing colossi

of Ramses the Great.

Ramses built Abu Simbel

not just as a statement of power,

but as a warning to his enemies

across Egypt's southern border.

Large parts of the temple complex

celebrate the king's military strength.

It's incredible how much

of the wall space here

is dedicated to scenes of war.

The reliefs record battles

Ramses fought

over the first half of his long reign.

Arto is hunting for evidence

of one of Ramses' earliest military engagements.

There it is,

right there is a scene

that shows where it all began.

Look at the headdress,

the horned helmet with the spherical shape on top,

the round shields, those massive swords.

These are not Egyptian soldiers,

in fact they are part of a mysterious group of people

known by the fantastic name of The Sea Peoples.

The Sea Peoples

were pirates who preyed on the rich

trading ports of Egypt's fertile Nile Delta.

After just two years on the throne,

Ramses mustered his navy,

and mobilized to protect his kingdom's wealth.

At their first battle he cornered his foes

and overwhelmed them with a much stronger force.

The pharaoh won a resounding victory

over Egypt's maritime enemies

and then drafted the captive Sea Peoples into his own army.

The records etched into the temple walls

suggest Ramses had good reason to bolster his army

with battle-hardened conscripts.

Ramses' reign coincided with a time

of economic turmoil in the Mediterranean.

Threats to Egyptian stability were coming thick and fast.

On the outside of the temple, here,

I found over a dozen representations of kneeling,

tied up, defeated peoples.

It is clear that Ramses has been busy

since he defeated the Sea Peoples

early in his reign.

Each bound-up captive

represents a different foreign power

who coveted Egypt's wealth,

looking to wrest control from the pharaoh

as their own societies crumbled.

Yet Ramses' inscriptions suggest victory after victory.

To uncover the tactical secrets behind the king's success,

Arto needs to explore deeper into the temple.

On the west bank

of the Nile at Dra' Abu El-Naga...

Egyptian Archaeologist Bahaa Gaber

is exploring a giant ancient cemetery

cut into a mountain.

Bahaa wants to know how Egypt coped

in the increasingly volatile Mediterranean

once Ramses II's 66-year reign

came to an end.

Dra' Abu-El-Naga is the ideal place to search,

as it's one of the main burial sites

for nobles of the Ramesside era,

a roughly 200-year period during which

11 pharaohs took Ramses as their royal name.

This year, halfway up the mountain's slope,

Bahaa believes he's found a promising lead.

During the Ramesside period,

nobles often built shrines or chapels

above their burial chambers

where visitors could leave offerings.

A tight passage leads down to the entrance

to a cramped cavity filled with rubble.

The team will have to clear the rock to see what's inside.

It's such an amazing feeling

when you stand in front of the door

removing the first block

and then you will see what's behind.

You can't put it in words.

As the team removes debris

from the end of the passage,

archaeologist Ahmed El-Tayeb

concentrates on the entrance way itself.

Mr. Bahaa!

Yes?

Did you find anything?

Oh, that's beautiful.

If there is a concealed tomb nearby,

a chunk of a doorway is a key piece of the puzzle.

In the shadow of Ramses' temple in Abydos,

Sameh's team is nearing the floor of the pit

at the entrance to what appears to be

a buried mudbrick tomb.

I think this is multiple burials

because we have certainly bones from a child

and others from a grownup.

How many persons, it's hard to tell so far.

Before he can break open the tomb's entrance,

Sameh must recover and record every single bone

deposited outside it.

This is the upper part of the skull.

I think we're getting very close to the bottom of this opening

but it's neatly blocked.

I don't think it was opened and re-blocked,

but we'll find out.

The mudbricks sealing the entrance

appear undisturbed.

It suggests the original tomb owner

could still be safely entombed inside.

With the end of the workers' shift approaching,

Sameh will have to wait to dismantle the wall.

We need to be patient.

We really don't know what's beyond this,

but I can tell you right now,

once we clear this,

we're gonna get a better idea what's inside.

At Abu Simbel,

Arto is looking for evidence to explain

how Ramses won his reputation

as one of the most successful warriors in Egyptian history.

Ramses II has defeated his seaborne enemies,

and now having incorporated them into his army,

showing great military sense,

he had his next challenge to face,

his enemies on land.

Over to the south were the Nubians,

to the west the semi-nomadic tribes of Libya,

and then to the north his greatest enemies of all,

the Hittites.

The Hittites controlled

much of today's Middle East

during the tumultuous period of Ramses' reign.

They were Egypt's main rival superpower

in the Mediterranean,

amassed in great numbers

right on Egypt's eastern border.

For Ramses, they posed an existential threat.

Arto wants to see how Ramses met this challenge

to Egyptian territory.

Oh, look at this scene. This has all the clues.

Clearly archery

was a very important element in Ramses' army,

but so were battle axes, spears, daggers.

And here's a horse,

which is harnessed to the most high-tech,

cutting-edge piece of military equipment,

the chariot.

The chariot had been introduced

to Egypt as a weapon of war

just a few centuries earlier.

For the warrior king

and the future of Egyptian civilization,

it was a game-changer.

The traditional Egyptian archer

could attack from distance on foot,

but was relatively static and vulnerable to enemy fire.

Mounting troops on chariots

made them more mobile and harder to hit,

while also extending their range.

One soldier drove the chariot,

while the archer shot arrows from a platform at the rear.

Egypt's wealth meant Ramses could deploy 2,000 chariots

in a single battle

to bear down on the enemy with overwhelming force.

Ramses II put the war chariot to tremendously effective use.

And here he is aboard his chariot.

He has no need for a driver.

He has tied the reins around his waist.

Truly, he was a master of the craft.

Riding his chariot alone

with a bow drawn impossibly far behind his head,

Ramses presented himself as a mighty hero

who led from the front.

Out on the battlefield his lighter,

more maneuverable chariots gave Ramses an edge

over the cumbersome Hittite vehicles.

It meant he could successfully defend Egyptian territory.

But the warrior pharaoh wanted more,

to expand his borders

and take the fight to the Hittites.

But to defeat a rival superpower

in its own backyard

required more than chariots.

Look at that, something new.

A fortified location sitting atop a high hill

with high walls.

You can see the ramparts.

The Hittites were no pushovers,

and on their own ground

they had the advantage of fixed stone defenses.

They're organized, they're well-armed,

and they are in control of many such fortified locations.

Clearly, Ramses had a challenge ahead of him.

To investigate the pharaoh's campaigns

in Hittite lands,

Arto needs to visit another of Ramses' monuments

to his military greatness.

At Dra' Abu El-Naga...

the rock fragments Bahaa's team uncovered

in the shrine's entrance suggest the presence

of a tomb from the centuries

following Ramses' death.

If he can find the crypt, its contents could help him

build a picture of life and death after Ramses' reign.

The sandstone building material

confirms the shrine is from the right time.

At the end of the shrine's entrance passage,

Bahaa's workers continue to haul out rubble,

hunting for bodies.

Doctor!

It's a stunning find,

a beautifully preserved wooden coffin

painted with images of gods

and elaborate scenes of resurrection.

Its presence confirms Bahaa's team

has uncovered a tomb within the Ramesside shrine.

Now Bahaa wants to know who it belonged to.

Doctor!

In Abydos...

the sun is rising on a new day of excavation.

Sameh is almost ready to open a buried structure

to the west of the Temple of Ramses II.

He hopes it will help him understand

how Egyptians felt about Ramses

in the generations following the warrior pharaoh's death.

I have no idea

what could be inside, no idea,

but I can't wait.

The unknown in this type of work is so exciting

because we know there was something inside at one point

but is it still there?

As Sameh's foreman, Ayman,

prepares to work on the entrance,

the morning light reveals intriguing details

in the surrounding brickwork.

We can see from these lines here that the bricklayer would,

would run his fingers here

to create some kind of a rough brick for better adhesion.

Very interesting, they are curved,

and I can tell for sure they came from the temple.

Egyptian master builders

normally only used curved bricks for rounded walls.

The bricks used to build the tomb

match similar fragments Sameh has found

while excavating and restoring Ramses' temple.

They appear to have been reused

from a set of domed structures attached to the monument.

So during our excavations in the past two or three years,

we came across the walls of these storage magazines silos.

So each of these storage magazines

contained about 100 cubic meters

of grain, that is a lot of grain,

and perhaps that's what Ramses II needed for his army.

For a pharaoh at war, grain was critical.

In an economy without money,

the bread and beer produced from grain

both paid and fed the king's entire force.

His horses alone

needed 6,000 pounds of feed every day.

The army of Ramses the Great

was legendary, over 100,000 soldiers,

one of the largest forces ever assembled

in Ancient Egypt.

To sustain his fighters,

the king gathered thousands of tons of grain

from farms in the Nile Valley.

To store the grain,

Ramses built vast silos at his temple complexes,

making them a vital part of his military machine.

The nearby structure

seems to have been built at a later date,

once Ramses' grain silos had fallen into disuse.

Foreman Ayman

is ready to break open the seal.

We're gonna start to take the bricks one at a time

because I have a feeling

that the sand that we see on top of that,

uh, collapsed vault will start to come down.

So, we need to do this very, very carefully.

In Dra' Abu El-Naga...

excitement is growing in the Ramesside tomb.

A noble's burial

could yield rich information

about how Egypt weathered the social upheavals

that continued to bring down Mediterranean kingdoms

after Ramses the Great's long reign.

It's an exceptional discovery.

The face is part of a delicately carved

and painted coffin lid.

Together with a richly decorated coffin,

it's evidence of a high-status burial.

The fact that the two parts are lying separately

shows that the tomb has been disturbed.

Alongside the prayers

and scenes of resurrection painted on the coffin,

nobles would have been buried with valuable items

to assist them in the afterlife.

With a coffin broken open,

these are almost certainly now gone.

But for Bahaa, the treasure is the burial itself.

In Abydos...

Sameh's foreman Ayman Mohamed

is delicately unblocking the entrance

to the buried structure.

Whatever is inside

could have lain undisturbed for more than 3,000 years.

I see... sand.

That's it, only sand so far.

At the other end of the structure,

workers have now uncovered a hole in the roof.

The vaulted roof had already collapsed at some time

and the sand got inside it.

Either the tomb has been robbed via the roof

or the ceiling has collapsed naturally.

It's going to take some time getting the sand out.

Sameh's workers

need to exercise extreme caution

operating beneath the degraded mudbrick roof.

One wayward thrust of a shovel

could bring down the entire structure.

Patience, patience, patience. You need to take your time.

Fifty miles southeast in Luxor...

Arto has come to one of Ramses'

most ambitious buildings:

The Ramesseum, his mortuary temple.

Designed to glorify his achievements

as pharaoh for eternity,

it's the ideal place to explore the events

Ramses wanted his descendants to remember.

Look at this place!

Just wow!

Arto's investigating

how Ramses fought his campaigns

against the Hittites' fortified cities

and cemented his status as Egypt's greatest warrior.

You can tell that Ramses II employed his best sculptors

in this place.

It is truly remarkable.

Arto scans the decorated walls

for evidence of how the warrior king

overcame the Hittites' defenses.

Look at all this chaos.

This is battle, this is war.

And there's Ramses II dispatching his enemies

under the shadow of that fortified location.

I mean, look at these ramparts.

You see that ladder?

You don't necessarily destroy the walls.

You climb over them.

And right there, there's a column of hieroglyphs

identifying this city,

and it says, ah, it's a little bit broken off

but at the very end it's spelling out "our."

The first bit is missing but this can't be anything

but the siege, the famous battle of Dapur.

The city of Dapur was heavily fortified,

and hundreds of miles inside Hittite territory.

Ramses needed more than chariots

for this sort of siege warfare.

He had to come up with a different strategy.

Approaching from one side of the city,

Ramses' troops used a tall ladder.

Below, more soldiers engaged the defenders

drawing fire from beneath a mantlet,

a covering shield that sheltered them

from projectiles.

With the enemy's attention

drawn to one end of their city,

the king's main force struck the undefended side.

With this pincer move, Ramses was victorious.

He captured the city of Dapur

and claimed the territory for Egypt.

You can imagine the army of the king,

with Pharaoh himself present, his resplendent armor,

his crowns, his jewelry, glowing under the sunlight.

Clearly, this would have been a terrifying experience

for the city's defenders.

Inscriptions from Ramses' time

call him "The one who breaches walls,"

and boast that he and his army

captured no less than 18 towns

in a single season in his eighth year as king.

Ramses' temple inscriptions

suggest a series of crushing victories,

but in reality his campaigns in the east were costly.

Long periods of fighting deep in Hittite territory

took their toll.

His wars left a more complicated legacy for Egypt

than his claims of glory suggest.

In the Ramesside shrine

at Dra' Abu El-Naga,

Bahaa is searching the remains

of an ancient crime scene

for evidence of what happened in Egypt

in the centuries following Ramses' death.

Normally the coffin should have the face of the owner

of the coffin himself. So that's him!

The beautiful face of that man.

It's amazing!

The face may portray the owner of the coffin

but its style seems not to match

the date of the tomb.

Bahaa believes the casket was made

after the Ramesside period ended,

suggesting this is not the tomb's original owner.

This coffin was buried during a later,

darker time.

After Ramses' death,

his successors, including

nine more pharaohs called Ramses,

continued to hold the unrest in the region at bay,

seeking to emulate the warrior king's success.

But eventually, the unrest

engulfing the region caught up with them.

The death of King Ramses XI

marked the end of the Ramesside era.

Egypt finally succumbed to the economic collapse

sweeping the Mediterranean world.

As rival factions fought for control in a power vacuum,

Egypt split in two,

and law and order collapsed across the country.

The ancient tombs that used to be closely guarded

were left unprotected and became vulnerable.

The treasures the elites had locked away

for their afterlives were now a temptation

for those living in troubled times.

Whilst the door jamb

proves the structure is Ramesside,

the later coffin suggests the tomb was reused

around the time of Egypt's economic collapse.

Bahaa believes this coffin was placed

in an older Ramesside tomb to protect it.

But in the chaos, no resting place was safe.

From kings down to recently deceased nobility,

the valuables buried with the dead became a target.

For Bahaa, the tomb's fate adds rich detail

to a key period in Egyptian history:

the disintegration of a long-established

social order as Egypt's golden age broke down.

The only question that remains

is did the robbers leave the body intact?

In a stroke of good fortune,

the debris covering the coffin

has saved the mummy itself.

Bahaa's final job

is to rescue the ransacked noble's remains.

The team will carefully transport the coffin

to a laboratory where specialists will stabilize

and interpret its extraordinary paintwork.

But Bahaa's work is on the mountain.

His mission to reconstruct the centuries

following the death of Ramses the Great goes on.

In Abydos,

Sameh's team is continuing the careful work

of removing sand from the fragile vaulted tomb.

Somewhere hidden in the debris

could be clues to how Egyptians here

felt about Ramses' long warlike reign

in the centuries after his death.

With the tomb's floor just inches away,

the excavation picks up pace.

We're finding more skulls here.

All the, the remains we have here,

they seem to be coming from different periods.

Like the pit outside its entrance,

the tomb appears to be packed full of skeletal remains

deposited at different times.

So far, we came across four human skulls inside the tomb.

Every five minutes we come up with something new.

As the workers make

discovery after discovery,

Sameh brings in a specialist

in working with fragile artifacts.

So this is Mohamed who's a conservator.

He scans the cavity with fresh eyes.

In Abydos...

Ah, ah, ah, ah. It's a decorated coffin.

Sameh's persistence

in the tomb beside

Ramses the Great's temple is paying off.

You can see red, green... Yes.

And Egyptian blue also. Yes.

Although the remains are fragmentary,

they could still help Sameh reveal who was buried here

and what Ramses meant to Egyptians

in the centuries after his reign.

Whoa!

With the tomb now cleared to floor level...

Okay.

Sameh can finally analyze the burials.

Wow, we have this mud sarcophagus,

painted with these beautiful colors.

This is the head, the top has already gone,

and on top of it

we have the skull of a donkey

which is very, very unusual,

and very interesting to have

a head of a donkey as an offering.

And it's laid directly on the sarcophagus

In ancient Egypt,

donkeys were seen as animals to be respected,

their ability to bear burdens enabling long-distance travel.

The intricately painted casket

topped with a donkey's head

suggests the original tomb owner

was someone with status.

This person with this kind of coffin

which has elaborate decorations in the outside

must have been a person of some means.

Built with bricks taken from Ramses' temple

and situated just steps away from the monument,

the tomb implies that even after Egypt's golden age

had begun to crumble,

Ramses' legend still carried weight.

At least nine other people of lower status

were buried haphazardly alongside the owner

either inside the tomb or at the entrance.

Their states of preservation suggest some date

to more than a thousand years after Ramses' death.

This is a great discovery.

We can get a glimpse of the mindset

of the Egyptians centuries later after Ramses.

A thousand years after the warrior king died,

Egypt's golden age was long over.

But Ramses' monuments

remained popular burial grounds.

His legend lived on.

The name of Ramses II

as the great warrior,

stayed in the memory of the Egyptians

for many centuries after his death.

Sameh still has acres of ground

to explore around the temple precinct.

It could contain hundreds of burials,

nobles and commoners alike.

The warrior pharaoh seems to have commanded respect in life

and for a thousand years after his death.

But was it simply for his military success?

In Luxor...

Arto wants to explore how Ramses sustained

multiple grueling campaigns beyond his eastern frontiers.

And earned the admiration of the entire country

for centuries to come.

Ramses II had a problem.

He was fighting wars abroad

for months on end, besieging cities.

His supply lines were stretched as far as they could go.

What was the solution?

A papyrus acquired

by a dealer in antiquities

in the 1830s could hold the secret.

The text contains evidence of a huge building project

Ramses commissioned

as his military ventures gathered pace.

I'm looking at this fascinating papyrus.

Parts of it are going into incredibly vivid detail.

It's actually describing this brand-new gleaming capital

founded by Ramses II.

And right here, it's also giving us its name,

Pi-Ramses, the House of Ramses.

Strategically built

on an island in the Nile Delta,

Pi-Ramses was hundreds of miles closer

to Hittite territory than the former capital.

What this means is Ramses II founded his capital

at the very edge of Egypt,

making it a perfect launching point

for all of his military campaigns.

With a giant temple

complete with an imposing avenue of sphinxes,

Pi-Ramses was built with an emphasis on grandeur.

But Ramses capital was no vanity project.

Next to the palace, rows of stables

housed nearly 500 horses,

serving as headquarters for Ramses' chariot corps.

The streets bristled with silos for grain,

enough to feed an army.

And great furnaces smelted bronze

into shields and swords.

This beautiful new city was really designed

as an engine of war.

The strategic location of this new city

meant that Ramses II could penetrate further

into enemy territory and stay there for longer.

Ramses' monumental inscriptions

were designed to promote his triumphs for posterity.

He showed off his victories in vivid detail.

But on the walls of Ramses' mortuary temple,

Arto finds evidence that the warrior king

also recognized the cost of constant war.

He knew when to stop.

This right here is the text of the peace treaty

that Ramses II forged with the King of the Hittites.

And it was so important to him

that he immortalized it into stone

in the setting of his funerary cult for all eternity.

He forged the Egypt Empire through war,

but the way to maintain it, it was through peace.

With his enemies subdued

either through force or treaty,

Ramses secured two centuries of stability for Egypt.

He earned a warrior's adulation on the battlefield

but won respect through strategic discipline.

With each new discovery,

archeologists across the country shed light

on the veneration Ramses the Great inspired.

As kingdom after kingdom,

founded in the wake of social and economic upheaval

across the Mediterranean,

Ramses' shrewd military decisions

held off the inevitable end of Egypt's golden age.

And his reputation survived,

his own version of history etched in monumental stone:

Warrior Pharaoh, King of Kings.