Original subtitles

Egypt's Great Pyramid...

..the only survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The Great Pyramid wasn't just a building,

it is where the king would have lived eternally.

Nothing on this scale had ever been built before.

It all started with a quest to make a gigantic pyramid that was perfect.

Exactly how a Bronze Age society

managed to haul and fit together 2.5 million stone blocks

is one of the world's greatest enigmas.

Today, archaeologists may finally be able to solve this mystery,

thanks to extraordinary new evidence.

An entombed ship being excavated right now

at the foot of the pyramid.

These boats were made for the afterlife.

And the long-lost journal of a sailor that is being decoded.

While leading experts to investigative ships

and ancient waterways

could actually have been the key to this desert build.

It's the infrastructure behind the construction of the pyramid

that, for me, is fascinating.

Now, this team is about to undertake a unique experiment...

..to put these new theories to the test...

..to see if they can finally unravel the secret

of how the Great Pyramid was built...

..and how Khufu's innovations transformed his country.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the tomb of a god king named Khufu.

He commissioned it over 4,500 years ago

as a giant fortress to keep his corpse safe for eternity.

This was an essential requirement to prosper in the afterlife.

Khufu designed his tomb to be the biggest burial chamber

ever seen in Egypt.

To build it, more than six million tonnes of stone

had to be sourced and hauled here.

This wasn't just for the 140-metre-high cull

that we see today,

but also for the brilliant white casing

that's been plundered over time.

Archaeologist Mark Lehner believes

that this lost outer layer of limestone

was one of the most striking elements of the pyramid's design.

This is some of the last remaining casing stones,

here at the centre of the north base.

That's what they used to cloak the outer pyramid,

making joins so tight you can't get a knife blade in-between.

So, I mean, truly it was otherworldly.

They didn't want you to see the human hand,

they wanted it to be a huge special effect.

Sourcing the 170,000 tonnes of high-quality limestone

to encase the pyramid was Khufu's biggest challenge.

This could only be mined from faraway quarries

at a place called Tora.

Nobody has ever been completely sure

how so much stone was brought to Giza to complete the build

in just over a quarter of a century.

But now new evidence is revealing that Khufu

may only have managed this with a fleet of specially built boats

and highly trained sailors.

Today, at the foot of the pyramid,

a unique find is shining light on this theory.

These pieces of wood are in fact a dismantled boat.

A ceremonial ship that Khufu would command in the afterlife.

It's a unique insight into the vessels used at the time.

Eissa Zidan oversees the excavation.

Figuring out how this boat was built

could help investigators understand the shipping technology

that was used to transport stone from distant quarries

to the pyramid's construction site.

But time has taken its toll on the wood...

..and reassembling it is a challenge.

This plank represents one of the larger planks

that we've worked on...so far.

There will be bigger ones, I'm sure,

but this one is about eight and half metres long.

Presumably one of the depth planks near the edge of the boat.

If I can make this plank strong and stable,

then we can learn a lot from the material, from the boat itself.

It's like a giant, but very fragile jigsaw puzzle.

So, the team uses new technology to help them find answers safely.

The 3-D scans reveal that holes in many of the planks line up.

Channels like this would have been used to loop rope through.

It's clear that Khufu's huge boat was literally sewn together.

Now investigators have found evidence that rope wasn't just used

to hold ceremonial ships together,

it was also used to build rock-carrying boats too.

The discovery was made 150 miles away in Wadi Al-Jarf.

Here, archaeologists, including Severine Marchi,

are unearthing fragments of vessels

that were stored securely when not in use.

They believe they were designed to transport stone.

Investigators working here want to know exactly how

these boats were used for the pyramid build.

And another find unearthed just metres away

is proving to be one of the most crucial new pieces of evidence.

Archaeologist Pierre Tallet has found an ancient scroll of papyrus.

It's taken Pierre four years of painstaking analysis

to decipher the papyrus fully.

It reveals in great detail

how sailors worked on the pyramid's construction.

The author was a man called Merer.

He was an overseer in charge of a cargo boat...

..and a team of 40 elite workmen.

He describes how his team's daunting job

was transporting the pyramid's precious white casing stones...

..along the River Nile.

It's the only first-hand account

of the construction of the Great Pyramid.

The ceremonial ship,

Merer's papyrus,

and the remains of his cargo vessel

are giving investigators a new insight

into the vital role boats played in the pyramid's construction.

Now they want to uncover what it actually took

to ship such vast quantities of stone.

In Cairo, one archaeologist is devising

a bespoke experiment to find out.

Mohamed Abd El-Maguid and his team

aim to learn more of Merer's journey

by recreating every step of it.

Mohamed's plan is to build a wooden cargo boat

using Merer's ancient techniques...

..and cut a casing stone from the same quarry that he used.

He will then attempt to sail the stone block across the Nile

before dragging it to the foot of the pillar.

Mohamed's first challenge is to construct the vessel.

But no complete cargo boats from the time have ever been unearthed.

So, what did it look like?

To find out,

Mohamed is searching for clues inside the underground tomb.

It's the final resting place for a man called Ti.

There are no first-hand accounts of how Merer built his cargo boat,

so deciphering these scenes

helps Mohamed select the right tools and techniques.

Mohamed can tell that the Egyptians made their boats

strong enough to carry huge rocks

through the precision and strength of their joinery.

But most importantly,

Mohamed can finally see what these cargo boats really looked like

and the exact shape they took.

Now he can draw up plans for his vessel...

..and his team can begin to build.

They need to fit each of the planks together

before starting the job of stitching them tight.

Mohamed's designing this vessel to carry one average-sized casing stone

weighing two and half tonnes.

But building boats was only part of the answer

to finishing Khufu's pyramid.

These vessels needed to get far closer to the construction site

than the Nile would allow.

The solution would involve another ambitious engineering project

that would completely transform the landscape.

New discoveries in Egypt

are revealing how highly skilled shipping teams

were the key to building the Great Pyramid.

Now, at this workshop in Cairo, Mohamed Abd el-Maguid

is constructing a replica wooden vessel...

like the one used by the ancient sailor Merer.

It's part of an experiment

to investigate how boats transported the pyramid's heavy casing stones.

Mohamed's team is using techniques learned from ancient tomb carvings

to assemble the eight-metre-long boat.

Now they're ready to fix the pieces together

by stitching them with rope,

just like the ceremonial ship of the pharaoh Khufu.

The team threads over three miles of rope...

..through holes along the length of the vessel.

After months of planning and construction...

the boat is finally finished.

At this nearby quarry, archaeologist Adel Kelany leads a team

that's mining the stone block for Mohamed's vessel to transport.

Carved from Tora limestone,

it will be just like the casing stones Merer shipped to the pyramid.

It's quite important to have very little cracks,

one colour, the hardness is OK and good, and in general,

this is a good spot for cutting the stone.

This is a chisel with a pointed edge

and this is actually one of the main tools that ancient Egyptians used.

The sound actually with hammering,

it was kind of like music for the workmen.

It kept them active.

It takes 12 workers two hours to hack deep into the rock

to rough out the shape of the block.

The stone is completely free from the whole site,

but the bottom, which is really the most important

and also the most difficult part.

OK, guys, it's working.

Now they need to lever the block off the quarry face

and roll it onto flatter ground below.

CHATTERING

CHATTERING

Merer would investigate the blocks

before transporting them to his boat,

otherwise it would be a big problem for him.

The block passes inspection and is ready for shipping.

But there's still a missing piece in the puzzle.

For ships to be effective,

they needed to get far closer to the pyramid than the Nile would allow.

Now, in Wadi al-Jarf,

Pierre Tallet is decoding the long-lost journal of sailor Merer

to find out how the ancient Egyptians achieved this.

It turns out that Merer's skills may have included engineering.

He writes that his crew were involved in a scheme

to transform the landscape.

They opened giant dykes to divert water from the Nile...

..and channel it to the pyramid through man-made canals.

Now archaeologists are uncovering evidence of this

at the Giza Plateau.

On the surface,

there's no sign of any canals at this site,

but Mark Lehner, who's been investigating the pyramid

for more than 40 years, and is one of the world's leading experts,

thinks that clues lie underground.

He's collected samples of earth from the plateau

to help track down the lost waterway.

For many metres the drill chords came up with nothing but dry sand

and then suddenly they came down onto very concentrated, thick silt.

The contrast couldn't be more stark.

And the several metres of this concentrated clay

told us that there must be an ancient waterway,

so we knew Nile water had to be there,

filling an ancient waterway with that clay and silt.

We've outlined a central canal basin,

which we think was the primary delivery area

to the foot of the Giza Plateau.

Mark have discovered how ancient pyramid builders

completely re-engineered this landscape.

They dug a series of deep canals by hand...

..and created an inland port...

..when Merer's men opened the dykes.

The Nile's water filled these cuttings to the brim.

This allowed his heavily-laden boat to dock

within just a few hundred metres of the pyramid.

Without this clever hydraulic engineering,

it would have been impossible to ship in casing stones...

..and complete Khufu's pyramid on time.

But the scale of these works was beginning to change the country too.

Khufu started something that must have been, truly,

a very complex port city,

perhaps the largest port city of its kind.

And that's why I'm more interested,

not in how the Egyptians built the pyramids,

but how the pyramids helped to build Egypt.

Water was key to Khufu being able to construct his Great Pyramid.

But the mighty Nile wasn't just vital for transport,

Khufu also used it to get people to devote their lives

to the construction of his tomb.

The nation believed that their own god king

controlled the river's flow

and that pleasing him was essential

to ensuring they had enough water.

On an island in the Nile, Egyptologist Salima Ikram

is investigating this link between the river and the pharaoh's power.

The Nile was key to Egyptian civilisation.

Without the Nile, Egypt wouldn't have existed.

This is a nilometer, built to measure annual floods

that were not only important for shipping loads to the pyramids,

but also for irrigating land.

The water would come in and it would climb and climb and climb

as the flood rose, and you could see all of these markings here

that measure the height.

In Khufu's time, a good flood suggested

the pharaoh was pleased with his people

and a bountiful harvest would follow.

About here is where it would have been an ideal flood situation.

Too far below, people would have been starving to death.

Too far above, they would have been washed away,

so there was no-one left to starve.

Khufu's supposed power over the Nile

gave him incredible control over his people.

The king was Egypt, the land of Egypt, and that also meant the Nile.

So, if the land was fertile and strong,

it meant that was because the king was strong and good.

If the Nile was failing,

it clearly meant that there was something wrong with the king,

so the king's success and his strength as a ruler,

in fact, was also very much tied to the strength and power of the Nile.

Without the Nile,

the Great Pyramid would have been impossible to build.

The river was a source of power over workforce

and the only way to transport enough stone.

Now investigators are ready to recreate

one sailor's dangerous mission

to discover first-hand exactly what it involved.

In Egypt, archaeologists are investigating whether boats

and elite teams of sailors were the secret to building

Khufu's Great Pyramid.

They've uncovered the long lost journal of the sailor called Merer,

who transported huge quantities of stone along the Nile to the

pyramid site.

Mohamed Abd El-Maguid and his team are conducting an experiment

to discover exactly how he did it.

Like the ancient Egyptians,

they've built a boat that is sewn together by rope alone.

They're about to find out

if it will take the load of a Pyramid block.

Merer's team would assemble their vessels on the shore

and slide them to the water on wooden rollers.

The ancient Egyptians knew that water would initially

seep into these stitched-together boats...

..but this would make the joints swell.

And Mohamed's boat is slowly becoming watertight.

It's a successful launch.

But can the boat hold the weight of a heavy stone block?

Pyramid construction would grind to a standstill

if rocks were delivered late.

So sailors like Merer had to work, exacting timetable.

In Wadi Al-Jarf, Pierre Tallet has been decoding Merer's journal,

to find out how sailors working on the monument were organised

and motivated to avoid delays.

The papyrus shows that Khufu divided his workers into teams

with clear responsibilities and targets.

A crew of 40 men, like Merer lead, was known as a "file".

Four files formed a "gang" of 160 elite labourers.

And it took many of these gangs to make up a huge workforce,

thousands strong.

Khufu didn't have general labourers.

He had focused, elite squads.

Pierre's team is investigating another discovery

unearthed at Wadi Al-Jarf.

These water jars reveal how each file was given its own clear

identity as motivation.

These pots reveal that Merer's file was called

"the followers of the boat"...

..named after the snake on its figurehead.

Pierre's crew is uncovering team names on hundreds of objects,

found right across the site.

They've discovered the identities of six separate boat crews so far.

By giving each file a clear identity,

Khufu may have deliberately

fostered a sense of pride and competition among his workers.

On the banks of the Nile, Mohamed's team is ready to recreate

the specific task assigned to Merer's file.

The ancient Egyptians probably dragged rocks onto their boats

over wooden ramps from jetties.

Their heavy cargo had to be placed

evenly across the vessel to prevent it capsizing.

They check the hull for leaks.

Mohamed's team discovers that boats stitched together with

nothing more than rope really can cope with heavy loads.

Now, they'll attempt to sail the vessel across the mighty Nile.

The limestone block will make it difficult to both propel

and to steer.

But Merer's papyrus reveals the best way to do it.

He writes that the quarries were upstream from the Pyramid.

This meant that when the boat was fully loaded his team could

paddle quickly with the current.

Then they used regular northerly winds to sail their empty boat

back against the flow.

Mohamed's crew will try to manoeuvre their cargo

straight across the Nile.

That's far shorter than Merer's regular run.

The rocking of the boat is causing the limestone to slip.

If the rock keeps sliding, the boat could capsize.

They need to get control.

Heading straight across the Nile is only making it worse.

So they decide to row with the current and head downstream...

..just like Merer.

Rudders at the stern angle the vessel towards the opposite shore.

Finally they approach safe harbour.

It's clear how skilful the ancient Egyptians must have been,

to transport 70 tonnes of stone at a time.

Adel's team will take over from here.

They'll investigate how workers hauled these stones from the water

right up to the Pyramid face using manpower alone.

When they delivered their heavy cargo to the Pyramid site,

Merer and his team would overnight here.

Khufu needed to look after his workforce

to keep them healthy and motivated.

And archaeologist Mark Lehner thinks that housing them

by the port played a role.

Here he's uncovered the ruins of a whole lost town.

Are we on the spot where Merer and his men stayed overnight?

We put a grid over the whole place in order to map it.

And then we can decide where to excavate, down to the floor level,

to the houses and places where they lived.

New walls were built to protect the original ruins.

And these now reveal how buildings were laid out.

Mark thinks this one is a style appropriate for a team leader

like Merer.

You come into the main living room.

Now, opening off this same central room, you also have,

in effect, his bedroom.

This is a rather substantial sleeping platform, as we call them.

And so it's just about the right length, you know, for

an official of moderate height, like myself, to stretch out.

But houses like this were too grand

for the workers that Merer commanded.

Around each of these house compounds I expected to find smaller

houses of the dependants.

Well, we found some of that.

But in the centre of the site we found something very different.

Mark has unearthed the outline of a building that is 35 metres long.

It's the perfect size to sleep 40 people.

The number of workers that Merer's journal suggests

he's likely to have had in his team.

The thick walls supported arches and a flat roof.

Laid side-by-side, these barrack blocks were an efficient

way of housing a huge workforce.

The structure Mark's found here was used just after Merer's time.

But he thinks his team was put up in similar vast, modern blocks,

just like this.

This would have been occupation of a density unseen

anywhere else in Egypt,

in any village or town site of that time.

Providing adequate accommodation was only part of Khufu's problem.

Investigators want to find out how he fed the thousands of hungry

labourers working here.

Archaeologist Claire Malleson is looking for clues.

These are samples of ash from within

one of the houses of the town.

And the plants are preserved when they're charred,

and we can identify what plant it is just by the shape.

Wheat is the most important crop for making bread.

To feed just the individuals staying in the barracks area,

it would need over 200 loaves of bread a day.

This was food production on an industrial scale,

and Claire has found the proof.

So we've got various different sizes of bread mould.

The mould itself weighs about seven kilos.

So you imagine this full of bread as well.

It was pretty hefty.

And we have hundreds of these.

Hundreds and thousands and tonnes of fragments of them.

People talk about how the Pyramid was physically constructed -

it's the infrastructure behind how that was done that, for me,

is much more fascinating.

Pyramid building was starting to transform Egypt.

A fast and efficient way to feed and house people was being developed.

But things weren't just changing at home.

Archaeologists are beginning to discover how Khufu's great

build had consequences far beyond his own nation.

In Egypt,

investigators are discovering that shipping

was vital for transporting stone

that originally encased the Great Pyramid,

giving it a brilliant white finish.

WORKERS TALKING

Now, new excavations are exposing just how far afield

these boats needed to travel to achieve Khufu's dream.

At the ancient port of Wadi al-Jarf,

Pierre Tallet's team has made an important discovery.

Builders needed copper chisels

so they could cut and shape pyramid stones with mathematical precision.

But the ancient Egyptians had a problem.

Mines near the monument couldn't produce the huge quantities needed.

So, workers had to look further afield.

Pierre has discovered the place where he believes

the builders headed to solve this problem.

Three miles from Pierre's main excavation,

he's unearthed another significant find -

the ruins of a lost ancient jetty.

Pierre's team has mapped out the jetty at low tide

to reveal that it stretches 200 metres out to sea in an L shape.

This harbour was built to be big enough

to protect a large fleet of cargo boats...

..that would sail to the Sinai Peninsula.

Without this harbour,

Khufu's dream could never have been achieved.

And Merer's papyrus reveals just how extensive

Khufu's shipping routes needed to be.

Decoding the hieroglyphs

shows that copper imports were just the tip of the iceberg.

Building the pyramid was such big business

that a vast transport network was needed

to funnel commodities to the monument.

The project was a truly international affair.

Food for the workers was farmed in the Nile Delta.

Wood for shipbuilding came from Lebanon,

400 miles to the north.

Limestone for the pyramid's casing came from Tura.

And granite, for its internal chambers,

from Aswan, far to the south.

But it wasn't just Khufu and his pyramid

that would benefit from this massive new infrastructure.

This huge construction project was transforming the nation

through the movement of goods and people on an unprecedented scale.

Archaeologist Mark Lehner is overlooking the area

where many of these materials and products arrived.

It was a teeming, bustling, busy port.

Through this water transport infrastructure

came people from all over Egypt.

It's at this port that Merer would have docked

with his limestone blocks.

The most forgiving place offered by the Giza plateau

to Merer and his men for off-loading their stone

and getting it up to the Khufu pyramid

would've been the area now just out in front of the Sphinx.

There's a natural ramping up.

In fact, the modern road from the Sphinx to the Khufu pyramid

follows that very incline.

Mark has identified the route.

But how were heavy stones hauled half a mile uphill

through manpower alone?

WORKERS TALKING

Near the pyramid,

archaeologist Adel Kelany has assembled a team of 40 men.

He wants to see how thousands of giant stones

were transported their final few hundred metres.

Now the workmen are preparing for putting this stone on this ledge.

They have to be very careful with this step

because the stone is really very heavy.

Recent excavations prove that the blocks weren't simply dragged

across the sand by sheer force.

The Egyptians used a clever system of rails

and, possibly, rollers as well.

WORKERS CHANTING

You can listen for the sound of the workmen, actually.

It shows that they are very happy and working very, very fast

for transporting these blocks.

Once they get going,

it's surprising just how much speed they can reach

with such a heavy stone.

The Egyptians had an innate understanding of force,

acceleration and momentum.

WORKERS CHEERING

WORKERS CLAPPING

When the blocks arrived at the pyramid face,

they had to be perfectly shaped to fit the sloping sides of the tomb.

This was a job for trigonometry,

not trial and error.

The ancient Egyptians are very clever with mathematic,

including, you know, the angles that

they needed for these kind of large buildings.

Ancient engineers figured out

that they only needed to take two measurements -

a horizontal distance of 11 units

and a vertical distance of 14 units.

Joining them gives the pyramid its perfect slope,

an angle of 51.8 degrees.

It was actually surprising for me

because, to making this shape, it was taking more than three hours.

It's taking more time, actually more than, you know,

splitting the stone from the quarries.

These bright white stones

were the final chapter in the story of building the Great Pyramid.

When the monument was finished,

it looked very different to today.

It's 68,000 casing stones were fitted so tightly together

the seams were barely visible.

But Khufu's huge construction project

achieved far more than just his tomb.

It brought life-changing innovations.

A massive network of waterways and an artificial port

revolutionised Egypt's transit system.

And a sophisticated new city

enabled the workforce to be organised and cared for

on a whole new scale.

Once they had put all these systems

and all this infrastructure in place,

there was no going back.

They became more important than the pyramid itself...

..and set Egyptian civilisation off on a course

for the next two or three millennium.

Khufu's workers believed this giant project

would reap rewards in the afterlife.

But their real success

was in helping to create a modern and powerful nation.

Subtitles by Ericsson