Original subtitles

[music playing]

NARRATOR: 1300 BC, the mighty Egyptian civilization

is in its golden age.

Its ruler is Ramesses II, a man who

intends to be the greatest of the pharaohs.

He will make his mark by building.

He built everywhere.

NARRATOR: Vast statues, towering obelisks,

temples carved from living rock.

Ramesses is a giant of a man.

He dominates this kingdom for 67 years,

pushing it on to ever greater glory.

North, south, east, and west, he's got a temple going up.

He's building a new capital city.

He's creating jobs like no one has created before.

NARRATOR: The ruins of what Ramesses built still stand.

But 33 centuries on, with the aid of new research

and cutting-edge graphics technology,

the true scale of his ambition can now be fully revealed.

Extraordinary feats of engineering

performed with only the most basic tools.

Thousands of people, thousands of tons of stone,

all manipulated by the will of one man.

We can now reveal "The Lost World of Ramesses the Great."

[music playing]

Ramesses is the heir to the throne of Egypt.

One day, he will become pharaoh, ruler of a civilization already

2,000 years old.

But the empire he stands to inherit

is emerging from a time of great political and religious

upheaval, and Ramesses is part of a dynasty that

has forced its way to power.

He watched as his grandfather, the first Ramesses,

became the first of the family to wear the Egyptian crown.

Now, he watches his father, King Seti,

enforce his will through military power.

You have to remember that the Ramesides were a new family.

Ramesses I had only reigned for a year and a half.

And then Seti comes to the throne,

rules for about 11 years.

NARRATOR: Ramesses' family has to show

that they are fit to rule.

They choose to do it by building.

[music playing]

Building is the tool that pharaohs have always

used to show themselves to the world,

and they do it at Karnak, the vast temple complex

in the great city of Thebes.

This is the domain of the god Amon-Re,

the imperial god of the Egyptian New Kingdom.

NARRATOR: Karnak is where the pharaohs worship their god.

They are his chief priests.

By the time of Ramesses' birth, Karnak is already vast.

Buildings were continuously added or removed or changed.

NARRATOR: Amon-Re's sanctuary lies at its heart.

Around it, each pharaoh, in turn,

has made a demonstration of his power and his piety,

adding his own new structure or gateway pylon, a new pathway

to the god.

So in periods when you have great pharaohs, pharaohs that

are conquering the world, Karnak temple's expanding.

KATHYLN COONEY: Karnak is a place where every Egyptian king

needs to make his mark.

So it makes absolute sense that Ramesses II would

be one of those kings that would need to extend Karnak temple.

NARRATOR: To make his mark, Ramesses' father conceives

the idea of a grand pillared or hypostyle hall.

His first born son, his chosen heir will help him build it.

Well, I think the transition between the reign of Seti I

and Ramesses II was a very gradual one.

And Ramesses was given a fair amount of responsibility

as a young man.

PETER BRAND: At the age of 10, Ramesses

was made a general of the army.

NARRATOR: The site for the building

is in the temple approaches, between two great pylons.

Today, any visitor to Karnak will be overawed

by what father and son built.

PETER BRAND: The hypostyle hall is absolutely vast.

You could fit most of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

within its walls.

NARRATOR: Investigators are now trying

to decipher how the hypostyle hall was constructed

and recapture what this extraordinary building looked

like during the reign of the man who built it.

This space was covered by a huge roof resting on stone supports,

the columns packed closely to accommodate the weight.

So if you want a large room, you

have to put in an awful lot of columns.

So, quite literally, the hypostyle hall

is a vast forest of columns.

NARRATOR: We know that the ancient Egyptian builders had

nothing more sophisticated to work with than stone pounders

and copper chisels, and yet, they

undertook a project which would be ambitious even

by modern standards.

Well, you're not building the columns individually.

What you do is you lay out the foundations

for the entire building, the column bases, and the side

walls.

NARRATOR: The building's plans demanded 134 columns.

The central colonnade had pillars

that were 7 stories high.

Clues to how the builders set about the task lie in these

wall paintings from a private tomb,

a kind of 3,000-year-old construction manual.

When deciphered, they reveal a highly inventive solution.

This wonderful 18th dynasty scene of mud brick making

could be a photograph taken in an Egyptian village

even today, because the techniques that it shows

have not changed in about 5,000 years.

Water is being dipped out of a pool surrounded by trees,

and it's mixed with mud and probably wheat chaff temper

to make the mixture, which is then put into molds

and put on the ground to dry for a couple of days.

The mud bricks are then carried over and used to build walls,

or, in this case, a ramp for the construction

of a hypostyle hall.

NARRATOR: The use of ramps in the construction

is a key discovery.

On this wall painting, the ramp leads

to a hall that appears buried.

Evidence indicates this technique was used elsewhere

in Karnak because the remains of one of these ramps

can still be seen.

It's now possible to work out how the builders did it.

They didn't use scaffold or cranes to raise the blocks

above the ground.

They raised the ground itself.

PETER BRAND: You lay the first level of blocks for all

the column bases and you fill inside with dirt

and you build mud brick ramps on either side.

You bring your next level of blocks--

these are all roughed out-- and you place them

over the next level.

And then you fill that in again, you

extend your ramps out further, and repeat the process.

So when the building is finished,

it is completely buried under a mound of Earth and huge mud

brick ramps on either side.

NARRATOR: The ramps were only temporary structures,

but they were hugely labor-intensive.

The slope would have been around 7 degrees.

To reach to the height of the columns

in the height of hypostyle hall, it must have been as long

as two football fields.

25,000 tons of stone were dragged up these long slopes

to make the columns.

The column drums were so massive that they had to be made in two

D-shaped blocks.

Each tipped the scales at 10 tons.

Ramesses' masons lock these stones together so tightly

that some haven't shifted in more than 32 centuries.

Peter Brand hunts for clues as to how they did it

with Denys Stocks, a specialist in ancient building techniques.

The key lies in pieces of wood fitted into notches

cut into the stone.

First of all, you have to get a piece of hard wood

and cut out the shape so that it fitted into the other side.

So the block is coming up to it, you put it in, bang, bang,

bang.

It pulled the two blocks together tight

so it couldn't move.

PETER BRAND: So these are more to assemble it

rather than to hold it together once it's built.

It is.

It's to line them up properly and make sure that they can't

move at all while the whole job is being built.

Of course, when it's all solid and finished,

there's no way that it's going to move after that.

NARRATOR: And then the stones had to be sanded smooth.

We know they didn't put the columns up smooth

from the beginning because we have one here that's still

carved in the rough.

Now, I think they didn't have time to be fussing with these

in the quarry.

They left it to the builders of the site

to finish dressing them.

They were trying to produce as many blocks in the quickest

amount of time possible.

When the columns had been erected

and the rocks and the platforms are gradually being lowered,

the workers will be smoothing the stuff like this,

with a sandstone rubber like this,

in preparation for the cutting of the hieroglyphs.

NARRATOR: Ramesses and his father oversaw this work.

But the time was coming when Seti would die

and Ramesses become king.

He would be able to do as he wished.

And the hall at Karnak would be just the start

of the most ambitious series of engineering projects

that his country had ever seen.

When Ramesses became pharaoh, he became the most powerful man

in the world.

His entire life had been a preparation for this,

and he grasped the challenge.

He took personal control of the building at Karnak.

Artists working under his orders depict him joining in the work.

It's hard to believe that he would have gotten

his hands dirty, but a formal foundation ceremony

demonstrated that what his father had started

was now to be his monument, his achievement.

PETER BRAND: First, the king stretches

out a cord between two poles in order to ceremonially survey

the temple.

Next, he takes a mattock and he hacks up the Earth,

then he has to make the first mudbrick.

And then, finally, he does the ceremony of giving the temple

to its lord.

He seems to claim in many texts

to have taken considerable interest in it,

to have been involved in the planning,

to have researched historical records

to ensure the accuracy of--

of temple plans and designs.

NARRATOR: Kent Weeks has researched these records

himself and built up a picture of how hundreds of masons

scaled these columns, working up to 70 feet in the air.

It's clear work didn't finish once the columns were up.

Every surface was to be covered with elaborate hieroglyphs.

There's good evidence that the ancient Egyptians knew and used

scaffolding in their engineering work, as in this tomb painting

from the 18th dynasty.

Here, the workmen have left pieces of wood together

to create scaffolding so that they can polish and prepare

larger-than-life-size statues of the king.

NARRATOR: Every inch had to be carved or shaped by hand.

KENT WEEKS: One man is using an abrasive to polish the surface

of the stone, and this man is working with a chisel

to carefully detail the eye.

NARRATOR: The size of Ramesses' ambition

becomes even more astonishing when you realize what

his men had to work with this was a time before iron.

The masons had to carve their stone with tools

made from soft copper.

Denys Stocks believes that the only way we can understand what

these ancient builders did is by attempting

to recreate their work with the tools they used.

Having done that and delineated

the edge of the sign.

All we need to do is take out the middle with a chisel.

NARRATOR: Denys discovers that although the ancient Egyptian

culture was highly sophisticated,

they could achieve some of their most complex work using Stone

Age technology, like this flint tool.

Because it is so hard and sharp,

it will delineate the features of the sign

much better than the copper chisel will.

NARRATOR: Each column, each wall would be adorned in this way.

And the hieroglyphs are more than decoration.

They are packed with political and religious messages.

PETER BRAND: To the average tourist,

the hypostyle hall seems a jumbling confusion

of scenes and inscriptions.

But when you look carefully at them,

you see there is an order.

The gods in the scenes always faced as if they're

inside the temple looking out.

The king always approaches as if he's coming from the outside

into the temple to greet the gods.

NARRATOR: The walls of this temple

describe the relationship between the gods, Ramesses,

and the people of Egypt.

It's a demonstration that Ramesses' authority is born

from divine power.

You stand there surrounded by this forest of columns,

and it's meant to evoke the feeling that you're

in a sacred space, enclosed space that's contained

by the gods, where new life comes into being.

NARRATOR: By bringing together decades of research with

state-of-the-art computer graphics,

we can reveal what this space would have looked like when it

was first built. All this weathered stone was once

covered with vivid painting.

Most temples in Egypt were--

appear to us today to be pretty monotonic, but actually,

in antiquity, they were a riot of colors.

NARRATOR: The kind of raw pigment

that Ramesses' designers use can still be bought today

in the markets of Luxor.

Now, as then, it's mixed with vegetable oil

and bound with natural glue.

The ancient Egyptians had a much more limited range than--

than what we see here.

They were basically working with six colors, red, yellow, green,

blue, white, and black, and that was it.

The most expensive pigments were blues and greens.

KENT WEEKS: Can you imagine a tomb painted in this color

blue?

KATHYLN COONEY: And would actually really communicate

to the people looking at this material

that you were able to afford the very finest.

KENT WEEKS: I think we're lucky that most of the paint

and pigment on these temple walls

has faded because 3,000 years ago, these must have been

the most garish places you can imagine.

NARRATOR: Thousands of man hours and vast expense

went into building and adorning this hall.

And yet, only a privileged elite of courtiers and priests

would ever get to see it.

KENT WEEKS: Ordinary hoi polloi like you

and me might be allowed outside the temple,

and maybe, on festive occasions, we

might be allowed into the first courtyard,

but that would be it.

NARRATOR: The temple was not a public place of worship.

It was the private home of a god, the place where, on behalf

of his people, the pharaoh makes his offerings to that god.

It raises him above all other mortals.

It gives him power.

The secret interior of the hypostyle hall

would be hidden behind monumental curtain walls.

And the walls themselves would be a statement

of Ramesses' greatness.

This phase of the building would require 7,000 tons of stone,

and only a certain type of stone would do.

KENT WEEKS: Here we are at Thebes

with these huge limestone hills surrounding us,

and yet, limestone was not the stone of choice

for the building of temples.

For that, the Egyptians much preferred sandstone.

And the closest source to that is about 100 kilometers

further south.

NARRATOR: The vast majority of it

came from one area, the Silsila quarries.

They are three days journey up the Nile from Karnak.

Kent Weeks has made this journey.

The pharaohs had an enormous hunger for stone.

KENT WEEKS: When you consider the number of cubic feet

of sandstone that had gone into the New Kingdom

buildings constructed at Thebes, Silsila

must have been a sight that was going full bore practically

every day of the year for 500 years.

NARRATOR: Silsila was on the river,

but investigators have found other quarries deep

in the Egyptian desert.

A team of investigators have been

trying to map the network of roads built

to service these quarries.

Well, it's probably the best preserved road network

from ancient Egypt.

NARRATOR: The quarries here are more than 2 miles

from the Nile.

PER STOREMYR: Interestingly, all the roads coming down

from the quarries here, they're leading in the same direction,

all towards this-- this0 point down here.

ELIZABETH BLOXHAM: The shortest overland route to water.

They could have stockpiled the stone

and then waited for the highest floods

to then float the stone away.

KENT WEEKS: To quarry so many blocks, drag them to the river,

load them on ships, bring those ships in timing

with the Nile flood, offload them at various sites

in the Karnak, Luxor area, it must

have kept thousands of people busy throughout the year.

NARRATOR: It took a fleet of 50 barges

to keep Ramesses' builders supplied.

They had to be almost flat bottom

to take advantage of the Nile's flood,

but they could still carry huge loads.

We have shipping records from the time of Ramesses

that tell us that there were captains delivering loads

of stone from the Gebel Silsila quarries,

each boat was carrying anywhere from five to seven blocks

of stone.

NARRATOR: With the Nile in full flood,

the boats could sail right up to the temple.

This is the inundation of year 28 of Ramesses III.

This tells us that 3,000 years ago, during the annual flood,

the Nile reached to this level.

NARRATOR: Using specially-built canals,

the blocks were delivered as close as possible

to the construction site.

But they still had to be manhandled into position

for the masons to begin.

Denys Stocks believes that this was done using mortar.

It acted as a lubricant to help the workers ease the stones

into place.

DENYS STOCKS: We've got the mortar

on now, which lubricates the block as they slide

across the other blocks.

Bit more.

That's it.

That's it.

NARRATOR: Block by block, Ramesses' great hypostyle hall

was enclosed and the pathway to the inner sanctum

was completed.

3,300 years on, we can reveal a site once only

visible to the priests of Amon-Re.

[music playing]

KENT WEEKS: The further in you go, the closer you

are moving toward the god who takes up

residence in this temple.

PETER BRAND: Here, in the inner sanctum,

set the enormous gold-plated bark of the god Amon-re

with a ram-headed prow filled this room.

Every day, the king, as the chief priest,

had to go into the sanctuary of the god, clothe the god,

feed the god, anoint the god, read a number of texts that

would awaken the god and give him new life,

and then sacredly close up that shrine,

leave no footprints behind.

NARRATOR: Ramesses had made his mark on Karnak.

It had been impressive by any standard when he started,

but now, it was one of the wonders of the world.

He now turned his attention to the other great shrine

in the city of Thebes, the Luxor temple.

[music playing]

Even as the hall at Karnak was being built,

Ramesses II began another project, just as ambitious,

and located barely 2 miles away.

The road to the great temple at Luxor was lined with sphinxes.

Every year, the pharaoh took this route in a procession

to celebrate the most important gift the gods could give

to Egypt, the Nile flood.

The flood kept the land of Egypt fertile.

The ceremony that marked it was called the Opet Festival.

KENT WEEKS: The ceremony started out fairly somber,

but by the end of the week, it had become a wild, almost

carnival-like atmosphere.

KATHYLN COONEY: This would have been

a time of great drunkenness, great joy,

lots of sexual abandon.

It was meant to help the god Amon-Re recreate himself

so that he could be renewed and help

Egypt get through another year of growth and prosperity.

NARRATOR: Wherever Ramesses built, he

was competing with the pharaohs who had gone before him.

There was already a massive colonnade at Luxor temple.

Ramesses would add to it, make it his own,

and overshadow it by building even bigger.

Worn down over three millennia, but still clearly visible,

this wall carving shows the scale of Ramesses' vision.

The statues would be 40-feet tall,

the obelisks, even taller, each carved from a single block

of red granite.

The obelisk would be the first thing

illuminated by the sun's rays every morning,

a symbol of the connection between the king and the gods.

We know that Ramesses' engineers took on the daunting task set

by their king and completed it.

The challenge for archeologists is tracing the steps back

and deciphering from the clues how they did it.

An obelisk needs to be made from hard stone.

Ramesses' men chose red granite, and the nearest source

of red granite is 100 miles south at Aswan.

PETER BRAND: Fresh granite is a marvelous stone.

It's very hard, and there's only one place in Egypt

you can get it, here at Aswan.

NARRATOR: This half-finished obelisk is an incredible source

of clues.

It was abandoned only after hundreds of laborers

had put in months of work.

Well, this obelisk is quite incredible.

I mean, it would have been about 130 feet long,

as maybe as wide as 9 feet.

When you get to this point here, you

find that they dug a deep trench here,

and then what they would have had

to do is lower the stone down and dug underneath the obelisk.

Now, they would have had to undercut it

along its entire length, leaving it only on a few supports.

NARRATOR: This was the second challenge,

to remove a single piece of stone

weighing close to 800 tons.

The tools were basic, to say the least.

--sharp point.

That's very helpful for cutting granite.

NARRATOR: Days, weeks, and months spent chipping away

at the rock, the body having to absorb

the shock of each impact.

That must have been hard on your hands, though.

It is very hard.

The pressure of banging this rock into another rock, it

must have been excruciating work.

NARRATOR: Trials suggest that with hundreds men working

at full stretch, it might take a week to remove

even an inch of stone.

And this was precision work.

The visual impact of an obelisk depends

on geometry and symmetry.

DENYS STOCKS: OK, hold it really tight.

NARRATOR: To create the four converging edges which travel

from the base to the tip of the rock,

craftsman had to rely simply on a length of string stretched

from fixed measuring rods.

Oh, yes.

Brilliant.

Now, this is right on the nose here.

This is just touching the underneath of the string, which

means it's exactly right.

NARRATOR: Once the cutting was finished,

the task began of getting the 800-ton obelisk into place.

It would be floated down the Nile on a vast, specially built

barge.

In Luxor, it would be hauled into position.

It was then lowered into place using temporary walls and sand.

They would have brought the obelisk in butt

end up a big, huge ramp, and then they

would have come to a silo filled with sand.

As they slowly let the sand out, the obelisk

would have floated down.

And it would have hit this narrow groove at the bottom.

Then men with ropes could come and they can tilt it up

to the final position.

NARRATOR: Ramesses had achieved his aim.

The view that faced him when he first saw this grand entrance

can now be revealed 33 centuries later.

He had eclipsed the achievements of those who had built here

before, and he claimed the temple for his own.

Throughout Egypt, the story was the same.

This guy is building everywhere, north, south, east,

and west.

He's got a temple going up.

He's building a new capital city.

He's creating jobs like no one has created before.

This is a time of economic prosperity.

NARRATOR: Ramesses wasn't just building

to ensure his place in history.

Turning his attention to the southern gateway

to his kingdom, he would build a new temple, Abu Simbel,

and here, he would make himself a god.

[music playing]

Ramesses would reign for 67 years, almost three

times the life expectancy of the average Egyptian male.

And during that time, an army of masons

would be constantly at work, carving his name and his image

onto walls, columns, and statues throughout the kingdom.

But his next building project would

take this a stage further.

On the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes

stands his mortuary temple, the Ramesseum.

It took 20 years to build, had its own pillared hall,

and was dominated by a statue of Ramesses which

lies smashed on the ground by the building's entrance.

It would have resembled this statue, only many, many times

larger.

It was one of the largest sculptures

in the ancient world.

Calculations put it at around 70 feet tall.

The entire structure would have weighed over 1,000 tons.

That's 15 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

The pharaoh intended that when his time came,

the Ramesseum would be his obituary in stone.

The evidence suggests that he was doing much more than simply

following tradition.

These carvings reveal that Ramesses

had a grand political and religious plan.

He was rewriting history the way he wanted it to be.

They tell the story of Ramesses' most famous military battle,

Kadesh.

The Battle of Kadesh happened in year five of the reign

of Ramesses II, and he faced his strongest foe, the Hittite

Empire, and they met the Orontes River in Syria,

and it was a near disaster.

We know that Ramesses II did very badly in the Battle

of Kadesh, and, in fact, we had information

from the other side, obviously, written by the enemy,

of a peace treaty that was signed after the battle had

been fought that suggests that at best, the fight

between the Egyptians and the Hittites was a draw.

NARRATOR: And yet, these are images of Ramesses victorious,

supreme.

The pharaoh is shown as a giant.

The foes that surround him are dead,

dying, or in complete surrender.

These carvings distort the truth.

And in the Egyptian way of thinking,

they are more powerful than simple propaganda.

KATHYLN COONEY: When you represent the Battle of Kadesh

in its ideal form with the outcome

that you desire, then, in the Egyptian mindset,

that's what will come into being.

NARRATOR: Ramesses believed that if he cast something in stone,

he made it happen, even if it wasn't true.

And the Ramesseum was only the beginning.

[music playing]

He is going to do what few other pharaohs ever dared.

He is going to transform himself and rule as a living god.

To make it happen, he will use the stone cliffs at Abu Simbel.

PETER BRAND: Abu Simbel is a unique temple

carved in the rock that these giant statues.

It's so audacious.

NARRATOR: Ramesses embarks on his most ambitious building

project, a vast temple on the edge of his empire.

This temple is built far afield to celebrate the king so

that he's not infringing on the territory of the god, Amon.

NARRATOR: It has taken the work of generations of investigators

to uncover the true scale of Ramesses' achievement here.

With Abu Simbel, Ramesses is literally breaking new ground,

because unlike his other monuments,

this temple is not built, but cut from the rock.

[music playing]

Instead of transporting stone to the site,

they are carrying it away.

Teams of masons chipped the sandstone away until four

great statues of their pharaoh emerge, each one almost 70 feet

high.

They are a deliberate attempt to intimidate the local Nubian

population.

KENT WEEKS: Nubians were in possession

of Egypt's principal source of gold,

and it was extremely important that Egypt maintain control

over the gold mines and the trade routes

that led into Africa, source of Ebony, ivory, slaves,

and so forth.

NARRATOR: The interior of the temple

is equally ambitious, a network of chambers tunneled over

150 feet back into the cliff.

And on two days a year, there is a dramatic demonstration

of the royal architect's grasp of astronomy

and the precision of his builders.

The Rays of the sun travel all the way through these chambers,

hitting the inner sanctuary, the place where

Ramesses' statue stands with those

of three other divinities.

And so, Ramesses proves a point to himself.

He is not merely the greatest of the pharaohs while alive.

Ramesses II is one of the few kings in Egyptian history

to declare himself divine before he died.

KATHYLN COONEY: I think many in ancient Egypt

would be awestruck that a king could live to such an age,

could produce what he produced.

And it is quite possible that some ancient Egyptians

did believe that he was the god incarnate.

NARRATOR: Ramesses made his mark,

but a final challenge awaited him.

In the eyes of the people, he was a living god.

He now had to build a tomb that was worthy of his greatness.

[music playing]

Every pharaoh builds his own tomb.

The planning begins the moment he takes the throne.

As in every part of his life, Ramesses

will build for his death on a greater scale,

with greater vision than every pharaoh who has gone before.

The traditional royal resting place,

the Valley of the Kings on the Nile's West Bank.

KENT WEEKS: Well, in a rough sense,

as we cross from the East bank to the West Bank,

we're crossing from the city of the living

to the city of the dead.

NARRATOR: In the time of Ramesses II,

this has been a royal burial ground for 500 years.

The plans for his tomb take these past burials

as a starting point.

But he lives into his 80s, ruling for almost seven

decades.

And before he is placed in his tomb,

he will bury many of his own vast family.

As part of his work mapping the Valley of the Kings,

Kent Weeks has discovered an extraordinary complex

of underground chambers.

They have been given the name KV5.

This is the largest tomb complex in the valley,

and it is where Ramesses buried his own sons.

We discovered that the tomb contains more than 125

chambers.

And it has every earmark of the reign of Ramesses II about it.

It's unique in plan, unique in size, unique in function

as a family mausoleum.

It must have been a very sad job and it must

have been a very difficult one.

And it may explain why KV5 is such an unusual tomb.

NARRATOR: This was one man's attempt to keep his family

with him for eternity.

Making it a reality required a special team

of workers who left their mark here, written on the rock.

Deciphering these notes has revealed a world of men

that history overlooks.

KENT WEEKS: They left behind a great amount of material.

A lot of that consisted of ostraca, notes

that they made to themselves, from love letters,

to IOUs, from notes to parents, to shopping lists.

And basically, they're just a piece of limestone on which

they would make little doodles.

These are wonderful texts for an archeologist and historian

because they tell us things that we ordinarily know nothing

about in ancient Egypt.

This is the home of Kaha and his wife, [inaudible]

Their nice-sized living room.

Kitchen with a mortar for grinding grain on the floor.

It's a very substantial house, but that makes sense,

because Kaha was a very important figure

in the early Rameside period.

He was responsible for a substantial amount of building

activity during the important reigns of Seti I and Ramesses

II.

NARRATOR: Once every 10 days, the work team made the journey

along the cliff face for their tomb-building shift

in the Valley of the Kings.

KATHYLN COONEY: They worked on a 10-day work week,

and they received, at least, during the reign of Ramesses

II, two days off.

NARRATOR: Kent Weeks retraces their path.

The builder's challenge was, within this maze

of existing tombs and passageways,

to find a suitable site with enough space

to accommodate Ramesses' vision of what his tomb should be.

KENT WEEKS: Every tomb for a pharaoh

served the same purpose.

In the New Kingdom, that was to ensure the safe journey

of the king from this life to the next.

NARRATOR: Ramesses had officiated at his father's

funeral, presided over the ceremony

in which his beautifully decorated tomb was sealed.

The images that cover these walls

would have been burned into his mind.

Seti he decided that he wanted this entire tomb

to be decorated with very elaborately painted and carved

reliefs.

And so the entire tomb, from the entrance to the burial chamber,

is covered with a reliefs and inscriptions.

NARRATOR: Ramesses commands the man

who built this for his father to build a tomb for him,

but more lavish, more magnificent.

The task was daunting.

Before any decoration could begin,

the tunneling had to be completed.

KENT WEEKS: We know that they worked two 4-hour shifts

every day, and they timed their shifts

by using lamps to light their work with wicks

of a certain length.

When the wick had burned out, it was time to break for lunch.

After lunch, they put a second wick in the lamp.

When that was gone, it was time to go back home.

NARRATOR: The Egyptian builders were highly

skilled and disciplined, but they were also capable

of making mistakes.

With so many burial chambers in the Valley of the Kings,

it was inevitable that some of the tunnels

would cut into existing tombs.

What did they do when they run into another tomb?

Well, in each case, they had a different solution.

In one case, they incorporated the earlier tomb

into the plan of the new one.

NARRATOR: Some of the most impressive tunnel systems

were effectively connected by accident.

Ramesses planned to be buried in a magnificent chamber

at the end of a series of long descending tunnels.

This chamber lay pristine and ready to receive his body

for as much as half a century.

But the 3,200 years since his death

have seen earthquakes and floods.

The roof has partially collapsed.

The decoration which would have covered its walls is erased.

Only by studying the burial chamber on which Ramesses based

his design can we recover what the king's final resting place

looked like.

Religious symbols would have covered every surface.

The ceiling would have been adorned with a starry sky.

On each of the walls, an image of the protective god, Isis,

would stand guard over the pharaoh's sarcophagus.

Positioned in the center of the room,

a multilayered stone casket was as much of a feat of skill

as the tomb that housed it.

[non-english] come on, [non-english]..

NARRATOR: Denys Stocks has been trying to establish precisely

how the ancient Egyptians managed to cut and shape

the rock into a casket.

DENYS STOCKS: This is very hard granite, the hardest stone

in Egypt to cut.

NARRATOR: He discovers that the Egyptians found

a way of cutting stone using soft, copper-bladed saws.

DENYS STOCKS: The saw is cutting this down probably

at a rate of a centimeter per hour, which means it would take

several days to cut this through.

NARRATOR: The sword doesn't have teeth.

Sand is used as an abrasive.

It's labor-intensive, but extremely effective.

DENYS STOCKS: Wind the rope around the shaft.

NARRATOR: Hollowing out the sarcophagus

would be even more difficult. By studying wall inscriptions

from before the time of Ramesses,

Denys believes he can recreate the innovative techniques

that the masons used.

DENYS STOCKS: If you imagine the top of the sarcophagus

being like this, an oblong, then they

had to drill holes around the perimeter in order

to delineate the shape of the hollow inside the sarcophagus.

And then they could put some weakening holes in the middle

and then break away all the columns of rocks between, as

well as the cores, and then, after four or five levels

of that, they will have reached the bottom of the sarcophagus,

deep enough for pharaoh to be put into it.

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NARRATOR: Although this process took a long time,

it was finished long before Ramesses died.

Even his age marked him out as remarkable.

He was in his 90th year when he was laid in his sarcophagus.

PETER BRAND: By the very length of his reign,

Ramesses achieved a literally godlike status.

There probably was nobody left alive in Egypt

that could remember the reign of his father

or that had even been alive when Ramesses

had come to the throne.

NARRATOR: The mummified body of Ramesses II

lies preserved in Cairo museum.

3,000 years on, we can still see his face.

We can still see the mark that this builder king left

on his country.

PETER BRAND: Ramesses left his stamp throughout Egypt.

You cannot go to a site in this country and not find the name

of Ramesses II inscribed on at least one block or statue.

NARRATOR: It is easy to see why his achievements have so

captivated engineers, archeologists, and historians.

Scarcely a ruler in human history

had left more monuments than he.

KATHYLN COONEY: We're interested in a king who

lived for so long.

We're interested in a king who's able to marshal

incredible amounts of manpower to make his mark on Egypt.

NARRATOR: The hypostyle hall at Karnak, the tomb that he built

for himself, the temple he cut in the rock at Abu Simbel,

these ruins are all clues to the Egypt

that Ramesses built. But it is only when they are brought back

to life, see them as Ramesses saw them,

that we can truly know what he achieved,

a world whose splendor has never been equaled in 3,200 years.

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