Original subtitles

Egypt, the richest source of

archaeological treasures on the planet.

Oh, that's a fabulous one.

Beneath this desert landscape lie the secrets of this ancient civilization.

Wow, can you see why the pharaoh's chose this place?

Now for a full season of excavations, our cameras have been given

unprecedented access to follow teams on the frontline of archaeology.

I'm driving so fast because I'm so excited!

It's an entrance, we can see an entrance!

Revealing buried secrets.

I have just been told that they have found something.

Oh my gosh!

A sphinx!

And making discoveries that could rewrite ancient history.

This time, new secrets of the boy king, Tutankhamen.

Alia uses pioneering technology to reveal startling new evidence about his tomb,

and why it remained hidden for 3,000 years.

A lot of robberies were going on, how was it not found?

Eissa's team discovers a long-lost cache of king Tutankhamen's treasures.

And Alejandro discovers extraordinary burial treasures in a

4,000 year-old tomb.

Congratulations!

The valley of the kings, 3,500 years ago,

the great pharaohs stopped building pyramids as their tombs.

They chose these secluded cliffs to become their cemetery.

Today, archaeologists come from all over the world to unlock the mysteries still

hidden in this city of the dead.

It's the first day in the valley for Cairo born egyptologist

Aliaa Ismail and her team.

There's a real buzz in this place.

People are coming from all over the world, coming to the valley, it's amazing.

I'm so proud to have such ancestry.

It's one of the most famous necropolises in the world and I think what

is special is that it comes out of nowhere.

Over 300 miles south of Cairo, in the heart of Egypt,

lie the limestone cliffs of the valley of the kings.

After 200 years of excavation,

archaeologists have located sixty-five tombs hidden among the rocks.

But only one has ever been found with its treasure still inside,

it belonged to the pharaoh, Tutankhamen.

This here is number 62, Tutankhamen.

One of those great finds of the century.

British explorer Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen's

tomb in 1922.

One of his teams spotted steps leading down through the sand.

They led to the tomb entrance, buried beneath feet of rubble and debris.

What Carter found inside inspired archaeologists for generations to come.

Deep inside the mountains,

amid a maze of tunnels that bore deep through the rock,

Carter reached the tomb of Tutankhamen hidden right in the center of the valley.

Inside, he found treasures unlike anything ever seen before.

Over 5,000 priceless artifacts including golden statues.

In the burial chamber the pharaoh's mummy, wearing a golden death mask,

was placed inside a coffin made of more than 200 pounds of solid gold.

This intact tomb made Tutankhamen the most famous of the pharaohs.

Now Aliaa is investing this golden pharaoh's life.

Wow.

And why his tomb remained hidden for so long.

Aliaa's team has been scanning and documenting the tomb for the last ten years,

and they've made a remarkable discovery.

The idea here is to understand what's going on when you look at

the data void of color.

The scans strip away the paint on the walls to reveal unusual markings.

This was the main scene, and here is the 3D of the north wall.

So, as you can see here, the silhouette of an image and this would have

been done while they were painting.

The images show the indented outline of the face hidden below.

It's caused by the tip of the paintbrush if you start painting when

the plaster is still wet.

This is why the brushes would have made a very light impression and

this allows us to understand it was rushed.

But why would the tomb builders rush such an important job?

The pictures on the wall reveal another set of clues.

Despite becoming the most famous pharaoh of ancient Egypt,

Tutankhamen did not have a lengthy reign.

He was only a nine-year-old boy when he became king,

and relied on trusted advisors to help rule his vast empire.

As Tutankhamen grew older,

he was known to portray himself as a warrior king,

riding into battle on a chariot.

But the boy king suffered from multiple illnesses, including malaria.

He was only nineteen-years-old when he unexpectantly died.

Aliaa thinks the marks her scans reveal in the plaster are evidence

of a hurried burial due to Tutankhamen's sudden death.

The decorated part of the tomb is very small, it's only the burial chamber.

The rest of the tomb is not decorated.

If they had more time, all of this was going to be decorated.

While the tomb's construction may have been rushed, its treasures were

everything a pharaoh could desire to take him into the afterlife.

So why did this tomb lay hidden below a layer of rock for thousands of years when

all the other tombs in the valley were looted?

To solve this mystery, Aliaa will turn to new technology as she moves her

investigation out into the valley.

300 miles north, in Giza,

in the shadow of the pyramids, the biggest treasure haul in history

is getting a new home, a one-billion-dollar museum and research center.

When completed, the grand Egyptian museum will reunite all of Tutankhamen's treasures

in one place, for the first time in 100 years.

Having all of the pieces from the tomb of Tutankhamen together

in one place, this will be a fantastic chance to find new facts,

new hidden things about Tutankhamen.

After Carter removed the treasures from tut's tomb,

they ended up in museums around Egypt.

Now, for the first time, scientists and egyptologists will use modern

technology to analyze each object.

Some details reappear and give us new information about these antiquities.

But some of tut's greatest treasures are yet to arrive.

300 miles south in the Luxor museum, Eissa Zidan is preparing 122 of these

priceless artifacts for the move to Giza.

Eissa's packing list includes one of tut's famous chariots,

intricate model boats and

a unique head of the cow goddess, Hathor, elaborately gilded with gold.

After just four hours, Eissa's packing suddenly comes to a halt.

One of his teams has discovered something completely unexpected

in the storeroom.

It's an antique box that Howard Carter used to pack and transport Tutankhamen's

treasures out of the tomb.

The box has been missing, presumed lost, for decades,

and no one knows what treasures it may hold.

120 miles south of the valley of the kings, near Aswan,

a Spanish research team from Jaen university

is hoping to follow in Carter's footsteps and make new

discoveries that could rewrite history.

Professor Alejandro Jimenez-Serrano heads the largest foreign team

working in Egypt.

Today is the first day of the dig season.

Sorry for the mess.

We are sharing the room, three researchers of the team.

This is my, my bed, supposedly the best one.

Sorry.

It's amazing to get up and the first thing that you see apart from the ugly face

of your roommates is the Qubbet El-Hawa, the hill.

Qubbet El-Hawa is one of the largest ancient burial sites in Egypt.

So far, 100 tombs have been discovered here.

They belong to the nobles who governed Egypt hundreds of years before

the pharaoh's buried in the valley of the kings.

Alejandro's mission is to hunt for more unopened tombs and reveal more

about these early Egyptians.

It's difficult to explain how I feel.

Not only nervous, it's exciting, it's a mix of feelings.

It's an honor to...

To come every year.

Now here comes the most difficult part of the day,

to climb the hill.

This is the team's tenth year digging here.

It's so nice to be here again.

There's a reason why everyone is excited to be back.

Last year, Alejandro found the entranced to a sealed tomb,

but his permit expired before he could explore inside.

Today is 40 degrees, and working underneath the sun,

today's gonna be tough.

To protect against modern day tomb-robbers,

they put a steel security door to block the entrance

of the vertical shaft that leads to the sealed burial chamber.

Well it has been one-year waiting, one-year imagining the possibilities.

I'm very excited.

In Luxor, Eissa's team packs Tutankhamen's treasures for the move

to the grand Egyptian museum in Giza.

But in the storeroom,

Eissa is ready to open Carter's long-lost box to discover

what's inside.

E if the box really does contain priceless

treasures from Tutankhamen's tomb.

Ah.

- Fantastic. - It's amazing.

These delicate wooden pieces are ancient boat parts.

Storeroom records suggest they could be missing from a model boat

Howard Carter found in Tutankhamen's tomb.

According to ancient Egyptian belief,

boats played a key role after death.

So, placing model boats into tombs was a vital part of any burial.

The vessels also came complete with crew because it was believed the replicas

would come to life and help with fishing and transport in the underworld.

The pharaohs used a special vessel to sail across the sky for eternity.

Ordinary people also thought they could reach the afterlife by boat,

rowing on the Nile and into the next world.

You can see here the date of the newspaper,

it's Sunday 5th of November, 1933.

To discover where these pieces came from,

Mohammad inspects Carter's original inventory.

Records show that the box was sent to Luxor in 1973

but had gone missing, presumed lost or stolen.

Eissa thinks the rest of the boat is safe in the new Cairo lab,

so they may finally be able to reunite it.

To transport the treasures to Giza,

Eissa's team must traverse 400 miles of barren desert roads

and crowded city streets before they reach the safety of the new museum.

It will take two trucks to transport all 122 of the artifacts to Giza.

This a very, very big moment for the collection,

this is the final trip of Tutankhamen.

But with such priceless relics on board,

there's concern the convoy could be a target for a hijacking.

We have a good police and good army.

They will follow us during moving from Luxor until arrive to Cairo.

With security in place, it's time to roll.

They now face a grueling twelve-hour journey through the desert to

reach Giza before nightfall.

Ever since Carter's discovery of Tutankhamen's priceless golden treasures,

archaeologists have continued to try and figure out where and how the

ancient Egyptians found vast quantities of gold.

Fifty-miles south of the valley of the kings,

on the edge of the eastern desert,

French gold expert Thomas Faucher and archaeologist John ward are

on the hunt for the origins of Tutankhamen's gold.

So, I'm going to...

What are you waiting for, a traffic signal?

The eastern desert covers 85,000 square-miles of remote barren wilderness.

Some of the rock here contains tiny grains of gold locked inside.

Thomas has studied ancient gold mining techniques for seven years.

Now he wants to see if he can find any evidence of it.

But this part of the desert is a risky place to be.

The thing is we need to leave before dark because it's not safe if we are

staying there because we can lose our way, we can have an accident and

it's also at the sunset that all the snakes are going out.

Snakes?

Yeah, vipers.

No one told me about...

There are horrid vipers, yeah.

The first stop, an ancient well.

It could provide clues to the location of mining communities during

the time of Tutankhamen.

This is the well just right in front of us here.

It's dry.

My god, that's a long way down.

The well might be dry today, but it was so important to

the ancient Egyptians, they built a temple to honor it.

It's beautiful isn't it?

They actually applied a plaster gyp ceiling and then applied the paint.

Amazing.

The text engraved on these walls reveals clues about the

gold miners and where they were heading.

Ancient engineers built a network of Wells and rest stops stretching all the way

across the desert, each a day's walk from the last,

enabling travelers and miners

to safely cross and explore the barren desert.

The temple carvings indicate these Wells led toward the mines.

Thomas hopes he will be able to find some evidence of the people

behind Tutankhamen's goldmining operations.

Now it's time to go deeper east...

Like an ancient treasure map, they must follow the trail of

Wells further into the desert.

In Aswan, at the ancient burial site of qubbet El-Hawa,

Alejandro is about to open a 4,000-year-old tomb.

They're on the hunt for whatever burial treasure may be inside.

I don't know who is more nervous, me or my team.

I want to go now!

It's amazing.

It contains a 4,000-year-old coffin.

Workers have inserted a box covered in acid-free paper inside the coffin to

stop it from collapsing while they examine the tomb.

There, we have been very lucky.

It's impossible to explain the feelings that I'm having.

The burial consisted in two coffins, the outer coffin and the inner coffin.

Among the debris of the outer coffin,

Alejandro spots something extraordinary.

It is full of wooden models, but unfortunately, the outer

coffin fall over them.

The chamber is full of model boats,

similar to the one in Tutankhamen's tomb.

To find this funerary boat in a tomb is rare today.

But there's not just one, there are four, complete with crew.

You want to laugh, you want to shout, you want to cry.

This is the first time in seventy-years a set of boats like

this has been found.

This discovery gives Alejandro an extremely rare opportunity to study

such important burial goods.

But first he has to extract them from the tomb safely.

Alejandro calls in his team of conservation specialists,

Sara and Theresa.

Termites have attacked the wooden boats.

Sara sprays on a liquid adhesive to hold them together.

So, we will see if they are capable to make a miracle.

They prepare a foam-lined cradle to support the boat for the move

to the team's restoration lab, but the wooden hull is stuck to the tomb floor.

It'll require surgical precision using scalpels to free it.

From the tomb to the restoration lab we are talking

about perhaps 40-meters.

But today's very windy which is very, very aggressive.

The ancient boats are extremely fragile.

Get ready.

With a drop in the wind, the team sees the chance to remove the first boat.

♪ ♪

Perfect. That was exciting.

One of the best moments in my career.

We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 person.

We take many weeks to clean it and fix the pieces that were

broken some centuries ago.

While the team gets to work on the boat,

Alejandro can finally open the coffin to see who and what is inside.

In the middle of the desert,

the convoy carrying Tutankhamen's priceless

treasures is two hours into its journey when Eissa spots a problem.

A thermal blanket protecting tut's golden chariot is coming loose.

If it flies off, it could cause a crash.

The unscheduled stop in the desert makes this convoy,

carrying the world's most priceless treasures, a potential target for hijackers.

Protecting tut's chariot.

Removing the cover,

they risk the scorching desert heat potentially damaging

the priceless treasure.

Everything is okay.

Now, Eissa needs to get the convoy moving.

We hope to arrive to Cairo safely.

In the valley, egyptologist Aliaa Ismail is on a mission to

discover how Tutankhamen's tomb and treasures remained hidden for 3,000 years.

A lot of robberies were going on in ancient times and modern times.

But it seems that this particular tomb was not found.

How was it not found?

The ancient engineers of Tutankhamen's tomb had a plan.

Inside the mountain, they went to great lengths to conceal the tomb.

The pharaoh's burial chamber is located 26 feet underground,

and is defended from the inside out.

Engineers constructed a wall to block off the burial chamber.

They filled the corridor leading to the king with tons of rubble,

before sealing a final doorway and covering Tutankhamen's tomb with

a vast amount of boulders under earth standard tomb protection of the day.

But when Carter discovered this tomb, it had more material on top than

any other in the valley.

This may explain how it remained undiscovered for over 3,000 years.

But how did this extra rock and debris get here?

Aliaa joins German geologist Martin Ziegler to investigate.

If you want to understand the evolution of the valley of the kings, you

need to also understand the evolution of the rock.

Martin thinks there could be clues in the rocks at the

entrance to a nearby tomb.

Just at the entrance of it, a slab is just hanging above,

a rock basically could fall out of the cliff.

Egypt is hit with dozens of earthquakes each year.

So, Martin's installed a seismometer to measure any vibrations that

could trigger rock falls.

With this one we calculate it to be...

Weigh about 600 to 700 kilometers from the valley of the kings.

What if an earthquake would...

Were to happen like much closer to the valley of the kings, how would it affect it?

A very big earthquake could destabilize some rock portions.

So, when you look in the...

In the history of recorded earthquakes, the historic timescales, let's say the

thousands of years, we have some records of earthquakes of that type of magnitude.

So, could rock falls caused by earthquakes 3,000 years ago account

for the extra tons of rock that covered the entrance to Tutankhamen's tomb?

From the geological past and the historic point of view, they could have rock

falls or rock slides that are triggered by earthquakes covering tombs.

But there are no cliffs directly above Tutankhamen's tomb, so it

wouldn't have been hit by a direct rockfall.

How did so much extra material travel down the valley and completely cover

the entrance to the tomb?

To solve this mystery Aliaa and Martin must take to the air.

Deep in the eastern desert, Thomas and John are looking for evidence of the miners who

produced the gold for Tutankhamen's treasures.

They're trying to find a route of ancient Wells that the goldminers would

have followed as they travelled to the mines.

It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But I'm losing a few kidneys.

Seventy miles from the last ancient well,

Thomas and John head into the unknown.

With their g-p-s broken down, they now risk getting completely lost.

This piece of technology is defunct!

It is not working.

Look here, it's literally on the right side.

So, we are now at the back end.

So, we need to turn around.

But after two days of searching, John thinks they may have

finally found something.

What's that over there?

At the base of that mountain there?

So, we found it!

It's a settlement.

It may look like scattered stones and debris, but to Thomas' expert eye,

he can see the outline of ancient buildings.

We have the huts where the people were living and where they were working.

Yeah, we definitely have here the evidence...

- Oh Thomas... - Here...

I mean people have been working here and we see, yeah,

there are even more over there.

As they get closer,

John spots the tools the ancient miners would have used to extract

gold from the rocks.

Oh.

Yeah, that's the grinding stone.

That's a pounder.

Yeah, that's a pounder. Yeah, exactly.

That's what they would break...

Yeah they would... The quartz with. Yeah.

It's the remains of an ancient goldmining camp.

I mean how many people are we talking, 20, 30?

Yeah maybe there were like families living here.

Thomas has studied ancient mining techniques for years.

But seeing this evidence first-hand brings home the hardships the miners endured.

You start from a piece of quartz like this and you want to make

product out of it.

So, you need to crush it.

And you have to imagine how much pain it takes just

to break a single piece of quartz,

doing that like all day long, in the sun, pounding and pounding and

grinding and grinding and doing that for years.

Evidence here paints a picture of the life of desert miners.

They cut shafts stretching up to thirty-two feet deep into the stone in search of

precious seams of quartz rock that contained gold.

Crushing the quartz was a massive undertaking.

Mining experts have calculated that a team of twenty people would take

a week to process enough stone to make just a spoonful of gold.

That's heavy.

Seriously.

Sadly, there is very little evidence left of these ancient mines, but these

settlements provide new insight into the communities that lived such hard lives

processing the gold.

We have all the material they were using for sure, that they were

working here to extract and process the gold to send it to the valley of the kings.

- We've found it. - We've found it.

In Aswan, Alejandro's team prepares to remove the coffin from the

tomb they've opened.

Inscriptions reveal it belongs to a man called Shemai.

They have just struck the lid of the coffin of Shemai.

Rebecca, you are the first person that is looking at Shemai's face in 4000 years.

Congratulations!

The inner coffin is intact, but extremely fragile.

Alejandro's team has reinforced it to try and protect the mummy inside.

It's difficult to express the feelings that I have now.

It's a special moment because I'm studying this family, and it's almost my second family.

In the restoration lab, the intricate beauty

of the model boats is starting to appear.

Termites have eaten much of the wood, but their excrement

has actually helped hold parts of the boats together for thousands of years.

We have some parts that are still in a very good state of conservation.

This head of the man, it is covered with excrement of the termites,

but the wood is still visible.

Alejandro has spotted a figure distinct from the other carvings.

We can see in the middle of the boat a yellow face which belongs to a mummy,

which would represent Shemai.

This exceptional discovery will help archaeologists understand

the evolution of burial practices in ancient Egypt.

I was dreaming always to discover something like this,

and it's a dream that came true.

Alejandro's next task is to bring Shemai's mummy above ground

for the first time in 4,000 years.

In the valley of the kings,

Aliaa and Martin look for clues to explain why

Tutankhamen's tomb remained hidden for so long.

They've got special permission from the government to use a drone to get a unique

perspective on the position of Tutankhamen's tomb.

There we go.

If we look down we should be over the Tutankhamen entrance right now.

Now we can see the cliffs in the back, and we can see the central position of

the tomb.

And above we can see debris.

Loose rock and debris cover the cliffs behind tut's tomb.

But the drone also reveals these flood channels, carved into the rock by heavy rains

over thousands of years and they could be the vital missing clue.

We think that if we have flash flooding, that material can flow down in

these kinds of channels.

Throughout history the valley has been hit by earthquakes,

and occasional flash floods.

The flood waters push rubble downhill toward the tombs.

Tutankhamen's tomb lies in the spot where the channels of water converge,

and dump tons of rock.

This, combined with stone chippings from a tomb built above, buried the entrance

deeper and kept it hidden for over 3,000 years.

It's very exciting for me as an egyptologist to see Tutankhamen's tomb

from up here and see how it fits within the valley.

It is the prime location, it is the one that was most protected.

He got the most sheltered tomb of all.

Tutankhamen was a boy king who played a minor role in Egypt's history,

but because his tomb remained hidden for thousands of years,

his treasure was kept safe from robbers and

made him the legend we know today.

In Aswan, the team is bringing the mummy of ancient Egyptian Shemai

to the surface for the first time in 4,000 years.

This is the culmination of ten years of field work for Alejandro,

and an incredible opportunity to learn more about Shemai.

Oh 125, it's quite short.

My daughter is more of less like this and she's eight years old.

I expected that at least he would be around 20-years-old or something.

It has been a surprise.

I never expected that he could be just a boy.

On his coffin it was written that he was the person in charge of

the administration of the store.

Controlling the store, you control the people because you decide who is going

to receive food or not.

This new evidence reveals Shemai held a powerful position in

Egyptian society at a very young age.

He may not have been a pharaoh, but like the boy king Tutankhamen,

his status afforded him a tomb and burial goods to ensure a safe passage into the afterlife.

It's taken twelve hours, but finally Eissa and his convoy of

Tutankhamen's treasures arrive in the city.

It's very, very, very exciting.

We wait for this moment.

Tarek Tawfik the museum director,

is anxious to get everything safely inside.

The first cradles have to be taken out, in order for the Tutankhamen

pieces to start emerging.

Now I can say I'm very, very happy.

Mission is complete, yes.

It will be like unpacking Christmas presents.

When we get out these pieces and find out more details about how they complement the

whole story of king Tutankhamen.

Eissa's team can finally unpack the priceless treasures.

Scientists and egyptologists can now begin to study and

analyze each item in their new high-tech lab.

Top of the list are the newly discovered boat pieces.

We'll check now in our database which of them maybe related to any

of the boats in the storeroom.

For almost 100 years, the boat that was buried alongside Tutankhamen

to help him travel into the afterlife has been missing its mast.

Exactly!

It's very beautiful.

It's amazing that after all these years, we still have new discoveries and new secrets

for this golden king, Tutankhamen.

100 years after its discovery,

Tutankhamen's stunning treasure is still

surprising the world.

And the valley of the kings

shows why it remains the greatest place on earth to

hunt for the secrets of Egypt's famous pharaohs.

Captioned by cotter captioning services.