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00:00We all die, and we all wonder, what happens after a heart stopped beating?
00:21Few have imagined a more terrifying and elaborate afterlife than the ancient Egyptians.
00:30Their vision of death required an arduous journey, a struggle to make it through a dangerous underworld.
00:40Their only guide? Collections of powerful spells called the Books of the Dead.
00:47Now, travel these treacherous pathways with one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs,
00:53and track modern archaeologists as they unearth key signs that will take us down deep into the Egyptian underworld.
01:03The End
01:13The End
01:151,200 years before the birth of Christ,
01:38Seti I takes his last breath.
01:41He was one of Egypt's greatest kings during Egypt's golden age.
01:491,200 years before the birth of Christ,
02:19He is able to end all battles.
02:23His soul takes flight, and his life on Earth is finished.
02:291,200 years before the birth of Christ,
02:33He is able to end all battles.
02:35Like all royal Egyptians, Seti is mummified.
02:41To them, the physical body is all important.
02:45If Seti's body is well preserved,
02:49His soul will recognize him later in the underworld,
02:52And they will reunite.
02:55When his mummification is complete, Seti is buried in Egypt's valley of the kings.
03:05Now his fight for resurrection begins.
03:11He must embark on a journey through the ancient Egyptian version of hell.
03:15To succeed, Seti will need a detailed guide through a terrifying realm.
03:29His guide, called the Book of Gates, is painted on the walls of Seti's tomb.
03:45He is met in the underworld by a cordon of dead souls.
03:51To them, he appears as Ra, the ram-headed god of the sun.
03:59Do you understand this transformation better than archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass?
04:05When a king die, he become the sun god.
04:09He united with the sun as one person.
04:13And therefore, the battle of the sun god for the netherworld,
04:17It is the battle of the pharaoh.
04:21To the ancient Egyptians, the sun was the holy of holies.
04:26They thought it literally died in the west each evening.
04:30And they prayed it would rise again in the east the next morning.
04:34The king's journey through death, therefore, paralleled the path the sun took every night.
04:42The biggest fear for the ancient Egyptians,
04:46If the king and the sun god will not make this trip, the world will enter.
04:56Seti's voyage will follow an afterlife version of the Nile River.
05:10Tonight, he must pass through twelve gates.
05:13One for each hour of the night.
05:16But it's no cruise down the Nile.
05:19Each gate is guarded by writhing serpents.
05:25Their job is to guard the gates against anyone who is not pure enough,
05:30Or who does not have the right magical strength to pass from one level to the next.
05:35Like many modern religious believers, Egyptians seeking eternal life needed a pure spirit.
05:45But they also needed magical knowledge.
05:49Seti cannot pass through the gates unless he knows and speaks the secret name of the snakes that guard them.
05:57If the king will say the name, it shows in the mind of the ancient Egyptians that he is the right one to go.
06:05He is the pure one.
06:07He is the magical one.
06:09And if you will say it, he will go through.
06:12This is why they write it so carefully in the text.
06:19Seti was supposed to learn the names by reading them on the walls of his tomb.
06:24And now, his journey depends on it.
06:33When he utters the name, they retreat.
06:37And he can pass.
06:47But before the night is done, he'll have to pass 11 more gates facing demons bent on his destruction.
06:59To destroy the Pharaoh is to destroy the sun.
07:04For the ancient Egyptians, all life depended on the sun.
07:10If the sun did not rise, it would be endless night.
07:17And everything will die.
07:21Over thousands of years, Egyptians evolved elaborate ways to make the journey of death predictable.
07:29And help guarantee a life everlasting.
07:34This quest for immortality is at the very root of Egyptian civilization.
07:41The journey for the afterlife to the ancient Egyptians was real.
07:45It was their life.
07:46It was everything.
07:50Guaranteeing eternal life, that massive numbers of people and resources had to be organized.
07:56Armies of workers had to be fed.
07:59Artists had to be trained.
08:01I actually say that pyramids and tombs built Egypt.
08:07Because their idea about death and the afterlife and immortality made them to create great architecture.
08:14Over time, they laid the foundations of a civilization that lasted 3,000 years.
08:24Everything starts in the tomb.
08:27Tombs.
08:28Tombs, whether they were for kings or for nobles, or anyone else for that matter, they recreate the cosmos and they act as basically resurrection machines, whereby the king's spirit gets to be reborn and refused into his body so he can live forever.
08:47No other tomb in the valley of the kings sets out to achieve that goal with the same zeal as the tomb of Seti the first.
09:00Here, craftsmen spent years creating a perfect portal to the afterlife.
09:06Every inch is covered in images imbued with magical power to help the pharaoh on his way.
09:12The tomb of Seti the first in the valley of the kings is the most beautiful tomb that the ancient Egyptian ever designed.
09:23It is the longest, it's beautifully designed, and you can really see that there is a guideline, there is a map that the king and the sun god is going to use for the way of the resurrection of the afterlife.
09:39Today, in the valley of the kings, archaeologist Sahi Awas is trying to make sense of that mysterious root.
09:53For the past five years, he has overseen the restoration of Seti's tomb.
09:59The tomb of Seti, there has been a destruction that has happened to the tomb, and that's why the tomb is closed to the public now.
10:06And this tomb is actually unique because the idea of the underworld and the passages can be seen clearly. It's a precious tomb.
10:19Hawas is excavating a strange tunnel that angles down below Seti's burial chamber.
10:25He thinks it's connected to Seti's quest for immortality, but he can't be sure how.
10:33You see a small, hidden tunnel to the south. That is the mysterious tunnel. That is the magical one.
10:43For Hawas, digging out this tunnel is the culmination of a dream he's had his entire career.
10:52Forty years ago, when he was a young archaeologist in the Valley of the Kings, he got a tip from a man named Sheikh Ali.
11:00For generations, Ali's family excavated ancient tombs, sometimes with permission from the Egyptian Antiquities Department, sometimes not.
11:10Not.
11:11This man was a huge man, with charisma, a mustache. He took me one day here.
11:20He said, young man, we believe that at the end of this tunnel, the burial chamber of Seti, the first existed.
11:29We had a permission in 1960 from the Antiquities Department to excavate, and we began to enter in the tunnel.
11:39But they stopped us. They were afraid that the tomb would fall down.
11:45Then I said, Sheikh Ali, what do you want? He said, if you become an important archaeologist, I want you to excavate this tunnel.
11:54Hawas knows Seti's burial treasure has never been found.
12:04And there's another curious detail.
12:08When the tomb was first excavated in 1817, this ornate sarcophagus was hiding the entrance to the tunnel.
12:16But the sarcophagus was empty.
12:19Some, like Sheikh Ali, came to believe the tunnel leads to Seti's true burial chamber.
12:31It's a long shot.
12:32But now, some 40 years later, Zahi Hawas is trying to find out if Sheikh Ali's theory that the burial chamber is hidden here could be true.
12:41The quest is taking Hawas on his own underworld journey, some 492 feet below the surface of the earth.
12:53By now, Seti has made it through the first and second gates.
12:58But as he approaches the third hour of his journey, he must reckon with a threat familiar to believers of many modern religions.
13:13The fires of damnation.
13:30For Seti, it's a test of purity.
13:33The lake of fire is this huge lake, which is made of fire.
13:43If you are one of the damned, then you are consumed by the fire.
13:48It's a challenge to every common man's soul.
13:53But because the pharaoh is merged with the sun god, he has a unique role during this hour.
13:59For Seti and the sun god, because they are amongst the blessed, they can go through and in fact, they decide, to some extent, who gets to be blessed and who gets to be damned.
14:17But Seti won't always go and challenge on this journey.
14:21He'll have to face his nemesis, Apophis, a powerful demon snake that represents evil incarnate to all ancient Egyptians, much like snakes do in many cultures today.
14:37On Seti's journey, the serpent demon threatens to plunge the world into chaos.
14:43Before he died, Seti battled the worldly chaos, helping to bring about a golden age in Egyptian history.
14:54Seti I was one of the greatest kings of the New Kingdom.
14:59He built many impressive things, but he was also a warrior.
15:04In his 11 years as pharaoh, Seti brought order to a land scarred by religious and social upheaval.
15:15He defined and secured Egypt's borders in Palestine and Nubia, and defeated invaders from the Libyan desert.
15:24But overshadowing all that, Seti was focused on the day he would die.
15:38Because in death he was merged with the sun god, his resurrection was crucial.
15:44By Seti's time, Egyptians had developed elaborate instructions to make sure that happened.
15:50If you look at the tomb of Seti, you'll see how the ancient Egyptians carefully designed the gates and the roads as a map.
16:06But the most important are the four books that is written inside the tombs.
16:11And this kind of books are like a tour guide for the king to go safely to the netherworld.
16:22For the Egyptians, committing an idea permanently in paint or writing was to guarantee it would happen.
16:29The first evidence of such magical texts comes 1,000 years before Seti, in the tomb of a pharaoh named Unas.
16:42Called the pyramid texts, they are the oldest religious writing in Egypt.
17:00The pyramid texts that you see in Unas' pyramid are quite entertaining because they're clearly inscribed for the king to use.
17:07Now the king is in his burial chamber, he's dead.
17:12He's supposed to rise up as he's being resurrected and to collect the magic or the power from these inscriptions.
17:20So he uses that last bit of magic to go shooting out of his pyramid to become one with the eternal stars.
17:28By Seti's time, the instructions have become far more elaborate.
17:40Plastered everywhere in Seti's tomb, they became a kind of sacred script for the pharaoh to follow.
17:45The 26 tombs in the van of the kings are different from each other.
17:52You will not find one tomb similar to the other one because this is how every king imagined the afterworld.
18:00Seti's tomb represents the high watermark for the Egyptian idea of an underworld journey.
18:06The result of centuries of evolving notions of death.
18:18Ninety miles north of Seti's tomb, German archaeologist Gunther Dreyer is tracing this evolutionary path.
18:25His quest, figure out how the earliest pharaohs imagined the afterlife.
18:35So he's come here to what he thinks is ground zero, the royal cemetery of Abydos.
18:42The roots of ancient Egypt are here at Abydos.
18:49The first idea is probably of afterlife.
18:52At least this is the place where we first can see it, trace it in the architecture of the tombs.
18:59So Dreyer is re-excavating one of Egypt's oldest royal tombs.
19:04The first dynasty burial of a king named Jere.
19:12Jere lived about 1700 years before Seti.
19:16But even then, Egyptians had a clear concept of life after death.
19:21Most interesting is that niche over there to the southwest, in the western wall.
19:28And that we may explain as a magic exit for the resurrecting king who could leave his tomb towards the opening of that impressive wadi,
19:41which obviously was regarded to be the entrance to the afterlife.
19:45Dreyer knows that by Jere's time, early ideas of taking food, wine and beer to sustain the dead in the afterlife were still evolving.
19:54In the first dynasty, pharaohs also took treasure, weapons and perhaps even servants.
20:08Archaeologists believe these early pharaohs killed their servants so they could accompany the king in the afterlife.
20:17They were sacrificed and buried in group enclosures surrounding the royal tomb.
20:24The pharaoh, Jere, was one of the last to practice human sacrifice at his tomb.
20:29And Dreyer is finding he likely took plenty of companions with him.
20:33Some were deceased family members and advisors.
20:37Some were sacrificed servants.
20:40Jere had more than 200, almost 300 subsidiary burials.
20:46And very little is known of them.
20:48We think that a lot of the equipment of the king's chamber and all these subsidiary burials is still there in the debris.
20:58Unlike Seti, the walls of Jere's tomb are blank.
21:02The idea of carving the walls with instructions for the pharaohs is still centuries away.
21:12At this point, the dead kings simply pass through the magic door and into another world.
21:17It's far from the complex journey that will evolve by Seti's time.
21:24But he carries with it an idea that will resonate with other things in centuries to come.
21:29Here at Abydos, for the first time, we see the idea of resurrection.
21:37They had an idea already developed of physical resurrection, which became so important in Christianity much later.
21:50By the time Seti I embarked on his afterlife journey, the idea of resurrection had reached full flower.
21:57Inside Seti's tomb, archaeologist Sahih Awas is following clues he thinks may lead him to Seti's burial chamber.
22:06The place where his resurrection process began.
22:10Seti's tomb is carved into the rock of the Valley of the Kings and descends through multiple levels.
22:18When it was first discovered in the early 19th century, it measured 310 feet long.
22:24Longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall.
22:29When 19th century excavators found the tunnel, they traveled inside 328 feet.
22:34But now Hawas has excavated far deeper into the tunnel.
22:41It's a tunnel with no obvious purpose.
22:45It's unique because in the tomb of Seti I, this tunnel has not existed in any tomb at all.
22:53It has no decoration, meaning it was cut for a reason.
23:00He doesn't know what that reason is.
23:03The only way to find out is to keep digging deeper into the underworld.
23:08On his underworld journey, Seti has reached the fourth gate of the night.
23:19As he chants the magic words to pass through, the demon Apophis is trailing him, waiting for a chance to strike.
23:32The idea of being challenged by demons in the afterlife is very old.
23:40It represented the belief that there would be a final reckoning after death.
23:47It's an idea that still resonates down the centuries.
23:50You know, why are people good nowadays if they're monotheistic?
23:56They're good because they're afraid if they're bad, God will punish them and they will go to hell, right?
24:01It's a matter of faith and it's the same way I think the Egyptians believed it.
24:06The Egyptian archdemon Apophis bears an uncanny resemblance to the Judeo-Christian idea of Satan.
24:14An evil being bent on destroying humanity.
24:17Apophis was represented in the mind of the ancient Egyptian as the devil.
24:28And if the king and the sun god cannot conquer him, the cosmos will be finished.
24:41It's no accident he's a snake.
24:44The Egyptian underworld was a place filled with creatures inspired by the natural world around them.
24:55Those animals sometimes combined and morphed into the gods and nightmarish demons that would haunt the afterlife journey.
25:02Some of these demons that were created by the ancient Egyptians might have had their basis in the idea not just of night terrors but things that might lurk underneath the water.
25:16Apophis will continue to stalk Seti throughout the night, culminating in a showdown in the tenth hour.
25:28For now, Seti makes his way further into the hellish twelve hour ordeal.
25:38In the fourth hour, he resurrects mummies who've been waiting for him.
25:43In hour five, Seti and an army of gods battle and tie up Apophis, the serpent demon.
25:53For Seti knows from his guide that Apophis will be back.
25:57In the same hour, the pharaoh meets the four races of man.
26:03Nubians, Egyptians, Asiatics and Libyans.
26:08Their presence shows that the Egyptian afterlife was open to anyone.
26:13It was a universal reality.
26:15As he approaches the darkest hour, Seti is about to come face to face with the most important god of the underworld.
26:28Osiris.
26:31For Egyptians, Osiris is central.
26:35Because he sits in judgment over all the dead.
26:38In life, Egyptians believed Osiris was the first pharaoh.
26:47That he was murdered and thrown into the Nile by his jealous brother.
26:54Resurrected by his wife Isis, his green skin symbolizes his divine power to create new life.
27:01Archaeologist Gunther Dreyer knows that Egyptians revered Osiris as their first king.
27:14But he thinks they went much further than that here, at the tomb of the pharaoh Cher.
27:20Creating a cult of Osiris and worshipping him as the first resurrected pharaoh god.
27:26Dreyer knows that a thousand years after Cher's reign, Egyptians try to find the tomb of Osiris.
27:35And since Cher's tomb is one of the oldest known even to the ancient Egyptians, this seemed to be the most likely place.
27:44This place was once the holiest site of all Egypt.
27:49And it became a center of pilgrimage for centuries.
27:53Dr. Dreyer believes this may have happened because of a key detail.
27:59He thinks that in the ancient Egyptian language the pronunciation of the two names was similar.
28:04So it was easy to confuse the identity of the tomb.
28:09Once Egyptians began worshipping the lord of the underworld here, the sight blossomed.
28:14As the tomb of Osiris became the center of pilgrimage for generations, for centuries.
28:24Each Egyptian wanted to come here to make his offering to Osiris and ask him for a good afterlife.
28:30There are offerings found from kings of the new kingdom like Tutankhamun.
28:38And all around here you see millions of potsherds from offering vessels left here by pilgrims.
28:44And one could, I think, compare this site to modern Mecca.
28:50Like the birthplace of Islam or Calvary, the site where Jesus died, the sanctity of the site is a measure of the devotion paid to that god.
29:02Seti recognized that power.
29:07Seti recognized that power.
29:09Just before hour six on his afterlife journey, when he arrives at the Judgment Hall of Osiris.
29:15He merges with the lord of the underworld.
29:18So he and Osiris could, in fact, almost be one and the same.
29:27The elite, once they had passed all of these various tests, had one big exam, as it were, where they would be judged in the hall of the god Osiris.
29:38And there, their heart would be weighed against the feather of truth.
29:42And if it was in balance, then they could continue on into the afterlife safely.
29:51But again, Seti is not subject to this test.
29:54Instead, since he has already merged with the god Osiris, Seti is the final judge of other dead Egyptians.
30:03The heart was the center of wisdom to the Egyptians and the dwelling place of the soul.
30:08In death, the heart of an ordinary man is weighed before Osiris.
30:15It's the ultimate test of purity.
30:21If your heart was heavier than the feather of truth, you would be thrown to Ahmet the Gobbler.
30:28And Ahmet is a monstrous creature. It's made of crocodile, hippopotamus and lion.
30:37And it is quite terrifying because if Ahmet eats you, you are basically annihilated, which would have been the worst possible thing for any ancient Egyptian.
30:44This ordinary man's heart is impure, heavy with sin. So Osiris pronounces him destroyed.
30:54Fear of eternal destruction drove the Egyptians from the very earliest days.
31:05Life along the Nile was good.
31:08No one wanted to part with it.
31:09Archaeologist Gunther Dreyer knows how far the ancients were willing to go to maintain the good life.
31:18At the first dynasty tomb of the pharaoh chair, Dreyer saw evidence that they killed the pharaoh's servants just so he could have them in the afterlife.
31:28But now Dreyer has moved to a second dynasty site, where the picture is not so clear.
31:42Some 300 miles north of his excavation of the tomb of chair, Dreyer knows how far the ancients were willing to go to maintain the good life.
31:49At the first dynasty tomb of the pharaoh chair, Dreyer saw evidence that they killed the pharaoh's servants just so he could have them in the afterlife.
31:55At the beginning of his excavation of his excavation of the tomb of chair, Dreyer is digging in Saqqara, in the tomb of a king named Ninachir.
32:04There is something rather mysterious about this tomb.
32:09We want the complete layout of the tomb to understand the ideas behind it.
32:15Dreyer wants to know how the earliest Egyptian ideas of the tomb evolved.
32:19In the first dynasty, King Cher's tomb was simple, and Cher likely believed all he had to do was walk through a magical door into his afterlife.
32:31Four hundred years later, in the third dynasty, things are far more complex.
32:37Here the pharaoh Djoser built the first step pyramid at Saqqara, a huge royal tomb that may have served as the pharaoh's majestic stairway to the sky.
32:52In between these two very different tombs is King Ninachir's second dynasty tomb.
33:01Here, Dreyer hopes to find a crucial missing link in afterlife beliefs.
33:07He thinks that when Ninachir was buried, there was probably some kind of primitive pyramid structure above this foundation.
33:16But it's not the missing pyramid Dreyer finds intriguing. It's what lies underground.
33:24The tomb had a magical door to the underworld as in the earlier tomb.
33:32But here, a mysterious maze of tunnels surrounds the king's burial chamber.
33:45Dreyer is fascinated because there's never been a labyrinth like this found inside a tomb this old.
33:50With no hieroglyphs here to show him, Dreyer is searching for clues to tell him what the pharaoh planned to do here once he died.
34:05It's talking architecture, I would call it. The shape of the galleries, which at the first glance looks like a labyrinth,
34:13was shaped intentionally to represent something.
34:17The subterranean galleries of Ninachir, which are about five meters below the present desert level.
34:25And the whole galleries extend over an area of about 75 by 50 meters, more than 100 chambers and corridors.
34:34That's a lot of chambers for one king.
34:36Well, we may assume that he was richly equipped, wardrobe of the king, instruments and weapons and jewelry and things like that.
34:47But something doesn't add up about the chambers.
34:51They're not quite right for just storing afterlife equipment.
34:54In other tombs, an earlier one, we have large storage rooms.
34:59But here it's all bent. There's no right angle.
35:02Some chambers are so small that they could maybe contain just a few vessels.
35:07The whole design of those chambers seems quite unpractical for storage of goods.
35:14Dryer has a hunch he'll find clues in the looming tomb of a next-door neighbor, inside the Pharaoh Joseph's Step Pyramid.
35:26He reigned only about 60 years after Ninachir.
35:31Underneath the Step Pyramid, Dryer sees something remarkably similar to what he sees in Ninachir's tomb.
35:41Miles of tunnels and hundreds of rooms surround the king's burial chamber.
35:46Dryer thinks he knows where Joseph got this grand idea.
35:53Though much smaller, Ninachir's tomb has the same kind of chambers and tunnels.
35:57There are chambers with model beds, banks, where people slept on.
36:05There are rooms with small benches on both sides, probably representing dining rooms, bathrooms and toilets.
36:13And another part of the tomb, which is very irregular, seems to represent roads, open places and facades of buildings, with dummy entrances.
36:22The real impression is, really, this is a small village around the burial chamber.
36:31He thinks Ninachir built these chambers as a parallel royal palace and village, where he would live after he died.
36:38Dryer believes it's the earliest evidence of a Pharaoh building a figurative home inside his tomb.
36:45The tomb of Ninachir is filling a gap between the early development from the First Dynasty and what we see in Joseph's precinct with the Step Pyramid.
36:57And this missing link we were looking for here, and we got it.
37:02Fourteen hundred years after Ninachir, during Seti's reign, the focus isn't on building a palace.
37:15It's on guaranteeing the Pharaoh's successful journey through the afterlife.
37:18But some traditions persisted.
37:23Seti still wanted to take the good life with him.
37:27So he undoubtedly stocked his tomb with treasure, weapons, furnishing, and plenty of servants.
37:36Unlike earlier kings, Seti didn't kill the servants he'd take with him into the afterlife.
37:45Instead, he took only figurines called Traptes.
37:50When the Pharaoh needed them, Traptes would magically come to life inside the tomb.
37:58Because it wouldn't be a very perfect life if you had to work in the afterworld.
38:05The shabti, the word shabti means one who answers.
38:10So when you are called upon by the gods or anyone else to carry out some work,
38:15in your place the shabti will leap up and say, here I am.
38:19I will cook, clean, or do whatever.
38:21Discoveries in the tomb of King Tut revealed just how important shabtis were.
38:30For Tutankhamun, we see hundreds of shabtis.
38:35Because they needed to put one shabti for every day.
38:43But Seti was a much more powerful king than Tut.
38:46And he was probably buried with many more riches and shabtis.
38:5319th century explorers found hundreds of shabtis when they first discovered Seti's massive tomb.
38:59But no major artifact has come out of the tomb since then.
39:05That just changed.
39:07Deep inside Seti's tomb, Hawassus made a discovery.
39:13Small, but significant.
39:16The most important thing, the first that we found, was this shabti.
39:21If you look at the style of this shabti, it's a typical dynasty 19.
39:28means the reign of Seti the first.
39:30But the interesting thing that we found this other shabti, beautiful one actually, made of wood.
39:42This find may be significant, not because of its value or beauty,
39:46but because of where it was found, inside the tunnel.
39:49That was found here, which is also very strange.
39:56Why the shabti would be hidden here?
40:01In Tut's tomb, the shabtis were found along with all the treasures and tools he would use in his daily life.
40:07But we can't know if the shabtis were placed in this tunnel to somehow help Seti with his daily life.
40:14And without more evidence, Hawassus still doesn't know exactly how Seti planned to use this tunnel.
40:23That's the dangerous areas now.
40:28As Hawassus digs deeper, Seti descends further into the underworld.
40:33Merged with the sun god, Ra, the pharaoh reaches hour six, the very darkest of his afterlife journey, when Apophis strikes.
40:47But Egyptians wouldn't dream of leaving their great pharaoh to fight this battle on his own.
40:53Azargaths, like an army, will come to defeat Apophis for Seti and the sun god to go safely to the other world.
41:03Protected from the demon, he makes his way to perhaps the most important moment of the night.
41:15When he died, Seti's soul left his body.
41:26Now his soul returns, recognizes his body, and reunites with him.
41:33He's joined by other mummies, eager to bask in the glow of the sun god, and reunite with their own souls.
41:50If body and soul remain separate, Seti can never be resurrected. Reunited, he can.
42:01It's a transformative moment for Seti, and marks a critical turn in the night.
42:06Fortified by his soul, he and his entourage speed toward dawn.
42:13They pass through another gate into hour seven, where they order a group of demons to punish the damned.
42:30In hour eight, mummies turn over on their beds, a key stage in the process of coming back to life.
42:44Hour nine, dead souls rejuvenate in primeval waters, on their way to rebirth.
42:51In the same hour, Seti has a chance to settle some scores.
43:06Enemies of the sun god are rounded up, and a serpent under Seti's power torments them.
43:12He's near the end of his journey, but he'll soon face one last battle with the archdemon, Apophis.
43:25Howas is now 33 feet further into the tunnel in Seti's tomb, when he finds another clue that the tunnel was intentional, built to serve a purpose.
43:43Look how it's amazing here, that after this ramp, which is like 35 feet, and now you can see, we're having stairs now.
44:00Ancient stairs.
44:02And this is another level, this is another level, and this is the other one.
44:13When Sheikh Ali explored this tunnel in 1960, he never made it to the end.
44:20He was forced to stop because it was too dangerous.
44:31Oh!
44:34You alright?
44:35Let's fight, fight, fight.
44:36You okay?
44:43Hmm.
44:44Good.
44:46We reached now to about 232 feet under the ground.
44:55And you can imagine how dangerous.
44:58A big stone, it did feel on my feet.
45:02Awas would later find out that he'd broken his foot.
45:05But right now, he just wants to keep going.
45:12Everyone expected that the tunnel will end.
45:16But we found there is more.
45:20It's 400 feet now.
45:22We still did not reach the end of the tunnel.
45:25I think there is no camera reached that far.
45:30At all.
45:32At this point, the tunnel is 450 feet long.
45:37That's equal to the height of the Great Pyramid.
45:40And it may go further.
45:45But Hawas must stop here.
45:48It's the end of the dig season.
45:49When summer temperatures rise too high to work down here.
45:54And he still doesn't know where the tunnel will lead.
45:58If there is no secret burial chamber,
46:02Hawas does have an idea of what the tunnel might have been for.
46:06We are under the ground 400 feet.
46:10Which is a perfect place for the quest of immortality.
46:14The quest for immortality in the Nile were closely linked.
46:23One theory is the city dug this tunnel.
46:29In a bid to connect his tomb with the ground waters of that sacred river.
46:33Seti has reached the 10th hour of the night.
46:50And the sun will soon rise over the Nile.
46:53But only if Seti can make it past the final attack by the demon snake.
46:58Apophis knows it's his last chance to devour the pharaoh.
47:07Seti again calls on an army of gods.
47:13They wield magic nets to gather strength from the sun god's power.
47:17Together they keep the demon back.
47:24But the moment just before dawn.
47:29The gods of order and light have finally defeated the demon of chaos.
47:33The demon of chaos.
47:45In the 11th hour, Seti nears his goal in triumph.
47:49Led by a procession of gods and goddesses.
47:57Heralding his resurrection as the sun.
48:04As he approaches the morning sky.
48:07Egyptians believe the pharaoh changes into symbolic figures.
48:10For a man to a griffin.
48:16A falcon to a scarab beetle.
48:20The Egyptian symbol of the rising sun.
48:24For the ancient Egyptians, sunrise was nothing less than a religious experience.
48:30They are watching the sun.
48:36They know that the sun god, Ra, is there.
48:40And that is very important for them.
48:43The universal god is giving them light.
48:46Warm.
48:48Kindness.
48:50The world now is happiness because the king become a god.
48:54He survived fire, monsters, and evil demons.
49:01And Egyptians believed the pharaoh's odyssey repeated every night.
49:05When the sun disappeared until it rose again.
49:11Now Seti merged with Ra.
49:15Sails across the sky shining his light on Egypt for another day.
49:19To ancient Egyptians, their great pharaohs are still making that afterlife journey.
49:29Still keeping chaos at bay.
49:32Still ensuring that the sun will rise.
49:36Today and into eternity.
49:39Today and into eternity.
49:40Today and into eternity.