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00:00In September 2002, an extraordinary event happened at the Great Pyramid of Giza, the
00:22biggest, the grandest, the most mysterious of all the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Teams
00:28of archaeologists and engineers were conducting two remarkable explorations, while the whole
00:34thing was also broadcast live on television. In the ancient cemetery of the pyramid builders,
00:41the oldest sealed coffin ever found in Egypt would be opened. It was thought to belong
00:48to the most important overseer of the whole pyramid project. At the same time, an exploration
00:56was underway deep inside the Great Pyramid. A robot crawled up a secret shaft to see what
01:03lay beyond a mysterious door. New spaces in the pyramid, discovered by the robot, would
01:09help Egyptologists understand the purpose of the pyramid itself.
01:14We're trying to reconstruct what was in the minds of builders in an archaeological instant,
01:22more than five millennia ago. You have your expectations, you have your mental models, but what you actually
01:27find is a surprise. And that's the way it was with this little shaft.
01:31It's a very important moment for us. That door was one of the most important discoveries before
01:38the end of year 2002.
01:42It's astonishing how little is known about the Great Pyramid. How was it built? What exactly was it for?
01:55Might there still be undiscovered chambers hidden inside? These are questions archaeologists have spent years trying to answer.
02:02It's astonishing how little is known about the Great Pyramid. How was it built? What exactly was it for?
02:08Might there still be undiscovered chambers hidden inside? These are questions archaeologists have spent years trying to answer.
02:18It's always been thought that the Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu some four and a half thousand years ago.
02:33But so far as we know, nothing of Khufus has ever been found inside the pyramid.
02:39Khufu had spent his whole life on earth, preparing for his funeral and his death.
02:54Khufu was the king of all Egypt, supreme ruler of the world and a living god.
03:00And his destiny was to join the other gods in the heavens. By day, he would be the sun god.
03:07At night, one of the northern stars, which never set in the night sky.
03:18As Khufu's funeral barge crossed the Nile, leaving the land of the living for the land of the dead,
03:24he took with him the trappings of his earthly life for the next world.
03:29What happened to all this treasure is unknown.
03:36Almost certainly, it was interred with him in the Great Pyramid, which Egyptologists are now convinced was Khufu's tomb.
03:47The pyramid provides a secure resting place for the body of the king, where it can remain undamaged and whole for eternity.
03:53But it's more than that, because it's like a machine which actually gives the king the energy to be transformed into the next life,
03:59and to live as a god in the celestial sphere above.
04:02But exactly how the Egyptians thought the pyramid would help the king reach the celestial sphere has never been properly understood.
04:11Archaeologists hope that answers may still be hidden inside.
04:16Every small thing that we find out about the Great Pyramid is important, because everything functions together in this one machine,
04:25whose sole aim is to get the king into the next life.
04:27In September 2002, scientists planned to send a robotic camera into a completely new and unexplored part of the Great Pyramid,
04:42and all of it live on television.
04:45This is the entrance to the Great Pyramid. It's not the original one.
04:49That was blocked off after they buried the pharaoh.
04:52Now this tunnel was cut through the stone about a thousand years ago,
04:56and eventually it leads to what's believed to be Khufu's burial chamber.
05:00But to reach the chamber where our team are busy working,
05:03I'm going to have to make my way through a series of tunnels and shafts right through the very heart of the pyramid.
05:09I'm just about reaching the first one. I'm going to make it up these steep stone steps
05:13to where the team is working on solving the mystery of the secret shaft.
05:22The mystery shaft was first explored in 1992 by a German engineer, Rudolf Gantenbrink.
05:29But when his robot had gone 65 metres up the shaft, his team was stunned by what they saw.
05:35The shaft was blocked.
05:38The stone looked as though it had been carefully cut to fit the shaft.
05:43But what were those things that looked like handles?
05:46Could this be a door?
05:48And was it a clue to the pyramid's function?
05:57Fascinated by this mysterious shaft and stone,
06:00Dr Zahi Hawass, Head of Antiquities for Egypt, had a dream of looking beyond it.
06:06I've been waiting for this all my life.
06:13In 2002, a new robot was commissioned.
06:16An ingenious device that could carry a range of tools and cameras.
06:22And a new team were given the special access to the pyramid they needed.
06:26By September, they'd been testing the robot for several weeks.
06:36It wasn't easy.
06:37Not only is the stone 65 metres up, but the shaft rises extremely steeply.
06:42But now the team was ready to launch the robot on its final mission of discovery.
06:49Well, that's the first part of the journey done.
06:52I'm a bit out of breath.
06:53I've just made it 120 feet up these steep steps here.
06:57But, you know, it was worth it because I'm now right inside the heart of the Great Pyramid.
07:01I'm standing in what's known as the Grand Gallery.
07:05You can see this impressive high stone ceiling here.
07:08And the staircases on either side of that gallery lead to the place where they found Khufu's sarcophagus.
07:14It's what's known as the King's Burial Chamber.
07:16But I'm not going in there.
07:17I'm going to head down this tunnel you can see behind me to what's called the Queen's Chamber.
07:22Now, it's called the Queen's Chamber, but Khufu's Queen was never actually buried here,
07:27so we don't really know what it's for.
07:29That's just one of the mysteries that we're hoping to solve tonight.
07:34Inside the Queen's Chamber, Dr Zahi Hawass and the robot team were waiting for Laura,
07:39so they could send the robot on its final journey into the shaft
07:43and the first view ever beyond the blocking stone.
07:47The robot, which would have to climb the steep shaft
07:50before it reached the blocking stone or door,
07:53was carrying a tiny camera at the end of a long probe.
07:57But look, that is the camera that's going through the door.
08:00It's got to fit inside this, what, seven or eight square inches there of a tunnel.
08:04One question I have to ask you, Zahi, because people at home are going to wonder,
08:07has anyone had a peek?
08:09No, but I have some ideas we'll talk about tonight.
08:14Sending a robot into the unknown wasn't the only excitement that night.
08:20Just a mile away from the pyramid, another unique event was happening.
08:25Dr Hawass had given permission for a recently discovered tomb to be opened.
08:30The hieroglyphs said that it belonged to a senior overseer called Nesut Wesat.
08:36It was a rare discovery.
08:40This was the oldest sealed sarcophagus ever found in Egypt.
08:43Nesut Wesat's tomb was the latest discovery in a remarkable cemetery that has transformed our understanding of how the pyramids were built.
08:56Dr Hawass only discovered the tombs in the early 90s.
09:00While there are hundreds of tombs near the pyramids, tombs of queens, of princes and princesses, of nobles and high-ranking officials, no one had found a single tomb of the pyramid workers.
09:14It was my dream to find any evidence of the people who built the pyramids.
09:27This is really the first tomb that we found.
09:30It's beautifully vaulted.
09:31It was covered with plaster.
09:32When I looked here, I could see the name.
09:35It's written hieroglyphic.
09:37Pitah Shib Su.
09:39I looked at the other side, I could see a niche for the people to bring offering during the feast to give it to this man.
09:48Next to the man's name was a key title, Acquaintance of the King.
09:53This is the beginning of this major story.
09:55The title and other tomb details suggested that this was a worker.
10:04Over a thousand new graves have now been found, each one belonging to a pyramid building.
10:11Most were simple, small mounds.
10:17Higher up the hill, they found bigger tombs, the graves of the overseers.
10:28This was a huge find.
10:30The overseers' tombs told them not only the names, but most important, the titles of the dead men.
10:41Fascinating details of how the pyramids were built began to appear.
10:44The overseer of the workmen who dragged the stones.
10:49The overseer of the west side of the pyramid.
10:52Each new title revealed how the Egyptians had organised themselves.
10:59Like the pharaoh, the workers took with them the essentials for their eternal life.
11:04In their case, dozens of beer jars, presumably full.
11:09They also took more practical things, their tools.
11:12This is the kind of tools that an artist will use in carving the face of a statue to make it smooth and make the chest of the statue or the legs of the statue.
11:26And if you touch it, you can feel the hand of the workmen who actually used it since 4,000 years ago.
11:34Treasures from the tombs at Giza are kept in a special store room.
11:41A place where television cameras have never filmed before.
11:46But for Dr Hawass, the most amazing things in here are the statues that show what the workers really looked like.
11:53This statue here is a very important statue for me because this is the first statue that we found in our excavation.
12:05A lady grinding grain because she's working to make food and bread for the workmen who are working very hard in building the pyramids.
12:13What's important is that if you look at the faces of each one here, each person can tell us the story of the great Egyptians who built the pyramids.
12:26The latest and possibly the most exciting of all the tombs they've discovered in the workers' cemetery is that of Nesut Wessert.
12:39He was the most important overseer of the whole pyramid project and on the 16th of September 2002, his sarcophagus was about to be opened.
12:48It was the oldest sealed sarcophagus ever found in Egypt and the hope was that it would provide new insights into the building of these astonishing structures.
13:04Nesut Wessert seems to have been an overseer in charge of supplies for the builders.
13:09Just what that means was being discovered right below the tombs of the workers in another archaeological gold mine by Egyptologist Mark Lehner.
13:25When Mark started mapping the entire pyramid plateau in the 1980s, he found the quarries where the stone for the pyramids was cut,
13:32but there were no traces of where the workers lived.
13:39Somewhere Mark knew a great city was hiding, the lost city of the pyramids.
13:54When we first started excavating, we didn't know quite what to expect.
13:58We had many pyramids and tombs, but we didn't know how the people lived.
14:02So when you gather people together and tens of thousands are building a pyramid, what imprint does it leave?
14:10Less than a mile from the Great Pyramid, at the edge of a Cairo suburb, he found that imprint.
14:16In one of our first excavation seasons, a backhoe, a machine, dug a hole through the site and narrowly missed three large vats of pottery.
14:25These pottery vats first appeared above a surface of black, consistent ash.
14:31We knew we must be on to an ancient bakery because of tomb scenes where they show mixing dough in big vats.
14:38But we had never found a bakery where they actually did this.
14:40Mark became even more intrigued when they found more and more bakeries.
14:52Finding it replicated on the scale of hundreds of bakeries basically gave us an insight into how the pyramid was made.
15:00In a very early period of Egyptian history, they didn't have Wonder Bread factories.
15:03They just took the way they did things in their homes, in their houses, and they repeated it many, many, many times.
15:09This was baking of an industrial scale, not some household kitchen.
15:13But he soon discovered they weren't just baking bread.
15:25They were preparing other foods, and on a scale that would put an army field kitchen to shame.
15:30In our excavations of the ruins of this city of the pyramids, we find thousands and thousands of pieces of cattle bone.
15:43In fact, along Main Street of the city, we find those kinds of bones that would have been left behind in butchering.
15:49Jaw bones and teeth and knuckle bones.
15:51This made us wonder, was a large part of the street and the city given over to the slaughter of cattle in the preparation of meat?
16:03Meat was a food for the well-off, and Mark's discoveries apparently contradicted the conventional story still being told to tourists
16:11that the pyramids were built by thousands of slaves.
16:21Mark was finding that the workers were being extremely well looked after.
16:26We have enough cattle bone to feed thousands and thousands of people if they ate meat every day over the better part of a century.
16:34In fact, just about the time it would have taken to build the three giant pyramids of Giza.
16:39As the search continued, Mark discovered just how rich in protein the builders' diet was.
16:45Looks like the spine of a little fish.
16:54It's one of millions of tiny fish bones he's found littering the site.
17:02So in addition to meat, the workers of the lost city were being provided with vast quantities of fish from the Nile.
17:09These weren't slave rations. These workers were being fed like Olympic athletes.
17:28Now Mark had a good idea about what they ate, but where was all this feasting taking place?
17:33Then he found the remains of a unique building with a strange arrangement of troughs and benches running its length.
17:43We began to find underneath these benches limestone column bases, like this one.
17:49And from holes in the bench just above the base, we realised that slender wooden columns rose every five Egyptian cubits.
17:57We were in fact in Egypt's oldest columned hall.
17:59And hidden in the sand, Mark found some small clues to what it was for.
18:06As we excavated these troughs and benches and looked really, really close,
18:10we found little tiny fish bone embedded throughout it.
18:17So were these table scraps from the world's first and oldest canteen?
18:21Maybe this was the place where groups of workers came to eat a feast every morning.
18:28Being fed a high-protein diet was the ideal preparation for the day ahead,
18:33and the phenomenal task they were undertaking.
18:36And this whole enormous supply operation would have been controlled by stewards of the king's estate,
18:41people like Nesut Weset, who must have died at Giza in the course of construction.
18:54In September 2002, his sarcophagus was to be opened,
18:59in the hope that the burial of such a key worker would provide fresh insights into the building of the pyramids.
19:04And at the same time, another mission was underway to reveal more about the meaning of the pyramid itself.
19:17A robot was inching its way up a small, long shaft towards a door.
19:22The purpose of the shaft and what lay beyond the door were unknown.
19:35As the thousands of pyramid workers laboured to construct a tomb for the man-god who was their king,
19:41we now know the structure they were building was the most complex ever attempted.
19:45As Khufu's new pyramid rose from the ground, the builders were creating a labyrinth inside.
20:00As each layer of stone was laid down, the chambers, all the tunnels and the small shafts were also being built.
20:08At any stage of construction, looking down on the pyramid would reveal just how complex this arrangement was.
20:16Some of these interior spaces are huge.
20:22The great gallery is a massive sloped shaft that leads to Khufu's burial chamber.
20:35At the entrance to the burial chamber, the pyramid workers built a device to stop any tomb robbers.
20:40After they put the mummy of the king inside the sarcophagus, the workmen and the priestess and the son of the king will push this slab to close the entrance of the burial chamber.
21:01And the king would be buried safely for the afterlife.
21:13But the blocking stones failed to protect the king. They disappeared a long time ago.
21:18On the other side is the inner sanctum, the burial chamber.
21:28This is where the king's body would rest in the giant sarcophagus.
21:31And just as in the queen's chamber below, there are two small shafts here pointing upwards to the sky.
21:41The purpose of these shafts is still not understood.
21:46Even some of the large chambers are still a mystery, like the subterranean chamber underneath the pyramid.
21:58It sits almost 30 metres underground and can only be reached by a steep shaft.
22:04This vast space was cut out of the bedrock, but it was never finished.
22:16No-one knows how all these different shafts and chambers combine to help the king's spirit achieve his divine destiny in the afterlife.
22:24At the heart of the puzzle is the queen's chamber itself.
22:36Despite the name, it wasn't for Khufu's queen.
22:40She has her own pyramid just outside.
22:43So what was it for?
22:45It's been suggested that the chamber contained a statue of the king.
22:49A statue which could be a home for the king's soul.
22:52Egyptians thought that it was important that the spirit had to be able to come back to the corpse, to the body, to receive nourishment and energy.
23:03In the cult temple's offerings were made to provide food in the morning and in the evening for the spirit so that it could live in the afterlife.
23:13But the spirit could also occupy a statue which could act as a sort of reserve body.
23:18Might that be a clue to the purpose of the small shaft, which the robot team were now exploring, and the function of the pyramid itself?
23:28Earlier, Dr Hawass and one of the robot team, Meg Watters, climbed to where the shaft from the queen's chamber should emerge, about halfway up.
23:40There are two of these shafts, one on the north side and one on the south.
23:49The exits from both these shafts have never been found.
23:52We are near that shaft now.
23:55OK.
23:57But the archaeologists here at Giza looked everywhere on the surface, on the south here, and they could not find any evidence at all of this shaft that has a hole outside.
24:09The shafts must have been important because building them was incredibly difficult.
24:17They weren't an afterthought.
24:19They were very carefully constructed as the pyramid was built up, layer by layer.
24:23No-one had any idea what these shafts before, and they've always been called air shafts.
24:37But despite carefully searching, Meg and Dr Hawass, like everyone before them, also failed to find any exit for the shafts.
24:44I think they're not there to allow air into the pyramid. They have something to do with the belief system of the Egyptians and what they thought the whole building was for.
24:55Can you tell me what were the shafts for?
24:58My theory that I believe that the south shaft functioned, it's a symbolic corridor for the soul of the king as the sun god Ra.
25:11Then, symbolically, in the mind of the Egyptians, the soul of the king will go through that shaft.
25:18The northern one, it's also a model corridor for the king as the god Horus to join the northern stars.
25:30It's possible that these shafts provide the means by which he can do that.
25:35He can get out of the spirit up to the skies, and he can come back and join his body.
25:39It's a dual carriageway for him to leave the earth and return when he wanted.
25:46Was this the secret of the shafts?
25:49Were they avenues to point the king's soul towards the celestial sphere in the northern and southern skies?
25:55Everyone was pinning their hopes on the robot solving the mystery.
26:06Maybe there'd be an answer behind the secret door.
26:09But when the robot team first came to the Great Pyramid in the summer of 2002, they found their task was far more difficult than they had imagined.
26:22They planned to send the robot, armed with tiny cameras, up the small shaft in the queen's chamber to investigate the mysterious door or blocking stone at the far end.
26:35At first they were optimistic. The shaft was smooth and easy to climb.
26:50And 60 metres up, they got their first glimpse of the blocking stone.
26:59That's the door. Look, you can see the tabs. Look at that.
27:04But there was a problem. Just in front of the robot, the shaft surface was extremely uneven, almost like a step.
27:16So, we're still getting a lot of slip.
27:20It's a very high step. It's an uneven step. It's at an odd angle.
27:24It's very difficult for me to steer and get traction.
27:36OK.
27:38All right.
27:39All right.
27:41Yep. OK.
27:43They finally made it. But then, disaster.
27:46OK, we're coming down.
27:54The robot fell nearly 60 metres.
28:05That clip, that clip let go.
28:07Luckily, it survived and went on to make its first successful trip up to the stone.
28:13Dr Hawass and the team got their first good look at the stone with its intriguing copper handles.
28:19Look at how smooth the stone is. It's gorgeous.
28:22Yeah, it's very smooth.
28:23That's a beautiful picture.
28:27These were the most detailed images ever, and already they've made a tantalizing discovery.
28:33So, from this chip at the bottom corner, you can see the shadows, and you can see very clearly that this stone is sitting in a vertical groove in the side wall.
28:43And that's very good news, because that is what you would do if this were actually a door that was slid into the place from above.
28:53Learning new details about the stone made the team even more determined to see behind it, perhaps into a new chamber.
29:03But the robot wasn't working properly. It would need some major improvements before they returned in September.
29:09The hope of finding secret chambers inside the pyramid is not that far-fetched.
29:16Hidden chambers had already been discovered by early explorers.
29:26In the 1800s, when dynamite was used to hunt for the missing treasure of the Pharaoh, one of the most amazing discoveries ever was made in the Great Pyramid.
29:35Several secret runes were discovered, stacked above the king's burial room.
29:50There are five, and they were built to spread the enormous load bearing down on the king's tomb below.
29:56Dr. Hawass had to crawl through the channel, blasted by the dynamite, to reach these secret rooms.
30:08And it was here that something sensational was found.
30:15Ancient hieroglyphs showing that the pyramids were built by work gangs.
30:20Each gang consists of 1,000 workmen. And they divide the gangs into small units. They call them phile.
30:30A phile is a Greek word. It means tribe. Each tribe consists of 200 workmen.
30:36The files were further divided into smaller gangs. Each had a name. Great one. Green one. Endurance. Even one called Perfection.
30:50One, two, three, two, one.
30:53But Egyptologists were even more fascinated by what they found in the very top chamber.
31:02There, amongst the graffiti left since the chambers were discovered, were more of the ancient hieroglyphs. But these were different.
31:09This is the name. The first time that you can see the name of Khufu written inside the pyramid. Khufu. Inside a cartouche.
31:23And after that, we have the word Apiru. And Simsu, meaning the gang. And this is the name of the gang who built the pyramids called Friends of Khufu.
31:33Amazingly, this is the only known place in the whole pyramid with Khufu's name. Signing their work in this holy place also gave the workers their chance for immortality.
31:46The graffiti were almost all that was known about the pyramid builders until their tombs were discovered by Dr Hawass.
32:03Now, tantalising details of their lives were emerging.
32:22And not just from the artefacts in the tombs. Their skeletons have also helped rewrite history.
32:28Before Dr Hawass found the tombs, he'd been haunted by the claims that the pyramids were built by an army of slaves.
32:42But new discoveries by bone expert Dr Azar Mohamed Sari El-Din were leading her to the same conclusion as Mark Lehner in the workers' town.
32:52The workers were too well cared for to be slaves.
32:55The workers were too well cared for to be slaves.
32:56The workers were too well cared for to be slaves.
33:02Building the pyramids without using wheels, pulleys or winches was punishing work, and accidents must have been common.
33:14But the workers' bones suggest that many survived injuries, thanks to an astonishing level of medical care.
33:20When the weight of a crushing stone virtually destroyed a worker's lower arm, there was only one medical solution, amputation arm.
33:39Amazingly, there's evidence that not only was this performed, but that the patient survived.
33:43These are the two bones of the arm, and they are amputated about this level, about one-third of the arm.
33:53For this individual, we have also the upper arm, and we can see which is this part of the bone.
34:01And you can notice that it's curved, because this individual was having this amputation at this level, so he used to use his hand like this.
34:15And this causes the curvature in the bone, as we see here, and this means that this person lives for many years after this amputation.
34:23Until now, no-one ever thought such surgery was survivable at the time when the pyramids were built, or that the workers received such intensive medical care.
34:35So far from being slaves, it shows how the workers were highly valued, and just how important this royal building project was to ancient Egypt.
34:52The discovery that the workers were well treated, and that they were divided into gangs, revealed how the pyramid planners organised their men.
35:00It also gave Mark Lehner clues to help him solve his latest problem.
35:07He was finding the streets of the pyramid town were lined with strange big buildings featuring long gallery-like rooms.
35:15Mark was puzzled.
35:17So at first we thought, well, we don't know what this is, it's quite alien, and it doesn't fit our expectations at all.
35:30Were these long rooms also for food production? What could the pyramid builders have been doing here?
35:41Then one morning, Mark had an idea.
35:44These galleries, which are more than 20 metres in length, could have been where a whole crew of workers slept.
35:49Maybe this was the dormitory for the Perfection Gang, or even the gang like the Friends of Khufu.
36:06But Mark thinks it took about 25,000 workers to build the pyramids.
36:10There's only room for about 2,000 in the galleries, so where did the rest of the workers sleep?
36:19It's a good chance that the entire worksite, the entire construction yard, was in fact a campsite.
36:26It's a very reasonable assumption that people were camped all over the quarry and on the pyramid itself during the time it was being built.
36:32So maybe some of the hard labourers, the workforce that was probably brought in seasonally, lived closer to the pyramid,
36:47and were cared for with good quality food by people from the city.
36:50But overseers like Nesut Wessert, the man whose tomb was being opened in September, and the skilled workers on the job, were not campers.
37:01Where did they live?
37:05Mark was still missing key parts of his picture, but that was about to change.
37:11Towards the end of their digging season, as Mark's team pushed the edges of the site further than ever before,
37:18they uncovered a critical part of the puzzle.
37:23It was only in the last few weeks, when we moved this far east, that we began to find these little chambers and these little houses.
37:31The city of the pyramid builders was now making a lot more sense.
37:36Here in this corner were the houses for the more permanent pyramid workers and their families.
37:41The craftspeople, the overseers, the potters, weavers and carpenters.
37:54Based on these new discoveries, Mark Lehner was now able to create the most comprehensive picture of the Giza Plateau ever seen.
38:01The world's first industrial city surrounded by houses for skilled craftsmen and their families.
38:11An extended campsite of seasonal workers.
38:15It was an incredibly well-organised operation for an extraordinary building project.
38:20And one of the key workers behind this organisation was the overseer Nesut Wesat.
38:29On 16 September 2002, in the search for further insights, his sarcophagus was ready to be opened.
38:36And we're going to do our best here to bring a camera in.
38:39And we're going to do our best here to bring a camera in.
38:48There it goes.
38:50I think there is a skeleton.
38:51God!
38:53There is a skeleton, isn't there?
38:55Oh, my God.
38:58Tell us what you see, Zahid.
38:59That's what you see, Zahid.
39:00I'm seeing this man is resting beautifully on the head of the skeleton.
39:07Inside was a perfectly preserved skeleton, lying on its side like all ancient Egyptian burials, facing east towards the rising sun.
39:16But was there anything buried with the skeleton that could tell us more about Nesut Wesat, the man?
39:22Do you see any artefacts, Zahid?
39:24Any amulets?
39:25You know, Jay, right now, I do not want to disturb this.
39:28Right.
39:29Every piece of this carefully will be taken to the lab for x-ray.
39:34Then we found out about his age, when did he die, any kind of diseases.
39:39The skull seems to be completely intact.
39:41Where is my brush?
39:43There.
39:44I can clean this beautiful face and tell this man to tell the world that the Egyptians were the builders of the pyramids.
39:52It's really a message from Nesut Wesat, and I'm glad that this man saved his body.
40:02The day after the opening of Nesut Wesat's sarcophagus, bone expert Dr Aza arrived to examine the body.
40:09As soon as she picked up the pelvic bone, a few things seemed clear to her experienced eye.
40:24And when she looked into his face, she could see that he'd been a large, strong man.
40:41As we can see, the skull is big. And the teeth are large teeth. And also this angle between the nose and the forehead. All this can tell us that he is a male.
40:55But an intriguing question remained.
41:02Nesut Wesat had the grand title of Overseer of Administrative District carved on his tomb.
41:09What could his skeleton tell us about the role he had played?
41:12The clues were in the bones from his back. Dr Aza immediately noticed the thickening of the edges of the backbone.
41:23This damage was evidence that he had spent a few years hauling stones or carrying heavy loads.
41:29So this man, whose title suggests would have had direct contact with the pharaoh, had also once laboured for him too.
41:43Is this evidence that men could work their way up to become the boss?
41:48That the ancient Egyptians had a far more mobile society than anyone imagined?
41:53It's a fascinating new development in the emerging story of the building of the pyramids.
42:06But the most significant discovery was yet to come, as the robot inched its way towards the secret door.
42:13The mystery of what lay beyond would soon be solved.
42:16Early in September 2002, the robot team returned with a new robot and battled with the problem of reaching the stone and working out how to see beyond it.
42:32The robot was carrying a ramp to get over the troublesome step.
42:36If it had difficulty here, the whole project was doomed.
42:39Looks like it recovered a little bit.
42:53The ramp worked.
42:55Now the team wanted to find out as much as possible about the stone.
43:00Did it move or was it a big solid block?
43:02They were unable to move the stone, so on this trip, the robot was carrying a device to measure its thickness.
43:13Why don't you walk me through what you want to do, Greg?
43:16They were surprised when they got the results.
43:19The stone was only about three inches thick.
43:22This is very...
43:24You cannot drill in a stone three centimetres like this.
43:26You've got a stone with a very thick stone like this.
43:31This should be sharp.
43:33After much debate, the team was authorised to drill a small peephole in the stone.
43:41Armed with a suitable drill, the robot moved up the shaft for its most important mission so far.
43:47They knew they had to avoid cracking the stone.
43:50A perfect hole and no other damage.
44:11So what was on the other side?
44:13And why was there a stone at all if the shafts in the Queen's chamber were there to point the spirit of the king towards the heavens?
44:27The answer may be linked to magic.
44:32A blocked passage would be no problem for a king's soul.
44:35It didn't have to be open for the king to ascend.
44:37The principal means of going into the other world in any normal Egyptian tomb was what we call a false door, a dummy door.
44:46When they make a simulated door out of stone, then it's magical and then it can commune with a netherworld.
44:52But what about the copper handles?
44:55It's important for the Egyptians that they have each of their areas of existence marked out and shut off by barriers or doorways.
45:02When the king's spirit comes to the blocking stone, he'll then say the magic words.
45:07He might have to give the names of the individual copper handles.
45:10He might have to take away the bolt through the copper handles.
45:14And once he's through the doorways, then there's no doubt that he is a divine being.
45:19So if the blocking stone is a kind of magical false door, would there be anything beyond it?
45:24The robot was about to find out.
45:28On the night of September the 16th, the robot was poised in front of the stone, ready to poke the tiny camera through the small hole and see for the first time ever what was beyond.
45:42This really is the moment of truth, isn't it Zahi? What we've all been waiting for. The camera is now lined up against that three quarters of an inch hole in the stone door.
45:53We are now going to follow its progress through the hole with that camera there and we're going to find out if and what is behind that stone door.
46:01Let's have a look at what's happening.
46:03Let's see.
46:05Okay, the lights are on.
46:07You can see the camera making its steady progress towards the hole there.
46:10Now, Zahi, talk us through what's happening.
46:13Just the camera is getting in the hole now.
46:16Okay. Now, oh my goodness, look at that.
46:20We're hearing shrieks inside here. I've got to tell you, this team of archaeologists has been waiting for this moment for months and months.
46:29This is incredibly exciting. What are we seeing, Zahi?
46:31We can see another sealed door.
46:34Another sealed door? What are these markings on the door? There seems to be a black mask or is that a crack?
46:38It's cracks, it's cracks.
46:39Wow.
46:41In another sealed door.
46:43We are here in front of a discovery.
46:46This is incredible.
46:47And I am really happy that we got this. We found a space. We found another sealed chamber.
46:53This is incredible. This is the first time a space has been found.
46:56The small sealed chamber was the first new space to be discovered in the Great Pyramid for 130 years.
47:01I was very excited when it went through and I was very surprised when we saw the white face of this rock right up front.
47:09It was a surprise. Something in front of you that no one had never seen since 4,500 years ago.
47:18The next day they went back to the Queen's chamber and had a good look at their discovery.
47:28And by using the camera probe as a measuring stick, they worked out the size of the new space.
47:36We took a measurement so we know that the space between the back end of the stone and then the front end of this new stone is about seven inches tall.
47:42So this strange new space in the pyramid was just seven inches deep.
47:54But this was not their only discovery that day.
47:58The team decided to send the robot into the other shaft in the Queen's chamber, the unexplored northern one.
48:05It was unexplored because of a major obstacle.
48:08The northern shaft isn't straight.
48:12The builders were forced to make it bend around the Grand Gallery.
48:16And no one has seen beyond the first quite sharp corner.
48:25After what seemed like endless manoeuvres, the robot eventually got around the tricky corner and set off into the unknown.
48:31As it crawled up the shaft, it had to avoid a rod which had been inserted by explorers in the 1920s.
48:39They too had been trying to solve the riddle of these shafts.
48:44The team didn't know what to expect, but they knew what they wanted to find.
48:49And there it was, at exactly the same distance as in the southern shaft, there was a small blocking door.
49:03It was the twin of the door in the southern shaft.
49:07For Mark Lehner, the discovery of the blocking stone on the northern side adds even greater significance to the shafts.
49:16The fact that there's a blocking stone with two mysterious copper pins on the south, and then in the shaft going from the north there's another blocking stone with two mysterious copper pins, makes it all the more an act of meaning on the part of the pyramid builders.
49:34If, in fact, somehow these copper pins were seen as bolts, they could be symbolic of the bolts to the doors to the sky, to the northern sky and to the southern sky.
49:45If they symbolized that, the secret chamber is nothing other than the celestial vault of the sky itself.
49:51I certainly have always had a problem with the fact that you have the king in his burial chamber, then you have the king in the stars, how does he get there?
50:09And here we have the answer. And in a very logical and completely Egyptian, pragmatic way, they provide a passageway for him with doors, which is exactly what is needed.
50:19There's this security built in to allow the king and only the king to get through and it's a direct route out for him.
50:27The discovery of one secret chamber raised the intriguing possibility that there'd be even more secret chambers in the shafts.
50:34Well, the fact that there's a space and then another slab could indicate that these are little model portcullis slabs, such as they blocked the passage into the king's chamber, little sliding doors as symbolic closure of these passages going down into the queen's chamber.
50:51So perhaps in each shaft, there will be a series of blocking doors for the king's spirits to negotiate. But these are magical doors. The mystery of why the shafts don't appear on the outside of the pyramid was solved. These doors and the mystery shafts lead only to the afterlife.
51:12I wouldn't be surprised if there were more because getting into the afterlife, it's not an easy process. There are lots of stages. So the king has to go through one doorway, another doorway, who knows, perhaps more doorways before he can actually get into the next life.
51:27It's a very important moment for us. That door was one of the most important discovery before the end of year 2002. And I believe this is the beginning of the revealing chambers inside the pyramid. It will continue.
51:46We'll see you soon.
51:47Let's continue.
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