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00:00Over 3,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians built the finest monuments the world has ever seen.
00:10The Great Pyramid, the largest stone building on earth, was constructed with futuristic precision.
00:19How were such quantum innovations ever achieved?
00:24The Valley of the Kings contains over 60 royal tombs decorated with secret codes.
00:30How did the pharaohs reach the afterlife?
00:35Hatshepsut's temple, an architectural marvel.
00:40But why has the face of the pharaoh been erased?
00:44The Sphinx, carved from a single piece of rock, became the world's largest freestanding statue.
00:51What secrets lie behind its silent gaze?
00:56The Karnak temple complex, the largest on earth, became an architectural battleground.
01:02What forces made Karnak prosper?
01:05And who tore it apart?
01:09The temple of Ramesses the Great was carved into a cliff face, with gigantic figures and chambers stretching for 200 feet.
01:19How could it vanish for thousands of years?
01:24And then there's Mount Sinai, Egypt's greatest natural wonder.
01:31The place where God is said to have spoken to Moses and given mankind the Ten Commandments.
01:37Some wonders would shape the course of architecture.
01:41Others would become shrines for all eternity.
01:44Throughout history, they continue to enthrall and inspire as the seven wonders of ancient Egypt.
02:01And beneath the stones of Egypt's wonders lie their hidden stories.
02:06To discover them, we have to travel back through thousands of years.
02:10Back through ancient dynasties that once ruled the greatest civilization on earth.
02:16This was a time when genius and invention laid the cornerstones of the most revolutionary structures.
02:24A time of rivalry and intrigue, conspiracy and deception.
02:29When God would pick his prophet from the royal house of Egypt.
02:35When a queen became a pharaoh.
02:38Kings who, with a single hammer blow, would destroy the past to glorify their name.
02:46A time when the rewards were so great, some would be driven to any lengths to realize their ambitions.
02:59The kings of ancient Egypt were no mere mortals.
03:03They were gods incarnate.
03:07And the ancient Egyptians cared more for the burial of their kings than any other nation that has existed.
03:15Three and a half thousand years ago, they began to build the most revered cemetery on earth.
03:24The valley of the kings is the most magnificent burial ground in the world.
03:30Sixty-two tombs cut deep into the rock, overflowing with the treasures of ancient Egypt.
03:38Pharaohs like Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great were laid to rest here.
03:44But before long, this remote valley would become a haven for treasure hunters.
03:58Tomb raiders and vandals would break into this secret underground world.
04:05They were followed centuries later by European explorers and adventure-seeking treasure hunters like Belzoni.
04:17Then archaeologists like Howard Carter would make breathtaking discoveries and begin to piece together the lives of the pharaohs.
04:27The oldest tomb in the valley belonged to the king, Thutmose I, from the 16th century BC.
04:37Probably this was chosen as a site for it because of this cleft which made it easier to begin the cutting of the tomb itself.
04:47Hidden tombs were the goals for these early kings.
04:53For the next 500 years, the pharaohs would follow Thutmose I and be buried here in the valley.
05:03Ted Brock has been responsible for creating a three-dimensional map of the entire valley and knows every tomb.
05:13Building a tomb was probably in many ways quite similar to quarrying operations that they were carrying out for hundreds or even thousands of years.
05:22And so it was a similar process of cutting into the rock, cutting out pieces of rock and removing it.
05:32It was hot, dirty and dangerous work.
05:36So they'd have groups of people working there, cutting away at the rock face, tunneling in and hauling the debris away.
05:43And behind them would be the finishers coming along with the copper and bronze tools, smoothing down the walls, truing them up.
05:52And then followed up by the people plastering the walls in preparation for the decoration.
05:57So you had all these various steps going on at the same time.
06:02After the walls had been plastered, the decoration began.
06:07Outline scribes would draw the hieroglyphics in red ochre.
06:12These motifs were copied from pattern books.
06:15A vizier would relay the progress to the pharaoh.
06:18Once the outline scribe had done his work, then the master artist has come in and made corrections.
06:26You can see that on the head of Horus here, a nice detail and well finished by the master artist.
06:33See there's no details, red outlines here, so that wasn't even drawn by the outline scribe.
06:38Like the coordinates of a teleport, it was essential for every detail to be correct to ensure the pharaoh's successful union with the afterlife.
06:50The tombs were decorated with these descriptions of the underworld.
06:55It was taking this hole in the rock and making it the underworld itself.
07:03Most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are unfinished.
07:06The work cut short by the king's death.
07:13But the tomb of Seti I is virtually complete.
07:17It was unearthed by the famous treasure hunter Giovanni Battista Belzoni,
07:23who in 1817 was lucky enough to chance upon the longest and deepest of all the tombs.
07:30Belzoni described finding it as the best day in his life.
07:33But it wasn't all easy.
07:36Once inside, the main chambers were hidden behind a false wall.
07:40And in front of this was a well pit 10 meters deep.
07:43He found as he came in that the rear wall was blocked up, except there was a hole which earlier tomb robbers had entered.
07:53Having discovered the secret entrance, Belzoni went on to explore one of the most cavernous tombs ever found.
08:03They built these large chambers in this tomb and pillars hewn out of the rock.
08:11They're not constructed.
08:13And beyond these other chambers as well, with lots of wall space for more decoration.
08:19The Pharaoh's body was mummified to preserve him forever.
08:25He would lie within many coffins before being lowered into a sarcophagus.
08:30This could weigh as much as 10 tons.
08:34The lowest chamber of all, several hundred feet down in the rock, was where the Pharaoh was laid to rest.
08:40This is the burial chamber of Seti I.
08:45It's really like a giant sarcophagus with a lid representing the starry sky.
08:53And the walls describing the sun god's journey through the underworld.
08:59And each end of the walls has the protective goddess as found on a sarcophagus.
09:05Here the Pharaoh would rest, sealed in state and surrounded by his finest and most valued possessions.
09:17The priest and burial party would seal the chamber.
09:23But the generations of workers would always be able to remember where each tomb was.
09:27And soon robbers learned where the tombs were.
09:37So a royal seal was put over the door lock.
09:41But this didn't deter thieves either.
09:44If the central government system was weak and people weren't getting their daily pay and rations,
09:50there's a great temptation to go and plunder these tombs.
09:57When the new kingdom ended, the tombs were abandoned, many stripped of their treasures.
10:03Some became shrines. Others became hidden.
10:07Some may remain undiscovered.
10:12But the new kingdom of ancient Egypt left behind far more wonders than tombs alone.
10:16The desire for greatness led some Pharaohs to immortalize their grandeur in vast temples.
10:23The most splendid of these was built by the Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
10:27Like many Pharaohs, Hatshepsut liked to be remembered as a great leader and warrior.
10:33What was unusual was that Hatshepsut was a woman.
10:37Built over the hillside from the Valley of the Kings, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut is the most impressive monument of Western Thebes.
10:49Hatshepsut's futuristic temple is packed with revolutionary features.
10:59A fitting memory to one of Egypt's most innovative pharaohs.
11:06Yet unlike Cleopatra or Nefertiti, the story of Hatshepsut's remarkable life is little known.
11:14She actually led armies in battle and this was something that early historians really didn't want to have to accept.
11:21She gave orders and Egypt bowed their head. It did as it was told.
11:28Hatshepsut was the eldest daughter of Thutmose I.
11:32And when her husband Thutmose II died, her young stepson became Pharaoh, Thutmose III.
11:40Worried that the boy might lose control, Hatshepsut appointed herself as co-regent and later king.
11:48There is no doubt that when she took the throne, she was acting unconstitutionally.
11:57But she didn't do as other ambitious women would have done and got rid of Thutmose III.
12:03He's always there. The thing is, she's the leader.
12:09Hatshepsut set out to finish what her husband Thutmose II had started.
12:13A splendid mortuary temple.
12:17Under her control, it would take 15 years to become the greatest architectural achievement of her dynasty.
12:25Hatshepsut chose as her architect a man called Senenmut.
12:31From lowly status, Senenmut had risen up the ranks to become Hatshepsut's most trusted companion.
12:37He was chief of her works. He would have been trained on how to choose a site and then to plan the work and then to manage the work as it goes along.
12:52As the temple was built up, so its visionary design was revealed, with multi-faced columns never seen before.
13:01There's no other temple in Egypt that looks like this. It's unique.
13:09Senenmut copied the ramp design from an adjacent temple complex.
13:14But he added other features. On the colonnades, he placed statues to the god Osiris in front of square columns.
13:22And at the back of the temple was a unique structure built to withstand the weight of the cliff above it.
13:28This is the innermost sanctuary and it's constructed in a rather extraordinary way.
13:35What they have done is to make a corbelled vault, as we call it.
13:40And this is putting one stone on top of another stone and moving closer and closer and closer to the ceiling.
13:46And then all those little corners are shaved off on either side.
13:51So what you're looking at appears to be a barrel vault.
13:53Hatshepsut illustrated the highlights of her reign on the walls of her temple, including the very first depiction of an expedition she organized in the ninth year of her rule.
14:08This is the only record that we have of an African village 2,500 years ago.
14:14Hatshepsut sent five ships to the land of Punt, thought to be near present-day Somalia.
14:22The purpose of the trip was to bring back the highly prized incense and perfumes to offer the god Aman at the temple.
14:29They brought back precious woods like ebony, ivory, gold, skins and everything else that they thought would be a delight for the god Aman.
14:40Some say also that the terraces of this particular temple were used as a place to plant these exotic trees.
14:48Throughout the 15 years of construction, Hatshepsut worked closely with her architect, Sennenmut, who became almost like family.
14:59Sennenmut was one of the favorites of Queen Hatshepsut.
15:02This man was responsible first for the upbringing, for the nursing of her only and lonely daughter, Nifluri.
15:13There's no evidence to suggest that Hatshepsut and Sennenmut ever became lovers.
15:20But Sennenmut was privileged enough to have his own tomb built beneath the forecourt of her temple.
15:25But it appears that his rivals may have been jealous of his achievements.
15:32After his death, all images of Sennenmut were destroyed, but one was missed.
15:39Here we have a line drawing of the famous Sennenmut.
15:44Unfortunately, we don't know what happened to him, because he disappears out of sight about the 16th year of her reign.
15:51Sennenmut remained an innovator until the very end.
15:56The ceiling on his room is most unusual, because it contains astronomical depictions.
16:04And this is the first time that such things appeared in the tombs of anybody.
16:09And Hatshepsut had them in her chapel as well.
16:15Hatshepsut died after a long rule of 22 years.
16:18A rule when national confidence was boosted by monumental architecture.
16:26Like Sennenmut, her face was erased from her monuments by later kings,
16:31who thought it wrong that a woman had not only ruled, but had been a hero.
16:35Hatshepsut was buried in the valley of the kings.
16:41Her tomb was aligned with her temple and beyond, with vast obelisks she erected inside the Karnak temple complex.
16:48It was here where the kings of ancient Egypt competed to make their mark, creating the largest religious monument on earth.
16:58Karnak, 2,000 years of triumph, turmoil and tragedy.
17:09Here, the kings of Egypt destroyed the memory of their forebears to build their own destinies.
17:14This was the site where Thutmose I would make his mark of power.
17:21Where Thutmose III would build on top of the shrines of his own stepmother.
17:26Where the exquisite carvings of Seti I would be defaced by his own son, Ramesses the Great.
17:33This is Karnak, the largest religious complex ever constructed anywhere on earth.
17:43How did it develop into a 250-acre site?
17:48When Thebes became the religious capital of Egypt, the Karnak temple became the seat of Amun, the state god.
17:56Karnak was soon home to over 600 priests.
17:59Its buildings spread west towards the Nile and also south.
18:04Obelisks and pylons appeared, followed by shrines and precincts.
18:10Then pylons to the east, a vast hall and giant statues.
18:15Eventually, the entire site was enclosed by a wall.
18:19At the center is a hyper-style hall containing a forest of gigantic columns, some of them 70 feet high.
18:29With capitals so big that 50 people could stand on one of them.
18:36There are obelisks, one of them the largest standing in Egypt.
18:41There are vast statues of kings, their egos frozen in stone.
18:45And there are monumental gateways and vast entrances, pylons.
18:52They are the largest in Egypt and decorated like giant billboards with incredible stone carvings.
18:59Standing up to 100 feet high, it's a marvel that they were built without cranes of any kind.
19:04A clue to their construction still survives.
19:09The vast wall of this pylon was never finished and when the work was abandoned, the ancient Egyptians left behind a clue as to how it was built.
19:18The mud ramp proves that they used vast earth structures built up against the wall to drag the stones up to the top.
19:30Building to an enormous scale never daunted the kings of ancient Egypt.
19:35Each king set out to surpass the last.
19:37When an ancient Egyptian came to the temple, he's likely to see the name of the latest pharaoh on the front.
19:47And a generation later, you have exactly the same thing.
19:52You rebuild, you improve, you make better.
19:55Karnak was about rivalry and competition.
19:59And obelisks were a measure of this.
20:02Obelisks marked the first rays of the day's sunlight.
20:06And Hatshepsut made sure hers out shone her father's, Thutmose I.
20:13At 96 feet high, Hatshepsut's is the tallest surviving obelisk in Egypt.
20:19Weighing 323 tons, it was carved from one single piece of granite 400 miles away at Aswan.
20:29Here lay the highly prized granite quarries.
20:33How were the ancient Egyptians able to cut such a hard stone?
20:38This is a piece of dolerite.
20:41It's a naturally occurring pebble.
20:44Essentially what they did is they pounded the surface with this stone.
20:48And every time they did, they took a minute fragment of the stone surface away.
20:54Working day and night in crews, they slowly but surely would have dug channels like this.
21:01So, at one point, they could break it away from the living rock, put it on a boat,
21:07and take it down to wherever the obelisk was supposed to be delivered.
21:10After the 400-mile river journey to Karnak, the chances of a mistake increased dramatically.
21:19Too much pressure in the middle, and the giant slab would snap under its own weight.
21:35But this was just the easy part.
21:39On arrival at Karnak, the giant granite block was hauled up a mound, base first.
21:46With men to maneuver and sand to do the real work, the giant stone was skillfully lowered into place.
21:53With time and enough labor, anything was possible.
21:59But then, building techniques were about to change, when along came scaffolding.
22:04One king, by the name of Akhenaten, was in such a hurry to realize his ambitions, he invented new methods of construction.
22:12Under his command, stone blocks were cut to a standard size.
22:19Known as a talatat, they measured about 50 centimeters long, and could be easily handled by one man.
22:27It meant the whole building process was freed up.
22:30An unskilled workman could easily carry the blocks right to the top of a building structure,
22:35and the whole process was much faster and cheaper.
22:37But it didn't last. Small blocks were quick to build up, but even quicker to pull down.
22:45And the next pharaohs, Tutankhamun and Horemheb, both plundered Akhenaten's buildings,
22:51the talatat blocks becoming rubble infill for their giant pylons.
22:55So the pharaohs returned to building big.
23:01And there is one structure at Karnak that not even a giant could pull down.
23:07The Hyperstyle Hall is the largest single religious building ever constructed.
23:12The vast hall was begun by the pharaoh Horemheb, continued under Seti I,
23:27and completed by his son, Ramesses II, in around 1220 BC.
23:32It's a forest of columns 70 feet high.
23:37How was it put together?
23:38Ancient Egyptian temples are built using huge columns like this one,
23:44and architraves that span between them.
23:47This was one of their biggest problems,
23:49because the architrave had to support not only its own weight,
23:52but the weight of the great stone roof above.
23:55Extraordinarily, building techniques were only moments away from solving this problem.
24:00We always think it was the Romans who invented the arch,
24:05but the ancient Egyptians were building them over a thousand years earlier.
24:09But without keystones, Egyptian arches had to lean backwards to support each other.
24:15They were used only for utilitarian buildings, like these mud arch storerooms over 3,000 years old.
24:21Undaunted, the ancient Egyptians simply carried the weight with enormous columns.
24:31Columns became so big that their bases were built out of two stones like these,
24:37brought together the perfect joint down the middle.
24:40They would be left rough, and the whole column was built on top of it.
24:44Earth was banked up around them as they grew to 70 feet high.
24:49Bridging the gap between each capital was a vast architrave,
24:54a single block of sandstone spanning 30 feet.
24:57These could weigh up to 80 tons, and had to be hauled up onto the site.
25:08These architraves were placed onto the roughly built columns.
25:12Now the stonemasons worked their way down, creating beautiful carved columns.
25:17And if a mistake was made, plaster was used to cover the cracks.
25:22Later, these relief carvings were exquisitely painted.
25:26As they worked their way down, slowly the earth mound was dug away.
25:31Ramesses II completed the hall using deep sunken outlines and buckets of plaster,
25:38changing the decorations to his own image and rewriting history.
25:43And he set out to cover Egypt in monuments to glorify his name.
25:47The most famous is his temple at Abu Simbel.
25:50Ramesses' power extended as far south as the deserts of Nubia, where he built seven temples.
26:04The most impressive is at Abu Simbel.
26:07It was built to advertise Ramesses' ultimate power, and it would become the finest rock-cut temple in the world.
26:18Gangs of masons set to work on the facade, to transform a cliff face into two pairs of enormous statues of the pharaoh.
26:25Carved out of the living rock, they were to be 69 feet high.
26:32Why did Ramesses choose this remote desert as the site for his temple?
26:37He probably built it because there was a fine piece of rock.
26:41It was located close to the Nile, and anyone coming from the south would be immediately struck by the majesty of Egypt.
26:52Nubia was important for mining and for traders coming from the south.
26:57Lying far from Thebes, the area was free from the power of the priesthood at Karnak.
27:02And so here, Ramesses could pay less attention to the established gods, and could concentrate on promoting his own image.
27:12This temple is built far afield to celebrate the king, so that he's not infringing on the territory of the god Amun.
27:24It's a little more of an egomaniac sort of thing, but he's doing it in a place where it's relatively safe.
27:30Inside, Ramesses had a hypostyle hole cut from the natural rock.
27:37The Egyptians had the technique down for a thousand years, fifteen hundred years before this temple was built.
27:46What Ramesses II does is he takes this technique, and he creates it on an absolutely tremendous scale.
27:54The columns he had faced with giant standing statues of himself.
28:15But it's the fact that it's celebrating Ramesses that makes it unique among the temples that you see in Egypt.
28:26He carves deep, and he carves boldly over huge surfaces, and everybody knows about it.
28:33His triumphs and achievements decorate the walls.
28:39His enemies cower before him.
28:42Syrians plead for mercy.
28:45A Libyan soldier is trampled underfoot.
28:50In the innermost sanctuary, Ramesses depicts himself beside the gods in the middle with Amun-Re.
29:03As twice every year the rising sun would penetrate this part of the temple and illuminate his image.
29:09The vast exterior statues were designed to be seen from miles away for all eternity.
29:21But instead they would disappear for two thousand years, until the treasure hunter Belzoni arrived.
29:38Once inside, he realized that fourteen rooms lay behind the facade.
29:43Some of them pillared and cut back some two hundred feet into the rock.
29:47This was a discovery to equal the Valley of the Kings, and European tourists flocked here in droves.
29:56But in the 1960s, when the Aswan Dam was built, the temple was threatened by the rising waters of Lake Nasser.
30:04Fifty-one nations from across the world contributed through UNESCO to save the monument.
30:10Piece by piece, the entire cliff face and temple were cut into thirty-ton blocks and reassembled two hundred feet up at the top of the cliff, like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
30:24Not even the waters of Lake Nasser could rise above the king who constructed his own immortality in stone.
30:35Some wonders were never constructed.
30:38They'd become natural shrines and spiritual landmarks.
30:42The most famous is Mount Sinai.
30:44Mount Sinai.
30:54At seven thousand feet high, Mount Sinai, known locally as Jebel Musa, or Mount Moses, is the highest mountain in southern Sinai.
31:03And one of the most spiritual places on earth.
31:12According to biblical accounts, it was here that Moses, amidst a violent storm, scrambled to the top of the mountain.
31:19Here the heavens are said to have opened, as God gave Moses the Ten Commandments written on two stone tablets.
31:34To mark the site where Moses received the commandments, a Greek Orthodox monastery was built over fifteen hundred years later,
31:41and dedicated to the Christian martyr, Saint Catherine.
31:46The monastery is known today as Saint Catherine's monastery.
31:50Saint Catherine herself was born in Alexandria in the late third century.
31:56She was renowned for her wisdom, for her intelligence, for her beauty and for her wealth.
32:02The monastery is the oldest on earth, and has been a centre of religious pilgrimage for over fifteen centuries.
32:09Christians have fled here to avoid Roman persecution.
32:14And in 530 A.D., the Emperor Justinian gave orders to build a vast fortification to enclose and protect an already sacred site.
32:27Towering walls enclose an area the size of a city block.
32:31Like a fortress, there was no doorway to enter.
32:34Until recently, the only way in was by a pulley that lifted any visitor up over the walls.
32:43Once inside, there lies a timeless miniature town from another age.
32:48A warren of ancient chapels and tiny courtyards.
32:51The monastery is one of the finest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture, and houses a priceless collection of religious art and manuscripts.
33:04According to scripture, it was here that Moses' life would be transformed by seeing a miraculous vision of a burning bush.
33:11And a species of raspberry bush, rubus santus, is still cultivated here by the monks.
33:21The first name of the monastery was the monastery of the burning bush.
33:25Because this is the place where God appeared to Moses, at the bush that burned without being consumed.
33:32It was here that Moses brought the children of Israel, and here that he received not only the revelation of the Ten Commandments, but the law.
33:41Moses' story began in the new kingdom of Egypt.
33:49He was a Hebrew orphan, but grew up in the royal house.
33:54This was a time when Hebrews were held as slaves.
33:57But when Moses grew up, he was forced to flee the palace.
34:01He killed an Egyptian guard when he saw the cruelty inflicted upon his fellow Hebrew people.
34:06His life changed from prince to fugitive.
34:11And for 40 years, he wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai desert.
34:26According to the Bible, it was the burning bush that appeared as God's sign to him.
34:31And Moses' life was to change again.
34:37Charged with new purpose, Moses returned to the palace to persuade the Pharaoh to release his people.
34:45There is a possibility that Ramses was the ruler during the Exodus.
34:51It takes place either 200 or 400 years before the building of the Temple of Solomon.
34:56If it's 200 years, Ramses is a candidate.
35:00You can't pinpoint this precisely.
35:03The Pharaoh would not comply until Moses had unleashed ten terrible plagues upon the country.
35:10The Nile turned to blood.
35:14Animals died and light turned to darkness.
35:18Only then did the Pharaoh relent.
35:21The Bible recalls how Moses led his people across the Red Sea, parting the waters to make their escape,
35:31before bringing them crashing down, drowning the Pharaoh's army.
35:34After years in the wilderness with his followers, Moses would return to Mount Sinai,
35:47where God, having tested his faith, would give mankind the Ten Commandments.
35:52Since the time of Moses, the monks have carved 4,000 steps of repentance up the mountainside,
36:05allowing pilgrims a path to the top.
36:08When temperatures are low, as many as 1,000 tourists make the climb each night
36:14up what is considered to be one of the world's most spiritual landmarks.
36:17The pilgrims that come here today are following in the footsteps of those who have come here for 17th centuries.
36:24It is gratifying to see people who come here as casual tourists
36:30and then become aware of the tremendous spiritual heritage that is here,
36:35and they come as tourists and they leave as pilgrims.
36:38From this site, Moses is believed to have shown his people the way to their promised land,
36:48and the Jewish nation was born.
36:55Egypt had long had its own icons and mythologies.
36:59The most mysterious of all is the largest freestanding stone sculpture in the world.
37:04No one is certain who it represents or even who built it.
37:14Half human, half animal, the Sphinx has long been considered the strangest icon on Earth.
37:21At 60 meters long and 20 high, it guards the Giza Plateau beside Egypt's two largest pyramids.
37:28For centuries, the Sphinx has been seen as the key to life.
37:35Pharaohs have worshipped at its feet.
37:37Conquerors have knelt down before it.
37:40The Sphinx has been subjected to every test, but remains an enigma.
37:45Why was it built?
37:47Why are the tunnels inside it?
37:49Which king does it represent?
37:51What power does the Sphinx hold?
37:53They call him Father the Terror.
37:57They're afraid of him.
37:59Can you imagine if the locals today are afraid of the Sphinx?
38:03The people at that time were also afraid.
38:05He's just here watching you all the time.
38:09In ancient Egyptian art, the idea of fusing animal with human was nothing new.
38:13But this was the first time a human head was sculpted onto a lion's body.
38:19And in ancient Egypt, there was only one person who could be portrayed in such a way.
38:25The Pharaoh himself.
38:27The king being the manifestation of Egypt, he has to be virile, mighty, fearless and powerful.
38:36So you have here the head of the king representing intelligence, but the body of a lion representing might and power.
38:46The Sphinx stands in a vast U-shaped quarry before the Great Pyramid, built by Khufu, and the second pyramid, built by his son Khafre.
38:56It is thought to represent one of them.
38:58But why build a sculpture in the middle of a pyramid complex?
39:01It's cut from actual rock. So this huge rock was standing there.
39:06So they decided to do something with it.
39:09And that thing would have been a huge statue that would manifest the king.
39:14And in the meantime, it would be a symbol for the sun god, Ray.
39:21But if the Sphinx manifests the importance of the king, why is its head so small in comparison with its long body?
39:28The head is made of the hardest of the limestone and therefore was very good for sculpture.
39:36So somebody's got the idea when the shape has been left at some stage, hey, this might be an interesting design to make as a monument to the king.
39:46But as the stonemasons began carving lower down, they ran into a soft layer of rock and hit a fissure.
39:57This poor stone may have forced the builders to extend the body.
40:01They then had to clad the bad area in a limestone casing.
40:09But it wasn't long after the Sphinx was finally completed that the entire statue would become buried beneath the sand for over a thousand years.
40:17Thutmose IV rediscovered it and installed a 15-ton granite stella or inscription between its pores.
40:28Known as the dream stella, it recounts how as a young prince he fell asleep in the shadow of the Sphinx's head.
40:35According to the stella, the sphinx came to him and said, my son, why do you allow this to happen to me?
40:44Uncover me and you shall become king of Egypt.
40:48So according to the dream stella, Thutmose IV uncovered the sphinx and lo and behold, he became the next king.
40:55But soon the desert sands were to consume the monument again before tomb builders came to the plateau.
41:06First of all, you have to imagine now the sphinx when it was covered with sand.
41:13So, it's all covered with sand, only the head is visible.
41:17The Greeks, by the way, believed that the sphinx was like the statue, standing statue, and they were seeing the head.
41:23They couldn't imagine the body.
41:26And because the body was hidden, tomb builders and treasure hunters have dug unknowingly into the sphinx.
41:35From all the times, people are curious.
41:38You see that during the ages, people tried to explore under the sphinx.
41:42Maybe people believe there are hidden secrets.
41:45Today it's forbidden to make passages, but some centuries ago nothing was forbidden.
41:50So we can come and make a lot of things here.
41:54Human activity is incredible.
41:59This explains the tunnels.
42:01But there still remains the enigma.
42:03Which king does the sphinx represent?
42:05When you face the sphinx, you find that it's in line with the pyramid of Khafra.
42:14And it's very close to the very temple of Khafra and to the causeway.
42:19So, presumably, it must have belonged to the same king.
42:23But other Egyptologists disagree.
42:25When you look at Khafra's pyramid, the normal thing would have been for the king to build a causeway at 90 degrees to the pyramid and bring it straight down to his valley temple.
42:37This was not done.
42:39His causeway had to take a swing over to the side over there because this quarry was already in the way.
42:46I personally think that Khufu was responsible because mainly the eyes are very wide open and very large.
42:57Another thing is the nemes headdress that he wears, which is just a head cloth that was striped.
43:02But in his successor's reign, there is not a stripe to be seen.
43:07The sphinx may indeed represent Khufu, the builder of the other pyramid, the Great Pyramid, which stands at its side.
43:17Khufu's pyramid nearly bankrupted the country.
43:23And so the sphinx could have been built by one of his sons, Jedefrae, to restore national confidence and Khufu's status.
43:31The idea that Jedefrae, as a good son, makes a monument for his father, the sphinx, to continue the cult of his father, the god.
43:41The image of the sphinx, in fact, helped because the power, the strength was given back.
43:50He's there watching the Egyptian people.
43:53Whether the sphinx bears the face of Khufu may never be decided.
43:57For comparison, the only surviving statue of the pharaoh is a tiny figurine just three inches tall.
44:07A small reminder of the pharaoh who would build the largest stone monument the world has ever seen.
44:18The Great Pyramid of Giza holds the number one position as Egypt's top wonder.
44:23It's the oldest wonder of the world and has been standing for four and a half thousand years.
44:30It's the greatest tomb ever constructed and remains the largest stone building on earth.
44:36It was built for the pharaoh Khufu in 2560 BC.
44:42And from that time to this, the Great Pyramid has remained an icon of world architecture.
44:47The idea of a pyramid is very simple.
44:52The ancient Egyptians believed that life is eternal.
44:57They crossed from this life to the eternal life.
45:01But they had to prepare the abode.
45:04Now, it took the shape of a pyramid because this is connected with the sun god.
45:08Now, King Khufu was the first king to put among his titles, Sare.
45:16Sare means the son of the sun god.
45:24The pharaoh Khufu had been brought up with pyramids.
45:28His father had been a builder on a grand scale.
45:30And from the start, Khufu set out to construct a pyramid that was perfect.
45:36Firstly, the pyramid was aligned with the compass.
45:40The points where the north star rose and set were divided to define true north.
45:45Then the base was levelled.
45:48Khufu's pyramid covers 13 acres and is levelled to within just one inch.
45:52They did this using a rectangular grid of channels in the rock, which they could fill with water.
45:59And any protrusion sticking up above the water could be shaved off.
46:06Once the base was marked out and the ground level, building could begin.
46:11This is where they cut the stones to build the pyramid.
46:15To move them, they dragged them from here up a great straight main ramp up to the pyramid itself.
46:22For the lower courses, the blocks weighed five tons or more.
46:35But as the pyramid grew, the weight of the stones reduced.
46:40In total, the workers hauled a staggering 2,300,000 stone blocks.
46:47For the first time in pyramid building, the blocks did not slope inwards,
46:51but were laid in horizontal courses.
46:56One was fitted into place every three minutes.
46:59But despite this pace, Khufu's pyramid would take 22 years to construct.
47:06Inside, the pyramid becomes a puzzle.
47:08From the entrance, a passage descends to the subterranean chamber carved out of the bedrock.
47:17It leads nowhere and leaves us with a mystery.
47:21Above, the queen's chamber is a sealed room for a statue of Khufu, representing his car or spiritual force.
47:29From here, there's a spectacular high-ceilinged passage.
47:35The grand gallery leading up to the king's burial chamber was built using a technique called korbeling.
47:41This is a simple form of arch that the Egyptians excelled at.
47:44Each stone block is progressively stepped in until you reach the top.
47:49And it has the advantage both of reducing the span that they have to bridge and of giving the room a great feeling of grandeur.
47:56Above this, high up in the pyramid, is the king's chamber, designed to be Khufu's final resting place.
48:02It's incredible. It's incredible. It's entirely walled in granite.
48:13And these roof slabs were the biggest span ever attempted at that time, 4,500 years ago.
48:20The Egyptians were so worried about the weight of the slab and the fact it might collapse under its own self-weight.
48:27But they built a series of voids or chambers above to try and hold the weight of the pyramid off this roof right here.
48:36And then right at the top, two great stones lean against each other like a V.
48:43And that takes the force, the weight of the pyramid, right down and guides it down these beautiful side walls.
48:50It's the most fantastic space I've ever been in.
48:53Inside the stress relieving chambers remain the graffiti of the workmen.
49:00One of them mentions the name Khufu, the only record of the pharaoh for whom this pyramid was built.
49:06This is the last resting place of Khufu. Unfortunately, it was robbed in ancient times, and that's why it was broken at this tip.
49:17The funny thing is, when this coffin was measured, they found that it was a fracture wider than the entrance there.
49:29So obviously, it was put here before the structure of the whole burial chamber.
49:36There are other curious features, like two tiny shafts that run from this chamber towards the outer face of the pyramid.
49:46These are believed to have released the pharaoh's car, or spirit, to the heavens.
49:51On their way out, once Khufu was in his sarcophagus, the priests and the engineers sealed the tomb by dropping three huge granite slabs down these great slots here, sealing it off forever.
50:07Then the entrance at the other end of the grand gallery was also sealed.
50:16To get out, the engineers now had to climb down a near vertical escape shaft, make their way back up the descending passage, past the blocking stones, and out through the entrance.
50:28Then the passages were blocked, and the entrance sealed with a flap stone, indistinguishable from the pyramid casing.
50:41Supposedly, nobody would have known how to get in, and even if they had done that, they would have found tons of blocks of stones blocking the ascending corridors.
50:52Every precaution was taken. But you know something? At the end, the pyramid was robbed. How did they do that? God only knows.
51:05These seven wonders all stood within the world's first empire, and have inspired every civilization to follow them.
51:12Whether a natural site or a man-made construction, the seven wonders of ancient Egypt will remain world landmarks for all eternity.
51:25.
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