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00:00Over 4,000 years ago, the old kingdom of ancient Egypt was the greatest civilization on Earth.
00:09Pharaohs ruled over a prosperous empire.
00:13Giant pyramids dominated the skyline.
00:17The height of its power, this mighty empire suddenly collapsed,
00:22leaving in its wake one of the great mysteries of the ancient world.
00:27What happened and why?
00:34Now, a team of archaeologists and scientists are unlocking the secrets of Egypt's old kingdom
00:40to discover what brought this great civilization to its knees
00:44and drove its people to the worst extremes.
00:49Here, there's a reference to how these people are essentially eating their own children.
00:56What they uncover is ominous.
00:59The civilization that built the great pyramids wasn't felled by political upheaval or war.
01:05It was destroyed by a force far greater.
01:112184 BC.
01:20The old kingdom of ancient Egypt stretches up and down the Nile for 600 miles.
01:27This is the great age of the pyramid.
01:30Almost 50 of these vast monuments dominate the ancient skyline.
01:36In their shadow, two million workers labor to support an ever-growing population.
01:42Artists immortalize the glory and might of the kingdom.
01:47The pharaoh, Pepe II, has ruled for an astonishing 94 years.
01:53It is a time of great prosperity and yet the old kingdom is about to come to an abrupt end.
02:01For the next 200 years, there will be almost no pyramids or tombs built at all.
02:07This sudden halt in construction is one of the great enigmas of history.
02:13Archaeologist Dr. Fekri Hassan is determined to unravel the mystery of what happened.
02:19The pyramid was part and parcel of the state machinery.
02:24It represented the power of the king.
02:26It represented his connection with the gods.
02:28So the fact that we do not have these pyramids is a good indication that something has gone terribly wrong with Egyptian civilization.
02:36Few records remain of the dark age that followed the collapse of the old kingdom.
02:42One is an inscription in the tomb of a governor named Anctifi.
02:47Preserved in stone are the following words.
02:51The sky was clouded.
02:54The people were like locusts throughout the land.
02:58The whole of Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.
03:07A papyrus document written centuries after Egypt recovered also purports to be a historical record.
03:16Lower Egypt weeps.
03:20The children of princes are dashed against walls.
03:24The river is blood.
03:27Yet men drink of it.
03:30How comes it that every man kills his brother?
03:35For years these writings have been dismissed as exaggeration and fantasy.
03:41But Hassan believes they are in fact an astonishing eyewitness account of the end of a great civilization.
03:49People were looting and killing each other and recoursing to all kinds of heinous crimes including the pillaging of pyramids and temples.
03:59So the country just went to pieces.
04:02I mean everything collapsed.
04:06The starting point of Hassan's investigation is the pyramid of Pharaoh Pepi II.
04:12As the last Pharaoh to rule before the collapse, his tomb may hold clues to what happened before the end.
04:22From the death of Pepi II afterwards, there is nothing.
04:28When you have an event that leads to the collapse of a well-established civilization, something big would have happened.
04:37If the collapse of the kingdom had begun during Pepi's reign, then his burial chamber might show signs of desecration and disrespect.
04:49Like so many monuments in this desert country, Pepi's tomb lies buried in sand.
04:55For almost ten years, it has been closed to archaeologists.
05:06The entrance to the tomb is down a long tunnel that leads to the actual burial chamber, where Hassan hopes to find vital clues.
05:15The walls are covered with elaborate pyramid spells that attempt to guarantee the Pharaoh's safe passage into the afterlife.
05:40The green is the color of fertility and renewal, so it's the color of life after death.
05:47This was a period of great artistic refinement.
05:51It all appears to be in perfect condition.
05:55The ritual of royal burial seems to have been carefully observed.
06:00There's no indication that there was any hurry or any trouble during his reign, especially its end when this was being done.
06:13In the place of honor sits the granite sarcophagus of Pepi II.
06:18His mummified body has long disappeared, but to Hassan, the coffin itself is a clue.
06:24The size of the sarcophagus is enormous. It's unparalleled.
06:31To bring a sarcophagus like that from long distances with this size indicates that there's no problem bringing material from the rest of the country.
06:41You can't build something like this without great stability in the country.
06:51No inkling that Egypt would be plunged in darkness thereafter.
06:59Hassan has found no signs of desecration, no indication that a weak Pharaoh had lost his grip on his empire,
07:06or that he left a crumbling kingdom.
07:12It is sad.
07:16You see the last remaining evidence of a great, great era of Egyptian civilization.
07:27This would be the last major tomb built for 200 years, and its apparent order is significant.
07:33So that suggested it must have been quite abrupt, because with the death of Pepi II, it all goes.
07:41Hassan thinks that soon after the death of Pepi II, something happened that plunged this great stable empire into chaos.
07:52What was it?
07:53One hundred miles down river, another archaeologist is investigating the same mystery.
08:02Over 4,000 years ago, the old kingdom of ancient Egypt stretched from modern-day Aswan all the way to the fertile farmland of the Nile Delta.
08:17The Delta was the Pharaoh's pleasure ground.
08:23They traveled here to hunt hippos and birds, and to breed cattle to feed their multitude of pyramid builders.
08:30The Delta was the agricultural capital for a thriving empire.
08:35It is here that another archaeologist, Dr. Sarah Parkak, also stumbled on evidence of the collapse of the Pyramid Age.
08:46She'd set out to study the lives of ordinary Egyptians.
08:49No one has ever looked at the Delta in terms of what places were inhabited in what periods of time.
09:00Where were people living? How big were the settlements?
09:03It's almost like there was this big missing chunk of evidence.
09:06To find the ancient settlements, she used a technique called remote sensing.
09:13Remote sensing uses modern satellite technology to locate the old kingdom sites.
09:19Parkak begins by searching satellite pictures of the Delta.
09:24In particular, those that detect moisture content.
09:27They pick up ancient settlement sites that tend to have much higher rates of moisture in them than the surrounding landscape.
09:37Look at all the red pixels. Those are ancient settlements, and this just gives us a sense of the density of archaeological sites.
09:47One cluster in particular looks interesting.
09:50She compares it to satellite photographs.
09:54One mound appears to match the cluster.
09:58It's very distinctly an ancient site.
10:02We can see the main part of here, but you can see it extends.
10:05The modern town is built on top of it, and it just keeps going and going.
10:09You can actually see the curvature of the ancient settlement.
10:13But trying to locate an archaeological site on the ground using only satellite imagery is not easy.
10:24Especially if it's under a modern city like El Mansour.
10:36Using a GPS, Parkak tries to zero in on the ancient settlement she's identified from space.
10:43Once she's found it, Sarah looks for any part of the site that might give a clue as to what it once looked like.
10:52I'm really getting a sense that this site was a very large city.
10:57What I think we're seeing is significant mud brick architecture that's slightly been exposed over time.
11:05I certainly think it would have been one of the largest sites in the Delta in the Old Kingdom.
11:09She then hunts for shards of pottery, sometimes the only remaining evidence of a thriving Old Kingdom settlement.
11:22At long last, Sarah spots what she's looking for, an artifact from the Pyramid Age.
11:28It's very interesting, this particular potsherd. The Old Kingdom has a very specific kind of burnishing to it, and based on the form, it looks like a little offering bowl, dating to the time of the pyramids.
11:45Sarah then tries to see how the city changed through the centuries by looking for signs of later kingdoms.
11:53This is what first alerted her that something wasn't right.
11:57In village after village, city after city, Sarah would find plenty of pottery from the Old Kingdom, but nothing else any later.
12:09This site is typical of so many sites across the Delta. There are no Middle Kingdom potsherds at all.
12:16Parkak marked out all the Old Kingdom sites and then compared them to sites that showed later occupation. The results were astonishing.
12:26We see a fairly large number of sites. There are 27 sites. And then in the period immediately following the Old Kingdom, there's only evidence for four sites.
12:41There was a really huge crisis going on for the number of sites to have dropped.
12:46Sarah Parkak's work shows that 80% of the villages and cities in the Delta were abruptly abandoned at around the same time as the Egyptians stopped building pyramids.
13:01Her evidence backs up Dr. Hassan's theory that the collapse of the Old Kingdom was sudden, cataclysmic and widespread.
13:08So now she's asking the same question as Hassan. What caused this dramatic collapse?
13:19One hundred miles south, in the heart of the empire, Fekri Hassan continues his search for clues to what happened in the tomb of the Pharaoh's agricultural overseer.
13:30Here we have the owner of the tomb T and his wife supervising all the estate activities.
13:40T's tomb reveals a vibrant and thriving empire.
13:46They joined the produce of their farms. They had estates that produced all kinds of fruits.
13:54Clearly the herding of cows.
13:59But Hassan sees that one theme runs through all the images.
14:05Well, most of the scenes that we have are related to the productivity of the Nile.
14:13They had boats to transport food from one area to another.
14:17And they depended on the variety of fish that they could catch.
14:22All of these activities had the Nile as a central element.
14:28Every indication is that the Nile was the linchpin of this ancient civilization.
14:35What if something happened to the Nile?
14:39Could that be an explanation for the collapse of the empire?
14:42For a civilization like Egyptian civilization to rise, it depended on the water of the Nile for almost everything.
14:51The Nile was and is the lifeblood of this desert country.
14:56Every year since time out of mind, annual rains in Ethiopia have swelled the river, which then overflows onto massive flood plains.
15:06As the flood recedes, it deposits nutrient rich sediment called black earth.
15:14Black earth is ideal and essential for successful farming and survival.
15:22Persperity of Egypt depended on the height of the Nile flood and the timing of the Nile flood.
15:29Egypt runs out of water. That's the end of Egyptian civilization.
15:32The river was essential, not only to farming, but to pyramid building as well.
15:40The stones for the pyramids had to be ferried from quarries hundreds of miles away.
15:45Here at the foot of the pyramid of one of Pepe II's predecessors, Sahur,
15:50Hassan finds evidence of a royal pact between the divine pharaoh and his people.
15:57The sacred promise to provide annual floods to replenish and sustain the kingdom.
16:03The black earth of the Nile flood plain, the mud that comes from Ethiopia, represented in these dark stones.
16:11So here we have more or less a representation of the valley and its mud, which is life-giving.
16:19So the pyramids were a symbol of the role of the king and the renewal of the fertility of the Nile every year.
16:25Dr. Hassan's theory is simple. Only one thing could bring the entire empire to its knees if the Nile stopped flooding.
16:37But as yet, Hassan has no proof that this happened.
16:41Archaeologist Dr. Fekri Hassan is on a quest to find out why.
16:51He suspects it might be due to the failure of the annual Nile floods.
16:57With the failure of Nile floods, the activities from herding to cultivating to fishing would have come to an end.
17:09And that means that all the produce of the land, the bread, the figs, would disappear.
17:19The most likely cause for the absence of the Nile floods was the failure of the rains upstream in Ethiopia.
17:29No rains, no floods.
17:33No floods, no food.
17:35Famine would follow quickly.
17:42Farmers will die.
17:44And many villages would lay totally waste.
17:48None of this would exist along the banks of the Nile.
17:53It's a fine theory, but Hassan still has no evidence to back it up.
17:58Meanwhile, in the far north of the country, archaeologist Dr. Sarah Parkak is discovering a distinct pattern in the abandonment of the villages in the Delta.
18:08One that seems to support Hassan's theory.
18:12The four sites that are here are the largest sites.
18:16What I think is happening, looking at these maps, I think people are actually leaving these more marginal settlements along canals or perhaps smaller sections of the Nile River.
18:29The people are gathering in these very large cities.
18:34They're trying to pool their resources.
18:35So this pattern is incredibly revealing.
18:39The most vulnerable villages in the Delta seem to have been the ones most dependent on the Nile's flooding.
18:46This is good corroborative evidence for Hassan's theory.
18:50Parkak thinks he might be right.
18:52The abandonment of Old Kingdom settlements in the Delta could have been caused by a prolonged failure of the Nile floods.
19:00I started asking myself, what happens to people who are used to living in very lush, fertile environments when all of a sudden the water's taken away?
19:10There wouldn't have been enough resources to support your family, to support, you know, continue feeding your cattle.
19:18There just, there would have been nothing.
19:19But to test this theory, Hassan must find proof that the Nile dried up over 4,000 years ago, causing a catastrophic drought.
19:30Hassan is also a geologist, and he believes the evidence will lie in the geological record of Egypt itself.
19:38Today, the Aswan Dam controls the flow of the Nile, so the annual summer floods are a thing of the past.
19:45But in ancient times, the Egyptians had no such control.
19:51All they could do was try to capture as much of the annual flood water as possible in irrigation channels.
19:57So Hassan selects a location that he believes held a lake in Old Kingdom times, one deep enough to serve as a harbor for the pyramids.
20:09We assume that there is a harbor and boats come in, it cannot be shallow. It has to be, you know, a deep water.
20:19Hassan drills down to extract a sample or core of earth.
20:22What he's looking for in the subsoil are the telltale clues of a terrible drought 4,200 years ago.
20:31A mix of clay and sand means flood water.
20:35Clay alone indicates standing water.
20:38And crucially, a band of fine sand means no water at all. A drought.
20:49The first task is to dig deep enough to reveal the clay lake deposits.
20:54Hassan and his team work on the rough calculation that three and a half feet equals 1,000 years.
21:00A rule of thumb supplied by other geologists working in the region.
21:06Very high clay content in sand, in medium grain sand.
21:11You see here is a clay layer, you see?
21:15These are very different from that.
21:19They've struck sand, but is it the right kind?
21:22For his theory to be substantiated, Hassan needs to find light windblown sand.
21:27There's some quite coarse sand there.
21:30Mmm.
21:32At approximately the 4,000 year level, Hassan finds what he's looking for.
21:38Sand, windblown sand.
21:42Several decades probably with low water reaching here.
21:46You know, just all what you have is just a windblown sand.
21:49This is compelling evidence that the Nile stopped flowing here.
21:52Not just for a year or two, but for a generation.
21:55It's very informative to find these sand layers going all the way down.
22:00So that's actually reading the secrets of the lake.
22:03So that evidence is very conclusive that something was going on at a very large scale.
22:12It appears that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom would have seen the lake dry up before their eyes,
22:17and the water recede from the channels that irrigated their fields.
22:22Around the edge of the lake would have lived the pyramid builders, as well as farmers and craftspeople.
22:29As the water dried up, they would have been stranded and thirsty, without direct access to food or other waterborne supplies.
22:42Surrounded by desert, they would have had no escape.
22:45These two archaeologists, Parkak and Hassan, have gathered evidence which points to the same conclusion.
22:55A drought of epic proportions destroyed the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt.
23:00Now, new research suggests the drought might have had an even wider impact.
23:14Two archaeologists in Egypt believe they have evidence that the sudden collapse of the Pyramid Age was due to a catastrophic drought.
23:21At the same moment in history, just 800 miles away, another ancient empire was in similar turmoil.
23:36The Akkadian Empire extended far across Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq and Syria.
23:43The agricultural capital was Leylan.
23:45The ancient city was surrounded by fertile tracts of land and boasted a population of 30,000, according to Yale University archaeologist Dr. Harvey Weiss.
23:58When I first went to Leylan, I was terribly impressed by its physical size.
24:04This was really a very, very large city.
24:07The same way that Kansas City served as the hub which collected grain from the great grain belt of the United States.
24:17So Leylan served as a great collection point for northern Mesopotamian agricultural production.
24:23But everywhere he dug in the once thriving metropolis, Weiss came upon the same mystery.
24:28A layer of windblown sand, similar to the one Hassan had found in the lake by the pyramids.
24:36Windblown deposits of different sized grains.
24:42Sandy deposit, very, very, very, very, very fine.
24:47This deposit represents something on the order of one or two hundred years of extremely different climatic conditions.
24:54For over one hundred years, there are no signs of human habitation or any life at all in the sediments.
25:04There was even within this dust, an absence of earthworm.
25:09And so this was becoming a very perplexing situation.
25:13It seemed that very quickly, Leylan had turned from a bustling metropolis into a ghost town.
25:19The collapse of Leylan appeared to coincide with the fall of the entire Akkadian Empire.
25:26Weiss began to suspect the same culprit that Hassan blamed for the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
25:33We initially thought drought, arid event, aridification.
25:39Then we began to see that this was rather extensive, that it extended across regions, extended into Turkey, extended into Palestine.
25:47There was a drought period in Egypt.
25:51There was a similar abandonment, collapse situation on the Greek mainland.
25:56There's increasing evidence to suggest that the collapse of the Old Kingdom was not unique.
26:01Around 2200 BC, half a dozen highly advanced civilizations were simultaneously brought to their knees.
26:11Weiss suspected only one thing could have had such a widespread and profound effect.
26:17A catastrophic change in climate.
26:19But he, like Parcak and Hassan in Egypt, needed proof.
26:26He needed an expert in ancient climates.
26:30Five thousand miles away, at the Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory in New York,
26:37paleoclimatologist Dr. Peter Domenical searches for ancient climate change events.
26:42Ah, wow.
26:47At his disposal is the world's largest drill core archive.
26:52It's an extensive geological record of climate change.
26:57When Weiss got in touch about a possible dramatic change over 4,000 years ago,
27:02Domenical was surprised by the question.
27:05My initial response was, this is incredible.
27:07What first struck me as a paleoclimatologist was, why didn't I know about it?
27:12Because there we see this, there was this proposed climate change
27:17that wasn't something that we were familiar with.
27:20The best evidence for past climate behavior lies buried beneath the ocean,
27:26in the sedimentary layers of the ocean bottom.
27:29To test Weiss's theory, Domenical wanted to extract cores from the ocean floor,
27:34much like Hassan did from the old lake bed near the pyramids.
27:39The oceans are this reservoir, this archive of information,
27:43and so all we needed to do was to find a place that would be closest to Tel Leilan.
27:48The Gulf of Oman lies approximately 1,000 miles southeast of Iraq.
27:54Any dry, wind-blown dust that swept down from a drought-ridden Leilan
27:58would show up in an ocean core drilled here.
28:03Domenical was hunting for a mineral called dolomite.
28:08Dolomite is found in abundance in the mountains and plains of Iraq,
28:13and would be present in any dust from the area.
28:17What we realistically expected to find was nothing.
28:20We really didn't expect to see much, in part because I thought the signal would be so small
28:26that it would just be barely above our detection limit.
28:29His team searched the sample for any sign of dolomite.
28:34It was just like what we expected. It was completely flat.
28:38There wasn't much variation in the percentage of dolomite.
28:40And then about halfway up the core was this spike where the percentage of dolomite increased by 400% over the baseline.
28:52So, you know, a factor of four. I mean, it was this huge spike. It was enormous.
28:57The dates were on target.
29:00The dramatic spike of dolomite in the ocean core from off the Omani coast matched the fall of the Akkadian Empire.
29:06And, importantly, the collapse of the Pyramid Age as well.
29:12All of a sudden I get a phone call.
29:15You're not going to believe it.
29:18Dust spike, 2200 BC.
29:21It was really quite overwhelming.
29:25The proof was now really massive and independent.
29:29This finding proved that the Akkadian Empire suffered a cataclysmic drought.
29:34At the same time as the drought which caused the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt.
29:40So, to find this event was something that was gratifying, of course.
29:46But it was also kind of troublesome because why was this particular event so big?
29:51Domenical believed the trigger for the event could only lie thousands of miles away in the North Atlantic.
30:02The North Atlantic Ocean's natural circulation creates a conveyor belt of water that transports heat from the tropics northwards toward the pole.
30:11As this heat is released gradually into the atmosphere, it affects the weather around the world, but especially in Europe and North Africa.
30:22If this conveyor belt stops moving, radical climate change would follow.
30:27Climate models show parts of Europe and North America would experience a mini ice age, while the rest of the world would heat up.
30:39Climate changes that we see in the North Atlantic at that time coincides perfectly with the onset of dry conditions in the Middle East at 4200 years ago.
30:49In Ethiopia, the rains would stop falling, and since that's where the Nile draws most of its water from, 80% of Egypt's water supply would dry up.
31:02The most advanced civilization on Earth could do nothing to protect itself.
31:16We had the best of the best at that time, and yet that still wasn't good enough.
31:22Domenical and climatologists around the world are trying to piece together the full story of the global climate change
31:29that caused the drought in Egypt and elsewhere in the region.
31:36There's another twist in this extraordinary real-life drama.
31:40New evidence is revealing that the climate forces that destroyed ancient Egypt were the very ones that created this remarkable civilization in the first place.
31:49Over the millennia, Egypt has been plagued by droughts, but none as extreme as the one that may have created it.
32:03New research suggests the civilization owes its genesis to the deadly desert that surrounds it.
32:10The vast Sahara Desert is almost as large as the continental United States.
32:17Today, it's one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.
32:21But 6,000 years ago, and 2,000 years before the Pyramid Age, this part of Africa was a very different place, according to climatologist Dr. Nick Brooks.
32:31So I'm looking here at a satellite image of northern Africa, and we can see the Sahara Desert, and we can see Egypt up here.
32:39The Nile is essentially a giant oasis.
32:42So if we were to travel back to the Sahara more than 6,000 years ago, we'd find a very different place.
32:47We'd have savannah, woodland, lakes, rivers, and the Sahara then would have been populated by quite a large human population.
33:006,000 years ago, North Africa was home to hunter-gatherers who lived a nomadic existence in close communion with the land.
33:08But then something happened. The monsoon began to retreat, there was a collapse of the vegetation system, and the rains disappeared.
33:18An abrupt shift in global climate caused a massive interruption in weather patterns worldwide.
33:25The transformation of North Africa from verdant grassland to desert was also caused by changes in the currents in the North Atlantic.
33:34The effects of this 6,000-year-old climate change event were even more devastating than the one that destroyed the Old Kingdom in Egypt 2,000 years later.
33:45The desertification of North Africa was swift and deadly.
33:51People would have seen very, very dramatic changes within the course of a human lifetime.
33:56They could look out at barren areas that they could remember once upon a time being green and productive.
34:00Within their lifetime, the inhabitants saw their verdant grassland replaced by high drifts of wind-blown sand.
34:09The people of the Sahara had no choice but to flee the sand or die.
34:14In search of water, they migrated east to the fertility of the River Nile.
34:19What a beacon the Nile Valley is. It really represents one of the last refuges.
34:27We can see this strip of green going through this otherwise barren desert.
34:31The last and the greatest oasis in the Sahara.
34:33The Nile Valley acted like a magnet, drawing together different people, all driven here by catastrophic climate change.
34:44Out of their adversity, they would create one of the great cradles of civilization.
34:49This story, of what happened thousands of years ago, lives on in the archaeological record of ancient Egypt, according to Dr. Fekri Hassan.
35:02Maybe part of the ancestral memory, the time of the pyramid building, was that the desert were green and their ancestors lived there.
35:09One possibility is that these pyramids are actually resembling the hills of the desert.
35:17Without this dramatic period of climate change, the old kingdom of Egypt might never have happened.
35:24But this booming empire was always vulnerable to forces far beyond its borders or its understanding.
35:32The people of ancient Egypt believed their pharaoh was a living god and would protect them.
35:39In the end, this faith in the pharaoh's divine powers would cost them dearly.
35:45Here, there's a reference to how these people are essentially eating their own children.
35:56Archaeologist Dr. Sarah Parkak has tracked its destructive effects in the extreme north of the country,
36:03where it sapped the flow of the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt.
36:09The Nile was everything for the Egyptians, and take that away.
36:15Imagine you took away all of our electricity, you took away all of our water, you shut our highways down, you closed all the supermarkets in a big city.
36:25What would that do to us?
36:26To trace the aftermath of the drought, she travels upriver to Luxor.
36:32Sarah suspects this is one of the only places that was spared because of its proximity to the source of the Nile.
36:43Cut into the cliff is a tomb dating back to the Dark Age during and after the drought.
36:48Wow.
36:49It belongs to a governor called Anktifi.
36:54Sarah hopes to find evidence here of how life continued and what happened elsewhere in the kingdom during the drought.
37:02Almost immediately, she spots proof not just of survival, but of well-being.
37:13You still get a really great sense of everyday life, scenes of carpentry, of weaving, of just preparing bread.
37:23It's wonderful.
37:26And here at least, water continued to flow.
37:30Really incredible attention to detail on the fish here, really striking colors.
37:39So even during this time of drought, the Nile is still flowing.
37:45Sarah locates the pillar that serves as Anktifi's autobiography.
37:49All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger.
37:59Anktifi is talking about giving food to the hungry.
38:06And we see actually the determinative for hunger right here.
38:10It's a skinny little guy holding his hand to his mouth.
38:14And there's a reference to people from Upper Egypt coming and they're willing to exchange their oils for barley.
38:23These people from other places in crisis are willing to trade their really valuable possessions,
38:31their most valued items, just for a measure of grain.
38:34It's a startling eyewitness account of the effects of dramatic climate change on ordinary people.
38:42There's a description here of the people being like locusts.
38:48Anytime you have a reference to locusts, you just think of a time of tremendous crisis,
38:57a time when you completely lose control of the land surrounding you.
39:04It really shows the severity of the drought.
39:08It's a record of people driven to horror by the need to survive.
39:15And this is, Anktifi makes it very clear.
39:19Here there's a reference to how people are eating, essentially eating their own children.
39:26These words are a testament to a people destroyed by climate change.
39:33An epitaph for what was then the greatest civilization on earth.
39:38Eventually, Egypt did recover.
39:43The Middle Kingdom rose from the ashes of the old.
39:47But it was a different kind of civilization.
39:50The pharaohs were no longer considered divine or in control of the environment anymore.
39:58It is a social revolution.
40:01Revising the way the ruler deals with people.
40:05Hassan believes the new line of pharaohs invested not just in pyramids,
40:11but in dams and reservoirs.
40:14He's now drilling for evidence of these.
40:16These reservoirs were an insurance policy against future droughts.
40:22And, Hassan maintains, a testament to human adaptability.
40:26The history of humanity is really coping with climate change.
40:30People are creative, so they always come up with new things.
40:33And the environment is not stable.
40:35So between these two, you are always getting a change.
40:39For now, the lifeblood of Egypt, the Nile, continues to flow.
40:49Eighty million people are now just as dependent on the Great River
40:54as those who suffered so terribly after the failure of the Nile floods 4,200 years ago.
41:03The ancient story of collapse resides in the historical record of the Old Kingdom.
41:09A testimony of how catastrophic climate change wrecked one of the greatest civilizations of all time.
41:17The great pyramids of Egypt have long stood as a glorious monument to the dead.
41:24But are they now a warning to the living?
41:27After hillside by 2025,ari A.J.
41:29The ponderous
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