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00:00For 5,000 years, this land, Egypt, and the epic civilization it gave birth to has been
00:15shaped by one thing more than any other. This awesome river, the River Nile.
00:23The Nile helped temples to rise, pharaohs to rule, and pyramids to be built. Without the Nile,
00:37there'd have been no ancient Egypt. So I'm making the historical journey of a lifetime.
00:44A 900-mile adventure along the Nile, across the whole of Egypt. I'll explore Egypt's greatest
00:54achievements. It is truly wonderful, isn't it? And find treasures hidden for thousands of years.
01:01Oh my God, that's a sheer drop down there. This is my chance to travel this fabulous land.
01:07Oh, lovely. And experience it as the ancient Egyptians did. From the River Nile. From pharaohs
01:15to slaves. From facts to fantasies. I want to explore firsthand and to understand how this
01:22river shaped one of the world's first and greatest civilizations. Join me as I uncover 5,000 years
01:33of history along the River Nile.
01:45The pyramids and crowds of Cairo are behind me, and I've reached a stretch of the Nile that hides
01:52some of the river's best-kept secrets.
01:59Hi. Hello. How are you?
02:04You good?
02:05Um, did you get a cup of tea?
02:08We're now a hundred miles into our journey upstream.
02:11Lovely. Thank you for crying on that. Fantastic. Thank you so much. See you later.
02:16The lives of the ancient Egyptians are always intriguing. But I was first drawn here by one
02:23of Egypt's superstars. There's one character who constantly fascinates me. It's Cleopatra,
02:31the queen of Egypt, whose beauty and charisma was said to have brought the most powerful men
02:37on earth to their knees. And she used this river to captivate and control the ancient world.
02:48For the next 200 miles, I'll be exploring the Nile that Cleopatra herself loved.
02:55I'll enter the hidden chambers that inspired history's most celebrated archaeologist,
03:00braved the longest tomb in Egypt, and at Dendra come face to face with Cleopatra herself.
03:12My Dahabir boat is pretty gorgeous, but it doesn't come close to the luxury and excess of Cleopatra's
03:20own Nile processions 2,000 years ago.
03:23This is an artist's impression of one of the royal barges that sailed down the Nile. The barge was
03:30equipped with gold and ivory furnishings, with embroidered sails, even with gardens. What a sight
03:39it would have been. So you can just imagine Cleopatra standing on the brow of her deck, her auburn hair
03:45probably dyed with local henna, blowing in the wind, oiled with perfumed oils, queen of all she surveyed.
03:58Cleopatra came to the throne aged just 18. She was the last great pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
04:06By her reign, from 51 BC, Egypt had enjoyed a 2,000 year reputation as the land of ideas,
04:13inventions and mystery.
04:20And my first stop would have been a hotbed of activity when Cleopatra was in power.
04:27We decided not to take the easy tarmac road, but to go up onto the local road, which is great.
04:35I've left the comfort of my boat and I'm heading over the flood plains of the Nile Valley
04:39and out across the desert.
04:43Oh my God, it's hot, very hot in there.
04:48This is Tuna El Gabel, one of Egypt's most intriguing ancient sites.
04:57I've enlisted the help of Saeed, who's faithfully guarded this place since he was a boy.
05:02It looks obviously deserted now. We've driven two hours across the desert to get here,
05:08but in its heyday, this place would have been absolutely humming with activity. That's right,
05:13isn't it, Saeed? This was a big town, a huge town with two-storey buildings and
05:18a real destination place. And actually, at the time of Cleopatra, it was at its height.
05:23The old town has virtually vanished today, but the curious treasures of Tuna El Gabel
05:32are locked away and found deep below ground.
05:41So how far down does this go?
05:43We're entering a vast catacomb.
05:56Archaeologists haven't fully explored it yet, but these passageways are thought to extend for four
06:02and a half miles. What an extraordinary place. So this is, it's like a textbook necropolis. It's like
06:11a city of the dead down here. But this wasn't built as a resting place for humans. It was for animals.
06:21Oh my goodness. So there are bones all over the floor. We've got to tread very, very, very carefully.
06:27Oh my god, and bats. Yeah. You could have warned me about the bats. Sorry, I just saw something moving and I wasn't sure what it was.
06:42Originally, each of the animals here would have been carefully mummified, but precious few remain today.
06:49So what I'm about to see is quite amazing. If I can just get the gate open.
07:01Oh, that door hasn't been open for a while.
07:06I'm about to come face to face with one extraordinary creature that's rested here for around 2,300 years.
07:19This is a slightly strange thing to see because there are so many fragments of mummies here,
07:32but what you've got is a mummified baboon. You can see the wrappings. It's really unusual to have
07:40the skull open. It's slightly freaking me out the way its eye sockets are staring at me across 2,000 years.
07:53There were centres like this across Egypt, producing mummies of every animal imaginable,
07:59from dogs and cats to crocodiles. And Tuna El Gabel's speciality,
08:06the beautiful Ibis. This ancient Nile bird, like the baboon, was regarded as highly intelligent by the
08:14Egyptians. The perfect offering for Toth, their god of wisdom and invention.
08:27It does feel like a real privilege to be here, because originally only priests and the cult servants
08:33of Ibis were allowed down in the corridors of these catacombs. So you just have to try to imagine them
08:39in their heyday, lit with tallow light, soots on the walls and over the ceilings. And in every single
08:46one of these niches, a perfectly preserved mummy. And we think that around 15,000 new mummies were
08:54dedicated every year. So that means there'd have been a total of 2 million here. The reason it was
09:01so popular is that people really believed that this was a way that they could communicate with the gods.
09:08Some brand new research suggests there's a twist in this macabre tale.
09:12There's actually been some x-rays done of some of the animals that were mummified. I don't know if you can
09:21see, it's often quite hard to read this. But by looking inside, we know exactly what kind of animal
09:27was being wrapped up. Here's a dog. And this is an Ibis. You can see that amazing curved beak coming down.
09:39The bird is wrapped very tightly up. But then there was a surprise with quite a few of the mummies that
09:46when they did the x-ray, you can make that out, you can see actually there isn't an animal inside.
09:55What there is is padding and stones and mummification wadding. So it's almost like a kind of,
10:02I can't really say fake, but a pretend mummy. Pretend or not though, the fate of most
10:08animal mummies has sadly been the same. And responsibility for that stretches back home to
10:15Britain. When lots were discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries, because they're made of organic
10:21material, they were actually shipped out of Egypt to Europe and the UK and ground down and used as
10:30fertilizer. And we've got one account of 20 tons worth of cat mummies being used as fertilizer when
10:40it was brought in to Liverpool in the UK.
10:45The ancient Egyptians would have been horrified at this act of destruction. The scale of animal
10:51mummification shows how much this strange ritual mattered to them. So my next step is to better
10:57understand the mechanics of how mummies were made. And a warning, it's not for the faint-hearted.
11:09On this stretch of my Nile journey, I've caught just a glimpse of the ancient Egyptian custom of
11:15mummifying animals. In November 2018, a remarkable discovery was made. Dozens of perfectly mummified cats,
11:26all laid to rest close to the pyramids of Saqqara. It's now thought 70 million
11:33animals may have been mummified in ancient Egypt. But how did the process actually work?
11:40It's something Professor Salima Ikram is actively investigating.
11:46OK, let me roll.
11:47I will, certainly, if I can do that. Thank you so much.
11:51I should perhaps explain what we're doing here. Salima is an incredibly eminent Egyptologist,
11:57and this is her lab. And what she does here, I'm right in saying, is one of the things that you do is
12:02investigate the mummification of animals in particular. Is that a kind of fair summary?
12:07Absolutely. Salima and Egyptology student Hayley are finishing off a rather unusual experiment.
12:16When Hayley's pet cat very sadly passed away, she was keen that Salima and herself tried to
12:22preserve her as the ancient Egyptians would have done. She was called Hatshepsut.
12:28She's adorable. Look, she's absolutely lovely. A real Egyptian cat, that. There's no mistaking that.
12:34Yeah. So if we were putting our heads into the kind of minds of the ancient Egyptians,
12:40you're doing this because the soul of the creature is in its body. So this is a way of
12:44kind of preserving the life spirit. Absolutely. OK, so now I'm going to give you this,
12:51and you are going to... Mummification was totally mainstream for the ancient Egyptians,
12:57but it involves skills and techniques that have now been lost. So this experiment, I should point out,
13:05is not for the faint-hearted. I'm a great cat lover, also a vegetarian. Oh. It's a tiny bit squeamish
13:11around this kind of thing. Eight weeks ago, Hatshepsut's organs were removed,
13:18just as they would have been thousands of years ago, before the drying-out process began.
13:25This looks like a pile of sand, and it's not. It's a very specialist material called natron.
13:30Natron. Natron. Natron. Which is what the ancient Egyptians used in mummification.
13:35It's the main thing that they used to mummify, because it desiccates and it defats.
13:40Yes. It sucks it all out. Well, parts of it are very dry, and other parts aren't that dry.
13:48Now, we put in... Oh, yeah. Oh, gully. I just got a waft of dead cat. For the first time in my life,
13:58I'm preferring the smell of plastic laboratory glass. What's that in there? That natron bag.
14:07As you put it inside to suck out the wetness. Yeah. Any remaining moisture could lead to rotting over time.
14:19It's fair to say our skills and techniques have a way to go to match those of the ancient Egyptians.
14:25Now, this is some resin, just like this stuff here, and it's a frankincense.
14:31Yes. Smells, it smells lovely. And that's been boiling up gently with some oil. So we're going to put some into the body cavity.
14:41Right. Resins like this had antibacterial properties, which could help preserve a body for thousands of years.
14:49It smells amazing, because there's frankincense in there. It smells like we're in a church at Christmas time.
14:55Yeah. Yeah, isn't it?
14:57Okay, now what we're going to do is, I think we can start to wrap. Lovely.
15:03Each limb of the body was individually bound in linen.
15:07This is an awkward angle. Yeah.
15:09And I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to do with it. And we use the resins also to hold it down.
15:19Doing this must give you huge respect for those environments, many fires of antiquity.
15:25They must have been astonishing people and really very clever chemists to understand
15:31what they were doing and how it affected the body and how amazingly effective really it was.
15:41It's a lovely, if slightly curious thing.
15:46But as a fitting end to the day, Hayley writes an epitaph in hieroglyphs.
15:53It simply reads, beautiful cat, Hatshepsut.
16:00Here in Egypt, the heat can be so intense, the cooling waters of the Nile often look pretty tempting.
16:18So today, the crew and I threw caution to the winds,
16:23and decided to go for it.
16:45We're now 180 miles south of Cairo,
16:48and heading towards another part of the Nile Valley that very few people reach.
16:57It's a spot that first inspired the world's most famous archaeologist.
17:05You probably all know that Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922,
17:11and kick-started a whole new wave of Egyptomania.
17:15But Carter actually first came here to Egypt when he was just a teenager.
17:19He was invited here to do drawings of an archaeological dig
17:22that was taking place on the hills overlooking these banks of the Nile.
17:28Carter may be known as the Great Tomb Finder,
17:30but as a young lad growing up in rural Norfolk,
17:35he'd earned pocket money painting portraits of animals.
17:41And it was this skill that brought him here.
17:48Thirty years before Carter captured the world's attention with Tutankhamun,
17:52his love affair with Egypt began at the cemetery of Beni Hassan.
18:02You might not have heard of Beni Hassan, and actually hardly anybody comes here,
18:05but that is completely crazy, because this place deserves to be a household name.
18:11In many ways, this is Egypt's best-kept secret.
18:14Two hundred feet above the east bank of the Nile,
18:21there are dozens of tombs here cut into the cliff face,
18:24so that those buried within could spend eternity overlooking the sacred river.
18:34It's really thrilling coming here today, and you can only imagine what it must have felt like for
18:39Howard Carter. He was only 17, and he'd been brought up in damp, rainy England.
18:45So all of this must have felt like a kind of desert wonderland.
18:52Salaam, hi, morning. Hello.
18:55This is a tomb complex that belonged to a, thank you very much,
19:01to a kind of high-class local official who was the equivalent of a mayor.
19:06This is where, inside is some of the most awe-inspiring wall art found anywhere in Egypt.
19:26And when you come in, you can understand why the archaeologists needed an artist's help.
19:32So just look at these paintings.
19:41These are close on 4,000 years old, and those colours are completely true.
19:50The vivid paintings give us an invaluable insight into what everyday life was like.
19:55And of course, the Nile is at the heart of it all.
20:00So you might just be able to see here, there's a poor guy who's fallen into the Nile,
20:07and he's being rescued by his friends. And this lovely chap here on his beautiful papyrus boat,
20:14he's a fisherman, and he's spearing these massive fish.
20:20Here is a hippo. There were loads of hippos in the Nile 4,000 years ago, so that's quite right,
20:27that there should be a hippo here. Everywhere you look, you can see there are images of the Nile,
20:33and fish, and water, and people interacting with the life on the Nile.
20:39As a teenager, in 1891, Howard Carter's job was to make perfect copies of these very images,
20:47to show people back home the wonderful discoveries that were being made.
20:51I've got one of the watercolours that you did here. See if I can find it. So, um, this is an African
20:59spoonbill. Somewhere, up here, there's birds, I think. Yeah, I think that's it, isn't it? So,
21:08this is the watercolour that Howard Carter did. Just imagine how exciting it would have been for him.
21:15He's 17 years old, and he's come here, we know he's sleeping in here overnight, and at dawn he gets
21:21up and gets his paintbrushes out. Amazing.
21:30Carter spent one winter season here, before travelling upstream to join a new team of
21:36archaeologists, where he was given his first real chance to dig. I really do love this place,
21:43and not only does it give us the most amazingly vivid details for ancient Egyptian life,
21:49that inspired a young Howard Carter to become an archaeologist, who would go on to make one of the
21:55greatest discoveries in the story of Egyptology, which means we can all share his passion and his
22:02discoveries today.
22:03One of the thrills of Egypt for me is that new discoveries are constantly being made,
22:14and there's a really special one waiting just along the Nile from here.
22:19I'm travelling the Nile to understand how this river shaped ancient Egypt.
22:32But a slow Dahabia cruise isn't a bad way to discover modern Egypt too.
22:36So this happens a lot, you get kids and fishermen who try to put onto the boat so they can get a lift,
22:53and they're getting told off a bit by the sailors up on top.
22:57Just over 2000 years ago, this river was Egypt's main highway.
23:11Travelling along it, you might have seen, or even spelt, the sensational ruler who made this river her own.
23:21One of the stories that we hear about Cleopatra is that she used to soak the sails of her barges in
23:26perfume so that people would smell her arriving before they saw her.
23:32One of the sources of Cleopatra's fabled scent was an icon of the ancient Nile valley,
23:38the beautiful blue lotus flower.
23:43Ancient accounts tell us that the waters of the Nile were once thick with these flowers,
23:48whose potent properties were legendary across the known world.
23:52But sadly, this symbol of ancient Egypt is now almost extinct.
24:01Ten miles into the desert though, there are rumours of a revival.
24:14Locals are always keen to help, and I've hitched a lift with Ahmed and his motorbike to meet a living legend.
24:22Oh, thank you so much for the lift.
24:26Excuse me.
24:30Thanks for the lift. Thank you. Take care.
24:33There are ancient cities up and down the Nile that specialised in perfume production,
24:38and I've just been told that there's one very brave, independent woman who's trying to revive
24:46that ancient tradition by herself here out in the middle of the desert.
24:53Hello.
24:55This wonderful oasis is the passion project of Dr Mirvat Nasser.
24:59Hello, how lovely to see you.
25:00Hello, you made it.
25:01I did make it, my gosh, properly across the desert.
25:05I didn't realise you were quite so remote, but what a little bit of paradise you have here.
25:10For six years now, Dr Mirvat has been trying to bring the magic of the blue lotus back to Egypt.
25:17I managed in the end to find the bulbs, and I grew the bulbs, and it's here we are.
25:24Why were they thought of as special flowers?
25:27One of the creation myths in ancient Egypt is that life came out of a lotus flower.
25:34It opens up by sunrise, and then it closes down and disappears into the water by sunset.
25:41So the following day, there is another flower coming out.
25:46So this kind of continuous cycle of renewal, of rebirth, of resurrection, I think that was what is symbolic.
25:551,300 years before Cleopatra, thousands of these petals were even found in Tutankhamun's tomb.
26:05But today, you've got to come a long way just to find a few.
26:11If you don't cut it, it will actually disappear into the water and it will not come back again.
26:17The blue lotus was said to smell like the god Ra's sweat.
26:22An interesting claim I can now test for myself.
26:26Shukran.
26:26Shukran, Hedda.
26:28How amazing to be given a freshly picked blue lotus.
26:34Oh, that is truly beautiful.
26:36It's very subtle.
26:37Very subtle, but you feel like you want to kind of draw it into your whole body.
26:41I wasn't expecting that.
26:42That's amazing.
26:43And the colour, I can see now where they say it's like having the sun in the centre of a flower.
26:50But is there more to the blue lotus than just beauty and a wonderful smell?
26:54I think it's also had an effect on the mood, so it made people feel happier.
27:02Recent studies have claimed that the flower has hallucinogenic properties.
27:06The ancient Egyptians also observed this and used the lotus as the original party drug.
27:14But I can tell you, it also makes a rather good cup of tea.
27:26Oh, it's so lovely.
27:27And we know the ancient Egyptians turned the petals into a highly fragranced oil.
27:34It's tragic that this enchanting flower has almost entirely gone from Egypt.
27:40But if Dr Mervat has anything to do with it, it might just flourish here again.
27:46When you study the ancient Egyptian world, you always hear about the popularity of perfumes.
27:50And there was one that was actually called the Egyptian.
27:53And I have to say, as a historian, I've always been really cynical.
27:56But do you know what?
27:57Coming here and being on the boat for weeks is very drying for the hair.
28:03So this beautiful little gift of lotus oil, I've been putting on my hair.
28:09So I now understand what those ancient Egyptian women went through.
28:14And lotus oil is definitely the solution.
28:20We're now 300 miles upstream from Cairo.
28:23And on our way to one of the most sacred sites in the whole of Egypt.
28:27I'm leaving the crew to a hearty Egyptian breakfast.
28:36While I make the short journey inland to the ancient city of Abydos.
28:50This has been a place of pilgrimage since the very dawn of this civilisation.
28:585000 years ago, when the kingdoms of upper and lower Egypt were first united the length of the Nile under one pharaoh.
29:06Abydos was the centre of this new superpower.
29:13I've come to this temple to see a wonder that gives incredible insight to the Egyptian world.
29:20A chronological list of 76 pharaohs.
29:24Apart from being exquisitely beautiful and parts of the temple are like a giant history book laid out.
29:32And that's what you've got here on the wall.
29:33This thing is called the king's list.
29:36And what it's supposed to be is a list of all the rulers of Egypt right from the very beginning.
29:42So the very first king that we have listed here is a kind of mythical pharaoh called Nama.
29:47And that's his cartouche at the top.
29:53The king's list is the ancient Egyptians telling their own story.
29:59In fact, it's the sole source we have for many of the pharaohs and their families.
30:03Actually, it's interesting because not all the kings are listed here.
30:10It's really history that's been censored.
30:11So there are some whole dynasties who are left out.
30:14Tutankhamun, for instance, appears nowhere on this wall.
30:17There's one particular guy that I'm interested in when we see who's here.
30:22It's obviously not the most beautiful one on the wall.
30:24There's a gigantic gash in the middle of it.
30:26But this is Pharaoh Seneset III.
30:29And there is a particular reason why I want to get to know Seneset better.
30:33Because I've just been invited to go into his tomb.
30:40Though he isn't a household name,
30:42Seneset III ruled 3,900 years ago.
30:47His tomb is found on the outskirts of Abydos.
30:50The archaeologist who's agreed to take me there,
30:57has unearthed some of the most majestic sites in Egypt.
31:00Hi, good, nice to see you. Thank you so much.
31:04His name is Yasser Rezik.
31:07Yeah, amazing.
31:08Why? It's very exciting.
31:10Very exciting.
31:12Yeah. Oh, my God, is it Ahmed?
31:14Hello. Welcome.
31:15Hello. Welcome back.
31:17Oh, lovely to see you.
31:19Me too, thank you.
31:20Welcome back.
31:21Oh, we were together here five years ago.
31:24Really?
31:24Yes.
31:25What a beautiful day.
31:26A new tomb, an old friend.
31:30Ahmed, how are your family?
31:32Is it everybody well? Is it good?
31:33I have four women and I have four, 15 children.
31:3915?
31:40Yes.
31:41Is it true?
31:41It's too early in the morning.
31:47We are almost arrived to the tomb.
31:52Okay.
31:52Okay.
31:54Semweset's tomb is hidden under this 700-foot mountain,
31:58and until recently was buried beneath 50 feet of sand.
32:03I think it would be better if you wear a boot or something.
32:07Yes.
32:08Yeah, no, I brought my boots.
32:09What are the conditions like inside?
32:11It's very hot, totally hot inside the tomb,
32:13and it's slippery in some places and totally dangerous, the tomb, yeah.
32:17Totally dangerous.
32:18Totally dangerous.
32:18This tomb is closed for the public, so this is a special visit for you.
32:23Thank you. Well, thank you. As long as you stay close.
32:25Okay.
32:26Thank you, Shagran.
32:27A long time since anybody's been in here.
32:30Semweset's astonishing burial place is entirely underground.
32:34It stretches for 800 feet, making it Egypt's longest tomb.
32:42As long as it's easier to get out than to get in.
32:44Hey. Thank you, ma'am. Well done.
32:50I like the fact that these tombs are built to defeat all robbers,
32:55and they're still managing to defeat us today.
32:58Watch your step.
32:59I will. So, is it really, really hot down there?
33:02Yeah.
33:02That's a very hot inside there.
33:05I think I might leave my scarf.
33:06And if we get lost, they'll know there's somebody down there.
33:09That's what you are saying.
33:10Exactly. It's our sign.
33:15One modern staircase is all we get before the bare stone and the dark takes over.
33:21I'm so glad we've got this torch.
33:24Did I tell you the only thing I don't like is small dark spaces?
33:26That's the only thing that freaks me out.
33:29Is that safe?
33:30Yeah, it's safe.
33:31Don't pull it too hard.
33:33Oxygen levels start to plummet.
33:35The temperature reaches unbearable levels.
33:38And with 90% humidity, we're quickly drenched in sweat.
33:42Now, this is where the heat starts, yeah, but take care of your head.
33:48I will. Thank you.
33:49I'll think of this.
33:50Before Semweset, pharaohs had been laid to rest beneath enormous pyramids.
33:55And now we are under the mountain.
33:59But this hidden tomb revolutionized the way that rulers would be buried for centuries to come.
34:05I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? It's so hot for us just walking down.
34:10Imagine what it would have been like for those workers digging it.
34:13And they're using just stone tools, presumably.
34:15What you'll get here.
34:17I will.
34:18After the tomb builders came the tomb raiders,
34:22searching for the treasures buried here with the pharaoh.
34:25Do you think, how many, how many workers do you think there would have been?
34:27Just hold on.
34:28Okay.
34:29Okay, because there's a shaft here.
34:31But Semweset had some tricks up his sleeve.
34:35That's a sheer drop down there, isn't it?
34:36We are above a shaft built special to trick the robbers.
34:41Oh my god.
34:42So once the robbers arrived to this place,
34:44they found that this part is closed by a block of stone.
34:49Right.
34:49Telling that there is nothing behind.
34:53But the robbers continued their desperate search,
34:56hacking their own passageways down through the solid rock.
35:00They've put these steps into the rocks, the robbers, have they?
35:03It's more stupid.
35:04Yeah.
35:04And after years, with many dying in the attempt, they finally found Semweset.
35:12600 feet from the entrance, at last, we reached the heart of the hidden tomb.
35:17Yeah, this is the sarcophagus of Semweset III himself.
35:21So this is the actual sarcophagus, is it?
35:23This is the actual sarcophagus of the king, yeah.
35:25And it is made of two pieces of granite.
35:28One is the lid, and this one is the body of the sarcophagus.
35:33It's been robbed, this, hasn't it?
35:35Yeah, it's been robbed, and it's not in its place.
35:39No.
35:40Originally, it was in the burial chamber, and the robbers, they dragged it until here.
35:53The robbers had to shift aside massive granite blocks,
35:57weighing up to 60 tons each, to reach the treasures down here.
36:01Gold, perfumes, even a boat was buried with the almighty pharaoh.
36:06But all that remains now is his empty sarcophagus.
36:10So where's his body?
36:12Robbed.
36:14Just gone.
36:14Robbed.
36:15Robbed.
36:16Like so many of Egypt's rulers, we no longer have his mummified body or any of his treasures.
36:25But we do now know that Semweset was the first pharaoh to take these extraordinary measures
36:31to hide his final resting place.
36:35Listen, I owe you such a debt of gratitude for bringing me down here,
36:40even though we've nearly died in the attempt.
36:44But do we know the way back?
36:46Yes.
36:48After you, after you.
36:54It's time for me to continue south.
36:57I'm leaving Semweset 1500 years behind to go in search of Egypt's last great pharaoh,
37:03the mighty Cleopatra.
37:16People have sailed this river for thousands of years.
37:21But none with more pomp and ceremony than the pharaohs.
37:26Hello, Captain.
37:27Are we okay with this boat?
37:28Good, I trust you.
37:35And of all the pharaohs who sailed the Nile, the most famous was Cleopatra.
37:42Just four years into her reign, Cleopatra led a massive military manoeuvre on this river.
37:48A fleet of 400 ships with her new lover, the Roman general, Julius Caesar, in tow.
37:54In fact, she was probably pregnant with Caesar's child at the time.
37:58When we think of Cleopatra, we make a real mistake just to imagine her as a beautiful face.
38:05This was a woman who was a philosopher and a mathematician.
38:08She spoke a huge number of languages.
38:11Cleopatra was, in every way, a force to be reckoned with.
38:16But in this land she once ruled, the evidence of this all-powerful woman has been overshadowed by the myths that have grown up around her.
38:29The Romans, Shakespeare and, of course, Hollywood have all styled her a manipulative femme fatale.
38:37And that's why my last destination on this leg of my journey matters so much to me.
38:47Dendra is a chance to discover the real Cleopatra.
38:51This temple complex was built by Cleopatra's family and it was actually started by her great grandfather.
39:02It's dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of love and beauty and motherhood.
39:11Built 2,500 years after the great pyramid of Giza,
39:15it's a place that boasts of Cleopatra's power and the brilliance of Egyptian ideas.
39:25The entire complex stretched over 40,000 square meters.
39:29And it's here on the temple's wall that you get a unique glimpse of ancient Egypt's last truly great pharaoh.
39:41We know that this is Cleopatra because she's got her name written in hieroglyphs in that cartouche.
39:46This is the only named portrait that we have of her.
39:51This wall is singing out a message of power.
39:55Cleopatra is a natural mother. That's her son Caesarean in front of her.
40:00She's a mother goddess. She's got the horns of Hathor on her head.
40:05And she is the mother of the nation of Egypt.
40:19Once you go inside the temple she helped to build,
40:21you really begin to get a feel for the woman behind the legend.
40:28A queen more obsessed with mathematics and philosophy than seduction.
40:34On the ceiling is a scientific wonder.
40:38The story of time itself.
40:42And its legacy is still felt every single day.
40:46So here you have the journey of the moon through the night.
40:54And then across the central corridor.
40:56Over there there's the sun making the sun's journey through the day.
41:00And of course this being Egypt, the sun is traveling in one of those flat-bottomed Nile barges.
41:06And up there there are the stars and they've been carefully mapped to prove that there are 12 hours in every night.
41:13And then at the end you've got the 12 months of the year.
41:16Represented by astrological signs very similar to the ones that we have.
41:21So there's what we'd call Taurus, the ball.
41:24And Pisces.
41:32What the ancient Egyptians did was to jigsaw puzzle together all this information.
41:37So the movement of the sun and the moon and the life cycle of the year.
41:42With the annual flooding of Nile and their mapping of the stars.
41:46And they came up with a new system of time.
41:50It was the ancient Egyptians who decided that the year should run at 365 days.
42:01When Caesar heard about this revolutionary reading of the cosmos in Egypt, he was blown away.
42:07He adopted these Egyptian insights and rolled out the Julian calendar across the Roman world.
42:21That notion stuck.
42:23So the rhythm of all of our lives in the modern world is dictated by an idea that was dreamt up here.
42:32With the rising superpower Rome as her ally and Caesar the father of her newborn son,
42:41Cleopatra must have felt unstoppable.
42:46It's said that here at Dendra, she climbed up to the root of the temple when the moon was full
42:51to give thanks to the gods.
42:56So you have to imagine Cleopatra coming up here.
42:59Her skin rich with frankincense and myrrh and lotus oil, crowned with those sacred horns of Hatha,
43:07celebrating her success and the successful birth of her son Caesarian.
43:11A woman physically on top of the world.
43:15And it is such a privilege to think that I'm standing here where Cleopatra once stood.
43:21But within just three years, Julius Caesar would be assassinated and Cleopatra would be mired in the politics of Rome.
43:31She died here eventually by her own hand in the land that she loved, the last great pharaoh of Egypt.
43:40Yes.
43:48Yes.
43:49Yes.
43:50Next time.
43:50Now I've got, I think I've got a pirate.
43:53My Nile journey brings me to the wonders of Lapsor.
43:57I'll come face to face with Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.
44:01This is what a royal tomb really should look like.
44:04And I'll board the steamship that inspired Agatha Christie's death on the Nile.
44:31I'll board the steamship.
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