- 1 day ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:01Nowadays, nothing remains of Ramses II's mythical capital, Pyramsi.
00:06It is only through ancient descriptions that we are able to imagine this vast and teeming city.
00:12Built in the 13th century BCE, it took barely 15 years to construct.
00:17By then, tens of thousands of Egyptians lived in a labyrinth of shops and valleys.
00:21Then, less than two centuries after the death of Ramses, the city was completely dismantled stone by stone and used
00:28to build another city.
00:30Tannis, another capital for another dynasty.
00:36Since the end of the 1980s, teams of archaeologists have followed one another to Kantir, where Pyramsi once stood.
00:46Today, Professor Henning Franzmeier from Germany leads the excavations.
00:52He is looking for something that the ancient Egyptians left behind when they dismantled the city.
00:58Something ubiquitous, and not considered valuable at the time.
01:02Mud bricks.
01:03These seemingly insignificant bricks are an essential source of knowledge for archaeologists.
01:08So here, one can really see beautifully this mud brick.
01:15And in between the mud bricks, you have a sandy material, and you always have little fragments of lime or
01:24limestone in the mud bricks.
01:27There are a certain number of sites, for certain epochs, where we could simply build on earth.
01:32And even for the temples in pierre, there were a certain part of these temples in pierre who were also
01:37built in briques.
01:38The walls surrounding these sanctuaries were almost exclusively built in briques.
01:49Technically, it's easy.
02:05These seemingly insignificant bricks are an essential source of knowledge for archaeologists.
02:13essential but difficult to identify in other areas in Egypt it's something different you
02:19have sand and you immediately see mud bricks but here in the Nile mud where the bricks are
02:26basically made out of the same material just maybe with a bit of sand and its straw at it
02:31it's extremely difficult to recognize fortunately the team can rely on the experience of the local
02:41koofties who can be recognized by their traditional dress they all come from the same village kooft in
02:52the south of the country was one of the first things when I got this position my predecessor
02:59Edgar Pusch said if they say there's a mud brick there's a mud brick if they say there is no
03:04mud
03:04brick there is no mud brick no matter what I say or what any other of the Europeans says
03:14for more than a century generation to generation the people of kooft have been involved in all
03:21the excavation campaigns carried out in Egypt a tradition providing them with unparalleled
03:56institutional knowledge
03:57There is a lot of water, I used to use water.
04:00There is a lot of water here.
04:03There is a lot of water.
04:07They really have the knowledge, they have the feeling for different types of soil.
04:15They really feel it, they can hear the difference.
04:19So they really know it and I'm simply, I know that I'm not,
04:23and I will never be as good as them in recognizing mud bricks.
04:29Day by day, thanks to the watchful eyes of the Kuftis and the detailed work done by the archaeologists,
04:36the contours of Ramesses the Great's lost palace are gradually being revealed.
04:43So this is a type of mud brick that we don't know so far from any other building in Kantia.
04:48And it's really interesting because it's this really huge mud bricks of a size of 45 or even 50 by
04:5925 centimeters.
05:00And that is much bigger than what we normally have.
05:06These large bricks are very rare in Pyramsy, but common in Tannis.
05:13François Leclerc keeps a plaster molding of one of these bricks in his Parisian office.
05:23And here it is, it's a beautiful piece.
05:2946 x 26 x 11.
05:36There's not necessarily a lot of joints between the bricks.
05:40So we put the bricks side to side.
05:42And then we put a layer of dirt.
05:45This is for the most massive monuments,
05:50like the dead ones, for example.
05:54A huge monument, bordered by a very thick wall.
06:00The presence of these bricks confirms Henning's initial intuition.
06:04The walls of the palace must have been enormous.
06:08So you need at the bottom, in the foundation, mud bricks that are more stable, more resistant than mud bricks
06:15for a normal building.
06:17So this might be an explanation for these really extraordinary mud bricks.
06:27Thanks to this discovery, Mathieu Goetz, the team architect, can now begin a virtual reconstruction of the palace interior.
06:37From the files and photogrammetry, we can confirm what we see in the magnatography.
06:43And from that, I can retrace some lines and make a 3D of the palace.
06:49I started to place the columns in the palace.
06:52But at the beginning, I put all the columns in the same size.
06:56It's surely not like that.
06:57You need to look at the dimensions of the foundation to know if these columns in the palace were a
07:02little smaller than in the throne room.
07:05So there are still details to see.
07:073D modeling is another tool that has become indispensable to archaeological research.
07:13On a simple desktop computer, archaeologists can reconstruct lost buildings to better understand them and bring their ideas and questions
07:22to life.
07:22Where were the doors located? How did people move between the different rooms?
07:26In fact, a palace, it's like a temple.
07:29It's a ritual ritual, a protocol, a bit like Versailles with all the rules.
07:35And these rules change a little bit from year to year, from year to year, but not as fast as
07:41that.
07:41So we can think that all these rooms have a logic that we try to keep from one's palace to
07:46another.
07:47For example, the throne room is always in the axis.
07:51It's logical.
07:52However, these small rooms next to the four columns, I'm not sure if it's really where we entered these rooms.
08:00Fortunately, several palaces from the 19th dynasty, the period of Ramses II, have been better preserved than Pai-Ramses,
08:08and their ruins have been carefully studied by generations of archaeologists.
08:14By comparing them with the plan of Kantir's palace, Mathieu can move ahead with his reconstruction work.
08:22It helps a lot to understand the lines in the plan that I see to know what it was.
08:29Here we also see the walls that there was at Medinet Abou.
08:32We also see what there was at Kantir because of the thickness of the walls.
08:36That's what we see in the plan.
08:39The Habou Palace, which Mathieu mentioned, belonged to Ramses III, who came to the throne three decades after the death
08:46of Ramses II.
08:48But there is another palace that seems to be even more similar in size and design to the one at
08:53Kantir.
08:55It is the palace built in Memphis by the pharaoh Meremta, the son and successor of Ramses II.
09:03To access the palace, one first passed through an entrance hall supported by four columns, followed by a long open
09:11-air courtyard,
09:13and then a second entrance hall, supported this time by twelve columns.
09:20Behind this was the throne room.
09:26Like the throne room in Meremta's palace, Ramses II's throne room was supported by six monumental columns.
09:34Since its proportions were similar, we can imagine that the throne was also on a pedestal, leaning against the back
09:41wall.
09:45From the other direction, there were two halls with sixteen columns each, which visitors had to cross to reach the
09:53pharaoh.
09:54Beyond them, as in Memphis, a long courtyard.
09:58Then, at the far end of the courtyard, the other entrance to the palace.
10:06The entire structure seems designed to impress visitors, to overwhelm them with the sheer power of the pharaoh.
10:14Perhaps this palace was the backdrop for Ramses II's diplomacy.
10:20Perhaps this is where he even received the Hittite emissaries, who came to negotiate with him.
10:28By 1275 BCE, Ramses had been in power for nearly five years and had firmly established his authority over the
10:36kingdom.
10:37He felt emboldened to confront Muatali II, the powerful Hittite ruler.
10:45We have a couple of battles in the time frame of Ramses II, but the most important one was very
10:52early, in his year five and six, this was the Battle of Kaddish.
10:56Because this was really a very strong fight for the influence in this area.
11:03In the spring, Ramses left his capital to lead an army of 25,000 men and 2,000 chariots northward.
11:12In early May, the Egyptian army was camped next to the city of Kaddash, in the south of present-day
11:19Syria.
11:21It was there that the Hittite troops decided to strike.
11:26Ramses was nearly captured.
11:30There are many, many representations in temples, for example, showing this battle, and also a lot of texts.
11:37And I think it was, for Ramses II, the moment of danger.
11:42And if you even see the representations of this battle, then you can see in the back of the king
11:48suddenly you have enemies.
11:50This is something which never before and never later was represented in ancient Egyptian temple areas.
11:59And of course, it also showed that his father, the god Amun, was protecting him and at the end was
12:06helping him to be the winner in this battle.
12:10With this battle, Ramses would forge his legendary identity.
12:16Recounted on the walls of Egypt's greatest temples, sung in epic poems, it would cement his status as a warrior
12:24pharaoh, a protector and a conqueror for 3,000 years.
12:30His arms are strong, his heart is valiant, and he has led his soldiers into unknown regions.
12:37He has driven back the whole world gathered together.
12:40No one knows what multitudes were before him, but hundreds of thousands fainted at the sight of him.
12:48It was not really that Ramses was a big winner of this.
12:52And if you read the Hittite text, and if you read the Egyptian text, they are quite different.
12:58And what we can say at the end, that they really found a compromise, but at home, each one of
13:04them was saying, I'm the winner, of course.
13:09The Battle of Kadesh was significant for another reason.
13:12Its name was invoked in the written peace treaty, ultimately signed by the two empires, the oldest known treaty between
13:19two states.
13:21And incredibly, we now have both versions of this text.
13:25The Hittite version engraved on a clay tablet.
13:28And the Egyptian version in hieroglyphs.
13:32In it, the Hittite king and Ramses declare that they are brothers forever.
13:36In fact, the treaty inaugurated a period of peace that would last for several decades, well beyond the reign of
13:42Ramses.
13:43It's a wonder to have after this war, after all this anger, after all this fight for the influence in
13:50the Near East, a solution which was a little bit untypically for ancient Egypt and for the Hittite.
13:58For world history, it's one of the most important steps forward that between two opponents which had been in war,
14:07there is such a peace treaty in a written form.
14:13After the Battle of Kadesh, it was nearly 20 years before the treaty was signed.
14:1920 years of intense diplomatic negotiations, some traces of which have been discovered in Kantir.
14:26And then we should maybe, ah yeah, 2801, we should have a look at the cuneiform tablet.
14:34That for sure would be 2801, 2801.
14:42Okay.
14:47It's always surprising how small it actually is.
14:50There's a little bit of debate about the text, but it seems really to be a royal letter.
14:55And we have the counterparts in the Hittite capital, Hattusha, where we have hundreds of such cuneiform clay tablets with
15:03a kind of diplomatic exchange between the two countries.
15:07And we know that we had in Kantir a kind of foreign office, an office for the exchange with foreign
15:13countries.
15:14And after the peace treaty with the Hittites of Ramses II, we have an almost private exchange between the royal
15:22houses and even the queens are corresponding with each other.
15:29And it's quite clear that there must have been thousands of them, but unfortunately so far not found.
15:46Without royal letters engraved on clay tablets, archaeologists need to make do with bits of pottery that are found within
15:54the palace.
15:55Fragments that reveal another facet of life in the city of Pairamsi.
16:16This is a fragment of a canonite jar, which is the most typical transport vessel in the whole eastern Mediterranean
16:24in the Late Bronze Age.
16:25And they were all made in the very same shape.
16:28And here in the eastern Mediterranean, where you find these containers, you would have traded faience beads, glass, resin, wine,
16:36commodities such as this, or also copper from Cyprus.
16:40Actually, this is a kind of phenomenon that one could call a kind of first globalisation, a kind of globalisation
16:48in the eastern Mediterranean, but also far beyond the eastern Mediterranean.
16:56Pairamsi, the royal city, was clearly a commercial centre for the ancients.
17:02Here all sorts of goods were exchanged, coming from all over the known world, as evidenced by this small piece
17:09of pottery, recently discovered by the Kuftis.
17:13This is already the second piece we find in this area.
17:17So it's Mycenaean pottery, which means it's from Greece.
17:21It's Greek pottery.
17:24Here in Kantia, we found in the 40 years we work here about 350 of these shirts, which makes it
17:34one of the largest corpora of this pottery from all over Egypt.
17:39Which in a way makes sense, we are here definitely in a diplomatic centre, and we are in the major
17:45trading hub with all eastern Mediterranean.
17:52Here representatives from different nations gathered.
17:56The city streets must have echoed with all kinds of languages, and myriad exotic deities were likely worshipped under the
18:03gaze of the Egyptians.
18:12In this cosmopolitan megalopolis, foreigners from Greece, Africa, and the Middle East had the right to live.
18:30Archaeological findings even suggest that some of them integrated into Egyptian societies so well, that they became prosperous and respected.
18:50This theory is demonstrated by the artifact contained in this box, an artifact discovered by chance by a farmer near
18:58the excavation site.
19:05This is part of a doorpost from a house, from a villa, because big villas, big houses had doorposts with
19:14the names and the titles of the owners of the house.
19:18This is the name of the town of Sidon, which is nowadays in Lebanon.
19:23And here, the name of the person, Yapach, and then there will be Baalu.
19:30So it's a name from the Levant, from this region.
19:33But he had a house here, in Kantia, and so we know that this person, this foreigner, really lived here.
19:43Amazingly, another fragment from this carved door had already been discovered in Kantia years before.
19:52A unique piece, preserved in Hildesheim.
19:59First of all, the person's name you could find here, and he is called Ipu Baal.
20:06But what is even more interesting is that the picture shows him with a dress, and in particular a kind
20:14of headdress,
20:15which is unusual for ancient Egyptians at the time of Ramses II.
20:19So what we assume is that this Ipu Baal was somehow being ambassador or so in Kantia for the Levant,
20:27or some people who were doing business with the regions of the Levant,
20:33so that he could afford such an estate.
20:36As you could see here in the center of the lintel, we have the name of Ramses II,
20:42which then established a link of the house owner to the king himself.
20:51This lintel suggests that Pai Ramsey was home to a community of traders,
20:56foreign merchants who came to settle in the royal city,
21:00and who supplied the Egyptians with goods imported from all over the known world,
21:07and who, in likelihood, also exported the products of Egyptian craftsmen abroad.
21:16Josephine Barsaghi is an archeological student, and the team's designer.
21:22These small objects that she is working on are an example of the craftsmanship found in Pai Ramsey,
21:29molds for making jewelry.
21:32I draw it in double size, so in the end it's easier to see, because the object is very small.
21:41There was a mass production here in Kantia in Pai Ramsey of these kind of objects,
21:46and of these so-called molds, we found more than 1,500 in the course of our excavation
21:54with all different kinds of motives, and you can see here on the drawings that Josephine did
22:00other little objects like a rosette or here a so-called jet pillar.
22:07So it's often small kind of amulets, beads. It's jewelry, in fact, mostly.
22:14Then you have this light pressure, which is here between us.
22:19Yes.
22:20It doesn't turn directly from the ear.
22:22Yes, yes, you can see that. It looks really great.
22:34Ramses II probably chose Kantia as the site to build his capital,
22:39because it blocked the Hittites' access to Egypt from the northeast.
22:45And it is thanks to this unusual location that Pai Ramsey was able to become a vital hub
22:51for commerce and diplomacy in the Mediterranean world.
22:58But this success would not have been possible without another asset.
23:03An asset that all the cities of ancient Egypt enjoyed.
23:06The Nile.
23:11The Nile is the longest river in the world.
23:14Nearly 6,500 kilometers carved into this ancient landscape.
23:20North of Cairo, it widens into a delta splitting into several branches before reaching the Mediterranean.
23:28Here, the ground is extremely flat and the river's course becomes erratic and changeable.
23:37Over the centuries, it has moved repeatedly, at times by several kilometers.
23:47Irene Forster Müller is the head of the Austrian archaeological mission in Egypt.
23:53For several years, she has been conducting excavations on the site of Avaris,
23:59three kilometers southwest of Kantia, a site once soaked by the waters of the Nile.
24:06This is the Pelusic Nile branch, which was in antiquities a huge Nile branch, the eastern Nile branch.
24:12And this connected the splendid city of Pyramese with the Nile Valley, with Memphis.
24:18Now, of course, it's very small, but in antiquities it was more than 200 meters wide, going from here to
24:25the edge of Avaris.
24:27This is the western edge, and the eastern edge is until 200 or 300 meters to the east.
24:36So this was really huge.
24:40This other bank, which Irene points out, is the one where Pyramese stood.
24:51At ground level, it is impossible to find the ancient course of the Nile.
24:55This is an agricultural region, and the constant working of the land has obscured its history.
25:06But minute traces of the river's meanderings may still be here.
25:11And it may be possible to locate them, from the air, thanks to a photogrammetric drone.
25:20To do this, Frank Stremke has called on a team of Egyptian drone pilots who are familiar with this method.
25:30They begin by setting up a relay antenna, synchronized with some 30 satellites.
25:36It makes it possible to geolocate every photo taken by the drone to the nearest square centimeter.
25:47We're going to be flying the area around three square kilometers at altitude of 440 meters.
25:53That should give us, with the lens that we have right now, the 35 millimeter lens,
25:57it should give us around 5.5 centimeter per pixel ground sampling distance.
26:04The archaeologists' goal is to map the entire area once occupied by Pyramese.
26:11An area of a little more than three kilometers by three kilometers.
26:18To cover it, they will need more than a thousand high-resolution photos.
26:33The team does not have the computer resources to process this huge amount of data on site.
26:42So, it will be assembled in Bremen, Germany.
26:50That's where we catch up with Frank Stremke, a few weeks later.
26:57So, this is the still images that were taken with the drone.
27:01Overall, we took three flights with the drone.
27:04And it took about a week of computing power to process the models to a usable stay.
27:12The result is an enormous map that covers nearly the entire ancient city of Pyramese.
27:22This was of most interest to us, to see how the terrain rises and falls,
27:27to look for the old bed of the river, and just better understand site formation processes
27:33and how the terrain was shaped and how it is shaped now.
27:38To do this, Frank applies a color filter to the image.
27:42The lighter the color, the higher the elevation.
27:48So, you can just draw a line across the model,
27:51and then let the software gather all the elevation information along this line.
27:56And then I can see basically a profile or a section of this along this line here.
28:06It runs from here.
28:08So, we have the channel here.
28:11And then the village starts.
28:13It gets a bit noisy.
28:14That still remains from buildings.
28:16And then we have this drop-off here on the edge of the fields.
28:20Then we have plain fields.
28:23And then we have the old river branch here.
28:28So, outside of this model basically here there must have been a Nile branch.
28:32And there was a Nile branch here.
28:35And Pyramese was built probably on an island with additional channels going in.
28:39That's presumed.
28:40And then neighboring sites on the east bank of the river basically.
28:48The photogrammetry carried out by Frank Stremke confirms what the magnetic surveys already led the archaeologists to believe.
28:57That the city of Pyramese was indeed built between two tributaries of the river on an island.
29:09And when the river was at its highest, ships arriving from the Mediterranean could access the city directly.
29:18In other words, Pyramese, now 60 km from the coast, was probably a seaport.
29:34Pyramese was a strategic position and a royal residence.
29:40But it was also a port both fluvial and maritime.
29:45In Egypt, we couldn't build any ports on the coast.
29:49Because we had lakes and lakes.
29:51We couldn't build any ports all the time.
29:55So, we had to have a port.
29:59But they could only be in the back country.
30:01And in addition, it would allow them to protect them more easily in the case of the exterior incursions.
30:08When Ramses II chose this location for his capital,
30:12access to the sea must have been a determining factor.
30:15However, excavations conducted 3 km south of Pyramese have revealed that a port already existed there at the time.
30:23The one built 800 years earlier for the city of Avarice.
30:27And here's the connection.
30:29These excavations also revealed that Pyramese extended well beyond its central island.
30:34The city came as far as here.
30:36Its suburbs covered the ruins of the ancient city of Avarice.
30:39The port of Avarice, therefore, was also the port of Pyramese.
30:44The archaeologist Irene Forster Müller is in charge of this site today.
30:52What we can say is, it's clearly a harbor.
30:55It was used from the time of the late Middle Kingdom until the Ramessite period.
31:03The port was located here, on what was then the eastern bank of the Nile, south of Pyramese.
31:10A location confirmed by numerous drillings carried out by Austrian teams over the last 50 years.
31:17This is a deep water harbor, but this is a basin which had a geological formation already.
31:23And of course they cleaned it, etc.
31:25Besides that, we can also say this is the main harbor.
31:30But a huge town like that, and this was one of the largest towns,
31:35they had several small harbors and mooring places.
31:38So you can expect harbors here, or let's say mooring places, small plots here,
31:43where people land and just have access to the different town quarters.
31:49All around the port, magnetometry reveals the presence of huge warehouses.
31:56Behind them, what looks like administrative buildings,
32:00and dwellings stretching eastwards, well beyond the banks of the river.
32:09In this period, the sea was much nearer than nowadays.
32:13So around 20 kilometers to the north, you already had the beginning of the coast.
32:19And then you had the ships coming from there, and several channels.
32:25So the landscape as you have now is not the landscape in ancient times.
32:29So one of the main tasks of archaeologists, as we are, is to reconstruct this ancient landscape.
32:37So you have to imagine the town before, where several islands and hills and valleys,
32:42and the people circled with the boats around.
32:56It is not yet known how far the capital of Ramses II extended,
33:01nor how many inhabitants lived there.
33:05But it is obvious that this vibrant, bustling, and colorful city
33:09attracted people and wealth like a magnet.
33:17Today, the river flows several kilometers away from Cantir until El Daba.
33:25But the water carried by the Nile from the heart of Africa is still nearby,
33:31saturating the earth just two meters below the surface.
33:34And that level rises regularly.
33:44For several days all around the construction site,
33:47farmers have been digging irrigation canals to flood their fields and sow rice.
33:54It's an exhausting job, and they do it by hand.
34:00This is also how their ancestors worked 3,000 years ago during the reign of Ramses.
34:11For archaeologists, these irrigation works are a persistent threat.
34:30With the start of the irrigation in the fields, the water was rising by at least half a meter.
34:36And so now we try to pump out the water to be able to finish the excavation in the other
34:43squares
34:43without getting the water all over the squares.
34:48Under the water you can't go deep, of course, and you can't see anything,
34:52and you can't make drawings, you can't take photographs.
35:00A race against time has begun between the archaeologists and the rising water
35:05threatening weeks' worth of excavation work.
35:08In the foundation shafts of the columns, the water is already eroding the walls,
35:13which threaten to collapse.
35:16The idea is that if we pump the water in the foundation walls,
35:20we can remove the water from the other structures.
35:26But it's amazing to see how fast it is to be filled.
35:35Caught by surprise, all the archaeologists can do is watch the catastrophe unfold.
35:40One of the walls of the throne room, eroded by water, begins to collapse.
35:48But luck smiles upon them.
35:50In the cavity left by the walls collapse, Henning makes an unexpected discovery.
35:58This piece of a vessel, it is a rim, so it should be something that we could probably date quite
36:04well,
36:05because it's a diagnostic piece of maybe a kind of amphora.
36:09We have to see when we get it out.
36:12And also, to see what kind of stone this is.
36:17It definitely has a worked surface, not a decorated one.
36:21This stone could be an important architectural feature.
36:26Perhaps it is even engraved on its other side.
36:30Sometimes you really get dirty when doing archaeology.
36:35Intrigued, Henning decides to have the cavity widen.
36:47This is a long and delicate process.
36:50At this stage, it is impossible to tell how big the artifact is.
36:54And it is important to keep rigorously documenting every step, every detail discovered during the excavation.
37:06Days pass.
37:08And the end of the excavation campaign is approaching.
37:11But nothing can be done.
37:13The stone is large and stubbornly remains stuck in the ground.
37:19It's almost impossible to understand what is really going on here.
37:23So this is really just to get a little bit of an idea what we have there in order to
37:29go on next year.
37:31But at least it shows that there is a lot down there.
37:38Henning and his team started their excavation campaign nearly six weeks ago.
37:43They only have a few days left before they must leave the site and return to Europe.
37:53It's time again to indulge in a tradition they've established here in Kantian.
37:57Every year, Henning invites the whole team to a traditional Egyptian meal at the dig house.
38:03Thank you very much.
38:06Thank you very much.
38:07Thank you very much.
38:11Thank you very much.
38:12Thank you very much.
38:13Thank you very much.
38:16This year's results are far from insignificant.
38:20The team was able to confirm the presence of a pharaonic palace at this location.
38:24And to further their ideas about its original design.
38:28They have collected thousands of pottery fragments, which will be analyzed over several months.
38:34And promised to provide much more information about Pyramsy.
38:41For the campaign to be a complete success, all they need now is a beautiful artifact.
38:48The ultimate reward for their many weeks of hard work.
38:53And as is often the case on archeological sites, the reward eventually does come.
38:59But at the last moment, 48 hours before departure.
39:03While digging around the large immovable stone, the Kuftis suddenly come across something.
39:10No, this is an absolutely exceptional piece.
39:13I have not seen something exactly like that before.
39:19Ceramic fragments, representing a human face, on which blue pigments can still be seen.
39:24So we definitely also have the rim.
39:27This is a piece of the rim and I guess it's the same vessel.
39:29So we might have preserved the whole top of the vessel.
39:35It's a piece of obviously a very big vase of this blue painted pottery, which is typical for the 18th
39:43and 19th dynasty in Egypt.
39:45And most likely it shows the face of the god Bes.
39:50In Egyptian mythology, Bes is a protective and familial god.
39:56The only one represented with a grimacing face, supposedly to ward off demons.
40:06There is a couple of them existing, but this quality is absolutely outstanding and I don't recall any other piece
40:14like that in any museum.
40:15And I also think it's the finest piece of pottery found here in 42 years of excavation at Kantia.
40:26But there are still more surprises in store for the team.
40:30Dozens of fragments are carefully removed by the Kuftis.
40:38With these fragments, it should be possible to reconstitute the entire vase, an object nearly one meter high.
40:47Only very significant people could have owned a piece like this.
40:57This kind of pottery is something that you would surely relate to temples, the elite living quarters, palaces or tombs
41:07of the elite.
41:08So just this shows something and it's definitely something that you would probably expect in a palace.
41:20We are in a place where we definitely have to go on excavating next year.
41:27We had so many excavations in necropolis, in tombs in the last 200 years, which of course had something to
41:35do that they are not in areas where people are living today.
41:39But I think it's important that more and more we are looking really to areas where people were living.
41:46We want to know about the history and the battles, but we also want to know something about the people
41:51who were involved.
41:57Sometimes ancient Egyptian culture looks a little bit different than 3000 years always the same.
42:03I think this is absolutely not the truth and particularly excavating in cities is here important.
42:11After four decades of excavations, the city of Pai Ramsey is slowly taking shape once again, virtually reconstructed thanks to
42:21the efforts of archaeologists.
42:27And the emerging image is nothing like the usual cliches of ancient Egypt.
42:33This was a surprisingly modern megalopolis, complete with residential districts, administrative areas, industrial production,
42:47and intense commercial activity.
42:51And towering above it all, garrisons, temples and palaces.
42:59Symbols of Ramsey's the Great's power.
43:09It will take many more decades to uncover all the treasures of Pai Ramsey.
43:15But this year, the excavation campaign is coming to an end.
43:20Before returning to Europe, Henning Fransmeier and his team are covering all their excavations with earth.
43:27Soon these areas will be used again for agriculture.
43:31The rice and wheat continuing to protect the secrets of the buried city until next year.
43:40As the Second World War explodes around them, a group of young people take up the fight against tyranny in
43:47the British war epic starring Sean Bean and Helen Hunt.
43:50World on Fire. Stream free on SBS On Demand.
44:01World on Fire. Stream free on SBS On Demand.
44:16Transcription by CastingWords
Comments