- 5/15/2025
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00:00Of all the wonders of ancient Egypt, Ramesses the Great's capital, the city of Pyrames,
00:11was one of the most spectacular.
00:15The pharaoh lavished a fortune on building his capital, but long ago, the whole city
00:21and all its treasures vanished off the face of the earth.
00:29The lost city of Pyrames became the stuff of legend, until 3,000 years later, its rediscovery
00:37opened up one of the most bizarre puzzles in the history of archaeology.
00:44Because when Pyrames reappeared, it was in the wrong place.
00:52A place where Ramesses the Great could never have built it.
00:57A place that didn't even exist at the time Ramesses was alive.
01:05This is the strange story of how an entire city could vanish, only to reappear thousands
01:12of years later, in the wrong place.
01:423,000 years ago, Egypt was ruled by a master builder, a pharaoh determined to leave a permanent
01:55mark on history.
01:59Ramesses II was born a commoner, but became one of the greatest kings of the ancient world.
02:05He ruled Egypt for over 60 years, and fathered 100 children.
02:12Across his empire, he built temples and monuments, but his masterpiece, the place closest to
02:18his heart, was the city he named after himself, Pyrames.
02:28A vast citadel of white and azure, Pyrames was filled with monuments designed to inspire
02:35awe in all who entered.
02:40The city was one of Ramesses' most ambitious creations, built on the Nile as a gateway
02:46between ancient Egypt and the sea.
02:54This was a thriving port, a hub of the ancient world.
02:58Up to 300,000 people lived here, the very rich and the very poor, nobility, craftsmen
03:05and slaves.
03:07Merchants came from far and wide to trade here.
03:20And at the heart of the city, Ramesses built a massive army garrison, housing thousands
03:25of soldiers, charioteers and horsemen.
03:30His garrison would have had stabling for hundreds of warhorses and chariots, and it was from
03:35Pyrames that the pharaoh rode out to his greatest battle.
03:48Ramesses the Great never stopped adding to his capital.
03:51Year after year, new statues of the pharaoh were erected all through the city.
03:56A production line of skilled craftsmen and workers was employed throughout his reign
04:02to add and embellish new statues and monuments.
04:07As home to the king and seat of power, Pyrames must have looked as if it would last forever.
04:15But just a couple of hundred years after it was built, the entire city vanished.
04:36For thousands of years, Pyrames was utterly lost, and the fate of this great city became
04:43the stuff of legend.
04:48The quest to find it again would baffle experts and provide one of the strangest twists in
04:54the history of archaeology.
05:12By the beginning of the 20th century, Egyptologists were puzzled.
05:18Most of the great cities of the pharaohs had already been discovered, all except the famous
05:25Pyrames.
05:27It would become almost a holy grail of Egyptologists to actually try and find this fabulous city.
05:41Everyone knew from the ancient texts that Ramesses II didn't build his new capital near
05:46the great temples at Karnak and Luxor, the traditional seats of power of ancient Egypt.
05:53Nor did he build it at ancient Memphis, near present-day Cairo, where the great pyramids
05:58lay.
06:00Instead, he built it where he'd been raised, the lush Nile Delta, where the river fans
06:07out into branches that flow down to the Mediterranean Sea.
06:12The texts were clear.
06:14Ramesses had built his city on the easternmost branch of the Nile in the Delta.
06:20You might think this would make the search for Pyrames easy, but you'd be wrong.
06:27One of the big problems with finding Pyrames was the problem that the eastern branch of
06:32the Nile, which we know it lay on, had gone.
06:39Over time, the branches of the Nile in the Delta often change course, so it's impossible
06:45to know where the easternmost branch was in Ramesses' time.
06:50This ancient branch of the Nile had silted up and disappeared long ago.
06:55Without this knowledge, finding the lost city would mean scouring the whole eastern side
07:00of the Nile Delta.
07:04The absence of this single, most important clue was a crucial obstacle to finding Ramesses'
07:10capital.
07:11Luckily, archaeologists knew exactly what remains to look for, because ancient texts
07:16had given a detailed description of Pyrames.
07:23First thing we knew about Pyrames was that it was a military garrison.
07:28It was the place from which King Ramesses II launched his campaigns into Syria-Palestine.
07:36Therefore, the presence of soldiers, chariotry, would clearly have to be something which any
07:49candidate for the site of Pyrames would have to have.
07:57One would certainly expect, in Pyrames, to have a lot of statues and other monuments
08:03of Ramesses II.
08:10Ramesses had a production line of workers in quarries, churning out statues of himself
08:16carved out of the living rock.
08:19Pyrames was filled with hundreds of images of the pharaoh, some as big as 28 metres high.
08:29Next, Ramesses II's personal mark, his cartouche, would have been carved into the city's great
08:40monuments.
08:54Each cartouche was like a brand, placed on objects as a stamp of ownership.
09:07Looking at the cartouche here of Ramesses, here, this little seated figure with a hawk's
09:13head and a sun disk on its head, is the sun god Ra.
09:22We then go down to this sign here, which reads Mez, and the following two signs read Su.
09:33So we have Ra, Mez, Su.
09:38This is Mary, or Beloved, and then the sign in the top left-hand corner of the cartouche,
09:45which is the great god Amun, the king of the gods.
09:51So we have the whole thing reading Ra, Mez, Su, Mary, Amun, or Ramesses, Beloved of Amun.
10:07Pyrames, we know, had major temples, particularly dedicated to the god Amun.
10:16Any site which is claimed to be pyramids must have evidence for temples.
10:25And finally, there'd be the home of the pharaoh himself.
10:32We know very little about the palaces of the pharaohs, but you'd expect them to be very,
10:36very large, with great open courtyards, the floors would have been of painted plaster,
10:42the walls as well.
10:44So that's the sort of thing one would expect to find in Ramesses' palace.
10:52So once you'd found a site you believed was Pyrames, you'd have to find the remains of
10:56these key markers to prove you'd really found the legendary city.
11:02And they'd all have to be conclusively dated to the time of Ramesses II.
11:10Find all of these, and you've found the lost city of Pyrames.
11:26The story of how Ramesses' lost capital was finally discovered began back in the 1920s,
11:33when archaeologists were scouring Egypt's desert landscapes, looking for the lost treasures
11:38of the pharaohs.
11:43Somewhere out there lay Pyrames, still waiting to be found.
11:53At the time, few wanted to take on the challenge of searching the vast and remote far eastern
11:58delta in search of Ramesses' lost city.
12:02But if anyone wanted to find Pyrames, this was where they had to go.
12:09And one man was prepared to take on that challenge.
12:18Pierre Montaigne was one of France's leading Egyptologists.
12:22He assembled a team to embark on an expedition that he hoped would secure his name in the
12:27history books.
12:31He heard of a strange ancient site deep in the Nile Delta that had gone largely unexplored,
12:37and he thought it might be significant.
12:43It was just possible that this site could be a lost treasure.
12:53Montaigne's destination was Tannis, in the north-eastern corner of the Nile Delta.
13:05Tannis was a very remote site, at the end of a very long track set in a landscape that
13:11looked like the surface of the moon.
13:24When Montaigne eventually reached the remains, his hopes were high of finding a spectacular
13:30lost world.
13:31So what do you think, sir?
13:33I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
13:59What do you think, sir?
14:03Looks promising.
14:12Tannis went beyond Montaigne's wildest dreams.
14:19Though the ancient Nile had long since gone, everything else about the site fitted the
14:28clues for Ramesses' lost city of Pyrames.
14:48Everywhere he looked, he found half-buried monuments of Ramesses the Great.
15:16This was one of the vital clues needed to confirm whether this truly was Pyrames.
15:28Montaigne's initial trip to Tannis left him in no doubt that Ramesses II's lost city
15:33lay buried beneath his feet.
15:37Better send word to Cairo.
15:40We've got an awful lot of work ahead of us.
15:49But this site would become famous for reasons far stranger than Montaigne could ever have
15:54imagined.
16:05The remains at Tannis secured Montaigne's name in the world of Egyptology.
16:10Within a few years, he'd established a full-time excavation site, and under his leadership,
16:16the work became an obsession.
16:25He published journals and identified the remains of a massive temple dedicated to the
16:30god Amun.
16:43As Montaigne's work progressed, his fame and reputation spread across the world.
16:54The more his teams excavated, the more statues and obelisks of Ramesses they unearthed.
17:00All the evidence went to confirm that this had to be the lost city of Pyrames.
17:06Another one.
17:08It's supposed to be found already.
17:21In Pyrames, we know that Ramesses constantly erected new statues of himself throughout
17:26his long reign.
17:28There was a workforce employed across his city to build and decorate his image.
17:35Eventually, there were over a hundred statues of the pharaoh throughout Pyrames.
17:42So it was no wonder Montaigne dug up so many beautifully preserved specimens.
17:47These statues were colossal.
17:50Some weighed over 1,000 tonnes.
17:54Carved from granite, they were built to last.
18:03As Montaigne uncovered more and more monuments, it all confirmed to him that Tannis was Pyrames.
18:13Allowing him to imagine what this great city must once have looked like.
18:19Pierre Montaigne was probably the great French excavator of his generation.
18:24And he was very keen on producing the big picture.
18:31But there's something not quite right at Tannis.
18:37It's true.
18:39There really is something not quite right at Tannis.
18:43Something about the stones and statues that doesn't add up.
18:50Something that Montaigne refused to acknowledge.
18:55Here you are.
18:58Pity he's not all with us.
19:02Well, we've found plenty of others that are.
19:05Over thousands of years, there's bound to be some displacement to be expected.
19:09But the rest of them will turn up somewhere.
19:14You don't agree?
19:17Well, some displacement is to be expected, of course.
19:25It's just that the more we excavate, the more we find structures with pieces missing or that don't fit together at all.
19:32It just seems a little odd.
19:39It was not unusual for parts of 3,000-year-old statues to break off and go missing.
19:48It was just that at Tannis, everything seemed slightly out of place.
19:53With nothing quite as it should be, it was turning into a very peculiar dig site.
20:01And then other strange anomalies began turning up.
20:05Puzzling finds from other places suggesting Pyramus might lie elsewhere.
20:12Show me.
20:14He says it was dug up about 30 kilometres from here.
20:19He claims it's from Pyramus.
20:27Well, the cartouche is certainly that of Rameses II.
20:32But how can anyone seriously compare a wall tile with what we have here?
20:38Well, if it's proof of Pyramus he's after, he's standing in it.
20:43It's written in almost every stone around us.
20:47We have a temple of Amun the size of Karnak, more obelisks than any other site in Egypt.
20:53We've only just scratched the surface.
20:58Come on, now, back to work. That's enough. Back to work.
21:12Montaigne spent the rest of his career convinced he had found, at Tannis, the great lost capital of Pyramus.
21:22And the truth is, he had.
21:26These are the ancient monuments and buildings of Rameses' magnificent city.
21:32But there was a bizarre twist to his discovery.
21:39Because this is not where Rameses built them.
21:44Montaigne had unwittingly stumbled upon a baffling mystery.
21:48One that would take science another 60 years to unravel.
22:11Pierre Montaigne died in 1966.
22:15That same year, an Austrian archaeologist, Manfred Bietak, set off on a journey of investigation
22:21that would turn Montaigne's discoveries on their head.
22:30In doing so, he would finally solve the strange puzzle surrounding Rameses the Great's vanished city.
22:39What Bietak discovered is so strange that it appears to defy the laws of logic.
22:47These are the monuments of Rameses. However, they are found in the wrong place.
23:00What's more, he has absolutely no idea where he is.
23:05What's more, he has absolute proof of it.
23:36Manfred Bietak was interested in the role played by the Nile in ancient times
23:41when he stumbled upon the strange truth about Pyrames.
23:47He was trying to trace the lost riverbeds and waterways of the Nile
23:51in order to map out what the delta would have looked like at the time of the pharaohs.
24:00Today, there are only two branches of the Nile in the delta.
24:04But we know that in the past, the river branches have switched course many times.
24:10Through history, the Nile would have had different branches all across the delta,
24:15branches that have long ago dried up and disappeared.
24:22The reason for this is that each branch of the Nile in the delta carries so much silt from upstream
24:28that its riverbed keeps building up until the water can no longer flow through it.
24:34At that moment, the river branch will switch course, finding a new route down to the sea
24:40and carving out a new path, sometimes far away from the old riverbed.
24:50The only way to trace these ancient waterways is to study a contour map.
24:56All lost rivers leave tell-tale signs in the contour lines on maps,
25:01signs that an expert can trace to find the ancient path of the old, dried-up river.
25:10By studying these contour lines, Betak finally came up with a single map
25:15charting every ancient, silted-up branch and waterway of the Nile through the eastern delta.
25:21There were many lost channels, and each had been active at some time in the past 5,000 years.
25:29On this reconstruction map, with the help of the study of the contours of the delta landscape,
25:37I was able to reconstruct the variety of Nile branches in antiquity.
25:44This one map held the truth about Pyrames,
25:48because it would reveal where the city should lie.
25:52The ancient texts said it lay on the delta's easternmost branch.
25:57So all Betak had to do was to work out which was the easternmost branch of the Nile
26:03at the time of Ramesses the Great.
26:06To do that, he had to date all the ancient branches.
26:10And he did that with pottery.
26:23In Egypt, cities and settlements were built along active branches of the Nile,
26:28which supplied them with drinking water, sanitation and transport.
26:32Like all ancient settlements, Pyrames's busy streets and markets
26:37would have left behind tons of rubbish, above all, pottery.
26:42That pottery can be dated, and so tell you the date of the city itself.
26:54By dating the pottery of all the settlements along the ancient, lost branches of the Nile,
26:59that will tell you when each settlement was inhabited,
27:02and therefore when that particular branch of the Nile was active.
27:16Every kind of pottery or ceramic has a unique signature that dates it in time.
27:21The type of clay, the way it was made, the techniques of firing and glazing
27:27can all be pinpointed to specific periods.
27:31Nowadays, it is possible to date within approximately 30 to 50 years accurately by ceramic alone.
27:43So, by combining his map of ancient waterways with his knowledge of dating pottery,
27:48Betak was able to pinpoint where and when the Nile flowed through the delta
27:53at each moment in history.
27:57What's more, the amounts of pottery along the old riverbeds
28:01would tell him where the biggest ancient settlements were.
28:07Just as Montaix would have predicted,
28:09Betak found that one of these branches of the Nile, known as the Ternitic branch,
28:14ran directly past Tannus, where Montaix had found Pyramas.
28:19The problem came when Betak dated the settlements along this branch.
28:31Here is Tannis.
28:34And this is the course of the Ternitic branch of the Nile,
28:38with numerous sites along its banks.
28:41This is the course of the Ternitic branch of the Nile,
28:45with numerous sites along its banks,
28:48but no site dates from the time of Ramses II.
28:54Which means this branch of the Nile didn't even exist at the time of Ramesses the Great.
29:01This eliminates the Ternitic branch of being active in the time of Ramses II.
29:08So it rules out that Tannis had been Pyramese.
29:14What Betak had discovered was extraordinary.
29:19There was no pottery at Tannis from the time of Ramesses the Great.
29:24All of it dates from at least 200 years after his death.
29:29This meant that despite all of Pierre Montaix's genuine finds,
29:37the great pharaoh couldn't possibly have built his capital city here.
29:46Tannis contained lots of ancient pottery,
29:49and Montaix assumed that, like all the statues and obelisks at the site,
29:54it also came from the time of Ramesses II.
29:58So he had never painstakingly dated it all.
30:03If he had, he would have discovered the bizarre truth about Tannis,
30:11that there was no city here at the time of Ramesses the Great.
30:18Not a single cave.
30:21Not a single pottery shirt has been collected
30:24from the time of Ramesses II or before,
30:27but everything is post-Ramesses II, and this is a very important point.
30:33And yet the monuments, statues and buildings here are, without doubt,
30:38those of Pyrames, built by Ramesses the Great.
30:45It was a bizarre paradox.
30:47How can a magnificent city turn up in a place where it could never have been built?
30:52And where on earth should it have been in the first place?
31:07Bitak was intrigued.
31:09He felt compelled to solve the puzzle left by Montaix
31:12and find the real site of Pyrames.
31:17And thanks to his map, he had the means of finding it.
31:21By using pottery to date the lost eastern channels of the Nile,
31:25one immediately stood out.
31:28The ancient Pelusiac branch, stretching over 180km in length.
31:35Along the course of this ancient branch,
31:37pottery had been discovered dating from the time of Ramesses the Great,
31:42which meant that it had to be the active most eastern branch of the Nile
31:46at the time of Ramesses.
31:50So Pyrames must lie somewhere along this lost Pelusiac branch.
31:57At this point, Bitak teamed up with German archaeologist Edgar Pusch
32:02to find the city.
32:04Here we have Tanis, which we know is not Pyrames.
32:10And then over here, we have the Pelusiac Nile branch.
32:15It's running something like this.
32:22And along it, we do have evidence of settlement remains
32:27of Ramesses II and his followers.
32:30But here, at Kantir,
32:34we have an incredible concentration
32:38of settlement remains of Ramesses II.
32:45There had been clues suggesting Kantir was the site of Pyrames,
32:49going back to the time of Monte.
32:52He says it was dug up about 30km from here.
32:56He claims it's from Pyrames.
32:59This is Kantir, 30km south of Tanis.
33:06Could this be the site of the lost city of Pyrames?
33:14When Pusch first arrived, there was nothing to see at Kantir.
33:19No statues, no obelisks, no temples.
33:22Nothing to suggest this could once have been home
33:25to the ancient world's great lost capital.
33:30When I came first to this area and to this site, I was shocked.
33:34Nothing was to be seen at the surface,
33:37nothing was to be seen at the surface.
33:40It was like a dream.
33:42When I came first to this area and to this site, I was shocked.
33:46Nothing was to be seen at the surface,
33:49no clue where to dig and where to excavate.
33:54The region around Kantir is one of the most fertile in Egypt
33:58and has been so intensively cultivated,
34:01all evidence of ancient worlds on the surface has been obliterated.
34:06It's the archaeological equivalent of a scorched earth.
34:12When we started to work in this area,
34:15every colleague told us,
34:17you won't find a thing.
34:19Everything is destroyed, nothing is there.
34:22And yet, somewhere here, amongst these fields,
34:26so Pusch and Bitak proposed,
34:29lurked the holy grail of Egyptology.
34:36Ramesses II's spectacular lost city of Pyrames.
34:43THE DIG
34:49And so they began to excavate.
34:54They were after any clue, however small, that might prove them right.
35:02Miraculously, just three days into the dig
35:05and only ten centimetres below the surface,
35:08Pusch's team found some tantalising evidence.
35:12THE DIG
35:30These odd carved objects
35:32would ultimately turn out to be the first crucial piece of evidence,
35:36suggesting that Kantir, this unprepossessing place,
35:40might just be everything they were hoping for.
35:43But at the time, no-one had a clue what they were.
35:48He didn't have the slightest idea what they could be,
35:51so they were called something like broken fragment of a vase,
35:56broken fragment of a dagger handle, or something like this.
36:04They kept digging and finding more and more of these mysterious objects.
36:09And then they found something rather wonderful.
36:19Now, this is a real surprising find.
36:22A complete set of horse bits, made from bones, locally produced,
36:27the only one ever found in Egypt.
36:30It is in such a condition that it looks like it was made yesterday.
36:40When they unearthed the floor of the buildings
36:43within which the objects had been found,
36:46they discovered another surprise.
36:56We found a special set of stones
37:00consisting of a tethering stone up front here,
37:05then an opening in the ground surrounded by limestone.
37:09Now, the size of all this is in such a way
37:12that a horse of that time, a male horse,
37:15would be tethered to those two stones
37:18that it would be urinating directly into these openings,
37:23giving us the possibility to say that we do have horse toilets.
37:29And a little archaeological experiment
37:32shows this and proves this.
37:34We took mules, which have about the same size as the horses in ancient times,
37:39and one of these mules did us the favour
37:43of urinating directly into the openings.
37:49Six rows of ten rooms each,
37:52and in each room, several positions to tether horses.
37:57It meant the complex must once have been home to at least 460 horses.
38:08Stabling on such a large scale could only mean some kind of military complex.
38:16Horses were the mainstay of a pharaoh's army,
38:19and the site certainly dated to the time of Ramesses the Great.
38:27But stables were not unique to Pyrames.
38:37It was the continued discovery of hundreds more of the mystery objects,
38:41some of them completely intact, that finally proved the most significant.
38:48Only by chance we found out what these objects were.
38:52I was going through the Cairo Museum
38:55and I suddenly saw that there are knobs like this,
39:00immediately connected with the yoke of the stave chariots of Tutankhamun.
39:14Thousands of these stone knobs would have held together
39:17the harnesses of Ramesses the Great's many war chariots.
39:26When combined with the number of horses stabled here,
39:30this could only amount to one thing.
39:37As ancient texts spoke of Pyrames as having a large chariot garrison,
39:42it was exactly the size of complex you'd expect to find
39:45at the lost site of Ramesses II's capital city.
39:55But it had taken Push and Bitak years of excavation
39:59just to unearth the garrison.
40:01At this rate of digging, it would take hundreds of years
40:04to prove if they had truly found the site of Pyrames.
40:13And so they turned instead to a new technology
40:16that, without lifting a stone,
40:18would be able to lift the chariot of Ramesses II.
40:25It conclusively unlocked the secrets
40:27of what lay beneath the fields of Kontyr.
40:34But when it arrived, the electromagnetic scanner
40:37was hardly the piece of cutting-edge technology they'd expected.
40:43Nobody believed ever that it would work.
40:47Just the same we said,
40:49OK, you took the trouble of coming here, now let's set up the device.
40:56The walls and foundations of ancient settlements
40:59all leave tell-tale traces in the ground.
41:04The electromagnetic scanner can penetrate the ground
41:07to read those traces.
41:12If the foundations of Pyrames were beneath these fields,
41:16the scanner would reveal traces of the roads, walls and buildings
41:20hidden there.
41:22Without the need to dig.
41:29At first, no-one thought for a moment
41:32that anything of any interest would be revealed in the scans.
41:39But they were wrong.
41:44There it was.
41:46Absolutely incredible.
41:48None of us believed it.
41:50There was the layout of a building.
41:54We were literally crying, and I can...
41:58I must admit it, I'm still close to crying and remembering these days.
42:03Laid out before him were the outlines of a building
42:07hidden just a few centimetres beneath the ground.
42:12We could see the wall as going like this.
42:15And there it is destroyed, and so and so and so and so.
42:19We said, OK, immediately back out to the field,
42:22continue the magnetic measurements.
42:24This is it. It really works.
42:39Since that first day, they have scanned an area
42:42of two square kilometres around Contier,
42:45the largest study of its kind in the world.
42:54Exposed for the first time in thousands of years
42:58beneath the fields of Contier...
43:04..are the foundations of the vast ancient city of Pyramas.
43:13MUSIC PLAYS
43:26The most wonderful part of all this huge area
43:31is a building in the middle of our scan,
43:34one huge structure
43:37covering more than 41,000 square metres,
43:42the centre of which is a building
43:46which shows a sequence of rooms,
43:49all of them with symmetrically arranged columns.
43:55The function of this building is most probably a temple.
44:01Temples were central to life in ancient Egypt.
44:05Their huge columned halls and cavernous interiors,
44:09deliberately designed to inspire awe as much as to intimidate.
44:24This is the western part of our scan.
44:28A villa area with long, stretching, straight-running streets
44:34branching off at right angles.
44:37The estates themselves surrounded by white lines
44:42which are the surrounding walls.
44:45The southern edge of this settlement and villa area
44:49is denoted by a black line
44:52and giving the shoreline of the Pelusic Nile branch.
44:56Laid out along avenues in a distinctive grid,
44:59these were the homes of the wealthy.
45:03It's in this area of the site
45:05that large inscribed door lintels have been found,
45:08bearing the names of Egyptian generals and royalty
45:12and looking out across the banks of the Nile.
45:18The eastern part of our scan
45:21The eastern part of our scan
45:24shows a much denser building area,
45:28also divided by streets,
45:32but they are neither straight nor on a clear grid.
45:37This area of very small houses
45:41might be an area where not only socially lower-ranking people
45:47were once living, but also workshops might have been in operation.
45:54This other sizeable neighbourhood,
45:57with its haphazard, tightly-packed layout,
46:00has all the characteristics of a more worker-day part of the city,
46:04both residential and trade.
46:07In contrast to the villa district,
46:10people here live cheek-by-jowl along packed, twisting streets.
46:15So you have a clear distinction between the West and the East.
46:24With the layout and style of architecture
46:27forming a strong sense of the scale of Pyrames,
46:30one structure, perhaps the most breathtaking of all,
46:34is out of the reach of even the most high-tech scanning equipment.
46:39The modern-day town of Kontyr
46:42is a jumbled collection of ramshackle buildings
46:45typical of a delta town today.
46:49Judging by its central position on the scan,
46:52it is almost certainly sitting slap-bang
46:55on the top of Ramesses II's palace.
47:02According to accounts of the time,
47:05According to accounts of the time,
47:07Ramesses the Great's palace was vast.
47:10The heart of the city, adorned with monuments
47:13celebrating his rule and longevity,
47:16the outside walls would have dazzled,
47:19painted white and decorated with glazed tiles.
47:27As incredible as the scan of Pyrames is,
47:30all it provides us with is the footprint
47:33of the city's once-impressive architecture.
47:40But we can get a glimpse of what it must once have looked like
47:44from other sites where Ramesses the Great's influence was felt.
47:49The vast majority of the temple to Ramesses II's time are now lost.
47:54However, when one looks at the great pylon he erected at Luxor Temple...
48:04...when you look at some of his constructions at Karnak...
48:19...and also the slightly later temple at Medinet Harbu...
48:25...one gets a flavour of what the buildings
48:28that once dominated the city of Pyrames may have looked like.
48:35With such a large expanse of the city laid bare,
48:39the scan had one more secret to reveal.
48:43These bare areas showed where lakes, canals and waterways
48:47had once been.
48:50These bare areas showed where lakes, canals and waterways
48:54ran through Pyrames, fed by the Nile.
49:00This final piece of the jigsaw completed the picture
49:03and showed just how unique Pyrames truly was.
49:09It contained huge temples...
49:14...palatial riverside villas of the wealthy...
49:18...winding, cramped streets of less well-heeled neighbourhoods...
49:24...and the site of the palace of the pharaoh himself.
49:36But it was Ramesses the Great's choice of location within the Nile Delta
49:40that made the city so unique.
49:48With canals fed by the waters of the Nile,
49:51Pyrames was quite simply...
49:55...the Venice of its day.
50:04But if Betak and Push had indeed found Pyrames at Kontir,
50:08what was it that Montaix had discovered at Tanis?
50:13Once you've recognised that Pyrames is indeed at Kontir,
50:18you start wondering, well, what on earth is Tanis then?
50:22There are buildings there which really any detached observer
50:27know must come from Pyrames.
50:30So what are they doing there? Is it a hoax?
50:34Have aliens dropped them there?
50:38Pyrames had been found, but it seemed to be in two places at once.
50:44The buildings were in Tanis, but the foundations were beneath Kontir.
50:50How could this have happened?
50:55The answer is intriguing.
50:59Ramesses the Great had chosen to locate his capital
51:03on the ancient Pelusiac branch of the Nile,
51:06and the river was its lifeblood.
51:12But the city was also at the mercy of the river,
51:15and one day it would spell doom to Pyrames.
51:20That moment came around 150 years after the death of Ramesses II.
51:32The Pelusiac branch of the Nile silted up.
51:37It dwindled away until the river finally switched course
51:41and reached the Pelusiac.
51:45It dwindled away until the river finally switched course altogether,
51:50leaving the Venice of its day without water.
52:01What happened was that the Pelusiac branch of the Nile,
52:05which passed Pyrames here,
52:09was blocked in its lower reaches.
52:15The Pelusiac branch of the Nile lost its waters
52:19to the Tanitic branch of the Nile,
52:22which became the main artery of the Nile traffic.
52:27For Pyrames, this spelled disaster.
52:33Now isolated from the world,
52:35it looked as though this magnificent city would have to be abandoned.
52:40But instead, after the death of Ramesses the Great,
52:44his successors decided to do something extraordinary.
52:56The clue to what the ancient Egyptians did to Pyrames 3,000 years ago
53:01lies hidden in the middle of an unassuming field in modern-day Contia.
53:07Here are the feet of one of the many colossal statues
53:11that Ramesses the Great built at Pyrames.
53:15The rest of the statue is somewhere else.
53:22The Pyrames is the center of the city.
53:27The Pyrames is the center of the city.
53:31The Pyrames is the center of the city.
53:34The Pyrames is somewhere else.
53:38Pity he's not all with us.
53:41There's bound to be some displacement to be expected,
53:44but the rest of him will turn up somewhere.
53:47The feet of some statues at Tanis had been left behind at Contia
53:52when the ancient Egyptians did something incredible.
53:58They moved their city.
54:04And they moved it to where the new branch of the Nile now flowed.
54:12Pyramese was abandoned
54:16and a new town, new residence,
54:21was built up along the Tanitic branch of the Nile.
54:25This was Tanis.
54:35It was at last possible to solve the mystery
54:38at the heart of the story of Pyrames,
54:41how it ended up being in two places at once.
54:47About 150 years after Ramesses' death,
54:50when the river around Pyrames silted up,
54:53the city ceased to function.
54:56Unwilling to abandon this splendid place,
54:59the ancient Egyptians decided to move the entire city
55:03to where the Nile had moved to.
55:12Slowly, Pyrames was disassembled block by block,
55:16statue by statue.
55:21It was a monumental feat,
55:23undertaken to keep alive one of the greatest cities ever created.
55:34The largest statues weighed up to 1,000 tonnes.
55:46Moving any single piece would have taken a workforce of hundreds,
55:51using sleds to transport the pieces through the city.
55:56Monuments, like statues and obelisks,
55:59would have been taken down and transported whole.
56:07Temples and other buildings, a single piece at a time.
56:26With no surviving accounts of the actual event,
56:29we can only wonder at how long such a move would have taken,
56:35and how many lives may have been lost in the effort.
56:38But, like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle,
56:41the monuments of Ramesses II's great city
56:44were reassembled on the banks of the new easternmost branch of the Nile.
56:52The Nile was the largest river in the world,
56:55and the largest city in the world.
56:59The Nile was the largest river in the world,
57:02and the largest city in the world.
57:04The Nile was the largest river in the world,
57:07and the largest city in the world.
57:11The Nile was the largest river in the world,
57:14and the largest city in the world.
57:20Pyramus dies,
57:22and the new north-eastern capital of Egypt, Tarnis,
57:26rises using the stones taken from Pyramus.
57:34The statues, temples and obelisks of Pyramus.
57:41Tarnis became the seat of power and home to a new dynasty of pharaohs.
57:48Until, like all great cities and civilizations,
57:52Tarnis too one day crumbled and faded into history.
57:59When it was discovered 3,000 years later,
58:02it started a mystery that archaeologists have only just solved.
58:15Tomorrow night in an isolated valley in Peru,
58:18the gruesome story of another of the last great pyramid builders.
58:21Their obsession with building pyramids led to an orgy of violence.
58:25Lost Cities continues tomorrow at nine.
58:28Coming up next tonight, Kath and Kim.
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