- 2 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Beyond the pyramids, beyond all you think you know, lies an undiscovered Egypt.
00:08It's like putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
00:11For the first time, walk where only pharaohs have walked.
00:15To the ancients, it was the sublime of the sublimes.
00:19Journey to where no television camera has been allowed until now.
00:23It almost looks as though the artists put down their brushes and left the temple yesterday.
00:27Now Peter Woodward reveals startling new discoveries about an ancient land, Egypt Beyond the Pyramids.
00:40Cairo, one of the world's great cities.
00:47Bulging with 16 million people, it straddles the Nile River not far from the ancient capital of Memphis.
00:54For more than 5,000 years, since the days of the pharaohs, Egypt has been a land of intense faith and spirituality.
01:06In many ways, it became a crossroads for some of the world's most prominent religions.
01:11Here in Cairo, the greatest Muslim metropolis on earth, one has only to listen to be reminded.
01:20The cacophony of modern life is punctuated five times each day by the Islamic call to prayer.
01:27Cairo is filled with hundreds of mosques of all ages and sizes.
01:39The great mosque of Sultan Hasan was built in the 14th century.
01:44It is a stunning display of enormous spiritual inspiration.
01:49But Judaism and Christianity have also found strength and motivation in this city.
01:58And their temples of faith are also here.
02:02The Benezra Synagogue was built in the 9th century.
02:07Legend has it that before the Nile shifted its banks, Pharaoh's daughter found the baby Moses on this spot.
02:14Cairo has numerous churches as well.
02:21Most are Coptic, a sect that was one of the earliest branches of Christianity.
02:27I visited the 4th century Hanging Church, where it's possible to sense the unbroken spiritual ties to Egypt's ancient past.
02:37If one were to find the look and sound of ancient Egypt today, then it would be here, at a Coptic church.
02:47The words of these prayers and chants are the closest clues we have to the spoken language of the ancient Egyptians.
02:54And the devout faith of this service is a direct link to the deep spirituality of Pharaonic Egypt.
03:06The chants, the incense, the hieroglyphs still used in the Coptic language can be traced to an even earlier religion that began here more than 50 centuries ago.
03:16Today, Cairo's houses of worship serve as a tangible link to that time.
03:26A time when magnificent temples provided the spiritual foundation for one of humankind's first great civilizations.
03:37The power of ancient Egypt's pharaohs was rooted in a complex hierarchy of gods and goddesses.
03:45It was a religion that prized ritual and ceremony.
03:50The temple was its centerpiece, a place of wonder and mystery.
03:57Temples were points of contact between humanity and the divine.
04:01And the Egyptians basically conceived of the temple first and foremost as the gods' dwelling place.
04:08So the basic purpose of the temple ritual was the care and feeding of the god.
04:14The second function of the temple was to physically represent the Egyptian concept of creation.
04:27Egyptians believed that the world began as a morass of primeval mud, a place of chaos and disorder.
04:36But from this morass, the gods pushed up a mound or island of safety, which became Egypt.
04:45To symbolize this mound of creation, temples were always built with a slightly raised section in their center.
04:51The temple mound reminded Egyptians that the primeval chaos could return if the gods were not happy.
05:00For over 3,000 years, fear of chaos and longing for order was central to religious beliefs of Egyptian civilization.
05:10The line between the two was very clear to the Egyptian.
05:15The desert was chaos and the absence of life.
05:19The valley nourished by the river Nile was security.
05:24The temple was the institution that kept Egypt safe.
05:29The god assured stability.
05:36It prevented chaos.
05:38You know that in the center of that temple, the god is there watching over you.
05:44And that Pharaoh, on your behalf, is going to make the proper offerings to that god.
05:50And that the world will continue to function properly.
05:54The Nile will rise.
05:56The floods will come.
05:57Food will grow.
05:59It's all a reciprocal process that continues throughout time.
06:05Temples quickly evolved to represent more than a home for the gods.
06:10They became the focus of all life in the community.
06:15When you think about the temple in ancient Egypt, you're really thinking about something that's much broader than a religious place.
06:22It's a religious and economic place.
06:25Something akin to, say, a great monastery in the Middle Ages in Europe.
06:30It owns land.
06:31It has herds.
06:33These were great economic institutions within the structure of Egypt.
06:40The first temples date from the birth of Egyptian civilization, over 4,000 years before the Christian era.
06:47These earliest holy places were probably little more than walls of reed mats or animal hides.
06:53Later temples were built of mud brick.
06:58Amazingly, some of these structures have survived.
07:01The huge mud brick temple of the early pharaoh Khazahemwi at Abydos is over 5,000 years old.
07:12But Khazahemwi's great walls were the exception.
07:15Most of these early temples vanished long ago, worn away by the relentless desert wind.
07:21This is a mud brick.
07:26Nile mud mixed with straw, baked in the Egyptian sun.
07:30Every early building from the pharaoh's palace to the peasant's hovel was made of this.
07:35In the right dry conditions, these can last for thousands of years, like at Khazahemwi's temple in Abydos.
07:41But most of habitable Egypt was close to the Nile and subject to constant flooding.
07:47After a few centuries, this stuff just dissolves back into the Nile.
07:54And the Egyptians knew it.
07:56Now, that's all right for the houses of the living.
07:59After all, life is just a temporary stage.
08:01But for the tombs of the dead and the temples of the gods, they had to last.
08:06The Egyptians were about to become the world's greatest masters of a new material, stone.
08:12And with it, they created some of the greatest monuments in human history.
08:26We've seen the beginnings of temple construction in Egypt.
08:35And now we see its magnificent culmination.
08:38This is the Temple of Karnak.
08:41And after the pyramids, it is the most spectacular architectural achievement in the history of Egypt.
08:49It is the greatest temple complex ever built.
08:53It grew to cover over 60 acres, a space large enough to enclose the Cathedral of Notre Dame and its grounds.
09:02Karnak Temple sits on the east bank of the Nile in what was once Thebes, the southern capital of ancient Egypt.
09:09Today, it is the city of Luxor, some 450 miles south of Cairo.
09:16A succession of pharaohs built and expanded this great temple over the course of two centuries, some 1,200 years before the Christian era.
09:25This great collection of gateways and column-filled halls was built to honor a single deity, Amun, the king of the gods.
09:35He is the great god, the number one god in Egypt.
09:40Because of that position as king of the gods, he receives the favor of Pharaoh.
09:46And all of the great halls that exist in here, the pylons and everything, are built for him.
09:52Along with his wife, Mut, the goddess of motherhood, Amun ruled over the capital of Thebes.
10:02It was Amun, more than any other deity, who served to legitimize and continually renew the authority of the pharaohs.
10:10In the darkest, most silent recesses of Karnak, the god Amun resided in the form of a statue.
10:22Surprisingly, the statue was not a huge colossus, but a small image that could be easily carried during festivals.
10:31The lengthy walls of Karnak were made of huge sandstone blocks.
10:35The construction challenges faced by the builders were enormous.
10:42Remember, we are not talking about cranes or even simple block and tackle to lift these enormous stones into place.
10:48Instead, the ancient Egyptians relied on dirt.
10:52Here we see the remnants of an enormous ramp up which the stones were dragged to their place in this huge pylon or gateway.
11:00As each course of stone was completed, the ramp was raised.
11:05When at last the wall was completed, the ramp was slowly dug away and each course of stone was dressed with carvings and paintings on the way down.
11:14The great hyperstyle hall is the heart of Karnak.
11:21Begun by Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the 14th century BC, the hall is a forest of 130 columns which once supported a roof over 80 feet above the temple floor.
11:33Windows in the roof admitted light which flooded the dramatic central isle.
11:40But the side isles, so sunny today, then would have remained in dramatic shadow.
11:46Fifteen obelisks dedicated to the sun god Ray were lifted into place throughout the temple.
11:52It took all of the engineering skill possessed by Egyptians to carve the massive shafts, drag them up dirt ramps and carefully settle them into place.
12:05The tips of the obelisks were once capped with gold so they might catch the first sunlight at dawn and the last at twilight.
12:12The glinting light from these shafts honoured the sun's primary importance to sustaining all life.
12:21This great collection of monumental stonework was not erected by slaves but by free citizens.
12:28For all Egyptians were expected to be available sometime during the year to work on the pharaoh's great construction projects.
12:35It was the equivalent of national service.
12:38The labor that put these temples together is the common people.
12:45They're serving their labor time.
12:49It's their week to go work in Karnak.
12:52It's probably one, we've got to pay our taxes.
12:55Two, we're working on the home of the god.
12:58This is a great service to the king and to Amun.
13:03We're ensuring the stability of life throughout eternity by building here.
13:06Although average working class Egyptians built this temple, they probably were allowed to enter only the outer courtyards during the festivals.
13:17These inner halls were entered only by the most elite class of priests, for it was here that the god spirit was most present.
13:25Each pharaoh in his turn felt called on to proclaim his devotion to Amun, and while he was at it, his own greatness.
13:35The walls and columns of the temple functioned as posters or billboards where the king's adoration of the god could be recorded and displayed to the world.
13:45Dr. William Munane of the University of Memphis has been studying the inscriptions at Karnak Temple for over 30 years.
13:56I guess my interest in this building starts with simple curiosity.
14:00I mean, it is so well preserved, and it's silly not to know very much about what made it tick, why it was built.
14:08I'm interested in what it tells us about the religious mentality of the ancient Egyptians.
14:12The only safe way you can begin to understand what the significance of a building like this is, is to understand what they carved on its walls.
14:22Simple photography of the inscriptions is difficult.
14:25Over hundreds of years and a succession of pharaohs, carvings were placed on top of older carvings.
14:31Munane carefully traces everything so that all the layers may then be minutely studied.
14:36For sometimes, these images are not what they first appear.
14:43One of the things that you find constantly being emphasized in the temple is this balance between the way things are and ought to be and what's actually happening in the temple.
14:55And I think you see that very nicely illustrated over here.
15:00You have this bird, which is a hieroglyph for the common people of Egypt.
15:04And notice it's seated on a basket, which is another hieroglyph, which means all.
15:09And the bird has sprouted arms.
15:11It's not because it's a genetic mutation, but because this is part of another hieroglyph.
15:16Egyptians, seeing those arms outstretched, would think instantly the word for adore.
15:22And in case you missed the point, the star, the five-pointed star, is another Egyptian hieroglyph that basically means adore.
15:28So you've got all the people adoring the king.
15:31Details like this have suggested that this was not just a symbol of humanity adoring the god king, it's also a logo for a basically illiterate society.
15:43Remember, after all, in Egypt, one or two percent of the elite knew how to read and write.
15:47So for most other people, something like this would tell them, when you see this on the column, you can stand there.
15:54A bird that's actually a crowd control sign is only one of the surprises that can be found here if you know where and how to look.
16:04The average visitor today might also be surprised that all of this drab stonework was once painted in stunning colours.
16:12The few sections of painted decoration which remain give us a tantalizing glimpse of Karnak's fabulous past.
16:22Recording this stuff is really urgent because, as you can see, the wall is flaking away.
16:29These name rings that you see above me were intact when we photographed them in 1992.
16:34They're practically all gone now.
16:36So every time I get fed up with the tedium of what I'm doing, I basically come back here and I remind myself what a waste of time we're in
16:43and how it's important to record this stuff before it disappears.
16:50Sadly, groundwater in Egypt has been rising since the construction of the great Aswan Dam in 1969.
16:57Like a sponge, the porous nature of these ancient stones now draws this water and the poisonous salt it carries.
17:05But other Egyptologists are continuing the struggle to unlock more secrets still held within these wondrous walls.
17:13We're in the heart of the temple of Karnak.
17:19The Holy of Holies, where the statue of the great god Amun was kept.
17:24The roof is gone now, but 3500 years ago, this place would have been very dark and very quiet,
17:30with only the most privileged priests allowed to enter.
17:33Each morning, one of them would open the doors to the shrine of the god himself, whose statue stood just up there.
17:38Then the statue would be washed, given his morning bath, and anointed with precious oils, and then dressed in the finest clothes.
17:47Offerings would be left. Here, perhaps, flowers or oils.
17:51And on this great table, food would be laid out before the god, so that he could refresh himself during the day.
17:57Of course, the god only took the essence of the food. After a suitable interval, the actual stuff was eaten by the priests.
18:06Finally, they would leave incense burning, and then the god would be allowed to enjoy his day in peace.
18:13The higher priests at Karnak were appointed by the pharaoh.
18:22Other priests were part-time laymen from important families.
18:26But there were many jobs at the temple that had little to do with its religious functions.
18:30Temples were not just the domain of royalty and priests.
18:37Hundreds of common people were acquired for the day-to-day operation of these huge religious centers.
18:42Farmers, carpenters, stonemasons, metalsmiths, potters, and many more,
18:47were all employed by the temples and relied on them for their physical as well as their spiritual needs.
18:52Charles Van Sicklen is currently excavating the site of an ancient workshop that once served Karnak Temple.
19:02At one point in the history of Karnak Temple, this was the manufacturing.
19:08This was the place where they made the statues. This was the place where they made jewelry.
19:13They processed copper.
19:16In this particular area, we've got a lot of mixed signals about what's going on.
19:20I have places where I have concentrations of dirt filled with metallic flecks,
19:28which we haven't checked out yet, that look a lot like a word we don't talk about in Egyptology.
19:33The G word, which is terrible.
19:36Gold is the G word.
19:39Archaeologists hate to find gold because it's only a problem and it never tells you anything.
19:44The age-old allure of gold has disrupted more than one dig site.
19:50For serious archaeologists, its presence only serves to distract from the search for more important discoveries.
19:58There are a whole series of basins, one on top of the other.
20:03They go down for over four feet.
20:05And they were putting stuff in and letting them have sediments.
20:10The sediment would filter out and then they put more liquid in and out.
20:13Maybe they were trying to extract some of the gold.
20:16That's probably the best theory this week.
20:20It's a problem I haven't solved yet.
20:23But that's archaeology.
20:24All facets of Egyptian daily life were dependent on pottery.
20:30Jars, bottles, basins, bowls, pots were everywhere.
20:35It might be assumed that every piece of pottery is dug up and kept.
20:39But over 3,000 years of history make for a lot of broken pieces.
20:44Most of this area is littered with literally millions of potsherds.
20:48This is a potsherd that I usually refer to by the Arabic word zaballa, which means trash.
20:57It's part of the body of a piece of pottery, so it has no characteristics that will tell me anything about it.
21:06So, we toss it.
21:10As the centuries passed, the cult of the great god Amun withered,
21:14and Egyptian civilization was overrun by other cultures.
21:18Karnak Temple was finally closed by the Romans in the 4th century.
21:26When at last Europeans saw Karnak in the 18th century,
21:31its great halls were filled with sand.
21:34Campfires blackened the beautifully painted walls.
21:37And only peasants and their donkeys looked upon the holy inscriptions once meant for gods.
21:45But as the 21st century begins, Karnak is again filled with energy and passion.
21:52Only now it is the passion of discovery and restoration.
21:58Today, no one lives here at Karnak.
22:01The sands have been cleared away to reveal these hundreds of blocks of stone.
22:05With slow and precise detective work, Francois Lacher and a French team have achieved the impossible.
22:14From these random blocks, they have managed to reassemble a whole building.
22:19They have recreated the red chapel of Queen Hatshepsut.
22:23Hatshepsut was one of Egypt's few female rulers.
22:33In 1487 BC, four years before the end of her reign,
22:37this dynamic queen built a small temple just outside the walls of Karnak.
22:42Made of red quartzite, it became known as the Red Chapel.
22:45It was used for only a few years.
22:51For reasons we don't fully understand, Hatshepsut's successor and stepson, Thutmose III, had the red chapel dismantled.
22:59By the time Egyptologists found it over 3,000 years later,
23:03the only visible remains were a few large blocks of stone.
23:10Francois Lacher was fascinated by these blocks.
23:14When I came to Karnak in 1987,
23:19I saw the blocks of the Red Chapel and I asked about it,
23:24and most of my colleagues were telling me that it was impossible to reconstruct this building
23:29because too many blocks were missing.
23:33Lacher and his team set out to do the impossible.
23:37Fortunately, some of the stones which were once the walls of the Red Chapel had been carved to tell a story.
23:43Unfortunately, most of these stones had been reused in other parts of Karnak.
23:49The challenge was to find them and put them back together.
23:53The first operation to be done for this study was to take around 2,000 pictures of the faces of these blocks.
24:09The photos of the chapel blocks became a template for Lacher to work from.
24:12It's like putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
24:17You don't have the box, so you don't have the picture, and half the pieces are missing.
24:23The Red Chapel had been designed to hold a small boat.
24:27The boat was used to transport the god Amun in the important annual festival of Opet, held each year at the onset of the flood.
24:37During the procession, the boat of Amun was carried out of Karnak and paraded in front of the common people on a day-long journey to meet the king.
24:47At this meeting, the king paid homage to the god, and the god renewed the pharaoh's right to rule for another year.
24:57Scenes of this journey were depicted on numbered blocks, which had been set in the chapel wall.
25:04Once Lacher discovered some of these blocks, he had the key to understanding the order of each course of stone.
25:11If five blocks in a course were each 30 inches long, it was logical the missing block in the order would have the same dimensions.
25:22The scenes with the shrine and the scenes with the priest carrying the bark have the same length.
25:30So it was quite easy to add these lengths to the missing parts to reconstruct a part of this entire third course.
25:38When the puzzle had finally been put together on paper, it took only nine months in 1998 to reconstruct the main portion of the Red Chapel.
25:50Sadly, some blocks were never recovered.
25:53The smooth plaster on these walls fills the space of those missing blocks.
25:58It will eventually be stained to match the colour of the original stones.
26:03Work still continues on the Red Chapel as some missing pieces are recreated by hand.
26:11But for the first time since the New Kingdom, we can look upon Hatshepsut's beautiful shrine and marvel at what had once been lost to us.
26:20I think it's fascinating to try and imagine the mysterious and dramatic scenes which once unfolded in this marvellous little chapel.
26:27The one day in the year when the average Egyptian could actually see the god Amun-Re was the festival of Opet.
26:39The god would be removed from his sanctuary and brought here to the Red Chapel.
26:43Inside, on this very spot, was a small bark or boat which would carry the god on his journey.
26:50He was placed inside the bark and shaven-headed priests with leopard-skin robes lifted the holy bark onto their shoulders and carried it out of the temple of Karnak towards Luxor, over a mile away down the avenue of the Sphinxes.
27:10Trumpets blare as the god's procession approaches.
27:18Soldiers in plumed-covered chariots line the route.
27:22Spectators sing and clap as musicians pluck lutes and beat drums and cymbals.
27:28Dancers sway to the rhythms. Acrobats spring through the air.
27:33And everywhere, the people cheer at the sight of the life-giving god.
27:37Much of Karnak temple remains to give us a wonderful sense of what this place was like 3500 years ago.
27:53But the effects of time, wind, earthquake and even vandalism have taken their toll.
27:59We must also look to other temples to help us appreciate the mystique of Egyptian temple design and the delicate beauty of their decoration.
28:09One of the greatest of these was built while Karnak was thriving.
28:14It was created by Pharaoh Seti I, the father of Ramses the Great, to honour Osiris, the god of the underworld.
28:24I wanted to see this very special temple, so I travelled just a few hours down the Nile from Karnak to the ancient town of Abydos.
28:33It's Friday, the holy day of the Islamic week here in modern Egypt.
28:42You can hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
28:45What we have left of ancient Egypt is its religion. Tombs, temples, monuments.
28:50But to the people of those times, that's what Egypt was.
28:53A living religion which directly involved the whole people, a religion which lasted with very little change for 3000 years.
29:02We've seen the glories of Karnak, but to really appreciate it and to understand the power and the impact of these New Kingdom temples,
29:10you have to come here to Abydos, this extraordinary temple built by Seti I for the god Osiris.
29:17Few tourists ever come here and parts of this temple have never been filmed.
29:20Our guide is Matthew Adams of the University of Pennsylvania.
29:32So, Matthew, tell us about this amazing place. Where are we?
29:36Well, we're in the first hypostyle hall of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos.
29:40And we've just come in from the sunlit world of the living of ancient Egypt and we're moving slowly into the more dimly lit world of the divine.
29:59So, Seti I originated this temple. What was his purpose?
30:02Well, from at least the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, around 2000 BC, Abydos was seen as the primary cult place of the god Osiris, the ruler of the land of the dead.
30:16The Egyptians believed that he had been buried here, that his tomb was out in the desert here.
30:21And Seti wanted to associate himself with the cult of Osiris. And in building this great temple, he was able to do that.
30:30I think that this is probably the finest relief carving ever done in Egypt. It's absolutely exquisite.
30:45But take us through them.
30:47Well, here we see the Pharaoh, Seti I, he's holding an incense burner. You see the flames from the burning incense coming up there.
30:54Very clearly.
30:55He's offering this to an image of the god Osiris, attended by various other deities. You see Osiris enthroned on a raised platform here, inside a shrine, which is just indicated by these thin lines that encircle the image.
31:16Where would this, this shrine itself have been?
31:19Well, the temple had a number of chapels dedicated to various deities. One of these was dedicated to Osiris, and this image, or the image that this represents, would have been in that chapel.
31:34Can we go and see?
31:35Sure.
31:36This is the chapel of Osiris, and we see him in various guises here, with the king making offerings of incense and libation offerings, adoring the image of the god.
31:52It really gives a sense of what the original decoration of most Egyptian temples would have been. It would have been this incredibly vibrant and alive color.
32:03It almost looks as though the artist put down their brushes and left the temple yesterday.
32:09The images here help us a great deal in understanding the nature of temple ritual, but the Seti Temple here isn't only important for Egyptologists to understand God's cults and temple ritual.
32:21It also has a singular significance in Egyptian history.
32:29On the wall in this room, we actually have one of the most important historical documents from ancient Egypt.
32:34It's something that has been of immense value to Egyptologists in understanding the sequence of Egyptian history.
32:40It's a list of the names of the kings of ancient Egypt.
32:52It starts at the beginning with the name of King Menes. Here it says Meni, who was the legendary founder of ancient Egypt.
32:59And it continues all the way through most of the rulers of ancient Egypt, all the way to Seti, here at the end, who built this temple.
33:13It's an amazing stretch of history, isn't it?
33:16Absolutely. This represents almost 2,000 years of Egyptian history.
33:19And it's just a list. Is that the only importance it has? What else does it tell us?
33:25Well, it tells us of the Egyptians' own awareness of the great depth of their history.
33:31Egyptology would have had a much more difficult time in putting together the overall outline of ancient Egyptian history without this document and others like it.
33:40Although Seti I is the last name on this list, he died before his temple could be fully completed.
33:51It was finished by his son, Rameses.
33:54But history will forever know it as Seti's gift to the ages.
33:59A beautiful monument to the deep spirituality and artistic greatness of ancient Egypt.
34:05In 1570 BC, a thousand years after the great pyramids were built, a new era in Egyptian history began.
34:20It was called the New Kingdom.
34:24The great pharaohs of this period, such as Seti I's son, Rameses, possessed enormous power and prestige.
34:31They would expand and perfect an altogether different category of temple.
34:38We're crossing the Nile at the site of the ancient holy city of Thebes.
34:42Just down there on that bank is the town of Luxor and the temple of Karnak.
34:47But it was to this bank that the pharaohs turned to create a new kind of temple.
34:52These were not dedicated to a particular god like Amun at Karnak or Osiris at Abydos.
34:58But rather, they were mortuary temples, dedicated to the honour of a living god, the pharaoh himself.
35:05Pharaohs had always required a site where, even after death, they could receive praise and offerings.
35:18A suitable place where their memory could be worshipped on a daily basis.
35:22It was not enough for the body to remain preserved.
35:28The glorious memory of the dead king also had to be maintained, if he was to keep his proper place in eternity.
35:37Pyramids had spaces for such activities incorporated into their design.
35:42But when tomb robbers forced the pharaohs to seek smaller, more secure tombs in the valley of the kings,
35:49a need was created for a special memorial structure.
35:53The result was the mortuary temple.
35:57And one of the most elegant of these was built across the river from Karnak by Rameses II.
36:02The spectacular temple he created is known as the Ramesseum.
36:06It was a fitting monument to the pharaoh known to history as Rameses the Great.
36:15Its location, the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, was really an enormous cemetery complex covering dozens of square miles.
36:23The great mortuary temples the pharaohs built here were all very close to each other.
36:28Just down the road from the Ramesseum is Medinet Habu, the beautiful temple built by Rameses III.
36:37And not far away from this spot sits another great testament to power and ego.
36:45We're on our way to visit the most spectacular of the mortuary temples.
36:49A temple that was built to honour one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs.
36:53A pharaoh who was not a king, but a queen.
36:59Her name was Hatshepsut, the same queen who had built the Red Chapel at Karnak.
37:04Initially she was less a queen than the wife of a king, Thutmose II to be exact.
37:09But when her husband died, the title of king passed to a boy, Hatshepsut's stepson, Thutmose III.
37:17The boy was too young to rule, and so Hatshepsut became regent to command Egypt until the young king matured.
37:23But this remarkable woman possessed great self-confidence and abundant ambition.
37:29In the second year of her stepson's reign, Hatshepsut had herself designated king.
37:34She decreed that she would now be depicted not as a woman, but as a man, complete with the traditional false beard of a pharaoh.
37:46Hatshepsut's reign was peaceful and Egypt prospered.
37:53Trading expeditions were sent to distant lands, and the queen mounted enormous building projects.
38:00None were more ambitious than her construction of a temple to memorialize herself.
38:10Nearly 1500 years before the Christian era, Queen Hatshepsut began the construction of a temple to honor her reign.
38:17She chose this spectacular site, a natural amphitheatre of stone, cliffs a thousand feet high.
38:27Today it is called Deir el-Bakri, but to the ancients it was the sublime of the sublimes.
38:34Hatshepsut's architect was named Sininmut. Some believe he was also her lover.
38:43She asked him to design a temple which would amaze the ages. He did not fail.
38:49No builder in ancient Egypt had a greater sense of theatrics than Sininmut.
39:10Three perfectly scaled terraces rise out of the valley floor and seem to meld with the towering cliffs which surround her.
39:17The temple.
39:23Carefully proportioned ramps connected these tiers.
39:28Statues of the queen were everywhere.
39:31And in the soft tones of the desert dawn or twilight, the temple's stones gave off a magical glow,
39:38which proclaimed to eternity Hatshepsut's sanctity and greatness.
39:42But fame can be fleeting. Hatshepsut's control of this wonderful temple was to be brief.
39:54Work on this architectural masterpiece began in the seventh year of Hatshepsut's reign and continued for fifteen more years.
40:01This temple was built in her honour, so her image is everywhere.
40:07Hatshepsut as Pharaoh, Hatshepsut as the god Osiris.
40:11But although her temple is still here 3500 years later, most of the images of the great queen herself were destroyed soon after her death.
40:19Thutmose the third became Pharaoh of Egypt in 1483 BC.
40:28He was convinced that his stepmother should never have been Pharaoh.
40:32So, as his reign came to an end, Thutmose did his best to obliterate the queen's image from her own temple.
40:38But time was the greatest enemy here. Later occupants continued the defacement of carvings and earthquakes tumbled walls and columns.
40:51By the twentieth century, Hatshepsut's beautiful temple was in a sad condition.
40:57Paving stones had heaved out of line. Huge blocks from balustrades lay collapsed in jumbled piles.
41:05But in 1960, the Egyptian government funded a restoration project working with a group of Polish Egyptologists.
41:12It's been a model of international cooperation.
41:19Critical parts of the temple, particularly the third tier, lay scattered like a huge stack of children's blocks.
41:27The first task was to analyze these blocks and, one at a time, put them back into their places.
41:35We were granted access to sections of the temple that have been closed for more than 30 years.
41:41It was a rare opportunity to see the restoration work up close.
41:48Old methods are used to recreate the missing parts.
41:52Stone is cut from the original quarries and brought here to Deir el-Bahri.
41:55Local Egyptian carvers are separated from the original artisans who worked here by thousands of years.
42:02But the care and attention to detail is identical.
42:09Each one of these stones is cut by hand, placed by hand and eye, shapes to exactly fit.
42:14And then, after this one, they have to go step by step up this great ramp to the third tier.
42:23And for the first time since ancient times, it'll be complete.
42:28There's hundreds of men working here.
42:30You can imagine, in ancient times, thousands working side by side in the heat to complete this great monument.
42:36With funding limited, there is no modern machinery here.
42:46Instead, workers bend their backs to their heavy loads.
42:50To provide a rhythm, they cry out a work chant in praise of the Prophet Muhammad.
42:54Like their ancestors centuries ago, they pulled these great stones up the ramp, using only their hands.
43:08Of course, these guys have got wheels. The ancient Egyptians, well, maybe they used sledges. It's still hard work.
43:27These limestone blocks are modern, but they're cut to exactly the same tolerances as the ancient stone would have been.
43:44And each block is a copy, an exact copy of what was here before.
43:48Like a piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle, a section of Hatshepsut's original temple is eased into place on its modern counterpart.
44:05Piece by piece, Deir el-Bakhri is put back together.
44:09Funds for this work are difficult to obtain. It has taken over 30 years, but at last, the end is in sight.
44:18And we can again see Egypt's great queen gazing over her marvellous temple.
44:37Each year, during a special festival, the god Amun-Re would be brought here, to the third tier of the temple of Hatshepsut.
44:44The statue of the god would be taken in procession across this courtyard, back there, into a cavern dug into the mountain.
44:52There he would rest for a few days, before beginning his progress through all the temples of the West Bank.
44:58The public have never been allowed access to this place, but soon the work of restoration will be completed, and visitors will at last be able to stand here, on the sacred terrace, and enjoy a view of the Nile once looked upon by Queen Hatshepsut herself.
45:17Like all ancient structures in Egypt, the great temples face many threats from time and the elements.
45:30Paintings continue to fade, inscriptions erode, rising ground water threatens foundations and puts important carvings at risk.
45:38But through the work of many dedicated people, these great mansions of the spirits thankfully remain.
45:48They proclaim to history the unique relationship of Egyptians and their gods.
45:55of Egyptians and their gods.
45:57of Egyptians and their gods.
46:02the behemoth was so much more effective.
46:05Thank you for that.
46:07Thank you for listening.
46:10I am all right.
46:11Goodbye.
46:12Goodbye.
46:14Goodbye.
46:25Bye.
46:28Goodbye.
Recommended
45:06
|
Up next
53:27
22:11
29:10
50:08
19:41
45:38
18:38
29:15
46:28
58:54
41:07
47:45
1:24:44
58:00
49:00
37:41