- 7/5/2025
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00:00Beyond the pyramids, beyond all you think you know, lies an undiscovered Egypt.
00:08I kept saying to myself, my God, I can't believe it.
00:11What happened next is one of the great moments of modern archaeology.
00:15A great pharaoh welcomes his children to the underworld.
00:19It turned into the most incredible sight I'd ever seen in my life.
00:22Hidden tombs unearthed after thousands of years.
00:25Nothing like this has ever been found before.
00:28Now, Peter Woodward guides you through an Egypt few are privileged to see.
00:33Egypt Beyond the Pyramids.
00:39500 miles south of Cairo, a stunningly beautiful temple perches on the edge of the vast desert.
00:47Within its walls lies a toppled thousand-ton image of one of Egypt's greatest kings, who left behind one of Egypt's greatest mysteries, the fate of his many children.
01:10It is a saga that some believe will end in a remote tomb in the legendary Valley of the Kings.
01:17This jumbled pile of huge stones was once a statue of Ramesses II, ruler of Egypt over 1,200 years before the Christian era.
01:38His face gazes towards the sky, and here is a shilder.
01:43This was one of the greatest statues ever carved.
01:46And it was erected here at the Ramesseum, Ramesses' mortuary temple close to present-day Luxor.
01:52In the 5th century AD, the Coptic Christians are believed to have pulled down the statue.
01:59And over the centuries, earthquakes further destroyed the fallen pharaoh's likeness.
02:04Of course, Ramesses had the last word.
02:08His image today is anything but a colossal wreck.
02:11This statue better symbolises the role of Ramesses II in Egypt's history.
02:21He was a king who led his armies to victory, who built the most astonishing structures all over Egypt.
02:27He ruled for 67 years.
02:30His was a reign longer than all but one pharaoh.
02:34And when he died, history would remember him as Ramesses the Great.
02:39Ramesses was in his early 20s when he succeeded his father, Seti I, in 1280 BC.
02:49Seti had been a dynamic and successful pharaoh, and saw to it that his son was well prepared to follow him.
02:58As a child, young Ramesses accompanied his father to war.
03:02He learned first-hand the lessons of leading an army.
03:06While still a young man, he studied engineering techniques.
03:09He oversaw the stone quarries where the huge obelisks were cut to decorate Egypt's temples.
03:15The training paid off.
03:19Ramesses II's reign as pharaoh was unsurpassed in its stability and achievement.
03:24The teenager who had followed his father into battle became a determined warrior who defended Egypt from outside threats.
03:32Ramesses also learned his lessons as an engineer.
03:39He left to history some of Egypt's most monumental and beautiful structures.
03:45In a civilisation of great builders, this pharaoh was certainly one of the greatest.
03:51Over 3,000 Egyptian citizens were put to work just to cut the stone for the beautiful temple he dedicated to himself, the Ramesses.
04:06And on towering cliffs overlooking the Nubian Nile, Ramesses had carved one of history's greatest monuments to ego, the breathtaking Temple of Abu Simbel.
04:19Four colossal statues of the pharaoh himself soar 60 feet high.
04:24I think Ramesses can be included amongst the greatest historical figures of ancient Egypt.
04:38He was a talented military man who saw battle, who in fact ensured a certain stability to the kingdom of Egypt.
04:45Starting at the delta and all the way to Nubia, Egypt was covered with monuments which tell the story of his reign.
04:52Ramesses was indeed a great warrior, and his enormous building projects have awed people since the earliest tourists sailed the Nile in Greek and Roman times.
05:03During his reign, Egypt's fame and wealth grew, and his subjects experienced a bountiful and secure era.
05:10So great was Ramesses' opinion of his own accomplishments that he would take the immodest step of declaring himself divine, a God living among mortals.
05:23However, his divine status would not have impressed one notable group of visitors to his country.
05:29Judeo-Christian tradition names Ramesses II as Pharaoh at the time Moses led the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.
05:42Of Ramesses' many impressive accomplishments, his greatest may have been his prodigious feats of fatherhood.
05:49The beautiful Nefertari was his most famous wife, but he had many other official queens, lesser wives, and concubines.
05:56With all of these women, Ramesses fathered over 100 children that we know of, including at least 50 sons.
06:04Having many wives and children was probably not unusual for a pharaoh, but what was unusual was that Ramesses proudly listed and portrayed his children on the walls of many of the buildings he constructed.
06:19He reproduced his children on the walls of the temples in long princely processions where we find both the king's sons and daughters.
06:34It's thanks to these lists that we are able to somewhat establish Ramesses' descendants.
06:39For most pharaohs of ancient Egypt, we know nothing about the members of the royal family.
06:47For Ramesses II, we know the names of many of his wives, we know the names of many of his sons and many of his daughters, more than two dozen of each.
06:56Ramesses II was indeed a singular fellow in that no other pharaoh before or after him had ever given so much attention to his children.
07:09Despite such unusual public acknowledgment by their father, we know very little about the lives of all those children.
07:15Being an heir to Ramesses' throne was a frustrating process.
07:19He would rule for 67 years and outlive five of his successors.
07:27The first of these was Amun-Hehepashef, who died in the 40th year of Ramesses' rule.
07:32If indeed Ramesses was the pharaoh of the Exodus, Amun-Hehepashef would have been the firstborn son slain when God sent the seven plagues against Egypt.
07:42Though it is doubtful history will ever be able to confirm this.
07:49Of the other princes of Ramesses, we know few details.
07:52Son number four, Chemwesi, was highly regarded and may have been his father's favourite.
07:58He was an important priest and oversaw the construction of many of Ramesses' most dramatic building projects.
08:04He died in the 55th year of Ramesses' reign.
08:09Merneptah was Ramesses' thirteenth son and we know little about him until he was appointed general of the army in the 40th year of Ramesses' reign.
08:18He was probably the real power behind the throne for the last decade of his father's life.
08:26Even as an old king, Ramesses was tall for an Egyptian, five feet eight.
08:31In his final years he was troubled with arthritis and curvature of the spine.
08:36And like most of his countrymen, his teeth bothered him.
08:40He was slightly built with a sharply hooked nose and large pierced ears.
08:45We might guess that he was a bit vain since even as a very old man his hair was dyed a stunning shade of red.
08:51Until the very end, Ramesses II remained Ramesses the Great, active, assertive and an enormous presence in the life of his nation.
09:02But even for a living God, the end in this world does finally come.
09:06In 1213 BC, Ramesses II at last died around the age of 90.
09:20Considering life expectancy in Egypt was just a little over 30,
09:24the gods may have been revealing to mortals the great nature of their king.
09:28He was succeeded by his thirteenth son, Merneptah, who ruled for another nine years before he too died.
09:36But of the many other sons of Ramesses, we know of the tombs of just two.
09:42All the rest have vanished.
09:45They are the lost princes of Egypt.
09:57The long reign of Ramesses II at last came to an end in 1212 BC.
10:03It was surely a time of great sadness in Egypt.
10:09Few of Ramesses' subjects would have known any other king.
10:16For forty days, priests performed the exacting ritual of mummification on Ramesses' body.
10:21The stomach, intestines, liver and lungs were placed in special containers called canopic jars.
10:30The body was dried with a special salt, then adorned with jewelled amulets and wrapped in linen strips.
10:36At last, the mummy was placed in an elaborate coffin and began the journey to the Valley of the Kings in southern Egypt.
10:46We're standing in the tomb of Ramesses II.
10:51This magnificent chamber has only recently been excavated and has never been filmed before.
11:00This is the largest single room in the Valley of the Kings.
11:05The pharaoh's mummified body would have been carried into this chamber and lowered into a huge sarcophagus placed here.
11:15His internal organs in their canopic jars would be put into an alabaster chest here and lowered into this shaft.
11:24Above it was a beautiful, gilded wooden shrine.
11:29The priests, having completed their last rituals, would have swept away the dust of their footprints as they backed out of the tomb,
11:38leaving the great pharaoh alone here for eternity in this beautiful space deep within the mountain.
11:54The world has seen the beautiful treasures that were discovered in the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died over a hundred years before Ramesses.
12:14If this was the treasure that was buried with Tut, a minor king with little impact on Egyptian history,
12:21we can begin to imagine the magnificent objects and adornment which must have filled the tomb of Ramesses the Great.
12:32But Ramesses was not lucky in his choice of final resting place.
12:36Within a hundred and fifty years, tomb robbers had found their way in
12:40and carried off what must have been a treasure beyond our dreams from this, the tomb of the pharaoh of the pharaohs.
12:48All we have left are a few precious fragments recently discovered by the French Egyptologist Christian Leblanc.
13:00In the tomb of Ramesses II, a number of objects which belonged to the funeral decoration were found,
13:06notably vestiges of the canopic jars in which the viscera of the king had been placed.
13:11We also found vestiges of the funeral bed.
13:15At the front end were two leopard heads like these, which still show very beautiful traces of color, which looked like gold.
13:23And this absolutely exceptional piece, a statuette of Ramesses as a rather young man.
13:35It was placed near the king's mummy in a tomb which must have been absolutely sumptuous,
13:41one of the most beautiful royal tombs.
13:43Robbers had invaded tombs since the earliest days of royal burials.
13:51Usually working in gangs, they sometimes bribed guards.
13:55More often they simply broke into the tombs after political unrest or threats to national security
14:00distracted the attention of those charged with their protection.
14:03Other than these few artefacts, Ramesses' great burial treasure had vanished.
14:12But by some miracle, Ramesses' mummy was undisturbed.
14:16The priests, who saw pharaonic mummies as gods, took drastic action to protect Ramesses' remains from desecration.
14:23Along with the corpse of his father, Seti, and many other kings, Ramesses' mummy was secretly moved to an ancient, long-existent,
14:32long-ignored tomb less than a mile from the Valley of the Kings.
14:39Here, the body of one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs was left unceremoniously stacked with other royal mummies.
14:46His secret resting place was so near yet so far from the place which had been so lavishly crafted to hold his corpse.
14:54His own great tomb now sat abandoned and unprotected.
14:58The final indignity was that in the centuries after the pharaoh's mummy was carried out of here,
15:05the rare desert thunderstorms came in and filled this tomb with water.
15:10The magnificent paintings and carvings which once covered every surface here were devastated.
15:16Plaster fell from walls, rock carvings collapsed, and flood debris steadily filled this tomb from floor right up to the ceiling.
15:25Those who discovered this place could barely find enough space to enter it.
15:31Finally, over 3,000 years after they were hidden, the mummies in the secret cache were recovered in 1881 by German museum curator Emil Bruksch.
15:45The whereabouts of Ramesses' remains were no longer a secret.
15:52But nothing was found in the hidden cache of mummies or in Ramesses' own tomb to shed light on the mystery of the great king's missing sons.
16:02How could these princes, whose existence had been so thoroughly documented, vanish from history?
16:09It would take over 100 years to find an answer.
16:13That answer suggests that Ramesses' sons may have been within walking distance of their father's tomb all along.
16:19Coming out of Ramesses' tomb into the Valley of the Kings, you can see that he had company.
16:27There are 61 other tombs here.
16:29Just a short walk up there is the legendary tomb of Tutankhamun.
16:33Seti I, Ramesses' father, is buried there.
16:36Maneptah, his son, just around the corner.
16:40But where are the tombs of the many other sons of Ramesses?
16:46Just 30 yards away over there is tomb King's Valley number 5.
16:51And KV-5 may well hold the answer to that question.
16:59In 1825, the Egyptologist James Burton entered the tomb.
17:03He pronounced it unimportant.
17:06Later, this whole area was buried under tons of rubble.
17:10Tourist buses passed within feet.
17:16In 1987, American Egyptologist Kent Weeks uncovered this entrance to the tomb.
17:23When at last he entered, he made what many call the most important discovery in Egypt since Tutankhamun.
17:30For the first time in over 3,000 years, the world edged closer to at last solving the great mystery of Ramesses' lost sons.
17:41For 450 years, Egypt's pharaohs were buried in a desolate desert canyon as a safeguard against tomb robbers.
17:57It has come to be known as the Valley of the Kings.
18:00Here 62 tombs were dug from the limestone.
18:07These subterranean palaces were embellished with sumptuously beautiful carvings and paintings.
18:14But by the third century BC, the Valley of the Kings lay silent and forgotten.
18:25In the early 18th century, an English clergyman named Richard Pocock visited the valley and drew its first map.
18:33Other European Egyptologists followed, but their mapping of the tombs remained imprecise and inaccurately plotted.
18:39In the 1970s, Dr. Kent Weeks, a leading American Egyptologist from Washington State, decided to begin the first mapping of the Valley of the Kings using survey techniques which relied on extremely accurate measurements.
18:56It would take over a decade of hard work just to accumulate all of the data.
19:03But sadly, by the late 1980s, there was little money left to print up the detailed map Weeks wanted.
19:09So, he decided to use the knowledge he'd accumulated and tackle another ambitious task.
19:14So, I thought what we would do is to take the little money that we had at that point and do something that I had considered doing a few years earlier.
19:24And that was to go back into the historical records, try to identify tombs that had been seen in the 19th century but for one reason or another had gone missing.
19:34And try to relocate those tombs and put them on the map of the Valley of the Kings as well.
19:38After an extensive search of historical records, one tomb stood out.
19:45It had been seen during the 19th century and given the designation KV-5, standing for Kings Valley No. 5.
19:53In 1825, the Englishman James Burton cut a 25-metre crawl space into KV-5.
19:59He drew a sketch plan which revealed the presence of eleven chambers.
20:04But his notes did not inspire enthusiasm or excitement from his peers.
20:11Even Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb, used the KV-5 hillside only as a dumping ground for debris from his excavations.
20:20They buried the tomb under three metres of fill.
20:25As if that weren't enough, another series of flash floods from torrential rains that hit the Valley of the Kings occasionally,
20:32dumped more debris over the tomb entrance and hid it.
20:36By 1920, possibly even earlier than that, KV-5 was a dim and distant memory. There was nothing to be seen.
20:43But Kent Weeks was intrigued by the drawings of the tomb that Burton had made.
20:51In his plan, it looked like no other tomb that I had ever seen before.
20:55Most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are long corridors cut deeply into the bedrock.
21:02This tomb, on the other hand, had, in Burton's drawing, about six chambers that went off in all directions from the entrance like tentacles of an octopus.
21:10And I thought, gosh, what a strange-looking tomb. Why don't we see if we can't locate this?
21:16Something else grabbed Weeks' interest.
21:20By 1989, some researchers were suggesting that the lost KV-5 might also be the missing tomb of Ramesses' children.
21:29From Burton's notes, Kent Weeks had an idea of where in the Valley to begin looking.
21:34He made a decision. He would try and find what had been lost for so long.
21:41We dug, basically, a narrow trench about three feet a metre wide.
21:46The first thing we encountered was a cut in the bedrock that very clearly delimitated a man-made, not a natural, pit or depression in the hillside.
21:56And then we began finding traces of staircases.
22:02After months of hard work, Kent Weeks staff had cleared the entrance pit to KV-5.
22:07Now, at last, the moment had arrived to look inside.
22:09Well, in the summer of 1989, we had cleared the stairway, come down to this doorway leading into the first chamber.
22:20Now, it didn't look like this. It was completely filled floor-to-ceiling with flood debris that had washed in.
22:25What sort of level?
22:26Right to here, right to here.
22:28And it was only because of a small little channel that had been dug by James Burton in 1825 that we could see anything at all inside.
22:35Here are traces of Burton's lamp black on the ceilings where he was peering through.
22:40So you just crawled through Burton's original tiny hole?
22:44That's right. That was the only access into the tomb.
22:46And even at that point, we could not see any of the side walls.
22:50Are we talking about inches here, or what sort of size was this?
22:53Well, it was a tight fit for me, let's put it that way. A very tight fit.
22:57So you managed to crawl in, probably a little guessing that you were going to be working just in this room for how long?
23:02Why don't you stand?
23:05It took us five years to clean this chamber out.
23:07But even by the second year, we knew that we were onto something in KV-5.
23:12Because at the top of the wall, we found a series of hieroglyphs that indicated that this tomb was the burial place of one of the sons of Ramses II, whose cartouche is here.
23:22And we have his name, Amun-Herr Chepeshev.
23:25Now that young man was the firstborn son of Ramses II.
23:29So this was the first confirmation you had, that one of Ramses' sons might be buried here?
23:34Yes, exactly. And the firstborn son at that. But shortly thereafter, it got even better.
23:40Because on this wall, when we exposed the text at the top, we found another scene with Ramses, a god, and a son who here is not Amun-Herr Chepeshev, but a son whom we call Ramses Jr. to avoid confusion with his father.
23:54Suddenly, we knew that we had a tomb with multiple burials. There were at this point at least two royal sons buried in this tomb.
24:03That was something that had never been seen before.
24:08Kent Weeks was now certain that KV-5 promised to be much more than just a minor tomb, even though he still didn't know if it was bigger than the 11 chambers detailed in Burton's original sketch.
24:19But making progress in unlocking KV-5's secrets was agonizingly slow.
24:26The Valley of the Kings may get, on average, one or two millimeters of rain a year, if that.
24:33But every once in a while, perhaps once every 50, 60, 70 years, a rainstorm hits this area and it causes disaster.
24:40By the time those waters, those flood waters and their debris, reach KV-5, the entrance to the valley, they can be traveling at 30, 40 miles an hour, carrying boulders the size of stoves or refrigerators.
24:54The 11 floods that hit KV-5 filled it chock-a-block full with debris, sand, silt, limestone chips, that over the centuries dried to an almost cement-like consistency.
25:05Clearing away tons of flood debris which filled the tomb proved to be enormously time-consuming.
25:14The techniques of moving dirt out of a tomb or any archeological site in Egypt haven't changed much in the last 100 years.
25:21We still take baskets, these are made of old tires, fill them up using trowels or shovels or picks, whatever, and carry them by hand in a bucket brigade out the door of the tomb.
25:36It had taken five years just to empty two small rooms.
25:40Although Kent Weeks had uncovered the names of two of Ramesses' sons, he had found little else.
25:48Now the much larger chamber three waited to be cleared.
25:53What Weeks would discover in this part of the tomb would justify all the years of patience and hard work.
26:03Kent Weeks crawled into the third chamber, into this tiny gap.
26:06He hoped to find something underneath this huge pile of debris.
26:12But he couldn't get to it.
26:14He realised that the weakness of these pillars and the ominous cracks in the limestone ceiling above my head
26:20meant that this whole area would have to be stabilised.
26:23Work that's only just been completed.
26:25Now Burton's map shows a mysterious door against the back wall.
26:30And Kent Weeks gradually dug his way towards it until by 1995 he'd managed to find just enough space to crawl through that doorway.
26:41What happened next is one of the great moments of modern archaeology.
26:46Kent Weeks at last prepared to look beyond chamber three.
26:54He would be heading into space no one had entered since the pharaohs.
26:58We thought what we would find is another small chamber, like that in the front, chamber one, chamber two.
27:05Instead we shone our flashlight down and we saw nothing, blackness.
27:09It meant that the chamber went on and on and on. We could not see an end wall.
27:15Later on when we put electricity in the tomb, it turned into the most incredible sight I'd ever seen in my life.
27:21A hundred feet down the corridor, lined on either side with doorways, we find a statue of the god Osiris.
27:28So you came along here, and you must already have known that this was the most incredible find.
27:34I kept saying to myself, my god, I can't believe it. There's nothing like this anywhere in the Valley of the Kings.
27:39There are chambers here on every side.
27:41Every ten feet or so we find a doorway, some leading into small chambers, others leading into suites of rooms.
27:46Most of them are locked up, but you can see them quite clearly where they are.
27:47No, we haven't dug these yet.
27:48That's incredible. You must have known at this moment that what you were finding here was probably one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century.
27:56Nothing like this has ever been found before.
27:59So you got to this point here and you saw this amazing sight.
28:04A life-size statue of what at first we thought was the god Osiris, but what we now think is a representation of King Ramses as Osiris.
28:12The deified king, welcoming his sons down this corridor and into the next life.
28:20The beautiful statue of Ramses offered further proof that this was almost certainly a tomb for his royal sons.
28:26And with the amazing discovery of Corridor 7 and its complex of rooms, the significance of what Kent Weeks had revealed began to dawn on the world.
28:37Most of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings contained no more than eight rooms.
28:51Ramses I, Ramses the Great's grandfather, had just four, as did the legendary Tutankhamun.
28:56Weeks had already discovered at least 65 rooms, and more soon appeared. Nothing like it had ever been found.
29:07KV-5 seemed to move off in all directions at once.
29:10This corridor is very perplexing. It drops more steeply than any other corridor in the tomb.
29:19In fact, some of the side chambers that are cut here actually lie beneath the floor of chambers on an upper level.
29:25Now, at the bottom of this steeply sloping corridor, suddenly we descend four steps, and we find ourselves in another large pillared hall.
29:36In this case, one with three pillars down the center of the rectangular room.
29:40This is a good example, by the way, of the stratigraphy that we're confronted with in KV-5.
29:45Filling this chamber like the others, chock-a-block full of flood debris, you can see the different layers.
29:50Deep inside the tomb, hundreds of feet from the entrance, flood debris continued to be a problem.
30:02This is one of the many unexcavated corridors in KV-5.
30:07This one heads south, directly towards Tutankhamun's tomb.
30:12Nobody's quite sure why. There's a blank wall at the end there, and maybe another doorway.
30:17Another doorway. The problem is getting to it.
30:25With all its chambers and corridors, this tomb is nearly half the size of a football field.
30:31And all of it is packed with this debris.
30:34Behind it, they may find more pottery remains, canopic jars, maybe even mummified remains.
30:40Some of this stuff is as hard as concrete.
30:45Mechanical excavation is out of the question.
30:47All of it, tons and tons of it, has to be removed by hand.
30:51But the flood debris was only one of the obstacles which still hid the secrets of KV-5.
31:02I think this is one of the most potentially interesting parts of KV-5.
31:06But unfortunately, it's also the most dangerous.
31:10Because it lay under the roadway, which for the last 40 years has had tour buses rolling over it,
31:15the entire ceiling has collapsed.
31:17It would be a very expensive undertaking.
31:20But I'd be willing to bet you that if we were able to do this,
31:23we will find evidence here, maybe a sarcophagus, maybe other funerary equipment,
31:29that clearly proves that this Chamber 5 was the place where one of the sons of the king was buried.
31:37Because of the flooding, carvings and paintings on the walls of KV-5 had been badly damaged.
31:43But as the chambers began to be emptied, remnants of carving made it clear that KV-5 had once been magnificently decorated.
31:52Now, the carving on this north wall here in Corridor 7 is absolutely spectacular.
31:57It's one of the best examples we have of relief carving in the tomb.
32:00Originally, of course, it was painted and all we have now are the outlines.
32:03But even so, you can see the elegant workmanship in this figure of a son.
32:08Unfortunately, his name is missing.
32:10Again being presented by his father, Ramses II, across a pile of offerings to the gods,
32:16in this case, Khnum and the goddess Hathor, elegantly carved in a beautiful face.
32:19But a strange thing happens in this corridor right at this point.
32:24Up to now, we've had beautiful relief carving.
32:26That stops, and instead, from here onward, the walls are roughened.
32:31It's called keying for plaster.
32:32I have no idea what the reason for this is, except one possibility.
32:37Perhaps this corridor originally stopped at this point, went no further.
32:42And then the corridor was lengthened, the tomb was enlarged, in order to provide additional burial space for additional sons of Ramses II who had pre-deceased him.
32:51As more and more damaged carvings have been revealed in the tomb, the job of reconstructing their original form has been handled by Kent's wife, Susan.
33:02She painstakingly makes detailed tracings which are studied to recreate the missing carvings and the paint which covered them.
33:11Once the missing lines are redrawn, Susan replicates the original colours based on tiny fragments of paint found on the tomb's walls.
33:19This is the son of Ramses.
33:25He's wearing a very bright blue collar, and he's wearing a rather elaborate priestly sacred garment, which is yellow with red stripes.
33:38Every day is exciting.
33:39You never know what you might see.
33:42Every time we look at the walls, even though I may have drawn the wall and stared at it for ten days,
33:46every once in a while the light changes, there's something different I see for the first time.
33:53Finally, after 3500 years, we can again look upon the glorious paintings which once enhanced this tomb.
34:04But in KV-5, success is often matched by frustration.
34:08Again and again the tomb seemed to taunt the weeks,
34:11as if the great Ramesses himself were withholding the answer to the mystery of his missing sons.
34:19We know that originally this tomb was magnificently decorated with brilliantly coloured painted relief,
34:24but because of the flooding a lot of that paint and plaster has washed off,
34:28and nowhere is that more frustrating than in this scene in the second chamber.
34:32We have Ramesses II, a figure of his son, and directly above the sun,
34:37if we can just make out the hieroglyphs, King's son of his body,
34:42and the name is missing.
34:44We have no idea who it might be.
34:47Given the title, given the figure of the son, we were very excited about this.
34:51It could be maybe son number six, number seven, number eight in our list of people buried in this tomb.
34:55We were so close, but we just didn't get the cigar.
35:02After ten years of excavation, KV-5, with more than 100 chambers,
35:07had already proven to be the largest and most uniquely designed tomb in the Valley of the Kings,
35:13and probably in all of Egypt.
35:14It had clearly been built by Ramesses II, and little by little evidence had begun to accumulate that indeed he had created this tomb for his many sons.
35:29We have the names of several sons written on the walls of KV-5.
35:34We have more than two dozen representations of the king presenting various of his sons in the afterlife to the gods.
35:42We have objects, grave goods, canopic jars found in several chambers in KV-5,
35:49and on those we have the names and titles of five different sons of Ramesses II.
35:54Kent Weeks would soon find evidence of a much more personal nature.
35:59In 1998, KV-5 at last began to give up some of the bodies that had rested in this special tomb for so very long.
36:12Like any good mystery, what was needed to solve KV-5 was a body.
36:20After nine years of searching, Kent Weeks finally found one.
36:24We had so many irons in the fire during the early years of work in KV-5 that it wasn't until just a couple of seasons ago that we cleared the northern half of this room, chamber two.
36:38And much to our surprise, when we got down to floor level, we found two parallel, very nice regular cuts that defined what obviously was a pit.
36:45Now, I think originally this may have been the burial place of whoever was buried in this tomb when it was only a two-chambered tomb in the 18th dynasty.
36:55What we found when we got to the bottom of the pit was a series of layers of bones.
36:59And beneath that, three adult male human skulls with the neck vertebrae still attached and traces of mummified tissue and wrappings over their body.
37:09Beneath that, we found a fully articulated adult male body, a mummy, about 50 years old, lying in a position like this directly on the ground.
37:20And I think, probably, given the position of the arms and the position of the body, it may well be that that, and maybe the other three skulls too, are in fact sons of Ramses II.
37:33Why would so important a mummy be left in such a crude and unadorned pit?
37:40Kent Weeks believes the answer is very simple.
37:42When tomb robbers entered KV-5, they went down deep into the tomb, into the burial chambers of his sons, grabbed the mummies and brought them up here near the front door, where the light was good and they could see what they were doing.
37:55They ripped the bodies apart in their search for gold jewelry and pectoral necklaces and so forth, and then simply dumped the body parts on the ground.
38:03Some of them washed into this pit.
38:05This is one of the three skulls that came from the pit in Chamber II, and what we're doing now is cleaning this, getting it ready to study, not by us, but by anatomists and geneticists.
38:23All of the teeth are rather heavily worn, including the front, the incisors, the canines.
38:29And all of these features, together with the sutures, the joins between the bones and the skull, suggest that this is probably an adult male.
38:40The next thing, of course, we'll want to do is to see, try to determine if we can, whether this is the skull of an individual who is related to the other bodies in the tomb.
38:50We would love to relate them to Ramses.
38:52Anybody who has seen a photograph of the mummy of Ramses, or even, in fact, a representation of him in Egyptian art, recognise the fact that he was shown with a very prominent nose.
39:01And that might be one of the anatomical features that we could look for in trying to determine relationships.
39:08Scientific analysis of skulls is only one of the many tasks that can't be done in the heat and dust of the Valley of the Kings.
39:16Some of the most demanding work in unlocking the secrets of KV-5 doesn't happen here in the tomb at all, but rather, in an office back in Cairo.
39:26When we started work on the Theban mapping project back in 1979, we were operating on a real shoestring.
39:38Today, we have a full-time staff on the project of eight people now, and a part-time staff of volunteers and part-time employees who were scattered all over the world.
39:47It's a very diverse project, and one of the fun things about being an archaeologist these days is, in fact, trying to pull all of these disparate specialties together.
39:59Can you pull that up in section?
40:02What I'd like to do somewhere is take a look at this detailing here.
40:07The work our graphic designers and architects are doing is extremely useful.
40:11It gives you a new means of looking at the material and of doing comparative studies of that material.
40:19We want to prepare a CD-ROM of the Theban necropolis, taking advantage of the photographs that our staff have been collecting,
40:26the architectural drawings that we have been preparing, and, of course, historical materials as well.
40:30We'll be able, for example, to stop at a site like Luxor Temple on the East Bank,
40:34and we'll be able to generate a series of three-dimensional drawings that show the various stages in the construction of this temple.
40:44This, of course, is KV-5.
40:46We thought we could produce something that would not only be useful to scholars, but that could be fun and exciting for grade school kids,
40:54for example, eight-, nine-year-olds who are doing Egyptology in school for the first time.
40:58In spite of all his efforts, Kent Weeks is the first to admit that there is much yet to be done in KV-5.
41:07The work is exacting and slow, and the task has continued to grow.
41:13So far, 150 rooms have been found, and only 7% of those have been cleared.
41:19But one thing has already been established.
41:23In 3,000 years of tomb construction in ancient Egypt, there is nothing that remotely resembles KV-5 in its incredible size or design.
41:33Why did Ramesses II apparently create so unusual a mausoleum for his many sons?
41:41Kent Weeks thinks he has one answer.
41:43We know that during his reign, he had himself declared to be divine.
41:50He had to assign to his children, to at least the heir apparent, many of the secular duties that he would ordinarily have performed.
41:58Now, once one of his sons, the heir apparent, was made a secular pharaoh, he was no longer simply a son who might one day inherit the throne.
42:05He was a junior king, and you have to bury a junior king in a rather more elaborate way.
42:12Numerous other of his sons, each of whom in turn had moved into this strange junior king position, died before him, and they too came to be interred in this very strange tomb.
42:25There are still more questions than answers to be found in KV-5, but the tomb has proven that our knowledge of ancient Egypt is far from complete.
42:40For Kent Weeks, the search, as always, will go on.
42:44He has wanted to be an Egyptologist since he was a boy in Washington State.
42:48Now he hopes to give something back to the work he so loves.
42:52In addition to our work in KV-5 over the next several years, one of the things I most want to do is help develop a master plan for the protection of the Valley of the Kings, and indeed for all of Thebes.
43:03Rising groundwater, pollution, increasing population in the adjacent villages, increasing tourism are taking their toll on all of the sites here, tombs and temples both.
43:13I can't think of anything that would make me sadder than to realize that future generations would be denied the opportunity to visit something as magical as the Valley of the Kings.
43:25It would be a real shame if little eight-year-old kids in Everett, Washington, a hundred years from now, couldn't dream of this place like I did.
43:31Ken Weeks has been working on KV-5 for over ten years. Sometimes there was no assurance that his work would reveal any more than a few empty rooms, and always the distraction of having to find funds to support all of this.
43:46But his patience and hard work have yielded what is becoming one of the most exciting finds in Egyptology.
43:55Over the next few years, KV-5 will reveal more of its secrets. Why was such an immense tomb built? What's become of its contents?
44:04And maybe, just maybe, Kent Weeks will discover if other sons of the great Ramses still rest somewhere within these walls.
44:34And maybe, we'll talk to both of the guests in white and many high vibe in the near future.
44:42That is one of the most imagination of whether it's been a withers beau- أстав!
44:47The merchandise of Tombs is that there's a whole installation of nothing much simpler than you about.
44:51The基ys and the home ab under the Marc's flatCAR
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