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00:00The story of Joseph and his multi-coloured coat has captured people's hearts for generations.
00:10It's even been turned into one of the world's most famous stage shows.
00:17His story begins when he loses that coat to jealous brothers who sell him into slavery.
00:24In Egypt, he interprets the dreams of Pharaoh and is promoted to prime minister.
00:31It's a wonderful story, but surely not a piece of history.
00:35Can Egyptology shed light on Joseph and the garment that started all the trouble?
01:00Joseph's adventures were written down by scribes in about 600 BC, over a thousand years after the story was set.
01:15No record exists as to who wrote the tale or where they got their information.
01:20So, debate has raged for centuries about whether it's pure fiction, or a description of a real man's life.
01:31According to Alan Lloyd, professor of Egyptology at Swansea University, the truth might lie somewhere in between.
01:37One can see over and over again, in other historical traditions, that you can have a situation where there is a core of an accurate historical narrative, but a great deal has in fact been bolted on.
01:51So, what is the evidence?
01:52The story starts in Canaan, modern day Palestine, Syria and Israel, before the time of Moses, around 1600 to 1700 BC.
02:08It's told in the Bible, the Quran and the Torah, and they all say Joseph was one of 12 sons of Jacob, a wealthy nomad.
02:21A central thread running through the whole story is the rivalry between the brothers.
02:30According to Dr Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, a specialist in family life, this sibling rivalry was strong because nomad chiefs in those times had more than one wife.
02:41Each wife wants their son to become the next leader, to be the next chief of the tribe, or the next king in some cases.
02:48And this is certainly inherent within the story of Joseph, where we see rivalries set up between the brothers from a very early age.
02:58Joseph, we must remember, and then Benjamin after him, is the son of a second wife.
03:04The other brothers are all sons of other wives, so there is this rivalry that seems to go on there.
03:09But the object that ignited this rivalry more than anything was the coat given to Joseph by his father, Jacob.
03:20It's been portrayed as a garment of great elegance, awash with colour, the stuff of legend.
03:25But perhaps it's not so far-fetched.
03:40A visit to any middle or near eastern market or bazaar will show that vivid colours have been an important part of this culture for centuries.
03:46You can come to virtually any middle eastern town or city and find a workshop like this, where fabrics are being made in exactly the same way as reported in a text or in wall paintings or in other visual media in antiquity.
04:04Today, in the modern Muslim or Arab world, there is a great emphasis still on colourful textiles and gift-giving of textiles too.
04:15Yet, with the modern imagination trying to picture the ancient world, a life in colour is not what comes to mind.
04:21I think that we tend to envisage the ancient world in monochrome, maybe because of our over-dependence on Greek and Roman statues.
04:32I think we have to put that out of our mind and remember that the ancient world, and again the Near East in particular, was a riot of colour.
04:38But most examples of colour in the ancient world only go back to 500 BC.
04:51The Joseph story is set 1000 years earlier.
04:55To find evidence of colour dating back to that time, we need to go deep into the Egyptian desert.
05:00The remote tombs of Beni Hassan were built in 1800 BC.
05:26Wow.
05:28And according to Barry Gitlin, a professor of ancient history, they give us a unique glimpse into Joseph's era.
05:36We're here in the 12th dynasty tomb of Numhotep III.
05:42Fantastic scene.
05:44Scene that I've lectured in my classes about for years.
05:51Numhotep was a high official of the pharaoh Amenemad I.
05:54Depicted on the wall of various scenes from his life.
05:58Some are people he lived and worked with.
06:01But there's one scene of a group of travellers with a very different appearance.
06:11There are two main kinds of garb, both of which are striped.
06:15And each stripe being a separate colour is very interesting.
06:21Plus you see that there are designs within the stripes which also adds to the differentness, the beauty, the importance of the garment.
06:30And as such, both represent the kind of garment that a character like Joseph could have been interpreted by the writers of the Bible as having worn.
06:41Although these are images of multi-coloured coats in an Egyptian setting, there are signs that these travellers in fact come from Canaan, Joseph's homeland.
06:51All art of the period shows Egyptians as clean shaven, whereas Canaanites are always seen with beards.
07:01You look at these characters coming in, you just look at the beards, at the faces, and this is the common representation of the Semitic Canaanites coming in.
07:18The markets of the modern day Middle East and the tombs of Egypt suggest that Joseph did have a multi-coloured coat.
07:29But the evidence doesn't explain why his brothers acted the way they did.
07:33There must have been something else about that coat that generated such envy.
07:38One reason why can be found in the translation of the Hebrew word for coat in the Old Testament.
07:48Now, when we go back to the Hebrew, as recounted in the book of Genesis, we seem to have an indication that the garment is a special garment.
07:59The word that's used to describe it is only found once more in the Old Testament, and that's in the first book of Samuel, where it's actually referred to as a long-sleeved garment.
08:09And, of course, long sleeves make something quite impractical to work in, so it's a sign of status if you can have long sleeves on your garment.
08:21But it wasn't just the long sleeves that marked out status. Great prestige would be attached to the choice of colours in the coat.
08:29In the ancient world, colour was a precious commodity.
08:39Well, today we've got a myriad of colours that we can choose from.
08:47And they're all basically, since the 19th century, made from chemical dyes, which mean that they are solid, they don't run at all, we don't really, on the whole, lose colour in the wash.
08:57But, of course, in antiquity, it was a completely different matter, because every kind of dye stuff that we had, had to come from natural commodities.
09:05Indeed, some colours were harder to achieve than others.
09:10Blacks were difficult, as textiles had to be saturated with dye to stop them turning grey.
09:16Whites required bleaching, a very complex process.
09:21But, by far, the most expensive dyes were reds and purples, colours worn by the semi-travellers in the tomb paintings.
09:29Red has to come from something like the stamen of the crocus flower, and, of course, a tiny crocus only gives three or four stamen, so you need thousands of these things to create a solid colour red.
09:45But, without any doubt at all, the most important colour that you could find in antiquity was a purple, a deep, deep, what we can call today imperial purple.
09:53A good, true purple has to come from harvesting the sea.
09:58It's created by picking up tiny shellfish, mollusks, and it takes thousands and thousands of these things, which are dumped into a vat of boiling water, which ingeniously, the ancients discovered, gives off a rich purple dye when wool or linen is dipped into it.
10:17To be given a coat made of purples and reds would have sent a very clear message to Joseph's brothers. Joseph was Jacob's favourite.
10:36It's no surprise, then, that this drove Joseph's brothers to get rid of him.
10:41According to the story, Joseph is sold to travelling merchants, but we only have the Bible's word for it. The Bible does, however, slip in an authentic detail.
11:08Joseph is sold for 20 shekels.
11:13Egyptian documents reveal that this is precisely the price you would expect.
11:18A few hundred years later, we find that the price is up to 30 shekels.
11:23And yet, down into the first millennium, it's up to 50 shekels, and so on.
11:28So we see you can actually plot on a chart and see the cost of slaves going up.
11:32Now, with the Joseph story, this is an important detail, because if the story is simply conjured up, made up, if it's just a novel from the end of Israelite and Judean history, you would expect that the author would not know what the price was five, six hundred, seven hundred years before.
11:51While Joseph is being hauled away to Egypt, his brothers smear his coat with goat's blood to fake his death.
12:05We're told that Joseph is sold as a slave to Potiphar, the chief of Pharaoh's army, a man in charge of soldiers, horses, chariots.
12:22He's rich and powerful with a large house and staff.
12:28No mention of Potiphar has ever been found in ancient documents.
12:33But, the Brooklyn papyrus found near Luxor dates back to Joseph's time, and proves that the use of Semitic servants was surprisingly common.
12:42During the late Middle Kingdom, which is a period when Joseph may well have come to Egypt, a well-to-do household of a nobleman in Egypt had a good number of Semitic household servants, people who did work in the fields, people who did the weaving and so on.
13:05So a well-to-do estate would have household servants, we might even use the term slave, to describe these people.
13:14According to the story, Joseph was given an Egyptian name, another custom confirmed by the Brooklyn papyrus.
13:22Their master may have had a hard time vocalizing their foreign name, and so we have the name X, who is called Y.
13:30Now, X being the Semitic name, who is called Y, his Egyptian name.
13:36In the Joseph story, we have Joseph, who is called Zafinach-Panaach.
13:43The Bible says Joseph worked hard and did well, rising to take charge of Potiphar's household.
13:50But then his fate takes a dangerous turning, instigated by Potiphar's wife.
13:54She makes a pass at him.
14:12The incident may well be fictional, an attempt by the author of the story to paint Joseph as the innocent party.
14:18But according to Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, the episode can't be ruled out altogether.
14:27When it comes to women in antiquity, and certainly when compared to their Hebrew or Semite sisters,
14:35elite women in ancient Egypt have a remarkably autonomous life, they have a considerable amount of freedom.
14:42We know, for example, that they could divorce at will, that they had the right to their own property.
14:52We find this legal status to be really quite remarkable for a woman's lot in antiquity.
14:59Joseph rejects her advances. Furious, she accuses him of trying to rape her.
15:04Joseph is thrown into jail.
15:16But just when his life could sink no further, it takes another dramatic twist.
15:21In jail, a former royal servant asks Joseph if he can interpret a strange dream
15:27about pressing three bunches of grapes into Pharaoh's cup.
15:30Joseph predicts the servant will be freed in three days.
15:35His interpretation proves true.
15:40The news reaches Pharaoh, who orders Joseph to be freed in order to have his own dreams interpreted.
15:57There is no way of checking whether Joseph was released from jail or even thrown into jail in the first place.
16:10Indeed, some biblical scholars suspect the whole episode is making a religious point.
16:14If one looks at the way that the Joseph story operates, what one has is a series of deliverances of Joseph himself from captivity.
16:25And he is delivered from imprisonment, we're told quite explicitly in the narrative, because he has the favour of God.
16:34But that's not to say that Joseph wasn't a gifted interpreter of dreams, and that somehow he came to the attention of Pharaoh.
16:48And that's not to say that.
16:50Artifacts found in ancient Egyptian tombs do in fact suggest that the Egyptians took dreams, specifically nightmares, seriously.
16:56Kasia Spakovska is an Egyptologist, who has studied the significance of sleep and dreams in ancient Egypt.
17:04Well, one of these objects, this one, is the top of a headrest.
17:11Today we have fluffy pillows that we use to sleep on.
17:15But in Egypt, a hot climate with lots of little bugs that walk around on the ground, you want to raise your head up higher.
17:22And this is the portion that your head would actually be on.
17:25Some of them have on either the underside here that supports the head, or on the pillar itself, or on top of the base.
17:35They have figurines, carved in figures of various types of creatures, holding knives, spears, snakes even,
17:46that would be used to magically repel things like nightmares that might come and attack you during the night when you're at your most vulnerable.
17:55But in Egypt, it's not a dream.
17:56Clearly, dreams were of interest in ancient Egyptian culture.
18:00But the biblical record is quite specific.
18:03A Hebrew interpreted the dreams of an Egyptian pharaoh in about the 17th century BC.
18:08And this presents a problem.
18:11For the first 2,000 years of Egypt's history, we really don't have any evidence for dream interpretation.
18:17It's not until about the 1300 BC, roughly, that we have the first book of dreams.
18:25We have the first book of dreams and their possible interpretations.
18:29But we're not even sure if it was used.
18:34However, there are clues that Joseph may have learned about interpreting dreams from his family.
18:43Joseph was from Canaan, modern-day Syria.
18:45All his ancestors came from Mesopotamia, just to the north.
18:53Dream interpretation was part of ancient Mesopotamian culture.
18:57It's found in the story of a leader called Gudea.
18:59At least about 2400 BC, we have stories of Gudea, which describe him having a dream, and him needing to have this dream interpreted by a third party.
19:13And when it's described, it's not described as something unusual, as Gudea having to go to a foreigner or go to a foreign land.
19:21So it's considered as part of that culture.
19:27The Bible says that Pharaoh asks Joseph to interpret a dream in which seven fat cows come out of the Nile, followed by seven thin cows.
19:36Joseph says the dream means seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine.
19:41In the Bible account, the prediction comes true.
19:46And on the strength of it, Joseph is made prime minister of Egypt.
19:51It almost sounds too convenient.
19:54A dream that accurately predicts a major crisis.
19:58But psychologists believe there's an authentic ring to parts of the story.
20:06This has to be.
20:07The bottle round your head goes.
20:08Mark Blagrove is testing the theory that dreams are more than just random images, or even an activity that processes memories.
20:18His research strongly suggests that people dream mostly what they are worried about.
20:25Student Katie Jones has volunteered to have her dreams analysed.
20:30Earlier, she revealed that her biggest worry is the stress of her new part-time job in a hardware store.
20:36These worries are hardly on the scale of those of the Pharaoh.
20:41But if Mark Blagrove's theory is right, then even Katie's dreams should mirror her concerns.
20:46However trivial.
20:48We could say that humans back then are going to have a similar relationship to their dreams as we have now.
20:54And those are your brainwaves, just there, which are very awake brainwaves, because they're very bitty.
21:04So over the night, that will get smaller when you're in non-REM sleep.
21:09And when you go into REM sleep, it'll disappear.
21:11Dreaming is identified by a type of sleep called REM, short for rapid eye movement.
21:17The sensors on Katie's head are linked to a computer that will tell researchers when she starts having REM sleep.
21:24Asking Katie the morning after what she dreamt about would only reveal a fraction of her dreams.
21:39Most of us forget 80% of them.
21:41So Katie will have to be woken up at 90 minute intervals when she falls into deep sleep.
21:50Right. She's been like this for a few minutes now.
21:54She's got these sorts of waves, which are called sawtooth waves.
22:01And that usually happens when you're going into REM.
22:04These brainwaves indicated it was time to ask her about her dream.
22:13Hi, Katie. Was anything going through your mind at that moment?
22:19Um, I was in work and I was stacking shelves.
22:22Ah, in work and I was stacking shelves, right.
22:24But they were really, like, strange things I was stacking.
22:27So I was sort of like, it was just really weird things like green and red cups and stuff.
22:31And I was making them into shapes and stuff.
22:37On each occasion she was woken up, her dreams were recorded.
22:40Like a big bunch of us were all going out.
22:42As the night progressed, a clear pattern emerged.
22:44Time and again, Katie's dreams related to her part-time job.
22:48She was dreaming repeatedly about being at work,
22:52either getting a different job at her newsagents,
22:55or arguing with a customer and the customer reporting her for it.
22:58So the interesting thing about the night is that we seem to have more dreams when we're under stress,
23:03but the content seems to be related to the things that are concerning us.
23:08Mark Bligrow's findings are in line with studies that show the powerful effects of stress on the dreaming mind.
23:14There's even experiments being done on depriving people of water for half the day,
23:19so that they go to bed thirsty and finding that they're then more likely to dream about drinking.
23:29The Bible says, of course, that Pharaoh is dreaming of weightier issues.
23:33A famine, to be precise.
23:37Remarkably, there are signs that the threat of famine would have plagued the mind of Pharaoh in Joseph's time.
23:42Fekri Hassan is an Egyptologist who has researched why the civilisation that created the pyramids,
24:03some 500 years before Joseph was born, was wiped out within decades.
24:11He concludes that it was famine.
24:14And his evidence lies in a little-known tomb in southern Egypt.
24:17The tomb of Anktifi, who was a governor of a district in Upper Egypt, is a very, very significant tomb,
24:28because it contains this unique record of the famine.
24:33The writing is on the wall, literally.
24:37The character is there.
24:38And he speaks in a very concise, clear manner on a series of events, low floods, about famines,
24:51about people leaving their homes and fleeing in every which direction.
24:57Famine was a constant threat to the ancient world, but this event eclipsed all others.
25:02Its effects were so extreme that it led people to commit unthinkable acts.
25:09All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.
25:19It brought not just mass starvation, but total collapse of the social order.
25:23We have evidence that they attacked the pyramids and they attacked the tombs,
25:32they attacked temples, they attacked royal institutions, they attacked the mansions of the nobles.
25:38We have evidence that the ladies, who were very highly esteemed by the noblemen,
25:44went to the streets in search of food.
25:47A total reversal in the social order, because the poor then were able to gain wealth
25:53by looting while the wealthy were reduced to poverty.
25:58The ruling pharaoh would have been blamed for the disaster,
26:01spelling the end of his reign and his dynasty.
26:06Any future king, even centuries later, would have famine on his mind and in his nightmares.
26:13If, you know, your major concern in life is whether or not there's going to be a famine
26:17and whether or not there's going to be enough food around,
26:20then we can quite easily imagine that people are going to be dreaming of that type of thing,
26:25and either dreaming of it literally or dreaming of it in some metaphorical way.
26:33With the trauma of past famines weighing on the minds of Pharaoh and probably all Egyptians,
26:37perhaps Joseph's interpretation is not so surprising.
26:42What is surprising is the Bible's claim that on the strength of this gift,
26:47Pharaoh promotes Joseph to prime minister of Egypt.
26:53Of all the twists and turns in the story, this seems the least likely.
26:56And yet, archaeological finds are consistent with the Bible's claim.
27:19One of these finds is in a new kingdom tomb in Amarna, Middle Egypt.
27:22When the Bible describes Joseph's promotion, it gives away some telling details.
27:29As a sign of authority, Pharaoh gave Joseph his signet ring
27:33and placed a gold chain around his neck.
27:39According to Barry Gitlin, these details can be checked against evidence of pharaonic protocol.
27:45The owner of this tomb was a man called Ai,
27:49who lived in 1450 BC, 200 years after Joseph.
27:57Ancient documents tell us a pharaoh promoted him into high office,
28:01and wall paintings inside describe his investiture.
28:06What we have in front of us is Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.
28:11According to some, looking out of a window from their couch or bed,
28:16and it allows us to look in on part of the activity of an Egyptian king
28:23as he bestows something upon the character of Ai in front of the pharaoh,
28:29in front of King Akhenaten.
28:30And it's the detail of what exactly the king and queen are bestowing
28:36that strikes a chord with the Joseph story.
28:37This is very similar to what happens in the book of Genesis,
28:50where you have the character of Joseph being raised to a high office by the king of Egypt.
28:55And as part of that investiture of high office, the king gives to him some sort of gold chain, fancy garments, and his insignia, his signet ring.
29:07So here we have some evidence that whoever wrote the story must have had some first-hand knowledge of royal practice within the Egyptian government.
29:16The details of Joseph's investiture might add up, but no mention has ever been found of a prime minister with his name.
29:29Indeed, the whole idea of a foreigner reaching the top of Egyptian society sounds far-fetched.
29:34But there is in fact a substantial body of archaeology that shows that Canaanites, like Joseph, did achieve high office in Egypt.
29:44There was no problem in people from Syria, Palestine, or indeed anywhere else outside Egypt, becoming extremely successful and reaching very high rank,
29:55provided they were prepared, as Joseph is represented as being, to take on Egyptian ways.
30:05In the 1980s in Saqqara near Cairo, archaeologists found the tomb of a former prime minister of ancient Egypt called Apper El.
30:13His name, Apper El, is highly significant. The word El was the Canaanite term for God.
30:20The name Apper El, of course, is not an Egyptian name, it's a Semitic name.
30:25And this man was the vizier, he was the prime minister of Lower Egypt, Northern Egypt, during the days of Pharaoh Akhenaten.
30:32So here we have a Semite who achieved a very high position in the administration under Pharaoh Akhenaten.
30:43Clearly, pharaohs did occasionally appoint Semite prime ministers.
30:46But all the evidence of this is from the New Kingdom, some 300 years after Joseph's death.
30:53There's no proof that it ever happened in the Middle Kingdom, Joseph's time.
30:56But some historians are chasing other leads.
31:05Joseph was appointed prime minister on the strength of his predictions of famine.
31:10Evidence of Middle Kingdom famines and measures to deal with them would support the biblical account.
31:15A newly discovered stela, a stone tablet, does indeed recount a spate of Middle Kingdom famines.
31:24This is an interesting stela. We see the governor and in front of him statements of various events of his life.
31:43One of them is a mention of a famine, and it indicates to us that famines were quite frequent.
31:53The mention of famines is not haphazard.
31:57It's mentioned in certain episodes, and almost invariably we can correlate those famines with global climatic changes.
32:05Confirmation of these Middle Kingdom famines has recently been found to the south of Egypt, in snow and ice at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
32:24Lonnie Thompson and his team of geologists climb from the jungle to beyond the snow line to drill for ice cores.
32:30And these ice cores can tell us about Egypt's climate history.
32:36Kilimanjaro is, let's say it's the only site that you can get an ice core record that would record events in this part of the world.
32:45But it's also very relevant to the history of Egypt, because the headwaters of the Nile depend on rain,
32:52and the accumulation on this ice field on Kilimanjaro depends on snow, all coming from the same events.
32:57So they are very closely linked, and you should see a record of that in these ice cores.
33:08In the lab, the scientists examined the ice core for the presence and quantity of dust.
33:14Dust is a fingerprint of major climate change, because its presence suggests an ancient catastrophe.
33:20A volcanic eruption, or even a meteor strike.
33:27Such an event would throw massive quantities of dust into the atmosphere, disrupting weather patterns and rainfall, causing drought and ultimately famine.
33:38These are sections of the Kilimanjaro age core. They are from about 40 metres below the surface.
33:49And this is the older piece that we see here. And we see this very distinct dust event.
33:55This represents 4,200 years ago. It's a 300 year drought in the Egyptian history.
34:00This is not the famine Joseph predicted, but the cataclysmic famine that led to the cannibalism discussed in Ankitifi's tomb 500 years before Joseph's time.
34:13By contrast, the evidence for Joseph's famine should appear higher up the core, as a smaller scatter of dust particles.
34:27As you come up in the core, you can see that it's a very clean core up until the very top here, you can see these very small particles, dust clumps, of this event about 3,600 years ago.
34:43The clusters of dust correspond with the eruption in 1644 BC of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea, just 500 miles north of Egypt.
35:01Now the Bible, of course, is quite specific that the famine lasts seven years.
35:06This seven year cycle also rings true.
35:09It fits with the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which has often caused famine, always in seven year cycles.
35:20We have one of these events that occurred between 1790 and 1797.
35:26Very large drought through India in 1792.
35:31In north central India, 600,000 people starved to death.
35:34And at the same time that you have the drought in India, you have very low water levels in the Nile River.
35:41And it lasted for seven years.
35:46The Bible also claims that as vizier Joseph took measures to deal with the famine.
35:51Since famine is often caused by drought, one important task would have been to ensure that water continue to reach agricultural areas.
35:59The bread basket for much of Egypt now and in the past is the fertile land around Lake Karun, to the west of the country.
36:15Here we are in the middle of Lake Karun, in the Fayyum Depression.
36:36On the east side of the lake, you have the verdant agriculture, palm trees and all sorts of other greenery.
36:46On the other hand, to the west, you have vast, empty stretch of desert.
36:53So that you can take a look at this lake as the dividing point between agriculture and life, desert and death.
37:02In very ancient times, the lake was fed by water from a branch of the Nile.
37:09But the Old Kingdom drought that devastated Egypt caused this branch to dry up, turning the lake to dust.
37:15So to avert another crippling famine, a Middle Kingdom official came up with an ingenious plan to keep the link between the lake and the Nile permanently open.
37:30The Egyptian government decided to dredge one of these branches and make it deeper and keep it free from silt and essentially make it a functioning canal.
37:52The project was so successful that the canal is still in use today.
37:55That work project must have taken thousands of men. We don't know how many people, we don't know how many hours, days, weeks, months, years.
38:07But it kept this branch of the Nile clear and it enabled this area, the area around Fayyum, to maintain its fertility.
38:15This construction project would have been essential in stopping future famines.
38:24Best estimates indicate that it was built between 1850 and 1650 BC.
38:29That's the right time for Joseph's era.
38:34Unfortunately, there's no record of who built the canal.
38:36But for thousands of years, it has only been known by one name.
38:42In Arabic, it's the Bower Yusuf, which translated into English, is the waterway of Joseph.
38:50During a famine, Joseph would have made other key decisions to protect Egypt and save his pharaoh's skin.
39:07A man who steers his people and his king through great adversity might expect a big reward.
39:12The Bible claims that Joseph asks Pharaoh if his family can settle in Egypt.
39:26Pharaoh allows Joseph and his brothers to live in a city called P-Rameses, in the Nile Delta in the north.
39:31But archaeologists surveying the area could find no trace of the city.
39:41Then one day in the 1970s, a farmer found the first remarkable clue.
39:49The remains of a colossal statue.
39:52Archaeologists are convinced this was the site of the city mentioned in the Bible.
39:57Rameses the Great, Rameses the Second, who is one of the most important kings of the New Kingdom.
40:19This is the area of Pirameses, his capital.
40:23It was a huge city in this time.
40:25We have here the statue and we know we have a temple over there and several other temples and villas.
40:41The find raised hopes that this was where Joseph had settled and was reunited with his brothers.
40:46But these hopes were dashed when archaeologists established that P-Rameses was built 300 years after Joseph's time.
41:00Worse still, there was no sign of a Semitic presence at all.
41:12But inscriptions were then discovered, suggesting that P-Rameses was built on top of an older city called Avaris.
41:18If they could find it, then maybe they could find Joseph.
41:25We know from ancient sources that Avaris must be located in the south of P-Rameses, the former capital of Ramses.
41:33So, the excavators who were searching for Avaris, they started in the south and finally discovered it and could attach the name Avaris to the things we were excavating.
41:47Now, excavations are gradually revealing the secrets of Avaris.
42:01It was built 300 years before P-Rameses, just when Joseph was thought to have lived.
42:05And its ruins reveal tantalizing clues to a Semitic presence.
42:15Although most of the buildings were Egyptian in style, one area was distinctly Canaanite.
42:23But the most compelling evidence of a Semitic presence came from inside the houses.
42:27These bodies were found buried in sideways postures, a typically Canaanite tradition.
42:38And objects found inside the burial pits left archaeologists in no doubt.
42:46We have a lot of Canaanite shapes, like the jugs here, combined with Egyptian shapes, like the small vessel here.
42:54We find sometimes weapons attached to the tombs, like this sword.
43:01It's made of bronze.
43:03And then with the same tomb comes a belt, in very fragile condition, which the male burial had around his hip.
43:13So we have always the mixture of both cultures.
43:15These finds are consistent with the Bible's claim that Semites settled in the Nile Delta.
43:25But only poor Semites, perhaps slaves.
43:30None of it indicated that someone of Joseph's status, a high-ranking pharaonic official of Semitic origin, had lived there.
43:36But further finds out of virus suggests that archaeologists are closing in on that elusive evidence.
43:46The excavations have since been returned to agricultural use, but not before extensive plans and photographic records were made.
43:55David Rowell, a specialist in biblical and ancient history, examined, then reconstructed part of the site.
44:09In this field, they found a very special monument.
44:14This is what's left of it. It's actually the floor of a palace.
44:18It's not a huge palace, it's not a royal palace, but it's a very, very high-quality villa of some high official.
44:23Reconstructed, you can see how complex it is.
44:27There are various elements to it, built at different times.
44:29The main party of the audience chamber and main bedroom is fronted by a 12-column portico.
44:38Then later on was added this twin suite, if you like, of rooms, with another portico in front, which enclosed then this courtyard.
44:50This small palace looked like the home of a high-ranking official.
44:53But it was a find at the back of the palace that most intrigued archaeologists.
45:01A tomb topped with a pyramid.
45:10The tomb was over there, to the south of the palace.
45:14And one of the most interesting tombs was that of a dignitary with a tomb chapel.
45:21And inside this tomb chapel, we found the rest of a tomb statue.
45:29The statue had been vandalised.
45:32But when reassembled, it shocked the experts.
45:36This could not have been the statue of an Egyptian official.
45:40When we get it back to the museum and restore it, it looks like this.
45:44And you can see that the head's been completely smashed, the lower part of the head, and the eyes have been gouged out.
45:49The most important thing is this. It's an amazing haircut.
45:52We don't see anything like that in Egypt before this time.
45:55And the hair colour is bright red. This guy had flame-red hair.
46:01The other details were typical of Semitic people.
46:03Another little detail is the skin colour. Here we can see the forehead.
46:09And this here is yellow skin.
46:11And that's typical of what the Egyptians did to represent foreigners from the north.
46:15People with pale skin.
46:16It wasn't just on the hair and face that paint was found.
46:23Flakes of red and black paint were found on the outline of a garment.
46:27And with it, a distinctive pattern.
46:29With these statue fragments, David Roll began to put together an artist's impression of what the figure may have looked like.
46:43Could this be Joseph?
46:59The absence of a nameplate means there's no way of knowing.
47:03But for David Roll, there are no other contenders.
47:06We have no other example of something quite as extraordinary as this.
47:12We have no pyramid tomb for an official estate.
47:15We have no other palace for a private individual.
47:18These sort of things are things reserved for royalty, usually.
47:21So this is extraordinary. We have no other examples to compare it to.
47:25But if you're trying to imagine the rewards of somebody who gave such service to Egypt,
47:30who saved it from the famine, you would expect these type of things to be given.
47:33Joseph's remarkable tale is, of course, but the curtain-raiser to an even more dramatic story.
47:46Moses and Exodus.
47:49But there is, in the story of the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt,
47:53one final clue to the identity of this mysterious statue.
47:56Most Egyptian tombs were stripped of treasures, furniture, clothes and jewellery.
48:05This tomb is no exception.
48:08But in this case, the bones were also taken away.
48:12If a plunderer had gone in there to wreck the tomb, he would have left the bones behind.
48:17He wouldn't have taken the bones away.
48:19Bones don't have any intrinsic value.
48:21So somebody's removed the body from this tomb.
48:23Now the story of Joseph is, at the time of Exodus, when Moses takes the Israelites out of Egypt,
48:28he takes the coffin of Joseph with him, so he would have left an empty tomb.
48:32So here we have a guy with a multi-coloured coat with an empty tomb.
48:35It's got to be Joseph.
48:36Joseph's his chest.
48:37Romeo and
48:38Joseph's his mom.
48:39Joseph's his mom.
48:46Joseph's his mom.
48:47He was so afraid to talk to you about this.
48:49Joseph's his brother.
48:51Yes, hello.
48:53Joseph's his sister.
48:55Joseph's his brother.
48:57Joseph's one of the biggest slapped him.
49:01He was so afraid that he was so afraid to watch the wolf before the burial scene.
49:02Joseph's his brother's son was so afraid to die from himself.
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