Death on the Nile Ancient Apocalypse


Death on the Nile

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The Sphinx guards the only surviving wonder of the ancient world,

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the mighty pyramids at Giza.

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They were built for the pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom,

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a civilisation that lasted for almost 1,000 years

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before mysteriously collapsing.

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Archaeologists are now discovering that the sudden end was one of most unimaginable horror.

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We had a pile of three skeletons in this position - an old man, over an old woman, over a child.

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All of them in contorted attitudes.

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The woman like this, the man with hands up, and the child was too disintegrated to say.

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5,000 years ago, long before the time of Tutankhamen,

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before Ramses,

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before Queen Nefertiti,

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the first great civilisation was established in Egypt.

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The Egyptian Old Kingdom's lasting legacy is the Sphinx

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and the great pyramids at Giza.

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The pyramids are royal tombs for the Old Kingdom's pharaohs,

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protecting their mummified bodies for eternity.

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The pharaohs united Egypt and the Old Kingdom flourished.

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They developed a unique style of art, architecture and literature.

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It was a civilisation that was remarkably stable and resilient.

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The daily life of the average Egyptian remained unchanged for nearly 1,000 years.

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But then, 4,200 years ago, the Old Kingdom suddenly collapsed.

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The pharaoh's power crumbled. Central government failed.

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Egypt was plunged into a dark age which lasted for over 100 years.

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It's an episode in history which has mystified Egyptologists.

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For the last 30 years, Egyptian archaeologist Fekri Hassan has been looking for his own explanation

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of why Egypt turned from stability to chaos.

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I felt compelled

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to find out why did it happen when it did?

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Especially when Egypt was doing so well. We had the pyramids, temples, statues,

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major achievements in arts, literature and everything else.

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Why did it end at that time?

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So, I had to pursue that question.

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I had to find out for myself the reasons for the sudden, unprecedented collapse of the Old Kingdom.

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Fekri Hassan has always challenged orthodoxy.

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The conventional wisdom is that the Old Kingdom fell apart after the death of a pharaoh

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and the battle for succession caused a major political conflict.

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For Fekri, this just didn't ring true.

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The first seed of doubt was planted in 1971

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when Fekri found evidence of something far more devastating than political unrest.

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This little-known tomb in southern Egypt has an astonishing story to tell.

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The tomb belongs not to a pharaoh, but to a local governor called Ankhtifi,

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who lived just after the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

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For me, personally, it's an incredible find.

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This is a remarkable tomb. This is one of the most outstanding tombs in all of Egypt.

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It's in Ankhtifi's writings that Fekri found the vital clue.

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The hieroglyphs tell of horrendous famines and the sufferings of ordinary people.

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It is rarely that we have a voice from the past that gives us a poignant account

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of what had happened, of the horrors, the famines, that happened 4,000 years ago.

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And to have them reported in such a concise and clear fashion is unprecedented.

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The entire country has become like a starved grasshopper.

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I managed it that no-one died of hunger.

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One small section is particularly moving as it tells of the despair and atrocities during the famines

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which were ravaging the south of Egypt.

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All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that they had come to eating their children.

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For Fekri, the writing on the wall was far too powerful to be ignored.

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But taking Ankhtifi's hieroglyphs literally brought him into conflict with most Egyptologists.

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When Ankhtifi talks about people dying out of starvation,

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I would take it with a pinch of salt.

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This is typical Egyptian rhetoric which amounts to exaggeration.

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There is no way that the statements made here are exaggerations.

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It is definitely a description of actual events.

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The text that we have here is not a folk tale, not a mythological statement. It's an actual account.

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It's an evidence that we can read and interpret like anything else.

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Like any observation, it's subject to analysis and examination.

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That text can be analysed and examined and I find it credible.

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Fekri felt compelled to prove that these writings were true,

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that Egypt had suffered devastating famines.

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But for years he was thwarted by the lack of any hard evidence of the suffering.

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Then, in 1996, archaeological evidence emerged for the first time.

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A new discovery in the far north revealed the scale of suffering at the end of the Old Kingdom.

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Archaeologists were excavating in the Nile delta,

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far removed from the glamorous tombs and pyramids of the rest of Egypt.

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The site is described as, "A place that only dedicated archaeologists can get excited about."

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Donald Redford is constantly excited at what he finds here.

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When we began to excavate, I was surprised, and still am,

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to find just under the surface poor burials under reed matting, some so tightly packed,

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that you almost literally tripped over them.

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They found a staggering number of bodies, nearly 9,000.

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And something else was unusual about these burials.

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Wherever we set pick in soil was a burial,

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supine, on the back, or on the side, under a reed mat,

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with very few grave goods, if any.

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And so we must conclude in all cases, that these were the very poor, and they all dated to the same period.

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Donald and his team were amazed at the sheer quantity of poor people buried here.

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They'd found a community reduced to extreme poverty. The date coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom.

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I have not actually run into this kind of thing before.

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I think what we see here parallels what is happening elsewhere in Egypt.

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Everything is breaking down.

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It's not just in one category of human activity, but everywhere - society, art, religion, economy.

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It's all breaking down. I think here for the first time we have evidence of it in dirt archaeology.

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Confirmation of that final and rather sudden destruction of the Egyptian civilisation of the Old Kingdom.

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Donald's discovery suggested that the descriptions in Ankhtifi's tomb of widespread famine must be true.

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Fekri realised that whatever had caused devastation on such a large scale

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must have been an apocalyptic event.

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My hunch from the beginning was that it has to do with the environment, in which the Egyptians lived

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and on which they depended for their livelihood.

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That would have contributed to this sudden event because I could not see any evidence

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in the archaeological record that would lead me to think that it would just suddenly break down like this.

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Of all the forces in the natural environment of Egypt, one dominates.

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The River Nile.

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The ancient Greek author Herodotus described the Nile as "a gift from the gods,"

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a belief that most modern Egyptians cling to passionately.

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The relationship with the Nile, I think, is a love relationship.

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I'm not the only one. I think all the Egyptians have a love affair with the Nile.

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The Egyptian civilisation is about the Nile - loving the Nile. It runs in the blood, it's part of you.

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You grow up with it. It's in you.

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I've just been thinking that if you commit yourself for a lifelong relationship like this,

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it has to be passion.

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Without the Nile, Egypt would not exist

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because it relied on annual floods for survival.

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Every year, rains in the south would bring floodwaters to the Nile valley,

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inundating the area with rich, fertile mud.

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Once the water had subsided, planting could begin.

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For Fekri, the fascination with the life and death powers of the Nile floods goes back a long time.

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One of the major turning points in my life was when I came here with my mother when I was six years old.

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I'd never seen a flood before. There was water all over the place on the banks of the Nile.

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I was terrified...amazed by it.

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I think, from that point on, I began to think that the Nile may not be that gentle river

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that has always flowed in a steady manner nurturing Egyptian civilisation.

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That there may be another side to the river, a dark side, a dangerous side.

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So dangerous that Fekri believed the Nile was implicated

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in the catastrophe that destroyed the Old Kingdom.

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To many Egyptian historians, the very suggestion was tantamount to heresy.

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I've been reading history from the very early beginnings of man in Egypt

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and I can see a pattern

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that's gone on for thousands of years.

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The regular thing is that the Nile comes.

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We know that the Nile is good, we know that the Nile is always faithful

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and we know that the Nile will come next year.

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I believe in that as I believe in God.

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Faced with such burning conviction,

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Fekri knew that he had to find some proof that the Nile was not always Egypt's faithful ally.

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He decided to look back in time

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to the 7th century AD when the Arabs conquered Egypt.

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Every year, they measured the level of the Nile floods in Cairo on this column.

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The meticulous records they kept for over 1,000 years were a revelation.

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When I began to look at the Nile record, I was under the impression

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that the Nile was a normal river with not that much change in the amount of water it brings every year.

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But I found that there are variations from year to year, from decade to decade, from century to century,

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and later found from millennium to millennium. That shattered my ideas that were based on a myth,

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that assumed that the Nile is a steady river. It flows every year.

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All people have to do is sow a few grains and everything is wonderful.

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That is not true at all.

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When I found that one out of every five floods was a bad flood, I was shocked.

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And so I think that discovery changed my views totally

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about not only the Nile, but about how Egyptian civilisation was developed and how it collapsed.

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Alarmingly, Fekri had also discovered that only a small drop in the Nile flood

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could have disastrous ramifications,

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a lesson not lost on one of Europe's greatest military strategists.

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In 1791 and 1792, the Nile flood was only a metre or two below average,

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but people starved, there were riots,

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and the political consequences were calamitous.

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Hearing that the country was so debilitated, Napoleon seized the initiative and conquered Egypt.

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Fekri now realised that any failure of the Nile could have far-reaching consequences.

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But he was puzzled.

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He'd found records of low floods for two-three years, but the dark age had lasted for up to 200 years.

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It seemed impossible for the Nile to fail for such a long period.

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Maybe there was something far bigger involved.

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Fekri decided to look at the other natural feature that lies at the heart of Egyptian life, the desert.

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Fekri has come with his wife, botanist Hala Barakat,

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to the far south of Egypt to search for clues.

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Today, this remote land is an inhospitable desert,

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but thousands of years ago, people lived here.

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Hala is scouring the desert for traces of these ancient people.

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She's looking for small piles of stones, telltale signs of their campsites.

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At night, they gathered wood for a fire. Fragments of charred embers still survive under the stones.

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Hidden in these tiny bits of charcoal is vital evidence.

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Back in the lab, Hala identifies the different firewoods.

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She finds traces of the acacia tree which is no longer found in this desert.

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We're looking at charcoal of the acacia tree.

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It's very distinctive by the presence of the big vessels.

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When we find the charcoal of acacia,

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it means that, when it was growing, there was underground water.

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You only find them in depressions or in oases where water accumulates.

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They need water to grow.

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Hala painstakingly collected and dated thousands of pieces of charcoal from all over the desert.

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The result was quite startling.

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About 7,000 years ago, there were trees growing here.

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Not exactly a forest, but a dry savannah with grass growing between the trees after the rainy season.

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It was a place where people could live.

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Over time, vast swathes of North Africa dried up and became a desert.

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Poets wrote of the devastation caused by sand.

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Indeed the desert is throughout the land.

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The desert claims the land. The land is injured. Towns are ravaged.

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The sun is failed. None can live where the dust storm fails it.

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We do not know what will happen throughout the land.

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Could the change from grass to desert

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be the cause of the sudden breakdown of the Old Kingdom 4,200 years ago?

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Unfortunately for Fekri, the dates didn't fit.

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I personally do not think that the gradual desiccation of North Africa

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was the main cause for the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

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The deserts we know today, by 4,500 years ago, were fully established by that time.

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The change had abrupt events in it, but it was in general a gradual trend,

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lasting for several millennia.

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So the slow desert encroachment was completed well before the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

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This had not caused its demise.

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Fekri had to look for another culprit which would strike more swiftly.

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There HAS to be another cause

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to explain the sudden and dramatic event

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that coincided with the end of the Old Kingdom.

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Then came a breakthrough.

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A new discovery in the hills of neighbouring Israel.

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In these caves, Mira Bar-Matthews has found a unique record of past climates.

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All the water here comes from rainfall.

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As the rain filters down through the rock, it dissolves the limestone,

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forming stalactites and stalagmites.

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As these gradually build up over the years,

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they trap ancient rainwater.

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Mira has discovered a way of calculating rainfall thousands of years ago

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by taking tiny samples of the stalactites.

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The ancient rain contains two different types of oxygen, a light one and a heavier one.

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If there is more of the light type, it was a very wet period. More of the heavy one means it was dry.

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Analysing the samples in a mass spectrometer gives the ratio of light and heavy oxygen.

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Mira had been analysing stalactites stretching back over thousands of years

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when she got to one sample 4,200 years old.

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As soon as she saw the results, she knew something unusual had happened.

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The striking finding was that there is a very important change

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in the amount of rainfall that was in this area.

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Mira had found a staggering 20% drop in rainfall.

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This suggested a sudden and significant climate change.

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This drop is dramatic.

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This event is the largest event over the last 5,000 years.

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Even though Egypt and Israel have different weather systems, this finding was very exciting.

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Rapid climate change was the culprit Fekri had been searching for.

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He believed it was the prime suspect in the catastrophe that destroyed the Old Kingdom,

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the reason why this powerful civilisation disintegrated at the height of its glory.

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I firmly believe that in addition to gradual changes on a millennial scale,

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climatic change can also happen very, very rapidly, suddenly and swiftly

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with dramatic consequences for people.

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Because abrupt climatic events happen very rapidly,

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within a few decades they can influence the livelihood of people,

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causing famines and droughts.

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They are of a magnitude and rapidity that people cannot deal with them

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in the way they would deal with a protracted, long-term change.

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Fekri now needed to know

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if the sudden climate change discovered in the Israeli cave was not a localised event,

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but part of a larger weather pattern that would have affected Egypt, too.

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The evidence to back him up came out of the blue...

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from the glaciers of Iceland.

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Geologist Gerard Bond is also searching for clues about ancient climates.

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He does it by looking at icebergs.

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The particular ones he's interested in are streaked with black ash.

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Can you make out the black?

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These are particles of volcanic material from the volcanoes here in Iceland.

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Some of it is scraped up as the ice moves over the rock.

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Some pours down the mountainsides that the glaciers are moving through

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and some is dumped on the ice by volcanic eruptions.

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Gerard follows the journey the icebergs take after they leave Iceland

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and drift south in the North Atlantic.

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When the icebergs reach warmer waters, they melt and specks of ash fall to the bottom of the ocean.

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And that's where they stay,

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embedded in the deep sea mud which gradually builds up over time.

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Gerard and his team have collected mud from the world's oceans with deposits from the last 10,000 years.

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As Gerard searched the mud from the North Atlantic, looking for traces of volcanic ash,

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he was surprised.

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He was finding ash in some very strange places.

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Some were so far south, it showed that the icebergs had travelled a very long way before melting.

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This could only happen in periods of extreme cold.

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And what was more intriguing, there was a pattern to these mini ice ages.

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What we found to our surprise was that not only were there suggestions

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that the climate was not stable,

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but every 1,500 years was a distinct cold period,

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lasting a couple of hundred years, perhaps.

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But what did a 1,500-year weather cycle have to do with famine in Egypt?

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One of these cycles had an age of 4,200 years.

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That means that the weather was cool enough at that time for icebergs to have got as far south as off Ireland.

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And it occurred at about the same time as the event that you're interested in in Egypt.

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So a mini ice age creating freezing conditions across Europe

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happened when Egypt was suffering from extreme famines.

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This could easily have stayed as a mere coincidence.

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But Gerard's work alerted fellow geologist Peter deMenocal.

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When he searched the climate records for the rest of the world,

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looking at everything from pollen to sand, he found an even more dramatic change.

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It was very exciting, something that we were not expecting.

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We were using techniques that were meant to find small climate signals

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in deep sea sediments.

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When we found a whopping huge signal, we were shocked. We didn't expect that.

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It's as if you're going after a mouse and you catch a lion. It's a very dramatic event.

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Not only was this change sudden, but the ancient climate data revealed just how far-reaching it was.

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It seems that everywhere we look, we find this event.

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We see it in the Mediterranean and then we see evidence off of Africa,

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we see it in many locations throughout the North Atlantic.

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We also see evidence for it in Greenland. We see it in the continental United States.

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Most recently, there's been evidence now that we actually see it in the Indonesian region.

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That is a very important result. It shows that it's truly a global event.

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What we see is that the climate change event occurs at the same time as the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

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It's an event that in terms of the change in climate was profound,

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not only in how large the event was, but also in how widespread it was.

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Scientists were at last confirming everything Fekri believed.

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Severe climate change was causing widespread human misery 4,200 years ago.

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As colder and drier conditions swept the globe, harvests failed and people starved.

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They were victims of a weather cycle out of their control.

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It really is a very sobering thought to imagine what it must have been like to have been these people

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and to have been struggling with climate as they were at the time and ultimately to have succumbed to it.

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And nowhere was this human suffering more acute than in Egypt.

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- Everybody has clustered here. - There's no way out.

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Donald Redford and his team had already discovered that this ruined city was poverty-stricken

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at the end of the Old Kingdom.

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But in 1999, he made a macabre new find,

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which showed in chilling detail the extent of the chaos

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that Fekri believes the sudden climate change had triggered.

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He found a group of skeletons lying underneath a temple wall.

0:37:280:37:32

I found that the destruction is everywhere.

0:37:390:37:43

Moreover, it's associated with what I would consider a massacre.

0:37:430:37:48

That puts it right out of the... realm of accidental occurrence.

0:37:480:37:55

Over the years, Donald has uncovered thousands of skeletons.

0:38:000:38:05

But he was extremely distressed when he found this particular collection of bodies.

0:38:050:38:12

There were 18 of them. In fact, their position was rather dramatic.

0:38:150:38:20

We had a pile of three skeletons in this position. An old man, over an old woman, over a child,

0:38:200:38:27

all in contorted attitudes, the woman like this, the man with hands up.

0:38:270:38:33

On top of the wall were two adult males, one sprawled over the wall,

0:38:330:38:38

with part of the wall having fallen on his back.

0:38:380:38:42

At this point, there were two males with a pig in the middle, of all things.

0:38:450:38:52

And in front of the temple, right on the axis, was a fallen teenager, with a rat clutched in his hand.

0:38:520:38:59

Sprawled like that, as though he had been in the act of running and he tripped and that was the end for him.

0:39:020:39:09

He lacked a head, as though someone had decapitated him.

0:39:090:39:13

Donald will never know exactly what happened, but he believes the 18 people who died had been murdered.

0:39:170:39:25

But most significantly, in a culture where the dead were always treated with respect,

0:39:250:39:31

these bodies had not been buried.

0:39:310:39:34

It was a very grisly scene. The interesting thing is that no-one ever came back to retrieve the bodies.

0:39:340:39:42

After an accidental conflagration with people dying by accident,

0:39:420:39:47

their relatives would have retrieved the bodies for burial. No-one was around to get them.

0:39:470:39:54

No-one was here and cared to get them. There is a real caesura.

0:39:540:39:59

It's almost as though, with their deaths and the destruction of the temple, the place was abandoned.

0:39:590:40:07

From stalactites in Israel to icebergs in Iceland,

0:40:370:40:42

Fekri had compelling evidence that this traumatic human crisis was linked to a global climate change.

0:40:420:40:49

But one piece of the puzzle was still missing.

0:40:490:40:53

Would he be able to find any scientific proof of climate disaster in Egypt itself?

0:40:530:41:00

He still needed to know if the country's lifeblood, the Nile, had failed for decade after decade.

0:41:000:41:07

The crucial evidence was to come from this lake.

0:41:120:41:17

It's an unusual place.

0:41:170:41:20

During the Old Kingdom, it was linked directly to the Nile by a tributary.

0:41:200:41:26

During the Nile floods every year, the lake would get much bigger.

0:41:260:41:31

If Fekri can discover the size of the lake at the end of the Old Kingdom,

0:41:360:41:42

he'll know if the floods failed.

0:41:420:41:45

He decided to search the mud at the bottom of the lake for answers.

0:41:550:42:00

And what he found was intriguing.

0:42:090:42:12

Actually, it's more what he didn't find that fascinated him.

0:42:130:42:18

They looked everywhere for sediments dating back to the Old Kingdom.

0:42:230:42:28

They looked in the middle of the lake and at the sides. It was a real mystery.

0:42:280:42:35

The huge surprise is that we can't find the Old Kingdom sediments at the bottom of the lake,

0:42:350:42:42

where they should be.

0:42:420:42:44

They couldn't find any mud dating back that far.

0:42:440:42:48

It was as if the lake didn't exist during the Old Kingdom.

0:42:480:42:53

But Fekri knows from the ancient records that there was a lake here.

0:42:530:42:59

He was quite bewildered, then one day it dawned on him why they were failing to find anything.

0:43:010:43:09

There's only one explanation.

0:43:100:43:13

The lake must have dried up completely, then the sediments have been blown away by storms.

0:43:130:43:20

So the Old Kingdom sediments are gone. They are vanished.

0:43:210:43:27

The fact that such a huge lake could vanish so dramatically was extraordinary.

0:43:400:43:46

The Nile must have been so low it had stopped feeding the lake.

0:43:460:43:51

What's remarkable is that this was the only time in its whole history that the lake completely dried up.

0:43:510:43:58

And it happened precisely at the end of the Old Kingdom.

0:43:580:44:03

Here, at last, was Fekri's clinching evidence.

0:44:050:44:09

A catastrophic global climate change caused a series of low Nile floods year after year,

0:44:090:44:15

turning the land to dust.

0:44:150:44:18

This was the explanation for the severe famines affecting the whole of Egypt.

0:44:230:44:30

Sandstorms smothered the land.

0:44:320:44:34

In one of the mightiest civilisations ever known, people were starving to death.

0:44:340:44:41

And it was these scenes that were described so vividly on the walls of Ankhtifi's tomb.

0:44:560:45:03

Although Fekri's quest is over, one poignant section still puzzles him.

0:45:170:45:24

"All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree

0:45:240:45:29

"that everyone had come to eating their children."

0:45:290:45:33

It's an astonishing description.

0:45:330:45:36

Were people so desperate that they resorted to cannibalism?

0:45:360:45:41

I was startled when I saw Ankhtifi's account

0:45:410:45:46

of people eating children in ancient Egypt because this is something we just don't think about.

0:45:460:45:53

We cannot imagine such events, such horrendous events, as happened in ancient Egypt.

0:45:530:46:00

But I was not surprised

0:46:000:46:03

because I knew that this has happened later in time

0:46:030:46:07

and that we do have a first-hand eye-witness account

0:46:070:46:12

of a famine, associated with a drought,

0:46:120:46:16

a low Nile, that lasted for a couple of years,

0:46:160:46:20

and have led to atrocious activities by people, including eating children, among other things.

0:46:200:46:28

The first-hand account came from a book written by a doctor from Baghdad

0:46:360:46:43

who'd witnessed a famine in Cairo in 1200 AD.

0:46:430:46:47

In his vivid description was a haunting echo of the tragedy that befell the Old Kingdom.

0:46:470:46:54

He said that the poor were so pressed by hunger

0:46:580:47:02

that they ate corpses, carrion, dogs and filth...

0:47:020:47:07

..and that they even went beyond that to eat children.

0:47:080:47:13

And so, at times, you can come upon people with roasted and cooked children.

0:47:130:47:20

A frank, straightforward account with no sentimentality,

0:47:220:47:26

but it reveals the...horrendous... level...of depredation that happened at that time.

0:47:260:47:35

If this could happen in a famine that only lasted a couple of years,

0:47:390:47:44

the horrors of one spanning several decades are truly unimaginable.

0:47:440:47:50

The collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom was a hideous end

0:47:550:48:00

to one of the world's great civilisations.

0:48:000:48:04

In the next Ancient Apocalypse,

0:48:160:48:19

3,500 years ago, the greatest power Europe had ever seen collapsed.

0:48:190:48:25

What was it that brought the Minoan civilisation

0:48:270:48:31

to this terrible end?

0:48:310:48:33

Subtitles by Dorothy Moore BBC Scotland 2001

0:48:380:48:41

E-mail us at [email protected]

0:48:410:48:44

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