Secrets of the Tomb Builders Egyptian Journeys with Dan Cruickshank

'The great civilisation of ancient Egypt,

'with its dramatic spectacle and mystery,

'has always fascinated me.'

'I've been exploring some of the intriguing stories

'that have emerged from this historic land.

'In this programme I'm off to find out about the mysterious people

'who built the spectacular underground tombs of the Pharaohs.'

I'm about to fly over the Valley of the Kings -

where, for 500 years -

the Pharaohs and the nobles of Egypt were interred,

along with their most precious things -

things precious in this world and essential, they believed,

for the journey through the underworld to rebirth.

Right, shall we? Up we go!

'The Valley of the Kings has long haunted my imagination,

'and on this journey, I'm going to discover more about the secret lives

'of the tomb builders who actually built this sacred place.

'The magnificent tombs of the later Pharaohs lie in the desert hills on the west bank of the Nile.

'There, I've discovered a hidden story even more intriguing than the tombs themselves.

'It's a story that, for me, unlocks the past,

'bringing me closer than ever to the real people of ancient Egypt.'

The valley is, of course, very arid,

but for the Egyptians,

it was a place of life, of re-birth -

a great womb, framed by these sacred mountains.

A place where the dead would continue on their journey

to another world, to re-birth.

'Around 3,500 years ago,

'the Pharaohs decided to hide their tombs down there,

'in the desert rocks below.

'It was a more secret place to bury themselves and their treasures

'than the ostentatious pyramids

'that were the tombs of the earlier Pharaohs.'

The treasure now, for us, is the information locked into the tombs.

Information that allows us to understand and reconstruct that fascinating world of the Pharaohs.

'There are over 60 tombs packed into this valley.

'Tunnelled into these limestone cliffs

'is a labyrinth of underground vaults and passageways,

'branching in every direction.'

Down here on the ground

we can understand more easily why this valley was chosen.

It's all to do with security.

The exits and entrances can be guarded,

tomb robbers kept at bay.

'It wasn't just treasure that had to be guarded from tomb robbers,

'but the body of the Pharaoh itself.

'Ancient Egyptians believed the soul could survive death,

'and that the dead could influence the living.

'But this depended on keeping the body safe,

'and that's what made tomb building so important,

'particularly for Pharaohs.

'It was believed that their well-being after death

'was essential for the prosperity of the nation.

'Most of the treasures that once packed the underground chambers

'have long since been plundered by tomb robbers,

'but we've been left with the spectacular monuments themselves,

'and the stunning work of the master craftsmen who built them.

'But it's only when you look at a map of the valley

'that you really appreciate the great feat of engineering

'that went into creating this place.'

Incredible - looking at it - the complexity of the tombs.

Some run under and over other tombs, some almost bash into each other.

Incredible, really, this strange, sacred world.

Apparently, in a state of disorder and disarray.

But, of course, the overwhelming impression is one of respect.

Incredible engineering skills of these ancient workmen,

cutting these tombs, these straight passageways, underground chambers,

multi-columned halls - very difficult to achieve.

An amazing piece of work.

'To get a sense of the remarkable engineering skills

'of the tomb builders,

'you have to go to a tomb called KV5,

'the biggest and most complex tomb in the valley.

'Only recently re-discovered, it's still closed to the public,

'but I've been offered a rare and privileged glimpse inside.

'This vast mausoleum was built by Ramesses II,

'for some of his 50 sons.'

This is a main hall,

roughly worked ceiling supported by these great columns...

Square piers, really.

Around here are arranged the 120 or so corridors

and smaller chambers...

in all directions.

Astonishing...piece of work, the massive scale.

'Sadly, this tomb complex was severely damaged by floods in ancient times,

'but you can still see the remarkable design and construction

'in this maze of chambers and passageways.

'The tomb makers were engineering geniuses.

'They exploited the strengths and weaknesses of the rock,

'cutting through the weak areas,

'while leaving the strong to act as supports.

'Not a single chamber or column has collapsed in thousands of years.

'Vast quantities of rock had to be chiselled out

'with simple copper and bronze tools,

'and yet this intricate, geometric design

'was achieved with remarkable precision.

'There could be 150 chambers or more,

'and excavation is still going on.'

Down there I can see yet another room with a ceiling and a wall,

and beyond that could be other rooms, other chambers.

Amazing. Perhaps great discoveries yet to be made.

Recently - tantalisingly - I'm told,

one ancient skeleton and three heads were discovered in this pit.

I'll have a look.

I'll be very careful.

Ah, some newspaper.

And er...my goodness me!

The skeleton is still here.

The legs...

the thigh...

..the backbone.

Amazing!

It's wonderful being here, this rough, tooled surface,

left really as the workmen would have seen it 3,200 years ago.

Incredible, so direct. It would have been covered with plaster,

which has now gone,

so we see it through the eyes of the men that made it.

You can almost hear their chisels echoing in this space.

'So, who were the people who created these remarkable tombs?

'The anonymous men who spent their entire lives toiling away

'so that the Pharaohs could pass safely into the underworld.

'These are my unsung heroes.

'These are the people I want to know more about.

'It's not just the builders and engineers I'm interested in,

'but the great artists who decorated the tombs so beautifully.

'And in the tomb of the Pharaoh Horemheb,

'you can actually see these master painters and sculptors at work.'

The amazing thing about this tomb is that it gives us a snapshot

into the construction and decoration of tombs.

The body of a Pharaoh took 70 days to mummify.

and after that, the body had to be interred in a tomb,

whether the tomb was ready or not.

That's what's amazing here.

Horemheb's tomb was not ready for him, but he had to come in anyway.

The place was sealed up so we get this amazing world -

a tomb in progress of construction.

Gosh, what an explosion of colour after the bare walls up there!

This chamber has been finished

and gives an idea of what the tomb would have looked like.

The colours are so intense, so fresh,

but the thing that's beautiful about this decorative scheme,

is that the figures are raised, giving a very three-dimensional,

very dramatic, very beautiful quality.

Now, if you go down deeper into the tomb,

you can see how this amazing, sacred art was made.

'Beautiful as these finished reliefs are,

'the unfinished work has even more power.'

Even in the burial chamber, with this great sarcophagus,

the scheme of decoration is incomplete.

Just a few red traces

and some of the red figures coloured in with black, no colour.

There's something that's wonderful here, actually.

In the very incompleteness of the tomb, there's incredible power.

'Through these simple outlines,

'we have a rare insight into how this sensational art was created.

'It's like peeling back the layers of a masterpiece

'to find out how it was made.'

There is immediacy in the sketches, a directness, a freshness.

One can connect with the workmen in a wonderful way.

'These walls are an instruction manual left by these ancient craftsmen.

'They reveal the secrets of age old techniques,

'passed down through the generations.'

Now, this is fascinating.

Clearly, the work teams were divided up

into more skilled and less skilled men.

I suppose the young chaps, the sort of apprentices, did the basic work.

The first thing was to dip some string in red paint,

and using that string to make these straight lines

which divide the wall up into various registers,

various zones to be decorated.

And again using the red paint, the first team did a rough sketch

of the figures on the wall,

and here you see the red figures.

Then, slightly more skilled chaps come along and correct -

or sometimes trace over the red - in black paint.

There are corrections quite clear, so this second team is more skilled.

They get it all set out properly,

but you know, mistakes can be corrected.

The third team, the highly skilled chaps,

would come along, and their job

is to cut the decoration

into the plaster surface that's over the limestone.

For me, I've seen nothing like this.

Here is a figure just emerging from the plaster,

and you can imagine the team of chaps here.

Think of the atmosphere - stone dust everywhere - not nice.

Just being in here now hurts the throat.

There's limestone dust and no light.

They had little, simple torches, I suppose,

or little lamps burning vegetable oil with linen wicks.

Incredible conditions.

And in these difficult conditions,

these men are doing this really precise work.

Look, here is the moment the work stops.

The chaps down tools.

I suppose the Pharaohs body has been sliding down the ramp

into the burial tomb over there, and that's it.

The tomb has to be sealed, and these chaps are out.

'So, what about these chaps, these tomb makers?

'I've heard of many myths and legends about them.

'Most famously that they were slaves,

'forced to use their skills in honour of the Pharaoh

'against their will.

'I'm off to find out the truth about these remarkable people.'

Leg over. Whoa!

Oh, yes. Lovely.

'And I can find the answer on the other side of the valley.'

Maybe just lead him on? How does he get going? Come on, old boy!

Thank you.

It's lovely. Thank you very much.

'For me, the place I'm heading for is a treasure trove,

'packed with information

'that has transformed our understanding of Egypt 3,500 years ago.'

We know much about the Pharaohs buried in the Valley of the Kings,

but what about the humble workmen who would - over 3,000 years ago -

have walked and ridden along the path I'm riding along now?

It's incredible.

Those are the people that I want to know -

they're the people that haunt my imagination.

I want to get into their minds and see the ancient world through their eyes. ..Come on!

'This place is a hidden gem,

'where all the extraordinary and intimate details

'of the lives of the ordinary people of ancient Egypt can be uncovered.'

When first discovered, this site raised lots of questions.

It really was a bit of a mystery.

People couldn't work out who on earth lived here.

The site's so arid, sun-baked hills around it, the Nile a long way off.

There's no water here.

So, what was going on?

Recent excavations have revealed

that this was the centre of a very fascinating world.

'This was clearly the home of a special community,

'kept separate from the rest of the world.

'As more and more evidence emerged from the rubble,

'it became apparent what this place was.'

This is the permanent home of the tomb makers,

their village founded around 3,500 years ago,

now known as Deir el-Medina.

'It's where generations of builders, painters, sculptors, and engineers -

'as well as all their families - lived for 500 years.

'They lived within these walls, guarding the secrets of the tombs,

'passing on their skills from father to son.

'From the wealth of archaeological evidence -

'scraps of cloth, fragments of wood, even traces of paint,

'archaeologists have built up a detailed picture

'of the tomb builders' lives -

'what their homes were like,

'and they even know the names of some of the people that lived in them.'

I'm in one of the streets in the town, houses on each side.

They would have been whitewashed.

There would have been a lovely, charming, mellow light flooding through the town.

The front doors were painted red.

Here, I've come to a front door just here,

a door belonging to a rather important fellow -

a workman called Senejem.

The house itself is ahead of me,

so I'll go inside and see Senejem's world.

This is the main reception room,

and what a room it is -

square, probably a cube actually.

Ceiling up there - a flat ceiling with ventilators, air intakes.

And here, a store room with a cellar.

That's where the family treasures were kept.

Oh, this is good. The stairs up to the flat roof.

You can imagine the family going up these stairs in the evening

to sit on the roof, looking at the sunset or the stars.

Very lovely.

And in this corner, a piece of built-in furniture.

A sort of bed or a couch, I suppose. Little recesses here.

I suppose these would have contained sacred writings,

or images of the gods.

Good Lord!

Sitting here is an amazing experience.

Sitting on this couch,

inhabiting the world inhabited by this family of workmen,

tomb builders...

over 3,000 years ago.

This is the world they'd have known.

'And in the hills surrounding the town,

'there are places that give us an actual picture of these people

'as they worked in the Valley of the Kings.'

'Being tomb builders,

'they were of course able to build tombs for themselves.'

This is high quality work. And here is something very marvellous indeed.

Here we see workmen constructing a shrine within a tomb.

Wonderful details.

Look at this - a chap with a saw.

A bronze saw.

Here, a man painting a sarcophagus.

And down below is a shrine scene.

And here's a man with a bronze chisel and a mallet.

And here, there's humour in this - it's incredible -

a chap sort of clambering up a wall, hammering away.

This fellow has dropped his mallet and his friend, looking alarmed,

has moved his foot away in time.

Saying, "What on earth are you doing?!"

Incredible, this world of the workmen.

And here it is...forever.

They're going about their earthly tasks,

but in the underworld.

'These paintings give us a vivid picture of the tomb builders,

'but something else about these people has been discovered here,

'and it's extraordinary.

'The people of Deir el Medina could read and write,

'unlike almost all the other workers in ancient Egypt.

'And thousands of examples of their writing

'have been uncovered by archaeologists.

'These are the most detailed, intimate writings and drawings

'of everyday life ever discovered in ancient Egypt.

'They're like pages from a notebook, ancient text messages.

'Reading them is like eavesdropping on conversations 3,000 years ago.'

"What is it with you?

"Write and send me the thoughts of your heart so I can enter into them.

"I've been with you since I was a child, but I can't understand you."

"He bought me a donkey, but it's no good so I returned it.

"Let him bring me a good donkey, or give me my money back."

"Peneb the foreman, my father,

"slept with Kene's wife Ti, and with Pendua's wife, Hunro.

"He even slept with Hunro's daughter."

"For the carpenter with his chisel, life is utterly vile.

"Covering the roof 10 cubits by six to cover the roof in a month..."

'Because papyrus was so expensive,

'the people of Deir el Medina wrote on bits of limestone and pottery,

'which they could literally just pick up off the ground.

'It meant they wrote, and wrote and wrote.

'The originals - known as ostraca -

'are kept in museums around the world,

'but I've got some exact replicas here.'

There's lots of things here. Some are simply lists of goods,

some legal documents, private letters,

but there's a lot of humour.

You get the idea that people come here,

come home after a hard day toiling in the tombs

and let off a bit of steam.

They obviously get fed up

making images all day glorifying the Pharaohs.

Here's a wonderful little bit of satire.

In the tombs we see Pharaohs in their chariots

smiting their enemies.

Here we see, not a Pharaoh, but a mouse in his chariot driving a dog.

The chap who drew this was probably the same chap

who had to paint the glorious Pharaoh, and he'd had enough of it.

When he gets home he really sort of takes the Mickey!

This one's really interesting.

This one's to do with love.

It's a spell - trying to make a woman fall in love with a man.

The chap says that if the woman of his heart doesn't desire him,

as a cow desires fodder, he'll go off and burn images of the gods.

That seems a bit daring to me, but there we are.

This one's almost my favourite actually.

It looks a bit abstract, but what it is is a laundry list.

Here we see drawings of items,

so I suppose this was someone who couldn't read,

and it's sort of things going off to the laundry.

A loin cloth here, I suppose.

A shirt without sleeves, and these are the number of items gone off.

One pair of pants off to the cleaners.

Isn't it absolutely amazing?

'The ostraca give us revealing details about life here

'that otherwise would have been lost to us.

'For instance, they tell us these workers had rights.

'They had two days off for every eight days work.

'They were prepared to go on strike if their rights were ignored.

'We know that the women could own property.

'They could sue for divorce and even prosecute their husbands for domestic violence.

'We even have their school curriculum,

'and know the myths and legends they read to their children.

'The ostraca also helped to solve the puzzle

'of how this community was able to survive,

'miles from the life-giving waters of Nile.

'The laundry from that list would have been taken down to the Nile

'to be washed by launderers paid for by the state.

'And all their water was delivered by water-boys,

'also paid for by the state.

'What's clear from the ostraca

'is that the state provided the tomb builders

'with everything they could possibly want.

'These workers - these tomb builders - weren't slaves.

'They were highly regarded state employees.

'They may have been kept in isolation in the arid mountains,

'but the Pharaoh made sure they led a comfortable life.'

As the builders of Royal tombs,

the people of Deir el-Medina were in a sense privy to state secrets.

The fate of the nation was linked

to the preservation of the Pharaoh's body after death.

And the people of Deir el-Medina knew the secrets of the royal tombs,

and in that sense, the fate of the nation was in their hands.

'Through the people of Deir el-Medina,

'I've seen a different side of ancient Egypt.

'Ordinary people are so often forgotten by history,

'but this journey has given me an insight

'into what everyday life must have been like in this land

'thousands of years ago.

'It's history from the bottom up,

'so different from that written by the Pharaohs.

'The Pharaohs were so concerned with their place in history

'that much of what they've left us is merely propaganda.

'But the humble people from Deir el-Medina,

'with their humour, scepticism and satire,

'give us a refreshingly truthful view of the past.

'But there is one final twist to the story of the tomb builders,

'which links the craftsmen of Deir el-Medina

'to the legendary tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings.'

Many - indeed perhaps most - tombs were robbed in antiquity.

There's evidence to suggest

that the tomb makers were also often the tomb robbers.

Even priests were involved.

There are also some contemporary legal documents that show that tomb makers from Deir el-Medina

were caught in the act - found with bags of booty containing plunder from tombs.

Amazing, really. It does sort of suggest that ordinary people

weren't too worried about the great Egyptian gods,

weren't worried about curses on the tombs,

and indeed weren't worried

that the vengeance of the Pharaoh - divine in death -

would be visited upon them.

'How ironic that some of the people who dedicated their lives

'to building the spectacular tombs here

'should have returned to rob them.

'A shocking revelation perhaps,

'but just one of the many hidden stories

'that I've discovered about this valley.'

This journey has completely transformed my understanding

of the Valley of the Kings.

Before, I thought of it as a place of death,

of afterlife, of ritual and religion.

It is that, but much, much more.

Now I see it contains stories about daily life in Egypt 3,500 years ago.

There's evidence here of ordinary working people -

the stories of the people who created these great tombs

are all there, waiting to be explored and unravelled.

The connections are amazing between the humble people and the great people -

the humble people, of course,

are the ones who created the monuments to the high and mighty.

And that, I suppose,

is what one now sees when one contemplates this view.

Not just the story of the kings and their families,

but the stories of the ordinary people of Egypt -

that's what echoes in the valley for me now.

'Next time, I follow in the footsteps of the great archaeologist Howard Carter,

'the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.'

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