Building for Eternity Egyptian Journeys with Dan Cruickshank

The civilisation of Ancient Egypt, with its dramatic spectacle and mystery, has always fascinated me.

I've been travelling the country to explore some of the intriguing stories

that have emerged from this historic land.

In this programme,

I'm setting off to discover how and why the Ancient Egyptians

made things to last forever, fuelled by their belief in eternity.

The remarkable thing about Ancient Egypt is that so much survives for us to marvel at,

up to 4,600 years after it was created.

Grand monuments, temples, tombs, we even have their bodies.

But it's no accident that we have so much.

They deliberately made things to last.

It was because the Egyptians believed they could,

in some sense, live forever.

That death was not the end,

it was followed by an afterlife,

free of the limitations of age or poverty.

Crucially, that afterlife depended on preserving their bodies

and monuments for as long as their spirits or souls would need them.

And so they developed techniques of building for eternity.

And some of those techniques were ingenious.

I want to see how these Egyptians prepared for the afterlife

so I've come here to see the beginning of the desire to build for eternity.

I'm at Saqqara, where, 4,600 years ago, the Pharaoh, Djoser,

built this great pyramid.

It marks the Pharaoh's burial place, where he would enter the afterlife.

Djoser believed his successful entry and survival in the afterlife

depended on the survival of his body and of this monument.

So instead of the usual mud-brick,

this is the first major building in Egypt made out of stone.

For me this pyramid is one of the greatest structures

ever made by man.

Not only is it one of man's first masonry constructions

but also just look at its sublime elemental geometry.

It's so powerful, so beautiful.

What's extraordinary about this pyramid, given its perfect form,

is the way in which it evolved, developed in a rather ad hoc manner.

Originally there were these shafts dug below it,

burial shafts and chambers in which to keep treasures

and these shafts were topped by a mastaba, a sort of horizontal slab.

A single horizontal slab was the traditional tomb monument at the time,

but Djoser realised that by using stone he could build a larger, taller structure.

A stairway to heaven that would carry him up to the realm of the gods, to immortality.

Tier was built upon tier to form a strong and stable design.

A step pyramid.

As if to guarantee immortality,

Djoser then increased the size of his pyramid to make it last even longer.

The original smaller structure is still visible in the walls we see now.

The pyramid is just part of a large funerary complex,

which also shows Djoser's ambition to build for eternity.

Up till then, large structures had been made from materials that didn't last,

such as reeds, timber and palm stems.

Djoser found a way to imitate these traditional, perishable materials,

with something more permanent.

The entire funeral complex was enclosed within a mighty wall,

a fragment of which has been reconstructed.

Traditionally, such walls would have been built out of temporary materials -

mud-brick and timber.

But here, we see something fascinating happening.

Those materials have been replaced by more permanent materials, wonderful stone here,

and above me the ceiling appears to be made out of timber logs.

They would have been in the old days, but here the timber logs were replaced by stone.

So the old materials and forms of construction are remembered,

even though replaced by new and more long-lasting materials.

And we see something similar happening here.

Amazing, a mighty symbolic gate, open,

even it has great hinges,

but rather than being made of timber, the leaves of this great gate are made of stone.

Certainly a gate worthy of lasting for eternity.

In this colonnaded hall, we can see more evidence.

Traditionally, columns were made out of palm stems tied together.

Here we can see palm stems, but made in stone.

Wherever you look here, you see reminders of fragile materials, but made to last longer.

These beautiful stone-built shrines,

again largely reconstructed, contain more very revealing details.

In front of me is something very weird.

In design, what appears to be a little timber gate.

And I suppose in conception and design that's what it's meant to be,

but a timber gate made out of stone.

All this shows, very directly and dramatically,

how building practice evolved to create a monumental stone-built architecture

that would last for eternity.

As for pyramids, Djoser promoted the idea that solidity and size mattered

if you want to live forever.

And that led to something staggering, a few miles down the Nile.

The golden age of pyramid construction started at Saqqara,

lasted for only around 100 years and reached its high-point here at Giza.

The builders of these three giants aimed for permanence and succeeded.

Of the seven wonders of the ancient world,

these pyramids are all that remain.

The great pyramid at Giza was started about 70 years

after the step pyramid at Saqqara.

Certainly it is the epitome of pyramid architecture,

designed and constructed with incredible accuracy and, of course, on an heroic scale.

The pyramid's orientated very exactly to the four points of the compass

and it is level to within two centimetres from one corner to the other.

Incredible accuracy.

It's built with over two and a half million blocks of limestone

and the weight of the structure is over seven and a half million tons.

Almost certainly this was created by the Pharaoh Khufu to serve as his tomb,

in which case, that man certainly had an eye to eternity.

This thing really is a force of nature, built to last forever.

It took a brilliant feat of engineering to turn Khufu's dream of immortality into reality.

So how did the Egyptians do it?

To start with, they had to cut and haul huge blocks of limestone.

I'm standing in the remains of an ancient quarry.

I can see all around me these square areas.

These represent the bases of great stones that once rose above me

and these stones, this limestone, was cut away

using the most basic, the most primitive of Bronze-Age technology.

Simply soft bronze or copper chisels,

and then these great blocks had to be lifted using not pulleys or anything like that,

simply wedges and rollers and levers, most simple stuff, incredible achievement.

And look at the size of all these stones, monumental in scale.

And to see where they went, you simply have to look over there.

Working out how the limestone blocks were assembled to form the great pyramid

has kept engineers and archaeologists busy for years.

Most now believe that massive ramps was used to drag the limestone blocks up to the working area.

It's reckoned that 20,000 people working on the entire project

could have achieved it during the 23-year reign of the Pharaoh.

The great pyramid may have ensured Khufu immortality and a place among the gods

but its construction must have involved getting labour and funds from all over the country.

No-one ever attempted anything on such a scale again.

Even Khufu's own son, Khafre,

and his grandson, Menkaure, had to settle for smaller pyramids nearby.

If it wasn't possible to build bigger, then new ways were needed

to make the monuments last, such as using even tougher materials.

Details of the three pyramids at Giza show a continuing obsession with eternity.

The first two pyramids were clad with a fine limestone.

That's still there, on top of Khafre's pyramid. There it is, a limestone.

But here, a third pyramid, the pyramid of Menkaure, is clad not with limestone

but with granite; granite much harder than limestone.

And here you see these blocks rising up and then stopping.

And more amazing, these great blocks of granite were to be smoothed off

to give the pyramid a fantastic sheer surface and that's happened over here.

Look at this.

The great block of granite smoothed to make this lovely facade.

What ambition!

Durable granite became the Egyptian's favourite material for everlasting monuments.

It was used in tombs, temples and obelisks throughout the country.

But what really impresses me

is the effort that went into getting the stone.

There is no granite suitable for building

anywhere in northern Egypt.

To trace the source of the rock,

my journey took me 600 miles south of Giza, to Aswan.

Here I found the only source of building granite in Egypt, a truly ancient quarry.

It looked like it was still in use,

and the stone cutters had just gone for a tea-break.

And in the middle of a very large job.

Good Lord, this is the largest obelisk in the world.

Or would have been, if completed and erected. It's absolutely huge.

This monster was carved out on three sides,

around 3,500 years ago, and then abandoned.

If it had been finished, it would have weighed more than 1,100 tons

and stood 42 metres high.

Most probably it was commissioned by the Pharaoh, Tuthmosis III.

It's a marvellous snapshot of Egyptian technology,

preserved simply because granite is so good at resisting erosion.

This is absolutely awe-inspiring.

Towards its tip, the obelisk would have been well over two metres wide,

two or three metres down here.

Incredible. And this very, very hard granite would have been cut

using nothing other than harder stones, pounding stones, like dolerite.

This was of course the Bronze Age, no iron,

and copper and bronze chisels would have been useless on this material.

Utterly, utterly fantastic.

But something went horribly wrong.

This great obelisk, almost reaching its bottom here for the fourth face to be cut,

was abandoned because it was discovered

that there were several frightful faults running through the stone.

If it had been lifted it would have fallen into pieces.

So this mighty obelisk, the largest single stone actually ever quarried

in the ancient world, was abandoned,

left here for us to discover and for us to wonder at.

So I'd found the source of thousands of tons of granite,

used to help ensure a long afterlife for many Pharaohs.

The granite must have been carried to temples and tombs

throughout the country by floating it down the Nile.

It would have been an extraordinary operation, taking many months,

to make the 600-mile journey to the pyramids at Giza.

It's fitting that the most eternal of building stone

was carried along this great river

because it was the Nile that inspired the belief in the afterlife in the first place.

It's not surprising that the Nile

was so important to Egyptian religion.

Without the Nile, there would have been no Ancient Egyptian civilisation, no gods.

It seemed to them to be the fertile centre of the world, a wondrous paradise.

And now I see how the Nile could have led to the idea of eternity,

because they'd seen the continuing cycles of life on the river.

The Nile is also like a great natural clock,

marking the turning of the world.

Seasons coming and going, and coming again.

The annual flood of the Nile bringing life to parched land.

They would have seen plants germinating

and dying and living again.

And of course that gave the idea of the cycle of life,

of man also living and dying and enjoying an afterlife.

This idea comes from the Nile,

and from nature brought to life by the Nile.

It's not such a big step to imagine that something similar

could happen to human life.

I can see why, just as the crops were renewed each season,

Ancient Egyptians should believe that after death, they too could be renewed.

But crucially, for them to be renewed

and to attain afterlife, the body had to be preserved

so that a new, finer being, could grow from it, could germinate.

This was a real challenge, to stop the body decomposing.

They would have noticed that when the dead were buried in the desert sand,

they were preserved naturally.

The bodies dried out before they could decay.

So the Ancient Egyptians developed mummification,

a technique that preserved the human body in a similar way.

It's another example of how their great practical skills

were put to the service of their belief in eternity.

In front of me lies the body of a young woman.

She died around 2,000 years ago.

She's been mummified. The process of mummification

is absolutely fascinating.

They realised that the decay of the body starts within the organs.

The organs had to be removed, but very carefully indeed.

The brain had to be extracted without damaging the skull,

with a special tool inserted usually up the left nostril,

and the brain would be pulled out.

In the process of this extraction, the brain would be virtually destroyed.

It didn't matter, though. They didn't reckon the brain was very important.

Other organs though are preserved.

Inside here, the heart, the liver, the lungs, the intestines all had to be taken out.

Now, four of these organs are preserved in these Canopic jars.

These have lovely little lids showing the four sons of Horus.

Horus, of course, the son of Osiris, lord of the underworld.

The heart, though, is treated differently.

That's preserved and then re-inserted

into the empty husk of the body.

The heart was very important cos that was seen as the place

where the soul resided and the soul had to face judgment in the underworld.

The body is then preserved by being packed with natron.

Natron's a form of natural salt, it removes the water and preserves the flesh.

And so there, this body is wrapped in bandages.

The last thing, the most moving thing in a way,

is this, the mask that's placed over the head of the mummy.

Here we can see the dead... the dead person.

An idealised representation, I guess,

but nevertheless there is the young girl looking at me, staring into infinity, into eternity.

The final phase of burial was the opening of the mouth ceremony.

That would take place just before the tomb was sealed.

A priest would approach the mummy bearing a selection of special instruments

and the object was to re-animate the dead,

to allow their senses to work in the afterlife,

so they could hear and see and take nourishment.

In a sense, it allowed the dead to live in the land of Osiris.

So preparing for a life in eternity

didn't just depend on the skills of the embalmers.

The rituals associated with burial were vital

if the person was to live on in the afterlife.

We know many of these rituals from tomb paintings.

For instance, here, the opening of the mouth ceremony

is being performed on the dead Pharaoh, Tutankhamen.

Tombs also give us an idea of what living in the afterlife was like.

It was shown as an agricultural paradise, sometimes called "the field of reeds",

where life was an idealised version of the existence the dead had left behind.

But what really fascinates me,

is the help the dead were given to ease their life in the field of reeds.

Entombed with the mummy were small helper figures

that would be animated by magic spells when things got arduous in the underworld.

Here's a model granary.

It shows people preparing grain and storing grain up here, a grain store.

And here's someone grinding up the grain.

So this really would ensure that the dead person,

with whom this was entombed, had sustenance in the next world,

would have bread, something to eat.

These are called shabti figures.

These are very important.

A number of these would be buried in the tomb with the dead and they have a very specific function.

This one has a spell carved into it here,

a shabti spell, and this explains what it does.

It toils, it works for the dead,

to relieve the dead of the need to labour in paradise.

This one, it says, shifts sand

and he's carrying the tools of his trade here, a little hoe.

Shifting sand to create irrigation ditches.

Always the same, water, fertility, as in Egypt around the Nile.

Water is life, so digging irrigation ditches is very important in paradise.

This one has a name of the dead, lovely little blue figure.

Oh, look, a little sort of work basket for carrying the sand,

just to make sure that the dead person,

entombed with this figure, could have a relaxing time

in the kingdom of Osiris. Very nice.

For the most important people in Ancient Egypt, like the Pharaohs,

much more was done to ensure survival in the afterlife.

A preserved body and a well-supplied tomb was just the start.

For the Pharaoh to live on,

his name had to live on, in speech and writing.

The names of Pharaohs are found all over Egypt,

inscribed in oval-shaped cartouches.

Tuthmosis III,

Ramesses II,

Tutankhamen,

Horemheb.

The shape is based on the circular hieroglyph meaning "eternity",

so by placing the name within it, the Pharaoh symbolically lived forever.

But for Ancient Egyptians, for all their sense of eternity,

for all their great monuments and the mummified bodies,

the onward march of time couldn't be taken for granted.

The annual flooding of the Nile, even the rising of the sun,

depended on pleasing the gods with rites and rituals in temples.

Temples were the engines of eternity where the forces of chaos

and darkness were kept at bay, where divine harmony was maintained,

and the safety of the living and those in the afterlife preserved.

So a temple had to last forever.

Even the Ancient Egyptian word for a temple means

"house of the millions of years."

I travelled down the Nile to the temple at Dendera.

Here you can tell from the massive architecture that it's made to last.

The solid temple building represented order and stability...

..while surrounding it,

is a gigantic perimeter wall keeping out the forces of chaos.

Temples provided a route from the world of man

to the world of the gods, from the profane to the sacred.

And this route is marked,

explicit in the architecture of temples such as this.

The outer parts were open to the sky, light, airy, relatively public.

As one penetrates, though, the temple becomes smaller,

more intimate, the space is darker.

Only the privileged, the high and mighty of the land,

can go into the very heart of the temple.

And all of this, of course, served a very particular purpose.

It was to act as a machine, really,

a machine for regulating the earth, for renewing the earth.

Nature was observed, the cycle of life observed and followed.

And in front of me is the shrine of Hathor.

This is the powerhouse of the temple, the holy of holies.

This is the culmination of the sacred route,

the smallest of the main halls.

Great doors would have originally

enclosed this space.

Only the priests would enter here.

Over there, would have been an image of the goddess.

On the walls her story is told, her powers made plain.

Now to worship the goddess here was really to worship nature,

to ensure that the world continued to exist,

to ensure that the world that man enjoyed would be here

for future generations, and ensure the sun would rise on the morrow.

So the apparatus of eternity was all there.

The great temples keeping the forces of chaos at bay,

the mummies, the names, and the giant funerary monuments,

all ensured an eternal life for the most important people of the country.

But how long could eternity stay the course?

Eventually, the idea that things could last forever

was severely tested.

The Egyptian civilisation lasted a very long time.

When Ramesses II started this mortuary temple for himself,

now known as the Ramesseum, the step pyramid at Saqqara was already 1,300 years old.

This long period of time allowed certain ideas

about eternity to be challenged.

Some people would have noticed

that tombs had been abandoned and robbed, mummies unwrapped,

and the jewels plucked from within them,

and temples themselves abandoned and left to fall into decay.

This temple of Ramesses II was most probably damaged

by an earthquake in antiquity and its collapse hastened by its later use

as a quarry for building stone.

Many Ancient Egyptians would surely have shared the sentiments

expressed in the early nineteenth century by the English poet, Shelley,

when he contemplated drawings of this mighty fallen statue,

once rising 16 metres high.

It's an image of Ramesses II,

but better known to Shelley by one of his Greek names, Ozymandias.

"My name is Ozymandias King of Kings

"Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair

"Nothing beside remains

"Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

"the lone and level sands stretch far away."

Many of the marvels of Ancient Egypt have disappeared,

yet much lives on as intended.

People still speak the names of the Pharaohs and their gods

in temples such as these, the houses of the millions of years.

Ramesses II and Tutankhamen are once again household names

and while their names live on, so, in a sense, do they.

Next time, I'm following the story of one intriguing woman

who tried to seize power in Ancient Egypt through black magic and, perhaps murder.

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