The Birth of Art Treasures of Ancient Egypt

I'm in Dorset, seeking a little bit of Egypt in the English countryside.

SHEEP BLEAT

It seems unlikely, but this is where I had my

first taste of the magical and exotic world of Ancient Egypt.

I remember first coming here to Kingston Lacy with my family

when I was a child, and I was fascinated

- like millions of others - by what I found.

This pink granite obelisk is well over 2,000 years old,

and today it's spotted with lichen and moss

as a result of the damp English climate.

But it once stood in front of the sun-baked Temple of Isis

on the island of Philae in southern Egypt,

where in 1815 it caught the eye of

the owner of Kingston Lacy, William Bankes.

He was a traveller, he was an amateur archaeologist,

an aesthete and a connoisseur, and he spent years endeavouring to

bring this obelisk from Egypt to his Dorset lawn.

As well as the obelisk, Bankes amassed the

largest private collection of Egyptian art in Britain.

Most of the Egyptian antiquities that Bankes collected

are on display here in the billiards room, but I suspect that most people

would consider these objects more as curious artefacts than works of art.

And it's true that the ancient Egyptians didn't have

a word for "art", but they didn't have a word for religion either,

and they are among the most religious peoples in history.

This enormous tome is the first volume of

The Description of Egypt, which began to appear in 1809.

And it is beautiful!

It's filled with hand-coloured illustrations and maps,

and these crisp, really immaculate engravings that record

the monuments of Ancient Egypt.

You can readily understand why William Bankes became so besotted

as he sat in this very library and leafed through these pages.

I want to follow in the footsteps of Bankes and his contemporaries

and explore Ancient Egypt for myself.

In this series, over three programmes

I'll travel the length of the country...

..in search of 30 treasures that

tell the bewitching story of Egyptian art.

But above all, I want to look at the treasures of Egypt,

not through the eyes of an archaeologist,

but through the eyes of an art lover.

My adventure begins deep in the Sahara, where I'm

searching for the very earliest Egyptian art.

The origins of the indomitable style

that would define this greatest of ancient civilisations.

So I've driven right out into the Western Desert,

which is this exhilarating landscape

and it's part of the Sahara which basically stretches on

unbroken to the Atlantic, thousands of miles away,

and this must be easily the most remote place

I have ever come to see a work of art.

In fact, right here.

We've made it. Excellent.

'My guide is artist and archaeologist John O'Carroll.'

Well, this is our first site, John,

and you were saying in the car that this is known as the Gallery.

The Gallery, it's a superb piece of Neolithic rock art.

It's a procession of four women - three of them pregnant -

leading about six giraffes. A wonderful piece of art.

-And when does it date from?

-It dates from, I would say 6-7000BC,

it was a culture called the Bashendi Culture.

So what can this tell us about the society that produced it?

It's their stamp, and we're looking at a window

to the mind of these Bashendi people,

which is quite marvellous. And in this piece you get a wonderful sense

of movement, a processional way, with the women, with the giraffes.

The giraffe was a highly effective totem as a rain god.

It was tall, it was touching the sky,

so to harness that type of animal was to harness nature in a sense.

I might try and scramble up to have a look at this giraffe,

if you think I'm not going to kill myself.

I guess the first thing that strikes me coming up here

is the simplicity but effectiveness of just using

incision in the rock to catch the sunlight. That creates the outline.

The way it's been conveyed is in quite, almost geometric, abstract, rectilinear fashion

- these are straight lines, right angles.

-This is quite a Mondrian...

-Yes!

-..a Mondrian prehistoric piece.

And elsewhere this dotted, stippled effect,

as though trying to imitate the skin or the hide of the giraffe.

It's a very good device for that, simple but effective.

'What's revealing is how the art and beliefs of the

'early Egyptians were so entwined with animals and the natural world.'

Now, John is taking me up a pyramid-shaped hill to show me

his favourite petroglyphs.

Phew!

Aha!

There we are.

And here we are at what we call the Altar.

What an extraordinary setting.

So this is the altar stone.

It's at an angle, and has four lovely Bashendi ladies on it,

dancing for us. ALASTAIR LAUGHS

With highly-decorated costume.

So we've got several different women, so here's clearly one,

and here are another two, facing each other, or next to each other.

Facing each other with a head, breasts and torso.

What about thinking of classic later Egyptian reliefs,

tomb paintings, where you see people, they look very different,

but in a sense the structure,

the way of representing them, is similar.

You have this - frontal, the torso,

but then the lower half in profile,

as though perhaps walking in one direction.

I believe there is some connection, there is a connection.

These early people brought their artistic...developments with them,

and artistic sense, and sense of stylisation.

So here, in a sense, we really have the origins of

Ancient Egyptian art, in this quite windy, but sacred spot.

Windy, sacred, but I do believe, I think you're correct.

Before we embark on the story of Egyptian art,

I'm going to map out the journey ahead of us in the sand.

I'll begin...

with prehistory - 7000BC.

The era of the petroglyphs.

Now I'm going to walk the history out

so that every step will be 100 years.

5000BC.

Then finally, 4000BC. This is known as the Naqada Period...

'When painted pottery sowed the seeds for an artistic style.'

Around about 1,000 years later, we have the beginnings of

Ancient Egypt proper, as we know it. The First Dynasty comes to power.

And 500 years after that, 2500 BC around about,

we arrive at...

the Old Kingdom.

'The age of the great pharaohs who built the pyramids at Giza.'

500 years that kingdom lasts, give or take,

and then the emergence of the Middle Kingdom.

'A period of tough-as-nails leaders and no-nonsense art.'

Lasts for another 500 years or so.

And then the New Kingdom emerges, around about 1500 BC.

'The great golden age of Egyptian culture.'

That lasts for another few hundred years...

..until the final millennium, the so-called Late Period.

'Egypt declines, but its art flourishes'

And then in 332 BC, Alexander the Great invades.

Known as the Ptolemaic Dynasties, they continue for about 300 years...

until 30 BC, when Egypt is invaded by Rome.

And that's the end of the Ancient Egyptian world.

So when you look back down you get a sense

- first of all of the great scope of what we are talking about -

but secondly, that Ancient Egypt dominates for thousands of years.

Ssh. Ssh.

The first great turning point in this sprawling history came when

the early Egyptians were confronted with a natural disaster.

Around about 6000BC, back in the Neolithic Period,

the Western Desert was a completely different place.

-It was much more lush and verdant.

-HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE

It was more like an African savanna,

sprinkled with a few donkeys, lots of rhinoceroses,

buffaloes, gazelles, giraffes.

And there were reliable summer rains that fed lakes

that were more than seven metres deep.

Over time, though, all of the rains disappeared and the climate

changed catastrophically. The wet grasslands dried up.

Eventually, the people who lived here

- the semi-nomadic cattle herders - were forced by these

tough and arid conditions to leave altogether and head off

in search of much more fertile plains

and a sustainable source of water.

They found it hundreds of miles to the east.

The River Nile.

"Egypt is the gift of the Nile."

That's what the Greek writer Herodotus said, and it was

a really elegant way of expressing a simple but essential truth,

which is that the civilisation of Ancient Egypt simply would never

have flourished - or even existed - if it wasn't for this

vast, broad body of water,

which the Egyptians called Iteru, or "The River".

But the Nile also had a special, quite magical,

almost miraculous quality.

Every year, in late summer,

flood waters roared down from the First Cataract, here,

and inundated the valley on either side, covering the land

with this thick black silt, very fertile, which aided agriculture.

So for the Ancient Egyptians, the Nile meant fertility,

it meant prosperity, but also symbolically,

it meant rebirth and it meant life.

And the Nile came to dominate and really shape the way that they

thought about and also saw the world around them.

So fittingly, my second treasure is a celebration of the Nile.

The Naqada Pots were discovered in graves near the river bank...

..filled with food and drink to sustain the dead in the afterlife.

They were decorated with images that would come to dominate Egyptian art.

I've come to see a collection excavated by

"The Father of Pots" - Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie.

It's quite startling to think that these pots, some of them,

are 6,000 years old.

The majority of it is red, representing the barren soil

of the desert, but the black stands in for the Nile,

for the irrigated fertile earth after the flood waters have receded.

And then as time goes by, you see - from an aesthetic point of view -

artistic development, as people come in,

change the forms of the pots,

add these handles and include these designs.

Some of them, like these spirals, geometric designs,

but occasionally you found pots like these, decorated with animals.

You can see flamingos, you can see gazelles,

and these triangular shapes a bit like pyramids,

like those natural forms that I found in the desert.

But above all, the biggest motif you found

on these Naqada Pots was the boat.

The boat had symbolic importance because it helped take

the deceased from this life into the realm of the afterlife.

So what you find in these late Naqada Pots are the beginnings,

if you like, of Egyptian art proper.

You find a delight in the natural world, a recognition of the

primal, central importance of the river for this culture,

and also a complex system of religious belief

in which the afterlife would predominate.

The pots were handcrafted with clay

harvested from the banks of the Nile.

And the pigments used to paint them were collected from the landscape.

John O'Carroll knows where to find these pigments.

Some almost greys as well, which are quite lovely.

-It's really vivid when you break it up...

-It's quite vivid, yeah, it's quite beautiful.

Ochres were the earliest pigment that mankind used,

so it's in a way a sacred material.

So is it just yellow we're looking for?

Well, there are wonderful, sort of, red oxides.

-We're spoilt for choice.

-It's glorious, yeah.

This is a lovely red.

Oh, there we go. Look at that!

Also known in Northern European culture as

"The Sacred Blood of the Goddess".

John prepares the pigment.

Then you add gum arabic and you have

a wonderful red, almost oxblood pigment,

which you will use to paint the pot.

We've got a typical Naqada scene here, it's a boat, a sickle boat.

It's all beautifully decorative.

And in all of the Naqada ware,

this lovely, joyous fluidity of line and repetition

occurs again and again, giving the pots life.

We know that scale is important in Egyptian art

- the bigger the person, the bigger deal they are,

so clearly the woman has more status. Perhaps a goddess then.

Often there's a man depicted next to her.

The man is always shown in a smaller size.

Sometimes he does have an erect penis, which I will put in here.

There we are, just do a little one there.

-Do you think I might have a go?

-I think you should.

-What about these creatures above?

-Flamingos.

-Ah.

-That's not bad.

-Very flamingo-like, yes.

Where do you feel that the pots stand in that history?

How important are they?

I think they're very good, they're joyous, bringing together nature

and man in a fluid, harmonious way before it becomes formalised.

And very important and pivotal to the art of Ancient Egypt,

and indeed the world.

'My first foray into the world of Egyptian art has taught me how,

'from the earliest times, artists developed

'a simple but powerful visual style.'

It's so clear to me now that the Ancient Egyptians before the

Dynastic Era were in tune with the natural world,

and their imagination was dominated by these opposites,

if you like, between life and death,

our world and the next, the world of mortals, the world of gods.

In fact, when you look at this stuff, you see all these motifs

and themes which I'm sure form the matrix for later Egyptian art.

And in a sense, it set the scene for my next treasure,

because we're on the way to the first nation state

in the world - a unified Egypt, the famous Dynastic Era of the pharaohs.

Thanks to the abundant gifts of the Nile,

by 3000 BC clusters of villages had grown into thriving kingdoms.

The annual flood brought trade and prosperity,

and half-a-million people lived alongside the river.

My third treasure was discovered in the Nile Valley,

close to an ancient fort in Nekhen - "The City of the Falcon".

Now, I think you'll find this quite surprising, but this

rather uninspiring plot of scrubland yielded one of the most important

artistic and historical discoveries ever in 1897,

when a couple of British archaeologists - Messrs Quibbel and Green -

were scrabbling around in the dirt here

excavating the ruins of the local temple.

Now, to the untrained eye it doesn't look like anything much,

I mean, today there's an old bottle, there's a flip-flop...

And back at the end of the 19th century, Quibbel and Green

weren't having much luck either. They found a mud brick wall,

an earth mound faced with stone...

nothing, UNTIL they started digging over here...

..and dug deep into a thick layer of clay.

And as they dug, they started to discover

what appeared to be treasures,

things that looked like ritual objects,

and one in particular caught their eye,

and that piece - discovered in this very spot -

proved to be nothing less than the foundation stone

of Ancient Egyptian civilisation.

CAR HORNS HONK

To see it, I head north to the capital, Cairo.

My treasure now resides in the Egyptian Museum.

It's a potent memorial to the father of Egypt, King Narmer.

People often talk about artists ripping up the rule book.

Well, this is the rule book of Ancient Egyptian art.

It's called the Narmer Palette, and it dates from around 3000BC.

A palette was used for grinding paint,

but this is a ceremonial, ritual version, and it commemorates

probably a series of victories after which the state of Egypt

- Upper and Lower Egypt - was unified into one.

And it shows a king smiting his foe.

But the reason I find this so interesting, the reason that

Egyptologists get very excited about this, is because it contains

in one piece a number of different elements and styles and approaches

to representing the world that were essential to Egyptian art,

and would be used time and time again

for 3,000 years until the days of the Romans.

The space has been organised into these different bands, or registers.

There's the presentation of the human figure, which is typically,

as we think of it, Ancient Egyptian.

It's a composite view - you see a torso front-on,

you see the legs to one side, the profile of the face

and yet a single eye facing you frontal as well.

There's the use of scale to indicate importance,

so the king is far and away the biggest person on the palette,

which means that he's the boss.

And there's an interest in the natural world that you would

see again and again in Egyptian art.

There's the god, a falcon, Horus.

Up above you've got a protective cow goddess called Bat,

and on the other side you see the king again

in the form of a bull attacking a fortified town.

All of these things became essential components of Egyptian art.

The system that was created here would last for thousands of years.

It's like a tablet incised with the commandments of Egyptian art.

In the centuries after King Narmer laid down the rules

of Egyptian art, the country he unified

went from strength to strength,

and the Ancient Egypt we know today began to take shape.

Perhaps no visual form says Ancient Egypt quite as memorably

and immediately as the pyramid, and here at Saqqara

there's a whole cluster of pyramids that still dominate the skyline

and communicate the thrilling power of the kings that built them.

But the earliest pyramid of all was this one here,

the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, which was built to mark the tomb

and funerary enclosure of Djoser, the first king of the Third Dynasty.

And in doing so he ushered in the Pyramid Age,

when three royal brothers

produced my next three very distinctive treasures.

These three treasures herald the coming of age of Egyptian art.

The first was discovered to the south of Saqqara,

at the ancient site of Meidum.

The father of the three brothers is thought to be Sneferu,

the first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom.

Sneferu completed this imposing pyramid, but my next treasure

was found in his son's more modest mud mastaba tomb nearby.

In 1871, the great French archaeologist Auguste Mariette

was excavating here, and when his team of Egyptian workers

opened up this tomb beneath me

and shone their lanterns into the darkness,

they suddenly saw four eyes staring back at them,

and they fled in terror because

they had just come face-to-face with their Ancient Egyptian ancestors,

who appeared to be alive more than 4,000 years

after they were buried here.

The extraordinary work of art they finally dared to dig out

is now in the Egyptian Museum.

Well, here he is, the king's son, Prince Rahotep,

with his Freddie Mercury tache, alongside his beloved wife Nofret,

whose name means "The Beautiful One".

And I think both sculptures embody a number of attributes

of Old Kingdom art. This is art that feels simple,

it's self-possessed, and it's stable, it's fit for eternity.

And I've seen both of these sculptures

many times in reproduction,

but I've never quite understood their power until seeing them

for real, because the reproductions don't show you properly the eyes.

Because the eyes are spectacular, they're made of rock crystal.

And when you see them from the side, there's a translucence to them,

they have a jelly-like quality, and a shimmering, sparkling feel.

'The skill in recreating the lenses of the eye

'so authentically is breathtaking.

'It's said the eyes are windows to the soul,

'and these ones certainly animate these statues.'

And I quite like the way you have little flickers of individuation.

So if you have a look at the brow of Rahotep,

you can just make out the furrows.

It looks like he's ever so slightly anxious,

and I know this is just projecting onto them, but I like to think that

he's not really the most important person in this relationship,

he's a little bit anxious because his wife, she seems like the boss.

She's the one who wears the trousers.

I reckon Nofret was quite high-maintenance.

'It's almost as if the souls of Rahotep and Nofret will live

'for ever in their statues, just as the Egyptians intended.'

Art from the Old Kingdom inspired one of Egypt's

most celebrated artists,

Adam Haneen, to become a sculptor.

What do you think makes the art that was

produced in the Old Kingdom so special?

The Old Kingdom is very, very important

and I feel it's the most important period, because it's the period

when they discovered the Egyptian style.

People prefer usually artists' first work, first years,

because this is the years of discovery.

After this, he gets the technique, he gets the style, and there is

a kind of repetition, exactly as what happened in the Egyptian art.

How much of an influence has Ancient Egyptian art

been on your own work?

Discovering. Discovering is something very important

and very strong.

The changing of form from natural form to stylised,

and when you see this, is something very great,

something alive, something active,

so it is very impressive, more than other periods for me.

BIRDSONG

My fifth treasure is a painting, and it too was born of the

Ancient Egyptians' quest for immortality via art.

The artists set out to create a vision of an

agricultural paradise, offering peace and plenty in the afterlife.

My treasure was discovered at Meidum,

in the tomb of the wife of Rahotep's brother, Nefermaat.

It's startling to think that this was painted

4,500 years ago, because it's such a delightful scene

that really appeals to a modern sensibility.

In some ways it doesn't feel that Ancient Egyptian,

because you sense that the artist who

did it had a degree of freedom, they were licensed to really use their

eyes and observe the natural world, and they have relished doing that.

You have a sense of harmony and balance.

Three are facing that way, then another three are facing the opposite way.

But repetition's never absolute. For instance, here,

the tail feathers are on different levels

to ensure that there isn't monotony.

The plumage has been picked out with such care and detail.

There are all sorts of different types of marks

- sometimes speckles, sometimes diagonal lines,

curving lines for different types of feather.

And the whole way through you sense that the artist is

looking, looking, looking,

and that's the secret of its success as a painting.

And it's tempting to just think of this almost as a modern work,

a genre piece, a scene from nature, but of course,

for the ancient Egyptians,

this was part of something much bigger, which actually

- when you realise the context -

transforms the meaning of what you are looking at.

The geese were one part of a much larger painting

which survives only in fragments.

Artist Leo Stevenson is piecing them together

to recreate this missing masterpiece.

So what I've done is, I've got a lot of photographs of the bits

that survive, and these are outlined in black on my drawing here.

And they're scattered in museums around the world?

Yeah, scattered to the four winds.

There's bits of them all over the place.

So here's a reproduction of the geese.

They go right along the bottom of the picture,

everything else above has been lost essentially.

The bits in between done in red are my interpolation

of what I think is missing. I mean, this piece is this.

Oh, yes, so there's the arm, and you can see the flesh colour,

the dark, sort of, tanned skin.

Tantalising little fragments,

and here we see one of the captured geese.

So this is a great fragment, this.

It's got a lot of clues as to what is going on.

But of course, you can actually use this fragment as

quite a clever way of reconstructing what this would've looked like,

because Egyptian art often employs symmetry in that fashion, doesn't it?

That's right, that's what I'm going to try and do in this painting.

Great, OK.

I can see that you've made a start at sort of doing the outlines.

Yes, what they would have done here is outlined the

-basic design in a very thin red paint.

-So you're ready to

-carry on with the outlining, are you, with that?

-Yeah.

I'll just continue this.

What's it like to work with this?

It's actually really nice. It's so simple, so direct.

'Leo's recreation makes us reconsider old prejudices about the

'supposedly primitive, two-dimensional style

'of the Egyptians.'

Do you feel that Egyptian art is as good as art from later periods?

-Uh, yeah.

-Do you really believe that?

The quality is not to do with technique,

quality is to do with intention.

-The best...

-I don't believe you think that.

-I do!

The best Egyptian art is very powerful,

and it has a certainty to it - this is the way things had to be,

this is the way things will always be.

-Do you think that we slightly write it off?

-Yes, we do.

It becomes invisible because it's alien-looking,

it's so repetitive, it's so stylised people have stopped looking at it.

So it's easy, I think, for modern people to be slightly dismissive

of this because it might seem repetitive, slightly stifling,

not particularly free, but, in fact,

it's something else, it's hugely strong.

It's very powerful. It makes for some magical images.

Now we return to the tale of our three Old Kingdom brothers,

the sons of Sneferu.

The third was determined not to be outdone by his siblings,

and left an artistic legacy like none other.

I'll give you a clue - his name was Khufu,

and very close to here he created one of the

most awe-inspiring works of art in history.

It's something that's fascinated the world ever since,

and it still throws up as many questions as it does answers.

I'd hoped to approach this treasure riding across the desert

like Lawrence of Arabia.

If we're lucky, I think we're going to get quite a good glimpse

of it down the end of this road,

and no series about the treasures of Ancient Egypt

would be complete without it, not least

because it is the only surviving wonder of the Ancient World.

CAMEL BRAYS

'I knew a camel would come into it somewhere.'

Whoa! Ugh! That is, erm, slightly scary.

I'm glad I'm up.

I am, of course, talking about the Great Pyramid,

and I don't really want to bombard you with statistics,

but in the case of the Pyramid, they are quite impressive.

It was 481-feet high, it was built with

up to 2.3 million blocks of stone,

each one weighs an average of one tonne, and there are estimates

that if it was built over two decades, a block of stone was

placed down every two minutes throughout

a ten-hour working day, every single day.

And it was the tallest building in the world for 44 centuries,

until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

BRAYING CONTINUES

The Great Pyramid was built around the same time as Stonehenge

- considered a prehistoric miracle back in Britain.

But as soon as I explore the inner workings of the Pyramid,

it becomes clear there's no contest.

It's an eerie and also quite transformative experience

coming into the Pyramid, because to begin with you go

through this squeezed passage...

..a bit like walking upwards through a giant birth canal

or something, before being reborn in another realm altogether.

You hit this space, which feels like a modernist cathedral.

I could be on an escalator in some sci-fi city.

Certainly I'm heading up towards the hereafter,

up towards the King's Chamber.

I find it impossible to think that minutes ago I was standing

outside in the desert sun, and now, all of a sudden, I'm in this

echoing space which is at the centre of the Great Pyramid,

which is frankly quite exciting, but more than that

this is the epicentre of the Old Kingdom.

And we don't know all that much about Khufu,

the man for whom this was built.

But I think of this not just as a monument to one man.

This is an expression of a civilisation that was

so sophisticated, confident.

What an emanation of power...

..from thousands of years ago,

and this space feels so contemporary.

The pyramids feel as old as mountains.

It's hard to fathom how they were ever built.

The hackneyed answer is that Khufu was an evil tyrant who

exploited thousands of slaves to construct his vainglorious tomb.

But the recent discovery of the graves of the workers who

built the pyramids debunks this myth.

This discovery could be the most important discovery

of the 20th century, because it's telling us

for the first time about the builders of the pyramids.

You know things about kings and queens, tombs of the officials,

but you never discover anything about the workmen who built the pyramids.

When you started digging, what did you discover here?

It's really amazing.

They built their tombs from what was left over

from building the pyramids.

Every workman will save a piece of granite or limestone

to build his tomb.

Underneath each tomb there is a skeleton,

and in the hand of the skeleton you will have a

pottery vessel for beer, because he has to drink beer in the afterlife.

Then actually, here also you have areas for making bread.

-So they were looked after?

-They ate meat every day.

They were not slaves then, as we might think?

If they were slaves, they would never be buried beside the pyramids.

This can't be a place for slaves,

this is an organised community of people living, eating, drinking.

'There's one question I really want to put to Zahi.'

Is it possible to consider the pyramid not so much

as a work of monumental architecture, but as a work of art?

It is a work of art.

Building the pyramid itself, the design of the interior

of the pyramid, the statues in the tombs, the statues of the kings -

it is a combination of arts to help the king to be a god,

and that's really for the quest of immortality.

Art in Ancient Egypt was not for the sake of art,

but art in Ancient Egypt was for the sake of religion.

Whether it's a work of art or of religious faith,

the Great Pyramid is a pretty hard act to follow.

But Khufu's son, Khafra, had a go.

Khafra built this enormous causeway that connected his pyramid

with his Valley Temple down here, and near it is this

monumental guardian to the entire site at Giza.

It's the Great Sphinx.

It was probably carved with his own features,

and the American writer Mark Twain said,

"The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness,

"it is imposing in its magnitude,

"it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story",

all of which is true.

Beautifully written, a wonderful, evocative description

of our obsession with Ancient Egypt, but I still think

that the Great Sphinx is a little bit obvious to be my next treasure.

In fact, my seventh treasure was found

in Khafra's magnificent Valley Temple.

These indentations on the alabaster floor provide a clue.

There are 23 in all,

and each one was designed to take a statue of the King...

..which marked an astonishing leap forward in the art of sculpture.

Well, this is one of those 23 seated statues of Khafra,

and it's one of the masterpieces not only of the Old Kingdom,

but also of Egyptian art as a whole.

It is the quintessential expression of kingship.

He looks like he has such innate authority and command.

And it's sculpted out of a stone called diorite,

a very hard, dark stone, and the sculptor has managed to

polish it up so that you've got the grain of the stone,

almost like mottled tiger stripes, very beautiful to look at,

and in the case of his torso and his face, appears soft and smooth.

With great care and deliberation

they've created that sense of musculature.

But my favourite detail of all is up here.

The falcon, the god Horus.

And he raises his wings in a protective gesture

around the King's head.

It's as if they're fused, one's merging into the other,

and the message here is that the King, Khafra, is divine.

Modern sculptor Nathan Doss is amazed that his ancestors

were capable of carving some of the hardest stones known to man.

The idea that Ancient Egyptian artists were

driven by their religious beliefs explains a lot to me.

We've seen how animals like Horus were thought to have divine powers.

This meant that artists excelled at portraying animals

in a range of different materials,

including alabaster and faience pottery.

When we think of Egyptian treasure, we tend to think of gold,

it was the precious metal associated with the pharaohs and the gods,

but no golden statues of the royals survive from the Old Kingdom,

and only one deity, and this is it, it is Horus, the falcon.

Horus being one of the oldest and most important of all the gods,

and appropriately enough this was discovered in Nekhen,

which means the City Of The Falcon.

It is clearly an exquisite piece of metal work, beautifully made,

but I particularly love the eyes, the obsidian eyes,

which almost appear to be swivelling, scoping for prey,

looking around, it gives the head of this bird a real alertness,

but also has an imperious quality,

so it's as if the artist who made it,

who's up there with the finest gold workers of all time,

has been closely observing nature,

but also trying to create something numinous, godlike,

something that you could worship, and to think that this is one really

rare piece of gold that survived from the Old Kingdom,

everything else was stolen, melted down, recycled,

it's a sublime piece.

Imagine everything else that there once was which has now been lost,

it's enough to make you weep.

It may seem bizarre to us

that a bird could mean so much to the Egyptians,

but from the earliest times animals played a starring role

in art and religion.

The Egyptians used animals to communicate with the gods

because they felt that the animals were at an intermediate stage

of evolution as it were.

So you have humans slightly on a lower level perhaps,

who are called Cattle Of The Gods and then you have actual animals

who speak the secret language and know what the gods are going to do

because the animals are very good at knowing what nature is going to do.

So for example, when the baboon stands up in the morning

and raises its arms and shrieks, it helps the sun to rise.

Crocodiles know where to lay the eggs before the inundation,

so if you want to predict the flood,

look and see where the crocodiles are building their nests.

Cats, dedicated to the goddess Bastet, and the cat was sort of

self-indulgent and beautiful and Bastet is the goddess of

self-indulgence, beauty and love.

And if you look at these statues you can see that

animals are carved with great diligence.

These gorgeous pieces are well-observed,

they are beautifully made and they are astonishingly lifelike.

Egyptian artists were brilliant at animals,

but when it came to humans, their work was more rigid and stylised.

But Egyptian society was changing.

During the Fifth Dynasty, around about 2450 BC,

a full-time professional bureaucracy developed

made up of hundreds of civil servants and priests.

These men, who started out as commoners,

were social climbers and they had a profound impact on

the course of Egyptian art.

One of the best examples of this was discovered at Sicara.

For the first time we can meet one of the pharaoh's subjects -

and it feels like coming face-to-face with a living,

breathing person from the ancient world.

This is a marvellous sculpture of a priest called Ka-aper,

a rather self-important man.

And there's a lovely story about its discovery

because the Egyptian workmen who uncovered it felt that he was a

dead-ringer for their local boss, their mayor,

and as a result this sculpture has had a nickname ever since of

Sheik Al Beled, meaning village headman.

It's been sculpted from sycamore,

the whole thing was covered in a thin layer of plaster and painted.

What I find startling about this statue is that it's

so full of vigour and animation, there's a real gesture here

towards a realistic style in the promise of his man-boobs,

in that great paunch, even in the podgy lower legs and ankles.

He's quite pleased with himself.

Here is a man who feels like he is striding towards us

across 4,500 years of history,

perhaps not in the prime of life, but in the pride of middle age.

It wasn't just bureaucrats and priests

who were scaling the social ladder.

Men like Ka-aper had serious competition from hairdressers.

The right hairdo was vital

because it was a social signifier about status, age and gender.

And of course, being Egypt...

Oh, yeah, sorry, I've got to keep my head in one place.

But being Egypt, there was a hierarchy of hairstyles,

and good hairdressers were like artists,

their skills were much sought after, a bit like couture designers today.

Elite men, they kept their hair very short, or shaven,

and relied on a decent wig to make the right impression.

Pharaohs had shoulder length wigs

which were arranged in curls and braids.

The sons of the elite,

they had round wigs or just opted for the shaven look.

Servants and musicians were completely shaved as well.

This obsession with hair in ancient Egypt meant that

the hairdresser was quite a star.

Suitably coiffured, I'm heading for my tenth and final treasure.

It's one of the most beautiful tombs in all of Egypt.

And, you may have guessed,

it belonged to a very important hairdresser called Ty.

We've witnessed the conventions of art being laid down,

now we can see them being brought together in one place.

The main event is through here.

This is an offering hall.

There's a sense here of a whole world,

it's a real glimpse into the Old Kingdom.

And it's really wonderful because Egyptians loved order,

they loved repetition, but it was never absolute.

So here's a little example, here are some agricultural workers,

they're driving some donkeys,

and the donkeys' heads seem to be exactly the same, again and again

and again, but there's a little donkey head leaning down,

just to break up what would otherwise potentially be

a tedious line.

There's a lot of vigour and energy and hubbub.

There are all sorts of activity, people building boats,

there are agricultural workers, there are sculptors,

there are metalworkers, there's a melee of activity on behalf of Ty.

And on the southern wall here you have these slits

and if you look through... you meet Ty himself, the statue.

And I think my favourite bit is over here.

This wall is dominated by one brilliant scene

in which Ty is on a boat with a number of attendants

and they're out for a day's hunting, but they're not hunting fish,

even though you can see loads of fish in the waters beneath,

they are hunting hippos,

and one poor hippo over here has been harpooned.

Hunting hippos is quite a dangerous thing to do, so our hairdresser Ty

is standing well back just overseeing things, it's a good view.

I love that sense of almost abstract pattern,

because you have these strong verticals of the background,

you have these dramatic zigzags which represent the water beneath,

and then within that, you have all sorts of variation.

Here, there's a fish which is actually being pulled out of

the water crossing one register into the next.

There's room for a slight insouciance,

there's room for variety, and it's very pleasing to the eye.

And in here you can see the hippos almost floating,

tumbling around in the water, there's a sense of motion,

there's actually a real sense of energy,

it's a totally delightful scene, this, completely absorbing.

I've reached the end of the first leg of my journey through

Egyptian art and for me it's been a revelation.

I've been travelling around Egypt for several weeks now

and over that time I've really had to confront a prejudice

that I didn't know I even had about ancient Egyptian art,

I assumed that it was a little bit monotonous and samey and unchanging,

but what I've discovered is something very different.

There is a lot of this kind of stuff, real life,

you find daily scenes in the tombs,

you find observation of the natural world, which is utterly charming.

So I have found a great deal more experimentation,

a great deal more innovation than I thought was there.

So this idea that Egyptian art didn't change

over thousands of years is just not true,

it really couldn't be further from the truth.

Next time, the Golden Age.

Art reaches new heights of splendour and ambition

as one man ushers in one of the most dramatic revolutions in

the history of art.