The Golden Age Treasures of Ancient Egypt

Ever since archaeologists began digging mighty temples

out of the desert,

and discovering objects of unheralded splendour and luxury,

ancient Egypt has obsessed

the imagination of the West.

Usually, though, the objects of its civilisation

are seen as historical artefacts,

the exotic relics of a mysterious lost world.

'I want to consider Egyptian art from a slightly different perspective,

'not that of an archaeologist or a historian, but of an art lover.'

'Over three films, I'm telling the story of Egyptian art

'through 30 of its greatest treasures.'

'So far, I've encountered surprising and stunning works

'that chart the emergence of a powerful and distinctive style

'over the first few thousand years of Egypt's history.

'Yet the glories of the Old Kingdom couldn't last forever.

In 2000 BC, Egypt was nothing like the mighty civilisation of old,

with its limitless wealth, fine paintings and great pyramids.

The country was impoverished, it was highly militarised,

and under constant threat of foreign invasion.

'But out of the darkness, Egypt rose again,

'to enjoy its golden age,

'when the art of the old order was reinvigorated

'by forceful personalities and revolutionary styles.

'It was a time when sculpture, painting, and architecture

'would reach new peaks of opulence and beauty.

'I'm in the ancient city of Thebes, modern-day Luxor,

'which rose to prominence around 2000 BC,

'after the breakdown of the Old Kingdom.

'The centuries that followed

'would be known as

'the Middle and New Kingdoms.

'If the Old Kingdom was the classical age of Egyptian art,

'when a strong visual style

'prizing harmony and repetition first emerged,

'then this would be its Baroque period,

'an era of grandeur, embellishment and experimentation.

'This ruined temple is where my first treasure was discovered.'

No-one has gone in here for years. I think more than two decades.

It's been blocked up with these old boulders.

GATE RATTLES

Look at that!

There's a whole chamber... corridor leading downstairs.

'From the moment tombs like this were first sealed,

'the promise of unimaginable treasures within

'has captivated raiders, explorers,

'and, more recently, Egyptologists.'

You had to be quite brave to be an Egyptologist.

It's easy to succumb to the idea of...the curse of the mummy.

I suddenly feel quite a long way from home,

as though I'm actually walking into...

Well, I am walking into someone's grave.

Hopefully, it's not mine.

'The early years of the Middle Kingdom

'were a dark and dangerous time,

'when ruling Egypt required toughness

'and a stomach for brutality.

'Among the treasures found around here were portraits

'of one of the most notorious tyrants in Egyptian history.'

Compared with the blunt, archaic

and even slightly primitive sculptures of before,

the statuary of this ruler,

with his striking Dumbo-like jug ears,

which are flapping at right angles to his head,

offers quite a sophisticated revolution, really.

We know quite a lot about him. He's called Senwosret III.

He's a Twelfth Dynasty king who was a warrior.

He waged a long and quite brutal, aggressive campaign

suppressing his southern neighbours in Nubia.

He poisoned their wells, apparently he carried off their women,

he burnt their fields of barley,

he built a series of forts and camps

which had quite unsubtle names like "Destroying the Nubians".

And these sculptures are typical of his portraiture

because they depict the king with this idealised torso.

He looks youthful, virile, he looks trim.

But his head is something totally different,

and that face is surprising and new,

because you find sunken cheeks,

thick-hooded eyes, and also these noticeable downturned lips.

He looks careworn and troubled, he's a bit world-weary,

so you find here the impression of an all-hearing, admittedly,

autocrat, but one who is also a bit pained by his own brutality,

and...I think that's why these sculptures feel so contemporary.

Arguably for the first time here,

you have the glimmer of complex psychology,

and I know it's anachronistic to say so, but, as result,

these sculptures feel a bit like modern portraiture.

'Like Oliver Cromwell 3,500 years later,

'Senwosret presented himself warts and all.

'He was a tough-as-nails leader of men

'and certainly not to be trifled with.

'But my next treasure, at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,

'reveals that Senwosret enjoyed the finer things in life, as well.

'His jewellers were capable of exquisite artistry.

'This is a pendant that he gave to his daughter.'

Jewellery in the Middle Kingdom was extremely sophisticated,

and this pendant on the end of a necklace,

known as a pectoral, is a particularly fine example.

And it contains these pieces of carnelian from the Eastern Desert,

turquoise from Sinai,

and lapis lazuli from modern Afghanistan.

And all of those have been secured within a framework of gold

that was probably mined near the king's stronghold in Nubia.

It's a very beautiful piece,

but I find it quite chilling as well as beautiful.

Beneath this vulture, which is hovering there with outspread wings,

you can see the king twice,

in the guise of a sphinx, trampling his enemies underfoot.

Particularly pathetic are those blue enemies,

they must be Nubians, right at the bottom, contorted in agony,

clearly crushed beneath the heel of a tyrant.

For me, this is a bit of a despot's bauble.

It's sinister and it's dazzling.

It's alluring and it's also toxic.

It's kind of like the jewellery equivalent of a poisonous orchid.

'Middle Kingdom jewellery is the finest in Egyptian history.

'Even master-craftsmen today struggle to understand

'how it was made using ancient technology.

'Mohamed Kalil has been making jewellery for 50 years.

'Egyptian craftsmen carefully had to trace and cut the intricate figures,

'meticulously slice and then set minute precious

'and semi-precious stones...

'..and buff the whole piece back to a sparkling finish.

'After the death of Senwosret,

'the Middle Kingdom soldiered on for almost 200 years.

'There was a period of chaos before Egypt re-emerged

'stronger than ever before.

'This was the New Kingdom, the pinnacle of the golden age

'that saw its kings take up a grand new title - pharaoh.'

The term for the palace, "pr-aa", or literally "great house",

came to refer to its royal occupant. "Pr-aa", "pharaoh".

It's a bit like British people talking about the crown.

And the shift came about to solve a particularly tricky problem

faced by the administration.

A new king had laid claim to the throne.

But there was a fundamental issue.

Egypt's first pharaoh was a woman.

'The Egyptians didn't really have a word for "queen".

'Royal women were given titles like King's Great Wife.

'So, when a young woman named Hatshepsut came to the throne,

'her somewhat confused portraiture

'revealed a little bit of an identity crisis.'

Hatshepsut ruled Egypt not as a queen but as a king,

and that clash between her gender and her position

seemed to be irreconcilable.

But she appears in the guise of the male god Osiris.

Her skin is red, and red skin in ancient Egyptian art

was associated with tanned, masculine skin.

And she also wears a divine beard,

hardly the most feminine of attributes.

Now, Egypt hadn't had a cross-dressing pharaoh before

but this has a gentle, wide-eyed beauty.

There's something quite ambiguous and androgynous about the face

which manages to nod both to her rank and also to her biology.

'It wasn't just Hatshepsut's image that received a makeover.

'Thebes was given a face-lift, too,

'transformed by her ambitious architects

'into a glorious capital city to showcase her public monuments.

'She rebuilt shrines and adorned the city with soaring structures

'that once loomed like skyscrapers.'

I don't think you need to be an ancient Egyptian

to appreciate that this gargantuan obelisk is a pretty awesome sight.

It's a beast of rock, weighing around 300 tonnes,

and it's monolithic, which means it was carved from a single chunk

of granite almost 30 metres high.

This is the tallest standing obelisk in Egypt,

and obelisks like this came into their own

under the pharaohs of the New Kingdom.

They were meant to represent the first rays of the sun's light

illuminating the known world.

And the tip of this one was sheathed in gold leaf.

People often talk about dazzling works of art. This one really was.

Imagine looking up to the top, in this glaring Egyptian sunlight,

and seeing that sparkling gold.

It must've actually been quite hard to look at,

like staring into the face of a god.

And Hatshepsut clearly understood the symbolic significance

of these soaring forms, because there's an inscription at the base

of this one in which she talks about "peoples of the future

"who will see my monuments and speak of what I've done".

So, for Hatshepsut, obelisks were kind of signposts for posterity,

pointing the way towards eternity.

'But Hatshepsut's crowning glory

'was like nothing Egypt had ever seen before.

'The road she built north from Karnak

'was a superhighway out of the city

'to one of the greatest buildings ever constructed.

'My next treasure is Djeser-Djeseru,

or "Holy of Holies",

Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri.

This is the first time I've visited Hatshepsut's mortuary temple,

and it makes this really...gleaming impression.

It's ordered and clean,

set against the wild, rugged disorder

of those Theban mountains above. It's a wonderful contrast.

And people often say that this anticipates classical architecture,

Greek and Roman, that it looks quite similar,

but, to me, for the first time that I've seen it for real,

it feels so modern.

This looks like a piece of

fascist architecture from the 1930s.

It could have been built

within the last 100 years.

'And, as you walk, there's this brilliant visual coup,

'because the temple itself is arranged across these terraces

'but, from a certain angle,

'particularly when you're further back, you can't quite gauge that.

'They stack on top of each other as though it's one big facade,

'and then, as you approach, it unfurls and reveals itself.

'It's like an Escher drawing, moving around in space before your eyes.

'Every aspect of the temple boasts of her brilliance...

'from the pillared porticoes

'decorated with giant statues of Hatshepsut,

'to the painted reliefs that extol her exploits.

'I love this one depicting her mission

'to the mysterious lost land of Punt.

'But my favourite part of the temple is tucked away to one side,

'an intimate chapel where she was free to be herself.'

It's quite a relief to leave behind those sun-soaked,

splendid public terraces of the temple outside and come in here

into this quite intimate, much more feminine space, really.

It's a chapel and it's dedicated to the mother goddess Hathor,

who often appeared as a cow. And you see Hathor as you come in,

her wide-eyed benign faces on the tops of those columns,

and you find Hathor again in the inner sanctuary

in these two really delightful

painted relief scenes on either wall.

Here she is, this scene dominated...

the composition in thrall to this image of Hathor,

the cow, the mother goddess.

And over here is an infant, a baby being suckled.

Now, that is Hatshepsut.

She's claiming the gods as her parents.

She had to present herself to the outside world

as a bit of an iron lady, with this sort of tough carapace,

but here, in this sacred inner space,

she could afford to show that she was, of course,

a woman of flesh and blood, as well,

someone with softer feelings, softer emotions.

Someone who could fall in love.

And that's why it's quite revealing to find in here

this little carving of a figure, a man.

The hieroglyphs tell us his name, and he was called Senenmut.

'Senenmut was Hatshepsut's right-hand man,

'and he was responsible for this extraordinary temple.

'We'll probably never know how the pharaoh came to recognise

'the talents of this low-born genius,

'but a sweltering cave above the temple contains evidence

'of scurrilous rumours doing the rounds at the time.'

This is an unfinished tomb cut out of the rock

just above Hatshepsut's mortuary temple,

and it was used as a kind of common room for the workers

who actually built the temple.

They came in here to shelter from the blazing sun,

and, as they whiled away their time,

they did doodles and made pieces of graffiti on the walls,

many of them quite crude and sexually explicit.

But there's one piece somewhere around in here...

I think... Oh, maybe up here,

if I can get up. There we go.

This is the doodle that I wanted to find.

It's two people, and they're having sex.

The one on the left, a male figure,

and the one to the right, apparently wearing the pharaoh's headdress.

And lots of people think that this is a very crude cartoon

of Senenmut having sex with Hatshepsut.

This isn't a treasure of ancient Egypt, it's not a great work of art.

You could just say this is a piece of misogyny,

it's having a go at a woman in power,

but it is very instructive and revealing,

because, even if they weren't actually lovers,

what this is saying is that, to ordinary people

who lived under Hatshepsut,

they felt that Senenmut really was the one in power.

And isn't that an amazing thing? He came from totally humble origins,

and yet he rose right to the very top of Egyptian society.

'With Senenmut's help,

'Hatshepsut had secured a glorious future for Egypt.

'I want to get an overview of what she achieved.'

Hatshepsut rediscovered the glories of ancient kingship.

Pharaohs no longer looked at all careworn, or troubled, or haggard,

because they were divine by their very birth.

And ancient Thebes would go on to become this glittering centre

of ancient Egypt.

It was a kind of stage set for this expensive drama of one-upmanship

as successive kings vied to commission art and architecture

that was more colossal, almighty, and opulent than ever before.

'By the 14th century BC, Egypt had settled into peacetime

'and become a land of plenty.

'The pharaoh could afford to take the art of monumental sculpture

'to another level.'

These two craggy figures

are some of the most famous

sights in the whole of Egypt,

with their weather-beaten faces.

They're known as the Colossi of Memnon

and Memnon was an Ethiopian king.

But they're not of this character Memnon at all.

In fact, each of these quartzite colossal sculptures,

weighing over 700 tonnes, five storeys, 60 feet high,

depicts one of the most important, powerful pharaohs that ever lived,

a man called Amenhotep III,

who ruled over Egypt at the pinnacle of its golden age.

'It's tempting to compare him to Louis XIV.

'Amenhotep III was the Sun King of the ancient world.

'He filled his deluxe palaces with distinctive statues of himself,

'their tranquil, Zen-like features

'now grace museums and galleries around the world.

'I've come to Berlin to find my next treasure,

'which suggests that even tiny objects in Amenhotep's court

'could be miniature masterpieces in their own right.'

This charming glass vessel

is one of the masterpieces of the New Kingdom,

and it's exactly the sort of thing that Amenhotep would have collected.

And, looking at it, you can understand why,

because it is really delightful.

It's like the ancestor of Nemo and his animated fishy friends.

It was once a cosmetics vessel.

It probably contained perfume or lotion,

and you can see that the rim of the vessel is actually formed

by the lips of the fish, a tilapia nilotica,

which was apparently associated with regeneration in the afterlife.

The thing I find really striking about this is actually that blue,

yellow, white decorative pattern,

because the artist has got this very effective tension going on

between the naturalism, where you can see wavy lines

creating the impression of fish scales,

but, at the same time, a sense of abstraction,

because the pattern's slightly visually distorting.

You can see, as well, these unusual hypnotic spirals

for the fish's eyes.

There's something still quite pliant and malleable about the glass,

it has this liquid quality.

And, to be honest,

I have no idea how the person who made this could have made this.

I'm blown away by the craftsmanship of this piece,

especially when you consider that the technique of blowing glass

wouldn't even be discovered for well over a millennium

after this sweet little fish was made.

'One expert has rediscovered how this fish was created.

'Using an ancient technique known as core forming,

'Mark Taylor reveals how molten sand could be transformed into art.'

Now, the idea is that the glass is wrapped around a core

in the shape of the inside of the fish, minus the tail and the fins.

Can I try this? I'm desperate to have a go at this.

-OK, that's yours.

-Am I using this rod?

-You're using that rod.

This is cool here to the touch.

Yeah, that's cold, that end.

-That's it, just touch it down.

-Just touch it?

-Yes.

Now, pull away, and turn with your left hand.

Ooh, it's sticking there.

Pull away a little bit with your right hand. That's it.

Just try and get a nice even trail around.

Now, how do you stop this? It's getting thicker and thicker.

-Just turn faster with your left hand.

-This is the ugliest fish!

Look at it!

It's quite... I like this, though, it's good.

Do you want to take back over for a bit?

Cos I think otherwise we'll be here forever.

-You make a lot of glass, Mark?

-Quite a lot, yeah.

How challenging is the Amarna fish?

Erm, it is difficult, it is difficult.

All core forming is difficult, it takes a lot of patience.

And it takes a lot of concentration, and you get rather hot.

I've got some thin rods of coloured glass,

and I will heat those up and literally wind them around.

It's like a piece of spaghetti.

I'm just using the point of the blade

and I'm just dragging it across the hot glass.

It makes the fish come alive,

-it suddenly looks as though you've got a fish with scales.

-Yeah.

How much admiration do you have, Mark,

for these ancient Egyptian glass-makers?

Well, to be honest, I've a lot of admiration for them.

They're working with a fairly simple technology,

using a material which can only be used at red heat,

sort of, you know, 1,000 or so centigrade.

This particular glass-maker who made this fish,

he is an experienced glass-maker,

he would've been probably doing this all his working life.

Now, the tail is where it all goes a bit free-range?

That's right. It's the bit I find most difficult.

This is a tense moment, actually, of making the fish.

There you go.

-So, you just sort of bash it?

-Literally, yes.

I'm just trying to squeeze it into a basic tail shape.

'This hot little fish will spend the night cooling down

'before being reborn.'

I have to say, I think this is superb.

-Do you feel pleased with it?

-I do, yes, yes.

I think it's reasonably similar to the original one.

Reasonably similar? It's pretty much identical!

You could swap it in the case, and no-one would really know.

'From skilled craftsmen to priests and bureaucrats,

'Amenhotep required a vast workforce to maintain his kingdom.

'As wealth trickled down during a reign lasting almost 40 years,

'a new elite could commission splendours of their own

'where it mattered most - in their tombs.

'My next two treasures offer very different visions

'of paradise in the afterlife.'

This stretch of hills here

just around the corner from Amenhotep III's grand temple,

is where many of Egypt's

lower-ranking officials were buried -

civil servants, bureaucrats, administrators.

And yet, some of the most refined tomb paintings

anywhere in ancient Egypt were discovered...in those slopes.

'11 fabulous fragments

'from one of the most sublimely decorated tombs of them all

'have ended up in the British Museum.'

I'll tell you what I find extraordinary

about the works of art in this gallery.

We know who commissioned them, a man called Nebamun.

But Nebamun wasn't really that important.

In fact, he was a middle-ranking accountant,

he was a bean counter, really,

and yet, somehow, he persuaded one of the most important artists

who ever worked in ancient Egypt to decorate his tomb chapel.

The man who made these has been described

as antiquities equivalent of Michelangelo.

In this scene, which is one of the masterpieces of the tomb,

he is out hunting with his family, and they're hunting birds.

You can see lots of wildlife behind them, a whole panoply,

a chaotic mass of activity, vegetation,

butterflies fluttering through the air.

It's a flurry of activity and observation of the natural world

which you see everywhere in the tomb chapel paintings.

Like here, you've got servants clutching these hares

with very long velvety ears.

Their fur has been brilliantly observed.

But my favourite scene from the whole tomb chapel

isn't actually that one, it's this.

It's a big banquet scene

and the whole piece is tinged with an unabashed eroticism,

a sexiness which you see

particularly in this amazing scene of servant girls dancing.

It's almost, for Egyptian art, raucous.

You can see that they are sinuous and supple and lithe

and bending and moving and whirling.

Getting a bit hot under the collar!

And there's one woman who's playing this double flute and, again,

this is very rare in Egyptian art

because, rather than seeing people in that classic profile appearance,

you have women here who appear frontal, they're face on,

and their arms, in the case of the flute player's left arm,

have actually been foreshortened.

It's new.

It feels completely unusual within the context of Egyptian art.

It's a moment of sudden freedom

that transports you to this wonderful party

which Nebamun was hoping to host after his death.

Having studied these paintings for years,

Richard Parkinson understands their complexity.

What's the significance of the marsh setting?

The marsh landscape is very much equivalent

to the European pastoral landscape.

It's the idyllic primeval world.

It's also where you go to have fun and sex.

It has huge symbolic significance

but, if we stress that too much,

we run the risk of saying that

when people go to the Sistine Chapel all they see is the theology.

Compare it with a Renaissance Madonna.

It is a religious work of art, it does show the Madonna,

but it also displays the artist's individual artistry

and it's exuberant, it's meant to be enjoyed.

The butterflies -

it's very hard to imagine

he was thinking deep theological thoughts as he painted.

You see somebody actively at work and that reminds us,

not just of the humanity of the ancient Egyptians as a whole,

but the humanity of this particular craftsman.

-Do you think...?

-He's anonymous but we know what he's doing,

we know almost what he's thinking.

Do you think that's quite surprising, perhaps,

for some modern viewers when they think about Egyptian art?

Because often it feels like it's quite monumental,

it's quite static, it's there for eternity.

It shouldn't, but I suspect it often does.

I think we underestimate, always, these artists.

Not to be outdone by a lowly grain accountant,

the mayor of Thebes had his refined idea of paradise

carved into the limestone cliffs.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised

that the highest-ranking official in the land could afford

top-notch art in his tomb,

but the carvings here are just breathtaking.

They're so beautiful.

Before you get into the nitty-gritty of who these people are,

what they represent, what these hieroglyphs mean,

you're just transported, dazzled by the artistry of the carving.

For example, here, just take this little passage.

There's an array of different marks -

very precise, very accurate -

to create all of this different patterning of the necklace

and the various wigs

and then this contrasting smooth flesh,

with the modelling of the face,

which has been created out of nothing more

than just gently undulating surface of the stones -

you get a sense of the crease between the jaw and the neck,

and around the nose.

And this, it's amazing in stone.

He's managed to create the impression

of translucent, diaphanous material out of solid rock.

You can tell that these are glossy, fashionable courtiers, really,

in all of their finery, with this black eyebrow and black eye

which has been drawn on top of the limestone.

And there's a debate about what's going on there

because the tomb's unfinished

and it could be that everything would have been painted,

but there's another theory which is that this was the finished effect,

and I like that because it gives it, I think, extra refinement,

it has a minimalist splendour.

The man who created this,

the sculptor or sculptors who worked on it, they were master craftsmen.

They've created a work of art

with so much delicacy and poise

and refinement and confidence.

These are artists working at the very top of their game.

Local artists continue to work with this soft limestone,

inspired by the tombs around them.

Have you ever almost finished and then made a horrible mistake?

Of course, many times.

And what do you do?

If I try to repair it, I can repair it.

If not, we can leave the piece

and I forget that I...

it was a piece we do.

Yeah. Do you think I could have a go at doing some carving?

-You?

-Yes.

-You want to try?

Yeah, if that's all right.

It is soft, isn't it?

But doing this way will take more than one year.

This is too timid, you mean?

I'll try a bolder one, then.

We'll just slightly narrow his arm.

How's that?

That's not bad, it's not the best line.

Do you see any talent here?

-Yes.

-Such a bad lie!

When Amenhotep III died,

Egypt was a superpower the likes of which the world had never seen.

But everything was about to change.

When his son took the reins around 1350 BC,

Egypt underwent a revolution.

For my money, Amenhotep IV is easily the most fascinating

and controversial figure in the whole of Egyptian history.

He was a rebel, he was described as history's first individual

and he became known as the heretic king.

This place - the beautiful Karnak Temple -

represents everything that he came to reject.

He rejected the god Amun, to whom this temple is dedicated,

he rejected the city of Thebes, the site of this hallowed ground,

and, above all,

he rejected the art and ideology of centuries of Egyptian kingship.

Amenhotep IV instigated

one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Egypt.

He swept away Egypt's religion...

..abandoned thousands of traditional gods...

..and instead pledged allegiance

to the one and only sun disc known as the Aten.

He even changed his name, in deference, to Akhenaten,

meaning Effective for the Aten.

And his new religion required dramatically different art.

This is one of the colossal statues from Karnak of Akhenaten

and it's got to be one of the strangest works of art

in all of the history of ancient Egypt because, ostensibly,

he appears as a pharaoh in the traditional guise of a king.

He's got the headdress, he's got the crook and the flail,

he's wearing his kilt, it's a very frontal statue.

But just look at it. It's bizarre.

Something odd is going on here.

Everything is distorted and elongated,

it looks almost surreal, quite grotesque.

If you look at his face, it's been stretched,

he has a very long nose, very, very full lips,

slightly slanting eyes set obliquely.

And then his physique is...so strange.

It's a sort of combination of a man and a woman.

You have the shoulders,

but then it really thins before swelling out to these broad hips.

And this slight - well, not slight, not just a hint of a paunch -

he's got a belly here which is sagging over the kilt

going down to these plump legs. And it's bizarre.

Who is the kind of man who wants to look like this?

Why does he want to represent himself like this?

Was he a visionary or was he completely insane?

You look at this and you think this isn't just a megalomaniac

who wants to look powerful, he looks bonkers really.

This distorted statue isn't my treasure

because it was only the beginning of Akhenaten's story.

Five years into his reign, he gave up tinkering with old temples

and abandoned Thebes altogether

to build his ideal city 300 miles down river.

Akhenaten was a man with a vision.

He was also canny enough to realise that his grand plans

for a new state religion dedicated to the sun disc Aten

stood little chance of flourishing

in the dynastic centre of the new kingdom, Thebes,

because it was so strongly associated

with another god altogether - Amun.

In other words he needed a new royal capital.

And that's where I'm heading now.

He selected a barren strip of desert

and named his settlement Akhetaten - modern-day Amarna.

It might not look like much today,

but this city once stretched for 10 kilometres.

It was a purpose-built metropolis

designed to meet Akhenaten's exacting standards.

It's staggering really to think that this vast, stricken dust bowl

was once a busy city inhabited by around 30,000 people.

And it was designed as a sort of monumental sun trap.

There were these open air temples that were filled with food offerings

in honour of the great sun disc Aten.

Akhenaten's new religion must have seemed,

in many ways, pretty strange and austere,

but in his odd new world, stark and almost bleak,

there was still ample room for all sorts of ceremony and splendour.

For the last 100 years,

this wasteland has proved a treasure trove.

The objects found beneath the sands

reveal the scope of Akhenaten's grand plans.

On his orders, the art of the city was evolving at breakneck speed

and his new style could be seen all over town.

This is a limestone relief from a private house in Amarna

and it contains many of the distinctive features

of art under Akhenaten.

You've got the distorted anatomies,

protruding buttocks,

brittle, narrow ankles and wrists,

swelling bellies,

elongated bony figures.

And then there's the sun disc with its rays ending in human hands.

But there's something else here, something new

because the scene is a domestic scene

in which Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti are relaxing,

playing with their daughters, three of them.

You can see Akhenaten sitting on a stool to the left

and he's holding out an earring

which forms a real focal point of the composition

and, beneath, his eldest daughter, the largest one,

reaches up to grab it

with a bit of a smile on her face.

It's a moment of play.

And then to the right, Nefertiti's also lounging on a stool

and two of her daughters are on her lap.

And it's sweet. And I love it

because so much Egyptian art was about lasting for ever,

it was built for eternity, it was about stability,

but here we find just a transitory moment.

It's an impression.

There's a sense that we've wandered into an apartment of the palace

and come upon the king and the queen and their family

in a moment of relaxation as if they weren't expecting us.

It's completely unprecedented in Egyptian art.

Today, the startling finds from Amarna

are scattered all over the world.

My next treasure now resides in Berlin.

It is the great masterpiece of Egyptian art.

The bust of Akhenaten's consort, Queen Nefertiti.

So here she is -

the second most famous face of antiquity after Tutankhamun.

This painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti

wearing this enormous, blue, flat-topped headdress

is actually a model from the workshop of a sculptor.

We actually know his name, he was called Thutmose.

And it's possible

that the eye for the left socket was never even made at all

because, in Egyptian art, figures are usually seen in profile

facing towards the right,

so it would have been redundant to finish off that side of the head.

And compared with those sculptures of her husband in Karnak,

which are quite grotesque, quite distorted, it is immediately obvious

that Nefertiti is the epitome of elegance and purity,

beauty and order and proportion.

We don't know much about Thutmose,

but we know that he was a genius of design

because he has composed this sculpture

using very strong, clear geometric shapes

like that inverted pyramid of the headdress, which rockets down

in perfect alignment with the forehead and with the cheekbones,

right down towards the point of her chin.

Then offsetting that, you have this spindly different axis of the neck

which looks like it couldn't possibly bear the weight above

and it creates this beautiful effect of her face gently bobbing about

like, I don't know,

a poppy bloom swaying gently in the wind on a slender stem.

Compared with Akhenaten

she's like this gentle, fragrant gust of midsummer.

But I wonder whether she's almost too perfect

because her skin is stretched right across the skull

and if you have a look down at the base of her neck,

you can see these very taut tendons

and she appears like a very powerful woman in middle age,

but a woman who has had quite a lot of work done,

she's had a few nips and tucks.

The only conversation she hasn't had

is the one with her optometrist about her left eye.

It's strange

because she is always hailed as the vision of ancient Egyptian beauty,

but the more I look at her,

the more I see something fraught

and, if that's right, it kind of makes sense

because, in real life,

Nefertiti was this leading player in the great revolutionary drama

that Akhenaten was enacting upon the national stage

and that must have come with its own immense pressures.

So, here, she appears as if she is desperately keeping up appearances

at the same time as suffering from epoch-changing stress.

The more I look at this bust,

the more I wonder whether her neck is, in fact, actually about to snap.

From the start,

there were violent palpitations within Amarna's dark heart.

It's only now that archaeologists are beginning to understand

why Akhenaten's one-man revolution was doomed to fail.

Anna Stevens is excavating the workers' tombs here.

There are a lot of signs here of joint disease,

so people were carrying loads that were too heavy for the skeleton.

There are a lot of healed fractures as well.

They could be the people who were quarrying the stone for Akhenaten,

carting the stone down to the city

and erecting his temples and palaces.

So tell me about some of the things that you've found in the graves,

aside from the human remains.

One of the nicest things we find are pieces of jewellery.

I don't know if you can make out the figure?

I can, I know him, he's called Bes.

He is my favourite Egyptian god.

-I like that.

-This is a superb piece, really lovely.

The detail on this piece is extraordinary.

You can see parts of his beard.

Are they lion ears, cat ears coming out the side?

And is that a tail or a big penis?

I think that's probably a tail.

So this was quite common?

Very common. Yes.

That's interesting because you sort of have this vision of Amarna

as being this new religious space

where it was all about worshipping the sun disc, but you're saying

that lots of ordinary people were still worshipping

-common gods that had been worshipped for centuries?

-Absolutely.

There was a tremendously strong current of domestic worship

that continued throughout the Amarna period.

There's not a single representation of the sun disc at the cemetery,

nor mention of Akhenaten on finger rings or scarabs or anything,

this was life continuing as normal.

What does that tell us about his power?

Or what does it tell of the interest of the ordinary people of Amarna

in the king and in his revolution?

Without the support of the people,

there was nobody to uphold Akhenaten's vision

when he died after less than two decades on the throne

and his revolution came crashing to an end.

He's gone down in history as a madman, a megalomaniac and a tyrant

but, for me, he was a powerful and brave reformer.

I have to admit I find the story of Akhenaten completely thrilling.

He's such a compelling figure.

He was a visionary and a rebel and he was also a prophet of sorts.

Just imagine what would have happened if his new religion -

worshipping the Aten, the sun disc - had taken hold.

Today, maybe we'd talk about Atenism

in the same breath as we mention other great monotheistic faiths

like Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Ultimately his vision burned just too brightly,

it was too fierce to connect with ordinary people.

The starkness and austerity of that inscrutable, omnipotent sun disc

blazing down on the people below -

that must have seemed ultimately to the ancient Egyptians

as much a kind of death star as a giver of life.

Shortly after Akhenaten died,

his city was abandoned by Egypt's new ruler -

the child pharaoh Tutankhaten.

Akhenaten's son was installed on the throne at the tender age of nine.

Unlike his father who'd initiated a revolution,

Tutankhaten set about a programme of restoration.

He issued a proclamation

lamenting the fact that the gods had abandoned Egypt.

He boasted that he rebuilt what was ruined

and drove away chaos throughout the two lands.

His reign witnessed the rebirth of traditional Egyptian culture

and a revival of the gods of the old.

In fact, in deference to the god Amun,

he even changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun.

When this tomb was discovered in 1922,

the name Tutankhamun became known the world over...

..and the art that was buried with him

is now as recognisable as any Western masterpiece.

It was a media sensation

as the cameras kept rolling to capture the glamour of the find.

And nobody was disappointed.

This is quite a strange sensation

because Tutankhamun is the most famous of all the pharaohs,

he's this towering figure in history and yet his tomb's tiny.

He didn't get a lot of real estate here in the Valley of the Kings.

This was the antechamber.

I've seen photographs of it,

it looked a bit like a kind of junk shop, a flea market.

It was just full of bits, bits and bobs,

like a very rich granny's attic or something.

This is him.

This is genuinely him.

It's like finding the portrait of Dorian Gray hidden in the attic.

It's a slightly ignominious tomb anyway in here now.

I mean, the poor guy's left to rest beneath...

in this rock-cut tomb with a sort of CCTV camera looking at him,

a few spiders' webs.

I feel like he deserves a sort of gentler resting place.

The treasures from Tutankhamun's tomb

are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The quantity of the work as well as its quality is astounding.

There can be no doubt that this was the zenith of Egypt's golden age.

But what really fascinates me is that

despite attempts to wipe Akhenaten out of history,

the art of Tutankhamun reveals

that at least some of his father's innovations would live for ever.

I think this is an exquisite piece of craftsmanship.

It shows the king hunting hippopotami

on top of, not a surfboard, but a boat made of papyrus stems.

It's beautifully made.

It's carved in wood and then gilded.

It's very detailed, very precise.

It's a beautiful, naturalistic representation as well.

There's something of the art of his father's regime here -

a certain swelling to the belly, a slight fleshiness to the lips.

And it's quite rare to find

a statue of a king or a queen in the round doing something.

That's why I find this quite exciting

from an art historical point of view,

because so much Egyptian statuary, particularly in stone,

is quite stiff and frontal, quite formal.

But here, you have something light,

something that feels like he could almost be surfing.

That he's in the moment.

My final treasure is perhaps a little obvious

but still utterly irresistible.

I wonder, though, whether it is possible to see a work of art

as famous as the golden mask of Tutankhamun with fresh eyes.

The mask of Tutankhamun

isn't just the most famous face of antiquity,

it's arguably the most famous face of all time.

Fashioned from solid gold

and decorated with precious stones and coloured glass,

it's become an emblem of the exoticism, the opulence

and the quality of ancient Egyptian art.

But for me, this mask is dazzling in a double sense.

It's spectacular, but it's also blinding.

And that's because in historical terms,

Tutankhamun was a bit of a non-entity.

He was this weakling boy king who didn't make it out of his teens.

So his reputation as the most famous pharaoh of them all

is the result of the transformative power of art.

Tutankhamun conquered eternity not because of his own exploits,

but because the master craftsmen who worked for him

during the golden age of ancient Egyptian art

were capable of summoning potent images of kingship like this

that have never been surpassed.

I'm at the end of my journey through Egypt's golden age

and I'm surprised and moved by what I've seen.

Beneath the carapace of glitz and sheen

is a touching and occasionally vulnerable human spirit.

During the Middle and the New Kingdoms,

Ancient Egyptian art reached uncharted summits

of luxury and magnificence.

But I've discovered something else, something a little bit less shiny -

the inner thoughts of Senwosret III,

the private spaces of King Hatshepsut,

the intimate, informal domestic scenes of Akhenaten.

Before I came to Egypt, I stared into the face of Tutankhamun

and I saw a rigid mask of power.

But now I sense something a little softer and more vulnerable as well

because, ultimately, there's an affecting naturalism to this mask.

It isn't just the image of a king, it's also the portrait of a boy.

Next time - the decline of a superpower.

Egypt succumbs to economic strife and foreign invasion...

..but its art follows daring and exciting new directions.