Ultimate Treasure Countdown

Narrator: Ancient egypt, this land of the pharaohs

Has captured our imaginations for thousands of years.

Bettany: It's one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known

And it's left us with some truly astonishing treasures.

Narrator: I am professor bethany hughes.

I'm a historian and I spend my life travelling the world

To investigate the stories of the cultures and civilizations

Of the past and I love having the chance to share what I found with you.

Ancient egypt, a land ruled by pharaohs.

Bettany: Selecting just 10 treasures from this stunning civilization

Is seriously tough.

Narrator: But I've pulled together a top 10 countdown that reveals

Some of the world's most breath-taking monuments,

First, we'll be heading to cairo, today the capital

Of egypt for number 10 in my countdown top 10 treasures.

It's a gruesome tale of a 3,000-year-old cold case,

A royal assassination and our treasure number 10,

The mummified body of an almighty egyptian king

That was discovered somewhere rather surprising.

Bettany: The trail starts here in the ancient city of luxor when some rather

Curious things started to appear on the antiquities market.

Narrator: Incredibly valuable riches belonging to some of egypt's most famous pharaohs

But no one knew where they were coming from.

In the spring of 1881, the suspicious authorities started to make enquiries.

They discovered that they were being sold by a local farmer called abdel rasoul.

He was immediately taken in for questioning.

Bettany: Under torture, abdel rasoul revealed the source of his treasures.

He led investigators out here to this rocky cliff face overlooking the nile valley.

Narrator: Back then this remote location was entirely unexplored.

Bettany: He led them to this spot and to a shaft in the sheer cliff face,

Which is now known as tt320.

The terrified suspect claimed that one of his goats had fallen down this hole

And that he'd scrambled down to rescue it.

Narrator: Rasoul had made a remarkable discovery.

When the investigators lowered themselves into the shaft,

30 metres deep no one was prepared for what they found.

Bettany: Down there, there were over 40 mummies, um,

They were pharaohs and queens and other members of the royal family

And the story of how they got there is truly extraordinary.

Narrator: Close on to 3,000 years earlier a priest called pinedjem discovered

That robbers were raiding tombs in the valley of the kings

And valley of the queens where egypt's pharaohs and super rich were buried.

And the robbers weren't just stealing all the tomb treasure,

Pinedjem realised they were taking the bodies too.

Bettany: For him, this wasn't just robbery this was desecration.

This was destroying their chances of an eternal afterlife.

So he knew he had to act fast.

Narrator: Pinedjem summoned trusted followers for a high-risk mission,

To break into the tombs, steal the royal bodies,

Smuggle them up this mountainside and then stash them in this shaft.

They hid here undisturbed for close on 3,000 years until abdel rasoul's goat

Gave away their hiding place.

Today, the pharaoh mummies found in the shaft are all together in cairo

And it's a truly extraordinary sight.

Bettany: What you've got here is basically a roll call of ancient egyptian power.

Many of the great pharaohs are here, there's seti I and rameses the great

And even that quick thinking priest who rescued these bodies over 3,000 years ago.

Narrator: But one particular pharaoh here is number 10 in our countdown.

Bettany: Meet rameses iii.

Narrator: Rameses was a man with lots of enemies,

He had to fight off invading armies from the middle east to defend egypt.

Bettany: But the real trouble came from within the kingdom.

His wife queen tiye wanted her son on the throne so she hatched a plot

To assassinate her husband.

Uh, now we know all about this because it's recorded on a papyrus that's now

In turin and this historical event is known as the harem conspiracy.

We're told that the plot failed.

The conspirators were arrested and were sentenced to death but what happened to rameses?

Narrator: The papyrus doesn't let on and rameses simply disappears from the history

Books sparking a theory that he died of natural causes.

For over a century, the mystery remained until a few years ago a group

Of forensic scientists carried out a post mortem

And subjected the dead pharaoh to a ct scan.

Ahmad samir a curator at the egyptian museum was stunned by what they found.

Bettany: Is there any evidence on this mummy

That tells us exactly what happened to rameses?

Bettany: Wow. So that was definitely so this was a mortal wound.

So he, he couldn't have survived it?

Bettany: That's the incredible thing about history

Is that it's constantly changing.

There are, there are constantly new stories, new chapters being written in.

Samir: Without doubt.

Narrator: But the story doesn't quite end there.

In the horde of mummies, there also appears to have been rameses' son

Prince pentawere the man who conspired to replace his father on the throne.

Now known as the screaming mummy this body shows signs of strangulation.

Most likely he was hanged for his part in the assassination plot.

We can tell he was in disgrace because his mummy was crudely wrapped

In a rough sheepskin instead of the traditional linen.

So now the guilty son and his murdered father rameses lie side by side.

The mummy of rameses iii is number 10 in my treasures of egypt because

It reminds us that ancient egyptians were people with real lives,

Full of scandals and tragedy and intrigue.

And that modern science is at last allowing us to tell their incredible

Sometimes gruesome stories.

Bettany: Egyptian mummies are obviously humans

And so have to be treated with huge respect.

Um, the mummification process was designed to give individuals immortal

Afterlife and in some ways that is exactly what's happening.

Uh, the mummies here are slowly revealing their secrets

So we know intimate details about how the ancient egyptians

Lived and in the case of rameses iii, exactly how he died.

Narrator: Next in our countdown, it's number nine,

A brilliant discovery that brought a dead language

Back to life and helped us to decode the secrets of this ancient civilization.

At number 10, we've met the mummy of rameses iii.

And now we're exploring the nile delta in search

Of number nine in our countdown of great egyptian treasures.

Bettany: The story starts here with the discovery of a modest bit of stone

That's probably the best-known stone fragment in human history,

The rosetta stone.

Narrator: This slab of rock is just three and a half feet tall but the intricate

Writing on it has given us a key to unlock the secrets of ancient egypt.

In 1799, it was discovered here at this fort that protects the town

Of rashid that was better-known back then as rosetta.

Narrator: This fort was on the front line of a power struggle for egypt

Between the british, the french and the turks of the vast ottoman empire.

Bettany: A small french garrison was based here and they received reports

That an ottoman army had landed just 20 miles up the coast.

Uh, this fort was all there was that stood between the attackers

And the glittering city of rosetta and so soldiers and military engineers

Immediately set to, to try to repair these dilapidated walls.

As they were working one french officer noticed that a number

Of the stones in the fort had carvings on.

You can still see some here.

But there was one particular one that caught his eye.

Narrator: It was a stone covered in egyptian hieroglyphs

But that's not all.

Underneath there was what seemed to be a translation in ancient greek.

It was incredibly tantalizing.

Egyptian hieroglyphs had been a total mystery for 1,500 years.

The greek translation could help decode this lost language.

But before they could make a start on the translation,

The french suffered a shattering defeat and the precious stone

Fell into the hands of the victorious british army.

Shipped back to london it ended up at the british museum.

International experts got to work, desperate to decode egypt's hieroglyphs

And to explore ancient egypt's secrets.

Bettany: So what you're looking at here, um, are two languages.

There are ancient egyptian hieroglyphs at the top and greek at the bottom

And in the middle there's a kind of street form of ancient egyptian.

Narrator: The experts began by looking at the greek which they could still read

And they found the world ptolemy which they knew was a pharaoh's name.

The challenge was to find the ancient egyptian equivalent.

Bettany: What they did was they looked in the hieroglyphs to try to find a cartouche,

It's a bullet-shaped thing and inside that's where

The pharaoh's name was always written.

Narrator: This was the very first word they were able to read

In ancient egyptian hieroglyphs.

The first step in deciphering a language

That had been dead for 1,500 years.

Bettany: So down here, you've got the name ptolemy in greek and then up here

Is the name ptolemy in ancient egyptian

But this is how they managed to decode it.

So what you have is a square that stands for a p, a semi-circle for a t,

That kind of rope shape is an o, the lion is an l,

Underneath here you've got an m and then these two reeds are a y.

So slowly, slowly it meant that they could start to piece together an ancient

Egyptian alphabet and that meant they could suddenly translate ancient egyptian.

Narrator: A dead language had been brought back to life.

And ancient egypt's temple walls, tombs, scrolls and treasures all of them

Covered in hieroglyphs could suddenly speak to us once again.

For the first time, we discovered intimate secrets of the pharaohs.

We could learn about murders and love affairs that shaped the story of the world

But we also heard about the ordinary people who built

These monuments and painted these walls.

Bettany: Suddenly, ancient egypt was filled with real people and their real voices.

Narrator: And our understanding of how the ancient egyptians lived

And loved and fought and died was completely revolutionized.

Bettany: The rosetta stone is possibly not the most beautiful or spectacular

Of our treasures but arguably it is the most important.

Writing was power in ancient egypt so by being able to read the ancient egyptians

Words we can really understand the lives of not just the great

And the good but also ordinary women and men on the street

And that is why it deserves to be in our list of top 10 treasures.

Narrator: Rediscovering how to read hieroglyphs

Transformed our relationship with ancient egypt.

The walls of temples and tombs became like the pages of a book,

Packed with myths and fabulous history.

And next, we're going to investigate a lost treasure that was plastered

In so many hieroglyphs it took 40 years just to copy them down.

When they were finally all translated, they told tales of incest and murder

And at the center of it all the family of egypt's most famous queen, cleopatra.

To get there, we're travelling more than 600 miles up the river nile

To a city in upper egypt for treasure number eight.

Bettany: If you'd come here in the middle of the 19th century then the whole place

Would've looked like this.

Just a very typical bustling egyptian market town.

But if you knew where to look you could've spotted a rather intriguing clue.

Just the very tip of a massive ornamental gateway poking out of centuries' worth of sand.

Narrator: But this wasn't any old gateway.

This was a gateway that once belonged to queen cleopatra.

That was enough to entice explorers and treasure hunters to the town of edfu

And they began to dig.

Bettany: It took them seven whole years to excavate this site

And if you follow me you'll understand why.

It is absolutely vast.

It's one of the biggest temples in the whole of egypt

And it is beautifully well preserved.

I mean it really is in the most fantastic state.