Sacred Sites - First Season

Of all ancient civilizations,

Egypt has left behind the greatest legacy of sacred sites.

The mighty Pyramids, the majestic temples

of Karnak and Luxor,

and the shadowy tombs of the Valley of the Kings

are among its greatest monuments.

All of these sites evoke a powerful reality.

The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death

and the afterlife.

They mummified the bodies of the dead,

preparing them to face the fearsome journey

into the underworld.

On papyrus rolls and tomb walls, they recorded the spells

that would help the dead survive this journey.

This collection of prayers and incantations

is known as the Book of the Dead.

But this seeming obsession with death

could mask a more subtle reality.

In 2015, a researcher discovered a unique artifact

at the Cairo Museum... a 4,000-year-old leather roll.

This leather roll opens like a window for us

for a new part of Egypt that we didn't know.

This incredibly rare manuscript

reveals the origins of the Book of the Dead.

It could change everything we thought we knew about religion

in ancient Egypt.

For 3,000 years,

Egypt was the most advanced civilization on the planet.

Its legacy of art and culture

includes some of the world's most famous and mysterious

sacred sites.

Many of these monuments were inspired

by the desire to prepare for life after death.

The ancient Egyptians essentially existed

for the afterlife.

They lived in houses made of mud-brick, unfired mud-brick.

Even the king lived in a palace made of unfired mud-brick.

But yet, you look at the funerary monuments,

and they are all made of stone, high-quality stone.

And the minute the king became king,

his workmen started working on his tomb immediately.

But in 2015, a new discovery

undermined centuries of Egyptology.

Hidden for four thousand years, it reveals the secret origins

of Egypt's most famous religious text.

This document rewrites the history of the Book of the Dead.

And it reveals that Egypt's sacred sites may tell us

as much about the living as they do about the dead.

Here at Giza on the outskirts of Cairo

stands the most famous of all these sites,

the last surviving wonder of the ancient world.

The Pyramids of Giza.

The Pyramids are guarded by the impassive Sphinx,

known in Arabic as "the father of terror."

It exudes this awful majesty

because its face is that of a pharaoh, Khafre.

The Pyramids were built for Khafre and two other pharaohs

some 4,500 years ago.

To this day they bear the names of these great kings of Egypt.

Menkaure, the smallest of the three,

but still a massive structure.

Khafre, its peak snow-capped with limestone.

And the titanic Khufu... the Great Pyramid itself.

Weighing almost six million tons, the Great Pyramid

was one of the most gigantic buildings ever erected.

It was originally covered with slabs of polished limestone,

representing the descending rays of the sun.

When the Egyptians began to build the Pyramid,

they located a square and they cut in the solid rock

and they made the base of the Pyramid to be nine meters high

of solid rock... no stones.

Using mortar made from mud and clay,

an army of workers spent decades building the Pyramids.

They were not slaves but free men, skilled laborers

who used simple materials like wood and rope

in the construction process.

For the Great Pyramid alone they assembled 2.3 million

finely cut limestone blocks.

The Pyramids are not just magnificent structures.

They are also tombs.

Deep within the Great Pyramid lies the King's Chamber,

said to be the burial room of the pharaoh Khufu.

From this chamber two shafts slice through

the colossal stonework like ancient skylights.

The mysterious tunnels in the Pyramids.

People, they call it air shafts they are not shafts for air.

The shafts speed the king's ritual ascent

into the heavens,

because the Pyramids and pharaohs

were a link between the people and their gods.

To guide the dead through the afterlife,

the Egyptians compiled a great collection

of prayers and spells.

They wrote them down on the floorboards of coffins,

on tomb walls, and on papyrus.

Around a thousand years after the Pyramids were built,

Egypt entered its golden age... a great era

known as the New Kingdom, roughly 1600 to 1100 BC.

The awe-inspiring Temple of Karnak

was constructed at this time.

It was a statement of intent by the New Kingdom pharaohs,

reflecting their power and majesty.

During this time, the Egyptians refined the afterlife spells

into a collection of some 200 incantations.

Many centuries later, archaeologists discovered these

spells in the tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs,

hundreds of miles south of Giza.

Today, they are known as the Book of the Dead.

The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead... the ancient title

is actually The Book of Going Forth by Day...

was to provide a guide for the soul of the deceased.

So to go forth by day is to actually have your soul

leave the tomb and return to the body at night.

What is called Book of the Dead

are actually a lot of spells, were grouped and put mainly

on papyri, and this papyri will be normally rolled

and put with the funerary equipment of the deceased.

It contains a lot of important spells

that gives the deceased a magical power in the hereafter.

No two books of the dead were the same.

And yet they all shared the same account

of a great journey through a mysterious realm,

peopled with gods and monsters.

On the west bank of the Nile,

opposite the ancient City of Thebes,

lies one of the most famous sacred sites in the world...

the great Necropolis of the Valley of the Kings.

This place is a who's who of ancient Egyptian royalty.

During the glorious New Kingdom era,

virtually every Egyptian pharaoh was buried here.

Ramses II, Seti I, and the famous Tutankhamun...

all had their tombs in this renowned cemetery.

Even in ancient times it was a tourist attraction

for Greeks, Romans and others.

The warrior pharaoh Seti I, who reigned

over twelve hundred years before the birth of Christ,

was one of the greatest of all Egypt's kings.

His is one of the most remarkable tombs

in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb walls are decorated with scenes

from the incredible journey through the afterlife

described in the Book of the Dead.

The walls crawl with extraordinary scenes

and creatures.

Snakes with swords, animal-headed gods,

winged goddesses.

To modern eyes, the images seem strange and fantastical.

But for the ancient Egyptians,

they were part of the afterlife... a universe

that was very real.

But before the dead could embark on this voyage

into the unknown, they had to be prepared.

Their bodies had to undergo an incredible transformation

and an amazing ceremony to ensure survival

in the land of the dead.

But surprising new evidence of this ceremony was discovered

in another Egyptian tomb only opened to the public in 2015.

And scientific research shows that part of the ritual

was physical, violent, and very real.

Throughout the sacred landscape of ancient Egypt,

inscribed on tomb walls and papyrus scrolls,

the Book of the Dead spoke of a great journey.

The journey began with an extraordinary transformation.

A ritual thousands of years older

than the Great Pyramids themselves.

Mummification.

The Egyptians employed mummification

to preserve the body essentially

as a resting place for the soul.

There are certain exceptions to the rule of mummification.

If you drowned in the Nile, it is actually an expressway

to the underworld, and you are considered to be a blessed dead.

Over thousands of years, the Egyptians perfected

the fine art of preserving the dead.

To keep the body from decaying, priests carefully removed

the internal organs through a slit in the abdomen.

The deceased needed these organs for the afterlife.

They had to be protected.

These four porcelain vessels,

discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun,

contain the young pharaoh's lungs, stomach, intestines

and liver.

They are called canopic jars,

each one guarded by one of the four sons of Horus,

the god of kingship.

There was one organ that did not receive

this special treatment.

The ancient Egyptians saw the brain

as a source of putrefaction.

They did not believe

that the brain was significant in the afterlife,

and it was actually removed via a hook

that would be inserted through the nose,

and essentially the brain would be liquefied

with that metal hook and then would come out through the nose.

Finally, the priests encased the mummy

in a sort of papier-mâché made from linen or papyrus.

They molded it to fit the shape of the face and body.

After mummification, it was time for the funeral

and the final ceremonies to prepare the deceased