Ancient Civilisations - The Pyramids

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Sakkara, Egypt, 2,630BC. A man stands atop a structure of dizzying height as the final block grinds into place. For Imhotep, it is the culmination of his life’s work: a mountain made by man. He checks the joint while his workers wait in silence. Then, he gives a barely perceptible nod. It is done. Imhotep’s pyramid is the first, but more will come. Bigger pyramids, more beautiful pyramids, tombs filled with treasure, chambers inscribed with complex, sacred writings. But what motivated these ancient people to toil for decades over their vast monuments? What purpose did the structures serve? And what mysteries might still remain inside? A ⁠Noiser⁠ production, written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University of Cairo. For ad-free listening, exclusive content, and early access to new episodes across the Noiser network, join ⁠Noiser+⁠. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to ⁠noiser.com/subscriptions⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the annual season of the flood in Sicara, Egypt, 2,630 BC, the third dynasty of the old kingdom, the age of the pharaohs. In the dense heat of the afternoon, workers haul a limestone block across the sand. The sun leans its full weight on their backs. Too exhausted to complain, they don't rest. This is a race against time. Time is something their boss, a man called Imhotep, thinks about a lot. The monument their building must last for all eternity. That's what Imotep has promised, his own superior, the Pharaoh, Zezer.

For years, workers have toiled here, but now the end is in sight. One more block to go. Imhotep strides up the ramps of wood and packed earth until he reaches the summit, some 200 feet high. The view is dizzying. His breath grows shallow from exertion and excitement. Since he was a boy, he's seen visions of this. A mountain made by a man.

For so long it existed only in sketches, blueprints drawn with a fingertip in the sand. Impossible, they said. It cannot be done. It took all his diplomatic skill to persuade the king that this dream could become a reality. Finally, his vision has risen from the desert. Now they say it's a wonder of the world.

Temlechit, the workers shout to each other. Watch out. Imhotep looks on as the final block grinds into place. He leans in to check the joint. It's perfect. The rock polished so smooth that the two blocks fit tightly together. You couldn't slide a piece of papyrus between them. There is silence until Imhotep gives a barely perceptible nod.

It is done. His men break into the laughter of relief, grasping each other's shoulders. They jostle down the ramp in search of beer to begin their celebrations. Alone, Imhotep walks to the edge, looking over the swollen river towards the western horizon. Here, his eye to eye with the gods. One step closer to immortality on the most audacious structure the world has ever known. The first pyramid of Egypt. Thousands of years from now invaders will rename this river the Nile, from their Greek word

for valley. But now it's called the Owl, the Black River, after the color of the rich sediment that infuses the surrounding farmland with nutrients. Crops flourish here, which means people thrive, civilizations grow rich. Their imaginations have time to flourish too. Visionaries like Imhotep born a commoner, but with the wisdom and ambition of a god, move up through the ranks of society. He will achieve more than his wildest dreams, knowledge, fame and immortality.

These three obsessions drive generations of genius. geniuses like him and dynasties of kings. Imhotep's pyramid is the first, but more will come. Bigger pyramids, more beautiful pyramids, tombs filled with treasure, chambers inscribed with prayers and names that will echo into the distant future. The pyramids will inspire people, corrupt people, cursed people for millennia. But what motivated the ancient Egyptian Jews?

Egyptians to toil for decades of a vast monument? Was it the vanity of kings, the religious fervor of the people, or simply artistic expression? How did they have the knowledge, the technology? Did they have help from the divine, from aliens, from the lost civilization of Atlantis? These are structures that have stood for 4,000 years, keeping their secrets on their secrets. disturbed until the last two centuries. Perhaps most intriguingly then what mysteries might remain inside. I'm Paul McGahn and this is the pyramids. Every society has a creation myth. In Egypt all life starts with the flood. In spring, heavy

rain falls in the highlands of Ethiopia. This torrent swells the River Nile whose waters rush down the valley through the old kingdoms of Nubia and into Egypt. There the river bursts its banks and the land is inundated. Huge lakes form. Fertile silt nourishes the soil. This is no sandy desert, but a lush savannah teeming with life. When the flood recedes, a hill emerges from the water. The Egyptian world is born on that hill.

It's little more than a simple mound of earth or sand, but from that vantage point, the sun god, Ray, creates all the gods and goddesses. The very first religious icons found in Egypt are known as Benben, simple stone carvings that form the shape of this mythological hill. Does the idea for the first pyramid come from this origin myth? An attempt to recreate the mound on which Ray created life. Professor Salima Ikram is the distinguished professor of Egyptology at Cairo's American University. She took a break from her fieldwork to speak down the line from Luxor.

I think pyramids have managed to mesmerize humankind because they're so unusual, because even the ancient Egyptians would go and visit the early pyramids as tourists. So we have absolutely no clue, really, to be perfectly honest, as to why the pyramids were built and why they took their shape. But we do have endless speculation. So some of the ideas are that, oh, it's imitating a normal kind of mountainous shape that you would see in the desert. Or this is a evocation of the primeval mound that emerged out of the waters of chaos when the world was first created. Or when the sunbeams come down out of the sky, you get that sort of pyramid shape. And then also there is the thought that it is like fire from heaven, like a bend,

which is supposed to have been a meteorite that hurtled through the spy and landed somewhere in Egypt and this was pyramidal and shape and because they thought it came from the sun god, they adopted the shape and took it on. So you can see that there are lots of stories, but we have very few facts. Imhotep's monument is known as the steppe pyramid because it's constructed of six layers that are stacked up rather like a wedding cake. Indeed, the ancient Greeks spot the resemblance and coined the term pyramid from their own word for cake. But that won't happen until some 2,000 years after Imhotep.

To the invading Greeks, his pyramid will already be ancient. The civilization we refer to as ancient Egypt spans a period of history almost inconceivable in length. Take its most famous queen, Cleopatra. Her death, in 30 BC, occurs closer. in time to the construction of the Empire State Building than the completion of Imhotep's step pyramid. For over two millennia, the Egyptians don't know the word pyramid. They call their monuments MIR. Less than a century after Imhotep's great innovation, so still

quite early in the time span of the ancient Egyptian dynasties, their architecture reaches its pinnacle. Giza, a site on the west bank of the Nile, is being prepared. First workers lay down an access road, then they dig a channel. The Black River runs close to the site, and the canal fills with water during the flood season, allowing blocks of stone up to 15 tons in weight to be floated on barges. After the blocks arrive, one team drags a rock on a wooden platform, while another team pours water in front of the sledge to reduce friction against the sand. This smooth running lightens the load by as much as half.

Simple physics, known intuitively by the ancient Egyptians. They are born of the desert and have observed and adapted to its ways. They are also subjects of the great Pharaoh, Hufu. And this endeavor will ensure that their king is revered in this life and the next. Better known today as the pyramid of Kiyops, after the Pharaoh's Greek name, His resting place in Giza is the oldest and only surviving wonder of the world. So when the Great Pyramid was built, it was the only major monument on the site. It would have towered above everything.

And you have to imagine it in its pristine condition, faced with white limestone, with this brightly colored temple in front of it and this long causeway that was hiding things leading to another temple. And of course, the top of the pyramid, there would have been this pyramidion, which would have been covered with gold or electron. And when the sun hit it, it would just shine brilliantly. And so it would really be emanating light and power. And it would have been the most enormous thing anyone would ever seen. So you could see it from miles and miles away,

and especially when the light hit it, it would be be beaming out, the stream of light. So it would have been an extraordinary, magnificent place, and if you had helped build it, maybe you had a more intimate feeling towards it. But in subsequent generations, people must have thought this is a rather terrifying and holy place. It's a construction that takes place on a scale never seen before, and rarely since. Over 2.3 million blocks are transported to the site. It takes 20 years to complete. We know that a man named Mera worked on the pyramid because he wrote about it in his diary.

Mara's journal is the oldest known papyrus document in the world. Merah was a project manager responsible for sourcing some of those millions of blocks. In neat rows under papyri, he records how his team of 200 men traveled a length and breadth of Egypt to fetch stone for the construction. Every ten days he makes a couple of round trips by boat to a port called Tura. Around 30 limestone blocks are loaded onto his ship and transported to Giza. Judging by the date of the diary, this white stone is the cladding that lines the outside of the pyramid to make it shine. He refers to the great pyramid as Akhet Hufu, or the horizon of Hufu. Finally finished around 2005,

The so-called horizon of Hufu stands 480 feet high. For the next 3,800 years, no civilization in the world is able to construct a building taller than this one. The Great Pyramid holds that title for nearly four millennia. The internal structure of the user is mind-blowing. It really is. You're going in there, going up halfway, and then suddenly having this grand galley. grand gallery opening up for you and also the sort of the hidden passages that are within the pyramid. Imagine coming up with this spatial construct and then being able to build it.

I find that really astonishing, especially given the size of these blocks of stone, the limestone itself, as well as in various parts of the granite's facing of the limestone to make it a little more solid and evocative of solar power and also to be protection against thieves. I do think that something like Grand Gallery is quite an extraordinary feat of both architecture as well as engineering. I think that also feeds into how they couldn't have been normal human beings.

But then when you look at everything else they were doing, yes, they were definitely normal human beings. It's just this one amazing gift with Stone Island. architecture they had. Let us leave the great pyramid of Fufu shimmering in the sunlight at Giza and travel up river. Around 250 years will pass on our short journey. We pass in Hotep's old steppe pyramid in our faluka, an open-decked wooden sailing boat. Then we cross a lake to reach a temple complex built for the Pharaoh Unas, the last king of the 5th dynasty. It's 2003. 375 BC now.

Society is in decline, and it shows. The pyramid of Unas is the smallest of the Old Kingdom, standing at 140 feet high, only a third of the Great Pyramid. But this monument contains an innovation that makes it one of the most important relics in all of Egypt. The stone walls of Unas's tomb aligned with densely carved columns of old Egyptian text.

This is the first time hieroglyphics are used in a pyramid. Known as the pyramid texts, these images give voice to the distant past. But what did they have to say? There are 238 separate phrases. Some are inscribed for the benefit of the king. They list the food and goods he needs in the afterlife. They contain instructions, directions,

so that when Unas arises from the dead, He can complete his odyssey to the next world. Other passages are sometimes described as spells, but they're better understood in the modern context of religious rites. They offer ritual words of comfort. It's not so different from a poem or a passage of the Quran or Bible, chosen to be read at a funeral. The most powerful of these liturges Unas on to his new life.

Ho Unas, it says, you have not gone away dead You have gone away alive To sit on the throne of Osiris With your sceptre on your arm To govern the living The Pharaoh UNAS passes on to eternal life But his old kingdom descends into chaos

Later when stability returns Pyramid building returns too But never on such a scale Or with such perfection of form Perhaps resources have grown scarce, or power has become so precarious for the later pharaohs, that building must be hurried, because kings now tear down older monuments to recycle the stones into their own tombs. They reuse the steely that are carved with powerful inscriptions in their new temples. By 2000 BC, the builders of the Middle Kingdom not only plunder the past, but learn from it.

They know the pyramids of the old kingdom have been decimated by centuries of looting and pillaging. The tombs of its great pharaohs desecrated. New pyramids are built not only for eternity, but also for security. I think some of the Middle Kingdom pyramids are really interesting because these are the ones that are primarily made either of rubble and faced with nice stone

or made with mud brick and faced with nice stone. So the big event was really not the pyramid. although it looked like it was big. The biggest event was the burial chambers because the interior, the understructure, the substructure of these pyramids are extraordinary. They're like a little labyrinth with all kinds of tunnels going to and fro, perhaps on some level,

evoking the journey to the afterlife so that the king could successfully achieve what he wanted. And these are the ones that, in fact, are the Hollywood pyramids in that the entrance is not to the north. They've got secret hidden entrances. their tractors, their ways of getting into the burial chamber that are hidden, because the Egyptians were fed up of having their pyramids robbed. The Middle Kingdom pyramids are really when you have the tricky pyramids

where they've got traps to stop people from robbing them and you have the substructure that is far more complicated, which also at the same time is evoking this perilous journey to the afterlife, much like snakes and ladders game. And I mean, later on also in the New Kingdom, when you have not the pyramids, but these tombs under the great huge mass mountain pyramid. Again, the way that the architecture and the texts are laid out, it is basically creating the journey to the afterlife.

So it is very symbolic. Centuries pass. Dynasties rise and fall. Even gods go in and out of fashion as kings switch allegiances. There are pharaohs who follow Montu, the god of war. Others dedicate themselves to Amun, whose cult dominates Egypt for centuries. Many are devoted to the goddess Isis, as she helps the dead find their way to the afterlife. The perennial favorite is Ray, God of the sun, God of kings, God of the sky.

After all, it is Ray who is credited with the creation of all life on the hill emerging from the flood in Egypt's origin myth. Perhaps it's because of Ray that kings continue to build pyramids even when times are hard religion and immortality are strong motivators but what else did the pyramids mean to these people? I mean yes they wanted to be remembered they wanted to be commemorated to scars

but if they would be political about the pyramid building and this was going to be a place where people would be paid to work and also keep them out of trouble and give them a sense of nationhood there was all of that. Plus, of course, once you build a pyramid and you have a temple, the temples were very key to the economy. So it wasn't just religion, but it was also a way to have funds come in and dispersal of funds and therefore support people who were your dependence, generation after generation after generation. And so in a way, the temple served as these beneficent places as well as sometimes moral guidance.

guidance centres and research centres and places where people went to school or where they had medical supplies and so on and so forth. So a temple became a bit of a hub and the king's pyramid was probably just monumental and a bit scary. The Egyptian kings, they had a crook and a flail. So the crook was to show that I'm your shepherd, I look after you. And the flail was, if you are out of line, I'm going to beat you up. So it really does encompass what the king was supposed to be doing. By about 1790 BC, it's all over. Pyramid building in Egypt stops.

It's the era of the new kingdom. From now on, pharaohs are buried at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, where the hillside itself resembles the shape of a pyramid. In 1323 BC, the most famous Pharaoh of all, Tutankhamun, is laid to rest here. His burial chamber is lavish, packed with gold and treasure, but it has no pyramid to signpost its location. But this, we can be grateful,

as his tomb remains undiscovered by grave robbers for over 3,000 years, allowing us to marvel at its riches today. No doubt Tutankhamun himself witnessed the majesty of the great pyramid of Kiza, well over a thousand years old by the time of the young king's reign, but still reflecting the rays of the sun on its golden capstone. Monuments retain their ideological power.

Some new kingdom pharaohs start to restore ancient pyramids. Imhotep himself, the great architect of the first pyramid, is worship now as a god. For the later generations of ancient Egyptians, faced with dramatic social upheaval, such as foreign invasion, the pyramids become powerful totems, symbols of their former glory. I think that they used the pyramids much more in, say, 700 BC, 600 BC, when Egypt had been overrun by foreigners and the Egyptians wanted to unite themselves and show their strength and regain their ascendancy in the Mediterranean and Africa. And I think that's when the pyramids were suddenly being used more as a political force and an ideological force to use. unite them and think of greatness. So I think that for the intervening years, they didn't worry

about it too much because they were still great. And it was only when they found that they weren't a world power and they needed to prove themselves is that when they looked to their past and to the magnificence and the power that they had and then they used that to help forge a new idea of Egypt and its strength. Soon, however, the sun set on ancient Egypt. The Greeks arrive, than the Romans, and finally we reach the time of Christ and the modern era. The pyramids stand through it all, but knowledge of their language is lost. No one can recall what those pyramid texts mean, and so they appear secretive and mysterious. No one can explain how the monuments were built.

No one can rationalize how a people so ancient could be so advanced. It goes against all logic because progress moves forward, doesn't it? Not backwards. In those lost centuries, we enter a time of myth when many fallacies take hold about the pyramids. Surely, the thinking goes, there must have been something suspicious, cruel even, about the people who built them.

We're back in Giza, 2,560 BC. Stone Masons, working on Pharaoh-Hufu's ambition, project, reached the end of a long shift. Deep inside the half-built pyramid, they down tools and climb up into the soft evening light. Exhausted and famished, they head for the labourer's village. I want beef, beer, and bed, says one, and the others agree wholeheartedly. But one craftsman stays behind.

Inside the stone tunnel where they're working, he picks up a sharp bradol. He grins to himself. His surprise will cheer them up tomorrow. Working quickly, he scratches their team name into the alabaster. The Friends of Hufu gang. The next day it gives them all a good laugh, and then the graffiti is closed up inside the pyramid.

Four thousand years later, It comes to light again when a fibre optic cable is sent down between the blocks, and this scribble makes archaeologists pause. Friends of Hufu? That doesn't sound like the words of a slave. It had always been assumed that the pyramids were built by forced labour, that the pharaohs would power-crazed tyrants. But the evidence from the archaeology does not support this myth.

It's something that makes one so fed up, because everyone goes on endlessly about, ooh, the slaves built the pyramid. Well, probably some prisoners of war, and people who were criminals were working in the quarries to cut the stone. But most of the people who were building the pyramids were being paid in kind, and they were low-level workers. Many of them were farmers, and many of them, instead of paying tax, were working. So this was Corvay Labor. So this whole idea of oppressed people making the pyramids for the evil pharaoh is really a modern construct.

The stonemasons who called themselves friends of Fufu finish another day and head back to the labourer's village. One heads to the healer to treat an injury he picked up that day. Another pops into the smithy to repair a damaged copper tool. It's nearly dinner time. The air is rich with smells. from the bakery, the brewery and the kitchens. They were much better fed if we were working for Pharaoh because a pharaoh had access to cattle. They found all these places where there was fish production,

so they were having dried fish, they had lots of bread, there's beer production going on, they had a fairly decent barracks to sleep in, and all the bones from cattle as well as sheep and goat. So this is much more meat than a pest plant would get at home. So I think they would probably work hard, but enjoyed themselves at least their bellies were full. Far from slaves, the labourers who built the pyramids at Giza are valued craftsmen.

They have a plum job. Their life is not easy, that is true, but they have purpose. They benefit from the protection of a powerful and prosperous Pharaoh. They have beef and beer, a bed to sleep in, and the blessings of the gods. Aside from the myth of slavery, There are other misunderstandings about the pyramids, say pyramid and we think of Egypt. But the country with the most pyramids is modern-day Sudan. The Nubians start building pyramids around the same time as those we've seen in Egypt,

2,600 BC. But their dedication to the form lasts much longer. The monuments of the so-called black pharaohs are smaller, but more numerous. The 25th dynasty is also known as the Kushite Empire, a line of pharaohs who rule from 747 BC for almost a century. Their kingdom stretches from their homeland of Nubia in Sudan, all the way through Egypt to the Mediterranean. In 701 BC, aged only 20, a Nubian prince called Tahaka leads an army to defend Jerusalem,

earning himself a mention in the Old Testament. A decade later, he ascends the throne back in Nubia and commences an ambitious building program along the Nile. This includes a cemetery at a site called Nuri. Here, a string of pyramids is arranged like a necklace around the throat of the river. Inspired by the longevity of the Egyptian monuments, every Nubian noble wants a pyramid in which to rest for eternity. They fashioned their own architectural style, with tombs that have a smaller base and rise at a sharper angle to a pointed tip.

The largest and oldest pyramid at Nuri belongs to Tohaka, and he is surrounded by 20 other kings. Today these pyramids are waterlogged, remote, and underestimated. But unlike their plundered Egyptian counterparts, many Nubian tombs remain unexplored, Even to this day, what about the biggest pyramid in the world? We know the tallest stands of Giza, but the largest is not in Egypt, but in Mexico. 200 BC, the Great Pyramid of Cholula, is the center of a thriving town of 100,000 people, the second largest settlement in Mexico. The complex starts with a smaller pyramid, but it expands over the centuries,

until you have to walk more than a mile to circle its perimeter. Just like the Egyptian pyramids, the construction of Chalula is lost to myth. The Aztecs, some 1500 years later, record that it was built by a giant called Zellua, whose audacity angered the gods. They rained down fire on his pyramid. The fact that the temple once enshrined a meteorite

suggests that perhaps there is a kernel of truels. truth in the folk tale of raining fire. But the heyday of Cholula is at an end by the 8th century AD. The population dwindles. The vast pyramid is slowly buried in sand and dirt, until it resembles a hill. That's how it looks to the Spanish invader Henan Cortes, who arrives in 1519. He sees nothing more than an insignificant mound. His army quickly sacks the town.

It's a sacred place of tombs and temples with virtually no defences. In just three hours, Cortez's troops kill 3,000 townsfolk. That's 10% of the population. As traumatized as they are, the survivors keep the secrets of Cholula. The Spanish never find the vast pyramid hidden under the hill, but rather build a Christian church right on top of it. It's not until a construction in 1910 that the pyramid is rediscovered. By now it's 2,000 years old,

but it's still the largest man-made monument ever constructed anywhere in the world. There are pyramids in China that resemble hills too, structures covered in earth. Many temples in Southeast Asia, such as Kokare in Cambodia, or Bagan in Myanmar, take the form of pyramids. There is a white pyramid dating to 12 BC in the centre of Rome. There's a pyramid in Peru at a site called Karao, that is as ancient as the first step pyramid of Egypt.

Some experts claim it could even be older by 500 years. Why do pyramids appear in disparate societies on almost every continent? What is it about this shape that captures the human imagination? Some say it's not imagination at all. but inspiration. We express our worship for the landscape by creating monuments in its image, our own mini-mountains. Then there's our abiding relationship of the heavens.

Gods reside in the sky or just over the horizon, while our ancestors turn into stars. Raising ourselves up brings us closer. In that sense, pyramids are literally a stairway to heaven. At the top of a pyramid, priests and pharaohs can commune with deities, spirits, and even the forces of nature. Finally, a pyramid is an organic shape. A mountain is wider at the bottom.

Even a person wanting to stand firm will widen their stance. It's logical to build in this way. Nowadays a modern engineer could explain that the pyramid shape is efficient. The bulk of its weight lies at the bottom, decreasing as you go up. The ancients work this out by observation and perhaps by trial and error. The classic step design, like a wedding cake, is one they could explore without complex blueprints. Professor Salima Ikram says the construction of a pyramid is instinctive. I think it's very interesting because in the West people are always going on about, oh, we have to have a plan and shall we make a model?

And over here, a traditional building actually, is still done, what you're doing. is you take the chalk and you lay out the foundation and then you say, oh, it should go up straight for about, you know, five cubits, and then it should tilt in one finger's length in, which drives Western architects mad, and they don't quite understand, and Eastern builders just go, yeah, oh, yeah, you're right. And so when you look even at some of the more complex mosques that were built here, there are no plans, or there are very few plans, and there are a lot of verbal detailed descriptions. And I think that maybe for the ancient Egyptians, we do have some, you know, sketches, but they're generally plans and not 3D prospectival drawings.

However the ancients conceived of the pyramids, the monuments were built to last and to inspire. Over the next four millennia, millions of tourists journey into the desert to wonder at the spectacle. A travel writer has risen early to catch the pyramid of keyops in the best light, and to beat the crowds. His tour guide goes to round up the rest of his party. They overindulged the night before and are struggling in the heat. The travel writer takes the opportunity to study the pyramids and imagine them in their heyday. He cups his hands around his eyes to block out the here and now. Behind him, someone shouts out an offer of a camel ride.

He can offer good prices, he says, the best in town. The writer dismisses the tout with a flick at the hand. A small boy tugs his sleeve. He's selling figs and dates from baskets hanging from his thin arms. He won't take no for an answer. The travel writer sighs. He knows that he knows that. people make their living from tourists, but he needs a moment's peace to compose his thoughts.

Another boy barges in front of the first, eager to sell a hunk of his honey-roasted ostrich meat, that he insists is delicious. Actually, that does sound good. The travel writer, a Greek called Herodotus, rummages in his robes through a coin and buys a snack. The boy scampers off to flog his wares to another sightseer. It's 440 BC when Herodotus visits Egypt. He tours the many sites, consults priests at Memphis and Thebes, and speaks to tour guides at Giza and Sakara. He blends their accounts with his own observations,

and in this way becomes the world's first historian and travel writer in our modern sense of the words. The way he refers to the pyramids suggest they are already renowned back home. That's not surprising, as tourists have been coming to Giza for 2,000 years before him. We are probably closer to the Greeks, and the Greeks were to the builders of the Great Pyramid. So that gives one pause, doesn't it? According to what some of the ancient writers say, that the pyramids still, in sort of the 4th century BC, the North 56th century BC, still had their casing.

And they were covered with graffiti, both ancient Egyptian graffiti as well as Greek graffiti. and probably later on some Latin graffiti. So when you think of them, they must have been just covered with painted as well as carved in reminders of people who have been there of tourism. And we do have other sites like Zosa's pyramid about 2,700 BC

and people coming there in about 1400 BC as tourists and writing about and saying, oh, isn't this cool, here I am? Peridotus is lucky enough to see the Great Pyramid when it's still cased in limestone. gleaming in the sunlight, wearing its golden capstone. Is he impressed? Undoubtedly, but like any foreign correspondent, he also has a nose for scandal.

He dutifully records how his Egyptian tour guides hate the pyramids. Apparently locals believe they are symbols of tyrannical kings who enslave their people to construct vanity projects. Is this perhaps where the slave myth about the slave myth about, the Pharaoh Hufu, known in Greek as Kiyops first takes hold. Herodotus writes, Kiyops became king and brought them to every kind of evil, for he shut up all the temples, and then bade all the Egyptians work for him. Herodotus is quite a gossip. He repeats a lurid story, picked up from a guide, about Kiyops prostituting his own daughter, Nefertiabet, to pay for a

a pyramid. Kiyops came, they said, to such a pitch of wickedness, that being in want of money he caused his own daughter to obtain a certain amount of money. How much it was they did not tell me. She requested each man who came in to give her one stone. And of these stones, they told me, the pyramid was built. Eridotus is a valued historian whose accounts enlighten his people, and ours too. but his stories from the pyramids reveal a tendency to confuse opinion with fact.

His reliance on hearsay damages the reputation of Nefertiabet for centuries. Academic papers are still written today, debunking the scandal that blackened her name. The eyewitness accounts, passed on by Herodotus, were relayed to him thousands of years after Hufu, and his much maligned daughter were laid to rest. The last hieroglyphics are inscribed in 394 AD. After that, the language goes unused and is soon forgotten. Any writings not covered by sand are hidden by a fog of ignorance. The pyramid texts are now mere decorations.

Some Greek scholars insist that hieroglyphics represent pure philosophical concepts unfiltered by human language. they do not think it's even possible to read them. It becomes an accepted truth that hieroglyphics are entirely symbolic, not a language at all. At best, they're explained away as spells, at worst, as naive childlike pictures.

As ancient Greece and Rome give way to the modern era, as religions proliferate from the Holy Land, the pyramids and their pagan wisdom continue to find. fascinate. But by now they're associated, especially in the European mind, with the dark arts. I think that even for the ancient Egyptians, after about a thousand years of their history, when they looked at it, and so, oh my God, that's so weird. How did people do it? It's so amazing. Why did they do it? And they were really great curiosities and a testament to human, I don't know, ingenuity. And in a way, also because they couldn't think that humans were that in genius.

as they don't today. People were always saying, ah, someone else must have helped. The gods made it, that this made it. And so now it's, instead of saying the gods made it, it's like extraterrestrials made it, or that, oh, yes, the Egyptians have kite technology and they flew these things.

It's sort of like, you know, Stonehenge. Merlin played his harp, and the stones danced into position. So, I mean, I think that Chalkh Cathedral or any of these other cathedrals are equally splendidiferous. and extraordinary and were definitely made by human beings. Throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the mysterious world of the powerful pharaohs becomes fetishized. This mania leads to a great destruction and consumption of artefact.

From the 12th to the 17th century, a drug called mummia is widely prescribed by physicians in Europe. As the name suggests, mummia is made from preserved human bodies. Mummies. They're stolen from ancient Egyptian pyramids and tombs. Although, as demand for the wonder drug grows, it is rumoured that Egyptian prisoners are mummified to keep the supply coming. In 1658, one Englishman ships £600 or 270 kilos of what he describes as powdered mummy. This ghastly remedy is delivered to London, where it's sold in tinctures and poultes. to a credulous public who believe in the occult power of the pyramids. Decoding hieroglyphics becomes a fascination in its own right. Yeah, you know, in the 1600s, 1500s and even earlier,

people thought that this was all, these signs, each sign meant something, and it had a deep symbolic meaning. And that's why, of course, the ancient Egyptians have also been associated with secret societies like the Masons and those Christians and lots of other ones. That's why people like Napoleon also thought that there were ways of gaining power and lordship over the entire world if he could figure out what the ancient Egyptians knew. Even the great military leader Napoleon Bonaparte is not immune to the craze. He thinks that if he can figure out the secrets of the pyramids, it might give him an edge over the expanding British Empire. This man's vaulting ambition leads to a violent imperialist operation.

but his invasion of Egypt has one unexpected benefit. He inadvertently gives voice to its silenced ancestors. It's the 1st of July 1798. The French general, Napoleon, sails into the Egyptian port of Alexandria with 300 ships. He brings 38,000 troops to occupy this crucial crossroads between Europe and Asia. But there are also 160,000. scientists and scholars on board his armada. Just like Alexander the Great, who invaded 2,000 years earlier, Napoleon wants to use Egypt

as a stepping stone to stand astride the world. He is obsessed with the ancient people whose monuments rise like mountains from the desert. What secrets lie undiscovered beneath the sands? What knowledge can he acquire in this mystical place? What untapped power? Napoleon's soldiers take Alexandria easily. They then rampage up the Nile. During the Battle of the Pyramids,

they wipe out the entire Ottoman army based in Egypt. Napoleon names his victory after the great monuments of Giza, even though they are only faintly visible on the horizon during the actual battle. But this dedication gives a clue to how Napoleon wishes to harness the fearsome and esoteric reputation of the mighty pharaohs. Once he settled in Cairo, the general gives orders to his core of scholars. Go to Giza, unearth its secrets. His troops are also given clear instructions.

Conquer the people, but do not destroy the treasures. These he plans to take back for the cultural benefit of France. It's one year after the invasion, on the 19th of July 1799. engineering officer called Captain Pierre Bouchard is overseeing the construction of a new fort at El Rashid, the ancient port of Rosetta. Bouchard orders the removal of an old war. Amid the rubble is a large slab that snatches his attention. It is black basalt, polished to a shine in places, and he sees at once that it is covered in dense carving. Taking a rag, he orders his men to start.

aside. He brushes away the dust of centuries to reveal three different scripts. Mumbo-Jumbo complains one of the soldiers. But Bouchard is a cultured man. He runs his fingertip over the carving. He recognises hieroglyphs. A second pictorial script he does not know. And Greek. Send this to Cairo. He orders at once. Napoleon, Bouchard knows. will be pleased. This discovery could be good for the both of them. Within a month, the significance of the Rosetta Stone is clear. It's a Stelai from the 2nd century BC when the ancient Greeks ruled over Egypt. Crucially, the Greek section, written in the language of the occupiers, states that This is a decree so important it has been translated.

The text is then rendered in the hieroglyphs used by priests and the demotic script of the people. The same information, written in three languages. Napoleon scholars realise that if they can compare the unknown hieroglyphs with the known Greek, then they might finally decipher the mysterious language of the ancients. It will take another two decades to fully crack the code. But when it happens, voices ring out from the richly carved walls of the pyramids. It's like the pharaohs had come back to life, just as they always intended. Well, I think that the decitlement of the Rosetta Stone, and we've got the anniversary coming up next year,

was really the start of Egyptology as a proper science, when people stopped thinking of the ancient Egyptian. as solely as magicians or people from outer spaces that were. And really, the Egyptians could communicate with us because we could start reading their writing. And it changed entirely how one viewed ancient Egypt, what we could learn from it and about it. So I think that's been a very key moment in the history of understanding ancient Egypt. It is 4,700 years since Imhotep built the first pyramid.

But only 200 years since we reached. discovered his language. It's said that only 30% of the known sites of ancient Egypt have been recovered so far from under their blanket of sand. The story of the pyramids gains a new chapter every time there is a fresh find. With so many mysteries remaining, what secret history would Professor Salima Ikram like to see emerge from the desert? I'd love to have a library, appear, or even an archive. A Royal Archive would be fantastic, because we only really have one proper one from the New Kingdom.

Oh, it would change how we looked at ancient Egypt, what we knew about the nitty-gritty, about international relations, as well as local government, politics, individual relationships. I mean, it all depends on what the archive has. The other archive, the Amarna Letters, for example, we know a lot now about international relations and how rulers were writing to each other,

and what kind of things they wanted and how they interacted. Trade, exchange, economy, all of that comes out of it. And then there's a small archives from the temple in Abu seeer from the Old Kingdom so you know what was being brought as offerings, who is in charge of them, who is getting meat to eat, who is not. So it's these little insights that help put together the jigsaw puzzle that gives us an idea of ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt, the valley of the Aur, the black river, is lush and green.

Trees drip with fruit, animals flock to the water. If you drop a seed, it grows where it lands. The neighbouring Mesopotamians complain that the lazy Egyptians have it easy. That's not quite fair. Egyptians work hard for their families and for their pharaohs. But they are blessed with a life of abundance. For that, they give thanks to their gods. They pray that the next life will also be fruitful.

Most of all, they wish that their names are not forgotten. I think the Egyptians got what they wanted, which was to achieve immortality by being remembered and being celebrated. And if you follow what they say, every time you say someone's name, or say, you know, in Hotep, I give you a thousand of beer, a thousand of wine and thousand of four good things. His soul is being fed and sustained in the afterlife and eternal fame.

There we go. You can live forever. Power, knowledge, immortality. These obsessions drove dynasties of pharaohs to build the greatest and most enduring monuments the world has ever seen. Their pyramids reached into the sky to capture the rays of the sun. They inspired generations to dream of greatness. And they ensured that their names not only survived, but became legend.

Next time, we'll bring you the Knights Templar. It was a very important point which was discussed. Why, how, and in what situation they are allowed to kill. You know, it was a brotherhood. They were not really monks, but very close. But, you know, monks like the Benedictine, they were only working. a little and praying. But the different with the brotherhood of the Ninth Templars, they were praying, they were working, but they were also fighting, which was very different. You have never

seen before a monk fighting because you have to kill somebody. That's next time.