Thank you. Everybody all over the world has heard of the ancient Egyptians and what they built. Their pyramids, temples, the mummies, the pharaohs, especially the boy king Tutankhamen.
But who exactly were the people responsible for this great civilization? And what were their origins? Egypt was one of the most splendid civilizations of the ancient world. The ancient Egyptians were the first to develop writing in Africa.
They also established an advanced centralized political system based on a complex administration. We know a lot about the ancient Egyptians from what they left behind, like this temple in Thebes in modern-day Luxor. But there are also some unanswered questions.
For instance, were the ancient Egyptians black? This was one of the most controversial issues in the general history of Africa volumes on which this TV series is based. In this program we'll be examining the controversy as well as looking at the rise and fall of ancient Egypt.
The story of early Egyptians is inextricably linked to the mighty River Nile. As early as 7000 BC, there's evidence that humans settled along the river in small communities. Along with agriculture on the banks of the river and just as important for survival, was the raising of cattle, hunting and fishing. At around 3000 BC, North Africa began to dry out, so more people from other parts of the continent converged on this narrow strip of land in the Nile Valley because they needed the water. UNESCO's General History of Africa studies show that the earliest people in the Nile Valley were from an early human population in East Africa who moved north.
Though some scholars still believe the Egyptians were right from the beginning made up of people from different regions of Africa who then mixed with migrants originally from Western Asia. I wonder how the Egyptians might identify themselves today. Well, to get an idea of this, I go to southern Egypt, where most of the country's historic monuments are situated. I drop by to meet the Suleyman family in the village of Al-Aqab, just outside Aswan. Oh, Amir Hassan.
This is the family compound, where they get together to share a meal and catch up. Between mouthfuls of food, I ask them where they believe their identity lies. So, Sherbat, you have a family?
Yes, we have a family. We live in the back of the village. How many children do you have? Four. Mashallah.
I also have four children. I have three children and two daughters. Mashallah. Oh good, we're being joined by other members of the family. Welcome.
I see you again. Do you think it's an African civilization or something else? African.
It's an African civilization. My local guide in Aswan is Fatima Mohammed Sobhi. She studied Egyptology and I ask her if she believes the ancient Egyptians were black. I believe, yes, they were not white, but black, because they always painted in dark red, not white at all. So this is a colour which we have, different colours of black.
Was it an African civilisation? I believe, of course, the South Sun. The kings come from the south, they were more similar or look like me and you. If you go more southern, you are more darker, so it's more African.
Identity is shaped by a sense of shared history and culture, but the explosive issue of race and colour still holds a powerful grip. on how many define identity. So what were the ancient Egyptians?
Which racial category should we put them in? Well, the late Senegalese professor, Sheikh Anta Diop, who contributed to the general history of Africa chapters on Egypt, caused a stir in the 1970s when he stated categorically that the ancient Egyptians were not only African, but were from the Negro race. He placed Egypt firmly in the cultural and genetic context of Africa. He wrote...
How did the ancient Egyptians see themselves? Into which ethnic category did they put themselves? What did they call themselves?
The language and literature left to us by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic Epoch supply explicit answers to these questions, which the scholars cannot refrain from minimising, twisting or interpreting. Egyptians had only one term to designate themselves, kympt. The Negroes.
This is the strongest term existing in the Pharaonic tongue to indicate blackness. The Senegalese Egyptologist Boubacar Diop, who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, agrees with Anta Diop. By the way, they're not related.
He says there's evidence people migrated from other parts of Africa to Egypt. I meet him in Dakar, where he teaches at the university. I think Anta Diop was right. I'm thinking...
is that ancient Egyptians came from different parts of Africa. One part from the Sahara, one part from East Africa, one part from the Great Lakes. So different African groups, for different reasons.
The desertification of the Sahara, and from the Great Lakes, there was eruption, volcano eruption, and from East Africa, and so on, different groups. The history of ancient Egypt is very interesting. It's the first time, I think, that many groups of Africans came together.
And the night was very important, gave to the Africans the possibility to be together. And it was the first African civilization. But the chapter written by Sheikh Anta Diop stating they were Negroes was disowned by some contributors to the general history of Africa.
Dr Zahi Hawass is a leading Egyptian archaeologist. When asked about the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, he describes them as being uniquely Egyptian. So why have the Egyptians not carried out tests on the mummies to verify their ethnicity?
You cannot make any tests. There are some studies to see that the shape of the skull... Could be looks like African, but still you will never put a final decision about the origin of the ancient Egyptian at all. Because you need really to make a very comprehensive study by DNA and this will take a long time.
So how African the ancient Egyptians were still remains a matter of debate for some, even if UNESCO scholars now say the matter is settled. and that the pharaohs and their people must be placed firmly within the black African context. Both halves of Egypt were significant throughout history.
Heliopolis and Memphis in the north were big centers, though most surviving monuments are in the south in Swenet and Thebes, modern-day Aswan and Luxor, deeper inside Africa. For instance, the impressive Temple of Karnak, which later became the spiritual heart of ancient Egypt, was a thousand kilometers away from the Mediterranean Sea. So why and how did such a sophisticated civilization flourish in Egypt? The answer has much to do with the river Nile. The rich mud it left behind when its waters receded after the flooding left the land gloriously fertile.
That was the case in ancient times and it still is today. Mahmoud Mohamed Mahmoud, a widower with four children, is a farmer living just outside the city of Aswan. He wants to show me the kinds of crops and fruits he grows.
This is a mango tree he's telling me, but it's very, very new. And so it's going to be a while until the mangoes come. He's just telling me that he feels a real attachment to the land and he feels that he's continuing the growing traditions of his forefathers.
and that they like to stick to the customs of receiving guests and also just having this connection with the soil. So can I have a piece of sugar cane? Yes.
Thank you. You understood that in English? No problem.
Mood is getting me some. Oh my God. Please, please. He's attacking me with the sugar cane.
This is a huge piece of sugar cane. You can cut it anywhere you want. Here, take it.
Here you go. Oh, thank you. I don't think I've got the teeth for this. Don't eat the skin, he says, but I don't think I can do it.
Oh my God. He's very good at this. I can't do it.
I think I'll have no teeth left if I try. It's just peeled a bit. God, that was good. Yeah.
Mmm. Good? Although the ancient Egyptians were almost entirely dependent on the Nile for their livelihoods, they were, in a sense, its master.
They managed to tame the river through a system of dikes, basins and canals so they could make the most of the Nile floodwater for irrigation and also to stop it washing away their cattle and villages. The Egyptians had to anticipate when the Nile would start flooding, and so they developed nilometers to measure the depth of water. At its simplest, a nilometer was a vertical column with evenly spaced markings at intervals like this one.
Mahmoud shows me the modern irrigation canals that provide the water for the farms in his area. So this is the water that you get from the Nile. for your crops? So he's just saying that the water comes through here and it continues for 10 kilometres and it feeds all the agricultural plots on either side.
Yeah. As farmers settled by the Nile, this inevitably meant that communities would develop. Early Egyptians had to communicate with one another all up and down the Nile Valley and so they needed better communication and organization.
Therefore they developed writing and a system of numbers to record information that they could share. They worked out that there were 365 days in a year, which they divided into months. They also used the moon to measure the passing of a month and developed the science of astronomy to study celestial bodies.
Unlike many other parts of Africa where subsistence farming was the order of the day, the early Egyptians could farm and feed themselves, store food and move it around. Crucially, this freed them for other activities. Like making pottery, metalworking, manufacturing wheels for carts, perfume making and of course large building programmes. There's an attraction in Cairo which you can get to by boat on the River Nile. It's popular with both locals and tourists.
It's called the Pharaonic Village and it tries to recreate aspects of daily life in ancient Egypt. I'm passing now by some papyrus and in ancient times... This grew abundantly in the wild in marshes and was later cultivated. Papyrus was used for a variety of purposes, most importantly, of course, for writing.
These two women are using ancient methods to make papyrus. papyrus into paper. They slice it and then they flatten it before putting it out into the sun to dry.
At one time, the ancient Egyptians may even have eaten papyrus, but they definitely also used it for baskets, mats, wicks for oil lamps, as well as boat making. It's hard to imagine that this is turned into writing paper, but it is because of papyrus and the development of writing in ancient Egypt that we have so many records that tell us a lot about ancient Egypt compared especially to other early civilizations in Africa. All this organized effort led to more formal and hierarchical local political structures.
One group formed a kingdom in northern or lower Egypt, and another in the south, that's upper Egypt. And on these foundations were built the mighty dynasties of the pharaohs. The pharaohs weren't all from one family or region. Local rulers from different parts of Egypt became prominent at different times and put their own families on the throne.
In later periods, rulers from what is modern-day Libya and Sudan also became pharaohs and established powerful dynasties. This partly explains why the ethnicity of pharaohs varied. Some of Egypt's best-known pharaohs are buried here in the Valley of the Kings.
Now, the Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived in the 3rd century BC, put together a timeline of the kings of Egypt. And from information gleaned from tombs, other monuments, scrolls and tablets, historians can tell that from about 3000 to 330 BC, there were 30 dynasties of pharaohs. They are grouped into three periods, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the new. The first recorded pharaoh was Nama, seen here on the Nama Palate at Cairo National Museum.
The Greeks called him Menes. It was he who united Egypt into a single entity around 3,200 BC. This marked the early dynastic or archaic period of Egypt's history.
King Nama set up his capital at Hierakonpolis in the south. Now you can see from impressions of Nama that he had obvious African features and didn't have a Mediterranean appearance. Ahmed Samir is a curator at Egypt's National Museum in Cairo.
So what do we know about King Nama? King Nama considered to be the first king who united Egypt as one kingdom. After King Nama, we then have another named pharaoh, Zoser.
What do we know about Xhosa from what you have here in the museum? Xhosa, we have a limestone statue, but what we know about King Xhosa, that he is the king who ordered his architect to build the first pyramid made from stones. So, King Xhosa known as the first king who made the first stone pyramid. At Saqqara? At Saqqara, the step pyramid.
In Memphis, which of course is deserted today. Yes, in Saqqara, the most known pyramid. is step pyramids. It's looking like a mastaba above many minor mastabas above six. That's kind of steps.
Yeah, steps, mastabas above each other. And in these groups we'll find some structure represented administrations, shrines, represent south and north. Zosa and the other kings who succeeded him made Memphis their capital.
At the time it was a meeting point for the people of Upper and Lower Egypt. It hasn't survived into the modern era but you can admire the ruins of this great city that was so integral to the history of ancient Egypt for three millennia. The burial ground of Saqqara which is spread over seven kilometers is the most Striking of the remains and its centerpiece is the step pyramid.
King Sneferu who ruled in the middle of the third millennium BC in the old kingdom was the most prolific of the pyramid builders at Saqqara. King Sneferu and his era very remarkable because in his era he began to think about building a complete pyramid. You remember King Xhosa made step pyramids, but not a full pyramid. In his era, King Snefero built a pyramid, the first pyramid of King Snefero becoming a pent pyramid, not a full, complete pyramid.
Then his architects built another pyramid, but with a full triangle. Then his son, King Cheops, built the biggest full pyramid. in Egyptian history. So this was when the pharaohs embarked on their vanity building projects, the great pyramids of Giza just outside Cairo. Edifices that throughout the ages, generations of visitors have marveled at.
It was the son of Sneferu, Khufu, also known as Cheops, and his grandson Khafre, called Kepren by the Greeks, who are responsible for the two largest pyramids at Giza. These were built sometime in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. The size of the Giza pyramids reflects the prosperity of the culture that thrived in Egypt in this period known as the Old Kingdom. The pyramids of Egypt have been studied so intensively there are whole libraries of books about them.
Some accounts hold they were built by slaves. According to the General History of Africa, Egypt was not a society where slavery was common, and the burial sites of the builders suggest they were mostly free men. The discovery of the tombs of the pyramid builders that I found at Giza gives us very important proof that the builders of the pyramids were Egyptians and the builders of the pyramids were not slaves because if they were a slave they will never be buried beside the great pyramid but you have to know one thing the pyramid was a national project of the whole nation every household in the north and the south of Egypt participated building the pyramid by sending workforce and food to help the king The formation of its society was based on a strict order of hierarchy.
At the very top, of course, was the pharaoh and his royal entourage. Then there was an upper class made up of nobles and priests. This is the kind of house that a nobleman and his family would have lived in.
It's a single-story residence with a series of connecting rooms and outside courtyard. The upper class in Egypt were the administrators and they ran everything. They could be high-ranking military officers or scribes or indeed both.
Egypt's success was built on the work of its civil servants and they were obviously richly rewarded for their efforts. By 2200 BC, the Old Kingdom, which had seen the construction of the Sphinx and the magnificent pyramids of Giza, descended into misrule and then chaos. The Old Kingdom came to an end with the rule of the pharaoh Pepi II.
Here in Aswan in southern Egypt are the tombs of some of the prominent noblemen of the Old Kingdom. Now it ended because with the death of Pepi II there was no dominant central power and so provincial rulers began raiding one another's territories and this led to a period of anarchy. A papyrus written many years later bearing the name of the ancient Egyptian sage, Ipuwer, describes this time in the country's history.
All is ruin. A man smites his brother. Plague is throughout the land. Blood is everywhere.
A few lawless men have ventured to despoil the land of kingship. It was not until the start of the Middle Kingdom at around 2060 BC that discipline and prosperity returned. A local ruler of the then unknown and unimportant city of Thebes in southern Egypt thrust himself centre stage.
Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, and it was the ruler of Thebes, Mentuhotep, who in about 2055 BC reunited the two lands of the North and South which had split apart during the intervening period. It was he who re-established a strong centralised government and it was Mentuhotep who started the first dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. Ahlan bus ahlan.
The Middle Kingdom marked the second great flourishing of ancient Egyptian civilization. King Menuhotep II was a strong ruler and he reigned for many years. One of his most significant accomplishments was the temple at Karnak. Religion was very important in the Middle Kingdom. So too was the power of the military, for this was the period in which the pharaohs began to keep a standing army.
The Middle Kingdom ended after a series of less powerful pharaohs lost overall control of Egypt to regional leaders. Over the next 150 years the weakened Egyptians were for the first time ruled by foreigners, the Hyksos. They were originally from Western Asia and had settled in the Nile Delta. They were well-organized and warlike.
But the Egyptians began a war of liberation led from Thebes by a member of the Theban royal family, Armos. He defeated the Hyksos and re-established Egyptian rule. The reign of Armos, beginning in 1580 BC, marked the start of the New Kingdom, a golden age in ancient Egypt's history.
His successors in the 18th dynasty include some of the best-known rulers like Queen Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II. During the New Kingdom, Egypt built an empire, the first developed by Africans outside the continent. You have to understand that the Egyptians never attacked anyone. But when the Egyptians found out they were occupied by strange foreigners for the first time, called the Hyksos, and they ruled Egypt for 150 years. And therefore, in the new kingdom, it's the first time that we began to see an army, a big army.
And this is why the army in the Middle Kingdom was just to guard the king. But in the new kingdom, we had an army by the name of army. Thebes became the Egyptians'capital, and it came into its own at this time. The temple complex at Karnak that was begun in the Middle Kingdom was added to, destroyed, restored and enlarged over a period of 1500 years. All in all, some 30 pharaohs contributed monuments to this vast complex of courtyards, temples and halls for the worship of the gods and their own self-glorification.
This shrine is dedicated to the three main deities known as the Triad of Thebes. That is the ram-headed sun god Amun-Ra, his wife the mother goddess Mut, and their son Honsu, the god of the moon. And it's through here that the pharaoh would have entered the shrine.
The god Amun-Ra was originally a local god in Thebes, but by this period he'd become a mighty deity revered right across Egypt. When you arrive at this entrance to the temple of Karnak, either side of the walkway there are statues to the god Amun-Ra. If you look at his head, it is obviously that of a ram, but... Look at his body.
It has the powerful shoulders, paws and claws and tail of a lion. As you walk through the temple at Karnak, there's this forest of pillars, built to look like a thicket of papyrus, with the flowers opening at the top, and dotted about are massive columns dedicated to this pharaoh and that one. Amongst the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, one powerful monarch stands out.
Queen Hatshepsut, daughter of a pharaoh and also a sister wife to another. This could be the statue of Thutmose I. Now, he was the father of his successor Thutmose II. He was also the father of Hatshepsut, who was married to Thutmose II.
So get... that it was a brother marrying his sister because incest was not a taboo for the ancient Egyptians and it was common for such marriages to take place within the royal family. The Pharaoh can marry whatever.
It's up to him to decide. But the most important thing that we have to know, Isis married her brother, Osiris. The king is a god.
Then the king has the right to marry his sister or his daughter because he was a god. But the common people cannot do this. When Thutmose II died, his son, by another wife, was to be his successor. But Thutmose III...
was too young to rule, so Hatshepsut became regent and later crowned herself pharaoh, sharing the regency with him. As queen, Hatshepsut wielded real power. She governed as pharaoh for 20 years and it was a period of peace and prosperity for the ancient Egyptians.
This is her obelisk behind me and it towers over most of the ruins here at Karnak. Its tip would have been covered in gold. It can't have been easy ruling as a woman in a society used to taking orders from men. Maybe this is why in some images Hatshepsut is seen wearing a false beard. Early on during the new kingdom, the pharaohs gave up using pyramids as tombs and moved to the practice of cutting burial chambers out of natural rock.
This is the Valley of the Kings in Luxor where they were buried, including Queen Hatshepsut. I believe she is the first queen to build a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. And I did search for her mummy. And I found that the mummy in KV60 is the mummy for Queen Hatshepsut.
And we did study this mummy under the CT scan. I found out that she was obese. She died in the age of 55. And actually, she suffered of diabetes.
And she died because of cancer. In all the popular books, people say that Thutmose III murdered her. It is not true at all. I've come to the Valley of the Kings to find out more about the new kingdom, its pharaohs and their military success, and just why this phase represented the zenith of ancient Egypt's power. We're sitting here by the tomb of...
Thutmosis III, who was the stepson of Queen Hatshepsut. Yeah, he was one of the most great kings who ruled from this time, New Kingdom, and he had many battles and campaigns all over the countries which surround Egypt, which is called now the Middle East. So Egypt was very much a military power. Yeah, at the time Egypt was a very military power and it was... The great empire happened in Egypt during the New Kingdom.
Tell us more about Thutmose III. Why was he such a great king? Once he ruled, after his stepmother died, he became a very great king. And his way at the beginning, it was to take revenge from his memory, the memory actually of his stepmother Hatshepsut. So he destroyed many monuments of Hatshepsut, erasing her names.
defeated her monuments, her figures from the monuments, and he made big army because he catch in his hands the priestess of Egypt and the military in the other hand. So he had both religious and military authority. Yeah. Can we go up to see the tomb of Thutmosis III, please?
You are the most welcome. Thank you. No other reign is as well documented as that of Thutmosis III. The walls of his tomb were covered with stories of his battle victories. But for all his military prowess, he's overshadowed by one of the later pharaohs of the New Kingdom and probably the best known of all.
Tutankhamun. The most famous of the tombs at the Valley of the Kings is number 62, that of Tutankhamun. It was discovered in 1922 and if you go down to the chamber of the tomb, the exhibits there are kept in the dark so as to protect them. You will see the remains of Tutankhamun himself, his magnificent sarcophagus and the main wall of the tomb. is decorated with paintings.
When it was discovered the tomb was crammed with jewellery, furniture, statues and these are on display in Cairo's National Museum. We've been given permission to film the most precious artefacts found in Tutankhamun's tomb. Here is the iconic gold mask weighing 11 kilograms, which was placed over the head of his mummy, outside the linen bandages in which his whole body was wrapped.
It shows the actual features of King Tutankhamen in order that his soul, the Ba, could recognise his mummy and help him be resurrected. And you may be able to notice that his ears are pierced for earrings. And some of the exhibits of Tutankhamun's possessions include exquisite items, as well as some distinctly unglamorous ones.
These are Tutankhamun's underpants. Tutankhamun's tomb was filled with items for him to use in the afterlife. Behind Tutankhamun's tomb is believed to be that of his stepmother, the beautiful queen Nefertiti.
Among no other peoples, ancient or modern, has the idea of life beyond the grave played such a prominent part and influenced the lives of believers. The deceased had to be prepared for the afterlife through mummification. The Egyptians developed sophisticated techniques to facilitate the process.
It's thought these hooked implements were used to remove the brain. They scooped out organs and discarded everything but the heart. because they believed it to be the seat of the body and soul. These are the real remains of Tutankhamen. He was mummified and buried in his elaborate coffin and sarcophagus.
But for all his fame, Tutankhamen actually had little impact. He died in his late teens, and there are no real recorded achievements attributable to his reign. If the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty of the New Kingdom are best known for their beauty and treasures, It's the next great dynasty which can lay claim to bringing ancient Egypt to the height of its power. The 19th dynasty is known as a line of warrior kings. For many years, Egypt had waged intermittent war on the Assyrians and Hittites based in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey.
The Nile Delta was open to attacks from across the Mediterranean. King Seti I and his son Ramesses II and made it their life's work to defeat them and recover Egypt's prestige. Here the pharaoh is depicted holding his enemies by the hair.
Of the 11 pharaohs who were called Ramesses, the most famous was the second one, known as Ramesses the Great. He reigned in the 13th century BC for several decades and he was responsible for some of the finest monuments. of ancient Egypt, including the temple at Luxor behind me, where two of his statues sit at the entrance.
Rameses II had about 50 wives and so he had lots and lots of children. Apparently he fathered seven by the time he was 15. He was also renowned for his courage and his calm demeanor in battle and his military campaigns against the Hittites in Asia Minor. helped make his reign one of the highest points in the history of ancient Egypt.
The struggle against the Hittites continued for 20 years after which Rameses ...the second signed a peace treaty. He considered to be very important, not because he made a lot of military campaigns, but because he considered to be the first king in the whole ancient world to make a peace agreement between Egypt and Hittites, or what we call it, ancient Turkey. And this agreement proves to us that Egypt was not a country of war, but a country of peace.
supported by force. He was very fond of his beautiful wife Nefertari. That's why he built a small temple of Abu Sambal dedicated for Hathor, the goddess of love, and his wife Nefertari.
He mentioned over one of his inscriptions that the sun will not appear till my beloved Nefertari will appear. So he was very romantic pharaoh, very diplomatic, and very skillful about campaigns and war. The romantic pharaoh.
That's true. I like that. That's true.
The death of Ramesses II in about 1213 BC robbed ancient Egypt of its powerful ruler, so the state gradually weakened as rival princes squabbled amongst themselves. At that time, an important part of the population of the Nile Delta was Libyan, sensing a power vacuum. The Libyans gradually took control of Egypt and they ruled it for two centuries. Henceforth, apart from a brief interlude, ancient Egypt was ruled by outsiders. In the 8th century BC by the Kushites from modern-day Sudan, then came the Persians.
Alexander the Great invaded in 332 BC. He established a new city in the north beside the Mediterranean and named it Alexandria. After Alexander the Great's death, one of his generals, Ptolemy, began the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The Ptolemies also embarked on big building programs like the temples outside Aswan in southern Egypt of Komombo and Edfu.
The last few years of the Ptolemies were marked by decline and chaos, after which Egypt entered its period of rule by the Romans and Byzantines until the Arab conquest in 640 AD. The Mediterranean coast of Egypt where the mighty River Nile ends its long journey through Africa and mixes with the waters behind me. When you come here to Alexandria, it's easy to see why Egypt became such a melting pot.
You can get here through the Nile Valley and also across the Mediterranean Sea from Europe and the Levant. what we call the Middle East today. This facilitated trade, but it also led to an exchange of ideas and cultures. Egypt's strategic position clearly made it attractive and hence vulnerable to attack throughout the centuries. The evidence of outsiders coming to Egypt from Europe, Asia and Arabia and mixing with the locals is apparent in the physical appearance of some of the population today.
But when you reach further back into time to the monuments of the ancient Egyptian civilization, a thousand kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, you're reminded of ancient Egypt's status as that of a great African civilization. We are in Africa. Egypt is in Africa.
And therefore, I believe that the Egyptian civilization is connected with Africa. In the next programme, we'll be travelling south along the River Nile to what is modern-day Sudan to see how the powerful kings of Kush defeated Egypt, governed it for nearly a century and became one of the most powerful forces in Africa. Thank you.