Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00.
00:30Along the banks of the Nile, the word has spread.
00:42The Canadians are back.
00:44They pay 65 piastres a day with an hour off for lunch.
00:48I'm trying to hire additional men, something like 50.
01:01And of course there's a triple that number, quadruple that number that's trying to get jobs.
01:07And of course they're quite eager to all be hired.
01:11So you get this mad mob scene.
01:18It is summertime in the Valley of the Kings.
01:46A time for intelligent persons to find shade and take their ease.
01:51But the Canadians are a curious group.
01:54They work in their far off homeland in the ice and snow of their dreadful winter.
01:59Then they come to work in Egypt, just at the rising of the insufferable summer sun.
02:04They bring two air conditioners, but neither of them works.
02:17Most of the Canadians sleep on the roof of a small building they call Canada House.
02:22It is only 95 degrees Fahrenheit at dawn.
02:28It will climb to 120.
02:30Perhaps this is appropriate.
02:33They are, after all, hunting the sun pharaoh.
02:36They are searching for the temple of the pharaoh Akhenaten.
02:58This was the pharaoh who was almost lost to history.
03:03Lost because his immediate successors went to extraordinary lengths to wipe his memory from the face of the earth.
03:10He ruled for 17 years, but his name did not even appear on the list of kings.
03:19What sort of man could arouse such hatred?
03:22He was certainly one of the most intriguing personalities in human history.
03:27And yet, to this day, the layman scarcely knows his name.
03:30Ironically, his son-in-law, a relative non-entity, is known to all mankind.
03:43Tutankhamun, young King Tut.
03:45He died at the age of 18, having done little of consequence.
03:50But when the British stumbled on his tomb in 1922, he became immortal.
04:00Amidst this magnificence, there appeared to be some of the burial furniture designed to accompany Tut's predecessor, Akhenaten, into eternity.
04:15But there was nothing to throw light on Akhenaten's mysterious death.
04:20His tomb had never been found.
04:27According to one great Egyptologist,
04:29There died with Akhenaten, such a spirit as the world had never seen before.
04:36For Akhenaten, 100 years before Moses and 1,300 years before Christ,
04:42was the first man in recorded history to speak of a single omnipotent God.
04:54It was a concept that shook the foundations of ancient Egypt.
04:59The history of the Egyptians began on the plains of Giza, just south of modern Cairo.
05:131,700 years before the birth of Akhenaten,
05:17Egypt was already a monumental presence in the civilized world.
05:21All the world fears time, said an old Arab proverb.
05:36But time fears the pyramids.
05:39Around 2000 BC, the capital of Egypt moved 600 miles to the south,
05:50and the ancient city of Thebes rose up on the banks of the Nile.
05:54It is a search for Akhenaten that brings a failed baseball player from Toronto to the ruins of Thebes.
06:14Donald Redford didn't make it as a pitcher, and so he became one of the world's most respected archaeologists.
06:23He divides his time between the Royal Ontario Museum, the University of Toronto,
06:33and the ruins of Akhenaten's civilization.
06:38Redford's Canadian expedition is but one of several working the area around Thebes on this summer day.
06:46The Poles, the French, the Americans, the Swiss,
06:48explore and reconstruct the other great temples that stand at Karnak, Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings.
06:55Readily visible and well-defined are the relics of the various pharaohs,
07:02Seti, Thutmosis, Hatshepsut.
07:07With the single exception of the enigma, Akhenaten.
07:11To find the foundations of Akhenaten, Redford must dig through the centuries.
07:27For not only was Akhenaten's temple at Karnak deliberately obliterated,
07:32it was believed that he had left a curse upon the land.
07:36It was looked upon with fear, a place to be avoided.
07:39Akhenaten had been dead 600 years before men dared to settle again on the ruins of the lost pharaoh.
07:49The city must have spread out here around 700 B.C.
07:53Before that, the area for maybe six centuries, in fact, 600 years, had been a kind of a dump.
08:00The city dump, in fact.
08:02And though we have a meter, over a meter sometimes, of waste material that has simply been dumped here.
08:07Which is fascinating, though, because people's garbage piles are of great interest.
08:12That's where you throw all the interesting things from everyday life.
08:19And so we get hordes of pottery here, fantastic quantities, and other things as well, figurines and molds and that sort of thing.
08:26But it is Akhenaten's temple that is the object of Redford's search.
08:35The unique properties of his reign can be seen in the very foundations of his temple.
08:40The architecture of ancient Egypt was constructed of massive stones, each one lifted into place by throngs of slaves.
08:53But the temple of Akhenaten was built on a more human scale, with stones small enough for a single man to carry.
09:00They were called Talatat, literally the span of three hands, and they were first uncovered less than a hundred years ago.
09:18As is often the case in archaeology, the discovery of the Talatat was an accidental by-product of another expedition.
09:29A French team in the early 1920s was restoring a temple of Amon-Re,
09:35when, from the core and base of the pylons and pillars of that temple,
09:39there began to emerge by the thousands the building blocks of Akhenaten.
09:44His ruined temple had been recycled.
09:54His Talatat stones had been used as fill by his successors.
10:14In 1971, Donald Redford joined an American team gathered in Cairo.
10:19They would attempt to piece together history's ultimate jigsaw puzzle.
10:25Each stone was individually photographed exactly to scale.
10:29Notations of the precise color combinations on each stone were meticulously recorded.
10:34They discovered that thousands more of the stones had found their way to museums and private collections in Europe and America.
10:42Then the information was fed into computers.
10:58Color, shape, and subject matter of some 40,000 separate stones.
11:02Even with computer technology, it took ten years to arrive at an approximation of the walls of Akhenaten.
11:15A paper temple began to take shape.
11:18We came to a point, however, where it was impossible to go on to make any further joins in this jigsaw puzzle
11:27without knowing something about the layout of the temple itself, or the temples that this king had erected at Karnak.
11:33And so then excavation became absolutely necessary.
11:36But that posed another problem.
11:38Since none of his structures are still protruding above the ground today, they were totally destroyed,
11:44where would one look?
11:48That is why Redford and his Canadian team are here,
11:51working through the dust and ancient garbage.
11:57Okay!
12:01And now their tools are not merely the pick, the shovel, and the sextant.
12:05For the first time, they have a portable computer on the site.
12:09Site one.
12:10There it is.
12:11Okay, and these finds are from this pit here, and this one, and these mud brick walls associated with this floor.
12:26It is not only modern technology that conjures up the memories of ancient Egypt.
12:32A familiar figure among the ruins of the Nile is a woman known simply as Umseti.
12:37How do you do?
12:39How are you?
12:40It's good to see you.
12:41Good to see you, too.
12:42Good to see you.
12:43When Umseti speaks of ancient Egypt, she speaks with the voice of one who was there.
12:49That's great.
12:50I don't know, it must have happened.
12:53And I had an accident when I was three years old.
12:57I fell on a big flight of stairs, picked up unconscious.
13:02Of course, their parents brought the doctor.
13:07He examined me very thoroughly and said I was dead.
13:11Well, of course, Mother went off the deep end.
13:13I was her one and only.
13:15And so the doctor said he'd come back after an hour and bring the death certificate and a nurse to wash the body.
13:22So I was left lying on my bed and everybody was fussing after Mother and phoning up for the rest of the family.
13:32So when the doctor turned up and went into my bedroom to wash the body, the body was sitting on the bed playing about.
13:41Apparently nothing, whatever the matter.
13:46But it was after that I started dreaming about the temple and crying and saying, I want to go home.
13:54And of course, I was assured that I was at home and I was quite sure that I wasn't.
13:59Well, after that, anything I saw with pictures of Egypt in it, I was fascinated by it.
14:09Then when I saw a picture of this temple in a magazine, and I recognized it from the place I used to dream about.
14:16But I was upset because, as I said, it was broken.
14:20Why was it broken?
14:21Well, my father said it was an old temple.
14:25I'd never been there.
14:27It was ruined because it'd been there thousands of years.
14:32And even I said, well, where's the garden?
14:35He said, don't be silly.
14:36It's in a desert.
14:39But Umseti had been right.
14:41There had been gardens.
14:43In ancient times, the Valley of the Nile was a lush green land.
14:48A land of the crocodile and the hippopotamus.
14:51And all along the valley of the Nile, the civilization of ancient Egypt gradually took shape.
15:03Old Egypt lasted through 30 dynasties.
15:07For over three millennia, she was the dominant force on earth,
15:11infinitely more durable than the Golden Age of Greece or the Empire of Rome.
15:21In fertile fields stretching far back from the Nile, some seven million peasants worked the land.
15:30The fruits of their labor were not all theirs.
15:37The hippopotamus took much.
15:39The rats, the grasshoppers, and the tax collectors took more.
15:43Many were slaves.
15:46All of them, in one way or another, were in service to the pharaoh.
15:50They were rich in soil and ingenuity.
16:07They turned their swine loose in the fields to tread in the seed
16:10and trained apes to pluck fruit from the trees.
16:22In the 14th century before Christ, Egypt was master of the Western world.
16:28The capital at Thebes was as great a city as any in history.
16:31The empire was in its fullest flower during the reign of Akhenaten's father.
16:42Amenhotep the Magnificent, who slew a hundred lions single-handed.
16:52It was assumed on the death of Amenhotep that life would proceed as before.
16:58But they had not reckoned on the new king, Akhenaten.
17:01His strange reign, a mixture of splendor and chaos,
17:07lasted 17 years and then vanished.
17:11It wasn't until the 1850s that modern man unearthed the first evidence
17:16of the existence of a pharaoh whose very appearance was strange and unique.
17:24Akhenaten was a very ugly man,
17:27almost to the verge of deformity.
17:31He had a great long jaw,
17:35a long neck and an awful stance.
17:40And the funny thing about him,
17:43he had so many female characteristics.
17:47He had a protuberant belly and very wide hips and fat thighs.
17:52And then below the fat thighs, spindly legs like a chin's.
17:58And some modern doctors,
18:02judging by his portraits and his statues,
18:05they say that he suffered from some glandular disease
18:09and that it was progressive.
18:10And according to the doctors,
18:13he would become impotent
18:15and couldn't possibly have produced children.
18:18So where these six daughters came from,
18:24God knows,
18:25but as the daughters all resemble him,
18:28I should think they're all his.
18:30not funny business.
18:36Of course they say he was a homosexual.
18:40There's some evidence for that.
18:43But after all, I mean, that's his own affair.
18:45Homosexual, hermaphrodite, hydrocephalic,
18:51impotent, or the father of many.
18:54All these conflicting theories
18:56have been supported by learned men.
19:00To Sigmund Freud,
19:02he was one of the most important figures in history.
19:06To Agatha Christie,
19:08he was the supreme mystery.
19:09And she was moved to write a play.
19:20But if Akhenaten comes to us
19:22in a cloud of controversy,
19:24his wife comes to us in simple glory.
19:30Nefertiti,
19:31whose name means
19:33the beautiful one is come.
19:39There can be no doubt
19:45that Akhenaten adored his queen.
19:48He called her
19:49his mistress of happiness.
19:53In Akhenaten's writings
19:54are mankind's first
19:56written expressions of love.
20:04Before and after Akhenaten,
20:07the pharaohs were a parade of giants.
20:09Colossi of the Nile.
20:14Only Akhenaten and Nefertiti
20:16are passed down to us
20:17in human dimensions.
20:20A pharaoh, for the first time,
20:22was depicted not as a warrior,
20:24but as a loving family man.
20:26We're here on what ought to be
20:40the west side of the temple
20:42of Akhenaten,
20:43or at least in that area.
20:44We've traced the wall of the temple
20:48on about 30 meters to the south of here,
20:52on the other side
20:52of this great mound of debris,
20:54and I'm not prepared to move
20:55that mound right now.
20:56So we've laid in these two squares here
20:58to try to straddle the line
21:00of the west wall
21:01just to see whether it's still going
21:02at this point.
21:04But with these large,
21:06major stone constructions
21:07coming so close to the surface,
21:09one is loathe to destroy them,
21:13although one would have
21:13to take them up, of course,
21:14if one wanted to dig beneath them.
21:16But I'm going to try
21:17to get around it.
21:18We have a good deal
21:19of open space there,
21:20and we'll just go down
21:21in a circumscribed area.
21:23Redford relies heavily
21:35on his foreman, Farouk.
21:38Farouk comes from the village of Kuft,
21:40some 20 miles away.
21:43Through many generations,
21:45it has become the tradition
21:47of the Kufti
21:48to supply the finest
21:49archaeological workers.
21:51The communication must be close.
21:58Redford is as conversant
21:59with modern Arabic
22:00as he is with
22:02the ancient hieroglyphs.
22:15Using a narrow-gauge railway,
22:17the dirt and worthless debris
22:19of previous digs
22:20must be carted well away
22:22from the working site.
22:24But with each succeeding dig,
22:26the pieces of Akhenaten's life
22:28are slowly falling into place.
22:31His father left him
22:32a well-stocked treasury,
22:33a well-organized bureaucracy,
22:35a strong army.
22:37He himself doesn't appear
22:38to have been an administrator.
22:40He's more a poet.
22:43Perhaps the greatest legacy
22:44of Akhenaten
22:45is believed to have come
22:47from the hand
22:47of the sun pharaoh himself.
22:50Found inscribed
22:51in the tomb
22:51of one of his courtiers
22:52was an epic poem,
22:55Akhenaten's hymn
22:56to his sun god.
22:58At last,
22:59he can speak to us,
23:00his voice carrying
23:01across the centuries.
23:02Dawning, glittering,
23:07going afar and returning.
23:09You make millions of forms
23:11through yourself alone.
23:14Bright is the earth
23:15when you rise in the horizon.
23:17When you shine as Aton by day,
23:20you drive away the darkness.
23:23When you send forth your rays,
23:25all the people are in daily festivity,
23:28awake and standing upon their feet
23:30when you have raised them up.
23:32Their limbs bathed,
23:34they take their clothing,
23:35their arms uplifted
23:37in adoration to your dawning.
23:39In all the world,
23:40they do their work.
24:00On this,
24:12the fifth summer
24:13of the Canadian dig,
24:14Redford finally had enough
24:16men and money
24:16to begin excavation
24:18of what was thought to be
24:20the Benben of Akhenaten,
24:22the spiritual center
24:23of his court.
24:27What are you expecting
24:28to find here, do you think?
24:30Gosh, I don't know now.
24:32I really don't.
24:34It would be nice
24:35to find some indication
24:36of what this thing was.
24:38We call it a pyramid,
24:39but that's for want
24:41of something better.
24:44It has now begun
24:45to appear to Redford
24:46and his team
24:47that this is not,
24:48after all,
24:49the Benben.
24:51In many respects,
24:52it's the luck
24:53of the draw in archaeology.
24:54Even with all the sophistication
24:55of the magnetometer surveys
24:56and the resistivity surveys,
24:58which will give you
24:58some impression
24:59as to what is under the earth
25:00at a particular point,
25:02it's still a little bit
25:03chancy at times.
25:05And this is the face
25:07that seemed to be
25:08the best preserved.
25:10Yeah.
25:14The more I look at it,
25:15the more it does look
25:16like a pyramid.
25:16One of these late
25:18mud-brick pyramids.
25:19This would be essentially
25:21how they built them.
25:22It's very strange
25:24that's why they built
25:24one over here.
25:37As the heat becomes
25:39unbearable,
25:40the Kufti and their workers
25:41sing to keep their spirits up.
25:43One creature looms large
26:03in both the mythology
26:04and the reality of Egypt.
26:06The serpent rising
26:12from the forehead
26:12of the pharaoh
26:13stood ready
26:14to strike at his enemies.
26:17The pharaohs are gone,
26:18the serpents remain.
26:24The snake men still come
26:26to cast their spells
26:27over each new settlement.
26:29They can, they say,
26:31protect the Canadians
26:32from the sting
26:33of the deadly horned viper.
26:36They say, okay?
26:47They say, okay?
26:49Are you afraid of snakes?
26:53No, not really.
26:56In a curious way,
26:58perhaps I am.
26:58That's my own hang-up.
26:59But I don't mind scorpions.
27:02Can't stand centipedes.
27:03What do you think of snakes?
27:03No, no, no, no, no.
27:05No, no, no, no, no.
27:06No, no, no, no.
27:12And I think probably
27:12that's enough.
27:12And the next job is simply
27:14to pick it up from where it is
27:16and I think probably that's enough
27:25and the next job is simply to pick it up from where it is
27:29and keep as much together as we can
27:31but I know it'll fall into a lot of pieces
27:33each dig collects its set of specialists
27:36the British call them boffins
27:38their area of expertise is narrow but deep
27:42Peter French is a leading authority
27:45on the properties of the pot
27:47he has a working knowledge of the kitchens of mankind
27:51this is just a fragment of a very large vessel
27:57a very coarse wear vessel
27:58it's not very nice
28:01and it's not particularly interesting
28:02except that it does tell us that at some stage
28:06in the occupation of this area
28:07it seems to have been used for the storage
28:09or the preparation of food
28:11侯 v
28:12it looks like you room with
28:14forecasting
28:15can you tell us why
28:17we need to dig
28:19it's good
28:20it's good
28:20it's good
28:23it's good
28:23you know
28:24I have to go
28:24don't
28:26and that's the whole of it nothing very special but the sort of thing one comes
28:55across and it all gives us a little information but further down are the fragments which can
29:00illuminate the age of Akhenaten they are colored in a particular shade of blue and when an expert
29:07sees that blue she knows that she is handling the pots that served the sunflower but that is just
29:15the beginning the pottery like the rest of Akhenaten's kingdom was smashed to oblivion
29:20each small fragment or sherd must be matched and glued with meticulous care that's why pottery
29:28reconstruction takes so long it has to be left for as long as possible there's no no possible
29:34way you can put together more than about four sherds in a day without destroying the curve of
29:40the vessel so if you'd like to do that gluing and then we'll see about putting perhaps one more
29:46sherd on over there
29:47no that's not quite right I'm just gonna have to get that sits like that okay
30:05the pot is the super clue the primary key in establishing a period of time from minute fragments
30:25absolute dates can often be established pottery is subject to the vagaries of fashion in the same
30:44way that other articles are but pottery is very durable it lasts for a very long time and if we have
30:49enough of it from the right spots we can trace its changes the changes in its form the changes in its
30:56fabric and then if we can link those to absolute dates we can date the site that we're digging this
31:04is where we sort out the pottery keeping those pieces that can tell us most and discarding the
31:11others we keep the rims rather nice one there because these are distinctive and we keep the handles and we keep any
31:26unconventional distinctive pieces of fabric as a nice black roughened piece there a lot of this stuff
31:35can't really tell us very much it's undistinguished common household wares it may be true that common household wares from ancient days can tell little except perhaps that the design was perfect for they are still being made in the nearby village
31:59the interaction between the egyptian villagers and the western archaeologists between the past and the present is very real
32:12Redford and his team must eat and Farooq the chief kufti is a maker of many bargains
32:20Achmed chef to the Canadians began his working day at 4 30 in the morning
32:47Achmed is now 83 and he was cooking for archaeologists on the day in 1922 that the Englishman Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun
33:08Achmed's bargaining is made easier by his family connections
33:12He has 81 grandchildren and almost every shopkeeper in town is in some way related
33:19Do you like making desserts best?
33:20Yeah upside down cake with pineapple
33:26pineapple
33:27Had it last week
33:32I had it last week
33:37do you like making desserts best yeah upside-down cake with pineapple I had it last week
33:50to all intents and purposes the dig is over at noon it is a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit it is
34:12perhaps understandable that the Egyptians also invented beer you know what the boys do on that
34:20your dump during break in breakfast time they take turns leaping off it oh I know as far as they can
34:28yes wonderful they take a running leap yeah stick their arms out it looks like wonderful fun oh it
34:33is yeah I haven't tried it's escaping hell me isn't it but there were five minutes to go today
34:38and I caught one of them doing oh yes he laid his basket aside and looked around sir that's right
34:47successive waves of archaeologists have ransacked Egypt of her heritage the glories of the pharaohs
34:57and rich museums from Berlin to San Francisco today only a few relics can be removed from the country
35:04modern expeditions have photographers and painters it is their precise reproductions
35:11that will be carried back to Toronto here's some painted material for you okay and uh at your leisure
35:20here you can uh you know never get a moment then a similar one to that already yeah I have done it
35:29see that one uh done I haven't done that no that's pretty yeah the same sort of thing
35:35mm-hmm something like yeah what would you say about that nothing nothing yeah yeah I was going to
35:42have to hazard a guess but I won't anyway now let me see where it came from oh all right but this is
35:52peculiar it wouldn't have wouldn't amaze me if that was uh was was medieval rather than ancient
35:57yeah among Redford's collaborators is David Reese a bone expert from Boston already this summer
36:14he has worked on digs in Turkey and Crete when everyone else is finished he does the final sifting
36:21the recovery of of such a complete record uh is of interest for trading patterns of course we get a
36:29lot of Nile perch and that that kind of thing which is understandable uh this was very much in their
36:34diet but we're now getting um uh things from the Red Sea cowrie shells I believe um and even one or two
36:42items um uh fish uh bones and the like that indicate um the presence of uh Mediterranean species here now
36:49that is strange uh they should have got this far uh up the river uh 600 miles up the river at any rate
36:56this is the um the kind of thing we're looking for and and the more complete the record the uh more
37:01complete the picture will be of the diet of the area at at specific times because we're doing this for
37:06every level and uh also uh where they're getting their food from
37:09uh this is a spine of a fish fin probably a normal Nile River catfish or perch strange enough most of the
37:24material at East Karnak are cattle remains which one would not have originally thought expected since
37:30cattle need a lot of grazing area certainly today you don't have the grazing area available mainly sheep and
37:35goats today sifting and collecting the bits and pieces of history archaeologists over the last
37:44century have managed to gather enough evidence to establish Akhenaten's unique place among the pharaohs
37:50of egypt he was born into the world of the ram
38:06the egypt of his childhood was filled with gods osiris isis horus a multitude of lesser divinities
38:16and above all amon the ram
38:23the priests who moved down the avenues of amon had grown fat with corruption
38:30tribute flowed from the far-off provinces the tables groaned with gold harems of concubines were
38:38delivered to the temples the appetites of the priests of amon were insatiable
38:45by the time akhenaten ascended the throne a mere boy of 13 he had developed a loathing for the temples of the ram
38:57in the words of one historian the blood of the ram sacrificed to amon began to stink in his nostrils
39:05and he proclaimed that the worship of amon was a vulgar idolatry
39:23there was but one god and that god was not amon but aton face of the sun
39:32beside him as he announced his new religion was his mother the dowager queen tea
39:50and i wouldn't be surprised if it was queen tea
40:05that sort of argued with akhenaten said don't bother about food you go and found a new capital
40:12and so akhenaten decided to leave the corrupt old capital at thebes gathering up his pregnant wife
40:23nefertiti he and his court set sail in a hundred boats they sailed down the nile in search of virgin
40:31soil soil that had not been defiled by pagan temples
40:36the great procession stopped by the present village of amarna here he decided he would build his city to the sun god
40:51if you've ever been to amarna you'll appreciate perhaps what the sun does to you there
40:56it was chosen perhaps with that in mind because there is absolutely no shade
41:01and with open temples my goodness the sun has free play it can uh can knock a person out very easily
41:07and in the summer it's excruciating
41:15gone were the windowless temples the darkened shrines of the ram the new city would be filled with sun
41:25they brought water and soil for the making of gardens
41:27and thousands came to help build the new city
41:42the soldiers of the egyptian legions came to join in the pursuits of peace for akhenaten would wage no war
41:50so here was a new faith based on a universal god
41:58and all men would live in peace under the sun
42:06oh god
42:20and all men would live in peace
42:30artists and artisans flocked to the new city
42:34they banded together into workshops under the chief sculptors tutmosis and beck
42:41akhenaten had decreed that they were now free of the rigid strictures that had governed egyptian art for
42:47two thousand years
42:49they were to abandon convention and turn to nature itself for their inspiration
42:59candor and realism would be the hallmark of this great age of art
43:04in terms of sheer beauty it would be the finest hour of ancient egypt
43:17the king would be seen in all his deformity just as nefertiti and her daughters would be seen in all her beauty
43:44everywhere was the face of the sun
43:55its rays reaching down with human hands
43:58three thousand years after the death of akhenaten
44:13the plow of an egyptian peasant accidentally unearthed an astonishing fund of history
44:18buried on clay tablets was the entire diplomatic correspondence of the court of akhenaten
44:27they contained the seeds of his own destruction
44:31one of these letters is a letter by the king of assyria
44:35asher ubalat to the king of egypt akhenaten and he complains in this letter that his messengers have been kept standing in the open sun
44:43uh he says if people stand in the open sun in egypt they will die
44:48he then goes on to say that he knows that the king himself akhenaten likes to stand in the open sun
44:53and that if the king himself wants to die that's perfectly all right but
44:56not to let his messengers stand in the open sun and die
45:00i think that's a a veiled illusion perhaps to
45:03that the uh fanatical resolve of this man to let the sun uh dominate his life uh and the way in which
45:12he obliged his entire court to follow suit
45:16some historians will argue that he was the first pacifist in history
45:20a gentle and poetic idealist dedicated to a universal god
45:26others will argue that if he was not a half-mad hydrocephalic
45:30he was certainly a religious fanatic who had become obsessed with his sun god
45:39in any event his empire was crumbling around him
45:47from the far-flung provinces came cries for help from his lieutenants
45:54the chariots of the hittites and the armies of the assyrians were tearing his empire from him
46:01but akhenaten did not respond
46:05perhaps the facts were hidden from him or perhaps he was in the words of one writer deafened to all
46:11sounds save the hymn to his god
46:18it comes across as a kind of elitist religion which uh in which the king queen and the royal family are
46:26central and everyone else hovers in the periphery everyone else bows low uh in a groveling fashion in
46:34in fact
46:46there is evidence that akhenaten's hermaphrodite form had now become a symbol of universal beauty
46:52his chief sculptor beck depicted himself with the breasts and distended belly of his master
47:00even the beloved nefertiti was now being distorted to resemble her misshapen husband
47:06well i feel that nefertiti was as big a fool as her husband well i mean seeing what he was like and how he was
47:19ruining the country and she was getting nothing from him but a lot of silly daughters
47:25i mean she ought to slip something in his beer and gone off with horum heb
47:32horum heb master of the king's horse was one of the unemployed soldiers of akhenaten's army
47:41horum heb was growing disenchanted with the sun pharaoh
47:44and even the devoted nefertiti appears to have finally wearied of his love affair with the sun
48:00that might have been the cause of the row between her and akhenaten at the end
48:07because they had a hell of a row didn't they and then she went off and made another
48:12palace at the other end of the town and took young toot along with her
48:25on the roof of canada house near the obliterated site of akhenaten's original temple
48:30a retired businessman from kenosha wisconsin has been drawn into the search for akhenaten
48:36he and 20 other americans belong to a group called the earth watchers they pay for the privilege of
48:44observing the work of the expedition helping out and learning what they can there is an entrance but
48:49the north wall is the one area where a statue is like likely to come up that's where the goodies may
48:55be who's going to be over there well you and and perfect all these sites are very important
49:04the money they pay helps redford cover his expenses if nothing else the earth watchers learn that the
49:10life of the archaeologist is not filled with the thrills of an undiscovered tomb some of the earth
49:17watchers become disenchanted what have you learned about archaeology
49:21oh i've learned that they dig holes in the ground that they do it very thoroughly and very completely
49:29and probably a little more so than i expected i wonder about the value of it and the money expended
49:35on archaeology for the findings that that are made and the knowledge that is acquired
49:43uh how do you mean whether all the effort produces enough facts and enough knowledge uh to make it all
49:54worthwhile in comparison with the other problems that egypt has couldn't we spend the money better in
50:00another fashion such doubts do not appear to enter the minds of the local population the cynic will say
50:14that if nothing else the digging is a local industry that provides a lot of work
50:30the modern egyptian is only a remote descendant of the ancients in his veins is the blood of many
50:45invaders the greeks of alexander the romans of caesar the arabians of muhammad the french of napoleon
50:54the british of queen victoria still there is a connection to be celebrated and some of the
51:02ancient dances passed from generation to generation may be virtually unchanged from the days of akhenaten
51:18so
51:27archaeologists in their more poetic moments see their task as that of enabling stones to speak
51:48after centuries of silence.
51:52But some stones are lost forever.
51:55There is no record of the death of either Akhenaten or Nefertiti.
52:00They disappear from history.
52:02There have been theories of murder, but the bodies have never been found.
52:13It was thought for a time that a mummy in the tomb of Queen T
52:16was that of the lost pharaoh.
52:19There was some evidence of water on the brain,
52:22but extensive bone studies ruled out the possibility
52:25that they had found their man.
52:27Shortly after the reign of Akhenaten came to its mysterious close,
52:50the boy king, Tutankhamun, assumed the throne.
52:53He was taken back to the old capital of Thebes,
52:58and the priests of Ammon recaptured their lost power.
53:05The capital of the sun at Amarna was left to the desert,
53:10and Akhenaten's revolutionary concepts of God and beauty
53:13became a mere interruption in the long history of Egypt.
53:18The people rejoiced.
53:28Akhenaten had moved too suddenly.
53:30The people had not been prepared for his God.
53:33They once again embraced the ram of Ammon
53:36and returned happily to their old pantheon of many gods.
53:40When King Tut died at 18 without children,
53:46the royal line had ended,
53:48and soon afterwards, Akhenaten's old general,
53:51Horemheb, ascended the throne.
53:56It was Horemheb who reduced the original temple of Akhenaten to rubble.
54:02In a frenzy of obliteration,
54:04the faces of Nefretiti and Akhenaten were hacked away.
54:09The broken fragments were poured into the pillars of the new temples
54:13to be hidden forever from the sight of man.
54:20Akhenaten's temple at Karnak stood for only 20 years,
54:24and that was 3,000 years ago.
54:26But archaeologists have defeated the purposes of Horemheb.
54:32Through the work of Redford and his team,
54:34modern man can begin to visualize
54:36Akhenaten's magnificent temple
54:38that stood here at Karnak.
54:41It is unlikely, however,
55:02that the complete picture will be known in Redford's lifetime.
55:07Excavation takes a long time.
55:08It's very slow,
55:09and so I don't anticipate that we will ever finish.
55:13It's perhaps right that we should never finish,
55:15leaving a good deal for people who come in generations to come.
55:18and so I don't anticipate that we will finish.
55:24ورداني محمد علي
55:31سالم محمود أحمد
55:34سالم محمود أحمد
55:36أيها عندكم
55:39واش التاني؟
55:41سبعين تبعين
55:42يلا صلاة
55:44سبع تراب جنيه تاني
55:46رجب يوسف حامد
55:54رجب يوسف حامد
55:57نعم