For 5,000 years, this land, Egypt, and the epic civilisation it gave
birth to, has been shaped by one thing more than any other.
This awesome river.
The river Nile.
The Nile helped temples to rise, pharaohs to rule, and pyramids
to be built.
Without the Nile, there'd have been no Ancient Egypt.
So I'm making the historicaljourney of a lifetime - a 900-mile adventure
along the Nile across the whole of Egypt.
I'll explore Egypt's greatest achievements...
It is truly wonderful, isn't it?
...and find treasures hidden for thousands of years.
Oh, my God. That's a sheer drop down there.
This is my chance to travel this fabulous land...
Oh, lovely!
...and experience it as the ancient Egyptians did, from the river Nile.
From pharaohs to slaves, from facts to fantasies, I want to explore
first-hand, and to understand how this river shaped one
of the world's first and greatest civilisations.
Join me, as I uncover 5,000 years of history along the river Nile.
The pyramids and crowds of Cairo are behind me, and I've reached
a stretch of the Nile that hides some of the river's
best-kept secrets.
Hey, hello, how are you? Are you good?
Do you think I could get a cup of tea?
We are now 100 miles into our journey upstream.
Lovely, thank you, shukraan. Fantastic.
Thank you so much, see you later.
The lives of the ancient Egyptians are always intriguing.
But I was first drawn here by one of Egypt's superstars.
There's one character who constantly fascinates me.
It's Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, whose beauty and charisma was said
to have brought the most powerful men on Earth to their knees.
And she used this river to captivate and control the ancient world.
For the next 200 miles, I will be exploring the Nile
that Cleopatra herself loved...
I'll enter the hidden chambers that inspired history's
most celebrated archaeologist...
Brave the longest tomb in Egypt...
And at Dendera, come face-to-face with Cleopatra herself.
My Dahabiya boat is pretty gorgeous,
but it doesn't come close to the luxury and excess
of Cleopatra's own Nile processions 2,000 years ago.
This is an artist's impression of one of the royal barges that sailed
down the Nile.
The barge was equipped with gold and ivory furnishings,
with embroidered sails,
even with gardens.
What a sight it would have been.
So you can just imagine Cleopatra standing on the bow of her deck,
her auburn hair, probably dyed with local henna,
blowing in the wind,
oiled with perfumed oils,
queen of all she surveyed.
Cleopatra came to the throne aged just 18.
She was the last great pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
By her reign, from 51 BC, Egypt had enjoyed a 2,000-year reputation
as the land of ideas, inventions and mystery.
And my first stop would've been a hotbed of activity
when Cleopatra was in power.
We've decided not to take the easy tarmac road, but to go
off onto the local road, which is great.
I've left the comfort of my boat, and I'm heading over the flood
plains of the Nile Valley and out across the desert.
My God, it's hot. Very hot in there.
This is Tuna el-Gebel,
one of Egypt's most intriguing ancient sites.
I've enlisted the help of Sa'id, who's faithfully guarded this place
since he was a boy.
It looks, obviously, deserted now.
I mean, we've driven two hours across the desert to get here.
But in its heyday, this place would've been absolutely humming
with activity, that's right, isn't it, Sa'id?
This was a big town? Big town, yes.
A huge town with two-storey buildings,
and a real destination place.
And actually, at the time of Cleopatra, it was at its height.
The old town has virtually vanished today.
But the curious treasures of Tuna el-Gebel are locked away,
and found deep below ground.
So how far down does this go?
About 15 metres. 15 metres?
15 metres. My gosh.
So we are going deep into the bedrock here.
Yes.
We are entering a vast catacomb.
Archaeologists haven't fully explored it yet,
but these passageways are thought to extend for four and a half miles.
What an extraordinary place.
So this is, it's like, sort of textbook necropolis,
it's like a city of the dead... Yes. ..down here..
But this wasn't built as a resting place for humans.
It was for animals.
Oh, my goodness.
So there are bones all over the floor.
So we've got to tread very, very, very carefully.
Oh, my God, and bats. Bats. Yeah.
You could've warned me about the bats.
Sorry, I just saw something moving,
and I wasn't sure what it was.
Originally, each of the animals here would've been carefully mummified.
But precious few remain today.
So what I'm about to see is quite amazing.
If I can just get the gate open.
That door hasn't been opened for a while.
I'm about to come face-to-face with one extraordinary creature
that's rested here for around 2,300 years.
This is a slightly strange thing to see, because there are so many
fragments of mummies here, but what you've got
is a mummified baboon.
You can see the wrappings, and it's really unusual
to have the skull open.
It slightly freaking me out the way its eyesockets
are staring at me across 2,000 years.
There were centres like this across Egypt, producing mummies
of every animal imaginable.
From dogs and cats to crocodiles.
And Tuna el-Gebel's speciality, the beautiful ibis.
This ancient Nile bird, like the baboon, was regarded
as highly intelligent by the Egyptians.
The perfect offering for Thoth, their god of wisdom and invention.
It does feel like a real privilege to be here, because originally,
only priests and the cult servants of ibis were allowed
down in the corridors of these catacombs.
So you just have to try to imagine them in their heyday,
lit with tallow light, soot on the walls and over the ceilings,
and in every single one of these niches,
a perfectly preserved mummy.
We think around 15,000 new mummies were dedicated every year,
so that means there would've been a total of two million here.
The reason it was so popular is that people really believed
that this was a way they could communicate with the gods.
Some brand-new research suggests there's a twist
in this macabre tale.
There've actually been some X-rays done of some of the animals
that were mummified.
I don't know if you can see it, it's often quite hard to read this,
but by looking inside, we know exactly what kind of animal
was being wrapped up.
Here's a dog.
And this is an ibis, you can see that amazing curved beak coming
down the bird, it's wrapped very tightly up.
But then there was a surprise with quite a few of the mummies
that when they did the X-ray, there you can make that out,
you see actually, there isn't an animal inside.
What there is is padding and stones and mummification, so it's almost
like a kind of, I can't really say fake, but a pretend mummy.
Pretend or not though, the fate of most animal mummies has sadly
been the same.
And responsibility for that stretches back home to Britain.
When lots were discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries,
because they are made of organic material, they were actually shipped
out of Egypt to Europe and the UK,
and ground down and used as fertiliser.
And we've got one account of 20 tonnes worth of cat mummies
being used as fertiliser when it was brought in to Liverpool
in the UK.
The ancient Egyptians would've been horrified
at this act of destruction.
The scale of animal mummification shows how much this strange ritual
matter to them.
So my next step is to better understand the mechanics
of how mummies were made.
And a warning, it's not for the faint-hearted.
On this stretch of my Nile journey, I've caught just a glimpse
of the ancient Egyptian custom of mummifying animals.
In November 2018, a remarkable discovery was made -
Dozens of perfectly mummified cats all laid to rest close
to the pyramids of Saqqara.
It's now thought 17 million animals may have been mummified in
Ancient EgYPt-
But how did the process actually work?
It's something Professor Salima lkram is actively investigating.
OK, Bettany, roll. I will, certainly.
Thank you so much.
I should perhaps explain what we are doing here.
Salima is an incredibly eminent Egyptologist, and this is her lab,
and what she does here, I'm right in saying, is one of the things
that you do is investigate the mummification of
animals in particular.
Is that a kind of fair summary? Absolutely.
Salima and Egyptology student Haley are finishing
off a rather unusual experiment.
When Haley's pet cat very sadly passed away,
she was keen that Salima
and herself try to preserve her as the ancient Egyptians would've done.
She was called Hatshepsut.
She's adorable.
Look, she's absolutely lovely.
A real Egyptian cat, that. There's no mistaking that.
So if we were putting our heads into the kind of minds
of the ancient Egyptians, you are doing this because the soul
of the creature is in its body, so this is a way of kind
of preserving the life spirit.
Absolutely.
OK, so now I'm going to give you this, and you are going to...
Mummification was totally mainstream for the ancient Egyptians.
But it involves skills and techniques that have now
been lost.
So this experiment, I should point out, is not for the faint-hearted.
I'm a great cat lover, also a vegetarian,
so a tiny bit squeamish around this kind of thing. Oh, dear.
Eight weeks ago, Hatshepsut's organs were removed,
just as they would've been thousands of years ago,
before the drying out process began.
This looks like a pile of sand, and it's not.
It's a very specialist material called natron?
Natron. Natron.
Which is what the ancient Egyptians used in mummification.
It's the main thing that they used to mummified, because it desecrates,
and it defats - it sucks it all out.
Well, parts of it are very dry,
and other parts aren't that dry.
\ Now we put in... l
\ Ooh, yeah. I
Oh, golly.
I just got this waft of dead cat.
For the first time in my life, I'm preferring the smell
of plastic laboratory gloves.
What's... What... What's that in there?
That's the natron bag.
You put it inside to suck out the wetness.
Yeah.
Any remaining moisture could lead to rotting overtime.
It's fair to say our skills and techniques have a way to go
to match those of the ancient Egyptians.
Now this is some resins, just like this stuff here,
and it's frankincense.
Yes! It smells lovely.
And that's been boiling up gently with some oil,
so we are going to put some into the body cavity.
Right.
Resins like this had antibacterial properties, which could help
preserve a body for thousands of years.
So it smells amazing, because there's frankincense in there.
It smells like we are in a church at Christmas-time. Yeah.
Isn't it?
OK, now what we are going to do is, I think we can start to wrap.
Lovely.
Each limb of the body was individually bound in linen.
This is an awkward angle. Yeah.
And I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to deal with it.
And we use the resins also to hold it down.
Doing this must give you huge respect for those embalmers
and mummifiers of antiquity.
They must have been astonishing people, and really very clever
chemists to understand what they were doing,
and how it affected the body, and how amazingly effective,
really, it was.
It's a lovely, if slightly curious, thing.
But as a fitting end to the day, Haley writes
an epitaph and hieroglyphs.
It simply reads, "Beautiful cat, Hatshepsut".
Here in Egypt, the heat can be so intense,
the cooling waters of the Nile often look pretty tempting.
So, today, the crew and I threw caution to the winds...
Woohoo! Next!
...and decided to go for it.
Thank you.
Hello, Captain!
Should I dive in?
We are now 180 miles south of Cairo, and heading towards another part
of the Nile Valley that very few people reach.
It's a spot that first inspired the world's
most famous archaeologist.
You probably all know that Howard Carter discovered
the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, and kick started a whole new wave
of Egyptomania.
But Carter actually first came here to Egypt
when he was just a teenager.
He was invited here to do drawings of an archaeological dig
that was taking place on the hills overlooking these banks of the Nile.
Carter may be known as the great tomb finder, but as a young lad
growing up in rural Norfolk, he'd earn pocket money painting
portraits of animals.
And it was this skill that brought him here.
30 years before Carter captured the world's attention
with Tutankhamen, his love affair with Egypt began at the cemetery
of Beni Hasan.
You might not have heard of Beni Hasan, and, actually,
hardly anybody comes here, but that is completely crazy,
because this place deserves to be a household name.
In many ways, this is Egypt's best-kept secret.
200 feet above the east bank of the Nile, there are dozens
of tombs here, cut into the cliff face, so that those buried
within could spend eternity overlooking the sacred river.
It's really thrilling coming here today.
You can only imagine what it must have felt like for Howard Carter.
He was only 17, and he had been brought up in damp, rainy England.
So all of this must have felt like a kind of desert wonderland.
Salam, hi, morning.
Hello.
This is a tomb complex that belongs to...
Thank you very much.
To a kind of high-class local official.
He'd be sort of equivalent to the mayor.
Inside is some of the most awe-inspiring wall art
found anywhere in Egypt.
And when you come in, you can understand why
the archaeologists needed an artist's help.
So just look at these paintings.
These are close on 4,000 years old, and those colours
are completely true.
The vivid paintings give us an invaluable insight
into what everyday life was like.
And of course, the Nile is at the heart of it all.
So you might just be able to see here, there's a poor guy who's
fallen into the Nile, and he is being rescued
by his friends.
This lovely chap here on his beautiful papyrus boat,
he's a fisherman and he is spearing massive fish.
Here is a hippo.
There were loads of hippos in the Nile 4,000 years ago,
so that's quite right, that there should be a hippo here.
Everywhere you look, you can see there images of the Nile, and fish,
and water, and people interacting with the life on the Nile.
As a teenager in 1891, Howard Carter's job was to make
perfect copies of these very images, to show people back home
the wonderful discoveries that were being made.
I've got one of the watercolours he did here.
Let's see if I can find it.
So this is an African spoonbill, somewhere.
Up here, there's birds, I think.
Yeah, I think that's it.
Isn't it?
So this is the watercolour that Howard Carter did,
and just imagine how exciting it would've been for him.
He's 17 years old, and he's come here, we know he's sleeping
in here overnight, and at dawn, he gets up
and gets his paintbrushes out.
Amazing.
Carter spent one winter season here before travelling upstream
to join a new team of archaeologists, where he was given
his first real chance to dig.
I really do love this place.
Not only does it give us the most
amazingly vivid details for ancient Egyptian life, but it inspired
a young Howard Carter to become an archaeologist, who would go
on to make one of the greatest discoveries in the story
of Egyptology.
Which means we can all share his passion and his discoveries today.
One of the thrills of Egypt for me is that new discoveries
are constantly being made, and there's a really special one
waiting just along the Nile from here.
I'm travelling the Nile to understand how this river
shaped Ancient Egypt.
But a slow Dahabiya cruise isn't a bad way to discover
modern Egypt, too.
Well done, guys. Well done.
That's good.
So, this happens a lot.
You get kids and fishermen who try to hook onto the boat,
so that they can get a lift.
And they are getting told off a bit by the sailors up on top.
Aww. They've been told to go.
Just over 2,000 years ago, this river was Egypt's main highway.
Travelling along it, you might have seen, or even smelt
the sensational ruler who made this river her own.
One of the stories that we hear about Cleopatra is that she used
to soak the sails of her barges in perfume, so that people
would smell her arriving before they saw her.
One of the sources of Cleopatra's fabled scent was an icon
of the ancient Nile Valley - the beautiful blue lotus flower.
Ancient accounts tell us that the waters of the Nile
were once thick with these flowers, whose potent properties
were legendary across the known world.
But sadly, this symbol of ancient Egypt is now almost extinct.
Ten miles into the desert, though...
There are rumours of a revival.
Locals are always keen to help, and I've hitched a lift with Achmed
and his motorbike to meet a living legend.
Thank you so much for the lift.
Excuse me.
Thank you. Shukraan.
Thanks for the lift, thank you, take care.
There are ancient cities up and down the Nile
that specialised in perfume production, and I've just been told
that there's one very brave independent woman who is trying
to revive that ancient tradition by herself, here, out in the middle
of the desert.
Hello.
This wonderful oasis is the passion project of Dr Mervat Nasser.
Hello, hello. You made it.
I did make it! My gosh.
Properly across the desert.
I didn't realise you were quite so remote, but what a little bit
of paradise you have here. Thank you.
For six years now, Dr Mervat has been trying to bring the magic
of the blue lotus back to Egypt.
I managed, in the end, to find the bulbs.
And I grew the bulbs, and here we are.
Why were they thought of as special flowers?
One of the creation myths in Ancient Egypt is that life came
out of a lotus flower.
It opens up by sunrise, and then it closes down and disappears
into the water by sunset.
So the following day, there is another flower coming out,
so this kind of continuous cycle of renewal, of rebirth,
of resurrection, I think that was what is symbolic.
1,300 years before Cleopatra, thousands of these petals were even
found in Tutankhamen's tomb.
But today, you've got to come along way just to find a few.
If you don't cut it, it will actually disappear
into the water, and it will not come back again.
The blue lotus was said to smell like the God Ra's sweat -
an interesting claim I can now test for myself.
\ Shukraan. I
How amazing to be given a freshly-picked blue lotus.
Oh, that is truly beautiful. It's very subtle.
Very subtle, but you feel like you want to kind of draw
it into your whole body.
I wasn't expecting that.
That's amazing, and the colour, I can see now why they say
it's like having the sun in the centre of a flower.
But is there more to the blue lotus than just beauty
and a wonderful smell?
I think it also had an effect on the mood.
So, it made people feel happier.
Recent studies have claimed that the flower has
hallucinogenic properties.
The ancient Egyptians also observed this and used the lotus
as the original party drug.
But I can tell you, it also makes a rather good cup of tea.
Mmm. It's so lovely.
And we know the ancient Egyptians turned the petals
into a highly fragranced oil.
It's tragic that this enchanting flower has almost entirely gone
from Egypt, but if Dr Mervat has anything to do with it,
it might just flourish here again.
When you study the ancient Egyptian world, you always hear
about the popularity of perfumes, and there was one that was actually
called The Egyptian.
And I have to say, as a historian, I've always
been really cynical, but do you know what?
Coming here and being on the boat for weeks, it is very drying
to the hair, so this beautiful little gift of lotus oil,
I've been putting on my hair, so I now understand
what those ancient Egyptian women went through, and lotus oil
is definitely the solution.
We are now 300 miles upstream from Cairo and on our way to one
of the most sacred sites in the whole of Egypt.
I'm leaving the crew to a hearty Egyptian breakfast.
While I make the short journey inland to the ancient
city of Abydos.
This has been a place of pilgrimage since the very dawn
of this civilisation.
5,000 years ago, when the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were first
united the length of the Nile under one pharaoh,
Abydos was the centre of this new superpower.
I've come to this temple to see a wonder that gives incredible
insight to the Egyptian world.
A chronological list of 76 pharaohs.
Apart from being exquisitely beautiful, parts of the temple
are like a giant history book laid out, and that's what you've got
here on the wall.
This thing is called the Kings List, and what it's supposed
to be is a list of all the rulers of Egypt right
from the very beginning.
So the very first king that we have listed here is a kind
of mythical pharaoh called Narmer,
and that's his cartouche at the top.
The Kings List is the ancient Egyptians telling their own story.
In fact, it's the sole source we have for many of the pharaoh's
and their families.
Actually, it's interesting, because not all the kings
are listed here.
It's really a history that's been censored.
So there are some whole dynasties who are left out - Tutankhamen,
for instance, appears nowhere on this wall.
But there's one particular guy that I'm interested in.
Where is he? He's here.
It's obviously not the most beautiful one on the wall,
there's a gigantic gash in the middle of its, but this is
Pharaoh Senusret Ill, and there's a particular reason why I want to get
to know Senusret better,
because I've just been invited to go into his tomb.
Though he isn't a household name,
Senusret Ill ruled 3,900 years ago.
His tomb is found on the outskirts of Abydos.
The archaeologist who's agreed to take me there has unearthed some
of the most majestic sites in Egypt.
Hi. How are you? Good.
Nice to see you. Welcome to Abydos. Thank you so much.
His name is Yasser Razik.
Yeah, amazing.
It's very exciting.
Very exciting!
Oh, my God, is it Achmed?
Hello. Welcome.
Hello! Welcome back.
How lovely to see you!
You too, thank you. Welcome back.
We were together here five years ago.
Really? Yes!
What a beautiful day.
A new tomb, an old friend.
Achmed, how are your family?
Has everybody been well and good?
15? Yes.
Is it true?
It's too early in the morning.
We have almost arrived to the tomb.
OK.
Senusret's tomb is hidden under this 700-foot mountain.
And, until recently, was buried beneath 50 feet of sand.
So it would be better if you wear a boot or something.
Yes, yeah, I know, I brought my boots.
What are the conditions like inside? It's very hot.
Totally hot inside the tomb.
And it's slippery in some places, and totally dangerous,
the tomb, yeah.
Totally dangerous. Totally dangerous.
This tomb is closed to the public.
So this is a special visit for you.
Thank you, well, thank you. As long as you stay close.
Thank you. Shukraan. A long time since anybody's been in here.
Senusret's astonishing burial place is entirely underground.
It stretches for 800 feet, making it Egypt's longest tomb.
As long as it's easier to get out than to get in.
Eh!
Thank you, man, well done.
I like the fact that these tombs are built to defeat all robbers,
and they are still managing to defeat us today.
Watch your step. I will.
So is it really, really hot down there?
Yeah. OK.
I think I might leave my scarf.
And if we get lost, they will know there's somebody down there.
That's right. Exactly.
It's our sign.
One modern staircase is all we get before the bare stone
and the dark takes over.
I'm so glad we've got this torch.
Did I tell you, the only thing I don't like is small dark spaces?
It's the only thing that freaks me out.
Is that safe?
Yeah, it's safe, but don't pull it too hard.
Oxygen levels start to plummet, the temperature reaches unbearable
levels, and with 90% humidity, we are quickly drenched in sweat.
This is where the heat starts as well.
It's starting, yeah, but...
Take care of your head.
Oh, I will, thank you.
Look at this.
Before Senusret, pharaohs had been laid to rest
beneath enormous pyramids.
And now we are under the mountain.
But this hidden tomb revolutionised the way that rulers would be buried
for centuries to come.
It's amazing, isn't it?
It's so hot for us just walking down, imagine what it would
have been like for those workers digging it.
And they are using just stone tools, presumably.
Watch your head. I will.
After the tomb builders came the tomb raiders,
searching for the treasures buried here with the pharaoh.
How many workers do you think there would have been here?
Just hold on. OK.
OK, because there's a shaft here.
But Senusret had some tricks up his sleeve.
That's a sheer drop down there, isn't it?
We are above a shaft, built specially to trick the robbers.
Oh, my God.
So once the robbers arrived to this place, they found
that this part is closed by a block of stone.
Right. Telling that there is nothing behind.
But the robbers continued their desperate search,
hacking their own passageways down through the solid rock.
They've put these steps into the rocks, the robbers?
And more steps here. Yeah?
And after years with many dying in the attempt,
they finally found Senusret.
600 feet from the entrance, at last, we reach the heart
of the hidden tomb.
This is the sarcophagus of Senusret himself.
So this is the actual sarcophagus, is it?
This is the actual sarcophagus of the King, yeah.
And it is made of two pieces of granite - one is the lid,
and this one is the body of the sarcophagus.
It's been robbed, this, hasn't it?
Yeah, been robbed, and it's not in its place. No.
Originally, it was in a bigger chamber, and the robbers,
they drag it into here.
The robbers had to shift aside massive granite blocks weighing
up to 60 tonnes each to reach the treasures down here.
Gold, perfumes, even a boat was buried with the
Almighty Pharaoh.
But all that remains now is his empty sarcophagus.
So where's his body?
Robbed. Just gone?
Robbed. Robbed.
Like so many of Egypt's rulers, we no longer have his mummified body
or any of his treasures.
But we do now know that Senusret was the first pharaoh to take
these extraordinary measures to hide his final resting place.
Listen.
I owe you such a debt of gratitude for bringing me down here,
even though we've nearly died...
You are most welcome. ..In the attempt.
But do we know the way back?
Yes. Yes. Let's go. After you, after you.
Thank you.
It's time for me to continue south.
I'm leaving Senusret 1,500 years behind to go in search of Egypt's
last great pharaoh -
The mighty Cleopatra.
People have sailed this river for thousands of years.
But none with more pomp and ceremony than the pharaohs.
Hello, Captain, are we OK with this boat?
We are good, very good, Madam Bettany.
Well, good, I trust you.
And of all the pharaohs who sailed the Nile, the most
famous was Cleopatra.
Just four years into her reign, Cleopatra led a massive military
manoeuvre on this river.
A fleet of 400 ships with her new lover,
the Roman general, Julius Caesar, in tow.
In fact, she was probably pregnant with Caesar's child at the time.
When we think of Cleopatra, we make a real mistake
just to imagine her as a beautiful face.
This was a woman who was a philosopher, and a mathematician,
she spoke a huge number of languages.
Cleopatra was, in every way, a force to be reckoned with.
But in this land she once ruled, the evidence of this all-powerful
woman has been overshadowed by the myths that have grown
up around her.
The Romans, Shakespeare, and of course Hollywood,
have all styled her a manipulative femme fatale.
And that's why my last destination on this leg of my journey matters
so much to me.
Dendera is a chance to discover the real Cleopatra.
This temple complex was built by Cleopatra's family,
and it was actually started by her great-grandfather.
It's dedicated to Hathor, the goddess of love,
and beauty and motherhood.
Built 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid of Giza, it's a place
that boasts of Cleopatra's power and the brilliance
of Egyptian ideas.
The entire complex stretched over 40,000 square metres.
And it's here on the temple's wall that you get a unique glimpse
of Ancient Egypt's last truly great Pharaoh.
We know that this is Cleopatra, because she's got her name written
in hieroglyphs in that cartouche.
This is the only named portrait that we have of her.
This wall is singing out a message of power.
Cleopatra is a natural mother, that's her son, Caesarion,
in front of her.
She's a mother goddess.
She's got the horns of Hathor on her head, and she is THE mother
of the nation of Egypt.
Once you go inside the temple she helped to build,
you really begin to get a feel for the woman behind the legend.
A queen more obsessed with mathematics and philosophy
than seduction.
On the ceiling is a scientific wonder.
The story of time itself.
And its legacy is still felt
every single day.
So here you have the journey of the moon through the night.
And then across the central corridor, over there, there's
the sun making the sun's journey through the day, and of course
this being Egypt, the sun is travelling in one of those
flat-bottomed Nile barges.
Up there, there are the stars that have been carefully mapped
to prove that there are 12 hours in every night, and at the end,
you've got the 12 months of the year.
Represented by astrological signs very similar to the ones
that we have.
So there's what we would call Taurus, the bull.
And Pisces.
What the ancient Egyptians did was to jigsaw puzzle together
all this information, so the movement of the sun,
and the moon and the life cycle of the year with the annual flooding
of the Nile, and their mapping of the stars.
And they came up with a new system of time.
It was the ancient Egyptians who decided that the year should run
at 365 days.
When Caesar heard about this revolutionary reading
of the cosmos in Egypt, he was blown away.
He adopted these Egyptian insights, and rolled out the Julian calendar
across the Roman world.
That notion stuck, so the rhythm of all of our lives in the modern
world is dictated by an idea that was dreamt up here.
With the rising superpower Rome as her ally, and Caesar, the father
of her newborn son, Cleopatra must have felt unstoppable.
It's said that here at Dendera, she climbed up to the roof
of the temple when the moon was full to give thanks to the gods.
So you have to imagine Cleopatra coming up here, her skin rich
with frankincense and myrrh and lotus oil,
crowned with those sacred horns of Hathor, celebrating her success,
and the successful birth of her son, Caesarion.
A woman physically on top of the world.
And it's such a privilege to think that I'm standing
here where Cleopatra once stood.
But within just three years, Julius Caesar would be assassinated,
and Cleopatra would be mired in the politics of Rome.
She died here, eventually by her own hand, in the land
that she loved.
The last great pharaoh of Egypt.
Wait, wait! No, no, no!
Oh, my God!
Next time...
Now I've... I think I've got to buy it.
...my Nile journey brings me to the wonders of Luxor...
I'll come face-to-face with Tutankhamen in the
Valley of the Kings...
This is what a royal tomb really should look like.
And I'll board the steamship that inspired Agatha Christie's
Death on the Nile.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media