(suspenseful music)
- The treasure of Tutankhamun is absolutely staggering.
There are more than 5000 different pieces,
including 2000 items of gold and jewelry.
Tutankhamun's mask alone is 10 kilos of gold,
and his inner coffin is 110 kilos of solid gold.
Some of the objects are part of the typical
funereal paraphernalia of a pharaoh,
but there are clearly everyday objects too.
- [Narrator] It was in 1922 that British Egyptologist
Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Four small rooms and an extraordinary treasure.
The antechamber, with Tutankhamun's chariots
and three funeral beds.
The annex, with its dozens of chairs, tables,
ceramics, and other everyday objects.
The treasure chamber, where the embalmed internal organs
of the pharaoh were found preserved.
And the burial chamber, with its four wooden shrines
surrounding the sarcophagus, and the three coffins
inside of which the body of the king lay.
- We can see there's a first cartouche ring
circled with black, but beneath
it there are traces of a second cartouche ring.
- [Narrator] 100 years after the discovery,
the pharaoh's treasure is revealing some new secrets.
Hidden signs from a forgotten character.
- The feminine symbol was filled in,
covered over in gold leaf, polished up,
and became invisible.
- [Narrator] In the tombs of the great figures
of the new kingdom, scientists have been
studying the objects up close in order to get
to the origin of the treasure.
3300 after the events, they're writing a new chapter
in the history of the pharaoh's reign.
- The bracelet should've been removed
from the funeral paraphernalia, or the cartouche reworked,
but as we all know, there's no such thing
as the perfect crime.
- [Narrator] Why did the pharaohs,
more than three millennia ago,
choose this place to be buried?
No doubt because this rocky peak
resembles the shape of a pyramid.
It's the Valley of the Kings,
and it's situated on the west bank of the Nile,
opposite the city of Luxor, formally known
in the ancient world as Thebes,
and it's here that the most spectacular
discoveries were made.
21 tombs belonging to pharaohs have been exhumed here.
But there are also those of several important individuals
whom the kings wished to reward with the privilege
of being buried alongside them.
It was here on the morning of November the 4th, 1922
that the story of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb began.
- On that day, Howard Carter arrived,
and what struck him most was the silence.
The workers had fallen silent because
after years of searching, they had just found something,
a decisive clue to lead them to the tomb.
The first step of a staircase heading down into the ground.
Over the course of the first day,
as they revealed successive steps,
they uncovered a strip of wood.
It came from the top of one of the chests,
and Howard Carter immediately recognized it.
On it, there were several royal cartouches.
- [Narrator] The strip of wood was on the last step
of the staircase, amongst debris that at first appeared
of little interest.
It was the remains of a chest, recently reconstructed
in the laboratories of the Crown Museum.
The strip of wood had found its place.
There were two names on it.
Two key names in the hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb.
That of his father, the pharaoh Akhenaten,
and that of his elder sister, Meritaten.
Two names intimately linked to the history of Amarna,
a town located 200 kilometers to the north of Thebes
and the Valley of the Kings.
Amarna, the capital city built by Akhenaten,
Tutankhamun's father.
The pharaoh dedicated it to a single god, Aten,
and to his manifestation on Earth, the sun disk.
- You have to try and imagine how big this project was.
It was colossal.
A whole town spread across 10 kilometers
that was created in under six years.
The king decided to call this new place Akhetaten,
which means horizon of the Aten.
It refers to his belief that Amarna
was the place where the sun appeared on Earth.
- [Narrator] This new religion gave rise
to a new kind of architecture.
Here, temples had no roofs, enabling the sun
to enter the sanctuary.
- The temples of Aten have almost totally disappeared.
All that remains are a few tiny fragments
and the foundations.
British archeologists working on the site
used these stones in order to mark out on the ground
where the walls were.
Above them you have to imagine walls several meters high,
made from special prefabricated blocks called talatats.
These blocks were produced in an almost industrial manner
in Egyptian quarries, and their major advantage
was that they weighed around 50 kilograms.
As such, they could be carried
by regular construction workers,
which allowed the pharaoh's architects
to construct buildings very quickly,
because they could be laid one after the other.
The problem, of course, is that if you can
build walls very quickly, you can dismantle them
very quickly too.
And soon after the end of Ankhenaten's reign,
they decided to tear down all these temples,
down to the foundations, and all these blocks
were used in new construction.
- [Narrator] 10 years after work started,
the king's magnificent project ended in fiasco
and the fate of the royal family turned to tragedy.
And what has this got to do with the fragments of the chest
found by Howard Carter at the foot of Tutankhamun's tomb?
Why do the names of Akhenaten and his daughter, Meritaten
appear on the chest?
The answer is to be found in the royal tomb of Amarna.
A tomb dug into the mountains which overlooked
the former city.
The relief carvings are now very badly damaged,
but they enabled researchers to reconstruct
the terrible end to Akhenaten's reign.
- On the left-hand side, you can see two little princesses
lying down, dead on a funeral bed.
They were princesses Setepenre
and her younger sister, Neferneferure.
In front of them, in front of the bed,
is the royal couple, and they're crying.
Akhenaten is in front grieving,
and he's holding the arm of his wife, Nefertiti,
who's sobbing and reeling with pain.
At the exit to one of the rooms, there's a character
who is highlighted in the arms of a nurse,
and who could only be Prince Tutankhamun,
born just before his two elder sisters died.
There are women from the royal entourage who are grieving,
their heads in their hands, weeping,
as they accompany the royal family in the face of the deaths
of the two young princesses.
- [Narrator] In a neighboring room,
the terrible story continues.
Sickness has struck again, and another princess is dead.
Here she's depicted as a statue,
with the royal couple lamenting before it.
This is Princess Meketaten.
She was around 10 years old when she died.
- A sobbing Akhenaten and Nefertiti
are accompanied by the next three princesses.
The oldest was Princess Meritaten,
then Ankhesenpaaten, and the last one, the youngest,
was Princess Neferneferuaten Tasherit,
whose outline has disappeared.
Indeed, she was the next to die.
We know she died soon after, and after her
it was the turn of the Queen Mother Tiye,
Akhenaten's mother, and then the royal wife,
Queen Nefertiti, who died in the year 16
at the end of the reign.
- [Narrator] What could be behind all these deaths
that decimated the royal family?
Diplomatic correspondence between Akhenaten
and the king of Babylon mentions another
of the pharaoh's wives who died of the plague,
which affected the royal harem in Amarna.
Meritaten, the pharaoh's oldest daughter,
survived the epidemic.
After the death of her mother, Queen Nefertiti,
she married her father Akhenaten
and took the title of Great Royal Wife.
Her brother Tutankhamun was still a very young child,
which left her in a strong position to take over.
The next part of the story can be found
in the Museum of Cairo, and this time
in the treasure of Tutankhamun itself.
Marc Gabolbe is one of the leading specialists
on Tutankhamun.
He suspects that certain objects have a hidden identity,
and he intends to prove it.
- [Marc] This is rock crystal, it's great.
- [Narrator] Marc Gabolbe starts his examination
with one of the canonic chests in which
the pharaoh's internal organs were found.
On the outside is nothing unusual.
Nothing unusual inside either.
- [Marc] It's really difficult to glean any information
about who this belonged to from this cartouche.
- [Narrator] But inside the lid, some unusual markings
soon catch his eye.
- You can see Tutankhamun's cartouches,
but underneath there are small marks
that were made prior to these.
- [Narrator] There's Tutankhamun's cartouche,
and then there are traces of previous engravings
that the Egyptologist is immediately able to identify.
- It's very difficult to be sure of how to read it.
But from other examples, we can reconstruct
the original cartouche, which is that of a pharaoh queen
who is also called she who is good for her husband.
So that means that these little sarcophagi
for internal organs were usurped from her.
- [Narrator] This pharaoh queen was almost certainly
none other than Meritaten, and if these little sarcophagi
originally belonged to her, and were then
re-baptized to King Tutankhamun,
what then of the four alabaster statues
inside of which they were contained?
Marc Gabolbe has been allowed to examine them
with the glass protection removed.
- [Marc] The amazing thing is that, given the position
of the cover, there's a kind of dialogue between
these two effigies, who stare into each other's eyes
across the space of a few millimeters,
and I find it extremely moving to witness
this staging orchestrated by the ancient Egyptians
for the king's organs.
- [Narrator] On the box containing
the four alabaster sarcophagi are the two
cartouches of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
On the left, the name of his reign,
on the right, his birth name.
- Just below the last character, the little basket,
there's a horizontal line which no doubt corresponds
to a first name.
And similarly, on the right, we can see
there is a first cartouche encircled with black,
but beneath it there are traces of a second cartouche ring.
It's clear that the name was changed
some time in the distant past.
It was changed so that this monument
would be attributed to Tutankhamun.
- [Narrator] It would seem, therefore,
that one of the most sacred objects
in the treasure of Tutankhamun was made for somebody else.
Here again, Meritaten is the most likely candidate.
- And then there are the objects which there is no doubt.
Such as this bracelet, which was discovered
among Tutankhamun's jewelry.
The priest responsible for the pharaoh's burial
must have missed it.
- You can see the two names of the king,
who bear the epithet she who is god for her husband.
That's a reference to a pharaoh queen
who reigned prior to Tutankhamun.
And this bracelet is one of the rare instances
where the name of the queen is intact.
It's a mistake.
The bracelet should've been removed
from the funeral paraphernalia or the cartouche reworked,
but as we all know, there's no such thing
as the perfect crime.
- [Narrator] Other than this bracelet,
all the objects belonging to Meritaten,
without exception, were renamed for Tutankhamun.
There are some unmistakable signs,
and the physique of this character is one of them.
The magnificent statuette in gilded wood
shows a pharaoh on the back of a black panther.
It's also part of Tutankhamun's treasure.
It was found in the pharaoh's tomb
and is supposed to represent him.
Except there's one detail that's not quite right.
- The definitive proof that this pharaoh queen truly existed
is in this figurine, which was usurped
and found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
If you look carefully at the chest,
the curve of her breasts clearly show
that she's a woman, a young woman, aged 16,
who ruled and who was no doubt Meritaten,
the older sister of Tutankhamun.
What is extraordinary is that it's the only complete statue
of this queen that we have, so it's an absolutely unique
and extremely precious item, and there's
nothing else like it.
- [Narrator] Meritaten, as this statue shows,
was part of a very small club of pharaoh queens
who reigned over Egypt.
Aged just 15 or 16, she was able to assert herself
while her country, the great power during that period,
was in the process of losing its supremacy.
Not only was Egypt hit by an epidemic,
it also found itself lacking in something
absolutely essential for its armies.
Bronze, an indispensable metal
for the manufacture of effective weapons.
Egypt lost its supply when it lost control
of the strategic city of Kadesh.
- The role of Kadesh is extremely important
in Egyptian history, because it controlled
a natural corridor from modern-day Turkey,
which back then was the kingdom of the Hittites,
to the near east, the Syro-Palestinian corridor.
- And that was where a great deal
of critical international trade passed.
In particular, the transport of tin and copper,
which are what you need to make bronze.
Without copper and tin, it's impossible
to produce bronze, and therefore weapons.
And whoever couldn't control these trade routes
would be condemned to sudden death
at the hands of their enemies.
- [Narrator] Akhenaten ordered the city of Kadesh
to be retaken so that trade could be reestablished.
But against all expectations, his armies were defeated.
- The Egyptians hadn't been beaten in the near east
for decades, because they controlled that area,
and this defeat at Kadesh was very serious.
It was a bit like their Vietnam at the time,
because it opened up a breach that allowed the Hittites
to steal everything they controlled
in the Syro-Palestinian corridor.
And then the king died.
He was buried here in the cave he'd had
dug out of the mountains, near Amarna,
a few kilometers from the palace
where he spent the last part of his life.
The Egyptians were in serious trouble,
and they started to doubt the king.
They began thinking Akhenaten had led them astray,
because they felt they were being punished by the gods,
that they'd stopped being protected by them.
And so fairly quickly, Akhenaten was relegated
into the annals as a bad king.
They wanted to rid themselves of any trace of his existence.
We can see here on this wall, Akhenaten's presence
has been completely removed and covered up.
Where the king was here, all that remains
is a ghost beneath the rays of the sun disk of Aten,
but the radiating disc of the god remains,
because the god wasn't prescribed,
it wasn't the fault of the god,
it was the fault of his sovereign servant,
who hadn't fulfilled his role as an interface
between human beings and the divine.
- [Narrator] When her father died, Meritaten was just 14.
Both elder daughter and great royal wife of Akhenaten,
she was first in line for the throne.
And her brother Tutankhamun would only
have been around four years old.
Meritaten then started putting together
her burial trousseau, as every new pharaoh would do.
At the Museum of Cairo, Marc Gabolbe is continuing
his investigation into the treasure of Tutankhamun.
He's now studying everyday objects,
and here again he believes he's once again
seeing the shadow of the pharaoh queen.
- Here you can clearly see Tutankhamun's name
in hieroglyphics, but beneath it are the traces
of a previous name, you can clearly see ankh,
which is the symbol for life, repao, the scarab beetle,
and below, traces of the name of Akhenaten.
It says (speaking foreign language), beloved of Akhenaten,
and that's the name of the pharaoh queen.
- [Narrator] The usurpation is even clearer
on the other button on the chest.
The golden hieroglyphs clearly correspond
to the name of King Tutankhamun,
but the first of the hollowed-out characters
clearly form the name of the pharaoh queen.
- [Marc] This box belonged to the pharaoh queen,
and was recuperated and modified
for the burial of Tutankhamun.
- [Narrator] A small object now captures Marc Gabolbe's eye.
An item of jewelry, also taken from the king's treasure.
An item of jewelry that contains a represenation
of the goddess Nut.
But during the reign of Akhenaten,
worshiping this goddess had been forbidden.
The only god that was worshiped was Aten.
The owner of this object had therefore
returned to traditional religion.
So who was the owner?
- Words spoken by Nut.
I reach out my arms to the son, the king,
Neferneferure, triumphant.
I make my feathers quiver over your perfection, Tutankhamun.
In this cartouche, Tutankhamun's name can be clearly seen,
but you can also see underneath traces of a first name,
which is also easy to read.
Neferneferuaten, which means she who attends to her husband.
In other words, the queen pharaoh.
- [Narrator] This means that it was Meritaten
and not Tutankhamun, as was thought up to now,
who ended the chapter started by her father.
A major decision which changed the history of the kingdom.
And then there's the question of the most sacred objects
in the tomb, those objects that were in contact
either directly or indirectly with the remains
of the pharaoh.
The solid gold anthropoid coffin, itself contained
within two gilded wooden coffins.
And all of that on a bed, together placed inside
a pink granite shrine, which itself is placed inside
four more sarcophagi covered in gold leaf.
Marc Gabolbe is now going to examine one of these shrines.
This time, the writing of the pharaoh's name is perfect.
But there is an anomaly in the arrangement
of the characters.
A too-large space between two hieroglyphs
which catches his eye.
- Tutankhamun is living from truth,
and yet here you can see that there are three signs,
one above the other, but they're not aligned.
So there's space for a missing sign.
That means that originally, it was written
with the feminine form of living,
and subsequently it was covered over in gold leaf,
polished up, and became invisible,
except that there's a sign missing.
It's extraordinary.
The gold is phenomenally beautiful with hints of red.
You can see very clearly that this monument
has a history, and it's a complicated one.
In all the places where there's the king's name,
you can see that the gold leaf is lighter
than in other areas, where it's darker.
So originally, it was done for one sovereign,
then they took off the names of that sovereign,
reapplied the gold decoration, and then added a new name.
But this new gold was much yellower and stands out clearly
against the red background of the original color
of the monument.
It's very obvious.
- [Narrator] Lastly, there's the question
of Tutankhamun's mask.
10 kilograms of pure gold.
The most famous object from the pharaoh's treasure.
Was it made especially for him?
Or was it usurped from his older sister?
Marc Gabolbe has found some more clues
to suggest it was indeed made for Meritaten.
A cartouche that once again contains
tiny traces of a previous engraving.
Once reconstituted, they again suggest
that the object was originally cast for the pharaoh queen.
Her cartouche was no doubt then replaced
by that of Tutankhamun's.
Such extraordinary objects were no doubt created
for every pharaoh.
But Meritaten was both a woman and very young,
so for her, such privileges would have been
harder to obtain than for a male pharaoh.
Perhaps she had to demonstrate exceptional merit.
A tomb in Amarna suggests that might just be the case.
The tomb of Meria II, superintendent
of the royal harem under Pharaoh Akhenaten.
The first image shows the 12th year of the reign,
before misery struck the royal family.
- This represents an idyllic moment.
The couple looks happy and united,
and there's this detail of Akhenaten
taking Nefertiti's hand in his.
The queen is probably already pregnant
with the future Prince Tutankhamun,
and the six princesses are shown
behind the king and his wife.
- [Narrator] The second image is of three years later,
when Akhenaten and Nefertiti are dead.
Another royal couple is shown.
To the right is Meritaten.
To the left, a certain Smenkhkare,
a pharaoh who never actually reigned.
The scene depicts a plot, a tale of cunning and power
led by the pharaoh queen against her chief enemy,
the Hittite Empire.
First Meritaten ensures that her little brother Tutankhamun
is protected, and kept away from the court.
Here he is with his nurse.
He's barely five years old.
Then she turns to the king of the Hittites,
the kingdom that is causing all kinds of trouble for Egypt
by blocking its trade with the east.
She asks him for one of his sons in marriage.
Several months later, she receives a letter from the king.
"I sent my son," he wrote.
"But he was murdered along the way."
Clearly Meritaten had never intended
to marry the Hittite prince.
She'd simply bought some time.
The time that her armies needed
to reestablish their supplies of copper and tin.
- So we don't actually know if he was murdered,
or if his death was a lucky accident for Egypt.
But in any case, this diplomatic marriage
is one of the greatest coups carried out
in the entire diplomatic history of the ancient world.
By pulling off this diplomatic coup,
when she was still only in her teens,
Meritaten probably earned herself a significant amount
of credibility in the eyes of the Egyptian people
and in Egyptian ideology, that required the pharaoh
to maintain the cosmic order for the good of the country.
- [Narrator] It was at this point that Meritaten
dispensed with the idea of a single god,
thus breaking with her father's views and life's work.
She decided to leave Amarna and return to Thebes,
where all the traditional gods were worshiped.
Meritaten took every member of her family with her,
including the dead ones.
And she had them placed in a new tomb
in the Valley of the Kings.
For her mother, Nefertiti, and her grandmother, Queen Tiye,
she chose the last residence of her grandfather,
King Amenhotep III.
A note in the hierartic writing system
used for daily life in ancient Egypt
marks the date of the ceremony.
The two women were placed in new coffins
alongside the sarcophagus of the pharaoh,
the major figure of this era, who had reigned
for over 40 years.
The year three, third month of the flood, day seven.
This is the last trace of the pharaoh queen.
One month later, according to the so-called
Restoration Tablet, her brother exceeded to the throne.
Tutankhamun became king, Meritaten disappeared.
It was almost certainly no coincidence
that that's all that we know today.
- The most likely hypothesis is that she died
making way for her brother to claim the throne.
The only thing we know for certain
is that she wasn't buried in the tomb she'd had prepared,
since it was totally reused for Tutankhamun.
She was almost certainly buried, but we don't know where.
Perhaps in a tomb that we already know of,
but which was entirely pillaged,
or maybe in another tomb that is yet to be discovered.
We have no clues as to where she ended up.
Tutankhamun was probably still a child
when he became pharaoh.
Among his treasure, one object throws some light
on what he was like at the start of his reign.
His famous throne, also found in his tomb.
On the back, here he is with Ankhesenamun,
his other older sister, whom almost certainly
he'd just married.
The throne is undoubtedly adult size.
But can we be sure that it had been built
for the king at the time of his coronation?
It's the lower part of the royal chair
that has caught Marc Gabolbe's attention.
It's clearly suffered some damage.
- You can see that there were some decorative elements here
that have come off the sides.
This may well have been due to normal wear and tear.
But it's also conceivable that something
a little different might have happened.
- [Narrator] What could there have been
between the legs of Tutankhamun's throne?
Something no doubt similar to the decoration
on the other chair that belonged to the pharaoh,
a children's chair that was also found in the tomb.
Woven reeds symbolizing the union
of the two lands of upper and lower Egypt.
- Imagine a seven year old child sitting on this throne,
which was made for an adult.
And what would any normal seven year old child
who has to sit on an adult's chair for a long time do?
It would no doubt be swinging its legs
and kicking the chair, damaging it,
eventually causing the decoration to be destroyed.
Once the decoration was broken,
it was no doubt removed all around
to make the chair look better,
but this is probably the proof
that King Tutankhamun was very young,
aged seven or eight when he sat on this throne,
and that this throne was made for an adult
and therefore not originally intended for him.
- [Narrator] And if that's the case,
then who did the throne originally belong to?
The answer lies on the back of the chair.
- Our hypothesis is that the gold leaf
from the original decoration was taken off,
and when it was taken off it tore,
then the new decoration was added
and the leaves stuck back on.
- [Narrator] Another clue that could confirm this hypothesis
is a mysterious phrase inscribed on the Restoration Tablet
marking Tutankhamun's succession to the throne.
"Then after days had passed with this,
"his majesty appeared on his father's throne
"and governed the banks of the Horus."
- On the restoration tablet it says
Tutankhamun sat on his father's throne.
So we can probably take this text at face value
and assume that it was indeed the throne of Akhenaten
that was subsequently modified for Tutankhamun
so that he could reign.
- [Narrator] Once on the throne, the young pharaoh
would've had to carry out one last symbolic act.
His father, who was buried in Amarna,
was maybe thought of as a bad king.
But Tutankhamun had to follow on from him,
and so there was something he had to do.
- This indentation corresponds to the exact spot
where Akhenaten's sarcophagus was placed.
He was buried here, so it was also here
that the representatives of Tutankhamun
removed his mummified body to rebury it
in the Valley of the Kings.
They left the sarcophagus behind,
which was then broken up, probably to prevent it
being reused, but perhaps also because
the memory of the pharaoh was going to end up
on the scrap heap of history.
- [Narrator] Reburying Akhenaten wasn't just about
bringing his body back to the Valley of the Kings,
where all the pharaohs of the new empire were buried.
It was also about conforming to domestic law,
as stated on this papyrus.
"He that buries will inherit," it says.
In other words, the person who buries the pharaoh
is his legitimate successor.
Tutankhamun chose the tomb of a commoner.
The deceased pharaoh was laid to rest
in the sarcophagus of one of his foreign wives, Kiya,
who had fallen into disgrace.
And that's how, on a November day in the year 1327 BCE,
Tutankhamun finally became the new pharaoh.
Tutankhamun was around 17 years old when he died.
He'd just celebrated the 10th year of his reign.
We know when he died thanks to a necklace of flowers
placed around his mummified body.
These flowers only bloom between the end of March
and early April.
In ancient Egypt, 70 days had to pass
between death and burial, so we can now be certain
that the pharaoh died somewhere between
December and February.
His body was then totally shaved and scrupulously cleaned.
Then exceptionally, his brain was removed,
not only through his nose, but also through
an incision in his neck at the level of the 10th vertebrae.
A resinous liquid was then poured into his skull.
His guts, lungs, and heart were removed,
and sashes of natron, a kind of salt,
were placed in and around his body for 60 days
in order to dry out the organic matter.
Resin-soaked fabric was then inserted into the abdomen,
and the same liquid mixed with sweetened wine
was poured over the body of the deceased.
This treatment was more severe than usual.
It burned the flesh of the king, so much so
that Tutankhamun's mummified body
is one of the least well-preserved
of all royal mummies ever discovered.
Once the body had been treated,
the king was given a beaded cap
and an earthenware collar was placed on his chest.
Caps were placed on his fingers,
his feet shod with golden sandals,
and his arms covered with bracelets.
The body was then wrapped in 16 layers of bandages,
in between which were placed dozens of amulets
with magic powers, necklaces, and some amazing weapons,
such as a golden knife and a dagger,
whose blade was formed from some extraordinary metal.
- When Carter found it, it was absolutely intact.
There was no rust, just a smattering
of finely polished dots of oxidation,
and when he tested the blade on his thumb,
it was perfectly sharp.
We know that Tutankhamun's grandfather,
King Amenhotep III, had been given a dagger
by the king of Metoni, which corresponds
to modern-day Kurdistan.
This dagger, then was described as having
an iron blade, a handle set with blue stones,
a golden sheath, and a pommel made from relabi stone,
which we can guest must have been rock crystal.
The last extraordinary characteristic of this metal
is that it was meteoric iron.
It was fairly common in antiquity
to use iron from meteorites, which was then
hammered and forged into excellent weapons.
In death, Egyptians needed to be able
to protect themselves from hostile forces,
and this iron dagger was almost certainly
a much better weapon than one made from bronze.
It was no doubt placed on Tutankhamun's mummy
to help the king in the afterlife.
It was an extremely effective weapon.
- [Narrator] 33 centuries later, it took Howard Carter
several weeks to undo what the Egyptian priests had done.
He had to separate the coffins without damaging them
in order to reveal the pharaoh's body and examine the mummy.
Carter arranged a wooden structure around the sarcophagus,
then lifted the lid and that for the first coffin.
Then he set up a complex system of ropes and pulleys,
finally managing to reach the coffin of solid gold.
In a neighboring tomb, he had to free the mummified body,
which had been sealed in the coffin with resin
poured in at the moment of the burial.
Lastly, he heated the upper section of the golden coffin
to separate it from the first one.
Then he turned to examining the mummy.
It was impossible to remove the bandages,
as they too had been solidified using resinous liquid.
So the mummy had to be dissected,
and that's how Howard Carter discovered
some 200 objects tucked between the layers of fabric.
When Carter had finished, the king's body was totally naked,
apart from the skull, which had a beaded cap
encrusted into it.
This was almost certainly the cap he'd worn as a baby.
There was also a superb collar in gold and blue earthenware
on the king's chest, encrusted into the pharaoh's flesh.
But when Howard Carter went to place the king's body
in a crate and put it back in the tomb,
most of the collar had disappeared.
In the years that followed, tomb raiders cut the torso
of the king to make off with the rest of the collar,
and they also stole his birth cap.
Which explains why today, in his tomb,
the king has none of the accessories
that were placed on his body when he was buried.
Tutankhamun's tomb had lost some of its treasure.
But at the heart of the funereal chamber,
the superb pink granite sarcophagus
of the pharaoh still remains.
Tutankhamun was buried in a very small tomb,
just over 100 square meters in size,
probably belonging to a commoner who decorated
according to his wishes just before the ceremony.
- The decoration of Tutankhamun's tomb
contains an exceptional scene
that is unique throughout the whole of Egyptian art.
It shows for the first and only time
a pharaoh burying his predecessor.
On the right you have the pharaoh Ay,
who has just been crowned, executing the last funeral rites
on the mummy of the young Tutankhamun, who has just died.
What is really surprising about this representation
of the pharaoh Ay is the youth with which he is portrayed.
He has exactly the same juvenile traits as Tutankhamun,
the person he is burying.
But we know that there were two generations
between these two characters.
Ay was old enough to be Tutankhamun's grandfather,
and it's possible that he was on the mother's side.
So here we have a grandfather burying his grandson,
who has died prematurely.
- [Narrator] The pharaoh Ay only reigned
for three years in Egypt.
His death marked the end of this turbulent period,
and the beginning of a renaissance.
Tutankhamun would soon be long forgotten.
That is, until Howard Carter brought him back to life,
3300 years after his death.
(solemn music)