Deep in the heart of Egypt...
..beyond colossal, magnificent temples...
..lies a secret, mountainous valley...
..hiding some of the most spectacular
archaeological finds the world has ever seen.
It may look like a barren desert wilderness,
but 3,500 years ago, this was the royal cemetery of the pharaohs,
the mighty rulers of Ancient Egypt.
It's known as the Valley of the Kings.
Pharaoh after pharaoh was buried here
in their own grand, underground tombs...
with hoards of priceless golden treasures...
..each hoping to rest in peace for eternity.
But 200 years ago, the valley became a battlefield in a gold rush
between adventurers, robbers, and nations,
who raced to find the lost tombs
and claim that treasure.
Now, I'm telling the incredible, cut-throat story
of the hunt for the valley's secret riches...
This is one of the most gorgeous places
in all of Egypt.
Every wall covered in gold.
..unravelling a tale with more twists and turns
than a Hollywood blockbuster.
With spine-chilling adventures...
He was scared, he was so scared.
..culminating in the greatest discovery of all time.
This is the Valley of the Kings.
Modern-day Cairo.
Downtown. The famous Egyptian Museum.
And pride of place is given
to the most astounding archaeological prize
in all of history.
The Golden Death Mask of Tutankhamun.
So here it is.
It is the most famous piece of art ever made.
It is the most famous and beautiful archaeological treasure
ever recovered.
When I'm this close,
I realise it's not only a thing of extraordinary beauty,
but it is such a powerful representation
of the young man himself.
You feel like you are in his presence.
It's breath-taking.
Tutankhamun was buried with 5,000 priceless treasures.
A magnificent coffin,
a golden throne and caskets.
For over 3,000 years,
all were hidden deep beneath the ground,
until 1922,
when they were discovered buried in a hidden tomb
in the Valley of the Kings.
This was the evidence
of the astonishing wealth of the Egyptian pharaohs,
and of the fact that there WAS gold
buried beneath those desert sands.
But this wasn't the start of some gold rush
to uncover the lost treasures of Egypt,
this was the culmination of a frenzied century of searching
in the Valley of the Kings.
Like a tale out of Indiana Jones.
300 miles from Cairo,
the Valley of the Kings lies across the river Nile
from the Ancient Egyptian capital Thebes,
now modern-day Luxor.
Thebes was the land of the living.
The Valley, the land of the dead.
Getting to it, even today, is an epic journey
crossing what was the Theban Mountains,
finally reaching one of the most awe-inspiring
and challenging landscapes imaginable.
It's the strangest feeling.
It's like you're heading into a barren moonscape,
just driving straight into the heart of a desert mountain range.
You'd never guess what was up ahead.
Shokran.
There's nowhere on Earth like this place.
I'm just trying to imagine what it was like
for those first archaeologists that came here,
and all they had to go on was whispers, a myth,
about what lay beneath their feet.
It would have looked to them...
Well, just like a nondescript desert valley.
Dry, bits of limestone broken off the cliffs,
landslides bringing it down, mounting it up in heaps down here.
No hint of what was underground.
It must have been incredibly exciting.
For the 3,000 years after the pharaohs were buried,
the rubble piled up high in the valley.
Most of the valley's tombs completely disappeared from view.
The pharaohs and their treasures lost,
and buried deep.
Apart from whispered legends of hidden gold,
this rocky gorge appeared largely empty and forgotten.
Then, just over 200 years ago,
something happened.
WIND RUSTLES
One of history's most famous empire builders, Napoleon Bonaparte,
invaded Egypt.
Captivated by stories of the mighty pharaohs,
his forces entered the valley.
The rediscovery of the valley's secrets
was about to begin.
To help me understand what the French explorers found,
I'm meeting Valley expert Alia Ismail.
When Napoleon came into Egypt,
he came with a very large group of scientists,
and they wrote La Description De L'Egypte,
which is one of the most amazing books that history has witnessed,
and basically that gives us a record
of what they saw with their own eyes.
I've got a map here,
and it shows you how the valley looked
back in the day.
So this is one of the maps from the books?
Yes.
It looks incredibly detailed, doesn't it?
You can see where we are
up this little ravine here.
The Napoleonic Expedition were actually coming
to transfer the knowledge between France and Egypt,
trying to document every intricate detail of Egypt.
Napoleon's team didn't find gold,
but they did record 12 visible tombs in the valley.
And their visit had a far greater impact.
It quite literally put the forgotten valley on the map,
and began a new era.
From now on, the valley would begin attracting
fanatical treasure hunters.
The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had hoped
to lie here in peace for eternity,
but now their secret was out.
News of Egypt's mysterious valley travelled fast down the Nile,
captivating audiences across Europe.
Suddenly, every nation wanted a piece of the action,
and the chance to capture gold and riches for themselves.
Britain was no exception.
In 1817, a rather unusual and iron-willed treasure hunter
sailed down the Nile towards the valley.
He was Italian by birth,
but he would become Britain's secret weapon
in the battle for the Valley of the Kings.
His name...
Giovanni Belzoni.
So this is the Great Belzoni.
Not exactly the sort of dusty,
fusty archaeology scholar that you might expect,
but a huge man, 6'7" tall.
As you can see in this picture, powerfully built,
barrel-chested, very charismatic.
You'd do what this man told you.
He'd trained as an engineer,
then done a stint as a circus strongman.
Famous for his strength, and sense of daring,
he was recruited by the British Consul in Cairo
to hunt for treasure.
His first mission was just outside the Valley,
in one of Ancient Egypt's most magnificent temples,
the Ramesseum.
He had been sent to secure a colossal statue of Ramses,
the exact twin of this one.
Together, they'd stood side by side here in the Ramesseum.
They weighed seven and a half tonnes,
and their beauty meant that their fame had spread
to Europe and beyond.
Napoleon's French team had tried
to shift the monumental pair of statues,
even considering blowing them out of the sands with explosives,
but they'd failed.
Belzoni was determined to succeed.
Using his previous engineering skills,
Giovanni Belzoni carefully surveyed the statue,
calculating the scale of the monumental task.
His army of workers then levered it sideways onto a cart...
..before slowly dragging the incredible weight
all the way to the Nile.
Even the French were impressed.
At first, Belzoni and the French got on quite well.
In fact they asked him to help them out with a particularly tricky task.
They wanted to move the sarcophagus,
the big heavy stone box in which pharaohs were buried,
belonging to Ramesses,
and he did, very successfully.
Trouble is, he kept the best bit, the lid,
for himself and the British.
That didn't go down at all well,
and the relationship between the French and the British
began to sour.
Suddenly, archaeological sites became battle grounds.
And wherever Giovanni Belzoni was digging,
the French sabotaged his work and stole his finds.
He decided enough was enough.
He wanted to go out and find a remote place
where he'd be left in peace by the French.
And there was one place that seemed to fit the bill.
The Valley of the Kings.
In October 1817,
after taking advice from local Egyptians,
Giovanni Belzoni began to search the valley.
He was hoping that 3,000 years after the pharaohs
were buried with their treasures,
he'd discover an intact tomb.
And incredibly, he soon found not one
but two previously undiscovered tombs.
Then, on 9th October, 1817,
he discovered two more on the same day,
and the next day, another.
Five in total.
None contained treasure.
But they were definitive proof
that there were tombs still hidden within the valley.
And one of them might just contain lost riches from Ancient Egypt.
In the middle of October, 1817...
..the British team were hunting harder than ever,
surveying every inch of the mountainous gorge,
Belzoni thumping the ground with a huge stick,
hoping for the tell-tale hollow sound
of a void beneath the rocks.
By this time, Belzoni had a few potential targets in his sights.
He just had to decide which one to really go for.
He had a good think about it,
and worked out that one of them felt
a bit more substantial than the rest.
As the sun rose on 16th October,
he and his diggers headed deep into the valley...
..towards the location he'd chosen.
When the Egyptian team heard
about the spot that Belzoni had chosen,
they were dismissive.
They pointed out that during the rare but heavy downpours
that afflict the Valley of the Kings,
there'd be flood water rushing straight through it.
The Ancient Egyptians would never have chosen that spot.
But Belzoni ignored them.
He had a hunch.
As the team cleared centuries' worth of rocks and rubble,
the sweat poured off them.
They dug and dug,
for the next 24 hours,
with barely a break.
As he cleared away all the loose debris and spoil,
he got down to the firmer rock below
and he saw something that didn't quite make sense.
It looked like it had been shaped by human hands,
sort of cut away in neat lines.
He must have thought to himself at that point,
could this be the entrance to a royal tomb?
Nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to discover.
October 18th, 1817,
in the Valley of Kings.
The atmosphere was electric.
The hunt was on for a lost tomb,
and buried royal treasures.
An army of 40 diggers had been attacking the rock face
for 24 hours,
shifting tonne after tonne of rubble.
This wasn't easy work.
By lunchtime, they'd dug nearly 20 foot,
that gaping hole down there behind me now.
It was exhausting. They must have been begging for Belzoni to give up.
But he pushed on, and suddenly something emerged.
They weren't sure what it was at first.
They cleared more rubble,
the energy levels rising this time.
Until, at last, they exposed a door.
And not just any door.
A magnificent one.
Belzoni had no idea what he'd find behind the door.
But he was about to take his first steps
into one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries
of all time.
The tomb is one of the most famous ever discovered in the valley,
and it belonged to one of the most powerful pharaohs of them all.
Seti I.
It's a very different experience entering this tomb today.
It's solid under foot, I can stand upright, and it's well-lit.
Belzoni came here in 1817, clutching a candle,
crawling across mounds of spoil and broken rock,
close to the ceiling in parts,
hot, bats whizzing past him.
As he got deeper and deeper,
he could see it was wondrous.
He was the first person possibly in here since 3,500 years.
How exciting must that have been?
And he was seeing glimpses,
the tops of some of the gods and goddesses and pharaohs,
images just emerging from the wreckage,
only getting a tantalising glimpse
of the full majesty of the decoration.
I'm 6'6", and I can walk through here today.
But the 6'7" Giovanni Belzoni faced obstacle after obstacle.
Progress would have been painfully slow.
Every inch he crawled through, a battle.
But then his descent became even more dangerous.
The steep shaft suddenly gave way
to a sheer, vertical drop.
Belzoni talks about it in his account.
He says, "There was a pit, 30 feet deep,
"the upper part adorned with figures
"from the wall of the passage to the ceiling."
For a moment, he was stopped in his tracks.
Another man might have given up.
But he had an idea that he thought might just work,
and the next morning, he returned.
"By means of a long beam,
"we succeeded in sending a man up into the aperture..."
which is this bit here,
and they built a kind of bridge across it.
With the makeshift bridge in place,
he was able to crawl, precariously, across the shaft,
to the chamber beyond.
And what he found there was extraordinary.
As he crept deeper,
the tomb became less and less buried with rubble.
Now, at every turn
he encountered another beautifully decorated passageway,
and another spectacular chamber.
He must have been completely overwhelmed.
But there was more to come.
As he continued through the tomb,
he saw another shaft,
that descended even deeper into the ground.
To help me appreciate the wonders that lay ahead,
I'm joined by world-renowned Egyptologist Salima Ikram.
I want you to imagine that you are Belzoni... I wish!
..and you've been crawling down this tomb,
and it's filled with dust, and bats,
and then you've been swinging over places where there are big chasms,
and you've gone about 450 feet deep into this mountain,
and now you have come here and you think, is it almost over?
So, you can open your eyes now.
That is astonishing, isn't it?
Every wall covered in gold.
Paintings on every inch.
It's extraordinarily beautiful.
This is one of the most gorgeous places in all of Egypt.
I think it's probably the most beautiful place in the world.
All of this glittering,
and Belzoni holding his flaming torch,
and seeing these walls glimmering with images
of the king with the different gods.
Then, with a final few steps,
he could go no further.
He'd at last reached the climax of the tomb.
The lost burial chamber of Pharaoh Seti I.
And it was magnificent.
It's incredible. It's like three stories high, virtually! It's wild!
It's enormous.
And you've got this beautifully arched roof
which is sort of the arc of Heaven.
And here you've got the Egyptian constellations,
beautifully painted,
so the King could be reborn with the sun,
and then on either side, you've got these goddesses guarding him,
and funerary texts.
And right in the middle is where you would have found the king.
In his sarcophagus?
That's right, and in fact,
Belzoni was very lucky, because he came here,
and there was a beautiful Egyptian alabaster sarcophagus.
The giant decorated box in which they placed the body of the king?
Yup, that would have been right there.
And was the king in there?
No, unfortunately he had moved on.
Just finding the tomb itself,
it's still one of the most astonishing discoveries...
virtually of all time.
Well, this was, in fact, and is, the deepest,
and most decorated and most beautiful tomb.
So I think, in terms of Egyptology,
this was pretty spectacular.
In the journal he kept of his adventures in Egypt,
Belzoni wrote of the day on which he found this tomb,
"a fortunate day, one of the best days, perhaps, in my life.'
And I can well believe it.
And this triumph would be enough for me,
but for him, he had even greater ambition.
He wanted to share news of its discovery with Britain
and the rest of the world.
The discovery of Seti's magnificent tomb
deep in the Valley of the Kings
was about to dazzle the world.
But not everyone was happy
with the British successes.
French archaeologists were furious.
They hated being beaten by the British.
They were so jealous of Belzoni's discoveries
that when they stumbled across him loading up a cargo of his treasures,
they opened fire on him.
TWO GUNSHOTS
He had had enough.
Luxor and the Valley were simply too dangerous.
In September, 1819,
he set sail for Britain.
One of the greatest Egyptologists of all time
had left the Valley of the Kings,
and he'd never return.
In 1820, Belzoni arrived back here in the UK,
and he put together a smash hit exhibition.
It was in a building right here.
It's gone now, so the street's completely changed,
but we do have an image of what it was like,
and look how enticing that is.
An exotic facade advertising the Egyptian treasures that lay inside.
And in that building, Belzoni, ever the showman,
built a scale model of Seti's tomb.
2,000 people visited on the first day alone.
He had a big success on his hands.
But more importantly, the discovery of the tomb
and all this publicity helped to ignite
something called Egypt-mania.
The world was now obsessed with the Valley of the Kings.
Belzoni's Egyptian adventures might have been over,
but the fierce race to find gold-filled tombs
in the Valley of the Kings
was just beginning.
The Valley of the Kings in the 1820s.
For 3,500 years,
Ancient Egypt's mighty pharaohs and their legendary treasures
lay secret and hidden here.
But now, the magnificent tomb of the great Pharaoh Seti I
had been discovered.
Suddenly, Egypt was destination number one
for the world's archaeological treasure seekers.
But surprisingly,
the Valley of the Kings was remarkably quiet.
This was a very hard place to get to.
I'm on one of the paths now that they used,
up and over the mountain range, in this heat,
arriving to a place where there was no water.
This was a difficult place to survive,
let alone carry out a large-scale archaeological dig.
And there's one other thing.
Belzoni, the great tomb hunter,
had grandly declared when he'd found his big royal tomb,
that he had emptied the Valley of the Kings.
Once again, the valley was in danger of being forgotten.
But not everyone was put off by the wild landscape,
or Belzoni's wild claim.
Enter John Gardner Wilkinson,
an English traveller and explorer.
Over 12 years, Wilkinson scoured the whole of Egypt
from top to bottom...
..visiting more Ancient Egyptian sites
than anyone before him.
There was nothing on Earth
that would keep him out of the Valley of the Kings.
I think Wilkinson is one of the unsung heroes
when it comes to the Valley,
because he helped to create order out of chaos.
Until now, discoveries in the valley had been poorly recorded.
Wilkinson was determined to change that.
Wilkinson didn't just explore every inch of this valley,
he used that hard-won research
to create a beautiful map of the valley, which is right here.
And he also created the first proper, scientific numbering system
to identify all the tombs.
He designated them each "KV", meaning "Kings Valley",
followed by a number.
KV 13 here, which I'm sitting in front of,
KV 14 and 15, which you can see up there.
Wilkinson began to catalogue each and every tomb he came across.
Under a sultry, burning sun,
he explored every inch of the valley,
simply numbering each tomb in the order that he passed them.
By the time he was done with the valley,
he thought there were 21 identified tombs,
and that gave a lot of people a lot of hope,
because ancient texts had been found
suggesting there were 47 burials in the valley.
That meant there were plenty more out there.
Wilkinson's survey was meticulous,
but he didn't actually dig a single new tomb.
It would need someone else to find out
if the ancient texts were right.
Someone prepared to take on the brutal challenge of the valley
with the passion to hunt deeper.
In the 1890s,
around 70 years after Belzoni's great discovery of Seti's tomb
and Wilkinson's map of the valley,
another archaeologist arrived,
determined to discover lost royal tombs.
His name was Victor Loret.
The French were back in the hunt.
The Egyptian Government had made Loret
the Chief Superintendent of Antiquities.
This job gave him total control over who could dig in the valley.
The special access soon paid off.
Within a few months of arriving,
Loret found three tombs.
The first to be excavated in 70 years.
They were all badly robbed.
Then, a month later,
he found another one.
Even today, approaching this tomb,
which is right at the bottom of this cliff,
there's a sense of foreboding, a real atmosphere here.
Cliffs rise up on either side, overhanging.
But whatever I'm feeling today
was nothing compared to what Loret experienced.
Buried deep into this mountainside
was something that would make his blood run cold.
He had no idea what lay ahead of him
when he stepped down into the dark mouth of the tomb.
A much more hidden entrance, I'd say,
quite high up in the hillside as well.
They didn't want everyone to see where it was. I see.
Even for me,
the descent into this tomb is unsettling.
For Loret, relying just on candle light to guide him,
it must have been terrifying.
The pitch-black tunnel that never seemed to end.
The steep steps down, strewn with debris.
No warning of what was to come.
Here we have this big, deep shaft.
It would have been pretty terrifying.
There would have been no bridge across it, right? No, nothing.
As Loret slowly descended
from the shaft into a cavernous chamber,
he wondered what on Earth he'd uncovered.
The walls were bare.
Could this really be the resting place of a mighty pharaoh?
It's not really finished, this one, is it?
It's not very well decorated.
You can see, there's still all the dots
from where they were taking out blocks.
But there were some tantalising clues
that someone had been buried here.
It was filled with debris,
there were statues, and pieces of gilded wood,
and all kinds of pottery scattered about.
Loret pushed on,
and then...
something remarkable happened.
He stepped into a room,
and everything changed.
DRAMATIC STRINGS
So suddenly we're back in the world of painted pharaohs
and gods and goddesses.
Yes, it's fantastic,
because you have all of that plainness,
and suddenly, boom!
And then, finally, at the end of this magnificently-carved room...
the prize Loret craved most.
A sarcophagus.
And so that is the original sarcophagus?
Yep, this is it. Still lying here at the heart of the tomb.
Intact, here, with its lid.
Wow!
It was really quite an extraordinary thing to find
because also... The body was in there. Yeah.
The body was in here. Brilliant.
The grand coffin made Loret certain the tomb belonged to a king.
He could even read the pharaoh's name, Amenhotep II,
great-grandfather of Tutankhamun himself.
But something wasn't right.
Amenhotep was not the only one buried here.
In a corridor leading off to the side,
Loret glimpsed a small wooden boat...
..and on it,
a sight that shocked him to his core.
The way he describes it is terrifying.
"The legs and arms were bound,
"a hole exposed in the sternum,
"an opening in the skull.
"Was this the victim of human sacrifice?
"Was a thief murdered by his accomplices
"in a bloody division of loot?"
You know, you're here crawling through
with this one lamp lighting your way, or a torch,
and then having that face leap out at you.
As he scoured further side chambers,
he found more bodies.
And as he began to examine them,
he noticed something incredible.
They all appeared to be royal.
It was a fantastic find,
and at first, Loret didn't realise how extremely important it was.
But soon, he figured it out,
because there were labels on these coffins
saying which king it was.
So he suddenly thought,
oh, my God, here we have half of the royalty of Egypt.
Loret had unearthed one of the Valley of the Kings'
most significant finds so far.
A secret hiding place, known as a royal cache,
where the mummified remains of the pharaohs and their families
had been hidden far from their own tombs,
to keep them safe.
Loret's discoveries may have been gruesome,
but they showed there were still plenty of treasures to be found
in the Valley of the Kings.
News spread all over the world like wildfire.
Problem was,
it wouldn't just be archaeologists that would be lured here.
On November 24th, 1901,
three and half years after Loret had discovered it,
the tomb was robbed.
Its precious contents were taken,
including all the royal mummies.
Some of the greatest finds in the Valley had been lost.
No-one knew if they'd ever be seen again.
But an Englishman had recently arrived in Egypt,
and soon, he'd be on their trail.
He would go on to become
perhaps the greatest tomb hunter of all time.
Howard Carter.
120 years ago, in the Valley of the Kings,
the atmosphere was tense.
In 1901, at the dawn of the new century,
a catastrophe occurred.
The mysterious tomb of Amenhotep II,
discovered just three and a half years earlier,
was broken into.
All of its precious contents, stolen.
To this day, no-one knows exactly what happened.
Were the guards overpowered,
or were they simply paid to look the other way?
One thing was for certain,
an investigation would have to be launched,
and the treasure and mummies recovered.
Enter Howard Carter, an English Egyptologist
who would become the most successful tomb hunter of them all.
At the time,
Carter was working as the local archaeological inspector.
He'd always dreamt of digging inside the Valley,
and finding a lost royal tomb.
If he was able to find out what had happened to the royal mummies...
..he might just get the chance.
Well, finding the robbers was easier than Carter had imagined.
Carter had the advantage of knowing the local area,
and two suspects were already on his radar.
Mohammed and Ahmed Abd-El Rassul.
Ten years before, another tomb had been robbed.
Shortly after,
precious ancient treasures and papyri began turning up
on sale here in the Luxor market.
Around that time, people started noticing
that the Adb-El Rassul brothers were suddenly, inexplicably,
extremely wealthy.
In the valley, Carter had investigated the crime scene.
The robbers had been careless,
leaving their footprints in the sand.
Carter took photos for evidence,
and paid a professional tracker to hunt them down.
They followed the trail,
and, surprise surprise, it led straight to the house
of the Abd-El Rassul brothers.
They broke in, and there were the mummies
and the precious treasures.
Carter recovered them,
and in doing so, he became quite the hero.
After recovering the mummies and treasures from Amenhotep's tomb,
Carter could now focus on digging in the valley himself.
But then, everything went wrong.
15 miles from Cairo,
some tourists forced their way into another tomb,
near the Saqqara Pyramids.
Carter wanted them punished.
Carter wanted to throw the book at them.
Rules were rules.
But these tourists seem to have friends in high places,
and Carter was encouraged to let them off.
He was furious, and he handed in his resignation.
Without his job, Carter had no reliable income.
But worse,
he no longer had the permission to dig in the Valley of the Kings.
He was no longer a big figure in the world of Egyptian archaeology,
so he got by, selling ancient collectables to foreign visitors,
and a few of his own paintings.
It looked like his dream of finding that new tomb in the valley
was over.
But, back in Britain, 2,500 miles away,
someone was about to come to Carter's rescue.
Ensconced in one of the country's most famous stately homes,
Highclere Castle,
was a man equally obsessed with the Valley.
Lord George Herbert Carnarvon.
Lady Fiona Carnarvon has been researching
her forebear's fascination with it.
His passion in life was Egypt.
He had a working knowledge of a little bit of Arabic
and he had some knowledge of hieroglyphics.
But he knew where he needed help,
so that's what his money, his passion,
and his commitment to it could do.
He was unconventional,
so he wasn't afraid to go somewhere different, or try somewhere
where everybody said it wasn't going to work.
He always wore that lucky hat with the white brim,
so you can always spot him in photographs in Egypt.
Well, it, er, certainly delivered the luck.
In 1907, Lord Carnarvon sailed to Luxor, Egypt,
on a mission to hunt for lost tombs and treasure.
He set himself up in luxury on the banks of the River Nile.
Carnarvon headed straight here, the Winter Palace Hotel.
Fairly plush, isn't it?
In fact, when he was here, it was also brand-new.
It opened just a couple of years before.
It shows how the discoveries of the Valley of the Kings
were attracting the world's great, and good, and certainly very rich.
Carnarvon had money,
but he now needed to find a local expert,
before he could start digging.
And, after asking around,
one name cropped up.
Howard Carter.
It didn't take much conversation
for them both to realise this could be a match made in heaven.
Carnarvon had power and wealth,
Carter had knowledge and expertise,
and they both burned with an unstoppable passion.
What happened here that day was the start of the most famous
archaeological partnership in history.
Immediately after the meeting,
Carnarvon and Carter began to work.
But they had a problem.
They couldn't actually dig in the valley itself,
and were forced to explore the hills around it.
The Egyptian Archaeological Service only issued
one licence to dig in the Valley of the Kings at any one time.
And for the moment, the wealthy American,
Theodore Davis, clutched that coveted licence in his hands,
and he wasn't going to let go of it anytime soon.
Theodore Davis was a rich, retired lawyer.
Just like Carter and Carnarvon,
he was obsessed with the promise of buried tombs
and golden treasures.
Davis took a bit of a bulldozer approach
to finding new tombs here in the valley,
But on one level, that heavy-handed method certainly paid off.
He almost doubled the number of tombs known about
in the Valley of the Kings.
But all the new ones he found had been badly looted.
By 1913, Davis had excavated nearly 30 tombs.
Now, a total of 61 tombs had been identified in the valley,
more even than the ancient texts had promised.
But despite his years of trying,
an intact, treasure-filled tomb remained elusive.
And bit by bit, Davis was losing heart.
Carter and Carnarvon had been digging around the valley
for five years,
circling like vultures waiting for their chance to swoop.
Then came the news they'd been waiting for.
Davis had grown old, and he had lost his patience
with the Valley of the Kings. He was giving up!
Carter and Carnarvon immediately snapped up
the permit to dig in the valley.
Carnarvon had even built Carter a house
to serve as an archaeological base,
and make sure Carter could stay focused on the mission.
So this is Howard Carter's house, his mud brick HQ.
I think it says a lot about the man.
While the other archaeologists are living in fancy hotels
down by the Nile,
he's set up shop so close to the Valley of the Kings,
just over those slopes there.
Any closer, he'd be sleeping in a tomb!
Carter was now obsessed,
spending the entire dig season day and night
between the house and the valley.
Nothing was going to stop him finding his tomb.
Carter felt certain that there was another pharaoh buried in here.
What's more, he believed that pharaoh's tomb was intact,
and still filled with its royal treasures.
Carter even thought he knew the name
of the pharaoh whose tomb he was looking for.
A little-known ruler called Tutankhamun.
Eight years earlier,
Theodore Davis had discovered a pit full of mummification items.
And on one of them, the name of a pharaoh,
Tutankhamun.
But no tomb had been discovered.
In the vast valley,
the idea of locating a single, specific tomb seemed crazy.
But armed with their permit,
Carter and Carnarvon began the hunt.
For the next seven years, every year they investigated a new area,
their hunt increasingly desperate.
When his predecessor Davis had been digging here in the valley,
he'd had the remarkable hit rate of averaging one new tomb every year.
In fact, in one year alone, 1905, he'd found six.
But in all the time Carter had been digging here,
he'd found zero.
After seven long years, Carter still had nothing to show for his work...
except the mounting costs.
As you can imagine, his patron, his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon,
was running a little bit short of money and patience.
Carter was summoned back to Highclere Castle.
Enough was enough.
Carnarvon had decided to call it a day.
Desperate, Carter pleaded for one more chance.
He even offered to pay for the work himself.
It wasn't a very realistic offer,
but somehow, it did the trick.
Carnarvon was so impressed by his passion
that he made a deal.
He'd fund one more dig.
It would be Carter and Carnarvon's final throw of the dice.
In November, 1922,
Carter was back in Luxor.
He prepared to start digging once again for Tutankhamun's tomb,
and its lost treasure.
I can just imagine the pressure that Carter was under.
Time was now against him.
There was no more room for mistakes.
He had to choose the right spot.
Then he had a brainwave.
In all the time he'd been digging,
he'd ignored one spot.
And thinking about it,
it was an obvious target.
The pit that Davis had found
containing the embalming objects with Tutankhamun's name on it
was somewhere round here,
and no-one had thought about excavating over here
because it was right next to the mouth of a tomb
belonging to Ramesses,
and the Ancient Egyptian builders of that tomb
had covered this area with their spoil,
and no-one had thought it was worthwhile
checking underneath that...
until now.
Carter and his team started digging once again.
It was slow, back-breaking work.
The entire mission was riding on Carter's flash of inspiration.
Day one, nothing.
Day two, nothing.
And then suddenly, on day three,
there was a breakthrough.
What happened next is the stuff of legend.
But it was an accident.
It wasn't really even down to Carter.
A 12 year old boy, Hussein Rassoul,
was employed on site as a water carrier.
He was about to do something that would change history.
On November 4th, Hussein put one of his big flasks of water
down on the ground, and accidentally knocked it over.
Now rather than pooling on the rock a bit like this,
it seeped into the ground,
suggesting there was a void below.
Carter was ecstatic.
This happy accident had given him hope
that Tutankhamun's tomb might be within his grasp at last.
He immediately set his team to work.
After two long days of clearing rubble,
spirits had been flagging.
But this discovery had been
the injection of energy everyone needed.
Then, in a matter of mere hours,
they discovered something.
I've got a copy of Carter's personal diary
for that fateful day of 4th November, 1922.
No regular, neat little notes here.
Instead, just one sentence dashed off any old how
across the page.
"First steps of tomb found."
You can feel his excitement here!
He doesn't have time to write things down.
He wants to get on with the job of finding
the rest of Tutankhamun's tomb.
Over the next few hours, more rubble was removed.
It was clear that the steps continued down.
And then, suddenly,
something appeared.
It looked like the blocked door of a tomb.
The door was still sealed,
and on those seals was a name.
A name that he had been hoping to see for years.
The name of Tutankhamun.
Before Carter could open them,
he had to wait for Lord Carnarvon to travel out from England.
He had no idea what lay behind those sealed doors.
November, 1922.
The Valley of the Kings was eerily quiet.
Digging had temporarily stopped,
and the feeling of anticipation was almost unbearable.
After so many years of failure and disappointment,
Howard Carter believed he had finally found the entrance
to the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
He was convinced this was the one.
This was the valley's Holy Grail.
An undisturbed pharaoh's tomb
filled with unimaginable gold and treasures.
But for now, Carter was holed up in his dig house,
waiting three miserable weeks
while his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon,
travelled the 2,500 miles by ship from England.
Finally, on November 20th,
Carter received the news that Carnarvon had arrived in Cairo,
and he was heading down the Nile.
Carter was all set.
In the valley, everything was prepped and ready.
On November 24th,
Carnarvon and Carter made their way to the unopened tomb.
But almost instantly,
as they came down the top steps to the blocked door,
the sense of excitement evaporated.
Something wasn't right.
Looking closely at the door, which was right here,
it was clear that someone had been through it.
It had been tampered with.
But it had then been closed, and resealed.
It wasn't the news he'd wanted,
but Carter pressed on.
Eventually, the stone blocking the doorway was cleared.
Carter and Carnarvon began to edge their way down the entrance shaft.
Both were prepared for the worst.
That the tomb had been robbed and then resealed.
The next two days must have been tortuous for them.
As they moved slowly down this passage, it was pitch-black,
and full of obstacles, dust and debris
that had gathered over the millennia.
But much more worryingly,
there were signs of broken pots and jars.
Carter wrote in his diary:
Over the next two days,
Carter and Carnarvon held their nerve,
continuing their inch-by-inch advance
along this corridor,
clearing away the debris.
At four PM, after nine metres of digging,
they found another door. It was right here.
Mysteriously, again,
this one showed that someone had been in,
but it had been closed up,
it had been resealed, and even replastered.
The team continued digging.
Carter sent for more candles to work in the darkness.
And, carefully, they began to make a hole
just big enough to see what was beyond.
With Carnarvon just behind him,
Carter peered into the darkness.
READS:
What happened next was probably
the singular most famous, most miraculous moment
in the history of archaeological discovery.
Carter was looking through the small hole that he'd made here.
He wrote,
"Carnarvon said to me, 'Can you see anything?'
"I replied to him, 'Yes. It is wonderful.'"
Years later, he put it a bit more poetically.
He wrote, "As my eyes grew accustomed to the light,
"details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist.
"Strange animals, statues, and gold.
"Everywhere, the glint of gold".
When Carter and Carnarvon eventually broke through into the chamber,
both were overwhelmed.
Alia Ismail has joined me to describe the amazing discovery.
So these are the things he saw, stacked up.
What kind of things are these?
So these would be, like, beds, over here, these.
And some food mummies, because they thought they needed this food
in the afterlife. You could see even the chariots.
OK, so this is the room we're in right now. Isn't that amazing? Yes.
By the candle light, it would have just been flickering,
it would have been just magical! Yes.
It's always more romantic with this candle light,
when we do think of it, how it was.
But 100 years ago, as Carter looked more closely,
he suddenly became gripped with a sense of foreboding.
Something seemed wrong.
The place was a mess.
More like a ransacked storeroom than an undisturbed tomb.
Coming in here you would think,
I mean, did people just stash things?
Did they not think about putting it in order?
He didn't know, and then he was scared,
he was so scared, because he wanted to find a tomb.
Digging for five years, looking for the tomb,
and then he finds a cache? It was a disappointment for him.
To call that a disappointment...
Anyone else in the world would've been thrilled to discover that.
I know, but he wanted a tomb.
But then, as Carter looked further,
something caught his eye.
Two guardian statues.
He saw those statues flanking either side of the wall,
he thought, "No..."
I mean, these statues and their placement,
there might be something beyond that wall.
Although the two statues were against a wall,
they looked carefully placed,
as if flanking the entrance to a burial chamber.
Then he saw something else.
And when he noticed there were lots of cartouches of Tutankhamun
on the objects he was looking at,
he was sure now that this was the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Carter and Carnarvon felt confident enough
to make their discovery public.
They headed across the Nile into Luxor.
In late November, 1922,
Carnarvon and Carter summoned the world's press
here to the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor
to announce what they had discovered.
Carnarvon secured a lucrative deal,
selling the exclusive rights to the story to The Times of London.
The whole world was instantly captivated.
But did Tutankhamun and his treasures
still lie buried in the tomb?
Carter had thoroughly surveyed this chamber,
and it was time now to take his search
beyond the wall that stood at this end.
You can still see the outline of where it used to be.
He believed that through here he would find the innermost sanctum,
the burial chamber of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.
On February 17th, 1923,
Carter and his team carefully took down the wall piece by piece.
What lay behind it was incredible.
Not a room, but a solid wall of gold.
This was surely the burial chamber!
In celebration, the dig closed down for ten days.
While Carter stayed in Luxor,
Lord Carnarvon decided to sail down the Nile for a holiday.
It should have been a triumphant trip
after seven years of digging in the Valley.
While he was away, Carnarvon was bitten by a mosquito.
He should have been fine,
but he managed to slice the top of the scab off
when he was shaving here at the hotel.
The wound went septic.
Carnarvon died.
Without Carnarvon's money and support,
the world's most exciting archaeological discovery
was now in jeopardy.
And no-one knew yet what lay behind that golden wall.
April 1923,
The mood had darkened in the Valley of the Kings.
Just six months after Howard Carter and his sponsor Lord Carnarvon
had discovered Tutankhamun's tomb...
..Carnarvon was dead.
Carter was distraught. He hadn't just lost a great friend,
he'd lost his financier,
and the licence to dig.
The money and the permission were both in Carnarvon's name.
The tomb was only half excavated,
and now the whole project was in jeopardy.
Carter had little choice.
Despite the fact that she was still mourning the loss of her husband,
Carter approached Lady Carnarvon.
If she would agree to continue the financing,
he could continue to excavate.
Lady Carnarvon agreed to take up the licence in her name.
Six months after Carnarvon's death,
work began again.
Day after day, Carter returned here to the tomb.
He'd made his big discovery,
but he still had the hard work of cataloguing,
photographing the thousands of precious objects that he'd found.
And they were incredible.
From royal beds, to treasure chests,
and the carved heads of gods.
But the greatest prize was still potentially hidden
behind the golden wall.
The body of Tutankhamun
was yet to be found.
Until Carter had explored that burial chamber,
and discovered whether Tutankhamun still lay there undisturbed,
his quest was incomplete.
He began investigating the golden wall.
What he discovered was incredible.
It was part of a huge box
filling a room from floor to ceiling.
It took six weeks and an army of workmen
to pack and remove the gold from the tomb.
And finally, the burial chamber of Tutankhamun
lay before Howard Carter.
Now this is much more familiar.
These beautiful paintings of humans and gods.
It's amazing. You can see a lot of images of Tutankhamun.
Every inch of the walls were covered with mysterious, fabulous pictures.
And in the centre of the room,
the sarcophagus itself.
This is what he'd been hoping, praying to see for years.
It was a magnificent sight.
So you can see here
the sarcophagus is flanked by four protection goddesses,
and you can see their wings on either side, protecting him,
and you can see his name, of course, and his titles.
So that's his signature, there, if you like. Absolutely.
That's his royal name, that's his birth name.
You can see both of them.
With the king's name engraved across the sarcophagus,
Carter finally had the confirmation he needed
that it belonged to Tutankhamun himself.
Everybody else had been trying,
no-one had ever found an intact royal tomb
in the Valley of the Kings. Absolutely.
And people thought Carter was a madman
to go and dig there,
and look at him, what he's found.
But there was just one final task
before Carter could celebrate fully.
The most important one of all.
Lifting the lid on the sarcophagus.
Carter was now standing next to the sarcophagus,
surrounded by a group of officials and archaeologists,
as this one and a quarter-tonne lid was winched off.
There were gasps of astonishment.
Inside, there was a golden coffin
bearing the image of Tutankhamun himself.
The first intact royal burial
had surfaced from the Valley of the Kings
after 200 years of hunting.
And within the spectacular, beautiful coffin
lay the greatest treasure the world had ever seen.
The Golden Death Mask of boy-king Tutankhamun.
3,000 years after his tomb was sealed up for eternity,
his treasures still take your breath away.
The battle to discover the secrets of the Valley of the Kings
is as fascinating and as full of intrigue
as the story of the ancient tombs themselves.
From Belzoni's inspired discovery of Seti's magnificent tomb...
..to the disturbing revelations of Loret's tomb of horrors...
..and ultimately, the passion, determination,
and glory of Howard Carter's hunt,
100 years ago.
Today, few people would claim with any certainty
that this valley has given up all its secrets.
How could they?
With hundreds of years of extraordinary discoveries,
tombs and precious objects,
I think this rocky canyon in the desert will go on dazzling us
with its treasures.