The Incredible Craftsmen Who Made The Egyptian Tombs | Our History

The land of Egypt, the valley of the Nile, green living fields and a bone-dry desert beyond. Two lands then set side by side, one for the living and one for the dead. A balance of men and gods. Imperial Thebes, a huge mud silty city, master of an empire and a home of awesome gods, all housed in a hundred mighty temples. Imperial Thebes, where the kings were brought home again for burial, each in his own exquisite tomb, deep under the mountains of the desert. Individual underworlds all filled with golden gods. One of the very great pleasures of the Cairo Museum is that here gold looks like gold. Not that awful waitress thing you see in big exhibitions where they shine lights on things and they sort of float off in a sort of glittery Christmas card look. Here this really looks like a work of art. Try and look through the gold and see the piece. It's amazing to think that it's actually constructed out of two sheets of gold riveted together. Somebody's worked it with a hammer from the back, a man tapping away. He's done it with such accuracy that he's even reproduced the cheekbones slightly tilted because Tutankhamen had an accident when he was a boy and his cheekbones were an eighth of an inch out and so is that gold mask. People I knew who had seen this mask when it first came from the tomb said that it looked more shiny, brighter than it does now. That's because they put such a high polish on it that when the modern cleaners came to wipe it with a cloth they scratched the ancient surface. What a marvel, an object made by people whose lives were saturated in deep colours and shining textures. Master craftsmen of breathtaking precision and this in the age when Stonehenge was new. Of all the hundreds and thousands of people that filed past Tut's gold mask, very few of them ever bothered to come here. Yet this case in the museum contains some of its minor masterpieces. It was set up about 80 years ago by one of the early directors of the museum and in it he put really the finest small objects that had ever been found in Egypt. You see most of the things that are this size were usually sort of bashed out in the workshops and they're pretty things but they're not wonderful. But this director he had such an eye that he could fathom the masterpieces and this case just jumps with life. Look at that piece there for example, that tiny little statue at the top. It's the only known statue of the man who built the great pyramid, King Cheops. And that little thing there, extraordinary strong face of a woman, Queen Ti, who gave birth to this heretic king who tried to turn all of Egypt upside down. It's all of her character stamped on that little bit of stone there. Now this woman she's equally filled with life as the queen and the king. Well she was the wife of a man who spent most of his life gathering corn for a small village in Upper Egypt. She was an interesting person, she was very quick-witted and when her husband was away she actually took control of all the village affairs. One of the things she did for example was to go around and inspect all the measures for the wheat with which the people made bread. She wrote a very cross note to her husband saying that somebody was fiddling them and when he came back she'd jolly well see he got punished. She also looked at all the family affairs as well, very competent woman. In fact in her day she ran the village. And these other people along here, they're probably her friends in the same village. It's a village we know more about probably than any other village in the ancient world. They're also the actors of our drama. And this is where they lived, the village of Deir el-Medina, hidden in the hills of Thebes. A village of craftsmen, of families, of men, women and children packed in neat houses set side by side. And how remarkable it is that modern science has given us more information about these ancient people than we have about most people of the last century. This for example was the bohemian part of town. Over there lived some scribes who painted coffins in their spare time. Over there lived the leader of the village choir. I don't expect his neighbours ever made much complaint about the fire practice though because next door lived this awful Heathcliff-like character who spent most of his time bellowing at his poor old adoptive stepfather. And in here lived a little old lady who so loved her pet monkey that she adopted a slave boy to sit and feed it grapes all day. And in this house, well there lived the village storekeeper. Not a very interesting job actually but sort of important and the villagers considered his fat jars so important, his big jars of fat that were rendered down from the oxen that they used to roast. The two men went to court over one of these for 17 years. And here the little village scribe in his spare time used to sit and write love poetry. Can you see him licking his brush and slowly writing his words by himself? I kissed your open mouth and it made me drunker than wine. The modern father of our village, the man who really has given all its people back to us in the modern world, was a Czech called Jaroslav Černý. He was a professor of Egyptology in Oxford and he studied the village and its people for 50 years. Even when he was 70 he was still walking slopes like this, climbing, looking for the village's inscriptions on these rocks over here. Our ancient villagers scribbled millions of little texts, little graffiti, told you about their days of life and birth and things like this. And that is why an elderly Oxford professor was still scrambling about here even when he'd retired because Professor Černý knew these people name by name. He could tell individual handwriting, he could tell when a man had written something as a young man and old man. And these texts are so detailed in themselves. This one here for example is written on the 13th of September 1275 BC. Can you see him? There he is, tiny little faint head. You see it there and his two arms coming up and praying? Looks like he's waving to us from 1275 BC doesn't it? That's the royal scribe Ramosa. What he's doing is announcing his appointment to the village as a royal scribe to work in a king's tomb. He's very proud of being a scribe because Ramosa was the son of a messenger, was not a scribe at all. And normally scribes of course it would be handed down from father to son. So nobody would actually celebrate the appointment because you'd be celebrating the death of your dad. But Ramosa was a self-made man and so he was pretty proud of it. And this is what Professor Černý came up here to find, this little figure. He was a man, in the words of Auden's poem, against who the Bureau of Statistics could find no fault. The perfect Egyptian, the man on the Theban omnibus. And we know all of this from the village's own records, much of which was written on the most surprising material. These bits of stone are called ostrica by archaeologists. They're the product of making tombs. But the quarrymen literally cut out the walls and they laid around the Valley of the Kings in hundreds and hundreds of thousands. And it was these beautiful smooth white flakes, the ancient scribes and many other people at the village too, picked up and used for writing. You know after all in such a hard environment, it's a pretty good and permanent surface to work on. It was something which you could later then put onto fragile papyrus to keep in the royal records. So this is what to us holds the village life. All the hundreds and thousands of documents, the records come principally from this source. They wrote on it, not in the flowery hieroglyphs of the monuments, in which a little seated man like this one might indicate the word love or to take, but in a very rapid script which is called today hieratic. It's that script flashing across the surface of these stones which tells us so much about those ancient people. Archaeologists found thousands of these ostrica buried in a deep pit close by the village. A precise and careful documentation of ancient life. A library of love and envy, of greed, of griefs and friendships. All held in letters, laundry lists, receipts, bills, contracts, deeds, prayers and sometimes even exquisite drawings. And this is hardly surprising, for our villagers were some of the greatest artists of the ancient world. when Thebes was the capital of the world. Because in a thousand BC that's exactly what it was. So let's imagine for a minute that these mountains are filled with the ancient Thebans again. The people that lived here for five or six hundred years. Absolutely honeycombing all over these mountains here. And every night of course they would walk in a great mass down and look over the fields again, back to the city which they all loved. There they would smell the sweet breezes of the river in the evening. An extraordinary sight it must have been. Over there, great dusty silty mass of houses. With two huge temples at each end. Probably great white walls around them. Sticking out from these white walls flagpoles and pennants all flashing in the sun. That by the way is the first thing that the returning Thebans saw as they came around the bend in the boats on the great river. Of course the crops were very different in those days. None of these tufty sugar canes that stand eight feet high. The fields would have been very much smaller and you'd have been very much more aware of all these little rivulets of water that have been coaxed off the Nile. Wonderful irrigators but sort of lazy people. They didn't go in for great water and irrigation schemes. They were little men doing little things very very carefully. And surrounded all around them these huge white temple compounds one after the other. Fourteen of them in a great row. Each one with its own individuality and each one to a particular god. And everybody here knew exactly what temple belonged to what god. And each temple had its own festival throughout the year. When the gods came down the canals to each of the temples and visited one another. And here hidden away the little village of our workers. The special men that went down into the underworld in the valley of the kings. An extraordinary group of people. Now the tomb maker's village was some three miles from the valley of the kings. This is the path that the scribe Ramosi used every day to get to work. And one of his favorite sights must have been this gathering of temples. The most beloved of all Theban temples. Today we call the rocky bay Deir el-Bahari. These temples here contain a part of the very essence of ancient Egypt. Their whole attitude to the world in which they live. And it's one that's very different from ours. So when you first come to look at Egyptian things you can be a bit disappointed. But that's because they're interested in a different universe. They inhabited a different world to us. That's where these temples can come in for us. Because here you see how the ancient Egyptians related to the landscape. If you think of a Greek temple, more often than not, like a gothic church even, they're in a prominent place on the top of a hill or somewhere. And they dominate the whole landscape. Somebody once said that they're like diamonds through which the landscape is refracted. Man is actually imposing himself on all the hills around. But this temple, this sits absolutely in the landscape. In fact the architects here actually cut a bit of the cliff away. And there's a balance here between the forms of the buildings and the form of the landscape. One flows into the other. That's what makes it such a magical and wonderful place. This is the exact point at which Ramosi turned his back on the living. The great city of Thebes to move over the horizon, quite literally, into the realms of the dead, into the underworld. Under the natural pyramid of this mountain is the Valley of the Kings. The mountain's goddess, Merit Saga, she who loves silence, looks down to the gates of the underworld, the fathomless tombs of imperial Thebes. This then is the modern doorway of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. The most famous tomb in the world, the tomb of Tutankhamen, Tut's tomb. And of course, as everybody knows, it was found by an Englishman, Howard Carter, in 1922. In his book he says that he was digging for years and it was very difficult and, you know, there was this last minute gamble when his backer, Lord Carnarvon, wanted to give up because he couldn't afford it and all this stuff. But I think there's a little different story really that's somewhat nearer the truth. So if you look at his excavation records, what you discover is that he was digging very, very close to here, years and years before, and in fact he may have actually come down on the doorway of the tomb and left it again. Now why would anybody have done that? Well, I think because Carter understood Carnarvon. Carter knew that he had to keep some of his discoveries back for the moment when Carnarvon's enthusiasm flagged. Carnarvon said, no, I can't go on anymore. Carter said, one more season. He turned up here. On the 1st November he was digging here. Three days later he made a very narrow trench, just about down where I'm walking. And on the 4th, after three and a half days work, he was already back at the doorway for the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. The tomb's doorway was filled with rubble. Slowly Carter's men dug their way down a sloping corridor. They got here, they found a white plastered wall stamped with the royal necropolis seal all over it. Carter slowly took a stone and just underneath a wooden lintel which ran across here, it peered through into the tomb. The first thing he noticed was the candle he was holding flickered as the hot air trapped in the tomb for 3,000 years rushed out past him. Then his eyes slowly began to accustom to the gloom. He said he thought he saw a wall of gold. He was dumbstruck. Now, Lord Carnarvon was standing next to him. He was a shorter man, he couldn't really see, and he was desperately trying to find out what was going on. He was tugging Carter's sleeve. Carter was glued, of course, to the most famous archaeological picture of all times because in the little room in front of him stood those three huge gold couches of the king. The royal chariots lay in a great heap over there and all over the floor, all the paraphernalia of Tut's court, must have been the most extraordinary moment ever in archaeology. Can you imagine what Carter must have thought? He's still there, you know, the only king of all the kings that were buried in the Valley of the Kings. Tut had been buried in an amazing labyrinth of ritual. His king's burials were nothing like our burials at all today. They didn't even serve the same purpose. This is not a memorial. This is more like a machine, a piece of machinery. If you look around the tomb, as in all the other royal tombs, you find not one memory, not one word of how great or how powerful or how little or how unfortunate or how rich or happy the king had been. Nothing about their personalities at all. Only the king meeting the gods. These tombs were important too for the next king. That over there tells that story. It shows Tut's successor engaged in the rites of burying the dead king. You see, every new king buried his father in this careful ritual order which established the dead king as a god, which made the living king as the son of god and a true king of Egypt. So these tombs aren't like Christian tombs. They're not people waiting for the last trump in here. These are a part of a political statement, a religious political statement. So there's no Christian horror about the place. There's no gothic myth. There's no curse involved here. There's no reason anybody should curse this tomb. This tomb is a functioning thing. At the time of the funeral, it worked. It's done its job. They might not have liked them being robbed, but there was certainly never any worry of these awful myths that surround them today. Now Tutankhamen's tomb can show you what a buried pharaoh looked like, but he can't show you a real royal tomb. They were vast and took years to make. Compared with those great monuments, Tut was buried in a hole in the ground. Real royal tombs are very different. Just as our villagers were not slaves and were not killed after they had finished the tombs, so neither were most of the king's tombs hidden away. Let me show you what they look like. Great high decorative doorways. A single huge passage cutting straight into the mountain. The richly decorated walls. Visions of the underworld. The life's work of Scribe Ramosa and our villagers. In a long straight line, halls and corridors lead down to the chambers of the royal burial. And unlike Tutankhamen's secret tomb, all of them easily and inevitably robbed and plundered. Now, I'm climbing into King Ozymandias's armpit. That's the same as Rameses II, of course. For a real particular point, you see this great statue. I'm sitting on the edge of his broken chest. Here's the top of his arm here. His head busted, lays out over there somewhere. For a particular point, and the point is this really, that these statues are not made like they are in the movies, you know, with 55 extras banging away with chisels. These are really incredible works of art. Nobody can make them today. That's not because we lack the skill or any individual lacks the skill. It's because we don't work in community anymore. Look at the way these muscles are explained here. See, here's the shoulder coming round here and then slowly and perceptibly through hundreds of inches it comes out and then rolls in again to hit that muscle there. An incredible description of an arm. It's even more incredible when you think there was probably one man working on this bit and another one working on this bit. It shows a community of craftsmanship that the western world's completely lost. It's gone. It's not good enough to say there's no man can make this in the world today. No man ever made this. This was made by a group of people that worked together in an extraordinary harmony. Our villagers were just such a group of artists. Amazingly, they left us a detailed record of their working lives here in the village cemetery. This is the tomb chapel of one of the workmen of the village Now, he wasn't buried here. This was a place where people came on high days and holidays to have a meal, to share their food with the dead and also to offer to Ippy and his wife. So it's a sort of link between this world and the next really. Here you can see the man himself. He's lost his head unfortunately with his wife and their daughter and they're worshipping, as you would expect here, the king of the underworld with his blue skin and behind him the goddess of the western mountain, the peak that stands over the village and you can see she's a beautiful lady with a fine dress. It's a woven pattern this and it's very interesting because you only find this particular design either in tombs in the village or in the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. As they're both painted by the same people of course you'd expect that. Which makes all these tombs here rather special. They have this wonderful quality about them. The best artists in the world. Here you can see what actually went on in the chapel. There is Ippy and his wife again sitting on their chairs and their children are offering them food. They're a bit indistinct of course. You can see the son is offering this lovely pot painted up and in it bunches of onions. It's what's in this detail in this tomb that's so interesting and so very unusual too. See this little white table here? You see on it a lovely dish all bedecked with flowers and inside the dish little figs. There's joints of meat and here a beautiful duck. A lovely curved neck. You see it's been slit open. It was stuffed with something delicious like some nuts or something I expect and it would have been baked in honey. It was a real delicacy in ancient Egypt and other joints of meat. It's all these little details that are so delightful in this tomb. Here you see Ippy is wearing these wondrous linen robes. The finest linen ever woven anywhere at any time was made here and on Ippy's lap the family cat. What is really fascinating about this tomb, why it's a privilege to be here because not many people actually ever get in this tomb, is the fact that all the support industries that kept these people in such sort of magnificence really were all painted on the other walls of the tomb. It's as if Ippy wanted to bring them all along to keep his standard of living up. So here we've got a little picture of the very men who washed his clothes. It's quite unique. They're the village servants and there they are all chattering away and scrubbing and washing down by the river. See on this wall Ippy had really rare scenes of the village servants painted. Don't often see these sort of people in the tombs. Look here they are the fishermen of the village edging through the marshes at the side of the river in their boat. There's a good middle class artist. He's made the workers all look a bit comical you see with a funny round nose and rough hair and they're all sort of chattering and gesticulating at each other. But nevertheless, funny though they were, a nice big catch of fish for the villagers which after all was their main source of protein. And here after the fishing right in the corner here you can just make out one of the same fishermen mending his nets and he's done an extraordinary detail. I mean that hand is really we're talking about quarter of an inch here you know every fingernail and even the knot you can see the man tying it up. And this chap here is one of the village craftsmen. He's working on a mummy mask much like the mummy masks of Toot and Carmen. This wall you see is really filled with the villagers at their own work. Here for instance is one of the tool kits, a carpenter's tool kit. Have a saw here with its teeth and its handle a little strange but much like a modern saw and here the final part of the mummy is this scribe painting away the beard which comes on the wooden mummy case and this little fellow of course is holding the mummy up to stop it moving around whilst he's painting. Now normally you know artists hold their paints in Egypt in quite large bowls but this man he has a scribal palette. It's another indication really that it was the scribes themselves who were very much involved in painting things in the village. In fact you know this whole wall is just sort of filled with village life. It's quite extraordinary. Underneath the artist in this scene here where there's a dozen workmen working away on some great beer like a great wardrobe, some ceremonial object, has really looked at his fellows with a very caustic sort of an eye. And this guy here for example, lucky fellow, he's just had a big heavy mallet dropped on his foot. Now he's calling up to the guy above to be more careful you see whilst this man looks round. It's a big object you can see they're actually working on the top of it. Here a man has left his bag full of tools just like a plumber's bag see with a saw and a chisel sticking out of it. And here well somebody's gone to sleep and somebody else is waking up perhaps because the foreman's coming you know. And these little fellows of course are the people that lived in our village houses. So as much as the past can ever give you itself in real life this must be it. Most of our workman's village has been excavated during this century. Rubble and windblown sand had sealed it for 3,000 years. Now our village is empty, its people have gone away, their houses are ruined. But not too far away modern villagers are still living in much the same way, still employing the ancient methods to cope with many of the basic problems of daily life. Just as our ancient villagers did, the Nubian villagers use vaults to catch the wind and cool their houses. And the Nubian villagers still use the flat roofs to sleep on in the hot summer months and to store their things. Our ancient villagers did the same. Much of North Africa still causes water by evaporation in the age-old way that our villagers used. Of course such comparisons get ever more dangerous in their details. But in their order and regularity, their environment and their building methods, these two villagers, ancient and modern, share a great deal. But to see the actual stuff of village life we must go north to Turin where there is preserved a unique treasure, the tomb of Khan, the architect. The wonderful thing about this tomb is that our villager took all his house with him to his grave. This is a time capsule, it's what was in every village house. This bed here with its linen and its blankets, this is the bed he slept in. That curve, that slight curve in the middle is the bump that you get when you sleep in a bed too long. That's his pillow over there. It's a strange hard wooden thing that fitted under the ear. It must have been excruciatingly uncomfortable. God knows how they survived. This is his wife's handbag, or what passed for a handbag in those days. I suppose like lots of handbags it's a very strange mixture of pretty little things. You see those two little duck's heads on the top of a perfume flask, how delightful. There's another perfume flask in there as well and it's still sealed. The perfume is 3,000 years old. And here, that little pot in front, is an eyebrow pencil. At the bottom of it would have been this black stuff called kohl. The ladies in Egypt still drop into their eyes so that the black powder floats off and makes a fine black line around their eyes. Very good, very healthy for the eyes. That's the lady of the house's wig. It's made of human hair. She wore it to parties. It must have come down right over her shoulders. And this, this is the gentleman of the house's toilet compartment. You see he's still got what passed for broil cream in those days, a special perfumed air oil. These are his razors. They're extraordinary things. Beautifully made, bronze, sharpened this edge I think. God knows how he ever managed it. I sort of like that somehow. God knows how he ever managed to shave with such a thing. I haven't actually worked it out. And this, this beautiful little thing, the things of everyday life, the things that people carry about with them, that are closest to them. This little worn figure of a horse, a little pair of tweezers for pulling out those odd hairs. Egyptians were very fastidious people. You can see that too in their clothes. Look at these wonderful examples of ancient tailoring, practically unique. Look at the care and delight in this neck. The tailors made this beautiful loop and then caught it in a bow, just like a fashion designer. You see that little decoration on that stick? That's the sort of decoration that people must have had in their houses, but which hardly survives today. All we've got left is the monuments. It's a very famous stick from our village. And on it, it says, support me, oh stick, in your old age. This, if you like, in the next case here, really, I suppose it's the heart of ancient Egypt. It's a fuel parlor, certainly, because these are onions, real onions from the ancient fields. And that's ancient bread, just as they make it today, except this is more than 3,000 years old. And though, of course, the standard ingredients, if you look at any Egyptian stele, the first prayer will be, give my spirit bread and onions to eat. That's the basic diet. That's the diet that fueled the people that made the pyramids and our villages when they were making the royal tombs. But this bread, this is special bread. This has come from the altars of the gods, from the temples. And you see, as you gave things to the gods, you wanted gods to hear your prayer. So there's little ears, so that your prayer will be heard, fashioned from the loaves of bread. So that naturally brings you on to this case. In this case, it's full of the man's kitchen. Isn't that extraordinary? Look, there's a kitchen pot, a nice bronze cooking pot, still full of porridge or some gooey stuff that he was cooking up in it. Doesn't look very delicious anymore, I must say. And these are all his herbs, his herbs, his dates, his raisins, his garlic, all the food laid out for his spirit in careful little bowls, bought straight from his household. Of course, it would have been unlucky once he died to leave it there. That's why it's all in his tomb. But this, it's only a tiny little amount. This, if you like, is the village's wages, because this is what the people were paid in. There's a sort of little symbolic gesture in the tomb. This is the grain. And every month, those donkeys came up the track bearing the king's grain for the people that made the royal tombs. And that is some of the men's wages from our village. You may wonder why such intelligent people as the ancient Egyptians, and our villagers indeed, bothered to bury dead people with all these possessions around them and these beautiful things too. Well, I think to answer that question, you really have to start to look just a little into how the ancient Egyptians divided the person up. Because in these divisions of a person, each one of these divisions had its own heaven. Now, this is a burial chamber. It's the burial chamber of a villager called Senegem. And this is where his corpse lay. And that was a part of Senegem's personality, just one part of it, his body. And this is Osiris, the great god of the underworld, the great green-faced god. And these two eyes, these staring eyes looking out through the strange mirror that divides this world from this mysterious region of Osiris. So this is the god's domain, and this is part of the heaven that the body inhabits. And that, of course, is why the possessions are here. Because possessions really are part of the body, your clothes, your chairs, and the food you need to eat. It's part of the destiny, part of the heaven of the body. And that's why the things here are made so well, because it is a heaven. Now, there are other heavens for different parts of the person. One of those is the person's soul. Now, that goes up to heaven. And these are the souls of our villagers, these stars up here. Here's Senegem worshipping older villagers. But he, too, would be a star and shine in the night sky. But our villagers were very keen on the heaven that belonged to a person's personality, to his image. And this is a villager's heaven. And for a man who spent his life in the desert, chiseling away on dry rock, old Senegem saw his heaven as this beautiful garden with lots of canals running through it, with date palms and beautiful flowering plants and perfumes. And, of course, he plows the fields. He's not a real farmer. He's never plowed a field in his life. This is strictly a Sunday farmer, you know, with their fine linens and things. Here they plow and here they reap. Two of the great wonders of ancient Thebes were the Colossi of Memnon, each one carved from a single block of glistening quartzite, the hardest stone the ancient people ever quarried. And this carried from a mountain hundreds of miles away. The most remarkable thing in this place, perhaps, is that which has vanished, one of the biggest temples ever made. Behind these two statues stood two vast mountainous entrance walls, where I'm standing, a single doorway as big as an aircraft hangers, with granite hinges, the huge wooden doors of Lebanese cedar covered in bronze. So as I turn now into this spare field, you must imagine that I'm walking through a great courtyard. Now I'm coming to what used to be the heart of this temple. All that's left of this colossal wreck is this wondrous stone steeler. It's a fine irony, really, because this, if you like, is a deed by which the king gives the god this great temple. These lines actually record some sort of an agreement the two have made between themselves. Listen, I'll read you a remarkable piece of this document, where the king is actually boasting to the god about his great gift. Come, Mamun Ray, lord of Thebes, see the house that I have made for you. I've made it in excellent work of fine white sandstone. I've filled it with monuments, with statues made of mountains, of alabaster and pink and black granite, of gold and every splendid costly stone without end. God is greatly impressed by this, according to the steeler, and in the end he takes the gift and he takes the sun to his heart. Come, my son Amenhotep, I've heard what you say. I've seen your monument. I am your father and I accept what you have made for me. So with this great gift, of course, went a huge foundation. Went hundreds of thousands of workers, scribes and everything else, and Ramos was one of these. It was where he got his education. Now why would such a fortunate young man leave this lavish compound and go and live in a small village in the desert? Well, to understand that, we have to go to one of the oldest and most elegant monuments in the Valley of the Kings, the tomb of King Tut, Moses III. The tombs of the old kings have been made in a very particular way. See, the artists and the quarrymen that have made them left the walls bare right up to the time of the funeral. All they painted was the stars on the ceiling and the border underneath. It was only after the king had been put in his coffin that the scribes came in here and quickly dashed off the wall paintings in just two or three days. You see, the painters knocking in this border here were moving so fast down the wall they couldn't even be bothered to move away a box which stood here, so this area is left blank. Of course, that box came in with the royal funeral and that was the same time that these people were working away here because the painting of these texts was actually a part of the funeral. They're not supposed to be art, they're actually supposed to be very careful and detailed instructions on how to do something and that's why they're done with such precision, though so fast. It's a very funny mix really. See, these writings were very, very special. They were probably only known to a very few people in Egypt. They were guidebooks of the underworld. You see them at work here. It's another indication of just how fast they're going. You see, these scribes are holding in their hand a palette and a papyrus, the papyrus that holds the text. Their brush is in the other hand, so they're dipping their brush in the paint, looking down at the text and writing from right to left. They go, and then the brush runs out, dip it again, look at the papyrus, off they go again, brush runs out again, dip in the paint, look at the papyrus, start off again, but just at this point here, he's looked at the wrong place in the papyrus. You can see he's copied the same phrase, see that eye there, from there to there, as it is from here to here. He looks down again, realize what he's done, and he's off again, straight away, without even bothering to stop. But later kings, the kings that our villagers work for, wanted more opulent monuments, and this brought about a change that affected the lives of many people, including our scribe Ramosa. To make such beautiful walls in the new tombs was a long and laborious process. First of all, the artist flattened the wall out, so flat, so precise, I mean much more than any modern wall you've ever seen really. And then the outline draftsman came along, the guys who laid out the whole walls, and they started off with strings which they dipped in red paint, and these were laid at precise intervals along the wall that they wanted, and snapped against the wall to give dead straight lines. And then vertical ones were added too, those to fit absolutely harmoniously to the architecture. And then, the man, working very slowly and very carefully, very laboriously, came around and redid it all in black. So the way the rushed version was perhaps a little wrong, this one was finally placed. And this was done very carefully, because the next process was so very laborious. And that was cutting down all the back surface of the wall, and you can see a man actually at work here, this thing is half finished. This is where the sculptor is working, you can just see him, I mean he's literally walked out the door and I'd come in, right? Three thousand years later, and he has a chisel in his hand, and he's standing and he's slowly, slowly working around this figure. And this figure represents the flesh of the king going into the underworld. So for the sculpture, this figure has to live. And that's the terrifying thing about this work, because it goes on for yards and yards and tens of yards and hundreds of yards through the tombs. So all these signs down there, these little hieroglyphs that are letters of the alphabet, these are actually little living people, little living men, little living birds. Can you imagine the work? So the gods and goddesses at the bottom of them all took even more skill. And when you get onto those huge beautiful figures of the kings and gods in the outer corridors, well they're really the work and the long and involved work of master craftsmen. Obviously making tombs like this is a lot more hard work and labor than making the much smaller and simpler old tombs. And of course that's why they're not finished. It's why the first ones aren't finished anyway, because the gangs were still working in the old ways. So what happened was that the whole process of making a royal tomb was reorganized. Couldn't make the gangs much bigger because there simply isn't the room in these tombs to employ hundreds more people. That actually proved practical, would keep the gang about the same size. What they did do was to streamline the actual work process of the gangs themselves, because that had been actually rather lackadaisical. The old foreman had ordered the chisels and seen the supplies and made the reports. Now that was a special gang of scribes brought in to control all that work, separate from the foreman. And that is why Ramosa joined the villagers. So here in the Valley of the Kings, he spent the rest of his life controlling the work at the king's tomb and, as he grew old, training his successors. And one of these, his stepson, has left his mark all over the cliffs of the Royal Valley. Well, here's Howard Carter, 1917. And here, next to him, Ken Hair Copper Chef, 1300 BC. He was a difficult man, a cunning old man, in fact, at the time he worked here. He understood how the village worked and how all the little courts could be manipulated and exactly how the power structure worked. He was sometimes very rude too. He was very manipulative, but he was a historian. He made himself a personal copy of the text of the Battle of Kadesh. He made lists of all the temples at Thebes. He was very interested in history and in kings, but the men didn't like him much. To them, he was bossy and arrogant. And perhaps that was just as well, for making tombs was hard work. First, you cut out the doorway from the rock. Then, foot by foot, you cut your way into the cliff. And in Ken Hair Copper Chef's day, work was especially urgent, for his king was old and ill when he took the throne and wanted his tomb in a hurry. The workmen reached this point in the tomb and after about three years, and then the quarrymen They bashed away at that huge lump of flint with their chisels for some 20 days. At least, that's what Ken Hair Copper Chef's record tell us. But of course, they didn't get very far. They just managed to chip a little bit off the end. It must have completely buckled their copper chisels and that's all they had, you see. No steel at all. So they just left it there and carried on. Ken Hair Copper Chef's records are very exact. He was in charge of the baskets, which they carried with shippings out of the tomb. He was also in charge of the chisels and he was in charge of the lamps. And it was by these flickering halos of light that the villagers hurried to finish the tomb. So the poor old king's funeral procession, wound down through the corridors, came into the royal burial chamber. Poor old corpse, blown as dry as an egg, its arthritic body all wrapped up in bandages, covered in resins, put in two beautifully finely made cedar coffins, another alabaster coffin, was enclosed under this. Now imagine a procession. This is not like a procession today with orderly people walking in ranks. This is a swarming mass of people, very intent on doing things the right way. So you've got all our villagers down here with great wooden staves to move this into the final position over the coffins. And right at the end of the funeral, after everything was done, and all the priests and all the villagers had swarmed all over everything, Kenhir Kopyshev, one or two other of the priests, would have gone round and carefully lit four candles to keep the spirits of sand and of demons out of the corpse. And just before they left, after they did that, they put water on a bed of grain that would rise in the dark and give the magic of growth to the dead king.