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Mohamed!
Oh wow
It's inscripted stone
In the shadow of the pyramids,
archaeologists make an extraordinary discovery.
This oval shape, this is the name of the King, Khaafre,
the owner of the second pyramid.
They unearth a stone inscribed with a cartouche,
an ancient symbol of the pharaoh.
MOHAMED Kha'afre, this is the most important hieroglyphic sign
and it's dating back 2600 BC.
The Pharaoh, Khafre, built the second pyramid of Giza,
could this astonishing discovery of a four and a half thousand year old
stone bearing the pharaoh's name,
help to answer one of Egypt's greatest unsolved mysteries?
This is a great discovery.
What happened to the missing bodies
of the great pyramid pharaohs?
These are cold cases, maybe the coldest robbery case in the books.
The ancient Pyramids of Giza
tower above the urban sprawl of modern Cairo.
The pyramids were built four and a half thousand years ago,
as tombs for three generations of pharaoh kings.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu stands over 450 feet tall.
Khafre, his son, built his tomb just 13 feet shorter.
And Khufu's grandson, Menkaure, built the smallest pyramid,
but it's still the height of a 15 story tower block.
These tombs are giant fortresses,
designed to keep the pharaoh's corpses and treasures safe for eternity.
The man responsible for preserving these ancient monuments is
Ashraf Mohie El Din, the director of the Giza Plateau.
Ashraf is a world famous archaeologist and knows more about this site
than anybody else on the planet.
Today, he's spearheading a pioneering excavation that he hopes will
transform our knowledge of the pyramids and the pharaoh kings who built them.
Everybody's dreaming to come, to see the pyramid,
I get the honor to come every day.
Ashraf has dedicated the last 20 years to investigating this vast site.
But there's one area that's still shrouded in secrecy,
largely untouched by modern archaeologists, until now.
Due south of the pyramids, is a barren one square mile desert landscape.
It makes up the entire southern half of the Giza Plateau.
It's called the Southern Field.
Ashraf assembles a team of over 60 workers,
to undertake a vast excavation beneath this unchartered patch of desert.
Over the course of the next eight months,
they will remove hundreds of tons of sand,
dumping it at the base of the plateau.
Guys, let's work our way down like this
Our work actually here, to clear the sands, step by step,
layer by layer, to see what is under the sands.
Nobody knows what secrets lie undiscovered beneath the sands here.
But historic excavations across the Giza Plateau
have led to astonishing discoveries.
West of the Pyramids, archaeologists unearthed
an enormous cemetery for high officials.
To the east, the tombs of the Pharaoh Khufu's family.
And gigantic processional causeways, with grand temples,
including a temple devoted to the great sphinx.
Archaeologists have even found the remnants of a harbor town,
where pyramid building blocks weighing up to 15 tons,
were delivered on board fleets of ships.
But no-one knows for sure what lies buried beneath
the largely unexplored Southern Field.
As Ashraf's team shift the sands...
Mohamed!
They unearth a startling discovery,
just a few inches beneath the surface.
Oh wow
It's inscripted stone
They find a beautifully carved limestone block.
It's buried in soft sand
This oval shape, we call it a cartouche
This is the name of the king
The team are onto something big.
ASHRAF It's inscribed with the name of the King Khafre.
Kha Ef-Re, the owner of the second pyramid.
ASHRAF So, this means, this block dates back to the age of the pyramid.
What connects this limestone block to the pyramid pharaohs?
Could this discovery here in the Southern Field,
finally shed light on one of Egypt's greatest unsolved mysteries?
What happened to the mummies of the pyramid kings,
Khafre, Khufu and Menkaure?
The bodies of these pharaohs were once entombed inside the pyramids,
but have never been found.
It's a place to have his mummy and his treasures,
so it should be well secured, well protected.
But keeping the pyramids secure was a formidable challenge.
We know from both archaeological and textual sources,
that tomb robbery was always a problem in ancient Egypt.
The monuments failed.
The first explorers to enter Khufu's pyramid in the ninth century
find the burial chamber empty.
Khafre and Menkaure's bodies also disappeared.
Doctor Mark Lehner is a world leading expert on the Great Pyramids.
MARK These are cold cases.
Maybe the coldest robbery case in the books.
Mark wants to know how these enormous,
fortified tombs were broken into.
He retraces the robber's footsteps
into the Great Pyramid of Khufu to investigate.
Khufu built the first and largest great tomb on the Giza Plateau.
It's the only surviving wonder of the ancient world.
MARK Here, they built the most perfect, largest pyramid of all time.
And they never equaled it afterwards.
It's thought, 20 to 30,000 people labored for two decades
to complete this incredible monument.
Using enormous ramps to stack up 2.3 million stone blocks.
MARK They did it with such an exactitude,
that the base is off level only by an inch around the entire perimeter.
This wasn't just a burial tomb,
people worshipped the pharaoh's memory here after he died.
The pyramid would have looked very different when originally finished.
Mark examines smooth limestone blocks at the monument's northern base.
These blocks would have once encased the entire pyramid.
MARK This brilliant outer casing was also a line of defense
against anybody who would come in to plunder the royal burial.
It was one gleaming sheet of stone and nobody knew exactly where the entrance was.
But robbers did break in.
They didn't hunt for the entrance,
because that would have been concealed by the limestone.
Instead, they tunneled right through 100 feet of the pyramid's building blocks
until they hit an internal passage.
Mark climbs up through the pyramid's grand gallery.
These enormous structures weren't just protected from the outside,
inside there were even more anti-theft devices to negotiate.
At the top, Mark finds evidence of an ingenious pyramid locking mechanism.
Thick ropes would have run down these slots.
Those ropes would have controlled slabs
that would slide down these slots.
Boom, boom, boom.
To close the entrance into the burial chamber of the pharaoh.
Mark believes that when it was time to lock
the pharaoh's body in his tomb,
workers used a complex network of ropes to drop enormous granite slabs...
sealing the burial chamber.
The Ancient Egyptians then released three even bigger blocks,
that slid down the ascending passage,
before slamming into the end of the tunnel,
totally blocking it off.
Finally, they concealed the pyramid's doorway,
under a seamless layer of limestone,
making it impossible to tell where the entrance lay.
Ancient engineers thought they'd built the perfect pyramid protection mechanism,
they were wrong.
MARK The anti-theft measures didn't work.
The chamber has been empty since recorded history.
We don't know who carried out this crime,
but Mark has a theory about when the robberies took place.
MARK It's my sense that it was done,
maybe very soon after the pyramid was complete because
those who made the forced tunnel,
seemed to have known how to turn it just to connect with the ascending passage,
which is the way up to the king's chamber.
We know from the breath-taking discovery
of Tutankhamen's golden treasures that pharaohs were
buries with great riches for use in the afterlife.
So the pyramid pharaoh's burial chambers would have been rich pickings.
But the pharaoh's mummies had no intrinsic value
and the ancient tomb robbers would likely have feared these sacred remains.
Ancient Egyptians believed the key to eternal life
was to preserve the bodies of the dead.
So when thieves ransacked the tombs,
they would grab all the treasures buried with the pharaoh.
They even opened the coffins,
to pluck gems and amulets from the mummies.
But we know from other Egyptian tomb robberies
that looters may have feared the wrath of the dead pharaohs
and would have left their preserved bodies behind.
So why did all the royal mummies disappear from the Pyramids of Giza
and where are they now?
Any Egyptologist on this planet wishing to find a mummy for a pharaoh.
If archaeologists find those missing mummies,
it would be an enormous breakthrough
in our understanding of these ancient and enigmatic kings.
MARK We don't have a New York Times or a Sunday Times
that tells us about these pharaohs.
We just don't know how old they were, what they looked like,
their personalities,
we know these pharaohs primarily from their monuments.
Could the corpses of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure
have been moved and reburied elsewhere on the Giza Plateau
to keep them safe from further robbers?
I'm hoping in the future, in our excavations to find
a hidden mummy of Khufu, a hidden mummy of Khafre
Ashraf believes that this stone,
carved with King Khafre's name is just the tip of the iceberg.
What else lies buried in the Southern Field?
I believe lots of things in the future, is waiting for us
Ashraf's team is now eight weeks into their pioneering
35 week excavation of the Southern Field.
The more sand they remove,
the more extraordinary discoveries they make.
Unearthing ancient clay pottery.
They've got lots of jars, they put beer, honey, milk, wine,
even cheese to be re-used in afterlife.
And huge mudbrick structures Ashraf believes
are the walls of long buried tombs.
It extend from here to over there.
You see my colleague over there?
And where there are tombs, there are bodies.
As the team continues to dig,
they unearth dozens of burial shafts.
We have more than 50 shafts here,
so I'm cleaning one by one.
It's now clear that this unexplored patch
of the Giza Plateau was once an important necropolis,
a vast cemetery dating back some four and a half thousand years.
Who was buried here?
Many of the shafts are either empty or unfinished.
But some...
Oh my God
Still contain remnants of burials.
This burial chamber
may be three meters inside
Seven beer jars
One particular shaft astounds them.
ASHRAF Wow.
This shaft leads to an interconnected network
of underground chambers.
I think there is many chambers to explore.
It's an extraordinary discovery,
this mysterious network of chambers is a mass grave.
Lots of remains of mummies, skeletons,
bones and skulls.
This is one of the bandages which was used to wrap the body.
Could these tombs contain the missing bodies
of the pyramid pharaohs?
Some skeletons are ruled out because of their size.
Oh my God. It's a burial for a baby.
ASHRAF I'm working more than 20 years now as archaeologist.
This is for the first time for me,
to discover a burial for a baby.
ASHRAF And there is a beautiful mask.
In one hidden corner of the tomb network...
Wow.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
Ashraf makes another spectacular discovery.
A mask with a Golden sheets.
Wow! A golden finger!
ASHRAF I can see the nail.
Oh my gosh, he still has a hair.
ASHRAF A skull with a hair.
The whole coffin was covered with sheets of gold.
These golden shards once formed part of an ornately gilded coffin.
ASHRAF I believe got a high rank
to have this golden sheets on his coffin.
Such liberal application of gold
would have been reserved only for the wealthy elite
and high status Egyptians.
And to find an elaborate burial amongst the scattered remains
is a surprise for the team.
They must now analyze the body to investigate
who was buried inside this golden coffin.
Could these even be the remains of a great pyramid pharaoh?
Astonishingly, this wouldn't be the first pharaoh's body
to be found in a humble mass tomb.
Dr. Colleen Darnell has devoted her career
to studying Egyptian beliefs about death.
She investigates a spectacular collection of mummies
that could shed light on why the bodies of the pyramid pharaohs
weren't found inside their enormous tombs.
These mummies date from Egypt's New Kingdom,
a time some 1,300 years after the Giza pyramid pharaohs.
In the New Kingdom,
pharaohs no longer advertised their burials
with giant pyramids.
Instead, they conceal their tombs,
carving them deep underground in the Valley of the Kings.
It was in this valley that the New Kingdom pharaoh,
Tutankhamen and his golden treasures, were found.
But the final resting place of these pharaoh's mummies,
wasn't so final.
COLLEEN This is the mummy of Rameses III.
You might think that he was found in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings,
but over 100 years after he died,
his burial was removed and his mummy was re-wrapped
to be interred in an unmarked tomb.
Inscriptions on the linen wrappings
allowed archaeologists to identify the body of Rameses III
and he wasn't the only pharaoh
to be removed from his tomb and re-buried.
Thutmose the II, believed by some to be the pharaoh
from the Bible's Exodus was buried with him.
So was Seqenenre Tao, a king whose mummy
suggests he came to a gruesome end in battle.
There were many more pharaohs in that unmarked tomb,
spanning some four and a half centuries of Egyptian history.
Most of the kings of the New Kingdom were
buried together in that unmarked tomb.
Why were these great pharaohs removed from their tombs
and re-buried together?
And could the same fate have befallen the pyramid pharaohs,
Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure?
Dr. Colleen Darnell hunts for clues
to solve the mystery of why dozens of pharaohs were
removed from their original tombs and re-buried in an unmarked grave.
Could this ancient papyrus hold the answer?
COLLEEN One of the more remarkable documents to survive
from Ancient Egypt is a transcript of the
confessions of a tomb robber.
The papyrus was long ago torn down the middle,
the two halves now live in different museums.
But by bringing the pieces together,
Colleen can decode the ancient confessions of a New Kingdom
tomb robber named Amenpnufer,
who broke into the tomb of a pharaoh named Sobekemsaf II.
"We took our copper tools and we broke into
its very inner chamber."
And we know that they're going through the mummies themselves
because they talk about a piece of Gold jewelry
at the neck of the king.
Amenpnufer admits to digging a tunnel
into the tomb of the pharaoh.
Once inside, he took as much gold as he could carry,
but he was caught.
For his crimes, a brutal punishment,
sentenced to death by impalement.
This tomb robbery and others like it,
alarms New Kingdom authorities.
Their Pharaoh's mummies,
so sacred to the Ancient Egyptians, aren't safe.
The authorities take action.
In order to safeguard the royal mummies,
they were moved, re-wrapped and buried together in an unmarked tomb.
COLLEEN We know that the plan worked,
by moving them from the Valley of the Kings,
to an unmarked tomb, they survived for thousands of years.
If all of these kings were moved to an unmarked tomb,
could the same fate have befallen the great pyramid pharaohs,
Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure?
Could their bodies have been moved and buried in an unmarked grave
and could those graves lie here in the Southern Field?
Ashraf's team has cleared up to 32 feet of sand.
Their work reveals the vast scale of this cemetery.
We have one, two, three, four, five tombs over there.
ASHRAF Those tombs were completely covered with sand.
The most impressive tomb they find lies at the far edge of the site.
The tomb is an incredible limestone structure.
Detailed engravings cover its walls.
One hieroglyph is familiar.
ASHRAF So, Kha-Ef-Ra.
It was the same cartouche in the block we found in the excavations here.
Ashraf now believes the block of limestone bearing Khafre's name
may have once formed part of this beautifully carved tomb.
But this tomb doesn't belong to the pharaoh himself.
The hieroglyphics here tells about his title,
Webb Nisu.
Kh F Ra, Hemm, netter, the priest, so this guy,
he was the priest of the Temple of Khafre.
This was the burial chamber for a high priest.
This priest would have worked in the temple
attached to Khafre's pyramid.
The temple was built as a place of worship
to keep the pharaoh's memory alive after death.
The discovery suggests that this Necropolis was no ordinary cemetery.
It was a burial site for high-ranking officials
who worked in the very heart of Giza.
ASHRAF To find such a quality of hieroglyphics like this,
dates back from 4,500 years,
this really a great discovery.
Further study of this tomb
could not only shine a light on the life of Khafre,
the great pyramid king, but also those who worshipped him.
11 weeks into the dig,
further excavations reveal another strange shaft.
This shaft is carved almost ten feet deep into the rock.
Those blocks they are covering the entrance of the burial chamber.
ASHRAF It means it's intact.
Ashraf sends site inspector, Ahmed Ezz,
down to help clear the blocks.
I hurt my finger, you idiot
Wait, look at mine!
They lift the last of the enormous 80 pound blocks
that covered the entrance to the burial chamber.
Nearby Ahmed, I can see there is something there
maybe there is something from wood, I'm not sure yet
It's a coffin!
At the bottom of this newly discovered burial shaft,
in Giza's Southern Field,
Ashraf is inspecting an exquisitely painted coffin.
You can see the face
his lips, his nose, it's well detailed
I'm speechless
This coffin is an extraordinary, one of a kind find.
If you have a look here, we have the beautiful Anubis
the guardian of the tomb here
These markings protect the owner's body
so that he can flourish in the afterlife.
And this coffin even has a false lid...
Wow.
An extra line of defense.
It's a cover, above a cover
In fact, coffin after coffin are being discovered
scattered all across the excavation site.
Some are buried in shallow sand.
What's this, Ahmed? Wood?
Yes, that's wood
The team decode the markings on the coffins.
It's like your wife is giving a birth,
I wish I can hold this coffin between my arms, he's my baby.
The coffins were buried on top of and inside the old kingdom tombs.
But while the tombs may date back to the time of the pyramids,
the caskets inside are from a much later period.
This style of wooden coffin,
carved and intricately painted to look like its inhabitant,
did not exist when the pyramids were constructed.
It's much later than the pyramids time,
the decorations, the motifs of the scenes,
it's a style of, of late period.
The coffins of the Southern Field date from the late period,
the term given by archaeologists to a time
2,000 years after the Old Kingdom pharaohs.
Why do these graves lie amongst the tombs of their ancient ancestors
in the shadow of the pyramids?
The time scales are enormous.
The Pharaoh Khufu built the first Great Pyramid
around 2,500 BC.
A further 1,300 years passed,
before the rule of the boy king, Tutankhamen.
And the late period coffins unearthed in the Southern Field
came another 700 years after even King Tut.
In fact, these Egyptians lived almost as close to smart phones as they did
to the pyramid pharaohs.
It's a remarkable twist to the tale,
the Southern Field appears to be a cemetery on top of a cemetery,
created 2,000 years apart.
This burial site is a window into an astonishing chapter of Egyptian history.
This site was once an important old kingdom necropolis,
with limestone and mudbrick tombs covering the hillside.
But the cemetery's peace was shattered.
2,000 years later,
the Late Period Egyptians suddenly began to re-use the necropolis,
carving fresh shafts
and re-opening ancient burial chambers.
Burying their dead on top of and inside
the ancient tombs of the Old Kingdom Egyptians.
The discoveries here lead Ashraf,
director of the Giza Plateau, to propose an incredible idea.
Could these late period Egyptians have played a role in the disappearance
of the bodies of the pyramid kings,
Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure?
Maybe the Late period people
found the body of one of the pharaohs
and moved it some place else
Maybe there's a mummy
a great discovery of a pharaoh
was waiting for us here
Although late period Egyptians lived two millennia
after the great pyramids were built,
they had an obsession with the ancient pharaohs who built them.
These people, they were worshipping
the pharaohs from the Old Kingdom
Why did late period Egyptians have such a fascination
with these ancient pyramid pharaohs?
Dr. Colleen Darnell is a world expert
in decoding ancient texts.
She believes the walls of a lesser-known period,
nine miles south of Giza, in Saqqara,
could reveal the reason late period Egyptians
idolized the pyramid pharaohs and may even
have sought to protect and preserve their royal mummies.
Saqqara is an ancient cemetery.
It neighbors the Giza necropolis
and built around the same time as the Great Pyramids.
17 pharaohs are buried here.
Colleen investigates the pyramid of Unas.
It was built by King Unas who lived just 100 years
after the Giza Pyramid pharaohs.
COLLEEN The exterior of the pyramid of Unas is pretty eroded.
But on the inside, it's remarkably well preserved.
The interior of Unas's pyramid is covered with mystical symbols.
These are the Pyramid texts, magic spells designed to
help the deceased achieve immortality in the afterlife.
These spells also reveal why Late Period Egyptians
may have gone hunting
for the bodies of the Giza's pyramid kings.
Colleen Darnell decodes ancient spells
carved into the walls of the pyramid of Unas.
One of the spells begins, "Hail King Unas," and then it says,
"You have not gone away dead, you have gone away, alive."
COLLEEN He's achieved eternal existence in the afterlife.
These spells don't just grant the pharaoh immortality,
they're also a road map to becoming an all-powerful God.
COLLEEN It says, "The one whom he desires to live, he shall live
and the one who he desires to die, he shall die."
The spells of the pyramid texts describe how the
king becomes a god in the afterlife.
These texts reveal that pyramids weren't just burial chambers,
they were God-making machines.
No pyramid texts were found inside the Giza pyramids.
But Colleen thinks that's because the architects never carved them into stone.
COLLEEN It's entirely possible that the pyramids of Giza
would have had pyramid texts on papyrus scrolls included
in the original burial,
but all of that material is now lost to us.
The pyramid pharaohs built their enormous tombs
to become Gods in the afterlife.
And 2,000 years after their deaths,
that's exactly what they'd become.
They were now Gods to the late period Egyptians.
The late period marked the dying days of native Egyptian rule.
Between 664 to 332 BC,
Egypt was under attack from Assyrians,
Babylonians and Persians.
In the Empire's final decades,
late period Egyptians returned to Giza.
They looked to the pyramid pharaohs, Khufu,
Khafre and Menkaure for protection in the afterlife.
These were now their Gods and the late period
Egyptians wanted to be buried beside them.
Late period Egyptians idolized Khufu,
Khafre and Menkaure.
That's why they want to have their tombs nearby the pyramids,
they believed the pyramid pharaohs, they are Gods.
The late period Egyptians worshipped the pyramid pharaohs as Gods.
So if they did find the bodies of the ancient kings left behind by looters,
they would have wanted to preserve and protect the royal remains.
Just like the mummies of the New Kingdom pharaohs,
re-wrapped and re-buried near the Valley of the Kings.
Could the late period Egyptians have moved the royal mummies to their own
necropolis in the Southern Field to keep them safe?
After 12 weeks of intensive excavations on the Southern Field,
Ashraf's investigation enters a new phase.
The team will now begin to open the coffins found around the site.
ASHRAF Wow. It's a mummy.
But, it's not for a tall or a big guy, maybe he's 15, 16,
he didn't have enough time or money
to afford a big burial for him.
Ashraf works with expert osteoarcheologist Dr. Amira Shahin,
to examine the bones excavated from the network of tombs
beneath the Southern Field.
We have another clavicle...
But there is one burial in particular that
Ashraf is keen for her to investigate.
Can Amira's analysis finally reveal who is buried in the golden coffin?
Will the body reveal evidence of their status
and a reason for their elaborate burial?
Could this even be the body of a pyramid pharaoh?
Re-buried by late period Egyptians?
According to the shape of the, the skull, these tiny bones.
So this is most probably a skull of a female.
She died when all her teeth are present, so she's really young.
This is no pyramid pharaoh,
but the bones do reveal a remarkable ancient practice.
This is not normal.
Amira finds a substantial hole just above the right eye.
The hole is unusually smooth.
AMIRA This is the surface of the bone, it is not broken.
This hole happened before death.
It has been made by a physician.
This smooth, circular hole, suggests that
this skull had undergone an operation, ancient surgery.
These people get medical health
600 BC, we have medical health
for medium class people
and this for me, is something new
These bones might not be those of a pyramid pharaoh,
but they're an important discovery,
revealing physical evidence of ancient surgery,
in a civilization known for some of the earliest surgical procedures.
What of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure?
Can Ashraf's excavations reveal evidence to help solve the mystery
of what happened to their mummified bodies?
And what role, if any,
late period Egyptians played in their disappearance.
Incredible evidence may finally provide the answers.
Evidence from inside Menkaure's pyramid.
The enormous monuments of Khufu and Khafre tower 260 feet
above the smallest pyramid on the Giza Plateau.
But Khufu's grandson, Menkaure, still built a tomb that towers over
200 feet tall and weighs in at 600,000 tons.
In the hunt for the missing pyramid pharaohs,
this could be the most important monument of them all.
While the other two great tombs have been open to modern explorers since
the beginning of recorded history,
the entrance to Menkaure's pyramid was buried deep in the sand,
until the early 19th century, when archaeologists finally
dug down to access the burial chamber.
Inside, they found a mysterious wooden coffin.
The coffin now resides at the British Museum and
the inscriptions are worn and difficult to read.
Archaeologist, Dr. Lehner, is a world leading expert on the pyramids of Giza.
He examines a copy of a drawing made almost 200 years ago.
So this is the wooden coffin, found in 1837.
MARK It's inscribed for Menkaure, as Pharaoh.
And it says, "Oh Osiris, Menkaure, king of upper and lower Egypt.
They cause that you'll exist like a God, without enemies."
The text states that this coffin contains Menkaure's mummified body.
It reveals that he hoped to become a God upon death,
just like the other pyramid pharaohs.
But there's a mystery, the coffin is wooden and shaped like a human.
This style of coffin is identical to the late period burials
being unearthed by Ashraf in the Southern Field.
MARK It's named for Menkaure,
but this is not his original coffin.
Everything about this suggests that it was put into the pyramid
2,000 years after Menkaure died.
And this is very strange.
MARK Is this a re-burial of Menkaure, some 2,000 years later?
2,000 years after Menkaure was first locked into his pyramid,
late period Egyptians entered the tomb,
perhaps themselves hunting for the pharaoh's body.
They likely found the burial chamber desecrated from robbers
and maybe they found this body too.
But Menkaure was a God,
they couldn't leave his sacred body unprotected.
Instead, they re-wrapped the mummy and placed it in a new coffin.
Holding a fresh funeral for Menkaure,
restoring his body into the pyramid he built.
MARK We know at this period they revived the memories of these kings
and in this case apparently,
re-doing Menkaure's burial at this time of renaissance,
when they're reviving the cult of these long dead pharaohs.
Menkaure's body wasn't found inside the casket.
But the coffin itself is evidence that a pyramid pharaoh was moved by these
late period Egyptians and restored into his ancient tomb.
A God reburied 2,000 years after he died.
Could the same fate have befallen the other pyramid pharaohs,
Khufu and Khafre?
There's one way to get answers, find the missing bodies.
We now know that the vast Southern Field was an important burial site
for these late period Egyptians.
And Menkaure's coffin is evidence that late period Egyptians did indeed go
looking for the ancient pyramid pharaohs to protect and preserve their mummies.
This huge expanse of desert may offer up a pyramid pharaoh yet.
I will not stop digging here because every day I get more excited
to find more things, more finds, more discoveries.
Months of intense digging has unearthed a
treasure trove of unique discoveries.
From the beautifully carved tomb of a high priest
who worked in the shadow of the pyramids.
To the shattered golden coffin of a mysterious young woman,
the recipient of ancient surgery.
And they've found countless other artifacts
that reveal extraordinary details about the lives
of those who built Egypt's great pyramids
and the people who worshipped them.
ASHRAF Since I was a child, I was dreaming to be excavator,
to find new discoveries, and I think I'm making my dream come true,
by being here in this site.
The hunt for the pyramid pharaohs,
Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, will continue.
Maybe in the future we will find their mummies hidden
somewhere around the pyramid,
maybe not, but it's going to be fun to keep looking.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.