Lost Treasures of Egypt - S05E01 - Khufu's Palace
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00:00In the shadow of the pyramids, a team of archaeologists is zeroing in on a discovery that could rewrite
00:14ancient history.
00:16Thirty-three years ago, I started looking for the lost city of the pyramids, and everywhere
00:22we put down one of these excavation trenches, we saw big walls.
00:28Inside an abandoned soccer field, they found evidence of royal architecture.
00:34Something really big is lurking down there.
00:37What is this building?
00:38Is it a palace?
00:40Dating all the way back to the legendary pharaoh Khufu, this buried structure could be linked
00:45to the Great Pyramid itself.
00:48According to all the hints that we have, the building should be right here.
00:55We're about to see something that no one has seen for 4,500 years.
01:06Giza, today a district of Cairo, home to over four million people.
01:164,600 years ago, the site of the ancient world's greatest wonder, the iconic Great Pyramid.
01:25Was the final resting place of the game-changing pharaoh, Khufu.
01:32When Khufu commissioned his tomb, nothing on its scale had ever been attempted.
01:38At 482 feet high, the Great Pyramid was the tallest structure on earth for 4,000 years.
01:47Dr. Mark Lerner has been studying it his entire professional life.
01:53Well, it's hard to believe I've been here for 50 years.
01:56Now the pyramids are really kind of familiar.
01:58I mean, I probably know the Pyramid Plateau better than I knew any place where I ever lived.
02:06For Mark, the Great Pyramid's extraordinary engineering is just the tip of the iceberg.
02:13There are greater questions to answer on the Giza Plateau.
02:18The story of the stones only takes us so far.
02:23Archaeologists already knew there was a city here at Giza, the city of the dead.
02:28To really understand the pyramids, you have to understand the people who built them.
02:34Where was the city of the living?
02:36If it took 20,000 or 30,000 people, where did they live?
02:41How were they fed?
02:42Where were they housed?
02:44Those were the questions that I started with.
02:47We knew that if we could find their city, its footprint would tell us something about
02:54how the king used the social organization of his time to get this job done.
03:02I had to turn my back to the pyramids and look out to the surrounding site.
03:11In search of a lost city, Mark chose to excavate a patch of waste ground just over half a mile
03:18from Khufu's Great Pyramid.
03:21In 1988, he hit the jackpot.
03:24Once we found it, it gave us something to do for the next 35 years.
03:32And we're still at it.
03:36Southeast of the pyramids, Mark made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of
03:41modern times.
03:43The city of the pyramid builders.
03:47Tons of mudbrick homes for high-status administrators.
03:51And at the center, rows of long, thin galleries with vaulted roofs.
03:56A giant dormitory building where workers lived, cooked, and slept.
04:03At the excavation's southern edge, the team has found mysterious stone walls 6 feet wide.
04:10So large, they could only be part of a royal building.
04:15For 20 years, Mark has been waiting to expose the rest.
04:22Mark's discoveries have transformed our understanding of the people who built the pyramids.
04:28Not slaves, as once thought, but ordinary Egyptians, well-fed and paid.
04:34But how the greatest construction project of ancient times was organized has long been
04:39a mystery.
04:41And the role played by the legendary pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid, unknown.
04:49In an area surrounded by mudbrick, the thick stone walls of the building stand out.
04:56They could be the key that unlocks Khufu's secrets.
05:01What is this building?
05:03Was it a palace?
05:04If so, what kind of a palace?
05:07For now, most of it is covered in at least a foot of modern soccer field mud.
05:15We like to be careful, but we're anxious to get aggressive.
05:19Go medieval on it.
05:24A geophysical survey shows an anomaly under the soccer field.
05:30Mark thinks it could be the structure's buried corner.
05:34If he's right, this would be the largest building ever found in the Lost City.
05:41There's no doubt there's a building here.
05:43I'm almost certain.
05:44I mean, not almost certain.
05:46Certain is certain.
05:47It's just a question of how big is it, where does it go, and what is it?
05:57Mark decides to dig several trenches in line with the previously excavated stone wall.
06:03This should give the team the best chance of hitting the ancient building.
06:09Within an hour, a crew guided by Mark's long-term collaborator, Dr. Mohsen Kamel, has broken
06:16through the thick soccer field layer into the sand below.
06:20Mohsen, I think we should be seeing it by now, and we're just seeing clean sand.
06:27We'll give it another 20 centimeters or 30, and then we'll see.
06:34A man of faith.
06:38Mark wants to hit the building before the end of the day, but pit one is getting dangerously
06:43deep.
06:44We don't have any long tape.
06:45Oops.
06:46Uh-oh.
06:47All right, I think we should get everybody out.
06:52The side of the square collapsed, so it's beyond being safe, so we have to stop it here.
06:59The team has dug far deeper than the building's expected depth.
07:03It has Mark worried.
07:06Now we're more than a meter below the level where the wall is running strong.
07:12If anything was there, we'd be hitting it.
07:14That's the thing.
07:15There's nothing here.
07:17Maybe the geophysics anomalies aren't positioned right on the map.
07:24The giant building should extend well into the soccer field, but the corner suggested
07:29by the geophysical survey is not where Mark expected.
07:35Perhaps it's not a palace at all.
07:38He decides to focus efforts on test pits two and three.
07:45Mark authorizes some demolition work to check the trench's alignment with the building's
07:50previously excavated wall.
07:57The line looks good.
08:00If the wall continues that far, we should pick it up.
08:03As the team prepares the ground for pit three, the news coming out of pit two is also not
08:10good.
08:11Only 32 meters there.
08:13Wall, big buildings.
08:15Lost city.
08:16Here, just clean sand.
08:22Once again, they've dug beyond the expected depth of a stone wall and found nothing.
08:29We're at the water table.
08:30That means we're more than two meters underneath the level of the building wall, just 32 meters
08:37to the north.
08:41All the clues point to the stone wall being right beneath them.
08:45Its absence makes no sense.
08:48After 20 years of waiting to dig, Mark now faces the possibility that his search for
08:53a royal palace might fail.
08:57There's pottery.
09:00Oh my God.
09:04See?
09:05Well, that's highly intriguing.
09:09There's no doubt this is good Fourth Dynasty pottery from the time of the pyramids.
09:18Only moments ago, I was saying we have nothing, not even one shard, and now it's just popping
09:23up everywhere.
09:24It's not a lot, but it's a little that says a lot.
09:28It's the top of a jar.
09:32The pottery is evidence of human activity on this spot while the pyramids were being
09:37built.
09:39Perhaps the rest of the royal building is down there after all.
09:44As Mark's number two, Dan Jones, supervises the delicate work on test pit two, energy
09:50levels are ramping up in pit three.
09:55Mark watches with anticipation.
09:59Mark, they've located a wall down in the bottom in the second trench.
10:05A wall?
10:06My God.
10:07Wait, are you serious?
10:08Yeah.
10:09No.
10:10Come and have a look.
10:19Mark's search for an ancient royal building within sight of the pyramids has had a major
10:26boost.
10:27What's up?
10:28What's up?
10:29His previous excavations suggested the structure extended well into the soccer field.
10:36Now they finally found stonework in the second test pit.
10:41But it's much deeper than expected, right down at the level of the groundwater.
10:46Oh, we got a wall.
10:50That's amazing.
10:51Am I on the alignment though?
10:53Yeah, I think it's pretty much where we thought it would come.
10:56So we have the wall there only 32 meters away, something like 90 feet.
11:01Between there and here, we have some kind of ramping down by about two meters.
11:09Everything we see from here on out, no one will have seen in the previous 4,500 years.
11:16Mark has located the giant building beneath the soccer field, but it's six feet deeper
11:21here than at its northern end.
11:24This western wall seems to slope downwards.
11:28The only way to explain why is to clear the rest of the soccer field and figure out whether
11:33this building really was a palace.
11:40To help him understand what might have gone on in the pyramid builder's lost city, Mark
11:45heads for Khufu's Great Pyramid itself.
11:50It's still the case that every time I come, I see something new that I hadn't seen before.
11:58And I've been here for 50 years.
12:00He's searching for evidence of the human effort required for the pharaoh's immense project.
12:08Almost the entire pyramid is built with stone quarried from the surrounding plateau.
12:15Much of the stone that we see on the pyramid today was never meant to be seen.
12:21But the base is clad in a different type of rock.
12:25If you imagine the entire acreage of the pyramid covered with this beautiful polished white
12:30limestone, that's what the pyramid looked like when it was brand new and complete.
12:39Geologists have worked out that this fine white limestone comes from a quarry at Tura,
12:44eight miles away.
12:47The ancient Egyptians were good geologists in their own right and knew where to go to
12:52get the best stone for the right purpose.
12:56Inside, Mark explores the pyramid's closed-off interior.
13:03Even the internal passages are lined with high-value material.
13:08So the Grand Gallery is one of the ancient architectural marvels worldwide.
13:12The laid-in stone of the internal passages and chambers is from Tura.
13:19Every surface bears evidence of the craftsmen who worked it smooth, with chisels made of
13:24copper mined more than a hundred miles from the pyramids.
13:28The human story, the story of the human hand that created the Great Pyramid, is there in
13:35details like these chisel marks.
13:38One hundred and fifty feet up, in the center of the pyramid, is the king's burial chamber,
13:44a protective cocoon of solid granite shipped all the way from southern Egypt.
13:52This is where the king was buried as a god that had ruled the Egyptians on earth.
13:58It was meant to be the darkest, most inaccessible place in the universe.
14:03Everything we're finding in the Lost City Pyramids was all about building this room.
14:13The Great Pyramid was an unprecedented engineering marvel.
14:17But it was also an extraordinary logistical feat.
14:22Egyptologists have long wondered how an ancient society organized a project that required
14:27resources from all over the country.
14:32In 2013, archaeologist Pierre Tallet chanced upon some astonishing evidence.
14:39In a cave on Egypt's Red Sea coast, he unearthed the cache of decaying papyrus documents.
14:50Unique and priceless, they're now kept secure in the archives of Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
14:59We knew that we had the most ancient papyrus ever found in the world, in fact.
15:05It is the first real documentation that we have about the building of the pyramid.
15:10You have the cartouche of Khufu here, and here, for example, we have the pyramid.
15:17We got really excited when we were reading it, because it was evident that it is a logbook
15:24of a team of sailors that were supposed to bring material for the construction of the
15:31Giza complex of Khufu at the very end of its reign.
15:37The papyri were written by the crew's overseer, Inspector Merer.
15:43The entries describe the team's movements as the final touches were applied to the pharaoh's
15:48giant tomb.
15:50Inspector Merer is traveling by boat, sailing towards the pyramid of Khufu, laden with stones.
16:06Merer's records reveal his workers shipped limestone eight miles from a quarry in Tura
16:12to Khufu's pyramid site in Giza.
16:16His team may also have collected copper ore from mines on the Sinai peninsula, which was
16:22used to produce vast quantities of chisels for smoothing the pyramid's fine casing stone.
16:30Merer was just one of many overseers keeping detailed logs of their work.
16:38Why the records were sealed in a cave is unclear, but the arid soil ensured the script survived
16:45for 4,600 years.
16:51I think one of the interests of those papyri is that they are beautiful, in fact.
16:55I'm in love with them.
16:58The way they kept their records, it's really impressive.
17:03The building of the pyramid of Khufu is a great project of the reign.
17:07You can see that all the resources of the country are concentrated to build the pyramid.
17:15Here you have the most impressive pieces, but we still have about 500 fragments to study,
17:23and we have to extract all the valuable information from them.
17:29It will take Pierre years to decipher every last fragment of text,
17:34but each tiny scrap could help piece together how the pyramid project was run.
17:44On the dig site, Marc's plan is to find out whether the building he's waited 20 years to uncover
17:50played a role in the pyramid's construction, and whether it's a lost royal palace.
18:00Under the supervision of Marc's longtime friend and colleague, Syed Salah,
18:05the team has shifted a 10-foot thick layer of sand and mud, massively extending the lost city site.
18:13It means he's exposed another 15-foot section of the mysterious stone building at its heart.
18:23The secrets at the center of the lost city are just beneath their feet.
18:37The team has spent days shifting four and a half thousand years' worth of mud and sand
18:42from what they hope might be a pyramid-era palace.
18:47They're searching for evidence of the structure's purpose.
18:51With any luck, it will hold clues to the role this lost city played in turning the pyramid project into a reality.
19:00Immediately, they begin to unearth clues.
19:03The compacted mud seems to contain an unusual amount of stone.
19:08Not building material, something more valuable.
19:13There's just a tremendous amount of granite.
19:15Then we have alabaster, which is imported.
19:20The granite is imported from Aswan, 600 kilometers to the south.
19:24The alabaster is probably imported from Middle Egypt, maybe 200-300 kilometers to the south.
19:32The question is, why so much granite? Why so much alabaster?
19:39Ah, so yeah, we're starting to find pieces that show worked surfaces. That's quite nice.
19:47The fact that it's got a flat work surface indicates they were making things out of this hard stone here.
19:56Is this a moment of discovery?
20:05Yeah, looks like we have a corner.
20:08It looks like a base, like of a statue.
20:13Whole mounds of stone are accumulating as we move in and under the soccer field.
20:19They went to great lengths to get this.
20:22Whole expeditions going down to Aswan and out into the western desert.
20:26The fact that we're finding so much of it, it's telling you a story.
20:31I think it's very possible that this whole part of the Lost City of the Pyramids
20:37could well be the industry for providing statues for the temples.
20:41Think of the clink-a-chink of hammers cutting this stone.
20:44It must have been truly an amazing experience to be here at that time.
20:50A few yards away from the buried cache of imported stone,
20:54Mohsen is working on a fresh find.
20:56Inside the giant building's perimeter walls,
21:00the team has come across a number of circular structures.
21:04See here, he's scraping, scraping, scraping,
21:08and all of a sudden he sees a difference in coloration and he sees a straight line.
21:15So that would tell you there was a break here.
21:19Mohsen recognizes their form immediately.
21:22The Egyptian archaeological record is full of similar cylindrical structures
21:27used for storing food, but these silos are giant.
21:34Here, the diameter of these silos, or these structures,
21:39cylindrical, and the diameter is about 2.6 meters.
21:45Assume at least two meters high, if not more.
21:48This is a silo that, let's say, on an industrial scale.
21:54The silos are enclosed by the thick stone walls of the royal building itself.
22:01They could hold clues to how the pharaoh managed the resources needed to get the pyramid built.
22:10Archaeologist Clare Gould,
22:13archaeologist Clare Mallison specializes in studying the site's most minute evidence,
22:20plant matter.
22:22In the team's storeroom,
22:24Clare sifts through the soil samples taken from all over the excavation.
22:29She's trying to work out how an army of workers hauling stone could be kept alive.
22:36In the samples of dirt from the dig site,
22:39she looks for anything that appears to be burned.
22:42The burned plant remains will float because they're light,
22:46they're organic,
22:49and then we collect them in the sieve.
22:53Yeah, there's some little bits of charred remains in here.
22:58Fire turns the plant remains into carbon,
23:01preserving the shape of seeds, husks, and straws.
23:05By far the most common plant species Clare finds on the dig site are wheat and barley.
23:13What we can tell from the plant remains that's really exciting
23:17is that they were provided with ready-prepared grains,
23:21probably by the pharaoh because they're working for him.
23:23They're building a pyramid.
23:24He doesn't want them distracted by having to do lots of work on their food preparation.
23:29The remains are also found on the dig site.
23:32And grain wasn't only food in ancient Egypt.
23:40So we know that at some points of history in Egypt,
23:43this is how people were paid.
23:44They were provided with grain as their salary.
23:48What the plant remains can tell us about our site
23:51is that it was a very important central place.
23:53There was a big supply chain from all over Egypt
23:58to the pyramid building site to support the workforce.
24:02Nile floods gave bountiful harvests of wheat,
24:08a staple crop on which the entire country depended.
24:14It was turned into bread and beer,
24:17sustaining the people of Egypt's farms and villages.
24:23But if kept cool and dry in silos,
24:26wheat grain could be stored for months,
24:28guaranteeing a supply of food during times of drought.
24:34Since grain was needed all year round,
24:37it was the ideal currency to pay the laborers
24:40working on the pharaoh's eternal tomb.
24:45The most secure place for the king's vast grain reserves
24:49might have been within the walls of the city's giant stone building.
24:54People were actually paid in grain, bread and beer.
24:58So this is like the central bank, the bankroll of the pyramids.
25:01You got to keep that in mind with your pick.
25:05Mark believes the row of silos continues beneath the soccer field.
25:10Exactly how many is still unclear.
25:16But what is certain is that the royal building
25:18protected huge quantities of Egyptian wealth.
25:25On the other side of the site,
25:27the team is searching for the end of the building's stone wall.
25:32Yes, Said, is the wall still going, still further?
25:39Oh my God, look at that.
25:42Oh, the wall just keeps going and going.
25:47There's really big architecture down there.
25:51But work is hampered by an insurmountable problem.
25:55The wall continues to slope downwards.
25:58And although the area above ground may be arid,
26:02with winter approaching, groundwater levels are rising.
26:10The team can't excavate underwater,
26:13but Said continues to search every square inch of ground he can.
26:25Just a little bit of a corner of a hieroglyph.
26:27Said found this because he's got a really good eye.
26:29He's been doing archaeology for more than 30 years.
26:34What looks like an ordinary pebble
26:37turns out to be a small lump of hardened clay.
26:40They would block a door or a box or a bag with cloth,
26:44and they would tie string.
26:46And then they use this kind of clay to seal the string.
26:50So when somebody wants to open the bag, open the box,
26:53they have to break the clay.
26:56They are like our old-fashioned wax letter seals.
26:59Same thing.
27:00There's a vertical element and two little arms going up.
27:05And I think what we have is half of a sedge plant,
27:08which is the hieroglyph for Nisu, king, possibly.
27:14Found inside an apparently royal building,
27:17in sight of the pharaoh's pyramid tomb,
27:20even tiny clues like this unlock the secrets
27:23of ancient Egypt's greatest monument.
27:34So little is known about Khufu
27:36that every scrap of information is vital.
27:41In the team's storeroom,
27:42Claire combs through the hundreds of sealing fragments
27:46unearthed in 20 years of digging at the lost city.
27:50Those pieces found around the giant building
27:54could be a rich seam of information.
27:58They appear to belong to people in the service of the pharaoh.
28:02What we've got is each sealing belonged to one person.
28:06And on it, we have the job title, basically,
28:09and the name of the pharaoh he's working for.
28:11That's why they're so important for us.
28:15So this one is a particularly nice one.
28:19And it belonged to the keeper of royal instructions,
28:24scribe of royal documents.
28:29The pharaoh surrounded himself with high officials and advisors
28:33who ran the Egyptian government.
28:38These officials had unique hieroglyphic seals,
28:41like signatures,
28:42which they used to secure important documents,
28:45boxes, even doors.
28:50They were responsible for collecting taxes,
28:54monitoring the all-important grain supply,
28:56and managing the pharaoh's building projects.
29:01The top official was the vizier,
29:03effectively a prime minister,
29:06who oversaw the design of the king's eternal tomb,
29:09the pyramid.
29:14The sealings suggest dozens of different officials
29:16roamed around the royal building.
29:19Some were doing the pharaoh's bidding.
29:22Troublingly, the team has never found Khufu's name
29:26among the sealings, until now.
29:30Hi, Claire.
29:31Hi, Mark.
29:33So Ali tells me we have Khufu.
29:35Yeah, it looks like it.
29:37Wow, look at that.
29:40There it is.
29:41You have the cartouche.
29:44Then you have the ha sign, kind of like our KH.
29:47So KHU-FU.
29:49Pretty clear.
29:50So this is the first time we've had a mention of Khufu
29:53in the sealings.
29:56Keep picking away, and suddenly there's a clue,
29:59and then another one, and another one,
30:02and pretty soon it adds up.
30:03And this little dab of mud has so many implications.
30:10Khufu's cartouche, among the debris of the royal building,
30:14is yet more solid evidence that the city
30:16was key to his project.
30:19At its center seems to have been a multi-purpose structure.
30:24Mark's evidence suggests not only was the royal building
30:27a vault storing Egypt's wealth, it was a hub
30:31for the pharaoh's powerful officials.
30:35Could this have been one of the most important buildings
30:38in Egypt?
30:44Pierre has come to Giza to meet Mark.
30:49Among the scraps of papyrus he excavated on the Red Sea coast,
30:54he's found what may be critical new information
30:57for understanding the lost city of the pyramids.
31:04So Pierre, this is papyrus D, but it just
31:07looks like a series of very small fragments.
31:10Yeah, unfortunately, this papyrus
31:12was not so well preserved.
31:14But it is probably the most interesting
31:16for the Giza area.
31:18Within the workers' diaries recorded in this papyrus,
31:22Pierre has discovered references to a special building
31:25near the Great Pyramid.
31:29We have a mention of the henu, the royal residence somewhere.
31:33So that's interesting.
31:34You actually have the mention in a document
31:39of a palace of Khufu?
31:42Ancient Egyptian pharaohs had multiple palaces,
31:45including both private homes and administrative headquarters.
31:51If Pierre's translations of the fragmentary papyrus
31:54are correct, Mark's giant structure
31:56could be one of the royal buildings mentioned in the text.
32:01And more details seem to support the theory.
32:05What we have also in this papyrus
32:08is a mention of other administrative structures.
32:11Like, for example, here you can see the granary.
32:15What we have actually found are a series of big silos.
32:18So we have a granary.
32:21Is it possible our granary is the granary mentioned here?
32:24It's quite possible.
32:25It's really interesting when you can find a connection
32:28between archaeology and those texts.
32:31Absolutely.
32:32I mean, really, for the first time,
32:34these texts are bringing people to life,
32:37the people who built the pyramids.
32:41The giant building beneath the soccer field
32:44bears all the hallmarks of a center of power.
32:47Thick walls and high security
32:49protecting valuable grain and stone.
32:52Adjoining buildings bustling with high officials.
32:56Could it be that it was an administrative palace,
33:00like an ancient west wing of the White House
33:02from which the pyramid-building kings
33:04oversaw the construction of their giant tombs?
33:19On the dig site, another season is moving towards a close.
33:27In the shadow of the pyramids,
33:29Mark and the team race to uncover
33:31as much of the giant building's footprint as they can.
33:35So, oh, I see it.
33:38I see a turn here.
33:42I see a corner out there, but there's no doubt
33:45there's a beautiful line of a wall.
33:46You can even see the plaster render on it.
33:50Some people might think this is like watching paint dry.
33:55It's kind of like watching mud dry.
33:58But, you know, it's like just identifying
34:02little corners like this,
34:03walls corner by corner,
34:05that we came up with the whole map of the lost city site.
34:10The mud brick homes and workshops of the settlement
34:14sprawl some seven hectares beyond the royal building.
34:17But Mark's quest to understand the people who built the pyramids
34:22has taken him all over the plateau.
34:26In 2015, the team discovered more buildings
34:30to the southwest of the city.
34:33Curiously, they're cut off from the rest of the site by a wide gap.
34:39By uncovering the full extent of the huge building
34:42beneath the soccer field, Mark hopes to find out why.
34:48The team has shifted hundreds of tons of sand
34:51in search of the royal building's southern limit.
34:55But for now, they can go no further.
34:59The wall dips continuously downwards
35:01in a series of terraces.
35:04They followed it all the way to the groundwater.
35:08But what at first seemed like an obstacle
35:11has given Mark an idea.
35:14Sayed, are there any walls in here?
35:25So now we've arrived at this big rectangular enclosure
35:29filled with groundwater.
35:31As chance would have it, the groundwater is just where we think
35:34the level of the Nile flood was in the time of the pyramids.
35:39If the building ramps down to the ancient level of the Nile River,
35:43it could mean that the structure fronted onto water.
35:50That would explain the location of the cut-off buildings
35:53compared to the city.
35:56They were separated by a harbor.
35:59It's known the Khufu diverted the west branch of the Nile
36:03and built a harbor to receive the heavy Tura limestone.
36:08But this would be a previously unknown dock.
36:14We're going to take an elevation on the wall
36:20as far as we've traced it into the groundwater.
36:25All right, Dan, if you can give me an elevation
36:28on the wall, I want to know for the level of the Nile flood
36:32during the time of Khufu.
36:34Okay.
36:35It should be about 14, 14.5 meters above sea level.
36:43What's the elevation?
36:4414.51.
36:4714.51.
36:50The wall's height above sea level suggests that 4,500 years ago
36:55this area would have been filled with river water.
36:58It would have been an ideal dock for receiving the most valuable goods
37:02and perhaps the king himself.
37:06There's a whole series of little ramps
37:08going down into this rectangular enclosure
37:11that's now filled with water.
37:14I mean, the whole structure is starting to appear.
37:18It's a sophisticated port structure.
37:21When people were thriving in the city,
37:24men were carrying baskets of grain and other commodities
37:27up into the enclosures and the compartments.
37:30It's all really coming together.
37:35The building's thick stone walls
37:37and the ceilings belonging to the pharaoh's administrators
37:41prove to mark that the giant structure dominating the lost city was royal.
37:47It seems the building also had its own harbor
37:50built to receive precious goods and powerful people.
37:56To find the last wall of the building,
37:59Mark now has to wait for the groundwater level to retreat.
38:16Nearly four months after Mark closed up the lost city site,
38:20the groundwater has finally dropped.
38:23Syed and the team scrape away the overlying mud
38:26to expose the ancient archaeology.
38:29Mark hopes it will reveal the rest of the giant building
38:32he's waited 20 years to unearth.
38:37As soon as the men clear the surface,
38:40walls just pop out asking to be mapped.
38:44Where Syed is brushing, you can see the bricks showing brick by brick.
38:49And what it seems to be is the frame of a doorway
38:52coming into this unexcavated part of the royal building.
38:58All this is new. Nobody's seen it for 4,600 years.
39:02This morning, Syed has been delicately cleaning
39:05what appears to be the last of the stonework.
39:08Where the stone wall pieces out,
39:10he finds a telltale area of compacted mud.
39:14The royal building changes from stone to mud brick.
39:19And so the mud brick kind of fuses
39:21with all the disintegrated mud brick around it.
39:25But taking away the last of the sand,
39:30there is unmistakable the southeast corner,
39:33the end of the royal building.
39:37Having established the structure's limits,
39:39Mark and Dan can finally compare the building
39:42to the palaces and temples of later pharaohs
39:46and get a true sense of its importance.
39:50First time we've measured the north-south length
39:52of the royal building.
39:55By pinpointing the coordinates of each corner
39:58on their citywide archaeological grid,
40:01Dan can work out each dimension with millimetre precision.
40:0499059, 0.644.
40:12So we're talking around 51 metres in length.
40:16That's interesting.
40:18That's interesting.
40:18It's a standard 100 ancient royal cubits.
40:23Are very close.
40:26The building's east-west measurement
40:28is equally impressive at 140 feet.
40:3242 metres, 75 centimetres and one millimetre.
40:38It's as big as the biggest palaces
40:39that we know from ancient Egypt.
40:42Anyway, I happen to know the White House
40:43is 52.5 metres wide at the front.
40:48It's just comparable.
40:49It's a really large building.
40:51Thank God some of it's left for us to find.
40:54After half a century of searching,
40:57Mark has exposed one of the largest
40:59non-funerary stone buildings ever found
41:02from the time of the pyramids.
41:05The administrative palace on which
41:07the pharaoh's entire pyramid project depended.
41:12Mark's excavations have revealed
41:14the royal building covered a huge area
41:17of 23,000 square feet.
41:21Flanked by storehouses and workshops
41:23for master craftsmen working valuable stone.
41:26Inside, there were at least 30 silos
41:29that stored grain to pay the workers.
41:32Accessed from above and below.
41:37The building backed onto a stone dock,
41:39giving it direct access to the Nile.
41:42Making it the perfect hub from which
41:45the pharaoh and his officials
41:46could manage construction
41:48of the greatest monument on earth.
41:51Today, Mark is closer than ever
41:53to understanding how the great pharaoh Khufu
41:56and his successors transformed
41:59the Giza Plateau and Egypt itself.
42:02To build the pyramids, you know,
42:03it wasn't just stonework.
42:05It was far, far more than that.
42:07You needed to feed the people.
42:09You needed granaries.
42:11You needed fine craftsmen to work the granite.
42:16The pyramids were built
42:17by the pharaoh Khufu.
42:19He was a fine craftsman to work the granite.
42:21Egypt at this time, all evidence indicates,
42:23was largely an agrarian society.
42:26When Khufu came here
42:28to build the great pyramid at Giza,
42:30it required a whole infrastructure
42:33that was new and different.
42:36But a city like this was unprecedented.
42:39It set that society on a whole new spin
42:42like a gyroscope.
42:44And that resulted in the next 3,000 years
42:46of Egyptian civilization.
42:49Fifty years after starting his quest
42:51to understand Khufu's great pyramid project,
42:55Mark has exposed the buried secrets
42:58of the last surviving wonder
43:00of the ancient world.
43:02We're putting the light on the people
43:03who built the most gigantic structure in the world
43:06until the turn of the 20th century.
43:10This material, this pottery, these ceilings,
43:13this is the real treasure.
43:16The lost treasure of ancient Egypt.