National Geographic - Tales from the Tomb 4of4 Robbing the Dead
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00:00They strike at night, without warning, ransacking the tombs of Egypt's great kings and queens.
00:22They've been stealing from the dead since the beginning of time.
00:26It's a centuries-old cat-and-mouse game between tomb robbers and royalty.
00:35In this hour, investigate the tomb raiders and watch as the ancient pharaohs use ingenious
00:42technology to outsmart them as we enter the minds of Egypt's greatest criminals.
01:01Ancient Egypt, 1200 BC.
01:09It's the height of the Egyptian empire, and there's a crime wave.
01:14This man is part of it.
01:19He's a notorious tomb robber, and he's in the middle of one of his biggest heists.
01:26His name is Panep.
01:29His rap sheet includes robbery, sexual assault, bribery, and possibly even murder.
01:36He may be the first criminal in recorded history.
01:40Unknown to Panep, someone is watching him and recording every move.
01:48The big heist tonight?
01:50Knocking over the tomb of the pharaoh Seti II.
01:56He's cocky enough to help himself to some wine meant for the gods.
02:07He doesn't worry about being caught because he's bribed all the guards.
02:13Panep and other tomb robbers like him defy kings and gods.
02:19The risks are high.
02:20If he gets caught, pharaoh's enforcers will impale him on a stake.
02:27The rewards are tempting, a fortune in oils, fine linen, silver, and gold.
02:38In Panep's time, Egypt's desert sands are filled with buried treasure.
02:47For nearly 2,000 years, the pharaohs built pyramids and tombs as gateways to their version
02:52of heaven.
02:57They believed the afterlife was a lot like Egypt, so they needed to bring food and supplies.
03:07They stocked up on staples and luxuries, filling their tombs with supplies and offerings to
03:12the gods.
03:18Everyone knew about the buried treasure, and a few of them, like Panep, were willing to
03:25defy their religion and risk their lives to steal it.
03:32From the start, the pharaohs knew tomb raiding was a threat, so they tried to make it impossible
03:38for thieves to break into their burial places.
03:42They had a powerful motive.
03:46The pharaohs believed if the thieves damaged their mummies and tombs, the gods would bar
03:51the pharaohs' entry into the afterlife.
03:54The thieves weren't just lifting their stuff, they were stealing their immortality.
04:02Amidst the pyramids and tombs of ancient Egypt, it was an endless game of cat and mouse.
04:08The tomb robbers were constantly changing their tactics, while the kings battled to
04:13protect their afterlives.
04:172500 BC, this is Meidum.
04:25Built 50 miles south of Cairo, it was one of the first pyramids and a ripe target.
04:33But how did the cat and mouse game play out here?
04:39Archaeologist Salima Ikram is an expert on tomb raiding.
04:42This tomb really gives one an idea of what it was like to be an ancient tomb robber.
04:46They would have had to break through this thick wall of mud brick and then hack their
04:51way through this desert gravel, going all the way in through basically what was making
05:00another entryway into the tomb.
05:03Tomb robbing was tough work.
05:06It's very narrow and tight, but it would have taken several days' work probably to
05:14hack their way through here in an effort to get down into the burial chamber.
05:24And then, after that, they had to hack through what the ancient Egyptians had built, because
05:29the burial chamber was actually made out of limestone blocks.
05:34The tomb robbers needed to plan their operations meticulously.
05:38The only tools they had were hard stones and simple chisels.
05:43They'd have to tunnel through hundreds of feet of solid rock and do most of their work
05:48at night.
05:50So it would take weeks of back-breaking work to get to the burial chamber itself.
05:57They'd scoop up everything lying around the chamber.
06:00But to get the big payoff, they'd have to shift the sarcophagus.
06:06You can see that they pushed it over.
06:08There must have been several of them pushing quite hard.
06:11And to keep it up, they put a wooden mallet there, which, after over 4,000 years, is still
06:18there.
06:25It's a frozen moment in time when the thieves had put this mallet and pushed with all their
06:29might and gotten this granite sarcophagus lid out of the way.
06:34They needed just enough room to reach inside and get the jewels.
06:38And then, of course, their goal was the body.
06:41And a body was found here by archaeologists later on, but it had nothing on it.
06:47So all of the grave goods, any of the jewelry that might have been there, beads, scarabs,
06:52all of these would have been taken by the tomb robbers.
07:04These first pyramids were ancient billboards advertising their treasures.
07:13Within a thousand years, raiders had emptied most of them.
07:22By 1400 B.C., the pharaohs had had enough.
07:26They decided to change tactics.
07:31They stopped building pyramids and instead decided to search for a top-secret location
07:36to bury their dead.
07:38The pharaohs found it 300 miles away, the perfect place, the Valley of the Kings.
07:46The valley was just across the Nile from Egypt's capital, the city of Thebes, now known as Luxor.
07:58Over the next 500 years, the Valley of the Kings became the graveyard for every pharaoh.
08:07To be sure the tombs were safe, the pharaohs had their builders carve them out of sheer
08:12rock.
08:15Secrecy was paramount.
08:18The Valley of the Kings' first architect wrote this inscription.
08:22I supervised the excavations of the cliff tomb of His Majesty alone, so no one else
08:28in the world would see and no one else would hear.
08:33But there was a problem.
08:36The royal burial business got too big and the secret was out.
08:43Within a hundred years, the valley became packed with dead rulers and an entire industry
08:48boomed with thousands of workers.
08:53One of them is the known criminal, Paneb.
09:00It's 1200 B.C., the reign of Seti II.
09:06The tomb workers, stonemasons, coppersmiths, carpenters and artists are making a decent
09:12living.
09:15But for some, it's not enough.
09:23Paneb was orphaned at an early age and destined to become a beggar.
09:31But Paneb got lucky.
09:33A powerful foreman from the nearby workers' village of Deir el-Medina adopts him.
09:39Now Paneb has a chance to advance in a town that serves a vital role.
09:48Egyptologist Sally Ketari has studied Paneb's town for years.
09:54This is the village of Deir el-Medina, a very important village of necropolis workmen for
10:00the pharaoh of Egypt because he entrusted to the men of this village the supreme task
10:06of carving, hewing, decorating, furnishing the tombs, not only of the king, but of the
10:14queens and the royal children.
10:19From here, the workers commuted to the valley to build and maintain the great tombs of the
10:24pharaohs.
10:25Up there is the temple of Medina al-Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III.
10:31Over here would be the direction of the valley of the queens and up over this direction would
10:37be the valley of the kings to which the men had to make their weekly trek.
10:46The scribes at Deir el-Medina kept extensive records that survive today.
10:52The pharaohs paid the workers in goods, grain for making beer and bread and ten pounds of
10:57fish a day.
11:00And a foreman like Paneb's adopted father earned more than he needed.
11:06They were a pampered community.
11:08They were used to a level of life which was comfortable.
11:14The workmen at Deir el-Medina were something like a middle class engineer who owned a six
11:21room house, a car, and was able to take a holiday, say, at Disney World.
11:29So we're talking about people we can identify with.
11:38These middle class Egyptians didn't have to steal to feed themselves.
11:45But it was like living next to a bank vault they built and having the keys to get in.
11:53Paneb grows up comfortably, but for him it's not enough.
11:59He's not shy about telling people he wants his stepfather's job as foreman.
12:05His opportunity comes soon enough.
12:13Paneb's stepfather is murdered.
12:18No one knows who did it or why.
12:23If some suspect Paneb, no one can prove it.
12:30A bystander sees him bribing a local official, and soon after, Paneb lands his stepfather's
12:47job.
12:51Paneb's step-uncle had wanted the job and resents Paneb's promotion.
12:56He's determined to build a case against him and keeps a detailed record of Paneb's activities.
13:07Paneb's now in a position to cash in.
13:11As foreman of a building crew, he knows where the tombs are and how to break in.
13:18And it's easy to recruit accomplices.
13:23They saw the riches that went into the tombs.
13:26They saw the degree of decoration and were perhaps resentful of the great riches that
13:33were going to be going under the ground for eternity and would have liked to have a bit
13:38of this for themselves.
13:42Paneb's men will do the dirty work, and he'll be the mastermind.
13:47It's an ancient version of a modern crime ring and the ultimate inside job.
13:57Only those in the know, the tomb builders themselves, would have a real chance of success.
14:04People like Paneb.
14:07Paneb and his gang go after tombs and temples, anything they can get their hands on.
14:17High-quality linen, perfumes and oils, small figurines and furniture to sell on the local
14:26black market, and at the top of the list, silver and gold.
14:48Paneb turns them into lumps of metal that move easily on the open market.
15:06And now, Paneb and his ring are planning the heist of a lifetime.
15:17While his crime is big by Egyptian standards, it's part of a familiar cat-and-mouse game
15:31played out in ancient Egypt.
15:36Starting as early as 3000 BC, Egypt's royal architects devised clever obstacles, creating
15:43tombs full of false passages, dead-ends, pits and other barriers.
15:51Among the most ingenious is the tomb of Tedi Etsikara.
15:55It was a long passage carved deep into the bedrock which finally opened into this room,
16:00which is where they stored some of the blocking stones, because this was one of the ways that
16:04they tried to keep away tomb robbers.
16:08This is, of course, the first great blocking stone, the first portcullis made out of granite.
16:14It would have been perched up here until the burial was complete, and then it was dropped
16:18down. And this is sort of solid four feet of very hard granite, which are still in place,
16:25which is what would have stopped the tomb robbers from going in and disturbing the king's
16:28eternal rest.
16:31Once the high priests had placed the pharaoh's mummy and his treasure in the inner chamber,
16:36the workmen would have yanked the wooden posts. The massive granite blocks would then crash
16:41to the chamber floor. To get in, the tomb robbers would have to chisel away the stone,
16:47one chip at a time.
16:55So tomb robbers like Poneb, 1800 years later, would have to overcome all of these obstacles
17:01and more.
17:04The pharaohs ordered their priests to turn the tomb walls themselves into a threat. The
17:09priests devised elaborate curses, and the workers inscribed them strategically throughout
17:14the tomb.
17:15The ancient Egyptian tomb curses, which describe what the deceased might do to a tomb violator,
17:22is actually mentioned in this little bit of an inscription, because we have at the tail
17:27end here of these lines of text statements that,
17:30Anyone who attacks this tomb, I will seize his neck like a goose.
17:37And here is the word goose. So this actually contains the remainder of that goose curse,
17:42if you will, to literally come out as a ghost, grab the offender by the neck, and throttle
17:47him to death on the spot.
17:51Curses came in all shapes and sizes.
17:56His lifetime shall not exist on earth. He shall have no heir.
18:03A donkey shall violate him. A donkey shall violate his wife.
18:08He shall die from hunger and thirst.
18:13The question of how much effect any of these threats actually had is hard to measure, because
18:19so many Egyptian tombs are in fact damaged and robbed, almost all of them.
18:24The one way that we can see that this did have an effect is that when tomb robbers come
18:28into a tomb, one of the first things they typically do is to attack the images, the
18:33faces of the tomb owner, which means they recognize that this figure might in fact be
18:39a threat, and so they go and hack out his face so he can't see them as they come in,
18:45and so he can't manifest himself as a ghost and literally go and get them.
18:53But hardened criminals like Poneb didn't fear the wrath of God or the priest's curses.
19:01After all, once you robbed a tomb and lived to tell the tale, the curses became empty threats.
19:13Poneb defines brazen.
19:19His step-uncle sees him stealing in broad daylight.
19:24He went to the funeral of a king and took a golden goose, though he denied having it,
19:29but it was found in his house.
19:38Stealing in broad daylight is one thing, but raiding a major tomb forces Poneb to use the
19:45cover of night. It's his biggest heist yet.
19:52He and a gang member set out to scout their target.
19:57But this is no ordinary job.
20:00The pharaoh, Seti II, has died after a six-year reign, and when a pharaoh dies, that means
20:07a fresh tomb full of treasures.
20:16Poneb still doesn't know his step-uncle is shadowing him and taking notes.
20:23Poneb cases the new tomb, then goes home to plan the break-in.
20:32It may have taken him several days.
20:37First he has to bribe the guards.
20:42They'll look the other way while he cracks open the tomb.
20:46Then he'll hack his way into the burial chamber.
20:50The work may take several nights.
21:12His step-uncle describes the heist in progress.
21:17When the burial was complete, Poneb broke into the tomb and began to steal the things
21:22of the king.
21:24He took away the cover of the chariot and took away the wine and all sorts of treasure.
21:31He even went so far as to sit on the king's coffin, although the body was inside.
21:41Did the step-uncle rat him out, or did Poneb forget to bribe a guard?
21:51Here the eyewitness account breaks off, but one thing's clear.
21:55This time, the guards nail him in the act.
22:01Now he'll face justice, Egyptian style.
22:06And it won't be pretty.
22:10His step-uncle's the chief witness against him, but he's not an unbiased witness.
22:17He believes Poneb stole his job.
22:22The guards haul Poneb to jail.
22:28He'll stay there until his trial.
22:33And while Poneb's personal crime spree is over, tomb robbing is about to become even
22:38more popular.
22:41By 1150 B.C., the Egyptian empire has started to crumble.
22:48Rebellious border states and foreign invaders challenge the reign of Ramses III.
22:54The attacks stretch Egypt's resources to the breaking point.
23:01In the river valley, the rains haven't come.
23:06The Nile is shrinking.
23:10It's a drought, and the crops are failing.
23:15At the workers' village of Deir el-Medina, the comfortable world that Poneb lived in
23:20has vanished.
23:27The hard times ignite an uprising.
23:35The middle-class workers become a mob.
23:40It's the first recorded strike in history.
23:49Twenty days have gone by without rations.
23:52We are left without any staple from reserves.
23:55Truly, we are already dying.
23:58We are no longer alive.
24:02Chaos and hunger turn more and more people into thieves.
24:07When there came a time after the empire was lost,
24:12certainly there would come to be an even stronger feeling among the people
24:16that it somehow was not right, that all these riches were hidden away
24:21in the deep, dark recesses of tombs,
24:25and that how much better would it be if everyone had a share in all of this.
24:31What follows is a crime wave that will force Egypt's high priests
24:36to take drastic new measures.
24:441070 B.C.
24:49The Valley of the Kings.
24:55Once the final resting place for Egypt's greatest pharaohs,
25:00it's now a royal junkyard.
25:07Tomb robbers have smashed open the crypts,
25:12stolen their treasures, and trashed the royal mummies.
25:18These bodies were found in 1898 in exactly the state
25:23which the tomb robbers left them,
25:26stripped of their wrappings and badly damaged.
25:30First of all, the ends of the feet have been broken away.
25:35Then one of the hands has been broken away.
25:38And as we move on up the body, we see that the hands have been cut off.
25:43And one of the hands has been broken away.
25:46And as we move on up the body,
25:48we can see that a large hole has been hacked in the chest.
25:51And also, while probably trying to get at ornaments
25:54around the head and neck area,
25:56the side of the mouth has been smashed open.
26:00And there we have at the end of this particular glass case
26:04is a spare hand, which, say, turned up alongside these.
26:10There were also a number of broken up remains of bodies
26:15also found in the same tomb,
26:17spread around in some of the other chambers.
26:19So this arm probably belongs with a couple of skulls,
26:23which were found in a shaft further up the tomb.
26:27The royal priests were horrified.
26:31The Egyptians believed that if you destroyed a body,
26:35you destroyed all hope for an afterlife.
26:39Closing the gates to heaven,
26:43the priests decided something had to be done.
26:49There were still scores of royal tombs with their mummies inside,
26:53each threatened with looting.
26:58The priests searched for a new hiding place deep in the mountains.
27:08So far away and hidden,
27:10the mummies and their treasures would never be found again.
27:15They emptied all the tombs and transferred the mummies
27:18to temporary workshops.
27:23They stripped, re-bandaged, and placed them in wooden coffins.
27:31Then they took them to a secret cache in the cliffs
27:35surrounding the Valley of the Kings.
27:39There the royals' bodies and their treasure
27:41would finally be safe for eternity.
27:46The priests and pharaohs abandoned the Valley of the Kings.
27:50They moved the capital 300 miles north,
27:53near the city that's now called Cairo.
27:57But the priests still had to find a way out.
28:01They had to find a way out of the Valley of the Kings.
28:05They had to find a way out of the Valley of the Kings.
28:09They had to find a way out of the Valley of the Kings.
28:14But the priests still had to figure out
28:16how to keep the new burial chambers safe from thieves.
28:21Their royal architects devised ingenious new tombs
28:25using radical new technology.
28:28They dug shafts up to 100 feet deep
28:31and placed burial chambers at the bottom.
28:34Then they got inventive with something easy to find in Egypt, sand.
28:41These shafts are about 60 feet deep
28:43and they were carved by the Egyptians
28:45once they had finally figured out how to bury themselves
28:48without having their graves robbed.
28:50And you get these shafts going all the way down
28:53straight through the bedrock and opening into chambers.
28:56At the end of the burial, these would have been
28:59filled up with sand and sealed
29:01so that there was no way into them
29:03unless you dug all the way down 60, 80, sometimes even 100 feet.
29:10Workers filled the main shaft with sand
29:13and placed the sarcophagus at the top.
29:17Then they dug the sand out from underneath the sarcophagus
29:21and it gradually sank to the bottom.
29:26They poured the same sand back on top of it
29:29making it invisible from the surface and impenetrable.
29:34This huge sarcophagus that is here
29:37must have come down using a combination of sand hydraulics and ropes.
29:42What happens is that up here above this roof
29:45there really is a big shaft.
29:48This lid must have been put on the top of the shaft
29:51when the shaft was filled with sand
29:53and then gradually as the sand was moved
29:56the lid would have descended.
29:59Tomb raiders still tried to tunnel in
30:02but the shaft tombs fought back.
30:05Sometimes tomb robbers thought that if they made parallel shafts
30:08they would be able to access the burial chamber
30:11but the whole burial chamber would have been filled with sand
30:14and so if the tomb robbers broke into it
30:17all they would be faced with would be more sand
30:19which would in fact pour into their parallel shaft
30:22and would in fact suffocate them.
30:25The tomb raiders were buried alive.
30:30In fact, even today, gaining access to these tombs
30:34requires feats of engineering and lots of manpower.
30:39Archaeologists have only recently found their way in.
30:46This is the bottom part of the sarcophagus
30:49and this huge piece of limestone would have been lowered down as well.
30:54These tombs were definitely the most efficient way of keeping out tomb robbers
30:59because of all the ones that we found
31:01all but a handful have been found intact.
31:05The shaft tombs worked
31:07and so did the secret mummy cache in the valley cliffs
31:12till a remarkable discovery 3,000 years later.
31:221881.
31:24The pharaohs are ancient history.
31:28Egyptian officials announced an extraordinary discovery.
31:35A secret cache filled with famous mummies.
31:41The story behind it is controversial.
31:52As it's told, a farmer named Ahmed al-Rasul
31:56is walking through the desert when one of his goats gets lost.
32:02Rasul follows the goat's cries until he stumbles upon a deep crevasse.
32:08He makes his way inside
32:27and to his amazement finds himself standing in a tomb.
32:38But not just any tomb.
32:44It's crowded with coffins, mummies and treasure.
32:51Gold and jewels are everywhere.
32:55Thousands of precious objects, bronze vases,
32:59alabaster cups, glass jars and ornate statues.
33:06Rasul has stumbled upon the mother lode.
33:10It's the secret royal mummy cache hidden by the priests 3,000 years ago.
33:22He's about to turn it into the world's most successful tomb robbing franchise.
33:37In Rasul's hometown, Kirna,
33:43historian Dylan Bickerstaff has come to investigate Rasul's story.
33:52The village rests on the site of countless tombs.
33:57People who came to live in Kirna inevitably learnt how to find tombs.
34:03By accident at first they were just trying to extend their houses
34:07and put another room in or something and they'd stumble into another tomb.
34:11And eventually of course, they're not stupid,
34:13they learnt the sort of locations that tombs were in.
34:16And there was a lot of spoil in those to sell to tourists.
34:20It's likely that Rasul's family shared their extraordinary find with their neighbours
34:25if only to keep them quiet.
34:28And this may have encouraged further tomb robbing.
34:32As collectors clamoured for more, the local raiders did their best to satisfy the demand.
34:38There's a leg.
34:40But Kirna was only the training ground.
34:43The Rasul brothers lived in this area
34:45and they went on to discover tombs in all kinds of remote locations.
34:51The royal cache.
34:53So expertise started in Kirna, spread to far and wide.
35:02From Kirna, Bickerstaff retraces their route to the mummy cache.
35:14Yes, here you can see TT320, the royal cache.
35:19Tombs like this, cut into clefts, these chimney tombs as they're called,
35:23were specifically designed so that they would become hidden.
35:28Bickerstaff doesn't buy Rasul's story that he accidentally stumbled on the royal cache.
35:34He believes Rasul was out searching for treasure.
35:38The Rasuls found other tombs and caches nearby.
35:42They knew exactly what to look for.
35:46Nature itself would disguise them over the course of time.
35:49So when it rained, all the rubble that was brought down would gradually fill up the location
35:54and you wouldn't be able to see where the tomb was.
35:56And the brothers knew to look in cracks like this and examine to see where the water was disappearing.
36:02And it definitely wasn't whilst looking for a goat.
36:07For years, the Rasul brothers kept their finds secret from Egyptian authorities.
36:13Tomb robbing is still a crime.
36:15If they get caught, they'll do hard time.
36:18So they sold just a few pieces at a time to avoid raising suspicion.
36:24But eventually, these one-of-a-kind pieces show up on the black market
36:28and attract the attention of authorities.
36:34They trace them back to the Rasul brothers and arrest them.
36:39The Rasuls are jailed for months, interrogated and beaten.
36:44Finally, one of them, Muhammad Rasul, cracks and agrees to show them the cache.
36:52In 1881, Muhammad leads Emil Bruch, an antiquities inspector, to the site.
37:00Backed by government authority, he's here to recover the treasure.
37:04When Bruch sees the contents of the tomb, he can't believe his eyes.
37:11Standing against the wall or lying on the floor, I found an even greater number of mummy cases.
37:17Their gold covering and their polished surface reflected my excited state.
37:22It was as if I was in a dream.
37:25I was in a dream.
37:27I found an even greater number of mummy cases.
37:30Their gold covering and their polished surface reflected my excited state.
37:35It seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors.
37:45Forty mummies, many of them the most famous pharaohs of ancient Egypt.
37:52Seti I.
37:55Thutmose III.
37:58And Ramses II.
38:02It's the most important archaeological discovery in Egyptian history.
38:07And it's worth a fortune.
38:10Bruch has good reason to fear for his life.
38:15He needs to keep the news quiet while he moves the mummies and the remaining treasure to safety.
38:21He recruits 300 men.
38:28In 48 hours, they remove all the mummies, then take them to the Nile.
38:51As his ship leaves for Cairo, the local women wail while the men fire guns.
39:05They say this was a last tribute to the ancestors, the great kings of old.
39:10But probably it was a lamentation over the loss of so much revenue from the region.
39:15When the 40 mummies arrive in Cairo, the recovered treasure makes global headlines.
39:23But Bruch's handling of the coffins sparks fierce controversy.
39:28In his haste, Bruch mixed up many of the mummy cases and their treasures.
39:37No one could tell who was who.
39:39And 120 years later, many of the mummies' identities still remain a mystery.
39:47Since 1998, archaeologist Erhart Greif has been scouring the cache for clues.
40:00Dr. Greif has been trying to find anything that will identify the mystery mummies.
40:10Start!
40:21He takes Dylan Bickerstaff to the base of the 100-foot shaft.
40:28To the very spot where Rassoul first found the cache in 1881.
40:34The location of the coffins is so crucial because this is one of the reasons for reopening the cache.
40:42People were working with the thinnest amount of information, just the vaguest hints.
40:47And they're looking very closely at these minute clues to try and work out where the coffins were.
40:52Battery which was destroyed here and then here, the effect of unwrapping mummies.
41:04This is the chamber where Rassoul found the mummies.
41:12But the ceiling collapsed decades ago and the cave is now covered with six feet of limestone rubble.
41:22Dr. Greif has yet to solve the mystery of which pharaohs were stashed where.
41:28But he keeps digging, determined to make sense from the chaos created by Bruges' haste and the greed of the Rassouls.
41:43As for the informer, Mohammed Rassoul, not only did he escape punishment,
41:49the authorities gave him a job with the antiquities service.
41:52The tomb robber became a tomb finder.
42:00But not all tomb robbers were this fortunate, especially the one we know as Poneb in ancient Egypt.
42:10It's 1200 BC.
42:14Poneb stands accused of a series of offenses.
42:17Including theft, assault, attempted murder and tomb raiding.
42:26He's used his inside job as a foreman working on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings as a staging ground for robbery.
42:37His biggest job, knocking over the tomb of Seti II.
42:42His biggest job, knocking over the tomb of Seti II, has landed him in jail.
42:50And his step-uncle who's been shadowing him is the state's chief witness against him.
43:00From everything that we know about Poneb, from the condemnations to the confirmations of his crimes,
43:07there is absolutely no way that we can find much good in Poneb.
43:11He seems to have been a totally unscrupulous man who did not hesitate to commit crimes of bribery,
43:19of sexual assault, of theft, of sacrilege.
43:24There is nothing that we know about Poneb that in any way can justify his character.
43:32As a tomb robber, Poneb didn't respect the royal's afterlife.
43:37But he seems to have made plans of his own.
43:43This is the burial chamber of Poneb.
43:47So he built this tomb for himself and went through all this elaborate trouble in bringing extra stones for it and making it especially beautiful.
43:55And then, eventually, the law caught up to him.
44:00If he's found guilty, this tomb will stand empty.
44:06And he, too, will be denied eternal life.
44:19But Poneb's agony probably started before.
44:22Egyptian police routinely beat and mutilated their prisoners, partly to interrogate, but also to punish.
44:30They used torture to extract confessions.
44:36Eventually, Poneb would stand trial before a panel of judges.
44:46Egyptian justice was harsh.
44:49Even for minor offenses.
44:57We have here a situation showing justice being meted out in ancient Egypt.
45:03The ancient Egyptians were great believers in justice, regardless of what you had done.
45:07Now, this one, in fact, shows people who are being punished because they didn't pay their taxes.
45:13And that was a relatively minor infringement of the law.
45:15So he's being beaten up.
45:17Beating was one of the punishments.
45:19Of course, if you had been a tomb robber for a king, things would have been much worse, because the king was a god.
45:26And that would be a major infraction against both religious and civil law.
45:31The punishment of five cuts, where you have your nose cut off, your eyes pulled out, lips, sometimes even the tongue, and the ears.
45:38So you lose all your senses.
45:39Also, they would be beaten, and sometimes they would be killed by being impaled.
45:43And then, their names would be eradicated from everywhere, which means that they wouldn't exist.
45:49And for an ancient Egyptian, that just means you're annihilated completely, and you have no life in this world or even the next.
45:57Today, anyone caught taking antiquities discovered since 1983 is prosecuted, and often sentenced to hard labor.
46:09But stiff new laws haven't stopped the tomb robbing.
46:15Because they're hard to break.
46:18But stiff new laws haven't stopped the tomb robbing.
46:25Because they're harder to get, stolen goods have more value than ever.
46:32Stone statues and carvings now fetch thousands, if not millions of dollars in London and New York.
46:40Now, just as it was 3,000 years ago, the motive for tomb robbing is greed.
46:46And though it may lead to serving hard time today, in Poneb's era, justice was far more severe.
46:59The precise details of his trial no longer exist, but we know he was replaced by a new foreman.
47:08Apart from that, all traces of his name vanished from official records.
47:13Because he did rob from the tomb of Seti II, the capital punishment that was probably enacted in this case would have been impalement.
47:23Impalement on a stick, a horizontal stick, where it would go right through the body, an Egyptian form of crucifixion.
47:37Poneb would have died slowly.
47:39And when he did, his body was most likely dumped in the desert.
47:44His flesh left to rot in the sun.
47:48His bones picked clean.
47:53The tomb he built to help him to the afterlife stands empty.
48:09These days, Egypt's monuments and museums stand heavily guarded.
48:17As in Poneb's time, corruption flourishes just below the surface.
48:22And the cat and mouse game continues.
48:28Egypt is a relatively poor country, where a piece of old ceiling can fetch more than a year's wages.
48:34If an Egyptian finds something on his property, he must hand it over to the government.
48:39Trading antiquities is strictly illegal.
48:43And there's plenty to uncover in Egypt.
48:49We've only scratched the surface.
48:54Most of the country's ancient wealth may still lie beneath the ground, ripe for the taking.
49:04The Pharaohs' Immortality
49:09Five thousand years ago, the pharaohs believed their only shot at immortality was to keep their tombs safe and ensure their own passage to the afterlife.
49:23But now, in an odd turn of events, the mummies plundered by tomb robbers have achieved a kind of immortality.
49:34This wasn't the eternity the pharaohs imagined.
49:39But the world now knows their names.
49:43Their bodies are safe and cared for.
49:49Their treasures on display.
49:51The Pharaohs could never have dreamed that eternal life would come from the endless ancient battle between rich and poor.
50:21To be continued...
50:51To be continued...