HC_Strange Egypt
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00:00Ancient Egypt, where a conspiracy might use a wax doll and magic words to kill the king.
00:11In the empire along the Nile, what seems bizarre now was the norm, like the pharaoh's favored people.
00:19Dwarfs could dance the sacred dances of the gods.
00:22Their recreational habits.
00:24One scholar suggests that possibly a lot of people in ancient Egypt were high a lot of the time.
00:30And sex after death.
00:32In some cases mummies have rods that are inserted into the penises to make sure that they would have erections as well.
00:39Beyond the walls of the palace, inside the royal tombs, a journey into the strangest corners of ancient Egypt.
00:59For thousands of years, the monuments of Egyptian civilization have dazzled mankind.
01:19But there is another, often unknown aspect of life along the Nile.
01:26An eerie world of magic and puzzling beliefs.
01:30To understand this ancient culture, we travel back 5,000 years and examine the strange ways that Egyptians lived and died.
01:49We begin with their creation myth.
01:51A bizarre tale of sex, incest, and violence.
02:04The Egyptians imagined that a god actually masturbated the world into existence.
02:09And out of semen came male and female gods.
02:13Who then reproduced through regular sexual reproduction.
02:16And created a successive generation of male and female gods.
02:23In the pantheon of Egyptian deities.
02:25Brother, Mary, sister.
02:27These incestuous gods bring family feuds to violent new heights.
02:34Osiris was invited to a party by his brother Seth.
02:37And as a party favor, Seth offered a coffin.
02:41Only at an Egyptian festival would a coffin be an appropriate party favor.
02:47Driven by jealousy, Seth locks Osiris inside the coffin.
02:53And throws it into the Nile.
02:57After a frantic search, Isis, Osiris' wife, finds his body.
03:04But Seth attacks again.
03:06He slices his brother into pieces.
03:08And scatters body parts across the countryside.
03:12She was able to find all of the pieces except for his phallus which had been eaten by a fish.
03:19Isis binds her husband's body together.
03:22Turning Osiris into the first mummy.
03:27For thousands of years, Egyptians will imitate this story.
03:30Carefully wrapping the corpses of their loved ones.
03:33Isis, however, finds another way to ensure the immortality of Osiris.
03:39By her own magical powers, she recreated a new penis.
03:43And then was able to impregnate herself through her divine husband.
03:50And bear his son and heir, the god Horus.
03:55Ancient Egyptians believed their magnificent civilization was formed by this mixture of incest.
04:01Masturbation and castration.
04:05It would be thousands of years before the rest of the world
04:08got a peek at how strange it could get in an Egyptian bedroom.
04:191821, Egypt's empire is long gone.
04:23European armies occupy her land.
04:26French consul Bernardino Droviti combs through the ruins of an ancient village
04:30called Deir el-Medina, looking for artifacts.
04:36Built more than 3500 years ago, probably by Pharaoh Amenhotep III,
04:41this working class town near the Valley of the Kings
04:44once housed the men who constructed the royal monuments.
04:48That is a very important village that we can know a lot about.
04:54We can know a lot about marriage, about love,
04:59about life of an ordinary Egyptian who really created the tombs.
05:09Here, Droviti buys a huge cache of papyrus documents.
05:13He unrolls one and finds a set of shocking erotic cartoons.
05:24It has got wild scenes of men and women in most contorted positions
05:29performing intercourse in the most bizarre ways
05:33with all sorts of different accoutrements.
05:36I mean, they're hilarious scenes.
05:38We're not really sure what this is about.
05:45One of the amusing things is that modern scholars
05:48have been rather trepidatious about publishing this text
05:52because it was a little too raunchy for some of them.
05:56In one scene, a woman is engaged in intercourse with a man
06:00with an enormous phallus while she has a little hand mirror
06:03and she's putting on eye makeup.
06:07Is this a satirical comment on upper class behavior
06:11or just a private collection of pornography?
06:14Modern scholars aren't sure.
06:17But in the village of Deir el-Medina,
06:20archaeologists did find evidence that sexual vitality
06:23was on the mind of the average Egyptian.
06:28The ruins of the village were littered with statues of Hathor,
06:31the goddess of love,
06:34and Bess, the male god of fertility.
06:37Bess is portrayed as a dwarf with a large phallus.
06:43Married women often tattooed images of the dwarf Bess on their thighs.
06:49Egypt was a very sensual society.
06:52The women with their beautiful gowns,
06:54and the clothing in ancient Egypt, especially for women,
06:57really enhanced the body.
07:02Oddly enough, there is no real record of the disapproval
07:06of premarital sex in ancient Egypt.
07:08We don't even have a word for virgin, which is very odd
07:11because we have so many written records.
07:14Most women married soon after puberty, at age 12 or 13,
07:18boys a few years older.
07:20Scholars believe there was no wedding.
07:23The couple simply moved in together.
07:26We have no good indication of a formal marriage ceremony.
07:30We have no good indication of the state
07:32taking any interest in marriage whatsoever.
07:36After marriage, however, the rules changed.
07:39Adultery was considered shameful.
07:42In Deir el-Medina, archaeologists found legal records
07:46that suggest it was not uncommon.
07:50There's one man named Paneb, a famous workman at Deir el-Medina,
07:54who was really unbelievable.
07:56He had sex with a lot of women who were married,
08:00and he even had sex with a woman and her daughter,
08:03and his son had sex with the same woman's daughter.
08:08When faced with marital woes,
08:10the Egyptians invented a solution that isn't strange at all by today's standards.
08:15Divorce.
08:17What you have is actually much more like modern-day United States,
08:21and that is serial monogamy,
08:23that it was relatively easy for either a man or a woman
08:27to divorce the spouse for cause
08:30or just because they don't like them anymore.
08:33One of the mysteries the ancient Egyptians tried to solve
08:37was how not to get pregnant.
08:40Medical documents describe several strange forms of contraception,
08:45things like honey and a combination of dates and acacia bark.
08:50They would be substances that would be inserted into the vagina,
08:53and among the least appealing are things like crocodile dung.
08:58Some people have suggested they were more effective at keeping men away from the woman
09:02than it was for actually contraception itself.
09:06There was also a darker, more sinister side of sexuality in ancient Egypt.
09:12One book of dream interpretations
09:15describes fantastic scenes of women having sex with a crocodile,
09:19a serpent, even a mouse.
09:22And some families felt the need to protect their loved ones against necrophilia.
09:28There is some evidence that certain bodies
09:30were not delivered to the embalmers directly after the death,
09:33that they were actually kept in the house.
09:35And the assumption is because the husband was afraid
09:39that the body would be violated by the embalmers.
09:45Scholars have speculated that working with the dead
09:48gave embalmers such an awful odor
09:51that not even prostitutes would sleep with them.
09:56If the behavior on the streets of Deir el-Medina seems odd to us,
10:01in the halls of the pharaoh's palace,
10:03it got even more perplexing.
10:06Imitating their gods, these ancient kings
10:09sometimes entered into incestuous marriages.
10:12In order to ensure that the line was as pure as could be,
10:15they very often wound up marrying their half-sisters or sisters
10:20or someone in the family.
10:24This chair belonged to Sidamun,
10:26the daughter of King Amenhotep III.
10:29In one of the more bizarre episodes of Egyptian history,
10:32she also became her father's spouse,
10:36sharing the title of great royal wife with her own mother.
10:42Wives played important roles in serving goddesses as priestesses,
10:48so it's not at all clear that they were bedmates.
10:53Pharaohs maintained large harems of secondary wives and concubines,
10:57sometimes hundreds of women.
11:00This allowed them to put their own stamp on the imperial gene pool.
11:04Ramses II, for instance, fathered 55 daughters and 45 sons.
11:12This may explain why the first part of his royal title was
11:16Powerful Bull.
11:21Sex was important enough to the Egyptians
11:23that they didn't want it to be interrupted by death.
11:27They saved their strangest sexual ideas for the afterlife.
11:32Early religious texts assume that a man will be able to revive fully
11:38and will be able to have sex again in the afterlife.
11:43In some cases, mummies actually have rods that are inserted into the penises
11:47to make sure that they would have erections as well.
11:51After King Tut's mummy was discovered in 1922,
11:55archaeologists examined and photographed his penis.
11:59It had been positioned as if fully erect.
12:03One expert commented that the king had been
12:05flattered by the embalmer's work.
12:09However, when researchers x-rayed the mummy in 1968,
12:13the organ appeared to be missing.
12:15It was feared that a member of the expedition had stolen it.
12:19The speculation ended in 2005,
12:22when Dr. Zahi Hawass conducted a CT scan.
12:26Tut's penis was right where it should have been
12:29and not on some antiquarian's bookshelf.
12:38Dark forces in the service of love.
12:42Strange ingredients.
12:44A scarab beetle.
12:45Milk of a black cow.
12:47Apple seeds.
12:48Nail clippings.
12:49And a pot of human urine.
12:52These substances came from the toolkit of a highly skilled magician.
12:58Egyptians believed potions like this,
13:00combined with spells and incantations,
13:03connected them to the mystical power of the universe.
13:08They were very interested in controlling their own environment, as we are.
13:13But they couldn't control it through scientific ways.
13:16They wound up controlling it through magical ways.
13:22A papyrus from the 2nd or 3rd century tells of these magical ways,
13:27of a sorcerer who used these substances
13:30in hopes of making a woman fall in love with him.
13:35The notion of magic is fundamental to the Egyptian understanding
13:38of their gods and the universe.
13:41If you can make use of this force, which underlies the universe,
13:45then you too can make use of words or images
13:49and have a practical effect.
13:52With the scarab in his hand,
13:54the magician recites a long spell,
13:56thus dispatching it on his mission of love.
14:02He then drowns the beetle in the vial of cow's milk.
14:09Half the bug is cooked with the nail clippings,
14:11apple seeds and urine.
14:15This mixture is poured into a jug of wine with more incantations.
14:20All that's left is to somehow convince the object of his desire
14:25to drink the concoction.
14:30We don't know whether the potion worked,
14:32but we do know that sorcery was normal in ancient Egypt.
14:37Priest-magicians had no divine calling.
14:40It was a hereditary post,
14:42and a part-time one.
14:44Priests served for about three months of the year.
14:49During that time, they adhered to strict rules of ritual purity.
14:53They abstained from sex and meat.
14:58To get himself in the mood for spell-casting,
15:01a conjurer might chew the flowers of a blue lotus,
15:04a plant known for its psychedelic effects.
15:08There was a desire to transport yourself and experience dreams,
15:12and this was part of the way of divination,
15:15the way of figuring out what would happen or what should happen.
15:19People relied on the magician's skill
15:21to protect them from spirits of the dead,
15:23who had not been properly mummified.
15:26Egyptians feared such ghosts stalked the world,
15:29spreading evil.
15:33There were magical ivory knives
15:37designed to draw a protective circle around the bed
15:40to protect you in the evening.
15:43And these have figures of protective gods brandishing knives
15:47to ward off demonic forces that might attempt to cross that line.
15:53A conjurer could also create a magical text, like this one.
15:57Written more than 2,700 years ago,
15:59it was probably commissioned by the father of a young child.
16:03It is a decree promulgated by a temple
16:06which says that I, God so-and-so,
16:09will protect you, your name written here,
16:12from a wide variety of diseases, illnesses, nightmares
16:16that would be a problem for you for the duration of your life.
16:21For Egyptians, the world of magic
16:24and the spirits of their ancestors were familiar territory.
16:28There was actually very little real separation
16:31between the land of the living and the dead.
16:33You could communicate through letters to the dead,
16:36This simple clay pot, covered with hieroglyphs,
16:39is one of the strangest examples of a letter to the dead.
16:43This long letter, written by a man to his deceased father,
16:47asks for help against sickness on behalf of himself and his wife,
16:51and in addition, that his dead father ensure
16:55that he and his sister both have healthy children born to them.
17:00Egyptians used wax effigies to create even more powerful magic
17:05and curse their enemies.
17:07The practice is directly comparable
17:09to what Hollywood considers the voodoo doll,
17:12which has a much longer history in Egypt,
17:15where you actually have figures that are pierced,
17:18buried upside down, trampled, and boiled.
17:22The magic of the voodoo doll
17:26Exotic rituals weren't always necessary to summon magical forces.
17:31Sometimes all it took was a single word.
17:36Since Heka, the god of magic, was also the god of images,
17:40the pictures that made up Egyptian hieroglyphs
17:43were one of the most potent forms of magic.
17:46The signs themselves had the magical ability to come to life.
17:51It was often important, the Egyptians thought,
17:54to actually disable potentially dangerous hieroglyphs
17:57from attacking the dead man.
18:00For instance, to neutralize the power of the symbol for snake,
18:04a scribe would draw daggers through its body.
18:11Some believed the power of Egyptian magic
18:14could reach around the globe.
18:18And across centuries.
18:20Archaeologist Harold Carter
18:22discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen
18:24only after years of searching.
18:27When he opened the crypt,
18:29Carter was dazzled by the glint of gold,
18:32magnificent headpieces,
18:35ceremonial knives,
18:38and jewelry filled the crypt.
18:41This exquisite miniature sarcophagus,
18:44This exquisite miniature sarcophagus, he learned,
18:47once held Tut's liver.
18:50It also contained something much stranger.
18:54Violent curses.
18:57Hieroglyphs inscribed in the gold lining
18:59threaten a painful death
19:01for anyone who disturbs Tut's remains.
19:06Some believe these curses actually worked.
19:09Lord Carnarvon, who financed the Tut expedition,
19:12died of a mysterious infection
19:14only a year after the discovery.
19:17At the moment of his death,
19:19Cairo was darkened by a massive power failure.
19:22More than 2,000 miles away in London,
19:25Carnarvon's dog began to howl.
19:28Newspaper reports of the time
19:30detail the deaths of more than 20 other men
19:33who had entered the tomb.
19:35It created in the mind of the newspaper reporters
19:39the curse of the pharaohs
19:41and all these things that capture the hearts of the people.
19:45Experts attribute the deaths to something much less strange.
19:49They say Carnarvon died from an infected mosquito bite,
19:53and others may have been affected by bacteria
19:56or poisonous gases in Tut's ancient crypt.
20:00Yet many still believe Tut's curse
20:03is proof of Egyptian magic's strange power.
20:10Egypt, 15th century B.C.
20:13Pharaoh Hatshepsut, a self-proclaimed king,
20:16was lord of the Nile.
20:20Hatshepsut was a popular leader,
20:23masterful politician, and skilled diplomat,
20:26whose bearded image appeared on statues and tomb paintings.
20:31The strange thing was, this king of the Nile was a woman.
20:40Hatshepsut was the daughter of one pharaoh
20:43and the wife of another, her own brother.
20:46When her brother died,
20:48Hatshepsut's nephew ascended the throne.
20:51She became his regent,
20:53in charge of making important decisions.
20:56She evidently got tired of being just the regent
20:59and declared herself king.
21:01She had herself represented as a king,
21:04with a beard and wearing the male kilt,
21:07usually, rather than the woman's dress.
21:12Only a few women ruled Egypt.
21:15The last was Cleopatra, in the 1st century A.D.
21:20For the men who ruled, the palace was a place
21:23where their every whim and strange desire was satisfied.
21:27You're filled with beautiful women
21:29who were part of the harem, probably,
21:31or let's say, women who were part of the pharaoh's entertainment.
21:36While the common folk ate mostly bread and beer,
21:39the royals feasted on beef, waterfowl, pork and fish,
21:45all washed down with flagons of sweet wine.
21:49One thing you'd never see on the pharaoh's table
21:52was the Oxyrhynchus fish.
21:55Egyptians believed this denizen of the Nile
21:58had eaten the penis of the god Osiris,
22:00after his evil brother Seth tossed it into the river.
22:06If the food that did appear on the king's table wasn't strange,
22:10the waiter might be.
22:13Trained baboons sometimes served the royals.
22:16Egyptians considered them sacred and kept them as pets.
22:23They also put the Simeons to work as fruit pickers
22:26and even bathroom attendants.
22:29An equally odd Egyptian belief
22:31was that dwarves were close to the gods.
22:34Dwarves were often brought in to entertain the pharaoh.
22:38Dwarves were considered by the ancient Egyptians
22:41to be special players in Egyptian religious roles.
22:45They could dance the sacred dances of the gods.
22:48They amused the gods.
22:51Egyptians treated dwarves with reverence and respect.
22:54They were not only entertainers, but held important positions.
22:58This statue from the 23rd or 24th century BC
23:01shows the dwarf Seneb, a royal attendant and priest, with his family.
23:07Because of their stature,
23:08they were considered to be eternally youthful.
23:11And in ancient Egypt, this idea of youthfulness,
23:14in other words, rebirth, not dying,
23:16was a very important symbol to them.
23:22Celebrations were not just for the Egyptian pharaohs.
23:25In a worker's town like Deir el-Medina,
23:28the people who built the royal tombs
23:30took time off to celebrate important feast days
23:33and to let off some steam in their own way.
23:37Religious festivals were really raucous.
23:39They were like Mardi Gras,
23:40a little bit more free sexuality than you normally get up to,
23:43under the cover of the erotic influence of the goddess Hathor,
23:47the goddess of revelry and love and sexuality.
23:52The party atmosphere was enhanced with generous quantities of beer
23:56sipped through straws.
23:58Even children drank it.
24:00Ancient Egyptians loved their beer.
24:02By the time we reached the historical era,
24:05beer brewing and bread production was already commonplace.
24:10Egyptians made bread and beer from the same crop, barley.
24:14To brew beer, they first soaked the grain so it would sprout,
24:18a process known as malting.
24:21Malting produces enzymes
24:22that will help turn the starch into sugar when the grain is boiled.
24:26This step, called mashing, also sterilized the brew.
24:30Pure water was a rare commodity in ancient Egypt.
24:34The Nile water was already polluted.
24:36It had devastating organisms in it,
24:39and beer was a safe beverage to drink.
24:42The Egyptians didn't just drink beer for their health.
24:46The next step, the fermentation, turns the sugar into alcohol.
24:50Straws could be used to penetrate the upper layer of floating debris.
24:57Ancient beer was somewhat sweet,
25:00which had been characterized as tasting something like chardonnay.
25:05Alcohol was probably not the only intoxicant
25:08used in the village of Deir el-Medina.
25:11There, archaeologists found hundreds of small clay vessels
25:14that once held opium.
25:16The drug was also used as a teething remedy for infants.
25:20One scholar suggests that possibly a lot of people in ancient Egypt
25:23were high a lot of the time.
25:27Decades of research amid the ruins of Deir el-Medina
25:30gave archaeologists a unique look
25:32at the details of daily life in Egypt.
25:38They found remnants of the mud-brick houses
25:40that most Egyptians lived in.
25:42They were surprised when they uncovered toilets.
25:47Poorest people in villages would do
25:50probably what the poorest people do today,
25:53which is go outside the house in the desert.
25:56But the wealthy had toilets.
25:58They had both wooden toilet seats
26:00and there were stone-carved toilet seats for the very wealthy.
26:03So someone like a general or a major city administrator
26:06would go to the toilet and take a shower
26:09Someone like a general or a major city administrator
26:12would have his throne, if you can consider it that.
26:17Millennia before the invention of toilet paper
26:20and modern notions of sanitation,
26:22men and women, rich and poor,
26:25simply used their fingers to wipe themselves.
26:30The Egyptians invented the idea of the bathroom.
26:33It was a place for both men and women
26:35to fuss over their appearance in private.
26:38Egyptian men wore elaborate wigs made out of human hair.
26:42Nevertheless, they worried about going bald.
26:46They rubbed the milky juice of lettuce leaves on their head
26:49in hopes of sprouting hair and attracting women.
26:53Lettuce was the favorite food of the male fertility god, Min.
26:58The god Min is frequently shown with lettuces behind him.
27:03The oil from the lettuce leaves
27:05is seen as being the equivalent of semen.
27:10Living in the desert,
27:12the people of Deir el-Medina were plagued by lice.
27:15Egyptians kept their hair short and shaved their body hair.
27:21The Egyptians took regular baths,
27:23scandalized the Greeks who thought they bathed far too much.
27:26The Egyptians were the first ones to actually create a form of soap
27:30using natrin, a naturally occurring bicarbonate of soda.
27:34And they used this to clean their mouth, to clean their body,
27:37so that when they went into special sacred spaces,
27:39they would be ritually pure.
27:43Egyptian medicine was equally strange.
27:47For cataracts, the doctor would likely prescribe mashed brain of tortoise.
27:52For a burning rectum,
27:54try a compress made from onion meal, honey, water,
27:57and the tail of a dead mouse.
28:01Concern for cleanliness led the Egyptians
28:04to become one of the first cultures to practice circumcision for men.
28:09Starting more than 4,000 years ago,
28:11priests performed circumcisions with crude flint knives.
28:16They did it as a rite of passage into adulthood.
28:20By today's standards, it seems a little gruesome
28:23that young men were circumcised when they were in their early teens
28:26rather than as infants.
28:29In the 23rd century BC,
28:31a man named Uha commissioned this stone tablet
28:34as a monument to the greatest moment in his life,
28:37his circumcision.
28:40He says, after the usual platitudes of Egyptian thought,
28:44I gave bread to the hungry,
28:46was helpful to the widow and the orphan,
28:49I gave a boat to the person who had none,
28:51that I was circumcised together with 120 men,
28:55and not one of us cried out, not one of us scratched.
29:02Archaeologists have found many strange memorials in Egypt,
29:05but this one may be the strangest.
29:14The ancient city of Abydos
29:16is the site of many of the oldest ruins in Egypt.
29:20The temple to Osiris dates from the 32nd century BC.
29:26On its walls are perhaps the strangest hieroglyphs in all of Egypt.
29:31Some believe they are evidence
29:33that the ancient Egyptians possessed 20th century technology
29:37more than 5,000 years ago.
29:40In that temple, you actually have carvings of helicopters,
29:44planes,
29:47a spaceship,
29:49and possibly a submarine,
29:51all carved into the stone.
29:54These symbols led author John van Auken to a controversial theory.
29:58He believes Egypt's great civilization
30:00was founded by an older but much more advanced society,
30:04one that actually built monuments like the Great Pyramid at Giza.
30:09The Great Pyramid of Giza is a real piece of physical evidence
30:13that something very sophisticated was there
30:17and achieved this accomplishment,
30:19which we haven't been able to replicate.
30:22It is hard to understand how a society that lacked even wheeled carts
30:27moved the 2.5 million stone blocks that make up the pyramid.
30:31Some weigh as much as 70 tons.
30:36Who could accomplish such a monumental task?
30:40Van Auken believes people from the legendary Lost Continent of Atlantis
30:45migrated to Egypt after a massive flood destroyed their homeland.
30:50These survivors, he claims, brought with them mystical powers.
30:54They became the ancestors of Egypt's pharaohs and high priests.
30:58The Atlanteans used metaphysical and physical properties
31:04of the electromagnetic energy and radiation in building the pyramid
31:10to carve them perfectly,
31:12to move them and put them in position perfectly.
31:17Modern scholars are confident that the Egyptians used their skill
31:21and social organization to build the monuments,
31:24not otherworldly powers.
31:26This is selling the Egyptians short.
31:29If you look at the interior blocks of the Great Pyramid,
31:32you find that there are quarry marks by the Egyptians themselves.
31:36So if you had space aliens who built it,
31:38they had to be space aliens who could read and write Egyptian.
31:42Experts believe that the odd symbols at Abydos
31:45were actually created by stone carvers correcting earlier mistakes.
31:50You know, I have been working at Giza for the last 25 years,
31:54excavating, revealing secrets from the sand.
31:57We never discovered one single evidence
32:00to tell us anything about lost civilization at all.
32:06Egyptians didn't just construct stone monuments.
32:10They also built a sophisticated social structure
32:13with their own ideas about justice.
32:19Madinat Habu, Egypt, 12th century BC.
32:23A group of royal wives, generals, harem officials and priests
32:28meet secretly in the pharaoh's palace.
32:31They're planning a murder.
32:35In the ancient world, some killed with knives, some with poison.
32:40These villains are using the strangest weapon of all, magic.
32:46They made wax dolls,
32:48which they manipulated in the same way as modern voodoo dolls.
32:56But what is clear is that magic was completely legal
33:00because the texts were taken from the royal library.
33:07What was illegal was the name of who is going to be attacked.
33:16That name was Ramses III.
33:19He eventually uncovered what court records call the harem conspiracy.
33:23One of his own wives had hatched the plot.
33:26She hoped to kill the pharaoh and put her son on the throne.
33:30That's something we would have no idea about
33:33if there hadn't been discovered a text that describes legal proceedings
33:38against a series of men who were in cahoots with the queen.
33:42We have the punishments that were meted out to them,
33:45which were invariably death.
33:49Members of the royal family who participated
33:52were allowed to commit suicide.
33:54Dozens of others were executed.
33:56Although the text doesn't specify how,
33:59it is certain that the pharaoh's vengeance was slow and painful.
34:05Typical Egyptian execution methods included burning alive
34:12and excruciating death by impalement.
34:16What we see from the hieroglyphs must have involved
34:19a large pole erected in the sand,
34:22sharpened, and the human being, still alive,
34:26being forcibly brought down on that pole until they died.
34:40The harem conspiracy demonstrates one aspect of Egyptian justice.
34:44The pharaoh was the law.
34:48The Egyptian judicial system was kind of odd
34:50because we have almost no law codes, almost no written law codes.
34:54Law came from pharaoh himself.
34:57The principle of justice was represented by Maat,
35:00a goddess with a tall ostrich feather in her headdress.
35:04It was called the Feather of Truth.
35:07Maat is an extremely important goddess
35:10because it represents a concept of decorum.
35:15It also represents divine order.
35:19Egyptians believed that if Maat ceased to exist,
35:22the world would degenerate into chaos.
35:28In a town like Deir el-Medina,
35:31village elders would use the concept of Maat to settle disputes.
35:36The Egyptians were incredibly litigious.
35:39They were constantly suing each other.
35:41We even have examples of people who were alive suing people who were dead.
35:45We have examples of people who go to a court
35:48and they call upon the person who's dead
35:50to give witness against this person who's living.
35:53If they were unhappy with the verdict,
35:56Egyptians would appeal to the gods directly.
35:59In the temple, they would stand before an oracle statue like this falcon.
36:04People would ask questions as simple as,
36:06who stole my chisel?
36:08And questions as important as,
36:10will I get the job that I want to the god?
36:14This statue had a hole attached to a speaking tube.
36:18A priest, perhaps in a trance-like state,
36:21would deliver the answer from a hidden room.
36:24A little bit sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you know,
36:27where there's the man behind the curtain.
36:32For Egyptians, final justice was rendered after death
36:36by a strange divine court.
36:39If you had committed sin,
36:41then your heart would be eaten by a horrible monster
36:45who's called the Devourer.
36:52Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all about the ancient Egyptians
36:56is that they believed their strange habits would continue forever,
37:00even after death.
37:04Immortality was at the heart of Egyptian civilization.
37:08Over thousands of years,
37:10they developed elaborate rituals to prepare bodies.
37:13This way, the dead were ready
37:15for the perilous journey to the next world
37:18and judgment by the gods.
37:22The journey to the afterlife
37:24really was seen as a physical journey in ancient Egypt.
37:27And what was really important was that the body be made whole
37:31and that the soul, in its various forms,
37:34could return to the body eternally.
37:39Mummification, the most famous of Egypt's strange practices,
37:45was an elaborate process.
37:50First, attendants carefully washed the corpse.
37:53Using an iron hook, they crushed the brain,
37:56pulled the pieces through the nasal passage,
37:59and discarded them.
38:03Then the embalmers removed the internal organs
38:06and preserved them in ceremonial jars,
38:09except for the heart, which stayed in the body.
38:13For the ancient Egyptians, like medieval Europeans,
38:16the heart was the center of the emotions,
38:19which is why we send hearts at Valentine's Day and not brains.
38:25Sometimes Egypt's burial practices took a toll on the living.
38:29Early in its history,
38:31the pharaoh's servants and even high officials
38:34were ritually killed, perhaps with poison,
38:37and placed in the royal tomb.
38:39This was to ensure the king would be cared for in the afterlife.
38:43As Egyptian civilization advanced,
38:45this grisly ritual was abandoned.
38:48Substituting for the dead retainers were stone figures,
38:53which imitated all the various actions
38:56you needed your assistants to perform for you.
39:00To keep the deceased company in the afterlife,
39:03tombs were filled with a menagerie of mummified animals.
39:07Baboons, cats, dogs, alligators, and birds like this one.
39:15Even in ancient times,
39:17this strange practice attracted attention.
39:20Greek travelers reported that Egyptians worshipped cats
39:23and would shave off their eyebrows when the family pet died.
39:27Selling feline mummies as tourist souvenirs
39:30became a common and lucrative sideline for some temple employees.
39:36Although they revered cats just like so many other animals
39:39as sort of avatars or manifestations of gods,
39:42they killed hundreds and thousands of cats
39:44because they would raise cats in temples,
39:47kill them, mummify them, and sell them to pilgrims.
39:50This was big business in ancient Egypt.
39:54Archaeologists found even stranger things inside crypts,
39:58including a working toilet.
40:03Before the crypt was closed,
40:05priests equipped the mummy with amulets,
40:07magic jewelry, and books of spells.
40:11Preparation for the strange and perilous journey
40:14to the land of the dead.
40:16His spirit must then travel through the underworld,
40:20avoiding a series of dangers and pitfalls
40:24designed by demons and otherworldly creatures
40:27to prevent him from reaching the god Osiris.
40:35First the spirit traveled to the Hall of Two Truths
40:38where a panel of 42 gods
40:40with names like Strider, Eater of Shadows, and Breaker of Bones
40:45challenged his virtue.
40:47The deceased must proclaim the sins he didn't commit.
40:51Some were quite bizarre.
40:53I didn't eat excrement. I didn't drink urine.
40:56I didn't fornicate with anyone other than my wife.
40:59I didn't have sex with a man. I didn't have sex with an animal.
41:02They also include every single sexual activity you might think of.
41:06And if this were true and you never could do any of these things,
41:09there would have been no Egyptians left to utter these spells.
41:13But what if you had committed one of these transgressions?
41:17Or just forgotten the right answer?
41:20The Egyptians were ready for that.
41:24The correct responses were packed with the mummy in a book
41:28that was perhaps the strangest thing ever written in the Egyptian language.
41:32The Book of the Dead.
41:34They were written down in papyrus and these were mass produced.
41:37They were actually left with blanks for your name.
41:39You know, fill in name of dead person here.
41:41So you were kind of like absolved of all sins
41:45through the purchase of this very special document.
41:49If the Book of the Dead performed as promised
41:52and the 42 assessor gods were satisfied,
41:55the spirit was ready for the final ritual.
41:58He presented himself to Osiris, the god of the dead.
42:02Osiris placed his heart on a scale.
42:06On one side was the heart
42:09and on the other side was the feather
42:12which represented the goddess Ma'at.
42:15So everything had to balance.
42:19If your heart was heavy and you had committed sin,
42:25then the pan would hit the floor and clatter.
42:28And with that, your heart would be eaten
42:31by a horrible monster who is called the Devourer.
42:35If it was as light as the feather and you had lived a good life,
42:39you would be pronounced to be true of voice or justified
42:43which meant that your life had been worthwhile.
42:47Finally, the spirit entered the next world
42:51known as the Field of Reeds.
42:53Attendants unwrapped the mummy
42:55and prepared the person for the wonders of eternity.
42:59They open his mouth, then he can eat the afterlife.
43:02They open his nose, then he can smell.
43:05And they open his eyes, then he can see.
43:08In the Field of Reeds, the Field of Paradise,
43:12grain grows to colossal heights.
43:14Food is abundant.
43:18It was never anything but a sunny, beautiful day
43:21where you had all the abundance,
43:23the coolness of the breezes of the north
43:26and where you lived for eternity
43:28in happiness with your wife and family.
43:34With these death rituals, the ancient Egyptians
43:37hoped to recreate their strange earthly civilization here
43:41in the Field of Reeds.
43:44In essence, your tomb is the temple
43:47for you as a deified spirit
43:50and your mummy is the cult image of you.
43:55That's why it has to be protected,
43:57that's why it has to be fed,
43:59that's why it's essentially treated just like a god.
44:02After the funeral, it is a god.
44:06Incestuous kings, magic spells, letters to the dead.
44:16Ancient Egypt's way of life and death
44:20seemed strange and distant.
44:23Yet even with their fascination with baboons,
44:27dwarves and mummies,
44:29Egyptians created a culture
44:31whose soaring monuments are still with us today.
44:37Almost 2,000 years after the last pharaoh,
44:40the magnificence of Egyptian civilization
44:43and the strangeness still dazzle us.