Strange Egypt History Channel Documentary
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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, a 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, who then reproduced through regular sexual reproduction and created a successive generation of male and female gods.
02:23In the pantheon of Egyptian deities, brother, mary, sister, these incestuous gods bring family feuds to violent new heights.
02:33Osiris was invited to a party by his brother Seth, and 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 and throws it into the Nile.
02:56After a frantic search, Isis, Osiris' wife, finds his body.
03:04But Seth attacks again. He slices his brother into pieces and 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.
03:18Isis binds her husband's body together, turning Osiris into the first mummy.
03:26For thousands of years, Egyptians will imitate this story, carefully wrapping the corpses of their loved ones.
03:33Isis, however, finds another way to ensure the immortality of Osiris.
03:38By her own magical powers, she recreated a new penis and then was able to impregnate herself through her divine husband and bear his son and heir, the god Horus.
03:54Ancient Egyptians believed their magnificent civilization was formed by this mixture of incest, masturbation and castration.
04:03It would be thousands of years before the rest of the world got a peek at how strange it could get in an Egyptian bedroom.
04:181821. Egypt's empire is long gone. European armies occupy her land.
04:24French consul Bernardino Draviti combs through the ruins of an ancient village called Deir el-Medina, looking for artifacts.
04:34Built more than 3,500 years ago, probably by Pharaoh Amenhotep III, this working-class town near the Valley of the Kings once housed the men who constructed the royal monuments.
04:47That is a very important village, that we can know a lot about marriage, about love, about life of an ordinary Egyptian who really created the tombs.
05:06Here, Draviti buys a huge cache of papyrus documents. He unrolls one.
05:11And finds a set of shocking, erotic cartoons.
05:19It has got wild scenes of men and women in most contorted positions, performing intercourse in the most bizarre ways with all sorts of different accoutrements.
05:31I mean, they're hilarious scenes. We're not really sure what this is about.
05:36One of the amusing things is that modern scholars have been rather trepidatious about publishing this text because it was a little too raunchy for some of them.
05:47In one scene, a woman is engaged in intercourse with a man with an enormous phallus while she has a little hand mirror and she's putting on eye makeup.
05:55Is this a satirical comment on upper-class behavior, or just a private collection of pornography? Modern scholars aren't sure.
06:05But in the village of Deir el-Medina, archaeologists did find evidence that sexual vitality was on the mind of the average Egyptian.
06:14The ruins of the village were littered with statues of Hathor, the goddess of love, and Bess, the male god of fertility.
06:23Bess is portrayed as a dwarf with a large phallus.
06:29In the village of Deir el-Medina, archaeologists did find evidence that sexual vitality was on the mind of the average Egyptian.
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. The women with their beautiful gowns, and the clothing in ancient Egypt, especially for women, really enhanced the body.
06:59Oddly enough, there is no real record of the disapproval of premarital sex in ancient Egypt.
07:06We don't even have a word for virgin, which is very odd, because we have so many written records.
07:12Most women married soon after puberty, at age 12 or 13, boys a few years older.
07:19Scholars believe there was no wedding. The couple simply moved in together.
07:23We have no good indication of a formal marriage ceremony. We have no good indication of the state taking any interest in marriage whatsoever.
07:32After marriage, however, the rules changed. Adultery was considered shameful.
07:39In Deir el-Medina, archaeologists found legal records that suggest it was not uncommon.
07:46There's one man named Paneb, a famous workman in Egypt.
07:50There's one man named Paneb, a famous workman in Deir el-Medina, who was really unbelievable.
07:56He had sex with a lot of women who were married, and 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, the 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, and that is serial monogamy.
08:23That it was relatively easy for either a man or a woman to divorce the spouse for cause or just because they don't like them anymore.
08:33One of the mysteries the ancient Egyptians tried to solve was how not to get pregnant.
08:39Medical documents describe several strange forms of contraception.
08:44Things like honey and a combination of dates and acacia bark.
08:49They would be substances that would be inserted into the vagina, and among the least appealing are things like crocodile dung.
08:57Some people have suggested they were more effective at keeping men away from the woman than it was for actually contraception itself.
09:05There was also a darker, more sinister side of sexuality in ancient Egypt.
09:10One book of dream interpretations describes fantastic scenes of women having sex with a crocodile, a serpent, even a mouse.
09:20And some families felt the need to protect their loved ones against necrophilia.
09:25There is some evidence that certain bodies were not delivered to the embalmers directly after the death,
09:30but were actually kept in the house.
09:32And the assumption is because the husband was afraid that the body would be violated by the embalmers.
09:41Scholars have speculated that working with the dead gave embalmers such an awful odor that not even prostitutes would sleep with them.
09:53If the behavior on the streets of Deir el-Medina seems odd to us,
09:57in the halls of the pharaoh's palace, it got even more perplexing.
10:02Imitating their gods, these ancient kings sometimes entered into incestuous marriages.
10:08In order to ensure that the line was as pure as could be,
10:12they very often wound up marrying their half-sisters or sisters or someone in the family.
10:20This chair belonged to Sidamun, the daughter of King Amenhotep.
10:24In one of the more bizarre episodes of Egyptian history, she also became her father's spouse,
10:31sharing the title of great royal wife with her own mother.
10:37Wives played important roles in serving goddesses as priestesses,
10:43so it's not at all clear that they were bedmates.
10:48Pharaohs maintained loyalty to their wives,
10:50but they were bedmates.
10:53Pharaohs maintained large harems of secondary wives and concubines, sometimes hundreds of women.
11:00This allowed them to put their own stamp on the imperial gene pool.
11:05Ramses 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 that 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
11:39and 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 flattered by the embalmer's work.
12:08However, 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, when Dr. Zahi Hawass conducted a CT scan.
12:26Tut's penis was right where it should have been,
12:30and not on some antiquarian's bookshelf.
12:38Dark forces in the service of love.
12:42Strange ingredients.
12:45A scarab beetle, milk of a black cow, apple seeds, nail clippings,
12:50and a pot of human urine.
12:53These substances came from the toolkit of a highly skilled magician.
12:58Egyptians believed potions like this, combined with spells and incantations,
13:03connected them to the mystical power of the universe.
13:07They were very interested in controlling their own environment, as we are.
13:12But they couldn't control it through scientific ways,
13:15but they wound up controlling it through magical ways.
13:20A papyrus from the 2nd or 3rd century tells of these magical ways,
13:25of a sorcerer who used these substances
13:28in hopes of making a woman fall in love with him.
13:31The notion of magic is fundamental to the Egyptian understanding
13:35of their gods and the universe.
13:38If you can make use of this force, which underlies the universe,
13:43then you too can make use of words or images and have a practical effect.
13:50With the scarab in his hand, the magician recites a long spell,
13:55thus dispatching it on his mission of love.
13:57He then drowns the beetle in the vial of cow's milk.
14:05Half the bug is cooked with the nail clippings, apple seeds and urine.
14:11This mixture is poured into a jug of wine with more incantations.
14:18All that's left is to somehow convince the object of his desire
14:22to drink the concoction.
14:25We don't know whether the potion worked,
14:28but we do know that sorcery was normal in ancient Egypt.
14:33Priest-magicians had no divine calling.
14:36It was a hereditary post.
14:39And a part-time one.
14:41Priests served for about three months of the year.
14:45During that time, they adhered to strict rules of ritual purity.
14:49They abstained from the use of alcohol,
14:51and meat.
14:54To get himself in the mood for spell-casting,
14:57a conjurer might chew the flowers of a blue lotus,
15:01a plant known for its psychedelic effects.
15:04There was a desire to transport yourself and experience dreams.
15:09And this was part of the way of divination,
15:12the way of figuring out what would happen or what should happen.
15:16People relied on the magician's skills.
15:18People relied on the magician's skills
15:21to protect them from spirits of the dead,
15:24who had not been properly mummified.
15:27Egyptians feared such ghosts stalked the world,
15:30spreading evil.
15:34There were magical ivory knives
15:37designed to draw a protective circle around the bed
15:41to protect you in the evening.
15:44And these have figures of protective gods brandishing knives
15:49to ward off demonic forces that might attempt to cross that line.
15:54A conjurer could also create a magical text, like this one.
15:58Written more than 2,700 years ago,
16:01it was probably commissioned by the father of a young child.
16:04It is a decree promulgated by a temple
16:08which says that I, God so-and-so,
16:10will protect you, your name written here,
16:13from a wide variety of diseases, illnesses, nightmares
16:17that would be a problem for you for the duration of your life.
16:22For Egyptians, the world of magic
16:25and the spirits of their ancestors were familiar territory.
16:29There was actually very little real separation
16:32between the land of the living and the dead.
16:35You could communicate through letters to the dead.
16:37It was one of the most effective ways.
16:40This simple clay pot covered with hieroglyphs
16:43is one of the strangest examples of a letter to the dead.
16:47This long letter written by a man to his deceased father
16:51asks for help against sickness on behalf of himself and his wife
16:56and, in addition, that his dead father ensure
17:00that he and his sister both have healthy children born to them.
17:03Egyptians used wax effigies
17:06to create even more powerful magic
17:09and curse their enemies.
17:12The practice is directly comparable
17:15to what Hollywood considers the voodoo doll
17:18which has a much longer history in Egypt
17:21where you actually have figures that are pierced,
17:24buried upside down, trampled and boiled.
17:27Exotic rituals weren't always necessary
17:29to summon magical forces.
17:32Sometimes all it took was a single word.
17:36Since Hekka, the god of magic, was also the god of images,
17:41the pictures that made up Egyptian hieroglyphs
17:44were one of the most potent forms of magic.
17:47The signs themselves had the magical ability to come to life.
17:53It was often important, the Egyptians thought,
17:55to actually disable potentially dangerous hieroglyphs
17:59from attacking the dead man.
18:02For instance, to neutralize the power of the symbol for snake,
18:07a scribe would draw daggers through its body.
18:13Some believe the power of Egyptian magic
18:16could reach around the globe and across centuries.
18:20Archaeologist Harold Carter,
18:22discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen
18:25only after years of searching.
18:28When he opened the crypt,
18:31Carter was dazzled by the glint of gold,
18:34magnificent headpieces,
18:37ceremonial knives
18:40and jewelry filled the crypt.
18:43This exquisite miniature sarcophagus, he learned,
18:46once held Tut's liver.
18:48It also contained something much stranger,
18:51violent curses.
18:54Hieroglyphs inscribed in the gold lining
18:57threaten a painful death
19:00for anyone who disturbs Tut's remains.
19:03Some believe these curses actually worked.
19:06Lord Carnarvon, who financed the Tut expedition,
19:09died of a mysterious infection
19:12only a year after the discovery.
19:15At the moment of discovery,
19:18on the eve of his death,
19:21Cairo was darkened by a massive power failure.
19:24More than 2,000 miles away in London,
19:27Carnarvon's dog began to howl.
19:30Newspaper reports of the time
19:33detail the deaths of more than 20 other men
19:36who had entered the tomb.
19:39It created in the mind of the newspaper reporters
19:42the curse of the pharaohs
19:45and all these things that captured the hearts of the people.
19:48But there is something much less strange.
19:51They say Carnarvon died from an infected mosquito bite,
19:54and others may have been affected by bacteria
19:57or poisonous gases in Tut's ancient crypt.
20:01Yet many still believe Tut's curse
20:04is proof of Egyptian magic's strange power.
20:12Egypt, 15th century B.C.
20:15Pharaoh Hatshepsut, a self-proclaimed king,
20:18was the king of the Nile.
20:21Hatshepsut was a popular leader,
20:24masterful politician and skilled diplomat,
20:27whose bearded image appeared on statues and tomb paintings.
20:32The strange thing was,
20:35this king of the Nile was a woman.
20:41Hatshepsut was the daughter of one pharaoh
20:44and the wife of another, her own brother.
20:46When her brother died,
20:49Hatshepsut's nephew ascended the throne.
20:52She became his regent,
20:54in charge of making important decisions.
20:57She evidently got tired of being just a regent
21:00and declared herself king.
21:03She had herself represented as a king,
21:06with a beard and wearing the male kilt,
21:09usually, rather than the woman's dress.
21:13Only a few women ruled Egypt.
21:16Except for Cleopatra, in the 1st century A.D.
21:21For the men who ruled,
21:23the palace was a place where their every whim
21:26and strange desire was satisfied.
21:29You're filled with beautiful women
21:31who were part of the harem, probably,
21:33or let's say, women who were part of the pharaoh's entertainment.
21:37While the common folk ate mostly bread and beer,
21:40the royals feasted on beef,
21:43waterfowl, pork and fish,
21:46topped down with flagons of sweet wine.
21:50One thing you'd never see on the pharaoh's table
21:53was the Oxyrhynchus fish.
21:56Egyptians believed this denizen of the Nile
21:59had eaten the penis of the god Osiris,
22:02after his evil brother Seth tossed it into the river.
22:07If the food that did appear on the king's table wasn't strange,
22:11the waiter might be.
22:13Trained baboons sometimes served the royals.
22:17Egyptians considered them sacred and kept them as pets.
22:23They also put the simians to work as fruit pickers
22:26and even bathroom attendants.
22:29An equally odd Egyptian belief
22:32was that dwarves were close to the gods.
22:35Dwarves were often brought in to entertain the pharaoh.
22:38Dwarves were considered by the ancient Egyptians
22:40to be special players in Egyptian religious roles.
22:43They could dance the sacred dances of the gods.
22:46They amused the gods.
22:49Egyptians treated dwarves with reverence and respect.
22:52They were not only entertainers,
22:55but held important positions.
22:58This statue from the 23rd or 24th century BC
23:01shows the dwarf Seneb, a royal attendant and priest,
23:04with his family.
23:07Because of their stature,
23:10they were very youthful.
23:13And in ancient Egypt, this idea of youthfulness,
23:16in other words, rebirth, not dying,
23:19was a very important symbol to them.
23:22Celebrations were not just for the Egyptian pharaohs.
23:25In a workers' town like Deir el-Medina,
23:28the people who built the royal tombs
23:31took time off to celebrate important feast days
23:34and to let off some steam in their own way.
23:37Religious festivals were really raucous.
23:40A little bit more free sexuality
23:43than you normally get up to,
23:46under the cover of the erotic influence of the goddess Hathor,
23:49the goddess of revelry and love and sexuality.
23:52The party atmosphere was enhanced
23:55with generous quantities of beer,
23:58sipped through straws.
24:01Even children drank it.
24:04Ancient Egyptians loved their beer.
24:07By the time we reached the historical era,
24:10the Egyptians made bread and beer
24:13from the same crop, barley.
24:16To brew beer, they first soaked the grain
24:19so it would sprout, a process known as malting.
24:22Malting produces enzymes
24:25that will help turn the starch into sugar
24:28when the grain is boiled.
24:31This step, called mashing, also sterilized the brew.
24:34Pure water was a rare commodity in ancient Egypt.
24:37The Nile water was already polluted.
24:40Beer was a safe beverage to drink.
24:43The Egyptians didn't just drink beer for their health.
24:46The next step, the fermentation,
24:49turns the sugar into alcohol.
24:54Straws could be used to penetrate
24:57the upper layer of floating debris.
25:00Ancient beer was somewhat sweet,
25:03which had been characterized
25:06as tasting something like Chardonnay.
25:08Alcohol was probably not the only intoxicant
25:11used in the village of Deir el-Medina.
25:14There, archaeologists found hundreds of small clay vessels
25:17that once held opium.
25:20The drug was also used as a teething remedy for infants.
25:23One scholar suggests that possibly
25:26a lot of people in ancient Egypt were high a lot of the time.
25:31Decades of research amid the ruins of Deir el-Medina
25:34gave archaeologists a unique look
25:36at the details of daily life in Egypt.
25:42They found remnants of the mud brick houses
25:45that most Egyptians lived in.
25:48They were surprised when they uncovered toilets.
25:52Poorest people in villages would do
25:55probably what the poorest people do today,
25:58which is go outside the house in the desert.
26:01But the wealthy had toilets.
26:03They had both wooden toilet seats
26:06and there were stone-carved toilet seats for the very wealthy.
26:09So someone 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,
26:23men and women, rich and poor,
26:26simply 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
26:36to fuss over their appearance in private.
26:39Egyptian men wore elaborate wigs made out of human hair.
26:43Nevertheless, they worried about going bald.
26:47They rubbed the milky juice of lettuce leaves on their head
26:50in hopes of sprouting hair and attracting women.
26:54Lettuce was the favorite food of the male fertility god, Min.
26:59The god Min is frequently shown
27:01with lettuces behind him.
27:04The oil from the lettuce leaves
27:07is seen as being the equivalent of semen.
27:10Living in the desert,
27:13the people of Deir el-Medina were plagued by lice.
27:16Egyptians kept their hair short and shaved their body hair.
27:21The Egyptians took regular baths,
27:24scandalized the Greeks who thought they bathed far too much.
27:27The Egyptians were the first ones to actually create
27:29a form of soap using natron,
27:32a naturally occurring bicarbonate of soda.
27:35And they used this to clean their mouth, to clean their body,
27:38so that when they went into special sacred spaces,
27:41they would be ritually pure.
27:44Egyptian medicine was equally strange.
27:47For cataracts, the doctor would likely prescribe
27:50mashed brain of tortoise.
27:53For a burning rectum, try a compress made from onion meal,
27:56honey, water, and the tail of a dead mouse.
28:02Concern for cleanliness led the Egyptians
28:05to become one of the first cultures to practice circumcision for men.
28:09Starting more than 4,000 years ago,
28:12priests 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
28:27rather than as infants.
28:30In the 23rd century B.C., a man named Uha
28:33commissioned this stone tablet as a monument
28:36to the greatest moment in his life, his circumcision.
28:40He says, after the usual platitudes of Egyptian thought,
28:44I gave bread to the hungry,
28:47was helpful to the widow and the orphan,
28:50I gave a boat to the person who had none,
28:53I circumcised together with 120 men,
28:56and not one of us cried out, not one of us scratched.
29:02Archaeologists have found many strange memorials in Egypt,
29:06but this one may be the strangest.
29:14The ancient city of Abydos
29:17is the site of many of the oldest ruins in Egypt.
29:20The temple to Osiris dates from the 32nd century B.C.
29:26On its walls are perhaps the strangest hieroglyphs in all of Egypt.
29:31Some believe they are evidence
29:34that 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,
29:46a spaceship,
29:49and possibly a submarine, all carved into the stone.
29:54These symbols led author John van Auken to a controversial theory.
29:58He believes Egypt's great civilization
30:01was 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
30:12that something very sophisticated was there
30:16and achieved this accomplishment,
30:19which we haven't been able to replicate.
30:22It is hard to understand how a society
30:25that lacked even wheeled carts
30:28moved 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.
30:49These 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
31:09in building the pyramid to carve them perfectly,
31:13to move them and put them in position perfectly.
31:17Modern scholars are confident
31:20that the Egyptians used their skill and social organization
31:23to build the monuments, not otherworldly powers.
31:27This is selling the Egyptians short.
31:30If you look at the interior blocks of the Great Pyramid,
31:33you find that there are quarry marks by the Egyptians themselves.
31:36So if you had space aliens who built it,
31:39they had to be space aliens who could read and write Egyptian.
31:42Experts believe that the odd symbols at Abydos
31:46were actually created by stone carvers correcting earlier mistakes.
31:50You know, I have been working at Giza for the last 25 years,
31:55excavating, revealing secrets from the sand.
31:58We never discovered one single evidence
32:01to tell us anything about lost civilization at all.
32:07Egyptians didn't just construct stone monuments.
32:11They also built a sophisticated social structure
32:14with their own ideas about justice.
32:20Madinat Habu, Egypt, 12th century BC.
32:24A group of royal wives, generals, harem officials and priests
32:29meet secretly in the pharaoh's palace.
32:32They'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,
32:49which they manipulated in the same way as modern voodoo dolls.
32:56But what is clear is that magic was completely legal
33:01because the texts were taken from the royal library.
33:05What was illegal was the name of who is going to be attacked.
33:15That name was Ramses III.
33:18He eventually uncovered what court records call the harem conspiracy.
33:22One of his own wives had hatched the plot.
33:25She hoped to kill the pharaoh and put her son on the throne.
33:29That's something we would have no idea about
33:31if there hadn't been discovered a text that describes legal proceedings
33:36against a series of men who were in cahoots with the queen.
33:40We have the punishments that were meted out to them,
33:44which were invariably death.
33:47Members of the royal family who participated
33:50were allowed to commit suicide.
33:53Dozens of others were executed.
33:56Although the text doesn't specify how,
33:58it is certain that the pharaoh's vengeance
34:01was slow and painful.
34:05Typical Egyptian execution methods
34:08included burning alive
34:11and excruciating death by impalement.
34:15What we see from the hieroglyphs
34:18must have involved a 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.
34:39The harem conspiracy demonstrates one aspect of Egyptian justice.
34:44The pharaoh was the law.
34:47The Egyptian judicial system was kind of odd
34:50because we have almost no law codes, almost no written law codes.
34:53Law came from pharaoh himself.
34:56The principle of justice was represented by Ma'at,
35:00a goddess with a tall ostrich feather in her headdress.
35:04It was called the Feather of Truth.
35:07Ma'at is an extremely important goddess
35:10because it represents a concept of decorum.
35:14It also represents divine order.
35:18Egyptians believe that if Ma'at ceased to exist,
35:21the world would degenerate into chaos.
35:27In a town like Deir el-Medina,
35:30village elders would use the concept of Ma'at to settle disputes.
35:35The Egyptians were incredibly litigious.
35:38They were constantly suing each other.
35:41We even have examples of people who were alive
35:44suing people who were dead.
35:46We have examples of people who go to a court
35:48and they call upon the person who's dead
35:51to give witness against this person who's living.
35:54If they were unhappy with the verdict,
35:57Egyptians would appeal to the gods directly.
36:00In the temple, they would stand before an oracle statue,
36:04like this falcon.
36:06People would ask questions as simple as,
36:08who stole my chisel?
36:10And questions as important as,
36:12will I get the job that I want to the god?
36:15This 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.
36:49Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all
36:52about the ancient Egyptians
36:54is that they believed their strange habits
36:56would continue forever,
36:58even after death.
37:02Immortality was at the heart of Egyptian civilization.
37:06Over thousands of years,
37:08they developed elaborate rituals to prepare bodies.
37:11This way, the dead were ready
37:13for the perilous journey to the next world.
37:15And judgment by the gods.
37:19The journey to the afterlife
37:21really was seen as a physical journey in ancient Egypt.
37:24And what was really important
37:27was that the body be made whole
37:29and that the soul, in its various forms,
37:32could return to the body eternally.
37:39Mummification,
37:41the most famous of Egypt's strange practices,
37:43was an elaborate process.
37:48First, attendants carefully washed the corpse.
37:52Using an iron hook,
37:54they crushed the brain,
37:56pulled the pieces through the nasal passage
37:58and discarded them.
38:02Then the embalmers removed the internal organs
38:05and preserved them in ceremonial jars.
38:08Except for the heart,
38:10which stayed intact.
38:11For the ancient Egyptians,
38:13like medieval Europeans,
38:15the heart was the center of the emotions,
38:17which is why we send hearts
38:19at Valentine's Day and not brains.
38:23Sometimes Egypt's burial practices
38:26took a toll on the living.
38:28Early in its history,
38:30the pharaoh's servants
38:32and even high officials
38:34were ritually killed,
38:36perhaps with poison,
38:38and placed in the royal tomb.
38:40This was to ensure the king
38:42would be cared for in the afterlife.
38:44As Egyptian civilization advanced,
38:46this grisly ritual was abandoned.
38:49Substituting for the dead retainers
38:52were stone figures
38:54which imitated all the various actions
38:57you needed your assistants to perform for you.
39:01To keep the deceased company in the afterlife,
39:04tombs were filled with a menagerie
39:06of mummified animals.
39:08Baboons, cats, dogs, alligators,
39:12and birds like this one.
39:16Even in ancient times,
39:18this strange practice attracted attention.
39:20Greek travelers reported
39:22that Egyptians worshipped cats
39:24and would shave off their eyebrows
39:26when the family pet died.
39:28Selling feline mummies
39:30as tourist souvenirs
39:32became a common and lucrative sideline
39:34for some temple employees.
39:36Although they revered cats
39:38just like so many other animals
39:40as 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,
39:49and sell them to pilgrims.
39:51This was big business in ancient Egypt.
39:54Archaeologists found
39:56even stranger things inside crypts,
39:58including a working toilet.
40:03Before the crypt was closed,
40:05the priest equipped the mummy
40:07with amulets, magic jewelry,
40:09and books of spells,
40:11preparation for the strange
40:13and perilous journey
40:15to the land of the dead.
40:17His spirit must then travel
40:19through the underworld,
40:21avoiding a series of dangers
40:23and pitfalls designed by demons
40:26and otherworldly creatures
40:28to prevent him
40:30from reaching the god Osiris.
40:35First, the spirit traveled
40:37to the Hall of Two Truths,
40:39where a panel of 42 gods
40:41with names like Strider,
40:43Eater of Shadows,
40:45and Breaker of Bones
40:47challenged his virtue.
40:49The deceased must proclaim
40:51the sins he didn't commit.
40:53Some were quite bizarre.
40:55I didn't eat excrement.
40:57I didn't drink urine.
40:59I didn't fornicate with anyone
41:01other than my wife.
41:03I didn't have sex with a man.
41:05I didn't have any sexual activity
41:07you might think of.
41:09And if this were true
41:11and you never could do
41:13any of these things,
41:15there would have been
41:17no Egyptians left
41:19to utter these spells.
41:21But what if you had committed
41:23one of these transgressions,
41:25or just forgotten
41:27the right answer?
41:29The Egyptians were ready for that.
41:31The correct responses
41:33were packed with the mummy
41:35of Osiris.
41:37And these were mass-produced.
41:39They were actually left
41:41with blanks for your name.
41:43You know, fill in name
41:45of dead person here.
41:47So you were kind of like
41:49absolved of all sins
41:51through the purchase
41:53of this very special document.
41:55If the Book of the Dead
41:57performed as promised
41:59and the 42 assessor gods
42:01were satisfied,
42:03the spirit was ready
42:05for a scale.
42:07On one side was the heart,
42:09and on the other side
42:11was the feather,
42:13which represented
42:15the goddess Ma'at.
42:17So everything had to balance.
42:22If your heart was heavy
42:24and you had committed sin,
42:26then the pan would hit
42:28the floor and clatter.
42:30And with that,
42:32your heart would be eaten
42:33by a horrible monster
42:35who's called the Devourer.
42:37If it was as light as the feather
42:39and you had lived a good life,
42:41you would be pronounced
42:43to be true of voice
42:45or justified,
42:47which meant that your life
42:49had been worthwhile.
42:51Finally, the spirit
42:53entered the next world,
42:55known as the Field of Reeds.
42:57Attendants unwrapped the mummy
42:59and prepared the person
43:01for the wonders of eternity.
43:03They opened his nose,
43:05then he can smell,
43:07and they opened his eyes,
43:09then he can see.
43:11In the Field of Reeds,
43:13the Field of Paradise,
43:15grain grows to colossal heights.
43:17Food is abundant.
43:20It was never anything
43:22but a sunny, beautiful day
43:24where you had all the abundance,
43:26the coolness of the breezes
43:28of the north,
43:30and where you lived for eternity
43:31and where you lived forever.
43:36With these death rituals,
43:38the ancient Egyptians
43:40hoped to recreate
43:42their strange,
43:44earthly civilization here,
43:46in the Field of Reeds.
43:48In essence, your tomb
43:50is the temple for you
43:52as a deified spirit,
43:54and your mummy
43:56is the cult image of you.
43:58That's why it has to be protected.
43:59That's why it has to be fed.
44:01That's why it's essentially
44:03treated just like a god.
44:05After the funeral,
44:07it is a god.
44:11Incestuous kings,
44:14magic spells,
44:17letters to the dead.
44:21Ancient Egypt's way of life
44:23and death
44:25seemed strange and distant.
44:27Yet even with their fascination
44:29with baboons,
44:31dwarves and mummies,
44:33Egyptians created a culture
44:35whose soaring monuments
44:37are still with us today.
44:41Almost 2,000 years
44:43after the last pharaoh,
44:45the magnificence of Egyptian civilization
44:47and the strangeness
44:49still dazzles.