I'm Alice Roberts
and I'm on an adventure
to look at the world's oldest
and greatest civilisation.
I'm travelling the length
and breadth of Egypt by train,
following the river Nile
from Alexandria to Aswan
to discover its ancient past.
I want to find out about
those who found
the tombs, temples and pyramids
and dig even deeper,
to understand what life was like for
the ordinary people that built them.
I'll learn about the vast scale
of archaeological treasures
from an age-old kingdom.
And find out there's still much more
to be discovered buried in the sand,
unseen for thousands of years.
In the final part of my journey,
I track down
some extraordinary hieroglyphics...
Oh, my goodness!
That's a woman in childbirth.
Yes.
..21, 22...
..find evidence of
overly-ambition stone masons...
Just imagine the disappointment
when a massive crack appears.
..and discover how one woman
is hoping to shape the future of
archaeology and tourism in Egypt...
Instead of wanting to create
this Disneyland open-air museum,
tourism today should be focused
on real, authentic experiences
with the people.
..as I travel Ancient Egypt by train.
I'm starting my journey today
from Luxor.
As I travel along
this last stretch of railway,
I have Amelia Edwards' book with me
that helped to inspire
my fascination in Ancient Egypt.
I'm continuing south, upriver,
and I'll be stopping off
at a whole series of sites
that are strung out like jewels
along the banks of the Nile.
And I'm really looking forward to
visiting some of the places
that Amelia Edwards went to
more than 100 years ago,
and finding out
how different they look today.
Every town along this train line
seems to have its
own Ancient Egyptian temple.
They're all dedicated
to different deities -
and there were a lot to choose from.
We know of at least 1,400
gods and goddesses
that were worshipped
in Ancient Egypt.
They represented different aspects
of nature and human concerns,
from the sun to fertility
and childbirth to crocodiles.
I'll be stopping at four stations
form Esna to Aswan
to meet a variety of
different deities
worshipped in the later centuries
of Ancient Egypt...
..on the final leg
of my Egyptian journey.
Esna is a small city,
with a population of around 60,000.
Thank you.
Walking along
its main shopping street,
I eventually find
what I'm looking for.
When Amelia Edwards came to Esna,
she had real trouble
finding this temple.
And she describes
wandering through the marketplace,
asking people where it is,
and the chemist says "'urayib",
which means "nearby".
And then she sees it but,
as she says,
it was buried up it it's chin in the
accumulated rubbish of centuries.
And she's got a painting of it too.
So, this is what it looked like.
And you can see
the floor level there,
you can see the ground surface
goes right up
almost to the top of the pillars,
to the capitals.
And you can see those three
are the three to the left
of the main entrance to the temple.
So, it's extraordinary how much work
has happened since then,
how much excavation has gone on
in order to reveal the temple
in all its glory.
Now that all the sand and debris
has been cleared,
it reveals a dramatic difference
between the ground level of today
and that when the temple was built,
just over 2000 years ago.
This temple is dedicated to Khnum,
a very ancient deity linked to
the Nile, fertility and creation,
and worshipped throughout Egypt.
He's represented as
a man with a ram's head.
In mythology,
Khnum was also a potter,
moulding human children out of clay
on his potter's wheel.
The facade of the temple
combines images of Khnum
and other Egyptian gods
with the new rulers of Egypt,
Roman emperors.
But as you step inside,
the wonders of this place
become apparent.
The walls and ceilings are covered
with stunning images
and hieroglyphics.
But it's the 24 columns
holding up the ceiling
which, to me, are the most beautiful,
particularly their tops, or capitals.
There are lots of different
designs of capitals here
and they're all beautiful.
Some of them are flowers.
Some of them seem to be papyri.
They're all different plants.
And the colours are amazing.
So, they've just restored this side,
and then they're busy at work
on that side
doing this restoration...
..very carefully removing
the accumulated dust and dirt
to reveal these beautiful colours.
I've persuaded the foreman
El Tayeb Khoder
to come down for a quick chat.
So, you're supervising
all of the work here?
Yes.
How long has it been so far,
how long has this project been running for?
Maybe four years. Four years.
They start 2018.
You started in 2018? OK.
How much longer do you think
before it's all done, all restored?
One more year.
One more year? OK,
so you're nearly there.
Yes, one more year.
Yeah. And how many people
have you got working here?
30 up.
30 people up there?
Yes.
Yeah.
It's going to look amazing.
Yes, yes.
I'll have to come back when
you've finished this work. Yes.
Show me what you're doing
out here then, yeah.
Are these hieroglyphics?
Scene here, a main scene.
The main scene,
the main scene of the temple.
In the temple, yes.
And these seem to be
unusual hieroglyphics.
Yes.
They're not just parts of words.
Here, when she births.
Oh, my goodness!
That's a woman in childbirth?
Yes, he is inside his mother,
and he take out to the light.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's beautiful.
Really, really lovely.
Yes.
I'm back at Esna station
to catch the train heading south.
The next stop is Edfu,
just 30 miles down the line.
The railway slavishly follows
the twists and turns of the Nile.
I'm travelling to Edfu
on my adventure through
ancient Egypt.
Here, there's a temple
of the falcon god Horus.
Like the temple at Esna,
this one had fallen into ruin
when the Roman empire pivoted to
Christianity as the state religion.
It became buried in centuries'-worth
of rubble, sand and silt.
In the 19th century,
French archaeologists
led the excavation
to reveal an almost intact temple
from the Ptolemaic period.
I'm meeting the head
of Tourism and Antiquity...
Ahmed, hello.
..Dr Ahmed Hassan.
Nice to meet you.
This looks amazing.
Presumably,
when it was first excavated,
it was completely surrounded
and partially covered
by mud-brick buildings like this?
Yes.
And what about the structure
of this temple, then?
I can see the two pylons there.
What's the rest of the temple like?
Yeah, it's typical design
of the Egyptian temple.
But it was considered to be
the best preserved temple,
because it was most recent temple
and remained under the sand
for many centuries.
Yeah, completely buried.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's why it was preserved.
And what we can see behind us here
are layers and layers and layers
of mud-brick buildings.
So, presumably that was all around
and on top of the temple as well?
Yeah, it was the original part
which represented the city
of the workers in ancient Egypt
when they build the temple.
This is archaeology too.
Yes.
Just because it's built of mud-brick.
Yeah.
Archaeological investigation
has shown that the Ptolemaic temple,
which dates to
the late 3rd century BCE,
replaced an earlier temple.
It seems that the falcon god, Horus,
had been a special deity
for the people of Edfu
for thousands of years.
You suggested you might have
pre-historic evidence?
Yes, a lot of finds
have been uncovered here.
The falcon god cult
existed here from pre-history.
Yeah?
Yes.
That's amazing, isn't it?
A lot of falcons have been
found here and watched here,
so it was called
the city of the falcon.
And what does Horus represent, then?
He was the god of the sky.
And the commercial roads
had to be protected by a god.
So, protector of the trade routes
through Egypt?
Yes, it was a transit point.
Edfu was on the commercial road
between Egypt
and the rest of Africa.
So, the falcon god
was considered the protector.
Right. I think we should
get in there, don't you?
Yes, of course.
As we walk towards the temple,
two towers form its gateway,
or pylon.
Looking at those pylons, it looks
like they've got windows in them.
Are they original?
Yes.
The pylon is considered
the address of the temple,
which was built
as two inclined walls
with spiral staircases
to carry the priests
up to these windows
to throw gold pieces
over the people
during the main celebration
of the temple.
Are people bringing tithes, taxes
to the temple?
Yes, but the taxes were paid
in the form of offerings.
OK.
Offerings for the god,
and, at the same time,
taxes for the state of Egypt.
All together?
Yeah.
That's why the main doors
of the temple
were open just one time a year.
Oh, really?
When you have the
main celebration of the god.
Passing through the pylon gateway,
we enter the first courtyard...
..surrounded on three sides
by 32 columns,
..with floral capitals
like those at Esna.
The first courtyard,
it was an open court
to permit the visitors
to cut the neck of the animals
inside the temple.
That's why it was left open,
to dry the blood of the animals.
So, sacrifices are taking place?
Yes, the sacrifices.
We have to consider that
all the columns here were coloured.
The sun and the sand have cancelled.
So, it's completely gone, the traces
of paint have completely gone.
The next part of the temple
is protected by Horus himself.
And we have a massive statue
of Horus, with the double crown.
Ah, he's lovely. I like him.
Here's the hypostyle hall,
which special rank of people...
And another 12 columns in here?
Yes, 12 columns.
Once again, this temple includes
a roofed hypostyle hall,
the preserve of
the higher echelons of society
with important rooms leading off it.
And here we have a small chamber
called the House of Life,
which was the library of the temple.
Oh, really?
The House of Life,
that give us the impression
how important the book
in ancient Egypt was.
Oh, that's amazing, isn't it?
The House of Life is the library.
At that time,
it was full of papyrus,
which was very important,
because a lot of them
had the structure of the temple.
So, when it was excavated,
there were papyri in there?
We lost it completely.
Oh.
So much information.
But there's a lot on the walls.
Some of these images, though,
have been attacked.
We've got this defacing
of the pagan gods.
Is this Christians coming
and doing that? Yes.
And, look, every single
character here has been attacked.
It's damaged here.
Yeah, they damaged here.
And all the way up.
Yes.
The damage is thought to have been
deliberately carried out
under the orders of Roman rulers
in the 4th century,
who banned non-Christian worship.
..the real heart of the temple here,
aren't we?
Lastly, we enter the sanctuary,
the most sacred space in the temple.
So, right in
the inner sanctuary now?
Yes, the Hall of Horus,
the most important place
in all the temple.
And the first place
built in the temple,
dedicated to the god himself.
This is a replica
of the wooden barque, or boat,
of the god.
The original is kept
in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
And it would have been used to
carry a statue of the god Horus.
Imagine that this boat was caried up
on the shoulders of the priests,
one a year, to go outside
to show the people
this is your god,
this is the one who
you addressed your sacrifices.
The measurements of the god statue,
it was about maximum 1m high...
Yeah, so it fits in there.
..of gold.
This is what it
would have been carried out in
but actually it was in that shrine.
Yes.
You can imagine that the only person
who had permission to get
inside this place was the king.
And when he was not here,
he had to appoint the high priest
to perform the rituals every day
on behalf of him.
You can imagine that
he asked the god
and heard the answer,
and had to tell the people,
"This is the answer of the god."
Yeah.
Yes.
He's the one who's meant to be
the conduit, yeah.
Between the people and the god.
Back at Edfu station,
and the contrast
with the Temple of Horus
couldn't be greater.
But it's great
just to watch local life.
My next stop, just over an hour away,
will be at a town
of a similar size to Edfu,
with a population of 60,000,
and another incredible temple.
I'm here to see the temple
of Kom Ombo,
which, once again,
dates to the Ptolemaic period
in the 2nd century BCE.
And, again, this would have replaced
an even more ancient temple.
I'm meeting the Director
of Aswan's Antiquities, Abdel Saeed.
Abdel.
Hello.
Hello, salaam alaikum.
Nice to meet you, salaam.
Where did you learn Arabic?
Ah, last week.
Last week. Just a week, Is it
your first time to Egypt, yeah?
It's my first time in Egypt. And I'm
having an absolutely wonderful time.
This temple is one I'm particularly
looking forward to, though.
That's why I came here,
to show you so interesting scenes
here inside Kom Ombo temple.
Kom Ombo, like so many other temples,
was rebuilt during the time
when Egypt was ruled by
the descendants of Alexander
the Great's general, Ptolemy.
I'd like to tell you something
really very, very interesting.
Why did Greeks and Romans
reconstruct those temples?
When they came, they found
ancient Egyptian temples,
but they were damaged, destroyed.
Why did they reconstruct them?
They wanted to control Egyptians
through the religious feeling.
Of course, yeah.
Because religious feeling was and is
still very strong with Egyptians.
So, when they reconstructed
those temples,
they could control Egyptians.
Right, OK, yeah.
Yes, yeah.
The god worshipped
at the temple of Edfu
took the relatively benign form
of a falcon.
But here at Kom Ombo,
the temple was dedicated
to a much more dangerous presence -
the Nile crocodile.
The crocodile god Sobek
had been worshipped in Egypt
for more than 2,000 years
when the Greeks arrived on the scene.
So, what was Sobek about, then?
I mean, he's obviously a crocodile
so he's fierce.
What were his other attributes?
If you look in details
about the language itself,
S-O-B-EK, Sobek,
that was the name of the crocodile,
the worshipped the one,
it means the one who
causes the woman to be pregnant.
Sobek connected with the fertility,
plus the frightening or the fear.
Yeah, of it's a real kind of
dual personality there, isn't it?
Yes, exactly, exactly.
That's why it was worshipped
as the local god here in Kom Ombo,
because of this big island
which is facing Kom Ombo Temple
on the river Nile here.
It was said that it
was full of crocodiles,
which forbid Egyptians to cross
the island to the Nile easily,
so they worshipped him
at the beginning
because they were afraid to him.
It's almost as though
by worshipping him,
you can capture that danger
and you can turn it around.
To avoid his danger, yeah.
I agree with this opinion, really.
To avoid his dangers,
they worshipped him.
So, if he's a god of fertility,
is that human fertility,
is it about having offspring?
But is it also about agriculture,
is it about the Nile?
Both of them, because you know that
the river Nile represented the main
source of life for Egyptians -
it was, and it is still.
So, everything,
they wanted to connect
between the human beings
and the Nile.
But in fact, Sobek wasn't the only
god worshipped at Kom Ombo.
This temple is highly unusual,
and it's split right down the middle,
with one side for Sobek
and the other dedicated to
the god Osiris.
And it has not one, but two
hypostyle halls.
And if we go through here,
what's here?
We're going deeper into the temple?
Yes.
The amount of hieroglyphics
is overwhelming,
especially when you realise they
can be read in multiple directions.
Covered with hieroglyphics.
Yes, everywhere.
But Abdel can decipher this writing.
During the old kingdom,
they used letters, signs,
with a picture at the end -
we call it 'determinative' -
to explain the word.
Yeah.
Because hieroglyphic
was written from right to left,
from left to right,
from top to bottom,
how can I figure out the direction
from right to left
or from left to right?
Just look at the faces of the signs.
Oh!
The faces are looking to the right,
so I have to start from the right.
But here, the faces
are looking to the left,
so I have to start
from left to right.
Oh, that's clever.
What Ahmed's about to show me
reveals an incredible link
between the ancient Egyptians
and us today.
What have we got here, then?
Calendar for the first time,
or a part of the calendar.
Oh, really?
Yes.
OK, take me through it, then -
what are we looking at?
During the reign of
the king Djoser, 2600 BC,
astronomer noticed
a star appeared in the sky
when the flood of the river Nile
reached Memphis, the old capital.
Then that star disappeared,
then reappeared again
during the flood
of the river Nile again.
So they calculated
the period between
appearance and reappearance again
for that star.
They found a full year.
They divided that period
into three different seasons.
The first season
called the Nile flood - Akhet.
Could you repeat, Akhet.
Akhet.
The second season represented
the growing of the plants, planting
called Peret.
Peret.
The third season represented
the harvest of the plants,
cutting of the plants, called Shemu.
Shemu.
So, Akhet, Peret, Shemu.
Every season had four months,
every month had three weeks,
every week had 10 days.
Please, so far could you calculate
how many days per year, so far?
It's about the same, then
isn't it? 360.
Not yet. 360.
What about the extra five days?
You're going to have to
add them on sometime.
Ancient Egyptians considered them
the most famous festivals of the
most famous gods and the goddess -
Osiris, !sis, Set,
Nephthys and Horus.
So far, what happens
during the festivals?
What happens -
everybody's very happy,
everybody's staying up late,
everybody, sometimes, drunk.
So, they didn't calculate happiness
days in the age of the man.
Everybody should be far
from extra five days
when he calculated his age.
We still live on this calendar
in our farming,
for Egyptian farmers,
called the Coptic calendar.
Yeah?
Yeah.
In the calendar, the annual cycle
is symbolically linked to the gods.
Again - Akhet, Peret, Shemu.
Flood, planting, harvest.
Represented as Sekhmet, yeah.
Lion head.
Yeah.
And here she's being the seasons.
Yes, exactly.
You never see something like that
except here.
Yeah.
And what else did you
want to show me, Abdel?
I would like to show you something
that will be
a very big surprise for you.
Abdel knows I originally
trained as a doctor.
For the first time
and the last time,
just here in Kom Ombo,
a very nice representation
of medical instruments.
Here in the middle, we've got
all these medical instruments,
I can see knives, or scalpels,
some kind of shears,
and some forceps up there.
That's extraordinary, isn't it?
I mean, that...
It shows you very vividly that
people were performing surgery.
Exactly, you can imagine.
Egyptians were very intelligent,
and they were very advanced
about medicine
since the Old Kingdom.
Towards the lefthand side
you can see something else -
our famous goddess !sis.
She is sitting in
the position of birth.
Up of her, we can see
the goddess Meskhenet,
the goddess of birth who taught !sis
how could she give birth
to children.
Yeah, yeah.
Healing and childbirth -
it's interesting, isn't it,
that this medical technology,
this very kind of
hands-on medical technology
is represented here in a temple,
that it has
this religious aspect to it.
Of course, yes.
Because the temple was
not used just for religious.
No, it was a hospital,
it was a school, it was a library.
Yeah.
The temple now has
its own crocodile museum,
containing remarkable artefacts
relating to the worship of Sobek.
This s a great image of Sobek
on this stela.
Here he is, seated in the centre
in this register
with these people bringing him
piles of offerings,
presumably saying to him,
"Look, here's all this food.
You don't need to eat us."
Ancient Egyptians had
a love/ hate relationship with Sobek,
as they did with
crocodiles themselves.
These are ferocious creatures
that they're
sharing their world with.
They're there in the Nile,
and they're extremely dangerous.
But if you can get Sobek
on your side,
maybe, then,
he becomes a protective god
and he can save you from
the dangers lurking in the water.
It wasn't enough just to
carve sculptures of crocodiles,
the bodies of these reptiles
were preserved,
just like those of the pharaohs,
by mummification.
Part of the worship of Sobek
also involved breeding
and raising crocodiles.
And they were viewed as
living incarnations of the god Sobek.
And they were
very well looked after -
some of them even
have their claws painted.
And when the died,
they were mummified.
And this tends to happen
in the later periods,
so the end of
the first millennium, BCE,
right into the Roman period.
And you can see the care taken
in mummifying these crocodiles,
the layers of bandages.
And then these mummified crocodiles
are themselves
offerings to the god Sobek.
I like the way that they've got
bone plaques with
painted eyes on them as well.
These huge mummies of crocodiles
remind us of the reverence that
ancient Egyptians had
for these animals,
and for the crocodile god, Sobek.
And I think some of that
is about trying to tame,
to manage that ferocious element
that existed within the river Nile.
But also, Sobek was completely
bound up with the inundation as well,
with the flood of the Nile,
which was life-giving,
absolutely essential.
And it's interesting, of course, that
Egypt is just so different now.
With the building of the Aswan dam
the Nile no longer floods.
The landscape is very, very different
to what the ancient Egyptians
experienced.
And we don't really have
any crocodiles now
below the level of the dam -
north of the dam.
But they were already
being hunted to extinction
in the centuries before that.
So, here are some crocodile's eggs.
And these, again, were brought
as votive offerings to Sobek.
And they have another layer
of symbolism as well,
in that crocodiles lay
great clutches of eggs,
very large numbers of eggs
in one nest.
And the mother will make her nest
above the level of the Nile flood.
So there's a bit of magic here,
that crocodiles knew
how high the inundation
was going to reach each year.
As the day ebbs away,
I'm close to my final destination
on this epic journey.
I'm approaching Aswan,
30 miles from Kom Ombo,
around 500 miles from Cairo
and 700 from my starting point
in Alexandria.
I'm now on the approach to Aswan.
But I've seen bits of Aswan
all over the place,
Because the pink granite from here
ended up in temples and tombs
all over ancient Egypt.
And this is it -
my final station stop.
But it's not quite the end
of my Egyptian adventure.
In the morning,
I'll be visiting a quarry
that provided the stone
for monuments.
I'll meet a progressive
Egyptian archaeologist,
and I'll be taking a boat
to an island to see Philae Temple.
It's so beautiful down here
on the banks of the Nile.
And looking over to the other side,
I can see some archaeology
over there.
I can see some really ancient walls,
features rising up onto the hillside.
You also get that
really strong impression of
Ancient Egypt existing
right alongside the modern.
There's some more tourists
just crossing the river here,
Egypt is so geared up for tourism.
It's so important to its economy.
If we think back to Amelia Edwards
in the 19th century,
this is where tourism
was really starting.
And she studied Ancient Egypt.
We can definitely
call her an Egyptologist.
But she was also very much a tourist.
And I'm just another one
of these pilgrims.
It's really interesting
to look around here,
and just reflect on how different
this landscape is from Alexandria,
from the delta.
Everything's different.
The vegetation's different.
You're looking down at the Nile,
but you're straight up into desert.
This is very much a desert country.
And this southern half of Egypt
was sometimes united with the north,
but sometimes existed as
a kingdom in its own right.
This is ancient Nubia.
There's no doubt that
during my travels through Egypt
I've encountered a lot of stone -
tons of the stuff, in fact.
It's the fabric of ancient Egypt.
Some of that stone was local
to the place it ended up in.
But if the ancient Egyptians
wanted to make something special,
like a burial chamber
or a sarcophagus for a pharaoh,
they would use
the very best granite.
And that came from Aswan.
I'm here in one of the ancient
northern quarries of Aswan
where this stone came from.
Round this quarry,
you've got all of the evidence
of the quarrying at work,
you can see how they were
chiselling into the stone
and putting wooden wedges in
to break blocks off.
But we've also got
some drawings as well.
So up here you can see some birds,
maybe ostriches.
I think they look a bit more
like flamingos.
And if I was working here
in this hot quarry -
I mean, this is so hot
in Aswan today,
it's about 40 degrees -
Then you'd probably rather be
sitting somewhere next to water
looking at a flock of flamingos.
And there's a man, I think,
a possibly a boat.
Now, that might relate to the way
that stone is leaving this quarry.
It is being taken out of the quarry
and loaded onto boats,
probably onto a canal,
and then out onto the Nile itself
and from there, all over Egypt.
11, 12, 13...
The ancient Egyptians
were master builders,
the pyramids stand as testament
to their engineering knowhow.
They were clearly ambitious,
but it didn't always go to plan.
..25, 26, 27, 28, 29...
Here in the quarry is evidence of
ancient Egyptians
reaching for the stars,
and being thwarted
by earthbound geology.
They'd carved out
an enormous obelisk,
and then it cracked.
42.
42m long.
This piece of stone is ENORMOUS.
It's 4m across, it's 42m long.
If it had been
lifted out of the quarry,
it would have weighed
well over 1,000 tonnes.
And just imagine the disappointment
when you've done all this work
and you've carved out
the whole shape of it,
and you're getting ready
to go underneath and lift it up,
and a massive crack appears,
and all of that work was in vain.
This almost looks like
a natural gully,
but, of course, this was all
carved out by hand.
They must have been so annoyed,
mustn't they?
You can see these natural cracks.
I suspect many more have appeared
since it was quarried,
since it was formed.
And elsewhere in the quarry
you can see how these natural
cracks and fissures are used
to help split out
useable chunks of stone.
But, of course, what you want here
is this whole thing
to stay completely intact
and to be lifted out as one piece.
But, I mean, if this had been
lifted out of the quarry,
this would have been
the biggest obelisk in all of Egypt.
Visiting this quarry
certainly puts into perspective
all the architectural wonders
I've seen on my trip.
It's really interesting
to have seen this stone everywhere
and to have seen it finished,
beautifully smooth,
carved with cartouches
and hieroglyphics.
But then to come back to here
and see where it all comes from
and see that whole process,
and imagine the hundreds
and thousands of people
that were engaged in building
all of those tombs
and all of those temples.
I've been wowed by
the splendour of ancient Egypt.
But I've certainly felt that
we've left people behind.
We've been so focussed on pharaohs,
did we think about
the rest of society?
Towards the end of my journey,
I'm really keen to meet
an Egyptian archaeologist
who has some radical ideas
about how we should look at the past.
Monica.
Hello!
Morning.
Morning.
Lovely to meet you.
Lovely to meet you.
Shall we get on our...
Yes, let's do that.
Perfect.
There's a lot to discuss,
but I'm also keen
to learn about Philae Temple,
which will be my final destination.
Monica, tell me about Philae,
when was it built
and who was worshipped there?
Philae was built in the late period.
It was very small
at the 30th Dynasty,
but then it grew
with the Ptolemaic kings,
because !sis was worshipped
in that temple.
And then later on, Roman emperors
such as Augustus and Hadrian
added to the temple of !sis there.
And it was continued, even,
to be in service
up until the Christian period,
I think the Christians
were very scared
because !sis was
this very strong woman.
Yeah. What do you think it was
about the cult of !sis
that made her so popular.
!sis was very popular because
she was the goddess of motherhood,
she was the goddess of love,
she was also the goddess
of medicine.
And I think what
I find fascinating about Philae
is that it had an abaton.
And an abaton,
in Greek architecture,
was this place where sick people
would go to heal.
So, this magical place.
And of course !sis
was the goddess of magic.
I mean, I think that's
a really interesting time,
that you have these deities
persisting through time,
but this period when they
seem to quite abruptly disappear.
And I wonder what was actually
happening at that time.
I don't think they disappear.
It becomes part of
the hidden culture
that's not written,
but it's practiced.
Still practiced today?
Yes.
I've seen many women
going to temples early morning
with a friend,
because this is how she would
conceive a child, in her mind.
Yeah.
It's interesting to think about
how this ancient archaeology
sits within modern Egypt,
because it is all around us,
and there are all these...
And it's within us,
not just around us, it's within us.
People practise it
in their daily life,
without necessarily
writing an article about it
in a peer-reviewed journal.
Yeah, yeah.
We only study the ancient past
from the perspective
of the treasures,
not from the perspective
of the people,
of the culture, of the humans.
Knowledge is more valuable
than gold.
It's not about the gold,
it's not about the mummies,
it's not about the secrets,
it's, I think, about the regular
life an ancient Egyptian.
There's a really practical element
to this as well,
which is that there's
a completely intertwined relationship
between archaeology and tourism
here in Egypt.
So, I mean,
how does that effect archaeology,
and how can it work well,
do you think?
I think instead of wanting to create
this Disneyland open-air museum,
tourism today should be focussed
on real, authentic experiences
with the people
who live on a very ancient land
and how they interpret the past.
And I think tourism as it was
in the '80s and the '90s,
with these big buses
flocking into archaeological sites
is bad for the archaeology,
and it's bad
for the tourist experience.
I think the practice
without involving the communities
is replicating
the 19th- and 20th-century
colonialist attitude
towards archaeology.
And without having
the people have a say
in how they want their sites
excavated, conserved and managed,
and including them in long-term
development plans for these sites,
I think Egypt is like
how Gramsci specifies
in his quote that
the past is finished
but the future is not here yet.
So, I think the past is finished,
and the future of doing things
the way they should be done
is not here yet.
Yeah.
So it's still evolving, it's still
changing - we're not there yet.
Yes, we're not there yet.
So, you'd like to see more community
engagement... Yes, definitely.
..with the local communities
around archaeological digs.
Yes, with social history documented.
Community's important
for understanding the past
because we do not study the past
in a glass box.
We study a living past.
The site is left
for the local community.
If we are to safeguard these sites
into the future,
it must be done
through the local community.
Thank you again.
You're welcome.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
As I drop Monica off,
I have plenty to think about
before I reach Philae Temple.
The rive Nile has been the one
constant throughout my adventure -
throughout Egyptian history.
It provided the way for granite
to be transported
all the way up to Alexandria.
The height of the Nile flood
would determine
the success of the harvest
and the legitimacy of the king.
Ancient Egypt and modern Egypt
depends on the Nile.
But when Amelia Edwards came here
in 1873 to visit Philae Temple,
she would have gone
somewhere different.
In 1902, the first Aswan Dam
was built to control the floods.
In the lake that it created,
the temple of Philae was submerged.
And then, in 1971, an ambitious plan
was put into action
to move the temple
to a nearby island.
The temple was
surrounded by shuttering
so river water could be pumped out.
And the entire temple was dismantled
and moved to the new location.
Every block was numbered
and carefully recorded.
Over 50,000 individual pieces
were moved to higher ground,
some weighing as much as 25 tonnes.
Amelia travelled to
the original temple by boat,
as she wrote in her book.
"As the boat glides nearer,
between glistening boulders,
"those sculptured towers
rise higher against the sky/
"They show no sign of ruin or age.
"All looks solid, stately, perfect.
"One forgets for the moment
that anything is changed."
It's astonishing to think that
this temple has been entirely
dismantled and rebuilt here.
If you didn't know before you came,
you wouldn't think twice.
The temple itself is devoted to
the story of the brother
and sister gods !sis and Osiris -
brother and sister
who were also married.
The temple today
is home to a family of cats.
Inside the holy of holies here,
there's a lot of destruction,
a lot of iconoclasm.
That's part of the story
of the temple.
But you can still
prepose the mythology,
you can still see all these elements
of the !sis myth,
!sis and Osiris.
And !sis as
a mother of Horus as well.
And, of course, that idea of
divine motherhood doesn't go away.
Philae Temple is beautiful
to look at,
difficult to understand
and not in its original location.
It's like an allegory
of ancient Egypt itself.
I'm ending my journey
here at Philae Temple,
a monument that Amelia Edwards
saw on her journey up the Nile
at the end of the 19th century,
although, now
it's in a different place.
It was moved when the dams
were created, and the waters rose.
The Nile has changed
and Egyptian archaeology itself
has changed,
and it will keep on changing.
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