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00:00In an ancient necropolis in the heart of Egypt, the workers just indicated to me that they
00:13arrived to the entrance of the tomb.
00:17Archaeologists are hunting for tombs from the era of Tutankhamun.
00:20Wow, on the end, I can see another room behind.
00:26It's a big tomb.
00:28They will be the first to set foot inside for thousands of years.
00:34I think we are ready to go in.
00:37They're hoping to unravel the mystery of an ancient religious revolution.
00:44Some of the skulls, wow.
00:57Tutankhamun, Egypt's most famous pharaoh.
01:03Known as the Boy King, he came to power when he was nine years old and ruled until his
01:08death aged nineteen.
01:12But during his short life, he oversaw a transformation in how the ancient Egyptians worshipped their
01:18gods that had far-reaching implications for the rest of ancient Egyptian history.
01:27Today, archaeologists across Egypt continue to hunt for clues to this spiritual upheaval.
01:36They unearth evidence of mysterious religious rituals, investigate how some gods were banished
01:42and others rose to power, and search brick by brick to understand how the Boy King's
01:49far-reaching religious reforms had their roots in the chaotic reign of his father.
02:00Near Luxor, at Draa Abu el-Naga, Egyptian archaeologist Bahar Geber is excavating an
02:11ancient necropolis that contains burials from the era of Tutankhamun.
02:16It's a very rich area.
02:20The number of the tombs, more than 2,000 tombs, have been discovered until now.
02:26The burials here could contain valuable information about how Tutankhamun shaped Egypt's religious
02:33customs during his reign.
02:36This season, Bahar and his team are focusing on an area of sand near the base of the necropolis.
02:43They have a meticulous system to make sure they don't miss anything.
02:47When we start in the beginning, we have to divide the area into the squares.
02:53For us, that's the first square, and that's the second one, and this is the third one.
02:58We are looking for the bedrock.
03:02In each 16 by 16 foot square, the workers dig all the way down to the bedrock, searching
03:09for any structures hidden in the sand.
03:16We found a border of a courtyard.
03:20You can see the corners around the area.
03:23It means that this is the courtyard of a tomb.
03:27The style of all the tombs which return back to the New Kingdom period should start from
03:33a courtyard.
03:36It's a promising start.
03:38The New Kingdom period is the era of Tutankhamun.
03:43Now that the team has found the courtyard, they're on the lookout for signs of buried
03:48grave goods.
03:53That's very good.
03:55That's very good, really.
04:00On the west bank of the Nile, near Luxor, American Egyptologist Meredith Brand has come
04:10to Tutankhamun's tomb to explore which gods the boy king revered.
04:17This is so exciting.
04:19This is the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb.
04:23It's wonderful to go to the place where the greatest archaeological discovery in Egypt,
04:28and probably even the world, took place.
04:33Tutankhamun's mummified body lay sealed in this tomb for over 3,000 years.
04:39Meredith has special access to examine the burial chamber's walls up close.
04:45This is my first time getting to go into the burial chamber of Tutankhamun.
04:49This is fantastic.
04:51Oh, wow.
04:53Look at that.
04:54You can see every single detail, all the individual strokes, the lines.
05:01The ancient Egyptians honored over 2,000 deities, and the pharaohs were seen as a divine intermediary
05:08between them and the gods.
05:12Over the centuries, the popularity of individual gods waxed and waned, and some gods even combined
05:19into hybrid deities.
05:22Meredith studies the painted reliefs to identify which gods Tutankhamun chose to surround himself
05:28with.
05:29Here is the god Osiris, the god of the underworld, embracing Tutankhamun.
05:35Over there is the goddess Nut.
05:38This is somebody who worshipped the full pantheon of the Egyptian religion.
05:43When first discovered, Tutankhamun's tomb was crammed with more than 5,000 lavish grave
05:49goods, many of which honored the gods.
05:53A shrine bore a statue of the jackal-headed god Anubis.
05:58His sarcophagus was decorated with images of four goddesses, and on the royal chariot
06:05an image of the solar falcon representing the sky god Horus.
06:11But one object poses a mystery.
06:16Tutankhamun's golden throne was emblazoned with a strange sun disk and a different name
06:21for the boy king, Tutank Aten.
06:27The golden throne is highly decorated with imagery of the young pharaoh.
06:33Meredith wants to examine it more closely to see what clues it holds.
06:38This is an image of the golden throne of Tutankhamun, and when I look at it, I see there's something
06:44a bit unusual.
06:45I don't see any other gods, but I do see a sun disk with arms coming down, holding
06:51a key to life.
06:53This is the god, the Aten.
06:56The mysterious Aten, unlike the other Egyptian gods, didn't take the form of an animal
07:01or human.
07:03It was represented as a simple sun disk.
07:07The throne, with its alternative version of Tutankhamun's name, suggests that at some
07:12point during his life, the god Aten was very important to him.
07:18But in the young pharaoh's tomb, the throne is one of the few traces of this mysterious
07:23deity.
07:25In Tutankhamun's tomb, we don't have the image of Aten.
07:30It's not painted on the walls.
07:34To find out more about why the Aten wasn't featured in the tomb, Meredith wants to explore
07:41the site of a cataclysmic religious upheaval.
07:51At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna, archaeologists Bassem Gehad and Anne-Katrin Yeska are excavating
08:02a huge temple complex that was in use during the New Kingdom, the era of Tutankhamun.
08:11We are expecting that we could find more information about this temple that nowadays
08:18you can't see clearly at the site because of the destruction.
08:24The buried temple is located in the fertile ground close to the River Nile.
08:31Digging here is difficult for even the most experienced archaeologists.
08:36It's a kind of a challenging site.
08:39The landscape here is completely different than any other place that I have worked because
08:44I'm used to work in the desert.
08:45Now we are working in mud and silt and everything is just like buried into these compact layers.
08:52But if it's easy, it's not fun.
08:57That's what makes a very good archaeologist.
09:01Among the ruins of the temple's ancient gateway, the team has already uncovered something special.
09:09We can see here one of these locks which was in the core of this building and it bears
09:15the cartouche and the name of Akhenaten.
09:18Pharaoh Akhenaten was Tutankhamun's father.
09:23Akhenaten was the second son of the great Amenhotep III.
09:28He never expected to be king, but when his older brother died, the crown fell to him.
09:35Akhenaten married the legendary Nefertiti, with whom he had six daughters.
09:40But his son, Tutankhamun, would be his successor.
09:47This season, Bassem and Anne Katrin hope that this site can tell them more about the religious
09:53regime during Tutankhamun's early life.
09:57Anne Katrin oversees excavation of a smaller secondary temple that sits in the grounds
10:03of the main Hermopolis site.
10:05We excavate with seven to eight workmen.
10:09In each square, some are moving the soil.
10:13Today I hope we manage to excavate 20 more centimetres and I hope to find here more information
10:21about the temple.
10:24As the workers painstakingly scrape away at the compacted soil, Anne Katrin watches for
10:30any signs that there's a structure below.
10:35Here it's just the soil looks a bit different.
10:38It's a bit more sandy and our foundations are filled with sand, so it might be an indication
10:42that we come closer to the foundation.
10:48It's a promising sign the team is digging in the right area.
11:00One of the workers spots something buried in the soil.
11:06It seems like we have limestone blocks.
11:14One hundred and seventy miles north of the Valley of the Kings, Meredith is exploring
11:20the ruins of the ancient city of Amarna to find out more about the mysterious god, the
11:26Aten, and the role it played in Tutankhamun's early life.
11:32This is the best place to find out about the Aten.
11:36It was here that Tutankhamun was born and raised, back when he was known as Tutank Aten.
11:42The city of Amarna was built from scratch by Tutankhamun's father, Pharaoh Akhenaten.
11:49He intended it to be the new capital of Egypt.
11:55Oh, this is so beautiful.
12:00Meredith examines an impressive inscribed boundary marker, known as a stela.
12:05It is one of sixteen that delineates the ancient city limits.
12:10This is a lovely stela, and at the top there's a sun-disk Aten, and it's divergent rays are
12:16coming out like arms, and they're shining on the king and his family.
12:21This stela reveals a lot about the Aten and its role during the reign of Akhenaten.
12:27This text says that the Aten is his divine father.
12:31It shows that the Aten is the only god that Akhenaten is worshipping, and it makes it
12:36clear that his wish is for all of Egypt to follow this one god.
12:41This is a remarkable text.
12:43It's a huge departure from thousands of years of Egyptian history.
12:51Ancient Egyptians took religion very seriously.
12:55Many houses had their own shrine for everyday worship.
13:01When Akhenaten came to power, ancient Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of more than 2,000 gods.
13:09But a few years into his reign, the Pharaoh banished all the gods except one, the sun-god
13:15Aten, creating one of the world's first monotheistic religions.
13:23For many Egyptians, this would have been heresy, but they had no choice but to follow their
13:28Pharaoh's new god.
13:34It's hard to overstate how huge of a change this was for ancient Egyptians.
13:39The gods were in every single part of their life, so if their baby was sick, they prayed
13:44to the gods.
13:46If they were worried about the harvest, they prayed to the gods.
13:50So what Akhenaten did was tell the ancient Egyptians, you can't practice your religion
13:54anymore the way you want to.
13:56And that must have been very hard.
13:59The consequences of these unpopular changes had far-reaching implications for the entire
14:04country.
14:07Akhenaten's reforms were not just a radical religious change, they were huge political
14:11and economic power grabs.
14:14The priesthoods and the temples held huge amounts of the country's resources and wealth.
14:20And by closing them and firing everyone that worked for them, he fundamentally changed
14:26the political and economic structure of the entire country.
14:30Akhenaten's changes even extended to how the Pharaoh was depicted in reliefs.
14:39He and his family appear with slim torsos, wide hips, and long spindly arms, breaking
14:45with long-standing traditions.
14:50The young Tutankhamun, born Tutankhaten, grew up in this radically different world, surrounded
14:57by the cult of Aten.
15:00Tutankhamun would have grown up indoctrinated in his father's religion, and his entire
15:05life was mapped out for him.
15:07He would have ruled from here, in Amarna, and then been buried here.
15:11But that obviously didn't happen.
15:14Next, Meredith wants to explore Akhenaten's tomb, to find out why Tutankhamun later abandoned
15:22his father's new capital and its heretical religion.
15:29On the west bank of the Nile, at Draa Abu el-Nagha, Bahar is inspecting an object that
15:38he hopes dates from the era of Tutankhamun.
15:42Look at the colors.
15:43It's still, until now, in good condition.
15:45It's part from a small statue, which we call it Ushabti.
15:49That would be a big one, so that's the fiend.
15:53Ushabti figures are typically placed in the burial chamber of a tomb, as part of the deceased's
15:58funerary goods.
16:00This is a beautiful one, and this is a beautiful piece.
16:03And from the style, we can date that to the New Kingdom period.
16:11Foundations of a courtyard and an Ushabti statue dating from the New Kingdom are encouraging
16:17finds.
16:19If they discover a tomb from that era, it could offer valuable insight into the area's
16:23religious customs during the time of Tutankhamun.
16:28We're still working on that courtyard.
16:33Bahar is hoping the courtyard leads to the entrance of a tomb.
16:39It's a big piece of wood.
16:45I think this is a small box which had been used like a coffin.
16:49It's another one, yeah?
16:55So this is not just one coffin, I think that's more than one.
17:01This one is smaller.
17:02It's smaller?
17:03Yeah.
17:04I think from the size of those coffins, they were for just small children.
17:09We can say that between one and three years at least.
17:14It's something different.
17:15This is the first time that I see something like that in our size.
17:21The team searches for any grave goods around the coffins.
17:26Oh, wow, that's an ancient one.
17:30Be careful, Ahmed, be careful.
17:38At Hermopolis Magna, Ann-Katrin and Bassem are investigating the promising limestone
17:46blocks.
17:48We might find here now the foundation trench of the outer wall of the temple.
17:56They're searching for more information about Akhenaten's religious regime during Tutankhamun's
18:02early life.
18:03Here it's really where we can expose them and then we start slowly removing the structural
18:09support and then we take out the stones.
18:13After chipping away the surrounding mud, it's clear that these aren't ordinary building
18:19blocks.
18:20It's very likely that this is a talatap block.
18:24In this part of the temple, we don't find talatap blocks very often.
18:29It's a rather rare find.
18:36Talatap blocks are small sandstone bricks designed to a standardized size that first
18:42appeared during the reign of Akhenaten.
18:46Smaller than the traditional limestone blocks used to build temples and pyramids, they were
18:51light enough for one man to carry, making construction faster and more efficient.
18:57Akhenaten managed to quickly build his new capital of Amarna thanks to this revolutionary
19:03block design.
19:06We know that these blocks are from the time of Akhenaten simply based on the dimension.
19:11This dimension was only used in his period, not before and not afterwards.
19:21The discovery of talatap blocks is a crucial find.
19:26It shows that parts of the temple were built using this Amarna period stonework.
19:32The team now needs to remove the blocks from the trench to properly inspect them for any
19:36signs of decoration.
19:39The moment I see decoration, I'm happy because when I find something like a representation
19:44of the king or even God or some scenes, this would be really exciting.
19:51The team ties the talatap block together with string to prevent it from falling apart when
19:56they move it.
19:58They are going to lift it now, and you have to imagine it's not super easy because this
20:02block is about 70 kilos.
20:06Are you ready?
20:08Finally, everything is set.
20:11Bassem gives the go-ahead to lift out the block.
20:28The team rotates the block to inspect what's underneath.
20:34Oh, this is a nice find.
20:42At the Draa Abu al-Naga necropolis, Bahar and his team are inspecting the intriguing
20:52object they found.
20:55This is a bag.
20:57You can see the handle.
20:59You can see the bag inside.
21:01When he died, his parents actually took his bag and put it next to his coffin because
21:05he was a child.
21:07He loved to have his bag.
21:09He loved to have his bag with him in his second life.
21:13The ancient Egyptians believed that this object was a symbol of a god.
21:20This child wasn't old enough to own elaborate statues or golden treasure.
21:26Instead, they were buried with their most prized possession, a humble bag made from
21:31reeds.
21:33It's so beautiful.
21:35That's such an amazing excavation when you found something like that.
21:39In total, the team uncovers three wooden coffins and two children's bags.
21:47The coffins are not in a good condition, so we have to move them safely from here to
21:53protect them.
21:57The Draa Abu al-Naga necropolis is one of the oldest in the world.
22:03The team transports the coffins and bags to the storage magazine to preserve them.
22:11Now they can get back to searching for the Tutankhamun-era tomb.
22:19I can say we have a koon, a funerary koon.
22:23It's normally in front of the tomb.
22:26Ah, that's more than one.
22:28That's a good sign that we are very close to the entrance of the tomb.
22:37In Amarna, Meredith has come to investigate the tomb of Tutankhamun's father,
22:44the heretic king Akhenaten.
22:47She wants to find out more about the history of the tomb.
22:52This is the royal wadi.
22:54It's where Akhenaten built several royal tombs.
22:57And this is where Tutankhamun would have been buried.
23:02Akhenaten decreed that the city of Amarna would be the final resting place for himself
23:08and his dynasty.
23:11This was to be his new Valley of the Kings.
23:14Oh, wow.
23:17The walls of Akhenaten's burial chamber have been badly damaged by floodwater
23:22and little remains of their original decoration.
23:26Meredith searches for any evidence of the pharaoh's heretical religion.
23:32She finds the tomb of Tutankhamun.
23:36The tomb of Akhenaten.
23:39Meredith searches for any evidence of the pharaoh's heretical religion, Atenism.
23:45This is the sun disk.
23:47And it shows that this tomb belonged to Akhenaten.
23:50For him, the Aten was everything.
23:52His tomb must have been covered with Aten sun disks everywhere.
23:59But very few inscriptions now remain inside the tomb.
24:04And in several of them, the names of those depicted have been hacked out,
24:09making them illegible.
24:13At the time of his death, Akhenaten was still a true believer in his new religion.
24:20But Atenism was wildly unpopular with the ancient Egyptians.
24:25It disrupted the economy, shattered families' religious beliefs,
24:30and left the former temples and their priests in disarray.
24:35Once Tutankhamun took the throne, everything changed.
24:40This is the restoration stela.
24:42It was found in Karnak Temple,
24:44where Tutankhamun would have placed it prominently for everyone to see.
24:49And this is an important document.
24:53The stela records the ruinous state of the former temples,
24:57and that Tutankhamun restored them so the old gods would return.
25:04This stela, it makes it very clear that Tutankhamun had completely rejected the Aten
25:09and the religious revolution.
25:11It shows that he wanted to put Egypt back to the way it was,
25:16and forget the entire Akhenaten, Aten, and the Amarna episode.
25:22In the wake of Tutankhamun's great declaration,
25:26workers tore down temples and sacred sites dedicated to the Aten.
25:34All mention of the heretic Akhenaten was erased,
25:38his statues and paintings destroyed.
25:43Tutankhamun even abandoned his father's new city, Amarna,
25:48leaving it to crumble into the desert.
25:52Tutankhamun would have been a young boy when his father died,
25:57so his earliest memories would have been the cult of Aten.
26:01And despite his father being a true believer,
26:03when he ascended the throne, Tutankhamun and his advisors, probably,
26:08decided that the stability of the country was more important
26:12than the religious revolutions of his father, Akhenaten.
26:16The once powerful priests, who had lost their jobs
26:19when Akhenaten banished the old gods,
26:22may have pressed the young Tutankhamun to reinstate the old ways
26:26and hand back power to the priesthood.
26:29But Akhenaten had spent a lifetime establishing his monotheistic religion.
26:35To find out how the boy king restored the old gods,
26:40Meredith wants to explore one of ancient Egypt's greatest mysteries.
26:46The temples.
26:51At the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna,
26:55Anne Katrin inspects the Tutankhamun-era Talatat block from the trench.
27:01Wow, we have here a cartouche and even a fragment or residue of paint.
27:08So here is some blue paint.
27:10The team wants to investigate what information is inscribed on the block
27:15and work out how it ended up here, in Hermopolis Magna,
27:19ten miles from Akhenaten's Amarna city.
27:23So here I can see the outline of one cartouche
27:28and here is the outline, seems like a second one.
27:33A cartouche is a hieroglyph that represents the name of a pharaoh.
27:38It's a significant discovery for the team.
27:42We haven't discovered such a block in the temple before,
27:45so this is something exciting.
27:48We have here evidence of a secondary carving.
27:53This cartouche is not the cartouche of any Amarna king, but Merem Tagh.
28:00So yeah, on this Amarna period block is now a cartouche of a much later king.
28:08This block shows that King Merem Tagh, who came to power decades after Akhenaten,
28:14took Talatat blocks from Amarna and used them to build part of this temple.
28:20He made this block his own by putting his own name on Akhenaten's building material.
28:29This is really an exciting finding and this helps us a lot to understand more
28:35about how the kings of the 19th dynasty dealt with Akhenaten's heritage.
28:43Next, the team wants to study the blocks,
28:47to understand how and why these later kings used Akhenaten's Talatat blocks here.
28:53Now we are going to transport them to the magazine.
28:57In Luxor, Meredith has come to the ancient temple complex of Karnak.
29:05Some of the monolithic structures here predate Tutankhamun's reign by centuries.
29:12I've been here so many times, but every time I come back,
29:16I'm blown away by the sheer scale of this place.
29:19It's enormous.
29:21Before Akhenaten, Karnak was the main center of worship
29:25for some of ancient Egypt's most important gods, including Amun.
29:32Meredith wants to explore how Tutankhamun, having turned his back on Atenism,
29:38restored the old gods to Karnak and the rest of Egypt.
29:43She's going to visit the temple complex of Karnak.
29:47Tutankhamun would have come here to Luxor in Karnak Temple after he abandoned Amarna.
29:52It was here in Luxor that he changed his name from Tutank-Aten to Tutank-Amun.
30:00Amun, the creator god, was one of Egypt's most popular deities,
30:05believed to have saved Egypt from foreign invaders.
30:10Amun was king of Karnak.
30:13Tutankhamun wanted to honor the most important god,
30:16and by putting the god's name back into his own name,
30:19he made a personal connection with that god.
30:23After reaffirming his commitment to the old ways,
30:26the young pharaoh decided to return to Egypt.
30:30He went to Karnak Temple in Karnak Temple,
30:33where he met Tutankhamun's son, Amun.
30:37Tutankhamun's son, Amun, was born in Karnak Temple.
30:42The young pharaoh needed to show the rest of Egypt that his father's legacy was no more.
30:51Tutankhamun began by making his mark on Karnak.
30:56Outside the complex, he started work on a glorious processional avenue.
31:03He took statues of sphinxes that bore Akhenaten's image,
31:08and replaced their heads with those of rams, representing Amun.
31:14Hundreds of sphinxes lined Tutankhamun's avenue,
31:18which stretched nearly 1,000 feet between the temples of Amun and Mut.
31:31Meredith heads to the south of Karnak Temple
31:34to inspect the monumental avenue of sphinxes herself.
31:39Oh, this is fantastic. This is a cryosphinx.
31:42It's later than Tutankhamun, but it shows what his sphinx would have looked like.
31:47This has the head of the ram and the body of a lion.
31:50And this is a protective god associated with Amun.
31:55Tutankhamun's cryosphinx would have had a statue of the boy king between the lion's paws.
32:02A sign Amun was protecting the pharaoh.
32:06The message is very clear from Tutankhamun.
32:09The god Amun is back, the old gods are here to stay,
32:13and the Aten is no longer the main god of Egypt.
32:17Tutankhamun had to completely rebuild ancient Egypt's religion.
32:23The boy king reestablished Karnak and its priests' religious statues
32:28in an attempt to restore his honor among the population.
32:32It was a complete religious counter-revolution.
32:36But the young pharaoh ran out of time.
32:40Despite Tutankhamun's efforts to restore the old gods of Egypt and undo what his father did,
32:46he died when he was only a teenager and couldn't achieve everything he set out to do.
32:52Although Tutankhamun died young, the religious reforms he had begun swept across Egypt.
33:00The priests regained power, state resources were diverted away from Amarna,
33:06and the old gods returned to sacred temples like Karnak.
33:17At Draa Abu el-Nagr
33:24We are very close to the entrance of the tomb.
33:27Bahar is unearthing a series of funerary cones.
33:32Made of clay, stamped with the tomb owner's name, they typically mark the entrance to a tomb.
33:39Families, when they visited the tombs, they left those cones in front of the tomb or above the tomb itself.
33:49He hoped the tomb could provide clues to the area's religious customs during the era of Tutankhamun.
33:57I can see that the wall has been cut, so I can see it's a hole. This is the hole of the tomb.
34:04We just clean it layer by layer.
34:09The team races to clear sand and debris from the tomb entrance.
34:17Eventually, the opening is big enough for Bahar to squeeze inside.
34:24I think we are ready to go in.
34:27DRAA ABU EL-NAGR
34:33At the Draa Abu el-Nagr necropolis,
34:38Bahar is investigating the newly discovered tomb for the first time.
34:49When I discover something new, it's such a beautiful feeling.
34:53You are the first one who enters the tomb.
34:57You are the first one who touches the mummy, the vessels, the statues. It's an amazing feeling.
35:04It's not a small tomb. I can see it's a big hole and another room, and we have a room here too.
35:19Some of the skulls, wow, the linen around it.
35:27He examines details in the tomb to try to figure out the era it was constructed.
35:34The walls are so rough. That was the style of the Middle Kingdom period tombs.
35:40The people who were buried here, the nobles who lived during the Middle Kingdom period.
35:45The style of the tomb and the characteristic rough walls means Bahar now thinks the tomb was built 500 years before the reign of Tutankhamun.
35:57It's a setback for the team.
36:00But the date does offer a clue to how this tomb would have been used and why it is here.
36:07It was during this time that a major religious festival in honor of Amun, the god Tutankhamun restored, was founded nearby.
36:20The festival of the valley was a joyous celebration of the dead, where crowds gathered at Karnak every year in May.
36:29A statue of Amun was carried on a ceremonial boat across the Nile, from east to west, symbolizing the journey to the land of the dead.
36:41Worshippers piled masses of flowers onto the statue to imbue them with the god's essence.
36:51Families then took these flowers to the tombs of their loved ones.
36:56Feasting and drinking all through the night.
37:02Tombs in Drauparnagar were very important because they are on the way of the procession of the festival of the valley.
37:11So the relatives of the dead people, they stopped first here.
37:18The festival of the valley was celebrated right up to the time of Amun.
37:23But he probably banned the festival, as he would have considered the occasion heresy.
37:30It's a vivid example of how Akhenaten's revolution disrupted ordinary lives as well as religious practices.
37:39It would have torn apart the bond between families and their deceased loved ones.
37:45When Tutankhamun came to power, restoring the old gods opened the way for his grateful people to celebrate these popular religious events once more.
37:56The festival of the valley returned it back and the families came again to the West Bank and they visited their relatives' tombs.
38:06At Hermopolis Magna, Bassem comes to the team's magazine, where all the Talatat blocks, unearthed from decades of past excavations, are stored.
38:18He has a hugely ambitious plan.
38:21He wants to work out how all the fragmentary images on the Talatat blocks will be used for the festival.
38:29There are thousands of blocks of the Talatat blocks that came originally from Amarna.
38:36These Talatat blocks once formed elaborately decorated walls of palaces, temples and monuments in Akhenaten's city of Amarna.
38:47But following Tutankhamun's plan, the Talatat blocks will be used for the festival.
38:52But following Tutankhamun's restoration of the old gods and the dismantling of Amarna, the stonework was reused.
39:00The scenes originally inscribed on the walls were lost.
39:05It's a big mystery. No one knows what was the original scenes that were composing the main stories on this wall.
39:15Bassem also has a plan.
39:18Bassem hopes the scenes will reveal more about Akhenaten and the religion Tutankhamun so firmly rejected.
39:36But with around 3,000 Talatat blocks discovered to date, it's like piecing together the world's largest 3D jigsaw puzzle.
39:46Bassem's first step is to digitally record every Talatat block unearthed at the site.
39:53What I'm going to do now is ask one of my team to do a proper professional photograph for this Talatat block
40:01so we get an image that could be calibrated to the software.
40:06The team photographs each Talatat block several times using different lighting setups to ensure they capture the tiniest of details.
40:16Bassem has a hunch this block, and one other, belong to a typical Amarna period royal boat scene.
40:24So he uses a similar scene already pieced together from a different Amarna site.
40:29Using the software and the images that Mohab took, we've managed to identify the exact location of these two blocks
40:39that relates to part of the royal boats.
40:43It's a complete boat with these long beams and signature of the royal boats.
40:51It's a great result for the team.
40:54Using this innovative process, they have managed to identify the location of two pieces from this ancient wall relief puzzle.
41:03But with thousands of blocks still to document, and more being unearthed each season, it's a hugely ambitious project.
41:12This is one small part of the story of this huge jigsaw puzzle game that we are trying to solve.
41:20Hopefully, by this initiative, we would be able to compose more and more of these Talatat blocks
41:27so that we would be able, in the future, to display them in a public exhibition.
41:34The era of Akhenaten, and his religious revolution, remains one of the most mysterious periods of Egyptian history.
41:43It seems that every kind of evidence that proves the existence of the Talatat blocks
41:50has to do with the fact that the Talatat blocks were used by the Amarna people.
41:55But at sites like Homopolis Magna, archaeologists are slowly piecing the story back together, one block at a time.
42:03This is one of the most mysterious periods of Egyptian history.
42:08It seems that every kind of evidence that proves the existence of the Talatat blocks
42:15has to do with the fact that the Talatat blocks were used by the Amarna people.
42:21Today, archaeologists across Egypt are uncovering more about Tutankhamun's religious counter-revolution.
42:29Today, archaeologists across Egypt are uncovering more about Tutankhamun's religious counter-revolution.
42:38How he, and later pharaohs, tore down buildings and statues to abolish his father's heretical religion.
42:47And how the restoration of the old gods would have delighted his people,
42:53and restored peace and stability to ancient Egypt.