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Speaker 1: Imagine for just a moment that you are standing right

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at the absolute center of the Giza Plateau. The midday

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sun is just beating down, turning all that sand into

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this blinding mirror.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the heat there is, it's intense.

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Speaker 1: Right, and the air is just thick with dust. You've

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got the chaotic sounds of Cairo humming in the background,

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and you tilt your head all the way back looking

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up at two point three million blocks of solid stone

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stretching nearly five hundred feet into the sky.

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Speaker 2: It's staggering. I mean, it really puts human scale into perspective.

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Speaker 1: It really does. And for centuries humanity has looked at

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the Great Pyramid and just thought of it as a

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solved puzzle, a marvel obviously, but a known quantity.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we figured, well, we measured the outside with lasers,

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we mapped the interior chambers, put it in the textbooks,

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and basically just check the box exactly.

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Speaker 1: We thought we had the blueprint of antiquity all figured out.

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But what if the very stones you're looking at are

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hiding massive secrets right.

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Speaker 2: Now, like literally right now?

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Speaker 1: Yes, what if behind the walls of these monuments we

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thought we knew inside and out there are colossal voids,

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secret doors with tiny copper handles, and deliberately erased identities

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that we are only just now discovering.

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Speaker 2: And we're finding them using technology that borders on science fiction.

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Speaker 1: Honestly, welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm so glad you're joining us.

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We are taking all those centuries of assumptions, throwing them

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completely out the window, and doing a deep dive into

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the source material.

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Speaker 2: We're looking at the ancient world through the lens of

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modern particle physics, forensic biology, and cutting edge archaeology.

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Speaker 1: You're probably here because you, like us, absolutely love that

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aha moment when a piece of history just flips completely

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upside down. Today's thread is pulling together a wild mix

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of historical accounts and modern science to.

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Speaker 2: Explore really the most tantalizing ancient Egyptian mysteries that are

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still completely unsolved today.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because we aren't just talking about

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a few missing artifacts or misplaced pottery shards here.

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Speaker 2: No, not at all. The stakes are incredibly high when

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we look at these sources. We aren't just looking at

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old rocks, right, We are looking at a civilization that

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possessed astonishing engineering capabilities, incredibly complex spiritual mythologies, and really

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tense political traumas.

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Speaker 1: And so much of that reality has either been lost

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to time or deliberately erased by their own people.

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Speaker 2: Exactly when we study ancient Egypt, we are essentially acting

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as detectives at a crime scene where the evidence is

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four and a half millennia.

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Speaker 1: Old and all the witnesses have been dead for thousands

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of years. It really feels like having what you think

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is a fully completed jigsaw puzzle sitting on your dining

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room table.

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Speaker 2: Oh I like that analogy.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you're admiring it. You think you see the whole picture.

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But then you accidentally bump the table, a few pieces

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slide away, and you realize that half the pieces actually

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belong to an entirely different puzzle hidden underneath.

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Speaker 2: And suddenly you have no idea what the real picture

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is supposed to look like. So let's start with the macro.

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Speaker 1: The biggest puzzle piece on the board, the Great Pyramid

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of Gize itself.

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Speaker 2: Right, completed roughly around twenty five sixty BCE during the

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reign of the Faro Cufu, and for nearly four thousand

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years it was the tallest artificial structure on the planet.

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Speaker 1: Which is just wild to think about.

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Speaker 2: It is, but its sheer size, you know, the millions

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of tons of stone, That isn't actually the most perplexing

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mystery to structural engineers. The real mystery is its alignment.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, the Great Pyramid is aligned to true north, southeast,

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and west with an accuracy that is frankly terrifying. We're

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talking about a monugendive error of less than three sixtieths

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of a single degree.

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Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to comprehend.

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Speaker 1: If you ask me to park my car perfectly straight

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in my own driveway, I'm going to have a wider

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margin of error than they did building a four hundred

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and eighty foot tall artificial mountain forty five hundred years ago.

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Speaker 2: Right without a modern compass or laser leveling or satellite GPS.

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Speaker 1: How is that even possible?

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Speaker 2: Well, it's a testament to an observational brilliance that we

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often fail to credit to ancient peoples. There are several theories,

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mostly revolving around the observation of the stars that circle

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the North Pole, but the sources highlight a particularly compelling

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theory proposed back in the year two thousand by a

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British egyptologist named Kate Spence. She looked at the problem

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not as an architectural one, but as an astronomical one.

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Speaker 1: Oh interesting, so looking up instead of.

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Speaker 2: Down exactly, she suggested that the ancient builders didn't just

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look for a single north star because the sky didn't

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look the same then as it does now. Instead, they

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use two specific stars that aligned vertically in the night

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sky around the year twenty five hundred BCE.

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Speaker 1: Right, those stars are Kochab and Mizar.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you are standing in the Agician desert

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in twenty five hundred BCE and you trace an imaginary

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clumb line, like a straight vertical line between Koshab and

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Mizar down to the horizon, that line would point almost

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exactly to true north.

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Speaker 1: Wow. So the pharaohs architects could eventually just plant a

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sighting stick in the sand, wait for that exact cosmic

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alignment to happen in the night sky, and draw a

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perfectly straight line on the desert floor.

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Speaker 2: Exactly to establish the foundational grid for the entire pyramid.

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It's elegant in its simplicity.

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Speaker 1: I absolutely love that idea, but it requires you to

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understand something fundamental about how the Earth moves like it's

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tied to a very specific moment in time.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: It is because if you go out to the Giza

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plateau tonight and look up at Kochab and bizarre, they

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aren't going to help you build a perfectly aligned pyramid.

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The cosmic clock has shifted.

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Speaker 2: That brings us to the mechanics of axial procession. To

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understand why Spence this theory is so powerful, we really

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have to understand how our planet moves.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: Imagine a spinning top. When a top is spinning rapidly,

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it stands perfectly straight, but as it begins to lose momentum,

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the top of the stem starts to trace a slow,

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wide circle in the air. It wobbles, It wabbles, and

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the Earth does the exact same thing. As it spins

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on its axis. The gravitational pull of the Sun and

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the Moon causes it to wobble very very slowly.

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Speaker 1: And it takes what about twenty six thousand years to

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complete one wobble roughly, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Which means the direction our north pole points into space

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is constantly slowly sweeping across the stars in a giant circle.

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Speaker 1: So, because of this axial procession, the stars appeared to

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drift very slowly across the sky over millennia. The north

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star we use today Polaris, wasn't the north star when

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Kufu was building his pyramid.

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Speaker 2: No, back then, the closest pole star was Thuben. So

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the alignment of Koshab and Mizar doesn't point to true

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north anymore. But here is where Kate Spence's theory becomes brilliant. Okay,

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it not only explains the mechanism of how they might

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have aligned the pyramid, but it accounts for the error.

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The slight fractional error in the pyramid's alignment actually correlates

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perfectly with the very slight drift of those two stars

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around the exact decade Kufu.

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Speaker 1: Was building it. That is just mind blowing. The tiny

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aerds is a chronological fingerprint.

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Speaker 2: It really is.

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Speaker 1: They literally built a monument perfectly sank to a sky

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that doesn't even exist anymore. They anchored this massive physical

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weight to a fleeting moment in the cosmos.

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Speaker 2: It's poetry in stone, it is.

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Speaker 1: But I have to lay Devil's advocate here. It's brilliant

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to use the stars as a compass. It solves the

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geometry and the surveying, but knowing the precise angle to

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lay a fifteen ton block of solid granite doesn't explain

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how you actually get it there. You can have the

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most perfect blueprints in the world, drawn by the greatest astronomers.

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Speaker 2: But if you don't have cranes.

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Speaker 1: Right, if you don't have hydraulics or combustion engines or

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even the wheel, how are you moving two point three

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million of these blocks?

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Speaker 2: That logistics puzzle has been the eternal question how do

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you move mountains of stone without industrial machinery? But the

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sources bring up an incredible discovery from twenty thirteen that

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shed immense light on the logistics, if not the actual

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lifting mechanism itself.

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Speaker 1: Oh the Diary of Marror.

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Speaker 2: Yes, near the coast of the Red Sea, at a

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site called Waddy al Jarf, archaeologists uncovered a cache of

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ancient papyrus documents buried in these artificial caves.

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Speaker 1: This is honestly one of my favorite historical discoveries of

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the entire century. We always hope to find like a

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Golden mask or a magical text, but finding the Diary

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of Mirror is like digging in the sand. And finding

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a forty five hundred year old corporate spreadsheet. It sounds mundane,

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but it is utterly revolutionary.

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Speaker 2: It really is. Mirror was an official, essentially a middle

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manager or a maritime foreman, who was heavily involved in

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the supply chain for the construction of Kufu's Pyramid.

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Speaker 1: And his logbook just meticulously details his daily activities. He

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doesn't write about the gods or the cosmic alignment.

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Speaker 2: No, he writes about moving rocks. He details how his

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crew of workers transported the gleaming white Tura limestone, which

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was used for the pyramids smooth outer casing, from quarries

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across the Nile.

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Speaker 1: If you read the translations, it reads exactly like a

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modern shipping manifest. Inspector Mirror spent the day with his

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file loading stones sailed up the river, unloaded at Giza.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. He tracks his shipments, notes how many days the

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voyage took, and even records the rations given to his men.

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It describes a highly sophisticated state sponsored supply chain.

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Speaker 1: It's unbelievable.

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Speaker 2: They loaded these massive stones onto specially designed wooden boats.

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They navigated them down the Nile and through a complex

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series of artificial purpose built canals that acted as an

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aquatic highway, bringing the.

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Speaker 1: Stone right up to the base of the Giza plateau exactly.

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Speaker 2: They even use the annual flooding of the nile to

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their advantage, floating the stones closer to the site than

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would be possible during the dry season.

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Speaker 1: It just humanizes the whole endeavor so much. It wasn't magic,

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and it certainly wasn't Aliens. It was an incredibly sophisticated

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bureaucracy with thousands of workers, supply lines and maritime engineering.

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Speaker 2: Just massive coordination.

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Speaker 1: But I keep coming back to the physical reality of

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the stone. I mean, Marra writes about getting the stones

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to Giza by boat. He tracks the maritime shipping right,

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but he conveniently leaves out the par art where they

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take a stone the weight of three modern elephants out

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of the boat and list it hundreds of feet into

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the air.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the diary stops where the greatest mechanical mystery begins.

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We know they possess copper chisels, hemp rope, wooden sleds,

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and water to slick the sand to reduce friction.

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Speaker 1: Just really basic tools, very basic.

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Speaker 2: The prevailing archaeological consensus leans heavily toward the use of

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massive ramps made of mud, brick, limestone, ships, and rubble.

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But even the ramp theory has massive structural and logical issues.

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Speaker 1: Huge issues. I mean, if you try to build a

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straight ramp reaching the top of a four hundred and

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eighty foot pyramid with a gentle enough inclined actually drag

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a fifteen ton block up.

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Speaker 2: It, that ramp would have to be over a mile

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long exactly.

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Speaker 1: The ramp itself would require almost as much material and

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labor as the pyramid who was built to service. It

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doesn't make sense, which is.

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Speaker 2: Why architectural historians have proposed dozens of alternatives. Some suggest

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a spiral ramp that wrapped around the exterior of the

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pyramid as it grew. I've heard that one, and others

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like the French architect Jean Pierre Hudin, have proposed a

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fascinating theory of an internal ramp system, like a spiraling

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tunnel hidden just inside the outer edge of the stone,

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allowing workers to drag the blocks up from the inside.

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Speaker 1: I want you to just take a second and really

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imagine the logistical nightmare of this picture yourself trying to

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organize a workforce of thousands.

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Speaker 2: Of people without a single computer.

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Speaker 1: Right, you have to feed them, house them, coordinate them

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to stack two point three million multi ton blocks perfectly.

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No mechanized pulleys, no iron tools, just human muscle, sweat

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and organization.

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Speaker 2: And doing it all before the invention of the wheel.

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The ultimate lifting method remains an absolute, frustrating, glorious mystery.

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It forces us to recognize what human beings can accomplish

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with unified focus.

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Speaker 1: And generational medication. The sheer volume of stone used for

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Kufo's pyramid is staggering. It dominates the entire landscape in

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our modern imagination of ancient Egypt.

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Speaker 2: What if there was a structure that made the Great

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Pyramid look small.

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Speaker 1: A structure so vastly complex that it made Giza look

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like a simple geometric exercise, And what if we just

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lost it?

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Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, this brings

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us to the phenomena of missing megastructures, specifically, the legend.

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Speaker 1: Of the Labyrinth. Oh, this story is wild.

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Speaker 2: To understand this, we have to look at the accounts

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of early historians. Around four hundred and fifty BCE, the

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Greek historian Herodotus traveled to Egypt. Now, context is everything here, right.

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Speaker 1: Because by the time Herodutus visited Egypt, the Great Pyramid

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of Giza was already two thousand years old. He was

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a tourist looking at ancient history himself exactly.

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Speaker 2: But while he was deeply impressed by the pyramids, he

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described another structure near the pyramid of the pharaoh aminem

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Hat the Iid in the Fayum Oasis that left him

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completely awestruck.

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Speaker 1: He called it a labyrinth, and Herodidus was a chronicler

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known for occasionally exaggerating, but his description of this labyrinth

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is so specific and so wild that it demands attention.

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Speaker 2: It does. He claimed it had three thousand rooms.

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Speaker 1: Three thousand, yeah.

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Speaker 2: He wrote that half of them, fifteen hundred rooms were

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above ground, and the other fifteen hundred were entirely subterranean.

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Speaker 1: He described massive courtyards built of white marble, ceilings made

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of enormous single slabs of stone, and a layout so

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massive and complex that it was impossible to navigate without

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a local guide.

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Speaker 2: And it wasn't just Herodotus spinning a tall tail either.

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The Greek geographer Strabo also visited the site centuries later

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and confirmed it.

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Speaker 1: Existed, describing massive intersecting halls that dizzyingly confuse anyone who

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walked through them. So we have multiple independent eyewitness accounts

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from classical antiquity describing a megastructure that rivaled the pyramids.

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Speaker 2: It was considered one of the great wonders of the

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world by those who saw it. But today, if you

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go to the site at Hawara where it's supposedly stood,

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you see a ruined mud brick pyramid and a massive

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flat expanse of sand and scattered rubble.

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Speaker 1: The obvious question is, how does a civilization lose a

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building with three thousand rooms? Did it just vanish into

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the desert? Did a massive earthquake swallow it hole?

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Speaker 2: The answer is likely much more pragmatic, and it has

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to do with the ancient Egyptian practice of stone recycling.

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We look at these monuments as sacred heritage, but to

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the people living there thousands of years later, building materials

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were incredibly.

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Speaker 1: Precious right and labor intensive.

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Speaker 2: To quarry exactly. Subsequent generations of rulers, then the Romans,

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and eventually the builders of medieval Cairo looked at these ancient,

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abandoned monuments not as history to be preserved, but as

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incredibly convenient pre cut stone quarries.

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Speaker 1: So over millennia people simply dismantle the labyrinth block by block.

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Speaker 2: Yes, they carted the stone away to build new temples,

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Roman outposts, homes, and city walls. When archaeologists finally excavated

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the area in the late eighteen hundreds, like Flinders Petrie,

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they found the massive foundational.

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Speaker 1: Bed of sand and scattered stone chips, confirming something colossal

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stood there, but the superstructure was entirely gone. Is heartbreaking

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to think about. It is imagine taking a grand, majestic

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medieval cathedral like Notre Dame, carefully pulling down every single

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stone and using them to build a dozen completely mundane modern.

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Speaker 2: Houses or paving stones for a road. The grandeur is

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just dispersed into the mundane. You might be walking past

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a retaining while in Cairo today that was once part

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of the greatest labyrinth in the ancient world.

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Speaker 1: It is the ultimate architectural ghost. Yeah, but there's a

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tantalizing caveat to this story that keeps archaeologists awake at night.

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Speaker 2: Yes, there is. Remember, Heroddus specifically noted that half of

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the labyrinth fifteen hundred rooms were underground.

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Speaker 1: He claimed they contained the tombs of the kings who

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built the labyrinth, and the labyrinthine tombs of the sacred crocodiles.

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Speaker 2: Representing the god Sobeck, who was worshiped in that region. Now,

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while the above ground structure was easily visible and therefore

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easily quarried away, excavating a subterranean complex of that immense

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size just to steal the stone would have been.

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Speaker 1: Incredibly difficult, dangerous, and time consuming. So if the quarrying

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stopped at.

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Speaker 2: The ground level, then the colossal underground portion of the

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Labyrinth could theoretically still be impact Wow, it would be

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deeply buried beneath the sands and the very high corrosive

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water table of the Fayoum region. Some researchers fiercely speculate

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that this hidden world is just waiting to be unearthed.

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Speaker 1: We may still have the greatest, most complex Egyptian monument

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sitting entirely unseen beneath our feet, protected by the groundwater

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and the sand. That gives me absolute chills.

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Speaker 2: It's an amazing thought.

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Speaker 1: We are looking for lost rooms beneath the sand, hoping

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to find a buried city. But what is so incredible

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about modern archaeology is that perhaps the most shocking loss

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rooms aren't under the sand at all.

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Speaker 2: No, they're hiding right above our.

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Speaker 1: Heads, suspended in the stone, inside the very monuments we

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thought we knew inside and out, which brings us out

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of the macro mysteries of missing buildings and right into

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the micro mysteries of particle physics.

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Speaker 2: We are returning to the great Pyramid of Gear. For centuries, explorers,

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grave robbers, and eventually legitimate archaeologists have mapped the interior.

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Speaker 1: We know about the King's Chamber with its anti sarcophagus,

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the Queen's chamber below it, the chaotic subterranean chamber.

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Speaker 2: And the magnificent sloping, corbal vaulted hallway known as the

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Grand Gallery. By the twentieth century, the academic consensus was

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that we had found all the major spaces. The pyramid

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was considered structurally mapped and complete.

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Speaker 1: But then the year twenty seventeen happens enter the Scan

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Pyramids project, and they didn't bring pickaxes or ground penetrating

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radar or dynamite like the early explorers who literally blasted

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their way in.

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Speaker 2: They brought cutting edge particle physics. They utilized a revolutionary

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technique called muontomography, And to truly understand how profound this is,

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we have to look at the science of what a

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muon actually is.

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Speaker 1: Okay, lay it on us.

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Speaker 2: Muons are elemental particles similar to electrons, but much heavier.

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They are created naturally and constantly when high energy cosmic

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rays from deep space, often from supernovas or distant galaxies,

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crash into the Earth's upper atmosphere. They collide with atoms

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of gas, and.

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Speaker 1: This collision creates a shower of secondary particles right.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, including muons, which rain down on the surface of

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the Earth constantly at near the speed of light. They

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pass through our bodies, through buildings, through almost everything every

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single second of every.

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Speaker 1: Day, but they interact differently with solid matter versus empty space.

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I always think of it like standing in a greenhouse

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with a glass roof during a massive hailstorm.

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Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to picture it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, If the hail is just falling on the glass,

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you see even spread of impacts. But if there's a

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thick tree branch spind it above the glass roof, the

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hail hits the branch and you see a blank spot

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on the glass below. Where no hail hits.

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Speaker 2: That is a brilliant analogy. Meuon tomography works on a

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similar principle, but in reverse. It works basically like a

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cosmic X ray. Muons can penetrate solid rock, but as

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they travel through incredibly dense material like limestone, they gradually

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lose energy and get absorbed.

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Speaker 1: Or however, if they passed through empty space like a

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hidden room, they don't lose that energy, then they continue

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straight through.

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Speaker 2: Right. So the Scan Pyramids team placed highly sensitive muon detectors,

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which look a bit like specialized photographic plates, inside the

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known chambers of the Great Pyramid, and then they waited.

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Speaker 1: They simply tracked the particles raining down from the sky

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over several months, and as the data accumulated, a picture

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began to emerge from the cosmic noise.

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Speaker 2: Where there was solid rock above the detectors, fewer muons

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hit the plates, but in one specific localized area there's

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a massive spike in muon strikes.

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Speaker 1: And that spike meant the cosmic rays were flying unimpeded

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through an empty void, a void that nobody in modern

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history knew existed.

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Speaker 2: The data revealed a massive empty space sitting directly above

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the Grand Gallery. And we aren't talking about a little

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crack in the rock or a collapsed stone.

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Speaker 1: No, the mathematical modeling shows this void is at least

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thirty meters long that's roughly one hundred feet.

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Speaker 2: It is almost the exact same size and shape as

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the magnificent Grand Gallery below it. It is the first

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major hidden structure found inside the Great Pyramid since the

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eighteen hundreds, and.

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Speaker 1: They found it without moving a single grain of sand.

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It is a stunning triumph of non invasive archaeology. We

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use the debris of dying stars to look inside a

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forty five hundred year old monument.

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Speaker 2: But it also presents a massive, agonizing scientific frustration because

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we know exactly where this void is, we know its

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rough dimensions, but we have absolutely no idea what is

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inside it.

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Speaker 1: It doesn't appear to connect to any known hallway or passageway.

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The data shows it is completely sealed off by massive

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blocks of stone on all sides exactly.

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Speaker 2: And nobody wants to be the person who takes a

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giant industrial drill to the last remaining wonder of the

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ancient world just to peek inside.

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Speaker 1: Definitely not.

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Speaker 2: So we are in this agonizing waiting period. What is it?

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Is it a hidden, untouched burial chamber containing the true

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horde of Cufu. Is it a storage room for sacred artifacts, or.

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Speaker 1: As structural engineers argue, is it simply a large structural

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gap left intentionally by the builders to reduce the immense

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weight of the stone on the grand gallery below it.

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Speaker 2: We can see the ghost of the room through the

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mathematics of particle physics, but we cannot open the door.

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But as if that wasn't enough to digest, the same

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scientific team dropped another absolute bombshell in twenty twenty three.

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Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. They have plaied a

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similar highly localized Muon detection technique near the main original

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entrance of the Great Pyramid.

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Speaker 2: On the north face above the descending passage, there are

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these massive chevron shaped limestone blocks stacked in an inverted.

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Speaker 1: V and for a long time architects assumed they were

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just there for structural support to divert the immense weight

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of the pyramid away from the entrance below like an archway.

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Speaker 2: But the Muon detectors found another anomaly hiding right behind

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those chevrons. The detectors indicated a smaller void just behind

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those massive blocks.

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Speaker 1: And this time, because it was so close to the exterior,

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they were able to interact with it. They pushed tiny,

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flexible endoscopic cameras through the millimeter thin gaps between those

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chevron blocks.

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Speaker 2: And they didn't just find a rough cavity in the rubble.

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They found a beautifully finished, vaulted corridor.

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Speaker 1: It's about nine meters long, roughly thirty feet with a

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perfectly angled ceiling, just sitting there in the absolute dark.

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It hasn't seen the light of day since the Bronze Age.

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Speaker 2: And again, nobody is entirely sure why it was built. Sure,

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it could be a pressure relief chamber for the entrance,

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but an equally tantalizing idea is that this hidden corridor

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might be a blocked off path.

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Speaker 1: It could be a false lead, or it could be

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a tunnel leading deeper into the pyramid to places we

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haven't even conceived of yet.

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Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the complete paradigm shift it forces

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upon us. We have moved from a historical mindset of well,

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we have mapped the layout of the Great Pyramid to

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the thrilling realization that the Great Pyramid is actively hiding

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things from us.

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Speaker 1: The architecture is deliberately opaque, and this is the first

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time the internal architecture the Great Pyramid is deliberately stonewall.

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Speaker 2: No, it's not.

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Speaker 1: If we are talking about the pyramid actively stone walling us.

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We absolutely have to talk about the robots, right, because

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the saga of the ventilation shafts is like something out

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of a science fiction movie.

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Speaker 2: In the so called Queen's Chamber, which sits below the

474
00:23:14,200 --> 00:23:18,079
King's Chamber, there are two narrow shafts carved directly into

475
00:23:18,119 --> 00:23:21,599
the walls, angling upward into the solid body of the pyramid.

476
00:23:21,839 --> 00:23:25,559
Speaker 1: They are incredibly small, only about eight inches square, way

477
00:23:25,559 --> 00:23:28,079
too small for any human being to ever crawl.

478
00:23:27,799 --> 00:23:31,279
Speaker 2: Into right, And for decades the assumption in the archaeological

479
00:23:31,319 --> 00:23:34,440
community was purely pragmatic. They were just air vents for

480
00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:37,640
the workers who were carving the chamber to provide oxygen.

481
00:23:38,279 --> 00:23:41,839
Speaker 1: But then in the early nineteen nineties, specifically nineteen ninety three,

482
00:23:42,200 --> 00:23:45,880
an engineer named Rudolph Gauntenbrink decided to see exactly where

483
00:23:45,920 --> 00:23:49,519
these shafts went. He sent a tiny, custom built German

484
00:23:49,599 --> 00:23:53,240
robot equipped with tank treads and a camera named Upiat two,

485
00:23:53,599 --> 00:23:55,039
crawling up the southern shaft.

486
00:23:55,240 --> 00:23:57,880
Speaker 2: I remember the world watching the grainy footage as this

487
00:23:58,039 --> 00:24:02,920
little treaded robot slowly climb the steep eight inch tunnel.

488
00:24:02,720 --> 00:24:05,640
Speaker 1: Grinding its way up a forty degree incline through thousands

489
00:24:05,680 --> 00:24:08,119
of years of dust. Yeah, and after traveling about two

490
00:24:08,200 --> 00:24:10,279
hundred feet up into the dark heart of the pyramid,

491
00:24:10,680 --> 00:24:13,880
it didn't find the outside air. It suddenly stopped.

492
00:24:13,920 --> 00:24:16,400
Speaker 2: It didn't reach the exterior of the pyramid, as a

493
00:24:16,440 --> 00:24:21,079
functional ventilation shaft naturally should. Instead, the shaft was abruptly

494
00:24:21,119 --> 00:24:24,240
and deliberately blocked by a smooth limestone slab.

495
00:24:24,519 --> 00:24:27,279
Speaker 1: And here's the detail that absolutely sticks in my mind,

496
00:24:27,839 --> 00:24:29,680
the thing that I think about constantly when we talk

497
00:24:29,720 --> 00:24:33,519
about ancient engineering. On the front of this tiny stone block,

498
00:24:34,079 --> 00:24:36,240
sitting two hundred feet up a tunnel no human could

499
00:24:36,240 --> 00:24:40,519
ever possibly fit in, there were two little copper pins or.

500
00:24:40,440 --> 00:24:42,519
Speaker 2: Handles, Yes, the infamous door.

501
00:24:42,759 --> 00:24:45,880
Speaker 1: Why why would anyone put two copper handles on a

502
00:24:45,920 --> 00:24:48,960
tiny door that no human being could ever reach. If

503
00:24:49,039 --> 00:24:50,960
you are a builder and it's just a structural block

504
00:24:51,000 --> 00:24:53,000
meant to cap a shaft, you just use a block

505
00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:56,039
of scone exactly. Adding copper handles implies it was meant

506
00:24:56,039 --> 00:24:57,920
to be interacted with, or at the very least, it

507
00:24:57,960 --> 00:25:01,000
symbolically represents a door meant to be It is.

508
00:25:00,960 --> 00:25:04,359
Speaker 2: One of the most baffling poetic details in the entire

509
00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:08,440
structure of the pyramid, and it drove the archaeological world crazy.

510
00:25:08,960 --> 00:25:12,599
It prompted further highly anticipated exploration.

511
00:25:12,200 --> 00:25:14,000
Speaker 1: Because everyone wanted to know what was behind it.

512
00:25:14,160 --> 00:25:17,079
Speaker 2: Right years later, in two thousand and two, another robotic

513
00:25:17,119 --> 00:25:21,200
mission was organized broadcast live on television. They equipped a

514
00:25:21,240 --> 00:25:25,640
new robot with a tiny specialized drill. The robot crawled

515
00:25:25,680 --> 00:25:29,039
back up the shaft, meticulously drilled a small hole right

516
00:25:29,079 --> 00:25:32,400
through that limestone door, and pushed a fiber optic camera

517
00:25:32,519 --> 00:25:35,200
right through the hole to see what treasure or scroll

518
00:25:35,480 --> 00:25:37,799
or chamber lay beyond and what did they find.

519
00:25:38,480 --> 00:25:41,240
Speaker 1: The camera looked through the hole, the light illuminated the darkness,

520
00:25:41,480 --> 00:25:43,960
and right behind the first door with the copper handles

521
00:25:44,240 --> 00:25:47,480
was just another roughly hewn stone block sealing the way.

522
00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:50,680
Speaker 2: It's like a cosmic Russian nesting doll made of limestone.

523
00:25:50,799 --> 00:25:53,960
Speaker 1: And later another robot named Jedi went up the opposite shaft,

524
00:25:54,000 --> 00:25:57,039
the northern shaft, and found essentially the same thing, another

525
00:25:57,079 --> 00:25:59,839
door with copper pins you don't double seal and ate

526
00:25:59,839 --> 00:26:03,039
it shaft and meticulously installed copper handles on it just

527
00:26:03,079 --> 00:26:04,640
for weight distribution or ventilation.

528
00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:08,880
Speaker 2: No, this isn't structural engineering. This is deeply psychological, or

529
00:26:08,960 --> 00:26:13,119
rather spiritual architecture. That is the crux of the entire mystery.

530
00:26:13,799 --> 00:26:17,200
We often fall into the trap of projecting modern pragmatic

531
00:26:17,279 --> 00:26:21,039
engineering sensibilities onto ancient builders. We look for a physical

532
00:26:21,039 --> 00:26:25,400
function for every stone, But in the ancient Egyptian worldview,

533
00:26:25,720 --> 00:26:29,440
the spiritual and the physical were entirely intertwined.

534
00:26:29,480 --> 00:26:30,440
Speaker 1: They were inseparable.

535
00:26:30,759 --> 00:26:35,200
Speaker 2: Consider the shafts in the king's chamber above. Astronomical alignments

536
00:26:35,200 --> 00:26:37,839
suggest they point directly to the circumpolar stars and the

537
00:26:37,880 --> 00:26:41,599
constellation of Orion, which was associated with Osiris, the god

538
00:26:41,640 --> 00:26:42,440
of the afterlife.

539
00:26:42,480 --> 00:26:44,000
Speaker 1: So these weren't air vents at all.

540
00:26:44,160 --> 00:26:47,240
Speaker 2: Many Egyptologists believe these eight inch tunnels weren't air vents

541
00:26:47,240 --> 00:26:50,480
for the living. They were literal, physical pathways for the

542
00:26:50,519 --> 00:26:53,119
soul of the pharaoh. They were designed to guide the

543
00:26:53,200 --> 00:26:55,759
king's spirit out of the tomb and toward his eternal

544
00:26:55,799 --> 00:26:58,039
destiny among the imperishable stars.

545
00:26:58,279 --> 00:27:01,400
Speaker 1: So the door with the handles spiritual door. It's an

546
00:27:01,440 --> 00:27:04,319
obstacle or a gateway meant to be opened by the

547
00:27:04,359 --> 00:27:07,039
ethereal soul, not by a physical.

548
00:27:06,640 --> 00:27:10,519
Speaker 2: Hand precisely, and the fact that we, thousands of years

549
00:27:10,559 --> 00:27:14,319
later are sending little mechanized robots up there to drill

550
00:27:14,359 --> 00:27:17,799
holes in it represents a fascinating clash of civilization.

551
00:27:18,079 --> 00:27:22,319
Speaker 1: It really does. It's our modern scientific desire to physically

552
00:27:22,440 --> 00:27:26,920
conquer and categorize every space colliding with an ancient architecture

553
00:27:26,920 --> 00:27:29,079
that was built entirely for the incorporeal.

554
00:27:29,440 --> 00:27:32,480
Speaker 2: These shafts and doors weren't meant for the living to explore.

555
00:27:33,000 --> 00:27:36,519
They were vessels for the afterlife, which actually provides a

556
00:27:36,559 --> 00:27:40,119
perfect thematic transition to the immense physical vessels they built

557
00:27:40,119 --> 00:27:41,359
for the exact same purpose.

558
00:27:41,839 --> 00:27:43,920
Speaker 1: If we are talking about vessels for the afterlife, we

559
00:27:43,960 --> 00:27:46,440
have to talk about the journey of raw and Cufus

560
00:27:46,480 --> 00:27:49,119
solar boat, because while the pyramid itself is a mountain

561
00:27:49,119 --> 00:27:52,079
of stone, what they buried right next to it is

562
00:27:52,119 --> 00:27:54,440
a masterpiece of a completely different material.

563
00:27:54,920 --> 00:27:58,440
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty four, an Egyptian archaeologist named Kamal el

564
00:27:58,519 --> 00:28:01,599
Malock was directed to the clearing of sand and debris

565
00:28:01,680 --> 00:28:04,200
near the southern base of the Great pyramid. They were

566
00:28:04,279 --> 00:28:06,400
essentially just cleaning up the site.

567
00:28:06,039 --> 00:28:09,480
Speaker 1: But underneath massive enclosure wall he discovered a sealed pit

568
00:28:09,720 --> 00:28:11,319
carved directly into the bedrock.

569
00:28:11,640 --> 00:28:15,240
Speaker 2: The pit was covered by forty one enormous limestone blocks,

570
00:28:15,599 --> 00:28:19,519
each weighing around eighteen tons, sealed so perfectly with gypsum

571
00:28:19,519 --> 00:28:21,799
plaster that it was entirely air tight.

572
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:23,920
Speaker 1: And when they finally managed to lift one of the

573
00:28:23,960 --> 00:28:26,880
massive blocks and shine a light inside, the air that

574
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:30,920
rushed out still smell of ancient cedar. They didn't find

575
00:28:30,960 --> 00:28:32,000
a tomb or a mummy.

576
00:28:32,319 --> 00:28:35,000
Speaker 2: They found wood, but not just random planks of wood.

577
00:28:35,039 --> 00:28:38,519
They found an entire ship. But here's the incredible catch.

578
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:40,640
It was completely disassembled.

579
00:28:40,799 --> 00:28:44,480
Speaker 1: The builders had carefully and deliberately dismantled this massive vessel

580
00:28:44,759 --> 00:28:48,079
into one two hundred and twenty four individual pieces of

581
00:28:48,119 --> 00:28:51,279
beautiful imported lebonese cedar, and they had stacked them in

582
00:28:51,319 --> 00:28:54,720
this pit in thirteen neat layers with absolute precision.

583
00:28:54,960 --> 00:28:57,119
Speaker 2: It had been sitting in the dark in pieces for

584
00:28:57,119 --> 00:29:01,000
forty five hundred years. The preservation was astonished due entirely

585
00:29:01,039 --> 00:29:04,160
to that airtight limestone seal. Even the ancient ropes made

586
00:29:04,200 --> 00:29:05,640
of half a grass were still.

587
00:29:05,440 --> 00:29:07,839
Speaker 1: Intact, but discovering the boat was only the beginning of

588
00:29:07,880 --> 00:29:12,039
a massive logistical challenge. An Egyptian restorer and conservator named

589
00:29:12,039 --> 00:29:14,599
Ahmed Yusuf was tasked with putting it back.

590
00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:16,599
Speaker 2: Together, which is an incredible story in itself.

591
00:29:16,839 --> 00:29:20,400
Speaker 1: I always compare this to the ultimate nightmare scenario of

592
00:29:20,440 --> 00:29:24,000
building the world's oldest, most complex piece of Ikea furniture,

593
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:28,480
except you have two and twenty four wooden pieces, absolutely

594
00:29:28,480 --> 00:29:31,440
no instruction manual, no picture on the box, and if

595
00:29:31,440 --> 00:29:34,839
you accidentally snap a wooden peg or apply the wrong pressure,

596
00:29:35,119 --> 00:29:37,839
you just ruined a priceless Bronze age artifact.

597
00:29:38,039 --> 00:29:42,759
Speaker 2: It was an agonizingly slow, deeply respectful process. Amid Yusuf

598
00:29:42,759 --> 00:29:46,480
spent years just studying modern Egyptian boat builders along the Nile,

599
00:29:46,759 --> 00:29:50,720
looking for traditional techniques that might have miraculously survived the millennia,

600
00:29:50,799 --> 00:29:53,359
just to understand how the ancient joints and lashings might

601
00:29:53,400 --> 00:29:53,839
have worked.

602
00:29:53,880 --> 00:29:56,119
Speaker 1: He had the map every single piece of wood. He

603
00:29:56,200 --> 00:30:00,039
spent over fourteen years painstakingly rebuilding it without using a

604
00:30:00,079 --> 00:30:02,000
single modern metal nail, and when it.

605
00:30:01,880 --> 00:30:04,480
Speaker 2: Was finally complete, the scale of this thing was breathtaking.

606
00:30:04,559 --> 00:30:07,279
The reassembled ship measured forty three meters.

607
00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:08,759
Speaker 1: Long that is over one hundred and forty feet. It

608
00:30:08,759 --> 00:30:12,680
has a high, sweeping prow and stern shaped like papyrus stalks.

609
00:30:13,200 --> 00:30:16,640
It is a masterpiece of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic design.

610
00:30:16,920 --> 00:30:20,119
Speaker 2: What's incredible is the engineering of the wood itself. The

611
00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:23,720
ancient shipwrights used a system of mortise in tenin joints

612
00:30:23,799 --> 00:30:27,200
held together by wooden pegs, and then lashed the entire

613
00:30:27,279 --> 00:30:28,680
hull together with rope.

614
00:30:28,799 --> 00:30:30,720
Speaker 1: And the genius of this design is that when the

615
00:30:30,759 --> 00:30:33,559
ship is put in the water, the dry cedar wood

616
00:30:33,799 --> 00:30:37,839
absorbs the moisture and swells. The ropes shrink when wet.

617
00:30:38,079 --> 00:30:41,359
Speaker 2: Together, the swelling wood and shrinking rope pull the ship

618
00:30:41,400 --> 00:30:46,960
incredibly tight, creating a naturally watertight seal without pitch or nails.

619
00:30:47,119 --> 00:30:50,200
Speaker 1: It's brilliant engineering, but once again we run into the

620
00:30:50,240 --> 00:30:53,519
mystery of its actual purpose. Why go to the immense

621
00:30:53,559 --> 00:30:55,759
trouble and expense of building a one hundred and forty

622
00:30:55,799 --> 00:30:59,759
foot luxury yacht out of rare imported wood using master

623
00:30:59,759 --> 00:31:02,920
cracks only to immediately take it completely apart and bury

624
00:31:02,960 --> 00:31:04,240
it in a hole next to a pyramid?

625
00:31:04,519 --> 00:31:06,440
Speaker 2: Was it ever even used? That is the subject of

626
00:31:06,480 --> 00:31:10,519
intense ongoing debate among Egyptologists. One camp believes it was

627
00:31:10,559 --> 00:31:13,799
a highly functional funeral barge. The theory is that after

628
00:31:13,880 --> 00:31:17,279
Pharaohkufu died, his embalmed body was placed on a canopy

629
00:31:17,319 --> 00:31:19,759
on this very ship, and it was sailed down the

630
00:31:19,839 --> 00:31:23,559
Nile in a grand solemn procession to the Giza Plateau, and.

631
00:31:23,799 --> 00:31:27,880
Speaker 1: After the funerary ceremony was complete, the boat, having touched

632
00:31:27,920 --> 00:31:31,240
the divine body of the pharaoh, was considered too sacred

633
00:31:31,319 --> 00:31:34,799
for common use, so it was ritually dismantled and buried

634
00:31:34,880 --> 00:31:36,680
near his tomb as a sacred relic.

635
00:31:37,039 --> 00:31:39,799
Speaker 2: But the other camp says it's purely symbolic, tied deeply

636
00:31:39,839 --> 00:31:42,240
to the mythology of the Sun god. Yes the solar

637
00:31:42,279 --> 00:31:46,079
barge theory. In ancient Egyptian religion, the sun god Raw

638
00:31:46,279 --> 00:31:49,400
traveled across the sky during the day in a magnificent boat,

639
00:31:49,720 --> 00:31:52,880
ringing light to the world, and then traveled through the perilous,

640
00:31:53,039 --> 00:31:56,799
demon filled underworld at night in a different boat, and.

641
00:31:56,720 --> 00:31:59,720
Speaker 1: The Pharaoh, who was considered the living embodiment of Horace

642
00:31:59,759 --> 00:32:02,799
on Earth, was expected upon death to join Raw on

643
00:32:02,839 --> 00:32:04,440
this eternal cosmic journey.

644
00:32:04,559 --> 00:32:08,000
Speaker 2: Some researchers fiercely argue that Kufu's boat was never meant

645
00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:10,920
to touch earthly water. It was a magical object, a

646
00:32:10,960 --> 00:32:13,440
physical spell, buried in the bedrock so that the pharaoh's

647
00:32:13,440 --> 00:32:16,200
soul could use it in the afterlife to navigate the heavens.

648
00:32:16,240 --> 00:32:18,079
Speaker 1: So it's essentially a space ship made of cedar.

649
00:32:18,359 --> 00:32:22,720
Speaker 2: Essentially yes, and the physical evidence is completely contradictory. Some

650
00:32:22,839 --> 00:32:25,640
experts point to subtle water marks and shrinkage on the wood,

651
00:32:25,759 --> 00:32:28,240
suggesting it did indeed sail the Nile at least once.

652
00:32:28,640 --> 00:32:30,559
Speaker 1: Others point out that there is no evidence of rigging

653
00:32:30,559 --> 00:32:34,519
for sales, and the oars seem more decorative than functional

654
00:32:34,759 --> 00:32:37,279
for a ship of that massive size, making it a

655
00:32:37,319 --> 00:32:38,799
purely symbolic construct.

656
00:32:38,839 --> 00:32:41,039
Speaker 2: But regardless of whether it touched the Nile or was

657
00:32:41,039 --> 00:32:44,240
built for the stars, it perfectly reflects a society where

658
00:32:44,240 --> 00:32:47,559
the symbolic held exactly as much weight and demanded exactly

659
00:32:47,599 --> 00:32:49,759
as much engineering perfection as the physical.

660
00:32:50,200 --> 00:32:53,839
Speaker 1: Cufu's boat was carefully preserved in an airtight vault for

661
00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:58,279
his eternal glory. The Egyptians went to unimaginable lengths to

662
00:32:58,400 --> 00:33:02,119
ensure his name, his journey, and his soul lasted forever.

663
00:33:02,839 --> 00:33:05,039
But that reverence wasn't guaranteed for everyone.

664
00:33:05,160 --> 00:33:06,400
Speaker 2: No, it certainly wasn't.

665
00:33:06,599 --> 00:33:09,039
Speaker 1: What happens when a royal's legacy isn't preserved in the

666
00:33:09,079 --> 00:33:13,200
seal pit, but is actively violently and systematically destroyed.

667
00:33:13,519 --> 00:33:16,200
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the nature of memory

668
00:33:16,240 --> 00:33:19,359
and immortality in ancient Egypt, and to explore it, we

669
00:33:19,440 --> 00:33:22,079
have to move forward in time, roughly twelve hundred years

670
00:33:22,119 --> 00:33:25,440
after Cufu leaving the massive pyramids of Giza for the

671
00:33:25,519 --> 00:33:28,720
hidden subterranean tombs of the New Kingdom in the Valley

672
00:33:28,720 --> 00:33:29,279
of the Kings.

673
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:32,680
Speaker 1: Specifically, we have to look at a tomb discovered in

674
00:33:32,799 --> 00:33:36,519
nineteen oh seven by Edward Ayrton, known simply by its

675
00:33:36,640 --> 00:33:40,440
archaeological designation cavfafty five right.

676
00:33:40,440 --> 00:33:44,400
Speaker 2: Cave fifty five, is the ultimate true crime story of Egyptology.

677
00:33:45,079 --> 00:33:48,599
When archaeologists open this tomb, they immediately realized they were

678
00:33:48,640 --> 00:33:50,640
walking into an ancient crime scene.

679
00:33:50,960 --> 00:33:53,240
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the tomb had been robbed for gold,

680
00:33:53,440 --> 00:33:56,160
which is unfortunately common for almost every tomb in Egypt.

681
00:33:56,680 --> 00:33:59,279
It was that the tomb had been completely desecrated with

682
00:33:59,359 --> 00:34:00,880
specific targeted intent.

683
00:34:01,160 --> 00:34:04,440
Speaker 2: The beautiful wooden coffin inlaid with gold and glass, had

684
00:34:04,440 --> 00:34:05,680
been viciously smashed.

685
00:34:05,839 --> 00:34:09,880
Speaker 1: The spectacular gold face mask, which usually depicts the idealized,

686
00:34:10,119 --> 00:34:12,440
serene face of the dead to guide the soul back

687
00:34:12,440 --> 00:34:15,880
to the body, had been deliberately torn off and destroyed.

688
00:34:15,480 --> 00:34:18,960
Speaker 2: And most chillingly, of all the identifying inscriptions, the royal

689
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:22,119
cartouches containing the name of the deceased had been violently

690
00:34:22,119 --> 00:34:25,559
scratched out, chiseled away, and erased from every single surface

691
00:34:25,559 --> 00:34:26,119
in the tomb.

692
00:34:26,320 --> 00:34:28,440
Speaker 1: If you're a standard grave robber, you grab the gold,

693
00:34:28,519 --> 00:34:30,519
you grab the jewels, and you run before the guards

694
00:34:30,559 --> 00:34:33,280
catch you. You don't sit there in the dark meticulously

695
00:34:33,360 --> 00:34:35,199
chipping away a name from a wooden box.

696
00:34:35,559 --> 00:34:36,840
Speaker 2: Right, there's no profit in that.

697
00:34:37,079 --> 00:34:40,079
Speaker 1: Why it's been so much physical energy just to erase

698
00:34:40,119 --> 00:34:41,039
someone's name.

699
00:34:41,199 --> 00:34:43,960
Speaker 2: Because to understand this crime, you have to understand ancient

700
00:34:43,960 --> 00:34:47,840
Egyptian theology. To the ancient Egyptians, a human being was

701
00:34:47,840 --> 00:34:50,559
made of several parts. Okay, there was the physical body,

702
00:34:50,920 --> 00:34:54,559
the ka or life force, the ba or personality, and

703
00:34:54,639 --> 00:34:58,199
crucially the wren the name. They believe that to survive

704
00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:00,440
in the afterlife, your name had to be oken and

705
00:35:00,480 --> 00:35:03,840
remembered by the living. It anchored your existence.

706
00:35:04,800 --> 00:35:07,199
Speaker 1: So if your name was destroyed. If it was chiseled

707
00:35:07,199 --> 00:35:10,440
off your statues and erased from your tomb, your soul

708
00:35:10,719 --> 00:35:12,679
was completely disconnected from the universe.

709
00:35:12,800 --> 00:35:17,199
Speaker 2: It was effectively annihilated. It was the ultimate punishment, eternal oblivion.

710
00:35:17,280 --> 00:35:19,840
So the destruction in kV fifty five wasn't a robbery.

711
00:35:20,159 --> 00:35:24,119
It was an act of profound theological hatred. Someone wanted

712
00:35:24,159 --> 00:35:27,480
this specific person wiped from existence entirely.

713
00:35:27,320 --> 00:35:29,679
Speaker 1: Which immediately makes you ask who was in the coffin

714
00:35:29,920 --> 00:35:31,679
and what on earth did they do to make their

715
00:35:31,719 --> 00:35:34,079
own people so deeply violently angry.

716
00:35:34,239 --> 00:35:38,800
Speaker 2: Inside that wrecked nameless coffin was a badly deteriorated mummy.

717
00:35:39,440 --> 00:35:42,599
At first, the bones had suffered such massive water damage

718
00:35:42,599 --> 00:35:45,920
and decay over the centuries that researchers couldn't even agree

719
00:35:45,920 --> 00:35:47,119
if it was a man or a woman.

720
00:35:47,239 --> 00:35:50,000
Speaker 1: Eventually, the consensus settled on a male royal from the

721
00:35:50,039 --> 00:35:54,119
late eighteenth dynasty, but pinning down the exact identity set

722
00:35:54,159 --> 00:35:57,199
up a fiery debate that is raged in academic circles

723
00:35:57,199 --> 00:35:57,760
for over a.

724
00:35:57,719 --> 00:36:00,440
Speaker 2: Century, and the leading candidate for this wrath, the man

725
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:04,719
whose actions would justify such an extreme erasure, is a

726
00:36:04,719 --> 00:36:08,679
pharaoh who fundamentally broke every rule of Egyptian society.

727
00:36:09,199 --> 00:36:13,519
Speaker 1: Acanatan Akanatan is such a fascinating, almost alien figure in history.

728
00:36:13,559 --> 00:36:16,480
He comes into power and he completely upends the table.

729
00:36:16,599 --> 00:36:19,880
For centuries, Egypt had a massive, wealthy pantheon of gods

730
00:36:19,920 --> 00:36:22,639
a moon raw Osiris, Isis and Nubis.

731
00:36:22,360 --> 00:36:24,519
Speaker 2: And the priest of a moon based in Thebes was

732
00:36:24,559 --> 00:36:28,920
incredibly powerful, practically rivaling the pharaoh in wealth and political influence.

733
00:36:28,960 --> 00:36:31,920
Speaker 1: Acanatin takes the throne and effectively says, no, we are

734
00:36:31,920 --> 00:36:34,559
scrapping all of that. He institutes what many historians argue

735
00:36:34,599 --> 00:36:37,559
is the first recorded instance of monotheism in human history.

736
00:36:37,760 --> 00:36:41,280
Speaker 2: He commands the worship of a single, abstract, formless sun

737
00:36:41,360 --> 00:36:44,960
deity called the Atan. It was a religious, political, and

738
00:36:45,039 --> 00:36:47,679
cultural revolution of unprecedented scale.

739
00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:50,519
Speaker 1: He didn't just change the god, he moved the entire

740
00:36:50,559 --> 00:36:53,840
capital city away from the powerful priests in Thebes out

741
00:36:53,880 --> 00:36:57,280
into the barren desert, building a new city called Akatatan,

742
00:36:57,440 --> 00:36:58,679
known today as Amarna.

743
00:36:58,719 --> 00:37:01,920
Speaker 2: He even completely changed the style of Egyptian art, moving

744
00:37:01,960 --> 00:37:06,199
away from the rigid, idealized muscular forms of previous pharaohs

745
00:37:06,519 --> 00:37:09,440
to a strange, almost grotesque realism.

746
00:37:09,559 --> 00:37:12,320
Speaker 1: Statues of aconatins show him with a long face, a

747
00:37:12,320 --> 00:37:15,519
protruding belly, wide hips, and elongated limbs.

748
00:37:15,599 --> 00:37:18,840
Speaker 2: But when Acconatin died, the massive system he overturned fucely

749
00:37:18,880 --> 00:37:22,159
snapped back the old establishment. The priests of a Moon

750
00:37:22,480 --> 00:37:24,159
returned to power with a vengeance.

751
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:27,400
Speaker 1: They abandoned his new desert city to the sand, restored

752
00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:31,079
the old gods, and began a systematic state sponsored campaign

753
00:37:31,159 --> 00:37:32,719
to wipe his heresy from history.

754
00:37:32,760 --> 00:37:36,159
Speaker 2: They smashed his statues, chiseled his name off every temple wall,

755
00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:39,000
and attempted to erase him from the official king lists.

756
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:42,199
Speaker 1: So finding a desecrated tune like kV fifty five, with

757
00:37:42,320 --> 00:37:46,320
a smashed face and meticulously erased names perfectly fits the

758
00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:50,199
profile of Aconotin. The traditionalists found his body or press,

759
00:37:50,280 --> 00:37:53,000
intercepted it during a reburial, and tried to damn his

760
00:37:53,039 --> 00:37:54,039
soul for eternity.

761
00:37:54,239 --> 00:37:57,159
Speaker 2: It makes perfect narrative sense. It's the closing act of

762
00:37:57,199 --> 00:38:00,360
a religious war, and in twenty ten, modern science seemed

763
00:38:00,360 --> 00:38:02,199
to finally back the story up right.

764
00:38:02,360 --> 00:38:05,760
Speaker 1: The famed twenty ten DNA testing of the Royal mummies,

765
00:38:06,400 --> 00:38:10,360
researchers took tiny precious samples from the badly deteriorated bones

766
00:38:10,400 --> 00:38:12,719
of the cave fifty five mummy, and they ran the

767
00:38:12,760 --> 00:38:15,039
genetics against the other known royal mummies.

768
00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:18,800
Speaker 2: The genetic markers suggested two crucial things. First that this

769
00:38:18,960 --> 00:38:21,760
mummy was the direct son of the great pharaoh Amenhotep

770
00:38:21,840 --> 00:38:24,800
the third, and second that this mummy was the biological

771
00:38:24,840 --> 00:38:27,440
father of the famous boy king to tun Kamun.

772
00:38:27,159 --> 00:38:30,360
Speaker 1: Which points a massive glowing neon arrow directly at Ocanatin.

773
00:38:30,800 --> 00:38:33,159
We know from historical records that Acanaton was the son

774
00:38:33,159 --> 00:38:35,639
of Amenotep the Third, and while it was debated, many

775
00:38:35,719 --> 00:38:37,679
historians believed he was two Dunleman's father.

776
00:38:37,840 --> 00:38:41,039
Speaker 2: So the DNA seemed to definitively solve the century old

777
00:38:41,079 --> 00:38:43,880
mystery Cave fifty five is Akanon case closed.

778
00:38:44,159 --> 00:38:48,039
Speaker 1: But history is never that simple because the physical evidence,

779
00:38:48,239 --> 00:38:52,079
the actual bones themselves, threw a massive wrench into the

780
00:38:52,159 --> 00:38:53,000
DNA results.

781
00:38:53,239 --> 00:38:56,719
Speaker 2: When forensic anthropologists examined the actual skeleton of the Cave

782
00:38:56,880 --> 00:39:00,440
fifty five mummy, they looked at the epiphysile fusion, the

783
00:39:00,480 --> 00:39:03,000
way the ends of the bones fused to the shafts

784
00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:06,199
as a person ages, particularly the collarbone in the pelvis.

785
00:39:06,239 --> 00:39:08,840
Speaker 1: They also looked at the wear on the teeth. They

786
00:39:08,920 --> 00:39:12,199
concluded quite firmly that this person died in their early twenties,

787
00:39:12,559 --> 00:39:14,039
maybe twenty five at the latest.

788
00:39:14,440 --> 00:39:18,719
Speaker 2: And herein lies the immense contradiction. Historical records indicate that

789
00:39:18,760 --> 00:39:22,760
Akanatan ruled Egypt for seventeen years. He enacted a massive

790
00:39:22,760 --> 00:39:26,079
religious revolution, built a city, and had multiple daughters with

791
00:39:26,119 --> 00:39:30,159
his primary wife, Nephertiti, and likely other children with secondary wives.

792
00:39:30,280 --> 00:39:32,519
Speaker 1: He couldn't possibly have achieved all of that and died

793
00:39:32,559 --> 00:39:35,440
in his early twenties. To fit the timeline of his reign,

794
00:39:35,760 --> 00:39:37,599
he had to be at least in his thirties or

795
00:39:37,719 --> 00:39:39,360
more likely his forties when he died.

796
00:39:39,599 --> 00:39:42,400
Speaker 2: So the forensic bone age says one thing, the historical

797
00:39:42,440 --> 00:39:45,159
timeline says another, and the DNA, well, the DNA is

798
00:39:45,199 --> 00:39:46,440
profoundly complicated.

799
00:39:46,599 --> 00:39:48,719
Speaker 1: Why is the DNA complicated If it says he's the

800
00:39:48,719 --> 00:39:50,119
father of Tut, isn't that proof?

801
00:39:50,440 --> 00:39:53,280
Speaker 2: We have to acknowledge the severe limits of forensic science

802
00:39:53,440 --> 00:39:57,360
when dealing with three thousand year old degraded DNA, especially

803
00:39:57,360 --> 00:39:59,679
within the context of royal Egyptian.

804
00:39:59,320 --> 00:40:02,159
Speaker 1: Dynasties, because of the inbreeding right exactly.

805
00:40:02,239 --> 00:40:05,440
Speaker 2: The Egyptian royal family viewed themselves as divine and gods

806
00:40:05,480 --> 00:40:09,639
only marry other gods therefore they engaged in generations of

807
00:40:09,719 --> 00:40:13,559
close kin marriage, brother marrying sister, father marrying.

808
00:40:13,320 --> 00:40:18,559
Speaker 1: Daughter over generations. This intense inbreeding creates a massive genetic bottleneck.

809
00:40:19,159 --> 00:40:22,519
The DNA profiles of brothers or even cousins begin to

810
00:40:22,559 --> 00:40:26,159
look so remarkably similar that distinguishing them after three thousand

811
00:40:26,239 --> 00:40:31,239
years of environmental degradation, water damage, and contamination is incredibly fraud.

812
00:40:31,400 --> 00:40:34,880
Speaker 2: So the KVE fifty five mummy could theoretically be Oconotin

813
00:40:34,960 --> 00:40:38,480
if the anthropologists are drastically wrong about bone aging, or

814
00:40:38,559 --> 00:40:41,079
it could be a lesser known younger brother of Acanatin,

815
00:40:41,360 --> 00:40:44,400
a shadowy figure named Smith Carr, who may have ruled

816
00:40:44,440 --> 00:40:47,440
briefly and whose genetics would look nearly identical to Acanon's.

817
00:40:47,679 --> 00:40:50,159
Speaker 1: The science meant to solve the mystery only deepened it

818
00:40:50,440 --> 00:40:52,639
more than one hundred years after that tomb was opened,

819
00:40:52,639 --> 00:40:55,519
and after millions of dollars in modern genetic testing. The

820
00:40:55,559 --> 00:40:58,639
body in Cave fifty five remains a literal cold case.

821
00:40:59,039 --> 00:41:03,119
Speaker 2: But speaking of the power vacuum left after Acinatin's chaotic reign,

822
00:41:03,400 --> 00:41:06,880
we absolutely cannot talk about the Amarna period without talking

823
00:41:06,880 --> 00:41:08,840
about the woman who stood right beside him.

824
00:41:09,039 --> 00:41:11,800
Speaker 1: Her resting place isn't just a mystery finding. It would

825
00:41:11,840 --> 00:41:14,320
be the holy grail of modern Egyptology.

826
00:41:14,800 --> 00:41:16,920
Speaker 2: You are, of course, referring to Nefertiti.

827
00:41:17,280 --> 00:41:20,159
Speaker 1: Nephertiti is a true ghost of history. She lived in

828
00:41:20,199 --> 00:41:23,840
the fourteenth century BCE. She is undeniably one of the

829
00:41:23,840 --> 00:41:27,440
most recognizable figures from the ancient world, largely because of

830
00:41:27,480 --> 00:41:32,000
that stunning, perfectly preserved painted limestone bust discovered in a

831
00:41:32,039 --> 00:41:34,639
sculptor's workshop in Amarna in nineteen twelve.

832
00:41:34,760 --> 00:41:39,000
Speaker 2: The elegance, the cheek bones, the vibrant colors, it's iconic.

833
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:42,719
But she wasn't just a beautiful face. She wielded immense power.

834
00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:45,480
Speaker 1: She was right there alongside aconat and during his radical

835
00:41:45,559 --> 00:41:49,440
religious revolution. Some surviving stone reliefs even show her striking

836
00:41:49,480 --> 00:41:51,880
down the enemies of Egypt with a mace of violent

837
00:41:52,039 --> 00:41:55,599
dominant pose normally reserved strictly for the pharaoh himself. She

838
00:41:55,719 --> 00:41:57,719
was a co architect of the new religion.

839
00:41:57,519 --> 00:42:01,760
Speaker 2: And yet after Accinotton's death, her historic footprint becomes incredibly murky.

840
00:42:02,159 --> 00:42:04,920
The record's fragment. Did she die shortly after her.

841
00:42:04,840 --> 00:42:09,280
Speaker 1: Husband, or, as some historians strongly suspect, did she actually

842
00:42:09,280 --> 00:42:12,639
assume the throne herself and rule Egypt as a pharaoh

843
00:42:12,679 --> 00:42:15,760
in her own right, adopting a new royal name spank

844
00:42:15,800 --> 00:42:17,599
Today or Nefernifot.

845
00:42:18,320 --> 00:42:21,000
Speaker 2: She may even desperately trying to guide the country through

846
00:42:21,039 --> 00:42:25,199
the chaotic, violent aftermath of her husband's religious experiment, trying

847
00:42:25,199 --> 00:42:28,440
to placate the angry priests of Amun while holding onto power.

848
00:42:28,599 --> 00:42:30,840
Speaker 1: We don't know the end of her story because we

849
00:42:30,920 --> 00:42:33,440
have never found her tomb. Most of the major players

850
00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:36,960
from that era have been found, but Nefertiti.

851
00:42:36,480 --> 00:42:39,320
Speaker 2: Is missing, which leads to one of the most controversial

852
00:42:39,440 --> 00:42:41,760
edge of your seat theories of the last decade. In

853
00:42:41,760 --> 00:42:46,280
two twenty fifteen, a British Egyptologist named Nicholas Reeves proposed

854
00:42:46,320 --> 00:42:49,039
an idea that set the archaeological world on fire.

855
00:42:49,400 --> 00:42:52,159
Speaker 1: He suggested that Nefertini's tomb wasn't lost out in the

856
00:42:52,199 --> 00:42:55,239
desert sands, He was hiding in plain sight behind the

857
00:42:55,239 --> 00:42:57,360
walls and the most famous tomb ever discovered.

858
00:42:57,679 --> 00:42:59,840
Speaker 2: He was looking at the burial chamber of her stepson,

859
00:43:00,119 --> 00:43:04,000
King Tudunkamun. Reeves was examining ultra high resolution three D

860
00:43:04,159 --> 00:43:07,960
laser scans of the painted walls inside Tutakomon's burial chamber.

861
00:43:08,280 --> 00:43:11,599
Speaker 1: Beneath the vibrant paint, he noticed strange, perfectly straight lines

862
00:43:11,639 --> 00:43:14,960
and fissures in the plaster. He suggested these were the

863
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:18,320
faint structural outlines of plastered over sealed doorways.

864
00:43:18,599 --> 00:43:22,280
Speaker 2: His theory was radical, but logical. Two Tunkamun's tomb is

865
00:43:22,280 --> 00:43:25,840
famously small and cramped for a pharaoh. Reeves theorized that

866
00:43:25,880 --> 00:43:28,599
the tomb was originally built for Nefertidi.

867
00:43:28,239 --> 00:43:32,119
Speaker 1: But when young King Tut died unexpectedly at nineteen, his

868
00:43:32,159 --> 00:43:35,639
own tomb wasn't ready, so the priest quickly walled off

869
00:43:35,639 --> 00:43:39,920
Nefertiti's deeper burial chamber, plactered over the doors, painted over them,

870
00:43:40,199 --> 00:43:42,840
and hastily buried the boy king in the front antechamber.

871
00:43:43,039 --> 00:43:45,679
Speaker 2: It was an incredible theory. It meant the greatest treasure

872
00:43:45,719 --> 00:43:48,119
in history was sitting just inches behind the walls of

873
00:43:48,119 --> 00:43:50,480
a tomb we had been walking through since nineteen twenty two,

874
00:43:51,039 --> 00:43:53,159
and initially the science seemed to support it.

875
00:43:53,519 --> 00:43:56,679
Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen, a team of Japanese radar experts brought

876
00:43:56,800 --> 00:44:00,599
ground penetrating radar to the valley of the Kings GPR

877
00:44:00,679 --> 00:44:03,360
works by sending high frequency radio pulses into the wall

878
00:44:03,679 --> 00:44:05,679
and measuring how those ways bounce back.

879
00:44:06,039 --> 00:44:09,000
Speaker 2: If they hit solid bedrock, they bounced back quickly. If

880
00:44:09,000 --> 00:44:12,360
they hit an empty void, the signal changes. They scanned

881
00:44:12,360 --> 00:44:15,239
the north and west walls of Tut's tomb and announced

882
00:44:15,280 --> 00:44:18,920
that they saw distinct anomalies, evidence of open spaces, and

883
00:44:18,960 --> 00:44:22,920
even signatures that suggested metallic and organic materials sitting right

884
00:44:22,960 --> 00:44:23,679
behind the plaster.

885
00:44:24,119 --> 00:44:27,800
Speaker 1: The global media lost its collective mind. We were days

886
00:44:27,840 --> 00:44:29,199
away from finding nevertidy.

887
00:44:29,679 --> 00:44:32,599
Speaker 2: But this is where the rigorous, often frustrating process of

888
00:44:32,599 --> 00:44:37,280
the scientific method comes in. Science requires replication. The stakes

889
00:44:37,280 --> 00:44:39,920
were too high to drill a hole through priceless, three

890
00:44:39,960 --> 00:44:43,559
thousand year old wall paintings based on one radar scan.

891
00:44:43,920 --> 00:44:47,920
Speaker 1: So subsequent, more comprehensive radar scans were conducted by different teams,

892
00:44:48,320 --> 00:44:51,760
including a team from Nashville Geographic, using different frequencies and

893
00:44:51,800 --> 00:44:53,159
more advanced equipment, and.

894
00:44:53,119 --> 00:44:57,480
Speaker 2: Those results yielded mixed and ultimately negative conclusions. The radarways

895
00:44:57,480 --> 00:45:00,360
and the valley of the kings are notoriously tricky. The

896
00:45:00,440 --> 00:45:03,679
natural fissures in the limestone bedrock can scatter the signals

897
00:45:03,719 --> 00:45:06,800
and create false ghost voids in the data. It was a.

898
00:45:06,719 --> 00:45:10,639
Speaker 1: Crushing blow to everyone who wanted that mystery solved. The

899
00:45:10,760 --> 00:45:14,760
current official consensus of the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry is that

900
00:45:14,800 --> 00:45:18,039
there are no hidden rooms behind Tutunkomun's walls.

901
00:45:18,239 --> 00:45:21,360
Speaker 2: The anomalies in the initial scans were likely just natural

902
00:45:21,360 --> 00:45:24,760
cracks in the rock. Nefertidi remains a ghost waiting out

903
00:45:24,760 --> 00:45:26,360
there in the desert, but all of.

904
00:45:26,280 --> 00:45:29,079
Speaker 1: This ties directly back to the boy in the tomb himself.

905
00:45:29,960 --> 00:45:33,559
Tutokomen is the most famous pharaoh in the world, discovered

906
00:45:33,639 --> 00:45:37,119
untouched in nineteen twenty two by Howard Carter, a king

907
00:45:37,159 --> 00:45:39,320
who took the throne at nine years old and was

908
00:45:39,360 --> 00:45:40,719
dead by nineteen.

909
00:45:40,559 --> 00:45:42,800
Speaker 2: And his physical body has been the subject of the

910
00:45:42,840 --> 00:45:47,159
most intense evolving cold case in medical history. Two Tunkban's

911
00:45:47,199 --> 00:45:51,360
remains perfectly illustrate how are historical narrative shifts depending entirely

912
00:45:51,400 --> 00:45:53,639
on the lens of the technology we have available to

913
00:45:53,679 --> 00:45:54,800
analyze the evidence.

914
00:45:55,039 --> 00:45:57,199
Speaker 1: The story of his death has changed drastically over the

915
00:45:57,280 --> 00:46:00,000
last century. Let's track the evolution of this cold case

916
00:46:00,360 --> 00:46:02,519
because it shows how our biases shape history.

917
00:46:02,719 --> 00:46:05,639
Speaker 2: For decades after the tomb was opened, everyone assumed there

918
00:46:05,639 --> 00:46:08,440
was foul play. Look at the context. He was young,

919
00:46:08,639 --> 00:46:12,039
his father Achnaton's reign had been a chaotic heresy. The

920
00:46:12,079 --> 00:46:15,920
country was unstable and powerful generals and priests were vying

921
00:46:16,000 --> 00:46:16,639
for control.

922
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:20,239
Speaker 1: A nineteen year old king dying suddenly as prime real

923
00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:22,119
estate for an assassination.

924
00:46:21,639 --> 00:46:24,679
Speaker 2: Theory, and in nineteen sixty eight, new technologies seemed to

925
00:46:24,679 --> 00:46:28,199
objectively confirm that narrative. A team from the University of

926
00:46:28,239 --> 00:46:31,800
Liverpool took the very first portable X ray machine into

927
00:46:31,800 --> 00:46:34,320
the Valley of the Kings and X rayed the mummy

928
00:46:34,360 --> 00:46:35,039
in its tomb.

929
00:46:35,519 --> 00:46:38,519
Speaker 1: The two dimensional images revealed a dark shadow, a loose

930
00:46:38,599 --> 00:46:41,519
fragment of bones sitting inside the cranial cavity in a

931
00:46:41,559 --> 00:46:44,159
thickened area at the base of the skull boom.

932
00:46:44,360 --> 00:46:48,880
Speaker 2: Murder theory born. The narrative immediately shifted. Documentaries were made,

933
00:46:49,039 --> 00:46:49,840
books were written.

934
00:46:50,039 --> 00:46:52,679
Speaker 1: The story became that Tutonkaman was struck on the back

935
00:46:52,679 --> 00:46:54,960
of the head with a blunt instrument while he was sleeping,

936
00:46:55,280 --> 00:46:58,400
or maybe during a chariot ride, assassinated by his ambitious

937
00:46:58,440 --> 00:47:02,239
advisor I or his general Horemheb, who wanted to seize power.

938
00:47:02,519 --> 00:47:05,480
Speaker 2: It was Shakespearean, it was sexy history. It made perfect sense.

939
00:47:05,719 --> 00:47:08,480
But science advances and our ability to see the truth

940
00:47:08,559 --> 00:47:09,360
become sharper.

941
00:47:09,519 --> 00:47:12,000
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, researchers brought a much more

942
00:47:12,039 --> 00:47:16,559
sophisticated diagnostic tool to the mummy, a CT scanner instead

943
00:47:16,559 --> 00:47:19,119
of a flat X ray. This allowed them to capture

944
00:47:19,159 --> 00:47:23,280
thousands of cross sectional slices and create an incredibly detailed

945
00:47:23,599 --> 00:47:25,760
three D model of the skeleton.

946
00:47:25,360 --> 00:47:28,960
Speaker 2: And the CT scan completely dismantled the nineteen sixty eight

947
00:47:29,079 --> 00:47:32,320
murder theory the bone fragment floating in the skull. The

948
00:47:32,360 --> 00:47:35,400
three D imaging showed it perfectly matched a piece missing

949
00:47:35,440 --> 00:47:36,880
from the cervical vertebrae.

950
00:47:37,000 --> 00:47:40,159
Speaker 1: It was likely dislodged during the ancient embalming process, or,

951
00:47:40,760 --> 00:47:44,239
more embarrassingly, it was roughly knocked loose by Howard Carter's

952
00:47:44,280 --> 00:47:47,480
own archaeological team when they were using hot knives to

953
00:47:47,519 --> 00:47:50,599
melt the hardened resin to pry the solid gold mask

954
00:47:50,679 --> 00:47:52,280
off the mummy in the nineteen twenties.

955
00:47:52,400 --> 00:47:54,360
Speaker 2: There was no evidence of a healing blow to the

956
00:47:54,360 --> 00:47:57,000
back of the head, but while the CT scan closed

957
00:47:57,039 --> 00:48:00,360
one door, it opened another. The three D imaging found

958
00:48:00,360 --> 00:48:01,639
something the X ray missed.

959
00:48:01,920 --> 00:48:05,039
Speaker 1: It showed a severe compound fracture and Tuck's left leg

960
00:48:05,519 --> 00:48:09,119
specifically just above the knee, and unlike the skull fragment,

961
00:48:09,239 --> 00:48:12,119
this fracture showed a thin layer of embalming resin inside

962
00:48:12,159 --> 00:48:12,800
the break.

963
00:48:12,599 --> 00:48:14,760
Speaker 2: Which means the bone broke while he was still alive

964
00:48:14,920 --> 00:48:17,800
or immediately upon death and hadn't started to heal. So

965
00:48:17,840 --> 00:48:19,039
the narrative shifted again.

966
00:48:19,320 --> 00:48:22,280
Speaker 1: He wasn't murdered. The new theory was that he fell

967
00:48:22,320 --> 00:48:25,519
off a chariot while hunting, shattered his leg, and in

968
00:48:25,559 --> 00:48:28,920
a world three millennia before antibiotics, the massive wound got

969
00:48:28,960 --> 00:48:30,840
infected with gangreen and killed him.

970
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:35,119
Speaker 2: A very plausible, very mundane, very human tragedy, but the

971
00:48:35,119 --> 00:48:38,199
store doesn't end there. In twenty ten, the paradigm shifted

972
00:48:38,239 --> 00:48:41,719
a third time. We moved from structural imaging of the

973
00:48:41,760 --> 00:48:44,079
bones to molecular biology.

974
00:48:44,119 --> 00:48:47,199
Speaker 1: The DNA testing we mentioned earlier regarding kV fifty five

975
00:48:47,280 --> 00:48:49,960
didn't just map his Missy family tree. It looked for

976
00:48:50,000 --> 00:48:52,960
the genetic signatures of ancient pathogens.

977
00:48:52,480 --> 00:48:55,239
Speaker 2: And they found something massive. They found the DNA of

978
00:48:55,280 --> 00:48:58,679
the Plasmodium false apparent parasite in his bone tissue. King

979
00:48:58,760 --> 00:49:00,679
Tut had malaria, and not just.

980
00:49:00,639 --> 00:49:03,119
Speaker 1: A mild case, but evidence of multiple infections of the

981
00:49:03,159 --> 00:49:05,320
most severe, deadly form of the disease.

982
00:49:05,480 --> 00:49:09,239
Speaker 2: Furthermore, the DNA confirmed the tragic reality of his lineage.

983
00:49:09,320 --> 00:49:11,920
His parents, the mummy in kV fifty five and the

984
00:49:11,960 --> 00:49:14,920
mummy known as the Younger Lady, were full brother and sister.

985
00:49:15,320 --> 00:49:19,599
Speaker 1: This extreme genetic bottlenecking resulted in severe congenital health issues.

986
00:49:20,239 --> 00:49:22,960
The combined data from the CT scans and the DNA

987
00:49:23,360 --> 00:49:27,079
showed that Teutonkhamons suffered from a cleft palate, a mild

988
00:49:27,159 --> 00:49:31,079
curvature of the spine, and most significantly, a severe club foot.

989
00:49:31,480 --> 00:49:34,599
Speaker 2: The imaging also showed he had Cohler disease, a painful

990
00:49:34,679 --> 00:49:37,760
degenerative condition where the bones in the foot slowly die

991
00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:39,719
and crumble from a lack of blood supply.

992
00:49:40,239 --> 00:49:42,679
Speaker 1: This changes the entire picture of who this person was.

993
00:49:42,960 --> 00:49:45,559
He wasn't the robust, golden boy king we see in

994
00:49:45,599 --> 00:49:48,519
the Hollywood movies riding into battle on a chariot with

995
00:49:48,559 --> 00:49:51,079
a bone arrow who was assassinated by his enemies.

996
00:49:51,119 --> 00:49:53,559
Speaker 2: Exactly if we synthesize all this data from the last

997
00:49:53,599 --> 00:49:58,599
fifty years, Tutankhamon was a frail, severely immunocompromised teenager living

998
00:49:58,639 --> 00:49:59,920
in constant physical pain.

999
00:50:00,320 --> 00:50:03,079
Speaker 1: He couldn't stand do andated. He likely needed a cane

1000
00:50:03,079 --> 00:50:05,840
to walk, which perfectly explains why over one hundred and

1001
00:50:05,880 --> 00:50:09,000
thirty walking sticks, many showing signs of heavy use, were

1002
00:50:09,000 --> 00:50:10,840
found perfectly preserved in his tomb.

1003
00:50:11,159 --> 00:50:15,480
Speaker 2: He was suffering the profound, debilitating genetic consequences of royal

1004
00:50:15,519 --> 00:50:18,679
dynasty building. He didn't die of a dramatic blow to

1005
00:50:18,719 --> 00:50:21,119
the head in a political coup. He likely succumbed to

1006
00:50:21,199 --> 00:50:24,599
a cascade of failing health where a sudden broken leg,

1007
00:50:24,719 --> 00:50:28,360
combined with severe bonocrosis and a massive bout of malaria

1008
00:50:28,920 --> 00:50:32,000
finally overwhelmed his severely weakened immune system.

1009
00:50:32,280 --> 00:50:34,480
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us, the people

1010
00:50:34,519 --> 00:50:37,280
trying to look back in the past. It means that officially,

1011
00:50:37,599 --> 00:50:41,760
the exact pinpoint cause of his death remains officially unresolved

1012
00:50:41,760 --> 00:50:45,239
on the coroner's report, we can't say definitively which ailment

1013
00:50:45,320 --> 00:50:46,079
stopped his heart.

1014
00:50:46,159 --> 00:50:49,320
Speaker 2: But more importantly, it shows how our understanding of history

1015
00:50:49,400 --> 00:50:52,559
is never truly settled. It is a living, breathing thing

1016
00:50:52,639 --> 00:50:55,119
that changes entirely based on the lens we used to

1017
00:50:55,119 --> 00:50:55,679
look at it.

1018
00:50:55,719 --> 00:50:58,159
Speaker 1: The nineteen sixty eight X ray gave us a thrilling

1019
00:50:58,239 --> 00:51:02,159
murder mystery. The two five ct scan gave us a tragic,

1020
00:51:02,320 --> 00:51:06,159
mundane accident, and the twenty ten DNA gave us a sobering,

1021
00:51:06,239 --> 00:51:08,719
painful medical reality of a frail teenager.

1022
00:51:08,960 --> 00:51:11,679
Speaker 2: It forces us to approach ancient history with a profound

1023
00:51:11,719 --> 00:51:14,480
sense of humility. The more advanced our tools become, the

1024
00:51:14,480 --> 00:51:15,760
more we realize how much we do not.

1025
00:51:15,840 --> 00:51:18,480
Speaker 1: Know, and what an incredible journey that has been. Today

1026
00:51:18,760 --> 00:51:22,679
we started with the massive macro mysteries, the impossible precision

1027
00:51:22,679 --> 00:51:25,679
of the Great Pyramid aligning with dead stars using a

1028
00:51:25,719 --> 00:51:26,960
celestial plumbline.

1029
00:51:27,280 --> 00:51:31,159
Speaker 2: We explored the logistical nightmare of moving two million stones

1030
00:51:31,239 --> 00:51:34,519
tracked on a papyrus spreadsheet by a foreman named Mirror.

1031
00:51:34,559 --> 00:51:36,679
Speaker 1: We talked about the ghost of a three thousand room

1032
00:51:36,760 --> 00:51:40,199
labyrinth that was dismantled and recycled into the mundane streets

1033
00:51:40,199 --> 00:51:42,719
of Cairo. And then we zoomed all the way into

1034
00:51:42,760 --> 00:51:43,440
the micro.

1035
00:51:43,199 --> 00:51:47,480
Speaker 2: Mysteries, subatomic cosmic rays revealing one hundred foot voids hidden

1036
00:51:47,480 --> 00:51:51,280
above the Grand Gallery, tiny robots drilling through spiritually sealed

1037
00:51:51,360 --> 00:51:53,199
doors with copper handles.

1038
00:51:52,960 --> 00:51:56,960
Speaker 1: And the degraded DNA of a tragic teenage king rewriting

1039
00:51:56,960 --> 00:52:00,599
a century of dramatic murder. Theories. History is not static,

1040
00:52:00,719 --> 00:52:02,920
It is not locked in a textbook. It is actively

1041
00:52:02,960 --> 00:52:04,000
being rewritten.

1042
00:52:03,639 --> 00:52:06,360
Speaker 2: Today, which leaves us with a truly provocative thought tom

1043
00:52:06,360 --> 00:52:09,639
all over, one that expands far beyond the borders of Egypt.

1044
00:52:10,039 --> 00:52:13,199
If muon scanning, which allowed us to see massive hidden

1045
00:52:13,239 --> 00:52:17,000
voids through solid stone from the outside and ground penetrating

1046
00:52:17,119 --> 00:52:19,639
radar are just in their absolute infancy right.

1047
00:52:19,519 --> 00:52:23,360
Speaker 1: Now, imagine what archaeological technologies fifty or one hundred years

1048
00:52:23,400 --> 00:52:24,840
from now will be able to reveal.

1049
00:52:25,119 --> 00:52:28,519
Speaker 2: What if every major ancient monument on Earth, not just

1050
00:52:28,559 --> 00:52:32,559
in Egypt, but the massive temples in Mesoamerica, the forgotten

1051
00:52:32,599 --> 00:52:36,559
stupas in Asia, the megaliths in Europe has an invisible

1052
00:52:36,599 --> 00:52:37,519
twin structure.

1053
00:52:37,880 --> 00:52:41,199
Speaker 1: What if there is a hidden labyrinth of rooms, forgotten corridors,

1054
00:52:41,239 --> 00:52:44,760
and intact tombs just waiting for the right scientific lens

1055
00:52:44,800 --> 00:52:47,280
to finally be seen. We might be living on a

1056
00:52:47,320 --> 00:52:50,000
planet filled with undiscovered history right in front of our eyes,

1057
00:52:50,239 --> 00:52:53,719
hovering just beyond our current spectrum of sight. That is

1058
00:52:53,800 --> 00:52:56,159
exactly the kind of thought that keeps me entirely glued

1059
00:52:56,199 --> 00:52:59,320
to this subject. The puzzle is never finished. We just

1060
00:52:59,400 --> 00:53:01,840
keep finding tools to see the pieces that were buried

1061
00:53:01,880 --> 00:53:04,159
under the table, and we keep dick and now we

1062
00:53:04,199 --> 00:53:07,079
want to bring you into the conversation. Think about everything

1063
00:53:07,079 --> 00:53:10,719
we've unpacked today, from the cosmic to the genetic. If

1064
00:53:10,719 --> 00:53:13,280
you had the power to safely magically look behind one

1065
00:53:13,320 --> 00:53:16,159
of those sealed double doors and the Queen shaft to

1066
00:53:16,159 --> 00:53:18,880
see where the soul was meant to go, or if

1067
00:53:18,880 --> 00:53:22,039
you could dig beneath the water logged sands of Hauara

1068
00:53:22,079 --> 00:53:25,280
to find the true underground scale of the lost labyrinth?

1069
00:53:25,519 --> 00:53:29,000
Which mystery would you choose to uncover? And why? Drop

1070
00:53:29,000 --> 00:53:31,280
a comment and let us know where you stand. Thank

1071
00:53:31,320 --> 00:53:33,039
you so much for joining us on this deep dive

1072
00:53:33,039 --> 00:53:35,960
into the unknown, unthrilling threads, where the past is always

1073
00:53:35,960 --> 00:53:39,840
full of surprises. Until next time, keep questioning everything.