Private Lives of the Pharaohs

For nearly three thousand years Ancient Egypt was the greatest civilisation on Earth, adhering to one religion, one language and one evolving history. But what we know about Ancient Egyptian culture has been pieced together from astonishingly little hard information and guesswork, leaving many mysteries unexplained.

This program addresses arguably the most debated mystery surrounding the ancient Egyptians: who built the Pyramids at Giza and how and why did they do it? In 500 BC, already two millennia after the Pyramids were constructed, the Greek historian Heroditus recorded that 100,000 slaves had built them - a purported fact that modern guidebooks still publish. This program reveals startling new evidence to disprove Heroditus' hypothesis.

In the final program in the series, Sex, Death and the Lotus, a mummy in the Manchester museum is the focus of study, revealing the forgotten links between an Egyptian water lily, the afterlife, and sex in Ancient Egypt towards the end of the New Kingdom.