These iconic monuments are just shouting, screaming at us.
Power, dominance, control.
I feel about this.
I feel so insignificant.
Together these pyramids and the Sphinx and the temples
create a landscape of power.
NARRATOR: The huge sculpture protects the necropolis.
A giant symbol of supremacy believed
by many to have the face of Khufu's son, Khafre,
owner of Giza's second largest pyramid.
Despite many visits here, John has never been up close.
Today he's been granted special access
to explore its enclosure.
JOHN: It's absolutely inspiring.
I mean, it's just jaw-dropping.
I've waited 50 years to be here, and now I'm here.
It's just wow.
NARRATOR: 66 feet high, the Sphinx gazes
east towards the rising sun.
JOHN: I know what it's like to work with the living rock
and how to carve it.
This would have been a monumental challenge.
They only had copper chisels, wooden mallets.
It would have been a harsh environment.
This dust would have been everywhere.
And yet the workmen, the craftsmen, the masons,
they were all willing participants, loyal to pharaoh.
NARRATOR: It would have taken thousands of people decades
to construct the epic monuments of Giza,
but there's no evidence the pharaohs
enslaved people to build them.
They didn't draw their power over the people from force.
John believes what stood these kings apart was
that they inspired devotion.
The sheer volume of stone has gone into building this,
and each individual block represents the loyalty
that they had for Pharaoh.
NARRATOR: The huge monuments of Giza
represent the peak of the pyramid age.
So why was nothing built on this scale again?
At the height of Khufu's reign, reliable seasonal rains
fed the crops that ensured Egypt's prosperity.
For three months every year, the Nile
flooded and inundated the farmland, so farmers
couldn't work the fields.
The farmers were free to help build the King's enormous tomb.
They believed he kept the gods content and the country fed.
But soon after Khufu completed his pyramid,
Egypt began to suffer drought.
As crop yields crashed, so did the taxes coming
into the state's treasuries, and despite the free labor
the Giza monuments almost bankrupted Egypt.
The people's loyalty began to falter.
The King's tombs that followed got smaller
while Khufu's Great Pyramid remained, dominating
the Nile's West Bank.
JOHN: The sheer power that he held
is absolutely unbelievable.
NARRATOR: It was a power his struggling successors
were desperate to replicate.
At Abu Ghurab Italian archeologist
Massimiliano Nuzzola wants to know
how the kings of the pyramid age held onto power as their wealth
and status declined.
He has spent his entire career trying to understand a very
different monumental structure.
An enigma whose mysteries captured
his imagination in his very first student course
in Egyptology.
This enormous scatter of ancient rubble
was once a sun temple dedicated to the most powerful
god of the pyramid age.
MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: Each king wanted a pyramid
for achieving his resurrection but this
was not enough for the five dynastic kings.
They wanted something more.
The king built this place to turn himself into a god.
The sun god.
NARRATOR: The Pharaoh Nyuserre didn't just
want to become divine in death.
He built this temple because he wanted
to be worshipped as a god while he was still alive.
Rising from the desert was an enormous obelisk,
the centerpiece of the temple.
It was not a traditional slender stone needle,
but shaped more like a pyramid.
Monumental walls enclosed it creating
a courtyard in which people could come to worship the sun.
The temple aligned perfectly on an east west
axis with the path of the sun.
So on the summer solstice every year,
the sun rose through the entrance,
traveled directly over the obelisk,
and set at the Western end.
This alignment is identical to that of the pyramids.
Records suggest that six of the pharaohs who followed Khufu
decided to build a sun temple as well as their pyramid
to underline their divine status to the people of Egypt.
But almost all of these temples are lost.
MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: We know that there were
six sun temples, and we actually so far
have discovered only two.
NARRATOR: Max hopes excavating this sun temple will shed light
on these kings power, and perhaps
help him crack one of the biggest mysteries in Egyptology
and find the other missing sun temples.
The problem is, Max is not the first to decode
this structure's secrets.
Early Egyptologists excavated here more than 100 years ago,
and left a mess of archaeological confusion
in their wake.
Well, this find is amazing because it's
a cover of matches left by the archaeologists
during their work.
NARRATOR: Along with their discarded matchboxes,
early 20th century excavators left 4,500 year old pottery
scattered across the site.
As you can see here, this area of the temple
is full of pot shells.
But unfortunately this material is completely useless for us
because it's out of a secure context.
Cannot tell us anything about the life of the temple.
NARRATOR: If Max can find undisturbed artifacts,
they might reveal clues the first archeologists missed.
Even the smallest of finds could be
crucial in the hunt for the lost sun temples of the pyramid age.
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