today we would like to introduce a topic about which we're going to film a number
of episodes that being what is commonly referred to as the Valley of the Kings
on the west bank of ancient Thebes modern Luxor and the ancient Egyptians
called it "set Maat" the place of truth now truth is a convenient translation
for maat but it's not the whole concept maat is really morality justice cosmic
order and because the King was charged with maintaining Maat
that's one of the main purposes of pharaonic kingship in ancient Egypt it's
appropriate that the King's final resting place would be called the place
of maat of truth so maat is essentially the opposite of what the Egyptians call
isefet so maat is order isefet is disorder but together they mean you have
an ordered world so everything for the Egyptians consists of balanced pairs the
Valley of the Kings as we call it becomes the burial place for really all
but one of the major kings of the new kingdom beginning with the reign of King
hatshepsut mm-hmm so hatshepsut when she is Queen has a
queenly tomb that was actually cleared and recorded by Howard Carter Wow before
Tutankhamun in one of the southern wadis of the great even
massive of the great Theban Hills in which the necropolis of ancient Thebes
are located and to define Wadi what is an Arabic term that refers to a dry
canyon and it's commonly used in Egyptology so it's a good word to know
dry watercourses anything from one Arroyo to a massive Canyon of some sort
so the Valley of the Kings is really a large Wadi with a number of Forks to it
located just behind the area in the western hills known as Deir el-Bahri to
examine a bit more the Kings we're gonna pull out a map and
show you how that wadi interrelates to some of the other geographical features
on the West Bank of Thebes when we think about the monuments of modern-day
Luxor or ancient Thebes we think about the big temples on the east bank Karnak
and Luxor and then the mortuary temples on the west bank, Deir el-Bahri, Medinet Habu
the Ramesseum and the Valley of the Kings is behind the cliffs of Deir el-
Bahri an interrelationship is not exactly obvious so so here's the
temple of hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri and as the crow flies
the tomb of hatshepsut is very close but if you go between the two points today
you have to go out of Deir el-Bahri, a round Dra abu Naga and back in to the
road that takes us into the Valley of the Kings most of the tombs are in this
main part of the body and this juxtaposition is very interesting the
tomb of Tutankhamen kV 62 and the numbers increase as more tombs are found
the tomb of Ramses the 6th which began as the tomb of Ramses the 5th is KV
9 Kings Valley 9 and the reason why fundamentally Tutankhamun's tomb was
found virtually intact is because when Ramses the 6th excavated his own tomb
the material that was excavated went on top of the tomb of Tutankhamun obscuring
it both from ancient tomb robbers those that were sent out by the pharaonic
administration at the end of the New Kingdom as well as anyone in more recent
times there's been some speculation that tell us the first might have begun the
tomb that hatshepsut completes mm-hmm but what we do know for certain is that
hatshepsut incorporated the burial of her father Thutmose the first in her to
in the Valley of the Kings he is later removed by Thutmose the third for whom
hatshepsut originally is regent and reburied in another - so there is a tomb
in the Valley of the Kings that was only for - almost the third but on the basis
of the history of his burial and reburial and based on the architecture
of the tomb it's fairly clear that the tomb that is often labeled as tomb of
Thutmose the first in the Valley of the Kings was actually excavated for Thutmose
the first by Thutmose the third complicated history we can go into this we
can go into this leader in much greater detail but this juxtaposition of a tomb
in the Valley of the Kings and the mortuary temple of Deir el-Bahri brings up a
really important point about ancient Egyptian tombs in general and that's
that all tombs have a private and a public component so the public component
the tomb Chapel is where you'd bring offerings or speak invocation offerings
such as a thousand of bread a thousand of beer thousand of fowl and a thousand
of beef because those are really the four things you don't want to do without
in ancient Egypt so from from very early on even apparently from the
first dynasty for the first dynasty rulers we seem to have this group of
burial place and burial monument along with some sort of a ritual center that's
located a little bit closer to the cultivation closer to the Nile Valley
where people come for celebrations that's really cool to see it going back
that far this is what's really interesting because one of the books
we'll be talking about later in later episodes we don't have time for that now
is it's time for it now well I think it's going to take a lot more than 10
years we just introduced it so we call the book of Amduat or Imy-duat that
which is in the netherworld sometimes it's written as though it means he who
is in the netherworld the ancient Egyptian original name for it seems to
be the book of the hidden chamber and in the fourth and the fifth hours of that
composition it's one of the two compositions along with book of gates
that emphasize the 12 hours of the night as major divisions in the book of Amduat
in the fourth and the fifth hours of the night
we see a series of descending corridors and passageways that lead down to an
oval very similar to what we find in the New Kingdom royal tombs in the Valley of
the Kings and this in the fourth and fifth hours of Amduat is called Rosetau
the place of hauling and the place of hauling interestingly first
comes up as the name for the Giza necropolis so what we see in Egypt is a
really interesting interdependence of actual architecture on perhaps religious
concepts and even religious tax and illustrations and then those very text
and illustrations made themselves come back and influenced architecture in some
way so we have descending passages and corridors and chambers and pyramid
architecture earlier and certainly in the New Kingdom royal tombs we walk
through an architectural realization dug into the mountainside of realization of
this Rosetau this descending series of corridors and passageways what we call
the underworld or the netherworld in ancient Egyptian is the Duat so it's
spelled up with a star hieroglyph followed by a T and often a
determinative that is the same designation as a building what we would
call the "per" sign or that house determinative and sometimes the star is in a
circle yes which is really significant because the circular form of the burial
chamber the oval form of the burial chamber is also the oval form of the
sarcophagus and interestingly that oval form seems to be related to a snake's
egg as well as a womb so you go back to this moment in the netherworld where the
Sun God descends this is all describing his journey through the 12 hours of the
night and he descends into the very lowest hours into the fourth and fifth
and sixth hour of the night and he joins together with the waters of
Nun these chaotic waters that enable the sun-god to be reborn and within
these chaotic waters is this circuiting the serpent's egg is referred to as the
was the chamber of Sokar the egg or the Oval of Sokar and the chamber of Sokar
that's down in the bowels of the netherworld where the ordered world the
created world comes back into contact with these chaotic waters this abysmal
substance called Nun that represents the oneness out of which creation is a
separation into an infinite number of balanced pairs when you walk into a
royal tomb of the New Kingdom you are walking into a model of the first half
of the night journey of the Sun and what happens after the middle of the night
happens in this realm beyond what we can experience it happens in some parallel
extension of the royal tomb out beyond this existence and what happens in the
egg of sokar is that the king descends into the sarcophagus which is a model of
the egg of sokar where these chaotic waters that are destructive for order
and life but that represent the potentiality for rebirth for the dead
the sun-god goes back into those waters turned in the nether world books youth
flesh the corpse of the Sun and is reborn so the King would go down into an
oval into an oval sarcophagus similar to this late 18th century Chinese export
for the American market tureen here and the king would be reborn so we did show
- Tutankhamun Tut lives in the slanting pines tureen
we've never got to use him didactically before perfect moment