"(NARRATOR) For over 4,500 years, people have marveled at the Great Pyramid of Giza." "The ancient Egyptians had a remarkable grasp of science and technology, which even today is hard to comprehend." "This is Egypt, land of the Pharaohs, a land where east meets west, and where ancient and modern worlds collide." "A country that was founded around the banks of the ribbon-like Nile that courses gently through these ancient lands." "This is a country proud of its heritage, and for "Pyramid" director Jonathan Stamp, this was the logical place to start." "If you're going to make a show about the Great Pyramid, you've got to go to Egypt, so that's precisely what we did." "We thought the most original way of looking at the building of the Great Pyramid was to look at it through the eyes of the men who built it, the real hands-on builders." "So we did some research and talked to experts in the field, and we gradually put together a story that goes all the way from a tiny village where our builder grows up - the village from which he's taken by a royal official" "who conscripts him, brings him up the Nile - all the way to the pyramid site." "It then follows his life there, from the moment he arrives up to the moment that, as an old man, we meet him." "We were telling a story about the conscripts who build the Great Pyramid, and we know that many of the conscripts came from Aswan, but that wasn't the only reason we went." "The real reason is that it is exceptionally beautiful." "It's probably one of the most beautiful stretches of the Nile." "It's also not very built up, and it meant that we could very easily create an atmosphere that looked like Egypt 4,500 years ago, without having to avoid lots of ugly buildings and power lines." "We looked into whether there were any boats existing in Egypt that we could just use that were accurate to the time " "2,500 years BC is the time we're talking about - and the answer was, there wasn't one." "So we had to start from scratch." "So my design team, particularly a man called Nick Somerville, went back to basics, started looking at books, talking to experts, and off the basis of a plan we found in one particular book, we took that to a boatyard in a place called Rosetta," "home to the last great craftsmen who still build boats in Egypt today in a way that they would have been built all that time ago." "{NARRATOR) Chief Production Designer Nick Somerville..." "As the winds always blew from the north to the south, they always went upstream with sail and downstream with the current." "So, in terms of coming from Aswan with granite blocks, they'd have just used the drift of the river." "Because we need several different boats, we've used a kind of average, so we can show it as a working boat and as a conscript boat, as a pot-carrying boat or a rock-carrying boat." "So it's a generalization of that period, rather than a specific one." "{STAMP) The river at Aswan is a difficult piece of tideway." "The current runs very fast at Aswan." "It can run at four or five knots, and the wind blows quite hard." "The combination of those two things makes it a difficult place to sail - almost impossible to control and often very expensive." " What's going on up there?" " Who's up there?" "They've been standing there since..." "That's the extras." "{STAMP) The boat wouldn't do what we wanted it to do when we wanted it to do it." "If we'd put a hidden engine in the boat, that would have helped, although then the boat wouldn't have behaved as naturally as it did." "It certainly behaved as a boat 4,500 years ago on the Nile would behave, so in the end, it looked authentic, but it was just..." "It was a nightmare, frankly, to film." "We're filming a sequence in which our young conscripts are going from the village to Giza, where they have to build the pyramid." "And we had a fairly set idea of what we'd try to film that day, but there were occasions - and this was one - when what happened on location affected how the drama unfolded." "While we were getting the camera ready - always an interminable process - the conscripts suddenly just started to sing to entertain themselves." "I suspect that in 2500 BC they sang to entertain themselves." "They were on the river a lot, and singing was a way to pass the time." "It was a way of celebrating, like a form of prayer." "And also, if you were doing rhythmic work, it was a way of keeping rhythm." "(SINGING)" "Some of the songs we heard on the Nile at Aswan" "I felt were not very much changed over four millennia." "{NARRATOR) The river at Aswan is so busy today with holidaymakers taking a cruise on one of the numerous liners or aboard more traditional vessels like the felucca sailboats." "The west bank of the Nile is home to the tomb of the Aga Khan." "Following his death in 1957, his wife oversaw the construction of the beautiful mausoleum." "Because the sun sets in the west, the ancient Egyptians considered the west bank sacred." "The granite boulders rising from the Nile at Aswan are often believed to resemble a herd of bathing elephants, the largest of which is known as Elephantine Island." "The island is also home to the temple of the ram-headed god Khnum." "Worshipped as the fertility god of the Nile," "Khnum's followers believed he had the power to control the Nile's water level." "This would have a profound effect on the lives of most who resided on its banks." "The temple priests monitored the rise and fall of the water level at this stone staircase." "This is an ancient Nilometer, 90 steps leading down to the Nile, which served as a river gage." "A high level indicated that the annual flood would be heavy enough to irrigate and yield a good crop, and if the crop was good, that would mean more revenue for the taxman." "Another reason for using Aswan is that it boasts a majestic position on the eastern side of the Nile, and watching the sunset here is something you'll never forget." "To truly understand the mystery of the Great Pyramid, you have to go to another place, a place called Sakkara, where the first pyramid ever built in Egypt still stands." "We wanted to include Sakkara in the story for that reason, and a natural way to do it was to have Nakht pass Sakkara on his way north on the Nile." "{NAKHT) Of course, I immediately thought of my grandfather." "So he had built his great stone steps." "I thought, "It's the same for Deba and me." ""That's what we're being sent to do. "" "If you go to Sakkara today, it's still impossible to visit it without a sense of wonderment and awe." "{NARRATOR) The step pyramid at Sakkara was believed to be the first stone structure of its kind, commissioned by King Zoser in 2686 BC." "Sakkara was the funerary complex of the area at this time and was host to a myriad of tombs and temples." "It was the Pharaoh's chief architect, Imhotep, who took the bold step of constructing a pyramid, rather than a traditional underground burial chamber." "Sakkara would be a major location, a place where we did several of our largest builds, because Giza itself is absolutely overrun with tourists." "It's also, for all the pictures you see of it in the desert, actually, in reality, really part of a suburb, so it's not a very pretty place and certainly doesn't look anything like it would have 4,500 years ago." "So we needed somewhere nearby that had a very similar geography and a good view of the desert just beyond, and this particular site that we found at Sakkara was perfect for the job." "It's one thing to find the right locations, it's another thing to get the costumes right." "So we went to great lengths to get authentic costumes for everybody, from the lowliest pyramid-building conscript, right the way up to the King himself." "We had an extremely experienced and expert costume team to work on this." "The source of their best research was the fabulous Cairo museum, one of the great museums in the world, where there are a lot of 4th-Dynasty costumes still surviving." "I understand - they're the experts, not me - that the crucial single thing that they did was get the right fabric." "No cotton in Egypt then." "Working with a form of linen, which we think is completely authentic to the 4th Dynasty." "They told me that once the fabric is right, everything else follows, because the fabric falls in a certain way and it catches the light in a certain way." "The crucial character in this story is King Khufu, because he's the person for whom the pyramid was built." "Difficult thing to do, to film great royals, great kings." "Can let you down." "Can look a bit inauthentic." "But we were extremely fortunate, because the people helping us as our location managers and organizers - a father and son team - both looked, by sheer coincidence, extremely royal." "They're Coptic Egyptians, and the Copts believe that they are the Egyptians who are most closely related, genetically, to the ancient Egyptians." "And if you look at the statue that survives in the Cairo Museum of Khufu and compare it to the father of that team, they actually do look remarkably alike." "Young Khufu's the one who really appears." "You only see old Khufu once." "One thing he had to do for his art - as a young man of 16, I thought it was extremely brave - is that he had to be completely shaved for the role, because we know the King had a religious function." "He was the chief priest, and priests had to shave themselves completely as part of their religious observance." " Can you feel it coming off?" " No." "{NARRATOR) Assistant Costume Designer David Wolfe was always on-set to make sure the costumes were just right." "This is one of Khufu's outfits." "He has more decorative belts and more decorative collars and everything, which is later on." "At the moment, he's wearing a single crown." "He's wearing what is just a very simple gold collar, which is counterbalanced at the back." "Further down, we have the King's kilt, which is actually worn by most of the Pharaohs." " Khufu's cartouche..." " ..with the chicken." "With the chicken." "And the belt itself is a representation of the Nile." "I feel great." "I mean, it feels really stupid for me, but great for them." "It's all for the sake of Jonathan and his movie, that's all." "{NARRATOR) Finally, Nakht arrived at the pyramid complex in Giza, where he would spend the rest of his working life." "Recreating the pyramid was probably the hardest thing we had to do, so we had to go to a variety of locations." "Probably the biggest location that we went to was at a place called Abu Roash." "Abu Roash is near Giza, about five miles away, and it's the site of an unfinished pyramid." "We went there because it shows what a pyramid looks like if you stopped it half way through - particularly what the interior of a pyramid would look like, the central passageways and the chambers." "That was something we wanted to create." "We knew if we had a basic set, we could modify it with our visual effects team to look exactly as we wanted it to, but we needed the basic set to go with." "Once we went to Abu Roash, we immediately could see its potential to be the half-finished Great Pyramid, if you like, and so we filmed for two days there." "We filmed a variety of sequences, including the death of Deba." "(CRIES OUT)" "{NARRATOR) All the reconstructions were shot on 35mm film, usually reserved for feature films." "So, for the first time, the BBC History Department used feature film camera equipment on one of their landmark projects." "Once all the action was in the can, it was time to merge real footage with state-of-the-art computer graphics, and using the magic of television, the BBC was able to bring back to life the ancient pyramid construction site" "and the conscripts who dedicated their lives to it." "We estimate it took the ancient Egyptians about 20 years to build the Great Pyramid, and we know that it took 18 months to make our film, and I couldn't help but be struck by a kind of similarity," "which is that both projects required state-of-the-art technology, the latest technology that was available, and, in a way, both are tributes to the teams that made them."