"NARRATOR:" "We all die... and we all wonder:" "what happens after our hearts stop beating?" "Few have imagined a more terrifying and elaborate afterlife than the ancient Egyptians." "Their vision of death required an arduous journey... a struggle to make it through a dangerous underworld." "Their only guide... collections of powerful spells called the Books of the Dead." "Now, travel these treacherous pathways with one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs... and track modern archaeologists as they unearth key finds that will take us down deep... into the Egyptian underworld." "1 ,200 years before the birth of Christ," "Seti the First takes his last breath." "He was one of Egypt's greatest kings during Egypt's golden age." "A warrior in life... in death he'll face a battle to end all battles." "His soul takes flight-- and his life on Earth is finished." "Like all royal Egyptians, Seti is mummified." "To them, the physical body is all important." "If Seti's body is well preserved, his soul will recognize him later in the underworld... and they will reunite." "When his mummification is complete," "Seti is buried in Egypt's Valley of the Kings." "Now his fight for resurrection begins." "He must embark on a journey through the ancient Egyptian version of hell." "To succeed, Seti will need a detailed guide through a terrifying realm." "His guide..." "called the Book of Gates... is painted on the walls of Seti's tomb." "He's met in the underworld by a cordon of dead souls." "To them he appears as Ra, the ram-headed god of the sun." "Few understand this transformation better than archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass." "HAWASS:" "When a king die, he become the sun god." "He united with the sun as one person." "And therefore the battle of the sun god for the netherworld, it is the battle of the pharaoh." "NARRATOR:" "To the ancient Egyptians, the sun was the holy of holies." "They thought it literally died in the west each evening." "And they prayed it would rise again in the east the next morning." "The king's journey through death therefore paralleled the path the sun took every night." "HAWASS:" "The biggest fear for the ancient Egyptian... if the king and the sun god will not make this trip, the world will end." "NARRATOR:" "Seti's voyage will follow an afterlife version of the Nile River." "Tonight, he must pass through 1 2 gates-- one for each hour of the night." "But it's no cruise down the Nile." "Each gate is guarded by writhing serpents." "SALlMA lKRAM:" "Their job is to guard the gates against anyone who is not pure enough or who does not have the right magical strength to pass from one level to the next." "NARRATOR:" "Like many modern religious believers," "Egyptians seeking eternal life needed a pure spirit." "But they also needed magical knowledge." "Seti cannot pass through the gates unless he knows and speaks the secret name of the snakes that guard them." "HAWASS:" "If the king will say the name, it shows in the mind of the ancient Egyptian that he is the right one to go." "He is the pure one." "He is the magical one." "And if he will say it, he will go through." "This is why they write it so carefully in the text." "NARRATOR:" "Seti was supposed to learn the names by reading them on the walls of his tomb." "And now his journey depends on it." "When he utters the name... they retreat... and he can pass." "But before the night is done, he'll have to pass 1 1 more gates... facing demons bent on his destruction." "To destroy the pharaoh is to destroy the sun." "HAWASS:" "For the ancient Egyptian, all life depended on the sun." "If the sun did not rise, it would be endless night and everything would die." "NARRATOR:" "Over thousands of years," "Egyptians evolved elaborate ways to make the journey of death predictable... and help guarantee a life everlasting." "This quest for immortality is at the very root of Egyptian civilization." "HAWASS:" "The journey for the afterlife, to the ancient Egyptian, was real." "It was their life." "It was everything." "NARRATOR:" "Guaranteeing eternal life meant massive numbers of people and resources had to be organized." "Armies of workers had to be fed." "Artists had to be trained." "HAWASS:" "I actually say the pyramids and tombs built Egypt because their idea about death and the afterlife and immortality made them to create great architecture." "NARRATOR:" "Over time, they laid the foundations of a civilization that lasted 3,000 years." "Everything starts in the tomb." "Ikram:" "Tombs, whether they were for kings or for nobles, or anyone else for that matter, they recreate the cosmos... and they act as basically resurrection machines whereby the king's spirit gets to be reborn and refused into his body so he can live forever." "NARRATOR:" "No other tomb in the Valley of the Kings sets out to achieve that goal with the same zeal as the tomb of Seti the First." "Here, craftsmen spent years creating a perfect portal to the afterlife." "Every inch is covered in images imbued with magical power to help the pharaoh on his way." "HAWASS:" "The tomb of Seti the First in the Valley of the Kings is the most beautiful tomb that the ancient Egyptian ever designed." "It is the longest." "It is beautifully designed and you can really see that there is a guideline." "There is a map that the king and the sun god is going to use for the way of the resurrection of the afterlife." "NARRATOR:" "Today, in the Valley of the Kings, archaeologist Zahi Hawass is trying to make sense of that mysterious route." "For the past five years, he has overseen the restoration of Seti's tomb." "HAWASS:" "The tomb of Seti, there is many destructions happen to the tomb, and that's why the tomb is closed to the public now." "And this tomb is actually, is unique because the idea of the underworld and the passages can be seen clearly." "It's a precious tomb." "NARRATOR:" "Hawass is excavating a strange tunnel that angles down below Seti's burial chamber." "He thinks it's connected to Seti's quest for immortality." "But he can't be sure how." "HAWASS:" "You see a small hidden tunnel to the south." "That is the mysterious tunnel." "That is the magical one." "NARRATOR:" "For Hawass, digging out this tunnel is the culmination of a dream he's had his entire career." "40 years ago, when he was a young archaeologist in the Valley of the Kings, he got a tip from a man named Sheikh Ali." "For generations, Ali's family excavated ancient tombs-- sometimes with permission from the Egyptian antiquities department, sometimes not." "HAWASS:" "This man was a huge man, with charisma, a moustache." "He took me one day here." "He said, "Young man, we believe that at the end of this tunnel the burial chamber of Seti the First existed."" "We had the permission in 1960 from the antiquities department to excavate, and we began to enter the tunnel, but they stopped us." "They were afraid that the tomb will fall down." "And I said, "Sheikh Ali, what do you want?"" "He said, "lf you become an important archaeologist, I want you to excavate this tunnel."" "NARRATOR:" "Hawass knows Seti's burial treasure has never been found." "And there's another curious detail:" "when the tomb was first excavated in 181 7, this ornate sarcophagus was hiding the entrance to the tunnel, but the sarcophagus was empty." "Some, like Sheikh Ali, came to believe the tunnel leads to Seti's true burial chamber." "It's a long shot, but now, some 40 years later," "Zahi Hawass is trying to find out if Sheikh Ali's theory that the burial chamber is hidden here could be true." "The quest is taking Hawass on his own underworld journey... some 492 feet below the surface of the earth." "By now Seti has made it through the first and second gates." "But as he approaches the third hour of his journey, he must reckon with a threat familiar to believers of many modern religions:" "the fires of damnation." "For Seti, it's a test of purity." "Ikram:" "The lake of fire is this huge lake, which is made of fire." "If you are one of the damned, then you are consumed by the fire." "NARRATOR:" "It's a challenge to every common man's soul." "But because the pharaoh is merged with the sun god, he has a unique role during this hour." "Ikram:" "For Seti and the sun god, because they are amongst the blessed, they can go through and, in fact, they decide to some extent who gets to be blessed and who gets to be damned." "NARRATOR:" "But Seti won't always go unchallenged on this journey." "He'll have to face his nemesis, Apophis, a powerful demon snake that represents evil incarnate to all ancient Egyptians, much like snakes do in many cultures today." "On Seti's journey, the serpent demon threatens to plunge the world into chaos." "Before he died, Seti battled a worldly chaos... helping to bring about a golden age in Egyptian history." "HAWASS:" "Seti the First was one of the greatest kings of the new kingdom." "He built many impressive things." "But he was also a warrior." "NARRATOR:" "In his 1 1 years as pharaoh, Seti brought order to a land scarred by religious and social upheaval." "He defined and secured Egypt's borders in Palestine and Nubia, and defeated invaders from the Libyan desert." "But overshadowing all that," "Seti was focused on the day he would die." "Because in death he was merged with the sun god, his resurrection was crucial." "By Seti's time, Egyptians had developed elaborate instructions to make sure that happened." "HAWASS:" "If you look at the tomb of Seti, you will see how the ancient Egyptian carefully designed the gates and the roads as a map." "But the most important are the four books that is written inside the tombs." "And these kind of books are like a tour guide for the king to go safely to the netherworld." "NARRATOR:" "For the Egyptians, committing an idea permanently in paint or writing was to guarantee it would happen." "The first evidence of such magical texts comes 1 ,000 years before Seti, in the tomb of a pharaoh named Unas." "Called the Pyramid Texts, they are the oldest religious writing in Egypt." "Ikram:" "The Pyramid Texts that you see in Unas's pyramid are quite entertaining because they're clearly inscribed for the king to use." "Now the king is in his burial chamber:" "he's dead." "He is supposed to rise up as he's being resurrected and to collect the magic or the power from these inscriptions." "So he uses that last bit of magic to go shooting out of his pyramid to become one with the eternal stars." "NARRATOR:" "By Seti's time, the instructions had become far more elaborate." "Plastered everywhere in Seti's tomb, they became a kind of sacred script for the pharaoh to follow." "HAWASS:" "The 26 tombs in the Valley of the Kings are different from each other." "You will not find one tomb is similar to the other one because this is how every king imagined the afterworld." "NARRATOR:" "Seti's tomb represents the high-water mark for the Egyptian idea of an underworld journey... the result of centuries of evolving notions of death." "90 miles north of Seti's tomb," "German archaeologist Gunter Dreyer is tracing this evolutionary path." "His quest: figure out how the earliest pharaohs imagined the afterlife." "So he's come here to what he thinks is "ground zero"... the royal cemetery of Abydos." "DREYER:" "The roots of ancient Egypt are here at Abydos-- the first ideas probably of afterlife." "At least this is the place where we first can see it, trace it in the architecture of the tombs." "NARRATOR:" "So Dreyer is re-excavating one of Egypt's oldest royal tombs-- the First Dynasty burial of a king named Djer." "Djer lived about 1 ,700 years before Seti." "But even then, Egyptians had a clear concept of life after death." "DREYER:" "Most interesting is that niche over there to the southwest, in the western wall, and that we may explain as a magic exit for the resurrecting king who could leave his tomb... towards the opening of that impressive wadi," "which obviously was regarded to be the entrance to the afterlife." "NARRATOR:" "Dreyer knows that by Djer's time, early ideas of taking food, wine and beer to sustain the dead in the afterlife were still evolving." "In the First Dynasty, pharaohs also took treasure, weapons and perhaps...even servants." "Archaeologists believe these early pharaohs killed their servants so they could accompany the king in the afterlife." "They were sacrificed and buried in group enclosures surrounding the royal tomb." "The pharaoh Djer was one of the last to practice human sacrifice at his tomb." "And Dreyer is finding he likely took plenty of companions with him." "Some were deceased family members and advisors." "Some were sacrificed servants." "DREYER:" "Djer had more than 200, almost 300 subsidiary burials, and very little is known of them." "We think that a lot of the equipment of the king's chamber and all these subsidiary burials is still there in the debris." "NARRATOR:" "Unlike Seti, the walls of Djer's tomb are blank." "The idea of carving the walls with instructions for the pharaohs is still centuries away." "At this point, the dead king simply passed through the magic door and into another world." "It's far from the complex journey that will evolve by Seti's time." "But it carries with it an idea that will resonate with other faiths in centuries to come." "DREYER:" "Here at Abydos, for the first time, we see the idea of resurrection." "They had an idea already developed of physical resurrection, which became so important in Christianity much later." "NARRATOR:" "By the time Seti the First embarked on his afterlife journey, the idea of resurrection had reached full flower." "Inside Seti's tomb, archaeologist Zahi Hawass is following clues he thinks may lead him to Seti's burial chamber... the place where his resurrection process began." "Seti's tomb is cut into the rock of the Valley of the Kings and descends through multiple levels." "When it was first discovered in the early 19th century, it measured 310 feet long-- longer than the Statue of Liberty is tall." "When 19th-century excavators found the tunnel, they traveled inside 328 feet." "But now Hawass has excavated far deeper into the tunnel." "It's a tunnel with no obvious purpose." "HAWASS:" "It's unique, because in the tomb of Seti the First, this tunnel is not existed in any tomb at all." "It has no decoration, means it was cut for a reason." "NARRATOR:" "He doesn't know what that reason is." "The only way to find out is to keep digging deeper into the underworld." "On his underworld journey," "Seti has reached the fourth gate of the night." "As he chants the magic words to pass through, the demon Apophis is trailing him, waiting for a chance to strike." "The idea of being challenged by demons in the afterlife is very old." "It represented the belief that there would be a final reckoning after death." "It's an idea that still resonates down the centuries." "Ikram:" "You know, why are people good, nowadays, if they're monotheistic?" "They're good because they're afraid if they're bad," "God will punish them and they will go to hell, right?" "It's a matter of faith, and it's the same way I think the Egyptians believed it." "NARRATOR:" "The Egyptian arch-demon Apophis bears an uncanny resemblance to the Judeo-Christian idea of Satan, an evil being bent on destroying humanity." "HAWASS:" "Apophis was represented in the mind of the ancient Egyptian as the devil." "And if the king and the sun god cannot conquer him, the cosmos would be finished." "NARRATOR:" "It's no accident he's a snake." "The Egyptian underworld was a place filled with creatures inspired by the natural world around them." "Those animals sometimes combined and morphed into the gods and nightmarish demons that would haunt the afterlife journey." "Ikram:" "Some of these demons that were created by the ancient Egyptians might have had their basis in the idea not just of night terrors, but things that might lurk underneath in the water." "NARRATOR:" "Apophis will continue to stalk Seti throughout the night, culminating in a showdown in the tenth hour." "For now, Seti makes his way further into the hellish 1 2-hour ordeal." "In the fourth hour, he resurrects mummies who've been waiting for him." "In hour five, Seti and an army of gods battle and tie up Apophis, the serpent demon... but Seti knows from his guide that Apophis will be back." "In the same hour, the pharaoh meets the four races of man" "Nubians, Egyptians, Asiatics and Libyans." "Their presence shows that the Egyptian afterlife was open to anyone." "It was a universal reality." "As he approaches the darkest hour," "Seti is about to come face-to-face with the most important god of the underworld" "Osiris." "For Egyptians, Osiris is central because he sits in judgment over all the dead." "In life, Egyptians believed Osiris was the first pharaoh, that he was murdered and thrown into the Nile by his jealous brother." "Resurrected by his wife, Isis, his green skin symbolizes his divine power to create new life." "Archaeologist Gunter Dreyer knows that Egyptians revered Osiris as their first king." "But he thinks they went much further than that here at the tomb of the pharaoh Djer, creating a cult of Osiris and worshiping him as the first resurrected pharaoh-god." "Dreyer knows that 1 ,000 years after Djer's reign," "Egyptians tried to find the tomb of Osiris." "And since Djer's tomb is one of the oldest known even to the ancient Egyptians, this seemed to be the most likely place." "DREYER:" "This place was once the holiest site of all Egypt." "And it became a center of pilgrimage for centuries." "NARRATOR:" "Dreyer believes this may have happened because of a key detail:" "he thinks that in the ancient Egyptian language, the pronunciation of the two names was similar." "So it was easy to confuse the identity of the tomb." "Once Egyptians began worshiping the lord of the underworld here, the site blossomed." "DREYER:" "As the tomb of Osiris, it became the center of pilgrimage for, for generations, for centuries." "Each Egyptian wanted to come here to make his offering to Osiris and ask him for a good afterlife." "There are offerings found from kings of the new kingdom like Tutankhamun." "And all around here you see millions of potsherds from offering vessels left here by pilgrims." "And one could, I think, compare this site to modern Mecca." "NARRATOR:" "Like the birthplace of Islam... or Calvary, the site where Jesus died, the sanctity of the site is a measure of the devotion paid to that god." "Seti recognized that power." "Just before hour six on his afterlife journey, when he arrives at the judgment hall of Osiris, he merges with the lord of the underworld." "Ikram:" "So he and Osiris could, in fact, almost be one and the same." "The elite, once they had passed all of these various tests, had one big exam as it were, where they would be judged in the hall of the god Osiris." "And there, their heart would be weighed against the feather of truth." "And if it was in balance, then they could continue on into the afterlife safely." "NARRATOR:" "But, again, Seti is not subject to this test." "Instead, since he is already merged with the god Osiris," "Seti is the final judge of other dead Egyptians." "The heart was the center of wisdom to the Egyptians, and the dwelling place of the soul." "In death, the heart of an ordinary man is weighed before Osiris." "It's the ultimate test of purity." "Ikram:" "If your heart was heavier than the feather of truth, you would be thrown to Ammit the Gobbler." "And Ammit is a monstrous creature." "It's made of crocodile and hippopotamus and lion and is quite terrifying... because if Ammit eats you, you are basically annihilated, which would have been the worst possible thing for any ancient Egyptian." "NARRATOR:" "This ordinary man's heart is impure... heavy with sin." "So Osiris pronounces him..." "destroyed." "[roar]" "Fear of eternal destruction drove the Egyptians from the very earliest days." "Life along the Nile was good." "No one wanted to part with it." "Archaeologist Gunter Dreyer knows how far the ancients were willing to go to maintain the good life." "At the First Dynasty tomb of the pharaoh Djer..." "Dreyer saw evidence that they killed the pharaoh's servants just so he could have them in the afterlife." "But now Dreyer has moved to a Second Dynasty site, where the picture is not so clear." "Some 300 miles north of his excavation at the tomb of Djer," "Dreyer is digging in Saqqara, in the tomb of a king named Ninetjer." "DREYER:" "There is something rather mysterious about this tomb." "We want a complete layout of the tombs to understand the ideas behind them." "NARRATOR:" "Dreyer wants to know how the earliest Egyptian ideas of the tomb evolved." "In the First Dynasty, King Djer's tomb was simple." "And Djer likely believed all he had to do was walk through a magical door into his afterlife." "400 years later, in the Third Dynasty, things are far more complex." "Here, the pharaoh Djoser built the first step pyramid at Saqqara-- a huge royal tomb that may have served as the pharaoh's majestic stairway to the sky." "In between these two very different tombs is King Ninetjer's Second Dynasty tomb." "Here, Dreyer hopes to find a crucial missing link in afterlife beliefs." "He thinks that when Ninetjer was buried, there was probably some kind of primitive pyramid structure above this foundation." "But it's not the missing pyramid Dreyer finds intriguing." "It's what lies underground." "The tomb had a magical door to the underworld as in the earlier tomb, but here a mysterious maze of tunnels surrounds the king's burial chamber." "Dreyer is fascinated because there's never been a labyrinth like this found inside a tomb this old." "With no hieroglyphs here to show him," "Dreyer is searching for clues to tell him what the pharaoh planned to do here once he died." "DREYER:" "It's talking architecture, I would call it." "The shape of the galleries, which at the first glance looks like a labyrinth, was shaped intentionally to represent something." "The subterranean galleries of Ninetjer, which are about five meters below the present desert level." "And the whole galleries extend over an area of about 75 by 50 meters, more than a hundred chambers and corridors." "NARRATOR:" "That's a lot of chambers for one king." "DREYER:" "Well, we may assume that he was richly equipped... wardrobe of the king, instruments and weapons and jewelry and things like that." "NARRATOR:" "But something doesn't add up about the chambers." "They're not quite right for just storing afterlife equipment." "DREYER:" "And other tombs, in earlier ones, we have large storage rooms, but here it's all bent, there is no right angle." "Some chambers are so small that they could maybe contain just a few vessels." "The whole design of those chambers seems quite unpractical for storage of goods." "NARRATOR:" "Dreyer has a hunch he'll find clues in the looming tomb of a next door neighbor, inside the pharaoh Djoser's step pyramid." "He reigned only about 60 years after Ninetjer." "Underneath the step pyramid..." "Dreyer sees something remarkably similar to what he sees in Ninetjer's tomb." "Miles of tunnels and hundreds of rooms surround the king's burial chamber." "Dreyer thinks he knows where Djoser got this grand idea." "Though much smaller, Ninetjer's tomb has the same kind of chambers and tunnels." "DREYER:" "There are chambers with model beds, banks where people slept on." "There are rooms with small benches on both sides, probably representing dining rooms." "Bathrooms and toilets." "And another part of the tomb, which is very irregular, seems to represent roads, open places and facades of buildings with dummy entrances." "The whole impression is, really, this is a small village around the burial chamber." "NARRATOR:" "He thinks Ninetjer built these chambers as a parallel royal palace and village, where he would live after he died." "Dreyer believes it's the earliest evidence of a pharaoh building a figurative home inside his tomb." "DREYER:" "The tomb of Ninetjer is filling a gap between the early development from the First Dynasty and what we see in Djoser's precinct for the step pyramid." "And this missing link we were looking for here, and we got it." "NARRATOR: 1 ,400 years after Ninetjer, during Seti's reign, the focus isn't on building a palace... it's on guaranteeing the pharaoh's successful journey through the afterlife." "But some traditions persisted." "Seti still wanted to take the good life with him." "So he undoubtedly stocked his tomb with treasure, weapons, furnishing-- and plenty of servants." "Unlike earlier kings, Seti didn't kill the servants he'd take with him into the afterlife." "Instead, he took only figurines called shawabtis." "When the pharaoh needed them, shawabtis would magically come to life inside the tomb." "Ikram:" "Because it wouldn't be a very perfect life if you had to work in the afterworld." "The shawabti, word shawabti means "one who answers,"" "so when you are called upon by the gods or anyone else to carry out some work, in your place the shawabti will leap up and say, "Here I am."" "I will cook, clean, or do whatever." "NARRATOR:" "Discoveries in the tomb of King Tut reveal just how important shawabtis were." "HAWASS:" "For Tutankhamun we see hundreds of shawabtis, because they needed to put one shawabti for every day." "NARRATOR:" "But Seti was a much more powerful king than Tut... and he was probably buried with many more riches... and shawabtis." "19th-century explorers found hundreds of shawabtis when they first discovered Seti's massive tomb, but no major artifact has come out of the tomb since then." "That just changed." "Deep inside Seti's tomb, Hawass has made a discovery-- small but significant." "HAWASS:" "The most important thing and first that we found were this shawabti." "If you look at the style of this shawabti, it's a typical Dynasty 19." "It means the reign of Seti the First." "But the interesting thing, that we found this other shawabti, beautiful one, actually, made of wood." "NARRATOR:" "This find may be significant not because of its value or beauty, but because of where it was found... inside the tunnel." "HAWASS:" "It was found here:" "Which is also very strange." "Why the shawabti would be hidden here?" "NARRATOR:" "In Tut's tomb, the shawabtis were found along with all the treasures and tools he would use in his daily life." "But we can't know if the shawabtis were placed in this tunnel to somehow help Seti with his daily life." "And without more evidence, Hawass still doesn't know exactly how Seti planned to use this tunnel." "HAWASS:" "That is the dangerous areas now." "NARRATOR:" "As Hawass digs deeper," "Seti descends further into the underworld." "Merged with the sun god, Ra, the pharaoh reaches hour six... the very darkest of his afterlife journey... when Apophis strikes." "But Egyptians wouldn't dream of leaving their great pharaoh to fight this battle on his own." "HAWASS:" "Other gods, like an army, will come to defeat Apophis for Seti and the sun god to go safely to the underworld." "NARRATOR:" "Protected from the demon, he makes his way to perhaps the most important moment of the night." "When he died, Seti's soul left his body." "Now his soul returns... recognizes his body and reunites with him." "He's joined by other mummies eager to bask in the glow of the sun god... and reunite with their own souls." "If body and soul remain separate," "Seti can never be resurrected." "Reunited, he can." "It's a transformative moment for Seti... and marks a critical turn in the night." "Fortified by his soul... he and his entourage speed toward dawn." "They pass through another gate into hour seven, where they order a group of demons to punish the damned." "In hour eight, mummies turn over on their beds... a key stage in the process of coming back to life." "Hour nine: dead souls rejuvenate in primeval waters... on their way to rebirth." "In the same hour, Seti has a chance to settle some scores." "Enemies of the sun god are rounded up and a serpent under Seti's power torments them." "He's near the end of his journey, but he'll soon face one last battle with the arch-demon Apophis." "Hawass is now 33 feet further into the tunnel in Seti's tomb, when he finds another clue that the tunnel was intentional, built to serve a purpose." "HAWASS:" "Look how it's amazing here... that after this ramp, which is like 35 feet, and now you can see we are having stairs, ancient stairs." "This is another level, this is another level, and this is the other one." "NARRATOR:" "When Sheik Ali explored this tunnel in 1960, he never made it to the end-- he was forced to stop because it was too dangerous." "HAWASS:" "Oh, ah:" "Man:" "You all right?" "You okay?" "HAWASS:" "We reached now to about 232 feet under the ground, and you can imagine how it's dangerous." "A big stone, it fell on my feet." "NARRATOR:" "Hawass would later find out that he'd broken his foot, but right now he just wants to keep going." "HAWASS:" "Everyone expected that the tunnel will end, but we found there is more." "It's 400 feet now." "We still did not reach the end of the tunnel." "I think there is no camera reach that far at all." "NARRATOR:" "At this point, the tunnel is 450 feet long-- that's equal to the height of the Great Pyramid... and it may go further." "But Hawass must stop here." "It's the end of the dig season, when summer temperatures rise too high to work down here... and he still doesn't know where the tunnel will lead." "If there is no secret burial chamber," "Hawass does have an idea of what the tunnel might have been for." "HAWASS:" "We are under the ground 400 feet, which is a perfect place for the quest of immortality." "NARRATOR:" "The quest for immortality and the Nile were closely linked." "One theory is that Seti dug this tunnel in a bid to connect his tomb with the ground waters of that sacred river." "Seti has reached the tenth hour of the night, and the sun will soon rise over the Nile." "But only if Seti can make it past the final attack by the demon snake." "Apophis knows it's his last chance to devour the pharaoh." "Seti again calls on an army of gods." "They wield magic nets that gather strength from the sun god's power." "Together, they keep the demon back." "At the moment just before dawn, the gods of order and light have finally defeated the demon of chaos." "In the eleventh hour, Seti nears his goal in triumph... led by a procession of gods and goddesses heralding his resurrection as the sun." "As he approaches the morning sky," "Egyptians believe the pharaoh changes into symbolic figures... from a man to a griffin... a falcon to a scarab beetle-- the Egyptian symbol of the rising sun." "For the ancient Egyptians, sunrise was nothing less than a religious experience." "HAWASS:" "They're watching the sun." "They know that the sun god, Ra, is there." "And that is very important for them." "Their universal god is giving them light, warm, kindness." "The world is now happiness because the king become a god." "NARRATOR:" "He's survived fire...monsters... and evil demons." "And Egyptians believed the pharaoh's odyssey repeated every night... when the sun disappeared, until it rose again." "Now Seti, merged with Ra, sails across the sky... shining his light on Egypt for another day." "To ancient Egyptians, their great pharaohs are still making that afterlife journey... still keeping chaos at bay... still ensuring that the sun will rise... today...and into eternity."