Airdate: Egypt’s Lost Princess

SBS has another Egyptian special this Sunday night with Egypt’s Lost Princess.

This is a UK special produced by Blink Films who also make Treasures Decoded.

The chance discovery of the first sealed tomb in the Valley of the Kings for 100 years reveals a tale of ancient Egyptian grave robbing, desecration, and the rise of a new elite that would overthrow the Pharaohs. The Valley of the Kings is the burial ground of the greatest pharaohs to ever rule Egypt. For hundreds of years it’s been a magnet for tourists, adventurers, and criminals and many scholars assumed that it had given up all of its secrets long ago. But in January 2011, Swiss archaeologists came across something unexpected – a sealed entrance to a previously undiscovered tomb. When the team broke the seal they discovered a puzzle: the remains of a dismembered mummy, a pile of rubble, and a coffin that was apparently 500 years younger than the tomb it sat in. It was the ultimate locked room mystery: One tomb, two bodies, separated by five centuries of history.

The team started work on the identity of the dismembered body and discovered the mummy was a female from the royal court and lived during the golden age of Egypt around 1400BC. They also established this was meant to be her tomb, but how did a royal lady from Egypt’s greatest age end up dismembered and covered in rubble? Egyptologist Susanne Bickel believes she knows the answer: ancient tomb robbery. 3,000 year old court transcripts reveal that robbery was rampant around the time and the robbers were not common thieves, they were priests. By 1000BC the golden age of Egypt was over and the priests had replaced the Pharaohs as the ruling class. They saw the Valley of the Kings as an opportunity to fill their coffers and systematically ransacked nearly every grave, including this one. But how did this trashed tomb end up being reused 100 years later?

Sunday, 19 August at 7.35pm on SBS.