Empires: Egypt's Golden Empire (2001) s01e01 Episode Script

For over 3000 years, a story has laid hidden beneath the sands of Egypt, a story we are only now beginning to reclaim.
It is a story of a time we call the New Kingdom.
It left us the greatest treasures of the ancient world, an extraordinary legacy in papyrus, stone and gold.
But behind these treasures lies an epic tale of real people.
People like Ramesses the Great, Tutankhamun, the Boy King, and one of the most beautiful and powerful women of the ancient world, Queen Nefertiti.
It is a story brought to life by their own words and those of ordinary men and women who changed the course of history.
In eyewitness accounts, soldiers described the birth of an empire forged on the battlefield.
Pharaohs record how they created their own legends and became the richest rulers in the world.
And ancient craftsmen reveal how they turned Egypt's unimaginable wealth into tombs, temples and treasure.
And how, in the end, they would be forced to destroy the very tombs they had built.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Egypt's Golden Empire.
Over 1000 years after the pyramids were built the greatest chapter in Egypt's history was just beginning.
The New Kingdom, an explosion of creativity, wealth and power.
It would be the envy of civilisations to come.
The Greeks, the Romans, Napoleon All would look for inspiration to the men and women who built the first empire in recorded history.
Yet the Golden Age might never have happened.
In 1560 BC, Egypt was in crisis.
For the first time in history the kingdom of the ancient pyramid builders was now occupied and divided.
Egypt was on the verge of extinction.
In the north, a foreign king had invaded and declared himself pharaoh.
His people, the Hyksos, now occupied the rich Nile Delta.
To the south, the warlike Nubians threatened the last remnants of Egypt.
The invasion of the Hyksos to Egypt was really a shock.
A surprise.
This is the first time Egypt was completely invaded.
This is the first time strange people entered Egypt and lived for 150 years.
The Egyptian royal line, and its city Thebes, had fallen on hard times.
But one local family was determined to revive Egypt's former glory.
The King of Thebes and his two sons, the young princes Kamose and his brother Ahmose.
The fate not only of their capital, Thebes, but Egypt itself lay in their hands.
Essentially, it was a time of great trial for the traditional ruling family of Egypt.
And the Thebans are really just pawns in this Between these two superpowers, they are not the superpower.
So really Ahmose and Kamose had become minor princes.
There was a feeling that Egypt, as it had been known for the past 1500 years, could cease to exist.
Kamose and Ahmose's hatred of the Hyksos was personal.
Their father tried to rebel against the invaders in the north.
He paid a terrible price.
3500 years later, his corpse still bears witness to his brutal slaughter at the hands of the enemy.
The face is grizzly, partly because it wasn't well preserved, and there are many, many axe marks all over the head.
It must have been Hyksos' struggle and it must have been fairly bloody.
Traditionally, Egyptians viewed foreigners as primitive and barbaric.
For young Kamose, the death of his father at the hands of the Hyksos must have been humiliating as well as tragic.
In the ideology of the Egyptians, the foreigner is the inherent enemy, the inherent inferior, over whom the Egyptians had been given divine power by the deities.
They are described as that vile foe, people who are beyond the pale.
Foreigners are dirt under the feet of the pharaoh.
Images of foreigners were carved on footstools like this so Egyptians could show their superiority by literally trampling on them.
Nubians, Libyans, Asiatics were depicted as ugly, as savages, not worthy of placing a foot on Egyptian sand.
But now northern Egypt, and even the pyramids, stood on land governed by foreigners.
This was the worst thing to the mind of the Egyptian.
The pyramid, to Ahmose and Kamose, was a kind of a reminder, telling them "We need the glory of Egypt to come back.
" And this gave them the power to unite, to defeat those strange people and dismiss them away from Egypt.
With his father dead, his land divided, Kamose was determined to defeat the Hyksos.
His actual words have survived, carved on this large stone, a stele.
Kamose bluntly states his intention to destroy the enemies to the north and south of Egypt.
"What power can I claim to have "when I'm stuck between an Asiatic and a Nubian? "Each of them has a piece of Egypt too, and shares the land with me.
"My aim is to liberate Egypt and crush the Asiatics.
" But Kamose could not fight alone.
He had to get his people behind him first and, as the stele records, most Thebans did not object to living in a divided Egypt.
"We are satisfied with our share of Egypt.
"The best fields are ours to cultivate, "grain is still being sent to our swine "and our herds have never been seized.
" Not everyone was upset with the Hyksos rule.
I'm sure times were good for lots of Egyptians under the Hyksos rulers.
What, then, would rally the forces and get people going? The Hyksos soon gave the people of Egypt good reason to be alarmed.
On a remote desert road, far from Thebes, Hyksos messengers raced south on a secret mission.
Hyksos messengers carried this letter, probably rolled-up papyrus with a mud seal.
They were going through the desert probably quickly And Kamose's spies must have intercepted these messengers.
Kamose's men had captured a messenger from the Hyksos king.
The letter he was carrying was addressed to Egypt's other enemy, the King of Nubia.
It was an invitation to unite, and conquer what was left of Egypt.
"Come north.
There is no need to worry.
"Kamose is busy with me here.
"We'll divide the towns of Egypt between us, and Nubia will rejoice.
" The Hyksos were inviting the Nubians to join them in a plot to converge on Egypt and destroy Kamose.
We can think perhaps of the United States.
It would really be as if Canada and Mexico were pressing against the US and actually managing, or talking about, invading.
Kamose knew it was time to fight.
The Hyksos were certainly not backward people.
The come from the area of the Levant where the towns are fortified towns, where the weapons of war are if anything more advanced than the weapons of the Egyptians.
These are fighting people.
Ahmose, still only a young boy, watched from the sidelines as his brother Kamose prepared his army for the fight.
Kamose and his brother Ahmose would become the liberators, the freedom fighters.
They would become the initiators of the greatest period of Egyptian history.
Twenty-year-old Kamose set off leading his troops north, into Hyksos territory.
"My mighty army went before me like a blast of fire.
" Kamose and his army soon came across a fortified Hyksos town.
Kamose was now face to face with his foe.
"When the next day dawned, I swooped down on him like a falcon.
"By breakfast time I had already defeated him.
"l demolished his defences, killed his men.
" Kamose recorded the capture of the town with unconcealed delight.
"My soldiers were like lions after the kill.
"As they carried off cattle and slaves, wine, fat and honey, "gleefully dividing the loot.
" The Egyptian army now headed towards their ultimate goal, Avaris, the Hyksos capital.
Kamose felt confident that victory was in his grasp.
He taunts the king of the Hyksos and shouts to him he's a coward, that he's no good, that he's going to vanquish him.
But Kamose would not sack Avaris.
The records do not say what happened to him but on the verge of expelling the Hyksos from Egypt, Kamose died.
Egypt's hopes now rested on the shoulders of his 10-year-old brother, Ahmose.
Although his mother has lost both her husband and eldest son to the Hyksos, she now groomed Ahmose to continue the war of liberation they had begun.
Ahmose would have been leaming the ways of battle.
His mother and courtiers would have trained him to become a great military leader and he had Kamose's example to follow.
So he's got to get it right, not only for his own case but because the nation depends on it.
After 10 years of preparation, Ahmose was ready to take on the Hyksos.
It would be his greatest test.
The consequences would determine the rest of Egyptian history.
Only one eyewitness account remains of this critical moment.
It lies in the tomb of a soldier who fought in Ahmose's army against the Hyksos.
The story inscribed on the walls of his tomb, his role in the battle against the Hyksos, is the only written record of what would be the decisive battle for Egypt.
"Let me speak to you and tell you the honours I received, "how I was decorated with gold.
"During the siege of Avaris, "the king noticed me fighting bravely on foot, and promoted me.
"We took Avaris.
"I carried off four people there, a man and three women, "and His Majesty let me keep them as slaves.
" These few words of an old man are the only record of the historic defeat of the Hyksos by Ahmose's army.
Ahmose returned victorious to Thebes.
He presented his ceremonial axe to his mother as a symbol of his great victory.
The work his father and brother had begun, he had finally completed.
He actually dismissed the Hyksos.
His father and grandfather and his brother did a start but he's the one that actually succeeded to expel the Hyksos away from Egypt.
Ahmose was no longer merely the King of Thebes, he was now pharaoh of a united Egypt.
The reunification of Egypt is crucial.
It means a new beginning.
It means that Egypt is back to where it should be as a unified land under the rule of one king, one pharaoh.
It's a seminal moment, it's a beginning moment.
There is Some time around maybe 1520 is the opening act in the New Kingdom.
Ahmose attributed his victories to one source The god Am un-Re, a mysterious god whose name means the Hidden One.
In the darkest recesses of the temple of Thebes, the god spoke to Ahmose.
"O my son Ahmose, I am thy father.
"I set terror in the northlands, even unto Avaris, "and the Hyksos are slain beneath thy feet.
" The Egyptians were so in awe of Ahmose's victory over the Hyksos that the pharaoh himself was worshipped as a god.
Ahmose was a hero.
In the eyes of everyone, they were smiling, calling his name, building him a chapel, asking God to protect him because he is God.
But Ahmose's ambition went beyond uniting Egypt.
He wanted gold, to build Egypt into a powerful nation.
He headed south with his army to Nubia.
Some of the richest goldmines in the ancient world were controlled by the powerful Nubian king from his capital here at Kerma.
In a series of battles, Ahmose's army crushed the Nubians.
Once again, Ahmose was victorious.
After 25 years on the throne, Ahmose died.
But his legacy would live on.
To ensure that foreigners would never rule his country again, he had pushed Egypt's borders beyond the Sinai Desert in the north and deep into Nubia in the south.
The warrior pharaoh had laid the foundations of an empire.
It was the beginning of the light of day.
It was the beginning of the sun that rise.
It was the beginning of the pyramids to come back, the beginning of the glory of Egypt.
That's why it's called the Golden Age.
Ahmose had spent his life securing peace for Egypt.
Now Egypt could be rebuilt and Thebes, the religious capital, could flourish.
One pharaoh in particular, Hatshepsut, transformed the city, constructing beautiful temples as well as the strange new obelisks that towered over them.
Weighing over 300 tonnes, and standing 30 metres tall, obelisks were cut from a single piece of granite.
Building and erecting these stone spires was a spectacular achievement that still puzzles engineers today.
Obelisks became the defining monuments of the New Kingdom.
Bold and innovative, they have been emulated around the world ever since.
But the obelisks also represented a mystery.
For years, archaeologists had known that obelisks were built during Hatshepsut's reign.
But this name was missing from the list of kings on these temple walls, the official records.
It was as if Hatshepsut had never existed.
It remained a mystery for 3000 years.
In 1903, British archaeologist Howard Carter was working in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Sifting through the sand, Carter came across a tomb and on it the name of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
Hatshepsut had been wiped from historical records for a very simple reason.
This remarkable pharaoh was a woman.
Early in her life, Hatshepsut had been an ordinary queen.
When her husband died, her stepson Tuthmosis came to the throne.
But he was too young to rule alone, so Hatshepsut ruled as co-regent.
This was not exceptional.
What was shocking was her next step.
Hatshepsut declared herself pharaoh.
Hatshepsut must have been an extraordinary woman.
She found herself.
.
The most important ruler of the time.
The next ruler to come to the throne, Tuthmosis III, was only a small child.
So she took action, and from being a regent, she had herself proclaimed not Queen, but King of Egypt.
What drives her? is it ambition? Or is it politically the right thing to do at that time? She saw the opportunity and seized it.
It was the desire for power.
She saw that this system of female regents could be turned into securing full power for a senior woman of the royal family like herself Only two woman had been pharaoh before Hatshepsut and both had failed to rule for long.
But this did not deter her.
She believed Egypt could be persuaded to accept a woman on the throne.
After all, women in Egypt were held in high regard compared with other cultures of the time, as ancient texts reveal.
"I hereby make my will for my wife.
" "I leave her all the property I inherited" "Don 't give your wife grief when you know she's in control.
"Never say 'Where is it, find it for me' when she's " "Keep your eyes open but your mouth shut.
" You were better off as a woman in Ancient Egypt than in most ancient societies.
But it was very difficult for them to branch out and have careers.
It was still a man's world.
Egyptian women were known as "lady of the house" on if you like, "housewife".
Hatshepsut is no housewife.
Despite the rights women possessed at the time, Egyptians struggled with the idea of a female pharaoh.
It went against the natural order of life, a concept Egyptians described as 'maat'.
'Maat' meant the order of the whole cosmos, the way the universe was constructed, Egypt's place in the cosmos Relationships with foreigners and Egypt were part of that.
Foreigners are inferior, Egypt is superior and dominant.
And the king should be male.
She knew she had no right to the throne and Egyptians would never accept that.
Hatshepsut's need to legitimise her role as pharaoh would dominate her entire reign.
First she turned to her ancestry.
Hatshepsut stressed the fact that she was the daughter of a king.
Hatshepsut can be seen as the Queen Elizabeth I of Ancient Egypt.
One of the strongest features in her life is her relationship with her father.
She may be a woman, and someone whose claim to the throne was rather shaky, but do not ever forget that she was the daughter of Tuthmosis I.
Queen Elizabeth used to interview ambassadors underneath a portrait of Henry VIII.
The message was the same.
"l am my father's daughter.
" Hatshepsut even put words into her dead father's mouth, claiming he had publicly appointed her as his successor.
"This is my daughter Hatshepsut.
I hereby appoint her in my place.
"She alone will sit on my majestic throne.
"Listen to her commands, and work together on whatever she orders.
" But she went further.
On her temple walls, she carved the tale of how the god Amun took on her father's appearance and made love to her mother.
Hatshepsut was not only the daughter of a pharaoh.
Now she was the daughter of a god.
Hatshepsut personally embraced her sexuality, revelling in descriptions of her own beauty.
WOMAN: "Her body was covered with the finest incense.
"Her scent was a divine shower.
"Her skin glittered like the stars.
"To look at her was more beautiful than anything.
" But Hatshepsut was pharaoh, and the pharaoh had to be male, so she had herself depicted with a male body, a male kilt and the false beard of a pharaoh on her chin.
Hatshepsut had to carefully choose who to trust at court.
Hatshepsut is a woman trying to be a king.
She inherited a court from her father but she replaces them with people that she herself has chosen.
And it's in their interest to keep their patron, even if that patron is a woman, in place.
They know that if she goes, they go.
One of the pharaoh's favourite courtiers was a man named Senenmut.
He had started life as a commoner but his rise to power had been meteoric, sparking rumours about the nature of his relationship with Hatshepsut.
Senenmut was promoted from the army to the royal household.
Hatshepsut even entrusted him with raising her own daughter.
But it was as her chief architect that Senenmut did the most for his pharaoh.
He had been responsible for the creation of Hatshepsut's obelisks.
Now she entrusted him with her most ambitious plan The building of her mortuary temple.
The temple would be Hatshepsut's ultimate attempt to prove herself worthy of the title of pharaoh.
It was one of the most lavish and monumental buildings of the ancient world Deir el-Bahri.
Below the great temple, an additional tomb had been carved out of the rock.
Halfway down the corridor is a drawing of the owner of the tomb, and next to it, a name Senenmut.
The tomb's position, so close to Hatshepsut's temple, may simply have been the ultimate reward for a loyal architect.
But perhaps it was a reflection of the intimacy between Hatshepsut and her favourite courtier.
There was speculation at the time that Senenmut was Hatshepsut's lover and a series of graffiti in a tomb near the temple of Deir el-Bahri make it clear that the person who wrote the graffiti thought that was what they were up to.
This is a problem that female rulers tend to get.
They pick up salacious views of what they're doing.
I suspect that's unlikely.
It's too dangerous a game for Senenmut to be playing.
I suspect the relationship was one of mutual respect and not going beyond the boundaries of that respect.
But while the inner temple harboured private secrets, the outer walls of Deir el-Bahri became a place for propaganda and self-aggrandisement.
Carved reliefs boast the crowning achievement of her reign An unusual and bold military adventure.
Every pharaoh was expected to prove himself on the battlefield.
But Hatshepsut's army was under the control of her stepson Tuthmosis.
Tuthmosis was acutely aware that the throne was rightfully his.
Like Elizabeth I of England, she doesn't trust the army.
She's got a problem.
If she sends the army out to extend the empire, if it loses, she will be blamed and will almost certainly lose power.
What happens on the other hand if it wins? The victorious generals are likely to tum around and say "See? We can achieve victory without this queen upstart on the throne.
" So Tuthmosis and his army represents a major problem for Hatshepsut.
The pharaoh devised an ingenious plan that would not only keep Tuthmosis and his army occupied, but would also enhance her status.
She commanded her soldiers to prepare for an epic trading mission to a place where no Egyptian had been for over 500 years.
The land of Punt.
As well as keeping her stepson busy, Punt offered Hatshepsut the promise of exotic goods, above all, incense.
Incense was a very important part of Egypt's foreign relations.
The Egyptians valued incense tremendously.
The elite liked to perfume their environments.
But, even more importantly, when you released incense in a temple the god or the goddess actually embodied themselves in the incense.
So what you were smelling wasn't just the incense, it was the aroma of the deity.
In the ninth year of her reign, the pharaoh launched the expedition to Punt, an epic quest for the rarest treasures of the ancient world.
Stage management was the essence of this trip.
It was a huge piece of theatre, a huge piece of propaganda, to show that Hatshepsut can deliver the exotic, the unusual, the divine.
It also creates work for an unemployed army.
It's a feat they can talk about to their grandchildren, that they can say we did, under the famous Queen Hatshepsut.
The walls of Hatshepsut's temple proclaimed the mission to have been a triumphant success.
The reliefs depict the exotic treasures her soldiers brought back to her.
WOMAN: "Look, they are returning "and they have brought something truly amazing.
"Trees heavy with fresh incense ready to plant.
"Ebony and whitest ivory, baboons, monkeys and dogs, "countless leopard skins, even slaves and children.
"Nothing like this has ever happened to another king of Egypt!" The scribes who accompanied the army carefully recorded the wonders of that exotic land.
Houses on stilts, giraffes and strange tropical trees.
Along with the flora and fauna the Queen of Punt was depicted as a huge, fat woman.
These reliefs are seen as the first anthropological study in history.
The expedition to Punt did more than legitimise Hatshepsut's position as pharaoh.
It set her apart, as the pharaoh who had opened Egypt and reached out to foreign lands.
Under her reign, you really have the explosion of wealth, of power, of vision, in a way.
It's a great reign.
After 22 years on the throne, Hatshepsut died.
She hoped that her obelisks, towering over Karnak, would forever remind the world of her greatness.
But she had stolen the name of pharaoh from her stepson and for this he would make her pay.
Tuthmosis III, rightful heir to the throne, was 25 years old and ready to claim his inheritance.
"Amun opened the gates and I flew up to heaven as a divine hawk.
"He gave me his strength and his might.
" Tuthmosis quickly reconnected himself with the line of warrior pharaohs, Ahmose and Kamose.
It would be as if his stepmother had never reigned.
Tuthmosis would make sure of that.
Tuthmosis had her obelisks bricked up and ordered that Hatshepsut's name and image be carefully removed from every corner of Egypt.
Tuthmosis III is saying we don't need the memory of this female ruler, this interlude in the history of Egypt as an imperial power.
Even Hatshepsut's beautiful temple was defaced.
It was like when it was being built and decorated, but in reverse.
The scaffolding would be up, with hundreds of workmen scurrying around, busily chipping away at the wall.
To organise the defacing of the royal image of Hatshepsut was certainly a major bureaucratic task.
And if the Ancient Egyptians liked anything, it was a major bureaucratic task.
So I'm sure this was some high official's acme of his career.
All evidence of Hatshepsut's reign was destroyed.
If you erase someone's image from their mortuary monument, you erase them from continuing existence in the afterlife.
For any Egyptian, royal or otherwise, that's total disaster.
Defacing a monument like that says "No, you don't have eternity.
" With her name erased throughout Egypt and excluded from all the lists of kings it was as if Hatshepsut had never existed.
The death of a pharaoh was always a time for neighbouring nations to test the resolve of a new successor.
Now a coalition of Middle Eastern princes moved south and gathered in the city of Megiddo, threatening Egyptian trade and influence in the region.
Perhaps his enemies thought Tuthmosis would be weak.
If so, they had made a terrible mistake.
Tuthmosis had waited over 20 years for this moment.
He intended not just to push back these warlike rulers, but to take over their countries.
Tuthmosis was planning what no Egyptian pharaoh had ever dreamed of.
To build an empire.
The strategy was hammer, hammer, hammer.
He realised that in order to build up a secure basis of power in the Eastern Mediterranean, that it would take a great military effort, that it was going to take many, many campaigns.
And so that's what he did.
To increase the size of his army Tuthmosis launched a huge recruiting campaign.
Soldiers were enlisted, either voluntarily or by force.
They had to be armed and there were great armouries filled with weapons and shields and things of this kind and every soldier was given his gear, his kit.
Finally, the four great divisions of the powerful Egyptian army headed north, across the scorching Sinai Desert.
They moved boldly up the Mediterranean coast.
The Egyptian army on the move would be an impressive affair.
The leadership was interested in maintaining the movement of the army as something that had considerable visual impact.
And it was partly to impress the enemy.
They'd be hearing, what's the Egyptian army like? Does it look intimidating? ls it straggling? Is it not well organised? It was also important for the army that it should have a sense of itself as a very well-organised entity with very high spirit.
Led by the Pharaoh Tuthmosis himself, 20,000 men marched towards Megiddo.
At the end of every day, when the troops made camp, the pharaoh's scribes recorded the army's latest achievements.
They were the first war correspondents in history.
He has scribes write down in a day book all the events that take place.
When they start, where they start marching, where they set up camp.
How many troops there are, how much they need to eat.
All the actual da y-to-da y life of an army on the move.
"Fourth month of winter, day 25.
"His Majesty passed the fortress of Sile "on his first victorious campaign "to crush the people who were assaulting Egypt's borders.
" Back in Egypt, their accounts were recorded on the walls of the Karnak Temple.
The faces of foreigners bear the names of all the cities conquered by Tuthmosis.
Here, the word "Israel" is recorded for the first time in history.
The scribal records also include intimate details of what it was like to be a soldier in Pharaoh's army, 3000 years ago.
"The trees I lie under at night have nothing to eat on them.
"Sandflies keep biting me and sucking my veins dry.
"I'm hobbling about like a cripple "because I have to go everywhere on foot.
"Tell Amun to bring me back alive from this hell hole "where I've been abandoned.
" Tuthmosis and his soldiers had finally arrived at their goal.
Beyond their camp, behind the mountain, lay Megiddo.
This is the town in the Levant where all the princes of the area have gathered.
If you manage to conquer this fortress town you've pretty well conquered the whole area.
In the words of Tuthmosis III, "The capture of Megiddo is the capture of 1000 cities.
" On the 16th day of the first month of summer, 1456 BC, the 25-year-old pharaoh stood on the Carmel Ridge and faced one of the greatest dilemmas in Middle Eastern warfare.
The great fortress of Megiddo lay before him.
Three paths led to the city.
Two were long but safer routes.
The third path was the quickest but it was also the most dangerous since Tuthmosis' men would have go in single file.
Tuthmosis called a council of war.
He later recorded how his generals were firmly against taking the dangerous path.
"They said to His Majesty 'How will it be to go on this road which becomes narrow 'when it is reported that the enemies wait beyond? 'There are two other roads here.
'Do not make us go on that difficult road.
' Ultimately, the last word fell to the young pharaoh.
His generals and men would have to live and perhaps die by his decision.
The enemy expected Tuthmosis III to come from the easy road.
They waited for him there.
They never thought that the army of Tuthmosis III will come from the left side and take this narrow, impossible road.
But he said "No, that is the road to victory.
" Suddenly, as Tuthmosis had planned, the Egyptian army appeared among the enemy.
In Megiddo, there was panic.
The enemy army rushed out of the city to take on the Egyptians.
It would have been clanking, noisy, dusty.
The smell, the noise, the whinny of the horse.
It would be this wild melee in all this blinding dust, with enemy soldiers looming up in front of you, just as frightened and angry as you.
"His Majesty set out on his electrum chariot, "dressed in his battle gear, strong-armed like Horus the Lord, "his father Amun strengthening his arm.
" The Egyptians forced the enemy to flee, back within the walls of Megiddo.
The enemy kings are galloping back to the city, having to abandon their wonderful gold and silver chariots because the city has closed its gates.
It won't open its gates while the Egyptian army is out there and these kings have to be hauled up the city walls in knotted garments that the people had let down.
It was a complete rout.
The enemy crumpled completely before the Egyptian attack.
But on the verge of victory, Tuthmosis' plan went wrong.
He wanted his forces to continue immediately and take the city.
But the Egyptian troops stopped to plunder the enemy dead and the enemy camp.
He can't stop it.
The army is going to plunder and he can't stop them.
They don't do a head count in Ancient Egypt, they do a hand count.
They cut the hands off They pile them up in a mound and count them one at a time.
Pretty gory business but not quite as horrid as cutting their heads off.
Each enemy hand was worth its weight in gold.
But by plundering, Tuthmosis' army had given the enemy time to gather safely behind the city walls.
The Egyptians had no choice but to surround Megiddo and wait.
He did not have to conduct an attack on the city because by setting up the stockade he signalled that he intended to starve them out, not attack them and try to take the city by storm.
For the next seven months, while the princes in Megiddo slowly starved, Tuthmosis and his army raided the surrounding countryside.
Finally, Megiddo surrendered.
Hundreds of years later, when the writer of the Book of Revelations spoke of the last battle of Doomsday, he would set it here in Megiddo.
He would call it Armageddon.
The pharaoh returned in triumph to Thebes.
Megiddo and all its wealth now belonged to Tuthmosis.
On the walls of Karnak Temple, his scribes recorded the staggering scale of the booty they had captured.
"Living prisoners, 340.
"Chariots of his wretched army, 892.
"Cows, 1929.
"Male and female slaves and their children, 1796.
"Walking sticks with human heads, three.
" The war booty and tribute that poured into Thebes would make it one of the greatest cities of the ancient world.
In a stroke of genius, the pharaoh also brought back the children of the defeated princes, to indoctrinate them in the ways of Egypt.
They'd grow up in an Egyptian school.
They'd learn Egyptian.
It was rather like what the British did in India by taking the children of the Maharajas and bringing them back to public schools in England.
That way the princes became semi-Egyptian.
At the same time, they were hostages to their father's good behaviour and as their father aged, they were sent back to replace him, now thoroughly inculcated with Egyptian attitudes.
In Nubia, Tuthmosis went one step further.
He appointed a viceroy to rule over Nubia.
The viceroy was called 'Overseer of the Gold Countries'.
He secured Egypt's lifeline All the gold the pharaoh needed to rule his empire.
Tuthmosis III established that empire and he gave this empire the leadership.
He gave the empire how the empire became to be strong.
How he controlled the south at the Sixth Cataract and controlled eastern Syria, Palestine and this area in Iraq.
The whole world, it was under Thebes.
Under his control.
For all these successes, Tuthmosis pledged thanks to one god, Amun-Re.
The pharaoh's first task on returning from Megiddo was solemn.
The king approached the inner sanctuary.
Alone, Tuthmosis made offerings to the god he credited with his victory, the god who granted him an empire.
According to Tuthmosis, the god spoke to him.
"I gave you valour and victory over all lands.
"I set your might, your fear in every country, "that you may lead the living forever.
" Stepping back, the king cast sand on the floor to obscure his footprints and ensure no one else entered the god's presence.
Tuthmosis could return into the light with the blessing of Amun for his new empire.
Only 100 years earlier, Egypt had been on the verge of extinction.
But by the end of Tuthmosis' reign, Egypt controlled Nubia, the Syrian and Lebanese coasts, and parts of Israel and Palestine.
Egyptians moved into territories that they never thought they would reach at all.
It is an enormous empire, the biggest empire that has ever been conquered.
And it is ruled by one king.
The wealth of the world arrives in Egypt and receiving it is the king of Egypt.
He is the richest man in the world at that time, the ruler of the greatest empire.
It was the beginning.
It was a first attempt to create a unified whole from among nations of different faiths, different traditions, different languages.
That concept had not been realised before in history.
The Egyptian Empire was born.
The question now was what the pharaoh would do with his Empire of Gold.