history

The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 3: Bettany visits the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor where, for 500 years, the Ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, among them the boy-king Tutankhamun. However, the historian crosses the local hills to the Workers’ Village, where generations of skilled royal tomb-builders lived.     As it turns out, they also dumped masses of domestic rubbish, which is now giving some insight into the highs, lows and preoccupations of ancient Egyptians. Bettany then heads south on the Nile’s oldest steam ship SS Sudan, which […]

The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 2 – Bettany visits a vast desert catacomb where tens of thousands of mummified animals were once left as an offering, tracks down Egypt’s lost emblem the Blue Lotus flower, and finishes at the stunning Dendera temple.     A hundred miles south of Cairo a stretch of the Nile was once considered Egypt’s main highway, used by Cleopatra to travel the country. More than 2,000 years after her, Bettany visits a vast desert catacomb where tens of thousands of mummified animals were once left as an offering.  Further upstream, there

The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes episode 1 – Bettany visits the Nile’s mouth, before boarding a dahabiya, a passenger boat used on the Nile, that will take her upstream. South of Cairo she explores some tunnels under a collapsed pyramid to find the earliest hieroglyphic writing.     On board a timeless dahabiya cruise boat, the historian sets off on a 900-mile adventure up the Nile to Egypt’s southern border, seeing the country as the ancient Egyptians once did. She arrives at Egypt’s gateway to the world – the Nile’s mouth – then meets the crew that