Power, dominance, control.

I feel about this.

I feel so insignificant.

Together these pyramids and the Sphinx and the temples

create a landscape of power.

NARRATOR: The huge sculpture protects the necropolis.

A giant symbol of supremacy believed

by many to have the face of Khufu's son, Khafre,

owner of Giza's second largest pyramid.

Despite many visits here, John has never been up close.

Today he's been granted special access

to explore its enclosure.

JOHN: It's absolutely inspiring.

I mean, it's just jaw-dropping.

I've waited 50 years to be here, and now I'm here.

It's just wow.

NARRATOR: 66 feet high, the Sphinx gazes

east towards the rising sun.

JOHN: I know what it's like to work with the living rock

and how to carve it.

This would have been a monumental challenge.

They only had copper chisels, wooden mallets.

It would have been a harsh environment.

This dust would have been everywhere.

And yet the workmen, the craftsmen, the masons,

they were all willing participants, loyal to pharaoh.

NARRATOR: It would have taken thousands of people decades

to construct the epic monuments of Giza,

but there's no evidence the pharaohs

enslaved people to build them.

They didn't draw their power over the people from force.

John believes what stood these kings apart was

that they inspired devotion.

The sheer volume of stone has gone into building this,

and each individual block represents the loyalty

that they had for Pharaoh.

NARRATOR: The huge monuments of Giza

represent the peak of the pyramid age.

So why was nothing built on this scale again?

At the height of Khufu's reign, reliable seasonal rains

fed the crops that ensured Egypt's prosperity.

For three months every year, the Nile

flooded and inundated the farmland, so farmers

couldn't work the fields.

The farmers were free to help build the King's enormous tomb.

They believed he kept the gods content and the country fed.

But soon after Khufu completed his pyramid,

Egypt began to suffer drought.

As crop yields crashed, so did the taxes coming

into the state's treasuries, and despite the free labor

the Giza monuments almost bankrupted Egypt.

The people's loyalty began to falter.

The King's tombs that followed got smaller

while Khufu's Great Pyramid remained, dominating

the Nile's West Bank.

JOHN: The sheer power that he held

is absolutely unbelievable.

NARRATOR: It was a power his struggling successors

were desperate to replicate.

At Abu Ghurab Italian archeologist

Massimiliano Nuzzola wants to know

how the kings of the pyramid age held onto power as their wealth

and status declined.

He has spent his entire career trying to understand a very

different monumental structure.

An enigma whose mysteries captured

his imagination in his very first student course

in Egyptology.

This enormous scatter of ancient rubble

was once a sun temple dedicated to the most powerful

god of the pyramid age.

MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: Each king wanted a pyramid

for achieving his resurrection but this

was not enough for the five dynastic kings.

They wanted something more.

The king built this place to turn himself into a god.

The sun god.

NARRATOR: The Pharaoh Nyuserre didn't just

want to become divine in death.

He built this temple because he wanted

to be worshipped as a god while he was still alive.

Rising from the desert was an enormous obelisk,

the centerpiece of the temple.

It was not a traditional slender stone needle,

but shaped more like a pyramid.

Monumental walls enclosed it creating

a courtyard in which people could come to worship the sun.

The temple aligned perfectly on an east west

axis with the path of the sun.

So on the summer solstice every year,

the sun rose through the entrance,

traveled directly over the obelisk,

and set at the Western end.

This alignment is identical to that of the pyramids.

Records suggest that six of the pharaohs who followed Khufu

decided to build a sun temple as well as their pyramid

to underline their divine status to the people of Egypt.

But almost all of these temples are lost.

MASSIMILLIANO NUZZOLA: We know that there were

six sun temples, and we actually so far

have discovered only two.

NARRATOR: Max hopes excavating this sun temple will shed light

on these kings power, and perhaps

help him crack one of the biggest mysteries in Egyptology

and find the other missing sun temples.

The problem is, Max is not the first to decode

this structure's secrets.

Early Egyptologists excavated here more than 100 years ago,

and left a mess of archaeological confusion

in their wake.

Well, this find is amazing because it's

a cover of matches left by the archaeologists

during their work.

NARRATOR: Along with their discarded matchboxes,

early 20th century excavators left 4,500 year old pottery

scattered across the site.

As you can see here, this area of the temple

is full of pot shells.

But unfortunately this material is completely useless for us

because it's out of a secure context.

Cannot tell us anything about the life of the temple.

NARRATOR: If Max can find undisturbed artifacts,

they might reveal clues the first archeologists missed.

Even the smallest of finds could be

crucial in the hunt for the lost sun temples of the pyramid age.

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