Lost Cities of the Ancients

Episode 1

The Vanished Capital of the Pharaoh

Excavations by Flinders Petrie in 1884 and Pierre Montet in the 1930s at Tanis in Northern Egypt led archaeologists to identify the site as Piramesse or Pi-Ramesses. Pi-Ramesses was built to be the new capital city of the pharaoh Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great, 1279-1213 B.C.) upon the Easternmost branch of the River Nile, but its location was unknown. Eventually it was realized that none of the monuments and inscriptions from the Ramesside period originated at Tanis. This program tells of the extraordinary work of archaeologists Manfred Bietak and Edgar Pusch who painstakingly mapped all of the branches of the ancient Nile delta and discovered that during Ramesses reign the Tanitic branch did not exist at all and that the Easternmost branch of the Nile ran some 30km South of Tanis. Their excavations at Qantir uncovered a remarkable story.