The Wonder List with Bill Weir (2015) s03e03 Episode Script
Egypt: Sunken City of Pharaohs
1
[dramatic music]
♪
- It was the envy
of the world
a shimmering city
of gods and pharaohs,
teeming with life,
energy,
and grand human plans,
right until the day
the earth moved
and it was swallowed
by the sea.
Silty waves held its secrets
for over a thousand years
until the arrival
of a renegade,
and what once was lost
has now been found.
I feel like a soggy,
salty Indiana Jones.
This is a story about Egypt,
both ancient
and modern.
It involves the Nile
and denial,
and it is evidence
that those
who do not learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.
My name is Bill Weir,
and I'm a storyteller.
I've reported
from all over the world,
and I have seen so much chang.
[upbeat rock music]
So I made a list
of the most wonderful places
to explore,
right before they change
forever.
♪
This is "The Wonder List."
[rousing music]
♪
I know what you're thinking.
"A camel ride?
"Around the pyramids?
"Come on, Weir.
Seems a bit cliché.
Every tourist and his mom
does the pyramids."
Well, not anymore.
These days,
the crowds at Giza are gone.
The Sphinx is lonely.
An American on a camel
is a real novelty,
because nothing
keeps the tourists away
like fear.
[explosions booming]
After so much turmoil
[men chanting
in native language]
And so much terror
- Traces of explosive materil
have been found on the victis
of EgyptAir Flight 804.
- Egypt can seem
like a scary place.
But it's complicated.
One minute, we're welcomed
by warm, friendly strangers.
The next minute,
questioned by authorities.
Soldiers and cops
run this country.
Jails are filled
with political prisoners.
Journalists
have been sentenced to death.
The economy is in tatters.
Meanwhile, the average Egyptin
has no idea
that his ancient civilization
is more vulnerable than ever.
And it's understandable why.
Just in the last five
or six years,
these folks have lived
through revolution and coup.
They've had 3 presidents,
3 constitutions,
4 prime ministers,
700 changes in parliament.
Seas are rising,
population is growing,
but you can kind of understand
if these folks
don't think about the long-term.
They're just trying
to get through today.
[soft dramatic music]
The Nile delta
the source of life
for 40 million
is in peril like never befor:
not enough fresh water for ma,
beast,
crops;
too much saltwater
from rising seas.
And when it comes
to the cities,
well, they don't build 'em
like they used to.
[crowd yelling]
YouTube is filled with exampls
of shoddy,
often illegal construction
falling to pieces.
♪
So a visit to Alexandria,
a place where they stash
surplus Sphinxes
in parking lots,
is so surreal.
This once chic
and cosmopolitan port
is now conservative
and crumbling
6 million people
bracing for an uncertain futue
while still stumbling across
treasures of the past.
- So, basically,
what we're walking on
there are catacombs
- Below our feet?
- Yeah.
So it's sort of Swiss cheese.
- Salima
is an esteemed Egyptologist,
and she's eager
to take me underground
and back in time.
- Shall we go down?
- Let's do it.
♪
- So it goes down
quite a long way.
- Wow.
♪
Until the day
a donkey came crashing
through a perfectly carved hoe
in the catacomb roof,
all of this was hidden
for centuries.
♪
- See, over here,
you had two statues
- Oh, yeah.
- To welcome you
into the land of the dead.
- Wow.
This graveyard is proof
that Egypt has been wrestling
with religious differences
for a very long time.
As outsiders moved in,
they created gods
everyone could believe in.
- In Alexandria,
it's this mad melting pot
where people are coming up
with new ideas
and taking a bit of this
and a bit of that.
You've got the god Anubis,
guardian of the underworld,
but he's wearing
his little Roman outfit.
- Right.
- He's got the
all the things
the spears
that the soldiers would have.
Little armbands.
It's really great.
I just love this mixture,
and he's got this big smile.
- Mummies and their treasure
filled each one
of these chambers
until the grave robbers
showed up.
- It's the second-oldest
profession, probably, in Egypt,
and people have been doing it,
you know
a pharaoh's buried,
and maybe 10, 15 years later,
someone's trying
to break into the tomb.
- But the more recent threat
to history
is this rising water
and the new need
for a boardwalk
to navigate amongst the ghost.
And is that an alarming trend
in terms of preservation?
- Yes, it is.
It is an alarming trend,
because there's so much change
in the whole environment now,
and this rising water table's
threatening a lot
of the monuments,
but particularly tombs,
from this period.
- What's contributing
to this water?
- Population.
The more people,
the more water expelled,
and also, I think, just
sort of rising groundwater.
- Yeah.
- Climate changing.
- At Pompey's Pillar,
not another tourist in sight.
- It's all of solid granite,
which comes from about almost
a thousand miles down the river,
or up the river, rather,
from Aswan.
- Is that right?
So just getting it here
is a superhuman feat.
- And it's one piece.
- This is what's left
of a massive
third-century temple,
but what they'd
really like to find
remains hidden.
- Basically,
anyone who came to Alexandria,
they would say
the librarian would get to them
and say,
"Ah, have you any books?"
- Ah.
- And "Please let us copy them."
- The Library of Alexandria
was the Internet of the day,
as the Ptolemies,
the Greek kings who followed
Alexander the Great
and Cleopatra,
built the smartest city
in the known world.
Scholars can't agree
on what exactly burned it dow,
but there is no debate
that religion and politics
led to Egypt's great decline,
then
and now.
- This is the new
Library of Alexandria,
built after
Richard Nixon paid a visit
and wondered out loud
what happened to the old one.
It is a point of pride
for many,
but unlike
the original library,
not all knowledge
is welcome these days.
- Actually,
there's lots of books
that is forbidden
to come into Egypt.
- Really?
- By the government.
- Really?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not just the religious books.
There's some political books
are forbidden to come to Egypt.
- Yeah.
- That's by the government.
[upbeat rock music]
♪
- Mohamed, Samo, and Ahmed
are members of Telepoetic,
and like millions
of Egyptian Millennials,
they have ridden
an emotional roller coaster
the last few years.
[crowds cheering and yelling]
♪
They grew up
under Hosni Mubarak's
long reign of corruption
and brutality.
For 30 years he ruled,
until the Arab Spring bloome,
and in 2011,
his subjects said, "Enough."
- The police was attacking us,
everywhere, in the whole city,
but we felt
that we're doing something
that is really important.
- After 18 days
of violent revolution,
the modern pharaoh fell.
Egypt belonged to the people.
- It was really
almost a utopia.
I mean, people were literally,
like, cleaning the streets
with soap, you know?
[all laugh]
They were so really happy.
- At least can you imagine this?
- They were proud.
all: Yeah.
- Really.
- Normally apathetic voters
showed up at the polls
in droves,
and Mohamed Morsi,
a little-known member
of the Muslim Brotherhood,
became president.
But when Morsi gave himself
unlimited power,
the people rose again,
and this time,
as Egypt teetered on the brin,
the military swept in
and put one of their own
in charge.
- All the youth were really
they had a lot of hope, really.
- They felt that
that it's their country.
- Exactly,
and that we're changing
and the times are changing.
And then things just started
to get worse and worse.
- All of that was snatched away.
- Definitely.
It was all snatched away, yeah.
- Since the coup,
a once shadowy general
named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
has ruled Egypt
with a stone fist,
crushing both Islamists
and liberalsalike.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- I don't know if you heard
when we were entering.
Everyone around us were talking
about the economic crisis
and how things are bad for them.
- Sarah is a Cairo journalist
who covered the revolution.
And she explains how,
under Sisi,
a bad economy has gotten wors.
The Egyptian pound crashed.
Tourism and foreign investmet
disappeared.
- Only 14% of the population
makes more than 4,000
Egyptian pounds per month.
- Okay.
- That's around $400 per family.
And the rest live under that.
- Most people are $100,
$200 a month?
- Actually much less than that.
- Less than that.
- [speaking native language]
- He says, "I want you
to talk about the economy
because it's really bad."
- Hameda is a falafel vendor
and says it's never been hardr
to make ends meet.
- A bag of beans went
from 100 pounds to 190 pounds.
- Oh, wow.
- Oil has more than quadrupled
the price.
And this is just, like,
poor people food.
- Right.
And it's not
you can't raise your prices,
can you?
- He can't raise his prices.
Like this
- But even though
he stopped us to complain,
he refuses
to blame the man in charge.
- He's telling you that the
government that's here
- Yes?
- Is much better now
than previous ones.
- Really?
- He says el-Sisi,
the President,
is better than the
- He likes Sisi?
- Yeah, yeah.
He does.
- Maybe he's spotted
the policeman following us,
or maybe he really believes
in Sisi's ISIS-fighting imag,
but for the moment, it seems,
the spirit of the revolution
has been drained,
and all the while,
this once great city crumble,
entire neighborhoods are
flooded with each big storm.
- Every winter, the people get
to their apartments using boots.
But the people just don't care.
The government don't care.
- Climate change
it's an issue
that's having troubles,
even in the West,
from really accepting it,
so you can imagine here,
if it has to do with nature,
then it's in God's hands.
- But this isn't the first tie
land, water, and human sprawl
have made for disaster.
Just off the coast
of Alexandria
is an entire city
lost beneath the sea
but protected
from grave robbers and looter.
It is a miraculous find
by the most unlikely
of explorers,
and we're invited
to come have a look.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- Long before
Alexander the Great
built this town
and named it for himself
the most important city
on the coast
was somewhere out there.
It was named for Hercules
and stood as an ancient versin
of Venice
a maze of inhabited islands,
rich temples,a bustling port.
Getting there today
involves a short drive
past many reminders
that wealth and power
are never forever.
We haven't even reached
the water yet.
Place is full of shipwrecks.
Look at this.
Look at that.
Amazing to think about all
of the great maritime battles,
going back to Cleopatra,
Alexander the Great, Napoleon,
but this is a modern seaport
in Egypt.
♪
We motor across
the Bay of Abu Qir
on seas so calm,
a fantail warbler
catches a nap.
I'm too excited to doze,
mind full of details
from an old Roman mosaic I sa,
one of the earliest depictios
of life on the Nile delta
how they hunted and worshippd
and raised families
right here,
before everything changed.
Back in the day,
we could've made this journey
on foot or by donkey,
but today,
the only way
to get to Heracleion
is through the "Princess Duda"
the research vessel
of a guy named Franck Goddio.
Thanks.
Hello.
I'm Bill.
- Welcome.
- Thank you.
So great to be here, Franck!
- Yeah, it is.
♪
- His ship is a hive
of activity,
a United Nations
of soggy antiquity.
Cuban, Russian,
American divers,
French and Egyptian
archeologists
all buzzing
with constant discovery.
I barely poured
my first cup of coffee,
and you're already
whipping out
- You can take it to go.
- 2,000-year-old artifacts.
- Oh, yeah. Look.
Look at that.
- Look at that.
- How old?
- And you guys
are the first human beings
to touch this
since the city went down?
- Ah, yes, yes.
- Wow.
- Zeus?
- How common is it
for you to find these?
Is this every day?
- Every day.
- Every day?
- His very best finds,
from delicate jewelry
to mighty colossus,
recently toured Europe
and headlined
the British Museum.
This is your Rosetta Stone.
- [laughs]
- It's incredible.
Even more incredible
is that archeology
was Franck's hobby
for most of his life.
You were a policy wonk.
You were
a math statistician nerd, right?
- He worked
in finance and economics,
just a guy at a desk,
buried in numbers,
all the while dreaming
of what's buried at sea.
When you started launching
these missions,
how did the archeology world
receive you?
- Yeah?
[both laugh]
- But this allowed him to thik
about underwater archeology
in a whole new way.
You've treated these mission,
these searches,
like a math problem.
- He spent more time
in libraries and archives
than at sea,
and the approach led him
to incredible finds
warships in Cuba,
important Spanish galleons
in Asia
but in the back of his mind
rattled rumors
of something much bigger.
- Tales of an Egyptian Atlants
were little more than myth,
really,
but Franck was relentless.
- Mm-hmm.
- Yeah, yeah.
- For five years,
his team scanned the seabed
off Alexandria,
until they came across
a curious line of stones.
It was the wall of a temple,
and under it,
they found a black stone,
known as a stela.
Perfectly carved,
perfectly preserved
the boasts and commands
of the pharaoh.
- [laughs]
- The kind
of political billboard
you might find today.
- Yes.
- Right.
Right.
The hieroglyphics confirmed
he had found it.
Thonis-Heracleion
the city
where kings became gods
in secret ceremony,
where Paris brought
the kidnapped Helen of Troy,
if the legends are true.
Most archeologists
hope against hope
they find one tomb
in their whole life.
- Ah, yeah, yeah, but
- You found an entire city.
- Yeah.
Will you show me over there?
- 72nd shipwreck you've found?
- Yeah. Yeah.
- And just this morning?
"Eh, I just found
another shipwreck."
- Yeah, yeah.
- How does this discovery rank
in your lifetime in terms of
- I have to say
that it is number one.
- Number one?
- Yeah, it is. Yeah.
- Dr. Mohamed Abdelmaguid
is Egypt's head
of underwater antiquities,
and he ranks
the discovery of Heracleion
above even
the Lighthouse of Alexandria,
one of the seven wonders
of the ancient world.
- We thought that we will have
about 20, 30 years
to discover all the site,
and now we are calculating
100 year or maybe more.
- Take a
it'll take a century
to find everything?
- Yes.
- What do you make of the fact
that it wasn't an Egyptian
and he wasn't even
an archeologist, Franck Goddio,
who made this discovery?
- Yeah.
He was not an Egyptian.
This is not a problem.
But as a non-archeologist,
Franck has
[speaks native language]
It means he can smell
all these antiquities.
- [laughs]
He's got a nose for history.
- Yeah, he's got a nose.
Yes.
- Look at that.
Wow.
Wow.
But Franck's nose
has some high-tech help
cameras and scanners
to make sense
of the murky depths.
Oh, look at that,
how it sort of follows
the contour of the ocean floor.
Wow, that gives you
a whole different perspective.
But what happened
to this place?
What ended these lives?
Franck says there are clues
just below us,
and it's time to get wet.
[dramatic music]
♪
- The Corniche is Alexandrias
popular seaside highway,
a poignant backdrop
for relic hunters like Eric,
scuba-loving native
of Key West, Florida.
- Sometimes,
you come to the surface
on a calm day,
and you can see the people
riding bikes
or horse-drawn buggies,
and you can hear their voices
and see all those buildings.
6 million people.
- Right.
- And yet, here on the bottom
is another city, the same
city, that disappeared,
and it makes you wonder,
do they know
do they think about it ever?
- Right.
- Do they wonder?
♪
- Welcome to Thonis-Heracleio.
♪
Not the greatest visibility
down here,
but if not for this silty mur,
looters would have
picked it clean long ago.
Fishermen have been
dragging nets here forever,
clueless to the columns,
crockery,
bones, and ghosts
just 20 feet below.
♪
We float in the belly of a shp
that sailed the Nile
centuries before Cleopatra
took her own life.
Wow!
[laughs]
That was incredible!
Oh, my God.
I feel like a soggy,
salty Indiana Jones.
[laughs]
[men speaking indistinctly]
So good.
So good.
- Fantastic.
- The shipwreck
the timbers of it
the way they fanned out
the way you could see the
[exhales]
contours of this
2,200-year-old ship
it was so amazing.
And pick up pieces of pottery
that probably held figs
or olives or wine.
You can piece 'em
back together.
And it's everywhere.
The whole
the whole bottom of the ocean
is like a bull went through
Pottery Barn.
Wow.
That was cool.
♪
When you're working
on these objects,
do you imagine
the people who built them?
Who made them?
Who owned them?
- Yes.
- Your great-great-great-great-
great-great-grandmother
[both laugh]
- Yes.
- Maybe lived here, right?
- Yes.
[speaking in native language]
- That's Shereen,
bringing a bit of history
back to life,
Rabiea,
cataloging what looks like
an ancient garage sale
both proud Egyptians.
- I think it's used for perfume.
- Perfume?
- Yeah.
- But whoever dabbed that scet
behind her ears
wouldn't recognize
the Nile delta today.
- That's over 40 square miles
of land
sinking into the delta
inch by inch over the centuris
until, all at once,
it crashed into the drink,
with temple columns
sinking ships as they fell.
- It was an earthquake
followed by a tidal wave,
you know?
- Tsunami, yeah.
- Right, right.
- Are you finding bones too?
- Yes.
And so
- Does that mean
people got out in time?
- No. No.
- No?
So it was a disaster
in every sense
of the word, yeah.
Wow.
- When you see these things,
when you become
the first person to hold them
in millennia,
you can picture
the human beings,
the families,
that owned these objects,
that set their tables
the day the big one hit.
It's fascinating,
and it's a little bit eerie,
especially considering
that Alexandria's
just as seismic now
as it was then
and the seas are rising
even faster.
♪
How long before archeologists
will be studying
those artifacts?
- How many times
did this city sink
before the last time?
Over and over through history,
recorded history,
we have these cataclysmic
events that appear
- Yeah.
- And so we know
it's gonna happen again,
it already to happened to
them, and you wonder,
were they lackadaisical,
and are we lackadaisical
- Right.
- In not considering this?
- It's human nature.
Hubris, right?
It's likely
Alexander the Great knew
Heracleion was doomed
and built his namesake city
on safer ground,
but modern rulers
have a much heavier lift
because humanity has altered
the longest river in the word
and the delta
that feeds North Africa.
Next stop, a trip
to the original breadbasket
for a taste of lifeand death
on the Nile.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- The River Nile
the carotid artery of Africa.
Over 4,000 miles it winds
through ten countries,
until Egypt,
where it fans
like a lotus flower
before hitting
the Mediterranean.
It turns sand into bread
for the 40 million people
who live around here,
grows fruits and veggies,
flowers and cotton
for countless others
around the world,
and when you see the soil
it is working with,
you understand why Hapi,
the god of the Nile,
is also the god of fertility.
[upbeat pop music]
♪
How long
have you been farming this land?
- [speaking native language]
- Essam grows apples,
pomegranates, and oranges.
And what's changed?
What's different now
than when you were a boy?
- He blames salination,
mysterious disease,
and pollution of air and wate.
He says he lost 60%
of his apple crop this year.
Do you get any help
from the government in trying
to figure out what's wrong?
How to help you?
- [speaking native language]
- No.
- No.
- You're on your own.
Do you have children?
Grandchildren?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
What do you think
will happen to them?
What will this land look like
when they're your age?
- A few miles away,
Magdy and his five brothers
farm a seaside strip
not far from where they found
the Rosetta Stone.
- [speaking native language]
- Oh, yeah?
Oh.
Mm-hmm.
- Hmm.
- [laughs]
You are really seaside farmers.
- [laughs]
- Look at this.
This family grows watermelon,
tomatoes, and cucumbers
in the sandy soil,
desperately reliant on rains
that haven't come as needed
the last four years,
so families
will often pool their savings
and drill wells
to tap the Nile delta aquife,
which only makes things wors.
You see,
that freshwater underground
is holding back
the Mediterranean Sea.
Pumping it up
creates a pressure
that pulls the salt water
inland,
and nothing turns cropland
into wasteland like salt.
Since they can't grow enough
to survive as farmers,
Magdy and his brothers
all have second jobs,
and they catch
whatever they can
from sea and sky.
This is how you put protein
on the table
in this part of Egypt.
These nets are here
to catch migrating quail,
although they tell me
they catch about 5%
of what they used to
in the old days,
which makes them
all the more dependent
on their crops,
which, of course, are threatened
by rising seas,
and this is their seawall.
It may look like just reeds
growing out of the sand.
It's actually placed here
by farmers.
They buy a bundle for about 10¢,
stick it in the sand,
let the wind create a dune,
and then they pray to Allah.
Scientists say
that the seas are going to rise.
Does that worry you?
- Yeah,
God's looking out for you?
Inshallah?
Do you get any help
from the government
when it comes
to protecting your crops?
- The Coastal Research
Institute
is the Egyptian agency
in charge
of these looming problems.
What an interesting place
to meet.
- Yes. Yes.
- Where the Nile meets the Med.
Dr. Mohamed Soliman
is the director,
and when I asked to see how
they are handling the threat,
he points to this seawall,
built by the Chinese
decades ago, and,
for the first time,
one piece
of high-tech equipment
to measure the changes.
What worries you the most?
Is it rising seas?
Is it the sinking delta?
Is it overpopulation?
- Yeah.
- So you have one
up and running right now?
And with plans for two more?
Is that enough?
- This is the guy
who controls that budget.
Dr. Khaled Fahmy is Egypt's
Minister of the Environment.
- The environment is a mirror.
You see in it the major features
of this society.
- Right.
- Whether it is political,
economic, or whatever.
It just only a mirror.
It just reflects
the kind of society.
- And what do you feel
when you look in that mirror?
- I'm seeing that
well, it needs
a lot of cosmetics, yeah?
- [laughs] Yeah.
- But cosmetics doesn't change
the situation that much.
- It just covers it over, right?
- So, really, I think,
what we need
is a major surgery.
- He believes
that richer countries,
like the United States,
share the responsibility
of protecting people here.
- We're not the one
that raised the temperature.
We're not the one
that changed climate.
You're the one that did that,
and we have to suffer.
We suffer most and more
than other parts of the world.
- Alexandria
- Yes?
- How much of that city
do you think will be underwater
by the middle of this century?
And how much can be saved?
- I think there is
there is a part of the city
which is endangered,
and the city was in danger
even before that,
but Alexandria's not gonna go
under the water.
I mean, it's still
we're
we have better technologies.
The problem is not whether
we have the technologies or not.
The problem is whether
you can afford them or not
and can afford them
in the right time.
And here where we need the help.
Here is one case
of where we can see
that people in countries
that were causing the problem
they should come and help us
in facing the consequence.
That does not mean
that we're gonna wait
until you come.
We have to work.
We have to address
- Right.
- The problem.
And we will address the problem.
But it is fair
that we share
the costs.
- The U.S. already gives more
than a billion dollars a year
to Egypt.
Most of it's spent on weaponr.
And there was a time
when America could've used
that influence
to share climate science her,
but times changed.
The U.S. elected
a climate science skeptic,
and his very first call
of congratulations
came from General Sisi.
- [man singing
in native language]
♪
- The borders of Egypt
have been largely intact
for over 5,000 years.
They are survivors,
and for most,
this requires
a hardy sense of humor
and constant complaining.
- We have a nostalgia problem
in this city.
It really burdens the individual
that everything was better.
Even some might tell you two
years ago was better.
But there is always this,
you know, chronic illness
to try and escape the present,
and no one wants to exist
in this present.
- Amro Ali is one of Egypt's
leading young intellectuals,
an affectionate critic
of his dysfunctional land.
- This has been a problem
for 2,300 years.
Even the poets
of the third century,
in Alexandria, used to say,
"We wish we can return
300 years earlier
to the Ptolemies
and Cleopatra."
- The good old days, right?
- The good old days.
The good old days is just
as long as it's not today.
It's not a paradise
in terms of, you know
there is repression,
and there is all these issues
that you see
I mean, the human rights abuses,
these are all real,
that is true
but life goes on
in the sense of,
people know how to make jokes,
people know
how to find happiness.
It's actually
a historical ruling
where the Romans prevented
Egyptians from practicing law
and only Greeks
could practice law,
and that was because
Egyptians made
too many wisecracks in court.
Not because
of imperialism or racism
- Is that right?
- But because of jokes.
- They were smartasses.
- All through history, yeah.
- But humor is harder
to come by these days.
Bassem Youssef
was the Jon Stewart of Egypt.
When it looked like
he might end up in prison
for insulting the military,
his show was cancelled,
and he fled to America.
When General Sisi said
he wished he could get
everyone's spare change
to help fund the government,
this meme went viral,
and the man who made it
was arrested and questioned.
Are you allowed to poke
fun at this government?
- The thing is, it's difficult
to control all of us.
- Yeah.
- They'll often go,
you know, for the
the more influential figures,
the hard hitters.
But it's never really
you just cannot control
this whole, you know,
alternate universe in Egypt.
- Right.
- It's just too widespread.
[soft dramatic music]
- And so they crack wise
on the street,
grumble between puffs
of shisha,
and they still have Twitter,
the megaphone
of the revolution.
And when this young man
saw our cameras,
he was eager
to share an original song
of protest.
- [singing in native language]
♪
- There was a dramatic
total dramatic change after
2011 in perception.
Regardless whether people
supported the revolution
or not,
it changed people's
perception their sense
of entitlement,
their hopes,
their aspirations.
- It's been hard to find people
who would speak out critically
of this place.
Do you fear reprisal
for talking to me this way?
- Look.
It's never easy.
It's never
you do have to think about it
and reconsider the choices
and so forth.
- Yeah.
- But I have seen
so much happen
in the past five years,
you know, one thing
the revolution taught you
is that never to fear again.
I mean, we've
using some wisdom, of course,
and all that,
but too much has happened,
too much blood has been spilled,
too much, you know,
censorship has happened,
and we've seen the gains,
and I want to see
that sort of restoration
or some sort of continuation
on that journey
by alternate means.
[serene music]
♪
- Back when Heracleion
was a living, thriving city,
Egypt had a population
of around 4 million.
When these kids are my age,
it will be 150 million.
♪
What will be lost by then?
What will be found?
And how much history
are we doomed to repeat?
[dramatic music]
♪
- It was the envy
of the world
a shimmering city
of gods and pharaohs,
teeming with life,
energy,
and grand human plans,
right until the day
the earth moved
and it was swallowed
by the sea.
Silty waves held its secrets
for over a thousand years
until the arrival
of a renegade,
and what once was lost
has now been found.
I feel like a soggy,
salty Indiana Jones.
This is a story about Egypt,
both ancient
and modern.
It involves the Nile
and denial,
and it is evidence
that those
who do not learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.
My name is Bill Weir,
and I'm a storyteller.
I've reported
from all over the world,
and I have seen so much chang.
[upbeat rock music]
So I made a list
of the most wonderful places
to explore,
right before they change
forever.
♪
This is "The Wonder List."
[rousing music]
♪
I know what you're thinking.
"A camel ride?
"Around the pyramids?
"Come on, Weir.
Seems a bit cliché.
Every tourist and his mom
does the pyramids."
Well, not anymore.
These days,
the crowds at Giza are gone.
The Sphinx is lonely.
An American on a camel
is a real novelty,
because nothing
keeps the tourists away
like fear.
[explosions booming]
After so much turmoil
[men chanting
in native language]
And so much terror
- Traces of explosive materil
have been found on the victis
of EgyptAir Flight 804.
- Egypt can seem
like a scary place.
But it's complicated.
One minute, we're welcomed
by warm, friendly strangers.
The next minute,
questioned by authorities.
Soldiers and cops
run this country.
Jails are filled
with political prisoners.
Journalists
have been sentenced to death.
The economy is in tatters.
Meanwhile, the average Egyptin
has no idea
that his ancient civilization
is more vulnerable than ever.
And it's understandable why.
Just in the last five
or six years,
these folks have lived
through revolution and coup.
They've had 3 presidents,
3 constitutions,
4 prime ministers,
700 changes in parliament.
Seas are rising,
population is growing,
but you can kind of understand
if these folks
don't think about the long-term.
They're just trying
to get through today.
[soft dramatic music]
The Nile delta
the source of life
for 40 million
is in peril like never befor:
not enough fresh water for ma,
beast,
crops;
too much saltwater
from rising seas.
And when it comes
to the cities,
well, they don't build 'em
like they used to.
[crowd yelling]
YouTube is filled with exampls
of shoddy,
often illegal construction
falling to pieces.
♪
So a visit to Alexandria,
a place where they stash
surplus Sphinxes
in parking lots,
is so surreal.
This once chic
and cosmopolitan port
is now conservative
and crumbling
6 million people
bracing for an uncertain futue
while still stumbling across
treasures of the past.
- So, basically,
what we're walking on
there are catacombs
- Below our feet?
- Yeah.
So it's sort of Swiss cheese.
- Salima
is an esteemed Egyptologist,
and she's eager
to take me underground
and back in time.
- Shall we go down?
- Let's do it.
♪
- So it goes down
quite a long way.
- Wow.
♪
Until the day
a donkey came crashing
through a perfectly carved hoe
in the catacomb roof,
all of this was hidden
for centuries.
♪
- See, over here,
you had two statues
- Oh, yeah.
- To welcome you
into the land of the dead.
- Wow.
This graveyard is proof
that Egypt has been wrestling
with religious differences
for a very long time.
As outsiders moved in,
they created gods
everyone could believe in.
- In Alexandria,
it's this mad melting pot
where people are coming up
with new ideas
and taking a bit of this
and a bit of that.
You've got the god Anubis,
guardian of the underworld,
but he's wearing
his little Roman outfit.
- Right.
- He's got the
all the things
the spears
that the soldiers would have.
Little armbands.
It's really great.
I just love this mixture,
and he's got this big smile.
- Mummies and their treasure
filled each one
of these chambers
until the grave robbers
showed up.
- It's the second-oldest
profession, probably, in Egypt,
and people have been doing it,
you know
a pharaoh's buried,
and maybe 10, 15 years later,
someone's trying
to break into the tomb.
- But the more recent threat
to history
is this rising water
and the new need
for a boardwalk
to navigate amongst the ghost.
And is that an alarming trend
in terms of preservation?
- Yes, it is.
It is an alarming trend,
because there's so much change
in the whole environment now,
and this rising water table's
threatening a lot
of the monuments,
but particularly tombs,
from this period.
- What's contributing
to this water?
- Population.
The more people,
the more water expelled,
and also, I think, just
sort of rising groundwater.
- Yeah.
- Climate changing.
- At Pompey's Pillar,
not another tourist in sight.
- It's all of solid granite,
which comes from about almost
a thousand miles down the river,
or up the river, rather,
from Aswan.
- Is that right?
So just getting it here
is a superhuman feat.
- And it's one piece.
- This is what's left
of a massive
third-century temple,
but what they'd
really like to find
remains hidden.
- Basically,
anyone who came to Alexandria,
they would say
the librarian would get to them
and say,
"Ah, have you any books?"
- Ah.
- And "Please let us copy them."
- The Library of Alexandria
was the Internet of the day,
as the Ptolemies,
the Greek kings who followed
Alexander the Great
and Cleopatra,
built the smartest city
in the known world.
Scholars can't agree
on what exactly burned it dow,
but there is no debate
that religion and politics
led to Egypt's great decline,
then
and now.
- This is the new
Library of Alexandria,
built after
Richard Nixon paid a visit
and wondered out loud
what happened to the old one.
It is a point of pride
for many,
but unlike
the original library,
not all knowledge
is welcome these days.
- Actually,
there's lots of books
that is forbidden
to come into Egypt.
- Really?
- By the government.
- Really?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not just the religious books.
There's some political books
are forbidden to come to Egypt.
- Yeah.
- That's by the government.
[upbeat rock music]
♪
- Mohamed, Samo, and Ahmed
are members of Telepoetic,
and like millions
of Egyptian Millennials,
they have ridden
an emotional roller coaster
the last few years.
[crowds cheering and yelling]
♪
They grew up
under Hosni Mubarak's
long reign of corruption
and brutality.
For 30 years he ruled,
until the Arab Spring bloome,
and in 2011,
his subjects said, "Enough."
- The police was attacking us,
everywhere, in the whole city,
but we felt
that we're doing something
that is really important.
- After 18 days
of violent revolution,
the modern pharaoh fell.
Egypt belonged to the people.
- It was really
almost a utopia.
I mean, people were literally,
like, cleaning the streets
with soap, you know?
[all laugh]
They were so really happy.
- At least can you imagine this?
- They were proud.
all: Yeah.
- Really.
- Normally apathetic voters
showed up at the polls
in droves,
and Mohamed Morsi,
a little-known member
of the Muslim Brotherhood,
became president.
But when Morsi gave himself
unlimited power,
the people rose again,
and this time,
as Egypt teetered on the brin,
the military swept in
and put one of their own
in charge.
- All the youth were really
they had a lot of hope, really.
- They felt that
that it's their country.
- Exactly,
and that we're changing
and the times are changing.
And then things just started
to get worse and worse.
- All of that was snatched away.
- Definitely.
It was all snatched away, yeah.
- Since the coup,
a once shadowy general
named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
has ruled Egypt
with a stone fist,
crushing both Islamists
and liberalsalike.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- I don't know if you heard
when we were entering.
Everyone around us were talking
about the economic crisis
and how things are bad for them.
- Sarah is a Cairo journalist
who covered the revolution.
And she explains how,
under Sisi,
a bad economy has gotten wors.
The Egyptian pound crashed.
Tourism and foreign investmet
disappeared.
- Only 14% of the population
makes more than 4,000
Egyptian pounds per month.
- Okay.
- That's around $400 per family.
And the rest live under that.
- Most people are $100,
$200 a month?
- Actually much less than that.
- Less than that.
- [speaking native language]
- He says, "I want you
to talk about the economy
because it's really bad."
- Hameda is a falafel vendor
and says it's never been hardr
to make ends meet.
- A bag of beans went
from 100 pounds to 190 pounds.
- Oh, wow.
- Oil has more than quadrupled
the price.
And this is just, like,
poor people food.
- Right.
And it's not
you can't raise your prices,
can you?
- He can't raise his prices.
Like this
- But even though
he stopped us to complain,
he refuses
to blame the man in charge.
- He's telling you that the
government that's here
- Yes?
- Is much better now
than previous ones.
- Really?
- He says el-Sisi,
the President,
is better than the
- He likes Sisi?
- Yeah, yeah.
He does.
- Maybe he's spotted
the policeman following us,
or maybe he really believes
in Sisi's ISIS-fighting imag,
but for the moment, it seems,
the spirit of the revolution
has been drained,
and all the while,
this once great city crumble,
entire neighborhoods are
flooded with each big storm.
- Every winter, the people get
to their apartments using boots.
But the people just don't care.
The government don't care.
- Climate change
it's an issue
that's having troubles,
even in the West,
from really accepting it,
so you can imagine here,
if it has to do with nature,
then it's in God's hands.
- But this isn't the first tie
land, water, and human sprawl
have made for disaster.
Just off the coast
of Alexandria
is an entire city
lost beneath the sea
but protected
from grave robbers and looter.
It is a miraculous find
by the most unlikely
of explorers,
and we're invited
to come have a look.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- Long before
Alexander the Great
built this town
and named it for himself
the most important city
on the coast
was somewhere out there.
It was named for Hercules
and stood as an ancient versin
of Venice
a maze of inhabited islands,
rich temples,a bustling port.
Getting there today
involves a short drive
past many reminders
that wealth and power
are never forever.
We haven't even reached
the water yet.
Place is full of shipwrecks.
Look at this.
Look at that.
Amazing to think about all
of the great maritime battles,
going back to Cleopatra,
Alexander the Great, Napoleon,
but this is a modern seaport
in Egypt.
♪
We motor across
the Bay of Abu Qir
on seas so calm,
a fantail warbler
catches a nap.
I'm too excited to doze,
mind full of details
from an old Roman mosaic I sa,
one of the earliest depictios
of life on the Nile delta
how they hunted and worshippd
and raised families
right here,
before everything changed.
Back in the day,
we could've made this journey
on foot or by donkey,
but today,
the only way
to get to Heracleion
is through the "Princess Duda"
the research vessel
of a guy named Franck Goddio.
Thanks.
Hello.
I'm Bill.
- Welcome.
- Thank you.
So great to be here, Franck!
- Yeah, it is.
♪
- His ship is a hive
of activity,
a United Nations
of soggy antiquity.
Cuban, Russian,
American divers,
French and Egyptian
archeologists
all buzzing
with constant discovery.
I barely poured
my first cup of coffee,
and you're already
whipping out
- You can take it to go.
- 2,000-year-old artifacts.
- Oh, yeah. Look.
Look at that.
- Look at that.
- How old?
- And you guys
are the first human beings
to touch this
since the city went down?
- Ah, yes, yes.
- Wow.
- Zeus?
- How common is it
for you to find these?
Is this every day?
- Every day.
- Every day?
- His very best finds,
from delicate jewelry
to mighty colossus,
recently toured Europe
and headlined
the British Museum.
This is your Rosetta Stone.
- [laughs]
- It's incredible.
Even more incredible
is that archeology
was Franck's hobby
for most of his life.
You were a policy wonk.
You were
a math statistician nerd, right?
- He worked
in finance and economics,
just a guy at a desk,
buried in numbers,
all the while dreaming
of what's buried at sea.
When you started launching
these missions,
how did the archeology world
receive you?
- Yeah?
[both laugh]
- But this allowed him to thik
about underwater archeology
in a whole new way.
You've treated these mission,
these searches,
like a math problem.
- He spent more time
in libraries and archives
than at sea,
and the approach led him
to incredible finds
warships in Cuba,
important Spanish galleons
in Asia
but in the back of his mind
rattled rumors
of something much bigger.
- Tales of an Egyptian Atlants
were little more than myth,
really,
but Franck was relentless.
- Mm-hmm.
- Yeah, yeah.
- For five years,
his team scanned the seabed
off Alexandria,
until they came across
a curious line of stones.
It was the wall of a temple,
and under it,
they found a black stone,
known as a stela.
Perfectly carved,
perfectly preserved
the boasts and commands
of the pharaoh.
- [laughs]
- The kind
of political billboard
you might find today.
- Yes.
- Right.
Right.
The hieroglyphics confirmed
he had found it.
Thonis-Heracleion
the city
where kings became gods
in secret ceremony,
where Paris brought
the kidnapped Helen of Troy,
if the legends are true.
Most archeologists
hope against hope
they find one tomb
in their whole life.
- Ah, yeah, yeah, but
- You found an entire city.
- Yeah.
Will you show me over there?
- 72nd shipwreck you've found?
- Yeah. Yeah.
- And just this morning?
"Eh, I just found
another shipwreck."
- Yeah, yeah.
- How does this discovery rank
in your lifetime in terms of
- I have to say
that it is number one.
- Number one?
- Yeah, it is. Yeah.
- Dr. Mohamed Abdelmaguid
is Egypt's head
of underwater antiquities,
and he ranks
the discovery of Heracleion
above even
the Lighthouse of Alexandria,
one of the seven wonders
of the ancient world.
- We thought that we will have
about 20, 30 years
to discover all the site,
and now we are calculating
100 year or maybe more.
- Take a
it'll take a century
to find everything?
- Yes.
- What do you make of the fact
that it wasn't an Egyptian
and he wasn't even
an archeologist, Franck Goddio,
who made this discovery?
- Yeah.
He was not an Egyptian.
This is not a problem.
But as a non-archeologist,
Franck has
[speaks native language]
It means he can smell
all these antiquities.
- [laughs]
He's got a nose for history.
- Yeah, he's got a nose.
Yes.
- Look at that.
Wow.
Wow.
But Franck's nose
has some high-tech help
cameras and scanners
to make sense
of the murky depths.
Oh, look at that,
how it sort of follows
the contour of the ocean floor.
Wow, that gives you
a whole different perspective.
But what happened
to this place?
What ended these lives?
Franck says there are clues
just below us,
and it's time to get wet.
[dramatic music]
♪
- The Corniche is Alexandrias
popular seaside highway,
a poignant backdrop
for relic hunters like Eric,
scuba-loving native
of Key West, Florida.
- Sometimes,
you come to the surface
on a calm day,
and you can see the people
riding bikes
or horse-drawn buggies,
and you can hear their voices
and see all those buildings.
6 million people.
- Right.
- And yet, here on the bottom
is another city, the same
city, that disappeared,
and it makes you wonder,
do they know
do they think about it ever?
- Right.
- Do they wonder?
♪
- Welcome to Thonis-Heracleio.
♪
Not the greatest visibility
down here,
but if not for this silty mur,
looters would have
picked it clean long ago.
Fishermen have been
dragging nets here forever,
clueless to the columns,
crockery,
bones, and ghosts
just 20 feet below.
♪
We float in the belly of a shp
that sailed the Nile
centuries before Cleopatra
took her own life.
Wow!
[laughs]
That was incredible!
Oh, my God.
I feel like a soggy,
salty Indiana Jones.
[laughs]
[men speaking indistinctly]
So good.
So good.
- Fantastic.
- The shipwreck
the timbers of it
the way they fanned out
the way you could see the
[exhales]
contours of this
2,200-year-old ship
it was so amazing.
And pick up pieces of pottery
that probably held figs
or olives or wine.
You can piece 'em
back together.
And it's everywhere.
The whole
the whole bottom of the ocean
is like a bull went through
Pottery Barn.
Wow.
That was cool.
♪
When you're working
on these objects,
do you imagine
the people who built them?
Who made them?
Who owned them?
- Yes.
- Your great-great-great-great-
great-great-grandmother
[both laugh]
- Yes.
- Maybe lived here, right?
- Yes.
[speaking in native language]
- That's Shereen,
bringing a bit of history
back to life,
Rabiea,
cataloging what looks like
an ancient garage sale
both proud Egyptians.
- I think it's used for perfume.
- Perfume?
- Yeah.
- But whoever dabbed that scet
behind her ears
wouldn't recognize
the Nile delta today.
- That's over 40 square miles
of land
sinking into the delta
inch by inch over the centuris
until, all at once,
it crashed into the drink,
with temple columns
sinking ships as they fell.
- It was an earthquake
followed by a tidal wave,
you know?
- Tsunami, yeah.
- Right, right.
- Are you finding bones too?
- Yes.
And so
- Does that mean
people got out in time?
- No. No.
- No?
So it was a disaster
in every sense
of the word, yeah.
Wow.
- When you see these things,
when you become
the first person to hold them
in millennia,
you can picture
the human beings,
the families,
that owned these objects,
that set their tables
the day the big one hit.
It's fascinating,
and it's a little bit eerie,
especially considering
that Alexandria's
just as seismic now
as it was then
and the seas are rising
even faster.
♪
How long before archeologists
will be studying
those artifacts?
- How many times
did this city sink
before the last time?
Over and over through history,
recorded history,
we have these cataclysmic
events that appear
- Yeah.
- And so we know
it's gonna happen again,
it already to happened to
them, and you wonder,
were they lackadaisical,
and are we lackadaisical
- Right.
- In not considering this?
- It's human nature.
Hubris, right?
It's likely
Alexander the Great knew
Heracleion was doomed
and built his namesake city
on safer ground,
but modern rulers
have a much heavier lift
because humanity has altered
the longest river in the word
and the delta
that feeds North Africa.
Next stop, a trip
to the original breadbasket
for a taste of lifeand death
on the Nile.
[soft dramatic music]
♪
- The River Nile
the carotid artery of Africa.
Over 4,000 miles it winds
through ten countries,
until Egypt,
where it fans
like a lotus flower
before hitting
the Mediterranean.
It turns sand into bread
for the 40 million people
who live around here,
grows fruits and veggies,
flowers and cotton
for countless others
around the world,
and when you see the soil
it is working with,
you understand why Hapi,
the god of the Nile,
is also the god of fertility.
[upbeat pop music]
♪
How long
have you been farming this land?
- [speaking native language]
- Essam grows apples,
pomegranates, and oranges.
And what's changed?
What's different now
than when you were a boy?
- He blames salination,
mysterious disease,
and pollution of air and wate.
He says he lost 60%
of his apple crop this year.
Do you get any help
from the government in trying
to figure out what's wrong?
How to help you?
- [speaking native language]
- No.
- No.
- You're on your own.
Do you have children?
Grandchildren?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
What do you think
will happen to them?
What will this land look like
when they're your age?
- A few miles away,
Magdy and his five brothers
farm a seaside strip
not far from where they found
the Rosetta Stone.
- [speaking native language]
- Oh, yeah?
Oh.
Mm-hmm.
- Hmm.
- [laughs]
You are really seaside farmers.
- [laughs]
- Look at this.
This family grows watermelon,
tomatoes, and cucumbers
in the sandy soil,
desperately reliant on rains
that haven't come as needed
the last four years,
so families
will often pool their savings
and drill wells
to tap the Nile delta aquife,
which only makes things wors.
You see,
that freshwater underground
is holding back
the Mediterranean Sea.
Pumping it up
creates a pressure
that pulls the salt water
inland,
and nothing turns cropland
into wasteland like salt.
Since they can't grow enough
to survive as farmers,
Magdy and his brothers
all have second jobs,
and they catch
whatever they can
from sea and sky.
This is how you put protein
on the table
in this part of Egypt.
These nets are here
to catch migrating quail,
although they tell me
they catch about 5%
of what they used to
in the old days,
which makes them
all the more dependent
on their crops,
which, of course, are threatened
by rising seas,
and this is their seawall.
It may look like just reeds
growing out of the sand.
It's actually placed here
by farmers.
They buy a bundle for about 10¢,
stick it in the sand,
let the wind create a dune,
and then they pray to Allah.
Scientists say
that the seas are going to rise.
Does that worry you?
- Yeah,
God's looking out for you?
Inshallah?
Do you get any help
from the government
when it comes
to protecting your crops?
- The Coastal Research
Institute
is the Egyptian agency
in charge
of these looming problems.
What an interesting place
to meet.
- Yes. Yes.
- Where the Nile meets the Med.
Dr. Mohamed Soliman
is the director,
and when I asked to see how
they are handling the threat,
he points to this seawall,
built by the Chinese
decades ago, and,
for the first time,
one piece
of high-tech equipment
to measure the changes.
What worries you the most?
Is it rising seas?
Is it the sinking delta?
Is it overpopulation?
- Yeah.
- So you have one
up and running right now?
And with plans for two more?
Is that enough?
- This is the guy
who controls that budget.
Dr. Khaled Fahmy is Egypt's
Minister of the Environment.
- The environment is a mirror.
You see in it the major features
of this society.
- Right.
- Whether it is political,
economic, or whatever.
It just only a mirror.
It just reflects
the kind of society.
- And what do you feel
when you look in that mirror?
- I'm seeing that
well, it needs
a lot of cosmetics, yeah?
- [laughs] Yeah.
- But cosmetics doesn't change
the situation that much.
- It just covers it over, right?
- So, really, I think,
what we need
is a major surgery.
- He believes
that richer countries,
like the United States,
share the responsibility
of protecting people here.
- We're not the one
that raised the temperature.
We're not the one
that changed climate.
You're the one that did that,
and we have to suffer.
We suffer most and more
than other parts of the world.
- Alexandria
- Yes?
- How much of that city
do you think will be underwater
by the middle of this century?
And how much can be saved?
- I think there is
there is a part of the city
which is endangered,
and the city was in danger
even before that,
but Alexandria's not gonna go
under the water.
I mean, it's still
we're
we have better technologies.
The problem is not whether
we have the technologies or not.
The problem is whether
you can afford them or not
and can afford them
in the right time.
And here where we need the help.
Here is one case
of where we can see
that people in countries
that were causing the problem
they should come and help us
in facing the consequence.
That does not mean
that we're gonna wait
until you come.
We have to work.
We have to address
- Right.
- The problem.
And we will address the problem.
But it is fair
that we share
the costs.
- The U.S. already gives more
than a billion dollars a year
to Egypt.
Most of it's spent on weaponr.
And there was a time
when America could've used
that influence
to share climate science her,
but times changed.
The U.S. elected
a climate science skeptic,
and his very first call
of congratulations
came from General Sisi.
- [man singing
in native language]
♪
- The borders of Egypt
have been largely intact
for over 5,000 years.
They are survivors,
and for most,
this requires
a hardy sense of humor
and constant complaining.
- We have a nostalgia problem
in this city.
It really burdens the individual
that everything was better.
Even some might tell you two
years ago was better.
But there is always this,
you know, chronic illness
to try and escape the present,
and no one wants to exist
in this present.
- Amro Ali is one of Egypt's
leading young intellectuals,
an affectionate critic
of his dysfunctional land.
- This has been a problem
for 2,300 years.
Even the poets
of the third century,
in Alexandria, used to say,
"We wish we can return
300 years earlier
to the Ptolemies
and Cleopatra."
- The good old days, right?
- The good old days.
The good old days is just
as long as it's not today.
It's not a paradise
in terms of, you know
there is repression,
and there is all these issues
that you see
I mean, the human rights abuses,
these are all real,
that is true
but life goes on
in the sense of,
people know how to make jokes,
people know
how to find happiness.
It's actually
a historical ruling
where the Romans prevented
Egyptians from practicing law
and only Greeks
could practice law,
and that was because
Egyptians made
too many wisecracks in court.
Not because
of imperialism or racism
- Is that right?
- But because of jokes.
- They were smartasses.
- All through history, yeah.
- But humor is harder
to come by these days.
Bassem Youssef
was the Jon Stewart of Egypt.
When it looked like
he might end up in prison
for insulting the military,
his show was cancelled,
and he fled to America.
When General Sisi said
he wished he could get
everyone's spare change
to help fund the government,
this meme went viral,
and the man who made it
was arrested and questioned.
Are you allowed to poke
fun at this government?
- The thing is, it's difficult
to control all of us.
- Yeah.
- They'll often go,
you know, for the
the more influential figures,
the hard hitters.
But it's never really
you just cannot control
this whole, you know,
alternate universe in Egypt.
- Right.
- It's just too widespread.
[soft dramatic music]
- And so they crack wise
on the street,
grumble between puffs
of shisha,
and they still have Twitter,
the megaphone
of the revolution.
And when this young man
saw our cameras,
he was eager
to share an original song
of protest.
- [singing in native language]
♪
- There was a dramatic
total dramatic change after
2011 in perception.
Regardless whether people
supported the revolution
or not,
it changed people's
perception their sense
of entitlement,
their hopes,
their aspirations.
- It's been hard to find people
who would speak out critically
of this place.
Do you fear reprisal
for talking to me this way?
- Look.
It's never easy.
It's never
you do have to think about it
and reconsider the choices
and so forth.
- Yeah.
- But I have seen
so much happen
in the past five years,
you know, one thing
the revolution taught you
is that never to fear again.
I mean, we've
using some wisdom, of course,
and all that,
but too much has happened,
too much blood has been spilled,
too much, you know,
censorship has happened,
and we've seen the gains,
and I want to see
that sort of restoration
or some sort of continuation
on that journey
by alternate means.
[serene music]
♪
- Back when Heracleion
was a living, thriving city,
Egypt had a population
of around 4 million.
When these kids are my age,
it will be 150 million.
♪
What will be lost by then?
What will be found?
And how much history
are we doomed to repeat?