Back to the Dara of the pyramids
O Briain lifts lid on the mysteries of Ancient Egypt in new documentary
AHEAD of his new documentary Mysteries Of The Pyramids, Dara O Briain has opened up about visiting the ancient wonders.
The 52-year-old comedian and presenter had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit Giza and meet knowledgeable archaeologists and Egyptologists.
O Briain, from Bray, Co Wicklow, said of the Channel 5 show: “It was a very easy sell to me.
“We were offered not just a chance to visit the pyramids, but the access to actually go underneath and scrabble around and do the whole Indiana Jones thing with them.
“And you kind of go, ‘Well, I’m not gonna be able to do this again, how often do you get offered this?’
“Checking in, when you arrived at the hotel, you turn around in the lobby or you look up and they’re there. It’s just this astonishing, iconic thing.
“The actual site, particularly in Giza, it’s insanely busy.
“Hawkers, people with camels, there’s wild dogs walking around.
“The angry tourists who are there on their bucket list trip to Egypt, passing by rubbing bellies with other tourists who are on their bucket list trip to Egypt. It’s all a bit tense.
Going down into chamber, that was a little bit scary
DARA O BRIAIN ON THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL TALK
They would leave graffiti within the pyramids that they had done
DARA O BRIAIN ON EVIDENCE LEFT BY WORKERS
INSANE
“We got this insane access all to ourselves, and then we got to go beyond there to the other sites, which are much quieter.
“And we were kind of like; ‘Why are you not here?’ You go to these other places, which is like, ‘This is fabulous’.
“And you could get a real sense of the history.
“Going down into the chamber. That was a little bit scary, because you do a similar walk up to the first one.
“And you’re kind of going; OK, this is about 60 metres of up and up and up, careful, careful, careful.
“And now the one down is like 100 metres plus, in a lower tunnel, and then you have to crawl through a tunnel, and you can’t see the tunnel you’re crawling through because it’s too far away to see.
“I’m a little bit claustrophobic, and I thought, I dunno, am I going to freak out at the bottom of this?”
Of all of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, just one is still standing today – the
Great Pyramid of Giza.
Built around 2600
BC, it served as the tomb of pharaoh
Khufu and makes up one of several famous pyramids on the outskirts of Egyptian capital Cairo. What makes the Egyptian pyramids so fascinating is, in some respects, how mysterious they are.
Many over the centuries have wondered how they were built out of massive blocks of stone so heavy even a modern crane would struggle to lift them.
Some have even concluded that extraterrestrials were behind their creation, not mankind.
O Briain said he could understood how conspiracy theories about the origins of the pyramids emerged.
He added: “Broken down, you need a small town, you need 20,000 people, basically [to build a pyramid].
“I found myself constantly just going, this is an incredible human achievement, so why do people keep inserting aliens into it?
“It’s so weird, because it’s like, it’s such an almost defining human thing to build, and it happened independently in all these different cultures.
“But rather than seeing that as a celebration of who we are as a species, how we wanted to construct something greater than ourselves, that reached above the trees, and we could see whatever, or would send us to an afterlife, whatever we believe in each society, the sense of people going, ‘Must have been aliens’.
INVESTIGATION
“Why would you stop your own investigation?
“Why would you put a limit on your own curiosity by having some plot twist come in from outside and do it?
“Where were the aliens where we needed, you know, flight, and vaccines?”
He laughed: “They weren’t there. They kept very quiet!”
Dara said everything about filming the documentary was “incredible”.
He added: “What I found fascinating is the human element of it. “There’s a camp just at
the back of where the pyramids are, which is clearly where [the workers] all lived.
“They had a lifestyle that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
“They would leave graffiti within the pyramids that they’d done.
“There’s one which says ‘the drunkards of Menkaure’, and Menkaure is a pharaoh for whom the third Pyramid in Giza, the smaller one, [was built].
“He’s the grandson of Khufu. And they wrote ‘the drunkards of Menkaure’ in one of the passageways...
“That was amazing, a piece of graffiti. [Also] the fact that essentially, it’s a heist movie.
“The fact that they were built to keep robbers out, and the robbers kept getting in.
“When you go into the tombs in Giza, you enter a doorway carved out by grave robbers.
“The actual main one is shut, but you go into a side passage, carved in by graverobbers, and then it meets the proper passageway. It’s a crime movie, essentially.”
Mysteries of the Pyramids with Dara O Briain starts on Monday, May 20 at 9pm on Channel 5 and My5.