Five thousand years ago - nearly two millennia before the Romans built their first mud huts - ancient Egypt's mighty pharaohs began commissioning and building monumental masterpieces whose scale, beauty, and sophistication continue to awe and amaze even today.

Hosted by actor and art historian Peter Weller, the feature-length Egypt: Engineering An Empire explores Egypt's awe-inspiring engineering accomplishments through the prism of its pharaohs' indomitable personalities. As Egypt's pharaohs alternately conquered and ceded vast expanses of land, they pushed their royal architects to stretch the boundaries of imagination and human potential, in effect inventing the science of structural engineering. Follow the empire's development from the First Dynasty of 3000 BC through the last days of the reign of Ramses the Great in 1212 BC, from dazzling obelisks to the 700-foot Great Pyramid of Giza.

Through cutting-edge digital graphics and countless interviews with noted Egyptologists, The History Channel® chronicles the pharaohs and feats that brought forth the world's very first superpower.