Original subtitles

Egypt.

Land of legendary pharaohs and monuments,

whose majesty has never ceased to fascinate us.

And yet for centuries, this extraordinary civilisation

was completely forgotten, buried beneath the sands of the desert.

But in 1798, the French general Napoleon Bonaparte

lands in Egypt with his army.

This military conquest, accompanied by

a scientific expedition on an unprecedented scale,

ignites a powerful fascination for ancient Egypt across Europe.

Soon, explorers from every corner of the Old Continent will be

engaging in a race to seek out hidden treasures.

Come on, come on, come on!

For Egypt has become the new battleground on which

the empires of Europe will come head to head.

These adventurers travel up and down the Nile,

clearing sand from buried monuments...

...and entering tombs which had been sealed for thousands of years.

They'll confront every danger

to seize the most magnificent antiquities

in the name of their nation.

We've come to seize your documents and your research.

Do you mind opening this for me?

Be they explorers or scholars, they'll unravel

the secrets of ancient Egypt and decipher its enigmatic language,

lost for centuries.

In the footsteps of these adventurers,

let us travel together to the lands of Egypt

and relive one of the greatest adventures in human history.

Spring, 1798.

Paris pays tribute to its new hero, General Napoleon Bonaparte,

triumphant victor of the war against Austria in Italy.

Since the French Revolution,

Europe's monarchies have closed ranks against France.

They fear the contagious ideas that turned

the country into a republic and cut a king's head off.

Under this new regime,

the ambitious General Napoleon Bonaparte is on the rise.

And so, after his victory his superiors entrust him

with a new mission - to attack England!

Napoleon knew that fighting Britain in Europe

was not the best idea.

He thought that if he took the fight outside of Europe,

he could take over and really have a more global power.

A born strategist, Napoleon Bonaparte

suggests a different approach.

Rather than attacking the British head-on,

he proposes invading a country vital to British trade, Egypt.

Napoleon wanted to check British power.

So his main concern was to stop the British stronghold over India

and to control Egypt as a way of blocking British control

over trade and their dominance.

For half a century, the British have established

a powerful colony in India, moving tea, spices, and other goods

between the two countries.

The traditional route to India winds its way around Africa by sea,

via the Cape of Good Hope.

But there is a second much faster route to India,

which passes through Egypt.

Until then, this has combined travel by sea and overland,

but Bonaparte plans to dig a canal that would make the journey

even quicker and bring important revenue to France.

Bonaparte was a student of history as well as of strategy

and he knew that there had been a canal in Egypt

in the time of the pharaohs.

And he thought if this canal could be reactivated,

then this would be a shortcut to India.

And also, who knows, what would be in Egypt.

Because he also was interested.

He saw himself as a second Alexander the Great.

In July 1798, General Bonaparte

lands on the shores of Egypt at the head of an army of 30,000 men.

Officially to challenge British power.

Just before their first battle, he addresses his troops.

Soldiers, you are about to embark on a conquest whose impact

on the civilisation and commerce of the world are beyond calculation.

You will strike England with the most painful blow possible.

Until the day you can deliver the final, fatal strike.

Vive la France!

The famous Battle of the Pyramids pits the newly landed

French forces against the Mamluk warriors who rule Egypt.

In less than two hours, the outcome is decided.

And Bonaparte proclaims his first victory in the land of the pharaohs.

Egypt was ruled by the Mamluks in the late 18th,

early 19th century, and these had been in charge of Egypt

for hundreds of years and they were basically military types of rulers.

At the time of this French invasion,

Egypt is part of the Ottoman Empire.

From his base in Constantinople,

its sultan rules over numerous countries around the Mediterranean.

In Egypt, he has delegated his power to the Mamluks,

warriors of Turkish origin who conquered Egypt in the Middle Ages.

They have divided up the territory among themselves

and are exploiting the Egyptian people.

Egypt had gone through some extreme changes.

In its history, it had previously been this glorious medieval empire

that had beautiful cities like Cairo, expansive trade.

But over time, the Mamluks ruling Egypt

did not pay attention to the needs of the country and the people.

Taking advantage of the Mamluks being weak,

the French seize control of Cairo and the north of the country.

Napoleon's expedition wasn't just a military and political expedition.

This was also a scientific expedition.

He brought a number of intellectuals at the time,

specialists in science and math and engineering and the natural world

and antiquities to come to Egypt and record the country.

To take control of Egypt, Bonaparte believes

they need to understand the country and its history.

He has therefore arrived with 167 scholars in tow.

An entire academy of science is set up in Cairo under the direction

of mathematician Gaspard Monge, founder of France's

still prestigious Ecole Polytechnique

Monge has recruited the brightest young graduates in France.

Their average age is around 25.

But one of the expedition's recruits

has a very different profile from the others.

Writer, scholar, engraver, and draftsman, he is 51 years old

and his name is Dominique Vivant Denon.

Born into nobility, he's at ease with European royalty

and escaped being beheaded just a few years earlier.

This former diplomat is keen to get back to the circles of power.

Vivant Denon is certainly one of the most interesting

characters of all of the earliest travellers,

adventurers who made a contribution to Egyptology.

He was not strictly speaking a scholar, perhaps.

He was also a noble and somebody who was involved

at the highest levels of court in French society.

He was also a skilled politician.

He managed to change sides without losing face or losing respect,

so he went from one regime to the other and he could also draw,

he was really, you know, very much a renaissance man.

Denon has quickly been accepted by his young colleagues.

His charm, his culture, and his talents as a draftsman

win him unanimous approval.

If Bonaparte has invaded Egypt for geopolitical reasons,

he also justifies his attempt at colonisation

with more "noble" objectives -

and has tasked Gaspard Monge

with making a grand announcement to his scholars.

Napoleon brought with him

major scientific technology that changed Egypt.

He brought the first printing press. It didn't exist in Egypt before.

He brought a lot of technological advancements and set up

an institution for scientific knowledge in Egypt to explore.

Bonaparte was coming from the tradition of the Enlightenment,

so he wanted to bring this idea and spread it around

and feel that this was part of everyone's heritage.

Egypt had been the hub, the centre of science

and Bonaparte felt that he wanted to bring that back and resurrect it

and really, it was its own legacy that it needed to have rekindled.

But before spreading European philosophical ideas

in Egypt, Bonaparte must definitively gain the upper hand

over the Mamluks.

For this, he counts on his soldiers, but above all, on science!

Bonaparte has asked his scholars to provide for the needs

of his occupying army.

In particular, they need to make beer for the troops

in a country where hops are not grown.

Make the water from the Nile drinkable,

because after a month, the soldiers start to get sick.

And finally, Bonaparte needs them to make gunpowder

purely from local resources for his rifles and cannons.

These questions are all the more crucial,

since even if the British who were allies of the Ottomans

haven't seen this French invasion of Egypt coming, they are quick

to respond to this attack on their commercial interests.

On the 1st of August, 1798,

the Royal Navy catches the French fleet off guard near Alexandria

and destroys it completely.

Including the Orient, Bonaparte's flagship,

which was carrying a cargo of gunpowder.

The French are now trapped in Egypt.

The scholars suffer a gruelling first few months.

Four of them are killed during an uprising by Cairo's population.

But it will take more than that to undermine

the morale of Dominique Vivant Denon.

The time has come for our artist to leave his colleagues

and venture out to explore an Egypt still shaken by the fighting.

Egypt, at that time, had not seen that many foreigners,

or most of the foreigners would have been just in the north,

in the delta up to Cairo.

So further south, there were very few travellers who had come here.

There were attacks by Bedouins, there were attacked by villagers.

There were snakes, there were scorpions,

there were hyenas running around, and of course,

there are all kinds of diseases that people would succumb to.

And of course, it was wild, there was not total control here.

Denon's mission is to do drawings

and make an inventory of all the remains of the monuments

built by the Pharaohs.

His journey begins at Giza.

Bonaparte has ordered that a detachment of 200 armed men

should escort Denon and a few others to the Pyramids.

Egyptologist Chris Naunton outlines for us what Denon

and his colleagues knew about the Pyramids at the time of this visit.

This is the very most famous and iconic of all Egypt's ancient sites.

It's the Giza Plateau, with its pyramids which were built

more than 4,500 years ago.

In the Fifth Century BC, the Greek historian

and geographer Herodotus visited the site and he wrote an account

which Bonaparte and his men probably would have had in their minds.

Herodotus said that the Great Pyramid, the largest

of the three, was the tomb of King Kheops, and he was right about that.

At the time of Napoleon's expedition, the Great Pyramid

would have looked more or less as it does now.

But at the time it was finished, it wouldn't have had

the kind of stepped appearance that we see now

created by all the different courses of stone.

There would have been an outer layer of casing stones

which were cut and fitted together perfectly.

So from any distance, you would have just seen

an enormous, monumental white triangle.

It would have been absolutely awesome.

In Napoleon's day, this pyramid was the only one at Giza that was open.

And in fact, it had been open for centuries by that point.

That day, Denon creates this magnificent drawing

outside the Great Pyramid. Then, he slips inside.

In the heart of the monument, Denon and his colleagues

describe narrow corridors cluttered with debris, stones,

and sand blown in by the wind.

One passage in particular proves a huge challenge for everyone.

This is one of the parts of the pyramid that most impressed

Napoleon's men.

It's the ascending passageway.

It's on an angle sloping upwards at 26 degrees, which was pretty steep.

It would have really, really slippery.

And it would've been pitch dark as well, of course.

They wouldn't have been able to see where they were going.

But it continues for another 38 metres.

And going, of course, is also made tougher by the fact

that it's only a metre and a half and across.

That's maybe not such a problem, but it's 1.2 metres in height,

this passageway.

That's quite a bit shorter than I am, and quite shorter

than most people are, of course. So you have to bend down all the way.

It's really tough on your thighs. It's really tough in general.

But beyond, there's a reward - the Grand Gallery.

This is the Grand Gallery.

A magnificent seven-metre-high space.

These overlapping stones helped to distribute

the weight above around the space and inside it.

For me, one of the most impressive

inside any ancient monument here in Egypt.

Denon knows he's one of the first Westerners

to enter this place, so he sets about making

the first precise surveys in history.

The ascending corridor, the Grand Gallery...

He documents everything in his drawings,

and gets all the way to King Khufu's monumental burial chamber.

Here we are, at last, in the burial chamber in the great pyramid.

It's an incredible, simple, monumental space,

entirely empty, except for the sarcophagus of the king

missing its lid.

For lots of people, it's a kind of mystical place.

But they might be surprised that there's no decoration,

there's no hieroglyphs, there's no figures here,

there's no images of kings or gods or anything like that.

Why would they go to all the trouble of building this enormous pyramid

and then not decorate it?

Well, that, in fact, is how things were done

at this point in Egyptian history, royal tombs were not decorated.

All that decoration would only come later.

Bonaparte's men pay little attention

to this absence of hieroglyphs, which are in any case

completely indecipherable.

But Denon and the soldiers are amazed by the sheer enormity

of this construction, so different from anything

they've ever seen before.

But there's no time to linger.

Military imperatives command that for their safety,

they must leave the site before nightfall.

200 years ago, we knew of monuments in Egypt,

but nobody knew what they were.

Nobody knew the history. Nobody knew anything

actually about these monuments in ancient Egypt.

Everything was guesswork.

Egypt had come to be lost to some extent,

at least as far as the Europeans were concerned.

The ancient civilisation had come to an end.

Lots of the ancient sites and monuments simply disappeared

under drift sand, which moves very quickly,

so they were obscured visibly.

We didn't really know the names of the major kings.

We didn't know the time periods involved.

We didn't know the events that happened.

Before hieroglyphs were deciphered, it was all a mystery.

It's a mystery that the French scholars,

with Vivant Denon leading the way, are working hard to solve.

Dominique Vivant Denon has now joined General Desaix's division

and its 3,000 men.

They're in hot pursuit of Mourad Bey,

one of the most formidable Mamluk chiefs.

The journey through enemy territory is exhausting.

The heat is crushing, the threats constant.

But between two warnings of danger, Denon manages to slip away

with a small escort to search for ancient monuments.

In his journal, he writes enthusiastically...

I was going to be a pioneer in a new country;

I was going to be the first to see it, and to see it

on a confidential basis, set foot in a land until now covered in

the veil of mystery, closed off to Europeans for two thousand years.

My only fears were not having enough time,

paper, pencils and ability.

Denon was in fact one of the small advanced party

that went into Upper Egypt to give a report as to what was here,

what they might do, what might expect,

sort of also taking the temperature of the population,

not just in terms of the physical space.

Three weeks after leaving his fellow scholars in Cairo,

Dominique Vivant Denon has travelled 400 kilometres

to the south of the city.

And he arrives in the Asyut region.

He's taken to some curious caves carved into the side of a mountain.

Thoughts race through his mind...

All these grottoes are covered with hieroglyphs;

it would take months to read them,

even if one knew the language, and it would take years to copy them.

And if these are tombs, who are these decorations meant for?

Who, apart from the living?

The division continues on its route southwards,

still pursuing the Mamluks.

And a few days later, 200 kilometres further on,

Denon and the soldiers finally get to explore a temple

which is still complete, the Dendera Temple.

Egyptologist Benedicte Lhoyer has delved back

into Denon's travel notes to help us share

his first impressions upon arriving here.

When Denon and all the members of the Commission

arrive here, they catch sight of a temple that's in

a very good state of preservation.

There are still traces of colour, the bas-reliefs are still there,

even if the ground is a bit higher.

You have to imagine around three metres of debris

cluttering up the entire front section.

Denon immediately begins to draw.

Dendera, January 24th, 1799.

I wish I could convey to my readers the extent of the sensation

which I experienced.

Nothing is more simple or better put together than the few lines

used to create this architecture.

I could not expect to find anything in Egypt more complete,

more perfect, than Dendera.

I had but a few hours to examine, to reflect on,

and to draw something that had taken centuries to conceive,

to construct, and to decorate.

With my pencil in my hand, I didn't have the eyes, hands,

or intelligence vast enough to see what was in front of me.

How one is happy to have braved everything

so as to experience such ecstasy!

It's easy to imagine Denon walking wide-eyed

around this temple, unable to understand what he has before him

since no-one is able to read what's written here.

No-one understands the meaning of these images.

Quite simply because ancient Egypt gradually disappeared, particularly

with the arrival of Christianity, and then Islam after that.

Most of the rituals also became diluted over time

or were completely abandoned.

So it's an entire culture that vanished.

During this period, most Egyptian temples are being

used as stables, warehouses or simply as places to live.

So you have people actually living in the ancient structure

in something resembling a village.

Denon thinks he's found a very ancient temple, but in reality,

in Egyptian terms, we're dealing with an extremely recent temple

since it was built in the middle of the 1st Century BC

by Ptolemy XII and his famous daughter, Cleopatra VII,

the very last queen of Pharaonic Egypt.

But in particular, it is the inside of the temple

as he wanders round, that blows Denon's mind.

On the ceiling, he's just spotted bas-reliefs which he immediately

judges to be masterpieces of Egyptian art and astronomy.

Here we are in the most important room of the temple

and the one that made Denon dream for years and years.

This is the room where this work, now in the Louvre Museum

and called the "Dendera Zodiac", is found.

It's a celestial planisphere, circular in shape,

with the representation of planets that the ancient Egyptians

had already discovered - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

It's true that this zodiac doesn't look very impressive at this point,

covered in an absolutely enormous layer of soot.

You can see practically no detail.

But Denon knows deep in his soul that he's looking at something

that's a unique example of a representation of a star chart

which shows just how far ahead of all others

Egyptian civilization is during this period.

The men would like to stay longer, but once again,

they must get back on the road and continue pursuing

the Mamluks southwards.

A few days later, Denon and the soldiers arrive at Thebes.

The ancient capital of Upper Egypt suddenly comes into sight

on a bend in the Nile!

At the sight of those scattered ruins,

the soldiers came to a halt

and spontaneously clapped their hands with delight.

And as the men were so enthusiastic and accommodating,

I found plenty of knees I could use as a table

and bodies to give me shade while I was drawing.

Vivant Denon went crazy over Egyptian things.

There are stories about him sketching, you know,

there's a battle going on. He's dodging bullets

but he is trying to record things.

Or they had to flee because they were being attacked

by people in Thebes. And he sits backwards on his horse

and trying to finish the sketch as he goes off into the distance.

And you know, the soldiers liked him very much.

And there's one story that he's running out of pencil lead,

and so they're melting down bullets so he could still do his drawing.

Archaeologist Meredith Brand has come back to this site

that so moved Denon and the French soldiers.

Ancient Thebes, modern Luxor,

was the cultural religious capital of Egypt.

This was the heartland of Egyptian ritual,

and in ancient Thebes, there were tons of temples

and ritual spaces, and Karnak Temple was the biggest.

It's the home of the god Amun-Ra.

This was a state god of most of ancient Egypt.

For 2,000 years, this is where ancient Egyptian kings were crowned

and it's where the most important festivals in Egypt occurred.

Every single king in Egypt built something here and added

to this space, so now the main centre of Amun is over 50 hectares.

When Bonaparte's troops came to Karnak, they were awestruck.

He couldn't even measure the area. He wrote that it was too large,

too chaotic. He called it a "mountain of sculpted stone".

All he saw was just jumble after jumble, heaps of stones

and so many different temples and it was something that was

so overwhelming, he couldn't make sense out of it.

The first time I came to Karnak, I was also overwhelmed.

You read books, you see pictures of it, but the scale of this site

is something that you almost have to come and see to believe.

Now, when I come to Karnak, I see the result of over 200 years

of archaeologists finding these stones, figuring out where

they go, and essentially putting this back together.

Karnak is one of the biggest Egyptological jigsaw puzzles.

But when Bonaparte's expedition came, they would have seen this

as really a ruin of temples strewn all over the place.

It would have really perplexed and confused them.

But one temple did more than leave Denon

perplexed and confused. It literally terrified him.

The temple that terrified Denon

is actually the Khonsou temple.

Khonsou temple is special because it's small and so well preserved.

It really gives a sense of what temples were like in ancient Egypt.

This is the most sacred part of the temple, this is the innermost

sanctuary where 3,300 years ago, only priests were allowed.

And Denon went to some rooms in the back,

and they're closed to the public, and I have special access to them.

And I'm so excited to walk in the footsteps of Denon.

For 15 years, specialised teams have been restoring

the frescoes in these chapels, painted 3,200 years ago.

Well, thank you so much for showing me this temple!

And today, for the first time, we can show you

the results of their exceptional work.

- Open the door for you. - Yeah, I would love to, thank you!

- Welcome. - Thank you.

Wow, this is gorgeous!

This is so beautiful.

It didn't look like this recently.

It used to be covered in soot

from hundreds of years of candles with smoke.

It was covered with dirt and sand and grime.

And it's so beautiful to see it restored to what it would have

looked like when this was a lively active temple.

In this sacred area, priests would have entered with lamps.

And you can imagine with incense smoke filling the air,

chanting for the gods,

and seeing the lamp flicker light onto the images

of the king and the gods, making it bright and almost move with life.

To the ancient Egyptians, this was a very spiritually inspiring

and exciting kind of image.

This is a great example.

This is something that we see in temples all over Egypt.

This is a hawk-headed god, Montu.

And he has the head of a hawk but his body is a man's body.

So we have to imagine Denon walking into this room,

completely dark, his torch, he holds it up and he sees an image

of a snake, a lion, and a human body, and it's terrifying for him.

This is a 19th Century European man who had a very strong

concept of what the world was like, of what God was like.

And these images shook him.

Denon was looking at these temples for the first time

and of course, at that time, no-one understood what it all meant.

Were they demons? Were they gods? Were they protective?

Were they going to attack?

So, he had no doubt nightmares about these creatures coming to get him.

You have to remember at this point, no-one knew anything about this.

Is this a temple or is this a palace?

Rooms are very small. If those are tombs, they're so well decorated.

Why would anyone go into them?

Is all the decoration for the gods?

There were so many things that he didn't know,

but he tried to piece together and make sense of them.

So it's interesting to see, through his eyes,

how he interpreted Egypt at that time,

and ancient Egypt in particular.

After this stop at Thebes, the French set off again.

They're still in pursuit of Murad Bey,

the Mamluk leader they confronted at the Battle of the Pyramids.

In five months, this man has rebuilt an army, and in early

March 1799, he sets a trap for the French to the north of Thebes.

The fighting lasts three days and two nights.

Denon gives a chilling account in his journal...

Death was hovering all around me; I saw it at every moment.

In the space of ten minutes, three people were killed

while I was speaking to them.

I no longer dared to talk to anyone.

Countless men are wounded. But the Mamluks have been beaten.

Their leader flees, leaving Egypt to its new conquerors.

It has taken the French five months to conquer Upper Egypt.

It will take them another five to stamp out sporadic uprisings.

A few weeks after this battle, Denon's journey is coming to an end.

In June 1799, he learns that General-in-Chief Bonaparte,

who pursued another Mamluk leader as far as Syria,

has returned from St John of Acre.

His army laid siege to this Mediterranean coastal city.

But the British, who are allies with the Ottomans,

supplied the Mamluks by sea.

Without his fleet, Bonaparte was unable to do anything.

Hearing this news, Denon senses that it's time to return to Cairo.

But first, he wants to return one last time to Gurnah,

a village close to Thebes,

where the inhabitants have made their homes inside ancient tombs.

Denon dreams of laying his hands on an untouched mummy,

and this is his last chance.

Mummies had been something that people had associated

with Egypt for hundreds of years.

People thought that they might have magical properties as well,

and so they were used in dark magic.

They were also thought that maybe they had something

called red mercury. Which if you ingested,

it would give you a great power. You'd understand the words

of the animals, you would live forever,

you could command the elements.

So, all these other tales had grown up around mummies.

And so, Europeans were in fact purchasing mummies,

grinding them up and selling them as medicine.

Denon finally finds himself face to face with a whole

and complete mummy, whose linen bandages have not yet been removed.

And as if the mummy were delivering him a message

from the past, he spots a papyrus scroll in its hand.

I didn't know what to do with my treasure,

I was so afraid of destroying it.

I didn't dare to touch this book, the oldest book known to this day.

I didn't dare to entrust it to anyone,

or to put it down anywhere.

Did it contain the story of this person?

Was the reign of the sovereign under whom he had lived

inscribed in there?

I almost forgot that I was unable to read the ancient language

that this book was written in.

At that point, people had not really found any papyri,

and so the question was, did they just write monumental

inscriptions on walls, or did they have books ?

And here, in the hands of this mummy,

was the answer to Denon's question.

In early August 1799, Denon,

barely recovered from his excitement,

returns to Cairo.

He is the first member of the Institute to return from Upper Egypt

and he can't wait to tell his colleagues about his misadventures.

Bonaparte therefore meets him at the Egyptian Institute

and examines his 300 drawings and sketches.

Denon easily convinces him to immediately send other scholars

in his footsteps to continue recording, copying,

measuring, and advancing science!

A few days earlier, on the 25th of July, 1799,

the Commander-in-Chief of the French army has triumphed over

the Ottoman armed forces at Abukir!

This outright victory comes at the perfect moment,

as he secretly prepares to return to Paris.

Bonaparte will abandon his troops in Egypt

to participate in a coup d'etat that will put him in power in France.

Sensing that he would be attacked again from the sea,

Bonaparte had ordered fortification work to be carried out

on the French positions at the mouth of the Nile.

Like here at Rashid, or Rosetta in French,

where French troops have occupied an old Arab fort.

This is a fortress which was incredibly important

during the Egyptian expedition.

It was known to Napoleon and his expedition as "Fort Julien"

after one of his aide-de-camps who'd been killed early on

in the battles here.

Crucially, it's on the River Nile,

at a point where the Nile meets the Mediterranean.

So this is perhaps the single most important point of entry into Egypt.

On the 19th of July 1799, a young French army officer,

Francois-Xavier Bouchard, made a fantastic discovery just here.

He and his men had been tasked with clearing the debris

from around the foundations of this fortress.

What they were doing was building it back up more or less from the ground

and strengthening the walls against the attack

that they feared was coming from the River Nile.

They were really waiting for the Turks or the British to attack them.

And in the process of doing this, they made this fantastic discovery.

Un, deux, trois!

What we now call the Rosetta Stone was found here and this is a copy

to give you an idea of the size and the shape and why it's important.

Bouchard noticed straight away that there was something very interesting

about what was inscribed on the face of this stone.

It seemed to be three different texts.

It's one in ancient Greek at the bottom,

which he might have been familiar with.

He probably would have recognised the hieroglyphs along the top,

and then in the middle there's a different text, a different script.

This is what we now call Demotic, which is a kind of quick,

cursive, handwritten form of the Egyptian script.

Bouchard had the intuition that maybe this is, in fact,

the same text written in three different ways.

So straight away,

he sent this to the savants in Cairo at the Institut de France.

Bonaparte doesn't have time to see this exceptional stele.

He has already set off back to France.

As he had promised him,

he has brought Dominique Vivant Denon back with him.

As soon as he arrives in Paris, Denon explains his drawings

and notes, and in 1802, he publishes his account,

entitled Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt.

Denon's book about his trip to Egypt made a huge impact.

He wrote very fluidly and it was also very much in the romantic vein,

so you feel like you are there.

It was something that brought people into Egypt,

both visually as well as through his words.

And he wound up eventually becoming head of museums in France.

It's an incredibly engaging story.

But to have done it in such difficult circumstances as well,

again, my hat is off to Vivant Denon.

Meanwhile in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone has been

transported under heavy guard to Cairo where the scholars

from the expedition who are still on site have begun to study it.

And very quickly, they confirm that the Rosetta Stone

does indeed bear one and the same text,

engraved in three different types of script.

This major discovery marks the beginning of the race

to decipher hieroglyphs.

For now, the French are in the lead.

But the British have no intention of letting them

keep the upper hand. They will do everything they can

to seize this exceptional stele.

The 19th Century has barely begun,

and it's now in Egypt that the European powers will go head to head

in a frantic race for knowledge and the treasures of the Pharaohs.

Subtitles by Sky Access Services