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 crazy race to seek out hidden treasures...

Come on, come on, come on!

...for Egypt has become the new battleground

on which the mighty empires of Europe will come head to head.

It's a race to see who will make the greatest discoveries...

and who will gain most influence

in this new El Dorado.

The fiercest competition is between France and England.

It's a time-honoured tradition!

First to set up camp along the Nile,

the French discovered the Rosetta Stone,

but the English took possession of it.

Thank you.

The British, with no intention of stopping there,

have commissioned a new agent:

the flamboyant smooth talker Giovanni Battista Belzoni.

The Italian achieved an early success

by getting a splendid bust all the way to London

right under the noses of the French...

...and now he has his sights set

on an unexplored temple in the far south of the country.

The rivalry between the Europeans

also plays out on a gentler battlefield:

the race to decipher hieroglyphs!

Working from the texts on the Rosetta Stone,

two contenders are leading the field:

the brilliant British scientist Thomas Young

and a young Frenchman, Jean-Francois Champollion.

Let's travel together to Egypt

to relive this incredible adventure!

This is what we'll be looking for, my friends!

In early summer 1817,

Giovanni Battista Belzoni,

an Italian explorer working for the British,

travels to Nubia, in the south of modern-day Egypt.

There is still a lot of work to do.

Many days of work, I think.

Belzoni has heard about an immense temple

which is still unexplored

near the village of Abu Simbel.

But it's going to be a huge amount of work

to clear the entrance.

American Egyptologist Meredith Brand

tells us about Belzoni's discovery of this unexpected site.

Digging the sand was a monumental task

and Belzoni was the perfect person to do this.

Belzoni was a great engineer

and he had already proved himself

by moving the seven-tonne young Memnon statue,

which was a feat of engineering that no-one could have done.

From then on, Belzoni was hooked.

He wanted to explore more, discover more...

A few years earlier,

Belzoni had fled his native Italy

to avoid being drafted into Napoleon's army.

He took refuge in England

and thanks to his extraordinary physique...

- he was two metres tall and weighed 130 kilos -

he became a circus strongman.

His signature act

was to carry 11 people on his back...

or to bend iron bars.

And so when he came here and he saw a mountain of sand,

all he had with him were simple agricultural digging tools.

There was nothing mechanised. It was just manual labour.

Close, even stronger, close to the rock !

I'm sure that the sand drew Belzoni to this temple

because it hid it and it left questions. It protected it

and it made Belzoni think, "What could possibly be behind the sand?"

Belzoni has hired some Egyptian farmers

to clear the sand from the temple.

And you! After you finish, use the wood plank...

But many of the men have already given up...

...and by day three, only a handful remain.

They are working long hours in a sweltering heat

with an authoritarian boss who doesn't give them a break.

Faster on this side, faster! Come on, come on!

What ? No, no, wait, calm down.

Hey! I paid you for today.

I give you money.

Faced with Belzoni's increasingly persistent demands,

even the boldest men decide to throw in the towel.

I tell everybody... I tell everybody how you work!

You never going to work... Listen to me! You're never gonna work again!

Never, ever, someone is going to hire you!

Belzoni has a rant...

but he soon finds another solution.

He replaces his Egyptian workforce

with his own travelling companions.

Can someone get this basket ?

Among the new workers are two former Royal Navy captains

and the secretary to the British consul Henry Salt,

who is funding the work.

With their sailors, they are 14 men in total

with no experience of this kind of work.

The task is immense,

but for Belzoni adversity is a driving force.

As he writes in his travel journal...

We soon realised that each of us

did as much work as five Egyptians...

...and this encouraged us.

We got up at daybreak and continued working

for two-and-a-half hours after sunrise.

The team is working for ten hours a day

in a stifling heat approaching 44C in the shade...

...because there is no time to lose.

Their food and water supplies are running low.

Belzoni wouldn't have had access to food.

Nobody was allowed to give him food if the village chief said no.

He wasn't able to make a strong relationship with the local chiefs

or with the people in the villages

and that significantly hampered his work.

It made it much more difficult for him to work at this site.

Abou Simbel is a remote place.

It is not somewhere where you would think there would be

a whole beautiful temple like this.

We're more than 250 kilometres south of Aswan.

This is the border between Egypt and Nubia...

...and yet there's this amazing temple.

There is the king Ramses II

and he's here in Nubia,

looking out and saying, "This is my land."

He's projecting power

and it's like a giant billboard saying,

"I'm the king of Egypt, I'm the Pharaoh,

I'm most powerful person

and this is my land and I'm a god."

Belzoni would have come from this direction.

He would have been sailing from north to south

and he would have first seen this small temple.

Then he would've seen a huge mountain of sand next to it

and this is where he heard rumours

that there was some great discovery to be made.

It would have looked so different than what I can see today.

First of all, this is a lake.

It wouldn't have been a lake in the time of Belzoni.

It would have been a river.

In the 1960s, the Aswan Dam was built

and it flooded this area

and made what we now call Lake Nasser.

So when Belzoni would have seen this giant mountain,

he would've seen the top of a crown

and some hieroglyphs on the top on this mountain...

and he looks at this area and says, "OK.

I know ancient Egyptian structures.

I know that usually the temple has two big towers,

an image of the god in the centre and a doorway runs through it."

So he looks this area and says, "It must be the same.

Underneath the image of the god,

in the centre of these two statues,

must be the doorway."

After 22 days,

the men's hard work finally pays off.

After clearing a hole 50 feet deep,

the equivalent of five storeys,

Belzoni finally spots an opening.

Henry, come here!

Look! We found it! I told you!

Belzoni did an incredible feat.

This entire area where I'm standing now was covered in sand.

These statues are 20 metres tall

and this facade goes up to 33 metres.

This is really a big monument. This is a lot of space.

Belzoni had to clear the sand from the god's sun disc

all the way down to the open door

and he cleared enough just to get

to this left top portion of the door

to climb in,

so he had this vast amount of sand to clear,

but everything underneath it, he never got to see.

And for many years after Belzoni,

everybody who came here had to clear away sand to enter,

because the sand kept coming in from the valley next to it.

So Belzoni started to crawl through the sand on his belly

and goes into the temple...

and at that moment, I can't even imagine the shock for Belzoni.

We had the pleasure of being the first to enter

the most beautiful and vast subterranean space in Nubia

and to see a monument

worthy of standing alongside the finest monuments of Egypt.

At our first glance, we were astonished

by the immensity of the space,

but we were even more surprised

when we found ourselves surrounded

by paintings and colossal sculptures.

On the walls were images of battles, assaults on fortresses,

victories against the Ethiopians, sacrifices...

This text caught the attention of Belzoni.

To Egyptologists now, we know this as the Decree of Ptah.

Importantly, it talks about Ramses II

and his important powerful role

and emphasizes his kingship...

...but to Belzoni,

he had no idea what any of this said,

because he didn't know hieroglyphs,

but he was interested in this text because he arrived at Abu Simbel

in the height of the race to decipher hieroglyphs.

In 1817, scholars on both sides of the Channel

are working relentlessly to discover the meaning of all these signs.

In France, all hopes rest on a young linguistic genius,

Jean-Francois Champollion,

while in England,

the doctor and physicist Thomas Young is the furthest ahead.

The British consul Henry Salt,

who is funding Belzoni's expedition, has asked him

to copy some inscriptions for Thomas Young,

especially those which are called "cartouches".

Thomas Young asked Henry Salt

to make sure all of his agents in Egypt copied cartouches,

because he thought they were the key

to understanding hieroglyphs

and our cartouche is this right here.

It's a circle, and inside of it is the name of the king.

If they could use what's in that circle

and compare it to known Greek text,

maybe they could figure out the sounds of hieroglyphs

and their alphabetic value.

So Belzoni came here,

he saw these cartouches

and he copied this text and sent it to Thomas Young.

Once he has copied these symbols,

Belzoni presses on

with his exploration of the temple he has just reopened.

This is the inner sanctuary of the Abu Simbel Temple

and here there are four statues at the back:

and there is Ra-Horakhty, Amun-Ra,

a god named Ptah...

and, in the middle of them, is Ramses II, over here.

So when Belzoni entered,

he would have seen these four gods,

but he didn't know the actual kind of very creative design

that had a bit of a trick to it.

So the sun, twice a year,

comes through the temple and it hits these statues

on February 21st and October 21st every year.

But the most fascinating thing is when the sun comes in,

it's focusing on Ra, Ramses II and Amun.

These are gods that are connected to the sun,

they're connected to light,

but the sun doesn't hit on this last god, the god Ptah.

He's connected to earth and creation.

So the ancient Egyptians had this sense of illuminating the sun gods

and keeping the earth gods in the dark.

This is so exciting!

So this is an inscription that I have been looking for.

I looked in the library, I looked in the books

and I couldn't find it, but I heard about it... and here it is:

this is the name of Belzoni.

He was the first person

in thousands of years to enter this temple.

He came here into the innermost sanctuary

and he carved his name.

They were here August 1st, 1817.

Belzoni doesn't just leave his name for posterity.

He measures the different chambers

and makes several sketches,

despite difficult conditions, which he describes in his journal.

The heat inside the temple was so intense

that it was almost impossible to make sketches.

The sweat from our hands quickly made the paper too wet.

When Belzoni carved his name,

he must have come into this chamber,

explored the whole temple

and then he was pretty disappointed.

He had great expectations of finding all kinds of treasures,

but despite all the things he did and all the searching,

he didn't find them.

He found a few smaller statues

and some metal parts of doors,

odds and ends, small pieces and antiquities,

but he never found any of the treasures he sought.

The actual treasure of Abu Simbel

is the beauty of the art

and the importance of the historical inscriptions,

but to Belzoni, that wasn't something he could sell,

so he was very disappointed with all of his efforts,

labouring in the hot sun in the summer, clearing the sand,

for what he thought was little reward.

So, just three days after his discovery, disillusioned,

he leaves Abu Simbel

and rushes back towards Luxor.

Luxor is built on the ruins of Thebes,

the ancient capital of the pharaohs,

and, at the time, it's French territory...

...so Belzoni decides to stay a little distance away,

on the other side of the Nile,

in the arid valley of Biban el-Muluk,

better known as the Valley of the Kings.

In the beginning of the 19th century,

when Napoleon's savants were here in the Valley of the Kings,

relatively few of the tombs that we now know are here

were known about - not even as many as 20,

but Belzoni would have known

that writers like Herodotus had said that there were many more.

Herodotus says there were 47,

so it wasn't a great leap of the imagination for Belzoni to think

there was more to find here.

Determined to finally find some treasure worthy of the name

and motivated to beat the French to it,

Belzoni gets to work immediately.

Belzoni was confident. He had a kind of intuition

that he would be able to find things,

even if there was no visible trace of them on the surface,

and in October 1817,

he was here with his wife Sarah

and they started finding things.

They made a number of discoveries.

They found a number of mummies,

they even found royal tombs,

spectacularly decorated royal tombs,

and yet, somehow, Belzoni wasn't satisfied.

He wanted to make an even greater discovery,

a grander discovery of a tomb that could be really "his" tomb,

"Belzoni's tomb".

Belzoni has studied the topography of the valley carefully

and believes he has identified a place

which is concealing the entrance to a new tomb.

This! See, the first tomb is here.

No-one imagined the Egyptians would build

the entrance to a great tomb in a riverbed,

but there were strong clues which led me to believe

that I would find what I was looking for.

Can you come here, please?

This area is, I think, we have the tomb, so...

No, but this is the tomb we've been looking for!

The Egyptians,

despite their experience with excavations,

were all convinced it would be a waste of effort.

I persisted and the next day we realised

the rock had been carved out to create an opening.

Belzoni said it was entirely down to his intuition,

his "archaeological nose",

that he was able to find the tomb in this place.

Actually, recently, new evidence has come to light

that suggests that perhaps the locals knew it was here.

But even if that's true,

the discovery of the full extent of what's inside is really Belzoni's.

The Italian explorer's efforts are soon rewarded.

Just two months after opening up the Abu Simbel temple,

he manages to clear the entrance to a cavity.

Belzoni immediately knows

that he's made an exceptional discovery.

Judging by the paintings on the ceiling

and the hieroglyphs visible through the rubble,

I knew that we were at the entrance to a magnificent tomb.

Belzoni entered the tomb for the first time

on 18th of October 1817.

Great moment and yet, of course,

he doesn't know what he's going into at all.

It's pitch dark in here.

He's just got tiny little candles

not really throwing much light onto what he is walking into.

The corridors were full of debris,

of loose stones and chippings,

so they were kind of half-climbing, half-scrambling,

proceeding with extreme caution,

not knowing what's ahead of them.

They were right to, because when they reached this point,

suddenly the floor just drops away...

...and Belzoni, in his account,

tells us that he nearly fell

and had he done so, it might well have been the end for him,

because the well that he had reached

is something like eight to ten metres deep!

So although he was stopped on that first day,

he came back the following day with a couple of beams

to lay across the well shaft.

It would still have been pretty dangerous,

but Belzoni had been in the circus,

so gymnastics of this kind were...

right up his street.

In any case, of course, he turned out to be right,

so laying those beams across here

allowed him to discover riches

perhaps even beyond his wildest dreams.

The day of this discovery

was one of the luckiest in my life.

I was gripped by an immense joy.

I was the first person on the planet

to enter a monument

that had been lost to the world,

and so perfectly preserved

that one might have thought it was finished shortly before our arrival.

The further Belzoni went into the tomb,

the more fascinated he became.

Finally, he reach the burial chamber

where Pharaoh was laid to rest.

It's an extraordinary space in two halves.

We're about 100 metres deep into the bedrock here.

He wanted to find something spectacular

and wow, he did it!

You can't imagine a more spectacular tomb.

Indeed, this is probably the largest, most extensively decorated,

best preserved anywhere in the Valley of the Kings.

The chamber here is six metres in height

and above us we have the very first example

of a vaulted ceiling with depictions of the heavens,

the way the Egyptians conceived

the sky and the stars as deities.

And here in this space,

where the King's body would have been laid to rest,

Belzoni found the sarcophagus...

...fantastically beautiful Egyptian alabaster sarcophagus!

The lid was also here,

but just off to one side, not in position.

The tomb was empty.

But to be the very first person in modern times

to see this...

it's impossible to comprehend, really.

Belzoni's discovery was completely outstanding, exceptional

and the news spread quickly.

But at this stage, no-one knows

the identity of the occupant of this tomb.

Belzoni hurriedly copies some cartouches

and sends them to Thomas Young,

who believes he can read the name of a ruler called Psammuthes.

It'll take several more years

before it is established that this tomb

belongs to Pharaoh Seti I,

father of Ramses the Great.

Belzoni spent months and months here

making records of everything that he found

and he made something like 900 drawings

of various different sizes.

He copied down thousands of hieroglyphs.

What he had in mind was that eventually those squeezes

could be exhibited back home

as a way of kind of recreating this tomb,

but in an exhibition in London.

In the winter of 1817,

it must have seemed as though everything Belzoni touched

turned to gold,

and you can imagine that the French were maybe not too happy

about the British boasting of all this success,

but little did they know

that Belzoni had something else in store for them, as well.

Not here, though - in Thebes, modern Luxor,

but 650 kilometres off to the north,

on the Giza Plateau, just outside the city of Cairo.

In early 1818,

Belzoni sets up camp

at the foot of the pyramid of King Khafre at Giza.

He studies, observes

and methodically probes every stone of the structure.

Comparing it with its neighbour, the pyramid of Khufu,

he finally manages to clear a passage

leading down into the monument.

This is what Giovanni Belzoni found

when he came inside the second pyramid of Khafre:

the burial chamber and, in particular, these granite blocks,

brought all the way from the south of the country,

surrounding the carved stone sarcophagus of the Pharaoh

and Belzoni could have been very disappointed

to not find the body of the King, a coffin,

or any jewellery or other treasures,

but we have a sense, in fact,

that he was probably delighted

to be the first to enter inside the pyramid of Khafre...

...and to mark this momentous discovery,

he wrote, in Italian, his name:

"Scoperta da G Belzoni."

Discovered by Giovanni Belzoni,

2nd of March, 1818.

So there we have his great moment of pride:

the first time anyone in modern times

had ever been inside the second pyramid.

As the French have taken over at Thebes,

the British are now concentrating their research efforts

around the pyramids of Giza.

Henry Salt, the British consul,

has recruited a new agent - another Italian:

a former ship captain named...

Caviglia is interested in the Sphinx of Giza.

but at this point, only the head can be seen

sticking out of the sand.

He is convinced the monument

is concealing a secret entrance.

So what is the Sphinx, exactly?

It's a massive portrait of the Pharaoh in his leonine aspect,

his aspect as the lion,

the most powerful animal in the animal kingdom.

In most of our opinions, it represents the pharaoh Khafre,

the builder of the second pyramid on the left,

the one that still has some of its original casing at the top.

The Sphinx stands at a height of 20 metres

from its base to the top of the head

and it's 73 metres long - enormously elongated body.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing is,

it's carved mostly from one piece of stone.

The appearance of the Sphinx when it was first created

was different from now.

It was coloured and painted in bright colours.

Red paint for the face

and, of course, the Sphinx had more of its nose and beard.

The headdress would have been in probably yellow and blue paint.

But in 1817,

when Caviglia came to this area,

he would have seen mostly just sand

with just the head of the Sphinx emerging

and people didn't even know at this point

whether it was a woman or a man,

what this image represented.

There were all sorts of myths and legends

about structures underneath the Sphinx,

which we know today to be inaccurate...

...but at that time, Caviglia was obsessed

with looking inside the Sphinx

and to see what it was, really.

When Caviglia dug between the paws of the Sphinx,

he didn't find a mysterious entrance to an underground cavern,

but what he did find was this:

this amazing 15-tonne stone slab

and on it, he couldn't yet read the hieroglyphs.

They weren't deciphered.

What we know now, this was erected

a thousand years after the Sphinx was carved out.

What the story is, is that the young Prince Thutmose,

at that point who wasn't even due to become pharaoh...

...young Prince Thutmose is out in the area of Giza in the desert

and he's hunting lions.

He got tired and he decided to take a nap

in the shadow of this old monument.

The Sphinx came to him in a dream and it said,

"If you remove all the sand from my body and you free me,

I will make you King of Egypt."

Thutmose IV, as a prince, carries this out,

becomes the king of Egypt...

...and then he takes a stone

and he carves it over in his own image...

and the text tells the story.

What's fascinating is, right after Cavaglia came here

and found all of these things, he put the sand back

to protect them and also, perhaps,

to keep the discovery a little secret from others.

We don't know.

In Egypt,

the British have gained the upper hand over the French,

having dug the Sphinx out of the sand

and discovered Seti I's tomb...

...but when it comes to deciphering the hieroglyphs,

the game is not over yet.

On both sides of the Channel,

scholars are working hard

to decipher the texts of the Rosetta Stone,

discovered by the French during Bonaparte's expedition

in 1799.

The wars between the French and the English

were not just about land.

They were also about intellectual property or ideas.

Each wanted to outdo the other in everything,

whether it was science or the arts or literature

and this included the decipherment for hieroglyphs.

In 1819, the 49-year-old British scholar Thomas Young

presents his first conclusions.

Young has decent intuition,

but he still hasn't grasped all the subtleties of hieroglyphs.

Throughout the ages,

people had been intrigued by hieroglyphs

and had tried to understand them,

but whether they had been Arabs or Europeans,

no-one had really come up

with a satisfactory or accurate way of reading them

and so, for a long time,

people looked at them more as symbols,

rather than sounds or words,

and unfortunately, this idea of it being symbolic

is what sat in people's minds

and was really a deterrent,

an obstacle for people to truly understand

that the hieroglyphs were letters, as well as being symbolic

The Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion

has also been studying the texts on the Rosetta Stone relentlessly

for ten years.

They are written in three languages:

Ancient Greek, hieroglyphs and Demotic,

which is a simplified form of hieroglyphs.

Among the 15 or so languages Champollion has mastered

by the age of 32 is Coptic,

the language of Egypt's Christians, written with Greek characters.

Champollion had a really detailed

and thorough understanding of Coptic,

which was the last form

of the Egyptian language and script,

and that it is what allowed him

a way into the earlier forms of the language and script.

Until then, like his English rival,

Champollion has been going round in circles...

...but his knowledge of Coptic

finally gives him a decisive advantage.

By analysing the famous cartouches,

the oval shapes that contain the names of kings,

he understands that a hieroglyphic sign can also represent a sound.

On the Rosetta Stone,

he spots the name Ptolemy, or "PTOLMYS" in Greek,

finds its equivalent in hieroglyphs

and thus deduces the first letters of an alphabet.

He continues looking at other cartouches,

including those copied at Abu Simbel.

His stroke of genius is to realise

that within a single word,

a sign can represent either a letter or an idea...

...and on the 27th September 1822,

Champollion finally reveals his discovery

in the great hall of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

in Paris.

The most eminent scholars are all there on that day,

even his rival Thomas Young.

This language, which has been lost for 1,400 years,

is about to be revived,

but Champollion still needs to study

some other documents to refine his first alphabet

and he'll have a wonderful place to do that.

The Turin Museum, which has just acquired a new collection,

and Champollion is going to do the inventory.

Among all the exceptional artefacts that Champollion finds in Turin,

one in particular captures his attention.

This is a papyrus more than 3,000 years old,

which he will spend several months

reassembling from the fragments.

This document, which we now call the Royal Canon of Turin,

is a chronological table

that reveals the names of 77 pharaohs.

It's one of the most complete lists of royalty that we possess.

Champollion catalogues the extraordinary collection in Turin.

He knows that the British Museum in London

is enjoying a huge success with the Rosetta Stone

and the Young Memnon statue brought back by Belzoni

and it's clear that France is lagging behind,

so when he learns that a new collection is up for sale,

he loses no time in convincing the French government

to buy nearly 6,000 objects,

thus enriching the collection at the Louvre.

He also lands the job he was dreaming of:

Curator of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities.

We're in one of the famous original galleries

in which Champollion created our Egyptian Department

and opened it to the public for the first time in 1827.

Thanks to Champollion,

the French public will be able to learn

about Egyptian civilisation for the first time.

So here, typically, this is one of the objects,

and when I say "an object", I mean an exceptional masterpiece

that visitors to Champollion's first Egyptian museum

could see as early as 1827.

This object depicts

the Pharaoh Akhenaten.

You might think this is a statue where he appears alone,

seated on his throne,

but, in fact, the statue of the queen who was at his side

has disappeared. It was originally a royal couple:

Akhenaten and the famous Queen Nefertiti.

And when you look at the object from the front, you can't tell,

but if you walk around it,

you'll see that the Queen's arm and hand have survived,

tenderly placed on the king's back.

So that's how, little by little, the collection was created:

from masterpieces like this...

and from much more humble objects

like toiletry items, mirrors, boxes, and jewellery, too,

so we ultimately have

some very varied items

to evoke this civilisation.

While the French will be able to admire

all these new collections at the Louvre,

the British are rushing to London,

to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly.

Using the impressions he took in Seti I's tomb,

Giovanni Battista Belzoni has reconstructed two life-size rooms.

The exhibition opens in Paris few months later

and on this occasion Champollion and Belzoni,

two of the greatest Egyptologists of the era,

finally meet.

Belzoni will never go back to Egypt.

From now on, he wants to work independently

and in 1823

he decides to embark on the search

for the sources of the Niger River in West Africa.

But soon after, while on the road to Timbuktu,

he falls ill with dysentery.

He dies on the 3rd December 1823

at the age of 45.

Belzoni barely spent six years in Egypt,

yet his daring exploits, his tenacity

and his unwavering determination

will serve as an inspiration

for generations to come.

As for Champollion,

after years spent in libraries, gloomy museums

and smoke-filled lecture halls,

he can finally breathe freely

when he sets foot on Egyptian soil.

His promised land lies before him

and it will completely captivate him.

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