Original subtitles

Egypt.

Land of legendary pharaohs and monuments,

whose majesty has never ceased to fascinate us.

And yet for centuries

this extraordinary civilization was completely forgotten,

buried beneath the sands of the desert.

But in 1798,

the French general Napoleon Bonaparte

lands with his army, and creates in Europe

an enduring passion for Ancient Egypt.

Soon, explorers from every corner of the Old Continent

will be taking part in a crazy race

- to seek out hidden treasures... - Come on, come on, come on.

...while scholars and linguists

struggle to decipher the enigmatic

script of the Egyptians,

lost for 1,400 years.

And finally, in 1822,

the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion

succeeds in unlocking the secret of the hieroglyphs.

But the fact that Champollion has devised

an initial hieroglyphic alphabet

does not explain everything immediately.

Champollion's theories are hotly debated,

even in France, where many scholars

are still expressing doubts.

So Champollion sets out to test them.

First in the museums of Italy,

and then, for the very first time, in the field.

In Egypt itself.

From Cairo to Nubia,

via the ruins of Memphis,

the temple of Abu Simbel,

and the Valley of the Kings,

the most magnificent monuments

are about to reveal their mysteries

to the first man in the modern age

who is capable of understanding them.

But Egypt does not surrender its secrets so easily.

Like the explorers before him,

Champollion will have to push himself beyond his limits

to complete his journey

and become a legend in his own right.

30 years after Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign,

Jean-Francois Champollion sets foot, for the very first time,

in this land that has obsessed him since childhood.

At the age of 37, he is already without doubt

the man who knows more than anyone else

about the history and ancient civilization of Egypt.

Champollion devoted himself

with a relentless focus

from a very young age

to learning languages,

modern languages, ancient languages,

and in particular to the race to decipher Egyptian.

This journey is the pinnacle

of more than 20 years of effort,

devoted to awakening the language of the ancient Egyptians

from its long sleep.

In Egypt, Champollion wants to copy

as many hieroglyphic inscriptions as possible,

and he has to bring back antiquities for the Louvre.

But he is not alone on this mission.

He's with a team of 13 men.

Half are French, the other half Italian;

including his friend and right-hand man,

Ippolito Rosellini...

...as this expedition is financed jointly

by the King of France and the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Among them are a naturalist,

a doctor, architects, painters and illustrators...

...including the young Nestor L'Hote,

who is passionate about archaeology.

Champollion christens his men "the Argonauts."

They call him "the General."

Egypt was still a difficult place to go at that time.

The expedition that Champollion led with Ippolito Rosellini

was a pioneering expedition.

This was the first time an expedition went

armed with the knowledge of how to read texts.

That's transformative.

But in Alexandria, Bernardino Drovetti,

France's consul in Egypt for the past 25 years,

is astonished to see Champollion arriving in the country.

In a letter a few months earlier,

Drovetti had formally advised against the journey,

warning that Egypt was no longer safe for Europeans.

In the 1820s,

the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt is a part,

is shaken by internal conflicts.

Greece, in particular, is rebelling and demanding its independence.

In an attempt to bring Greece back into line,

the Sultan in Constantinople

dispatched all the fleets of his empire against her ,

including that of Egypt.

But in 1827, a Russian-British-French

military coalition intervenes to defend Greece

and destroys the entire Ottoman fleet.

Egypt has lost men and ships,

and the public is now demanding retaliation.

Champollion, however, never received Drovetti's letter.

Later, he would claim that it was

"the hand of the god Amun" that diverted it.

For now, after three weeks at sea,

he is simply grateful to enjoy

some comfort at the French consulate.

But what he appreciates the most, he writes,

are "two miserable clay jars filled with water from the Nile."

If you ask a man who has just come ashore

after several weeks at sea

what is the most delightful thing in the world,

he will answer: fresh water.

I was one of these men,

and I drank the water from the Nile.

We're very lucky, actually, with Champollion

that so much of life is documented,

and we have his own thoughts,

if you like, in the form of his letters.

In his letters, most often addressed to his elder brother,

Champollion, whose health has always been very fragile,

repeatedly expresses his conviction

that the water from the Nile is "regenerative."

In the days following his arrival in Egypt,

Champollion and his team were received by Muhammad Ali,

the viceroy, the ruler of Egypt,

in a palace like this one, in the Ottoman style,

although this one was built by Muhammad's Ali descendants.

Muhammad Ali was a curious character.

He was an Albanian soldier in the ottoman armies

and had taken control of Egypt shortly after Napoleon's departure.

He'd learned to read in his 40s.

He read as much as he could after that time,

even having the great philosophers translated for him.

And he wasn't just the person who gave out permits

to Europeans wanting to dig and gather collections of antiquities.

He was a clever politician and a true statesman.

Champollion's writings offer us his first impressions

of this man now considered to be the father of modern Egypt.

"His Highness was sitting down

and very simply dressed.

He is of average height and has a cheerful face.

His eyes are remarkably lively,

and a magnificent white beard covers his chest."

The meeting is cordial and Muhammad Ali grants Champollion

all the permits required for his project.

In mid-September,

after waiting for a typhus epidemic to finish,

the expedition finally sets off.

Champollion writes to his brother...

"I am a new man!"

And in fact, his appearance has changed dramatically.

He has shaved his head and is wearing a turban and local attire.

He's proud to be taken for an Egyptian.

The Argonauts also dress in local attire,

so as not to draw too much attention.

Champollion never stops taking notes

and sketching everything he sees;

plants, the shapes of mountains, animals.

Everything interests him in his quest to find

the origins of hieroglyphs.

After passing Cairo, the expedition reaches Memphis,

the remains of which have already been described

by Bonaparte's scholars.

But on the site, it seems that the remains

consist of just a few scattered stones and fragments of pottery.

In October 1828,

Champollion came here

and recognized that this

was the ancient city of Memphis.

There wasn't much to see beyond blocks like these,

fallen in the landscape.

No standing temples, no massive palaces,

although, of course, he knew that these once stood

in this very important city.

Memphis was the political,

religious, and royal capital of ancient Egypt.

It was the place where the pharaoh had his palaces.

It's the place where royal rituals, like coronation,

were enacted from the earliest times.

And it was the place where the main gods were worshipped.

What made the entire trip worthwhile for Champollion

was seeing the enormous colossal statue,

found seven years before, over a hill just like this one.

The statue had been discovered

by the explorer Giovanni Caviglia.

An Italian working for the British,

he has already distinguished himself

during excavations around the Great Sphinx of Giza.

At Memphis, the statue he has begun to clear is impressive,

but Caviglia has chosen to focus on other excavations.

The colossus is therefore still almost entirely buried.

Champollion, when he came across it,

could see that it was colossal,

10 metres long.

But he couldn't really see the beauty of it.

But he, for a couple of days,

had his workmen remove some of the dirt and get closer,

and finally was able to see

the spectacular features of the pharaoh,

the youthful face and energetic athletic body of the king.

This is a truly astonishing,

colossal statue of Ramses the Great.

It represents the pharaoh in all of his royal regalia,

the double crown that shows his control

over northern and southern Egypt,

and the cobra protecting his forehead,

as well as his false beard.

But most importantly, his name in cartouches

and name rings all over his body

that identify him as Ramesses the Great,

the great ruler of Egypt.

And it's done in spectacular,

hard white limestone.

Champollion was fascinated by the statue of Ramses

and he almost fell in love with it,

getting fascinated by every contour

and all the details of the inscriptions.

It was almost opening a new window

for him into ancient Egypt.

And it is interesting

that Champollion's cohort, his team,

considered ways to maybe bring the colossal statue back.

Some even suggested cutting it into fragments,

and Champollion was actually horrified

and disgusted at this thought and completely rejected the idea,

so it remained where it lay

until it was moved to the new museum in Memphis.

Based on what Champollion saw,

and in particular the colossal statue,

he became convinced that there was much more

to be found at ancient Memphis.

And indeed, he even suggested there was enough

to fill an entire museum. And he was right.

But in October 1828,

Champollion doesn't have time to do excavations in Memphis.

His project is to visit every ancient site in Egypt and Nubia

and copy every single inscription.

He needs to get on with it.

So the expedition now heads toward the pyramids.

It takes them four hours

to reach the desolate plain of Saqqara,

from which the first of the pyramids rises up.

The Step Pyramid.

Dating back to 2700 BC,

this structure marks an important turning point

in ancient Egyptian funerary architecture.

For the first time, the Egyptians used cut stone,

and not bricks made from dried mud.

After some 30 kilometres,

the expedition reaches the Giza Plateau.

Champollion writes to his brother :

"I have come to live in the shadow of the great pyramids,

to visit one of the wonders of the world."

But very quickly, his enthusiasm fades.

He grows morose, and is shocked to feel little more

than a mild sense of surprise

when coming face to face with these monuments.

He is the first of the team to feel

disappointed by them before realizing why.

For there are no texts inside the pyramids.

Nothing to quench his thirst for knowledge and hieroglyphs.

His health also begins to deteriorate.

But one tomb at the foot of the pyramids

captures his attention and lifts his spirits.

It is the only site where he chooses to spend time at Giza.

This tomb is so exceptional

that today it is totally closed to the public

to protect its paintings.

But we were granted special permission to film inside.

Champollion came here

in October 1828, and at that time,

hardly any digging had been done here at Giza,

incredible as that might seem.

But this tomb was accessible, one of the few.

However, it was only when Champollion,

armed with the knowledge of how to read

hieroglyphic inscriptions came along,

that he was able to identify this

as the tomb of a man called Iymery.

And in fact his name is written

above his figure here.

Champollion could read his titles,

which include things like

Priest of Khufu,

he was the steward of the great estate.

So 4,600 years ago, he was a very important man

and probably would have been quite well known.

And some of the scenes that are right here

are things that Champollion himself even copied.

In fact, this tomb was the only one

where he copied anything in the whole of Giza.

This was the place.

There's a scene that you might see anywhere in the world,

a scene of a cow giving birth to a calf,

which is being given a helping hand by this guy behind here

and there's a label on the top,

which would have interested Champollion,

the kind of thing he could have read, just as "Meset",

the birth or birthing.

And at the bottom, right in front of me here,

we've got a scene, the figures are quite large here,

and these boats are full of men wielding sticks

which they seem to be hitting one another with.

One or two people have apparently fallen out of the boats.

This is a scene not of a battle,

but of a kind of a sporting joust.

It's a kind of competition.

It's funny we often think of ancient Egypt as being so exotic

and so different from our own world,

and yet these are absolutely human beings just having fun

like we might want to.

In time, Iymery came to be forgotten

and he was probably, we can imagine,

delighted that Champollion was able to read his name again.

The ancients were very concerned

that one's name should live on.

They had this concept of causing your name to live.

So when he was forgotten, in some senses perhaps Iymery died,

and when Champollion came along, he was able read that name again,

in some sense, he came back to life.

Leaving the desolation of the desert behind,

the team is now heading south.

The landscape is greener

and the men get their energy back.

Soon, they reach the tombs of Beni Hasan,

in the heart of Egypt, and it is a wonderful surprise.

They had planned to stop there for just one day,

but they stay for 15.

The artists in the team surpass themselves.

The ancient world is finally about to be revealed.

Just three months after arriving in Egypt,

Champollion has already amassed

more than 300 pages of drawings.

In the middle of Egypt, the boat now passes through regions

reputed to be infested with crocodiles.

The crew are scared.

To make up for lost time,

Champollion decides not to make any more stops.

He wants to reach his final destination as soon as possible,

the heart of Nubia.

But serious health problems thwart his plans.

Champollion and his men are forced to break their journey.

They find refuge on the island of Philae.

Struck down by a violent attack of gout in his foot,

Champollion is unable to stand up.

He spends eight days bedridden

in one of the island's seven temples,

built during the Greco-Roman period.

The Argonauts do everything they can to comfort their "General,"

but Champollion is in agony

and is feeling depressed.

Champollion describes being bedridden in a small temple,

and it's probably this temple.

He would have been in this chamber.

They would have set up a bed and a whole place for him to rest.

So he was stuck laying,

looking up at the inscriptions he could see.

And his eyes would focus on these kinds of columns

that are very elaborate, with floral decorations,

very, very embellished.

Ancient Egyptian columns were more simplistic.

They had a minimalistic style.

Whereas this is maximalist.

It's the most amount of carving and flourishing

that you could possibly find.

And he looked at them and he didn't like it.

He said it was barbaric,

a degraded form of Egyptian style.

For him, like most people in the early 19th century,

Greco-Roman classic style was well-known.

He wasn't interested in the known.

He wanted the truly ancient Egypt

of 3 or 4,000 years ago.

He wasn't interested in the Greco-Roman Egypt

that was 2,000 years before him.

But to me, the modern viewer, I come here and I find it very beautiful.

Champollion rested here for eight days,

growing in frustration that he was sick,

he couldn't move around,

which is an interesting part of Champollion's personality.

He was famously difficult.

He was known to be brilliant, a great scholar,

he could be a wonderful friend and a colleague,

but he could also be grumpy,

obtuse, angry.

At this point he arrives here after being in Egypt for six months,

it's hot, the food is not good, you're very tired,

working over-time,

and you're also sitting with the same group of people

over and over and over again.

There's an element of frustration that grows,

and this is certainly something as an archaeologist I can recognize

in my own experience.

The other members of the expedition would come in and show him

the drawings they were doing, consult, and discuss.

Champollion was very interested in the mythology of Isis and Osiris.

And this temple is key to understanding this important myth

that was the foundation of ancient Egyptian religion.

The myth tells the story of how King Osiris is murdered

by his brother. But thanks to his wife,

the goddess Isis, Osiris is brought back to life.

To revive him, Isis creates the very first

mummy in history with Osiris's body.

This myth was central to ancient Egyptian kingship,

and it was fascinating to Champollion,

but it also brought to him some disturbing ideas that unnerved him.

We know from his personal correspondence with his brother

that the myth of Isis and Osiris caused a shaking of his foundation,

of the very ideas that he would have grown up with,

this Judeo-Christian concept of religion.

In particular, Champollion was...

most rattled by the idea of resurrection.

What's so central to Christian religion,

is that Jesus was resurrected,

and Champollion saw that Osiris was resurrected.

He started to recognize this idea that maybe

these Judeo-Christian ideas

had an origin in ancient Egypt

and even older mythologies.

And this was terrifying to him.

It was an idea he'd dare not speak out loud.

In mid-December, the expedition pushes deeper into Nubia,

and reaches the Tropic of Cancer.

They are all amazed by how cold it is at these latitudes.

Champollion is still unwell and in a foul mood.

Champollion was relentlessly devoted to and focused on his work.

In his Egyptian expedition in particular,

he seems to have been on this almost manic

quest to get through as much work as possible.

And he expected similarly high

and almost kind of self-destructive standards of those he was around.

On the morning of December the 29th,

the temples of Abu Simbel finally come into view.

This is a stunning view.

I'm standing on a hill overlooking Abu Simbel Temple.

And from this perspective, I can really get a sense

of what's happening here and some of the challenges

that would have faced Champollion.

He found the situation exactly as Belzoni

had experienced it when he first arrived.

So what he saw was sand

all the way up to the top of the heads of Ramses II statues.

The entire thing was covered.

So his team had to once again come and dig everything out

in order to access the temple.

Champollion arrived here to record all the inscriptions

and to double check his growing understanding

of the ancient Egyptian language, of the hieroglyphic script.

The team begins by doing drawings

to capture the exterior of the temple on paper.

They then go inside the temple,

where temperatures reach 51 degrees Celsius.

In this furnace, the expedition's artists

need to become tightrope walkers.

They have to climb up eight meters from the ground

to copy all the inscriptions.

For Champollion, the ordeal is even harsher.

Struck by another bout of gout,

he works himself to the point of exhaustion.

But his persistence impresses his companions...

...and helps to ease the tensions of recent weeks.

This is one of the scenes that Champollion copied.

So we know what this would have looked like 200 years ago.

It's almost shocking when you see some of the images of Champollion

and you think, maybe he made this up,

is this a bit artistic and fanciful?

What's with all these colours ?

And when I look at the scene, I can immediately see

that Champollion was right. He recorded it accurately.

You can see traces of red colour on the figures of the men,

you can see the darker colours on the wig.

But one of our questions now is, what happened to these colours?

We're here 200 years later,

and I can just see these tiny bits of traces of colour.

What happened was, in part, a combination of this being

open to the natural environment,

humidity, air, processes like these.

But some of the very early explorers and Egyptologists 200 years ago

helped remove the colour.

So, one of the ways they recorded the drawings

and the images in the temple is that they would either

put plaster all over it and then peel the plaster off.

And then when the plaster came off, so did the colour.

So we made progress, yet lost the beauty.

It is from here, in the depths of Nubia,

after five months spent deciphering inscriptions on site,

that Champollion writes to the permanent secretary

of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

Seven years after his 1822 presentation

to the scientific community, Champollion confirms

that he has correctly understood hieroglyphs.

"The first of January 1829.

Sir, having followed the course of the Nile

from its mouth to the Second Cataract,

I am proud to state that there is NOTHING

to change in our letter on the hieroglyphic alphabet.

Our alphabet works.

It applies with equal success to Egyptian monuments

from the Roman period and to the temples,

palaces, and tombs of the pharaonic age."

Two months later, the team,

which is making its way back down the Nile in stages,

has returned to the centre of Egypt

and finally sets up camp in Thebes.

Its boats moor in front of the Temple of Luxor,

which gave its name to the modern city.

To Champollion's great dismay,

a village and a mosque now cover the remains of the pharaonic temple.

"When Champollion makes his one and only journey to Egypt,

he finally arrives in Luxor at a quay very close to here."

He is quite horrified by this first encounter with Luxor,

because as in many places, the ground is much higher,

with houses pressed up against the walls,

narrow streets and bunkers built of clay.

And to get access to the monument,

you'd have to destroy the whole village.

And that of course creates problems.

One thing has survived

from this village, with its jumble of houses,

and that is the mosque, which still in use.

But it has kept several of its openings,

and notably its elevated doorway...

...which gives us a sense of how high the ground level was

when Champollion was in Luxor.

It also reveals the enormous quantities of earth

that had to be removed to uncover the whole building,

and reveal the ground once walked trodden

by Ramses II in the 13th century BC.

Despite these difficulties with gaining access,

Champollion quickly realizes

that the whole front section of the temple

was built by Ramses the Second, while the back is much older.

A temple is constructed like an onion,

with layers gradually added by successive kings,

each extending the monument with a new courtyard,

portico, or chapel.

And it's only once Champollion has all these hieroglyphs

and real monuments before his eyes

that he can finally put his grammar fully to the test.

And at last, he is able to read fluently

what he has in front of him.

An entire civilization unfolds before him,

and it is almost vertiginous.

He admits that he understands so much it frightens him.

Because he is the first on earth to once again have access

to a history, to names, gods and concepts,

and it's almost too much for one man alone.

At the time, there is an obelisk

at either side of the entrance to the Temple of Luxor.

When Champollion is in front of these obelisks,

he is totally captivated.

They have a profound effect on him

because around 250 kilometres further south at Aswan

he had visited a granite quarry.

And in that quarry, there's another obelisk

which is completely unfinished.

It has a big crack

which has made it hard to move it.

Champollion is impressed

by this obelisk still stuck in the ground,

but he is even more blown away by the two towering obelisks

now standing before him.

In other countries,

obelisks had been taken as trophies of war,

in Rome or Constantinople, for example.

So for Champollion, it was essential that a monument like this

should be brought back to France.

He even writes in a letter that it would be an honour for France

to have one of the two obelisks from Luxor,

in particular the one on the right-hand side of the entrance.

In 1830, this obelisk is offered

to King Charles the Tenth of France by Muhammad Ali,

and it now stands on the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

It's already time for a progress report.

In seven months of travel,

the members of the Franco-Tuscan expedition

have produced more than 600 meticulously accurate drawings.

Champollion writes to his brother:

"And yet, so much remains to be done

that I am almost frightened."

Champollion came to Karnak after Luxor,

and when he got here, he was overwhelmed.

He called it a mass of marvellous constructions.

He saw these huge columns still preserved,

but yet temples that were dismantled and jumbled all over the place.

As he climbed throughout these ruins,

he was so impressed by the beauty of the space

and the sheer amount of inscriptions.

He was particularly interested in cartouches.

Which is what is over here.

It's a circle surrounding the name of a king.

And he knew that these cartouches

were the key to reconstructing ancient Egyptian history,

which was one of his major purposes.

He wanted to know which kings were in ancient Egypt,

what the kings did, and he wanted to put them in chronological order.

And as he looked around, he saw that the oldest cartouche

he could find was Amenemhet I,

and the most recent was the Roman Emperor Augustus.

So he identified 2,000 years of history

etched in the walls of Karnak.

For him, it was truly

a key to helping understand the history of Egypt.

Champollion's arrival in Thebes

marks a particularly happy period for him and his men.

In a painting, Giuseppe Angelellini,

one of the expedition's artists,

immortalizes his companions

in front of the ruins of the ancient city,

dressed in local costume.

A few weeks later, in April 1829,

the team crosses the Nile.

They are now working on the west bank,

the land of the tombs and the Valley of the Kings...

...an arid, inhospitable valley

where nothing grows and shade is scarce.

So they only have one choice.

In April 1829,

Champollion and the entire Franco-Tuscan expedition

moved into the Tomb of Rameses IV.

It regulated the temperature really well,

so it could be as high as 50 degrees out here

in the heat while they were working,

but generally much cooler, around 20 degrees, on the inside.

And after a while, it came to be known as Champollion's house.

It's a fairly simple arrangement

of a sequence of corridors, a burial chamber,

and then a continuation of the corridor here.

But that's not to say that the tomb isn't still pretty magnificent.

Ramses IV didn't skimp on the decoration.

Every available surface here is covered

in text and images and decorative colorations.

Every individual hieroglyph finely detailed

and beautifully and brightly painted.

It's decorated as you would expect,

with all sorts of texts and scenes

of what we call books of the afterlife.

Champollion and the entire

Franco-Tuscan expedition settled here.

Each of them would have had their particular place

lined up on either side of these corridors,

and Champollion even drew a little diagram

showing where everybody's beds was.

He called it a kind of princely dwelling,

and you can imagine that with his obsession

with Egyptian language and culture

he would have been happy to be surrounded by

hieroglyphic inscriptions and a starry sky above.

Outside, actually,

things were not quite as peaceful as they might have liked,

and perhaps they were that bit more thankful

for the shelter the tomb provides.

Champollion recounts a story about

how one of the servants awoke one morning

to find that his donkey, to his dismay,

had been eaten by something out there in the desert.

So, you know, as well as being a very romantic sort of place,

there was a clear and present danger here too.

While Champollion was here in Thebes,

it's as though he was a man in a hurry.

He had always been incredibly hard-working,

but now he wanted to work harder and harder and harder.

And at times, he wanted to go off

on his own into the tombs

to study the texts and inscriptions alone,

as if to sort of directly receive

the wisdom of the ancestors himself.

One day, the team finds him unconscious on the ground.

Champollion is eating poorly and sleeping badly.

He barely takes the time to see any daylight,

except occasionally to write to his brother.

"Having been thrown into the midst

of the monuments of Egypt for months,

I am frightened by what I read here

more fluently than I ever dared imagine.

Many things I had only vaguely suspected

have gained a substance and an undeniable certainty."

The final few weeks are heavy, but productive.

The team manages to complete the entire work program as planned.

On the return journey, Champollion withdraws into himself.

He is totally exhausted, overwhelmed by the sheer mass

of information he will now have to collate.

He knows that it will take him years

to classify everything and put in order.

In mid-September 1829,

Champollion was ready to return home

and he had amassed an incredible collection

of antiquities that were going to go with him.

He had a gorgeous sarcophagus

in greywacke...

...he had a number of mummies, there were some statuettes, stelae.

But the most beautiful,

the most stunning piece in the collection

was a relief which he had taken

from the tomb of Seti the First in the Valley of the Kings.

Champollion simply could not resist.

But he had to remove this from the tomb by force.

It was on the wall of a pillar in the tomb,

and he had to hack it away.

Champollion said of this relief:

"It's a capital piece worthy of a collection in its own right."

Champollion is now waiting for a ship bound for France,

which will not arrive for several weeks.

He uses this time to further enrich his horde of artefacts

destined for the Louvre.

He finds another object in the collection

of a Greek art dealer which he can't say no to.

It is a small bronze statue,

around 60 centimetres high,

inlaid all over with gold and electrum.

Champollion declares :

"This is an exquisite piece of work.

It's the finest known object of its kind."

Champollion also begins drafting a memorandum

addressed to the Pasha, Muhammad Ali.

It concerns the preservation of Egypt's monuments.

Despite having had a bas-relief sawn out from the tomb of Seti the First,

Champollion denounces the people

who are plundering antiquities all over the country.

There is a contradiction in what Champollion is saying

in different times,

as he's beginning to think about leaving Egypt.

On the one hand, he's amassed this wonderful collection of antiquities.

At the same time, he's mulling over everything that's happened

in the previous 18 months he's spent in Egypt

and beginning to worry

about the destruction of Egyptian antiquities,

destruction that he's been a part of himself.

Ah, mon ami.

Champollion personally presents

his memorandum to the Pasha,

calling for Egypt's monuments and artworks to stay in Egypt.

He's beginning to realize that actually there's as much

value in the monuments staying intact in Egypt.

In any case, this is a crucial turning point.

His change of belief is gonna have a really serious influence

on the way things play out from here.

On December the 5th, 1829,

taking advantage of favourable weather at last,

Champollion leaves Alexandria for France.

Champollion writes:

"I have enough work for an entire lifetime."

A lifetime that will prove tragically short,

as Champollion dies prematurely

just two years later.

Exhausted by this journey on which he has drunk

a lot of water from the Nile,

completely absorbed by his work,

he succumbs to a stroke

at the age of 41.

With the death of Champollion,

Egyptology has lost its first virtuoso.

But the people he has inspired are about to emerge.

A fervent admirer of Champollion,

the Prussian, Karl Richard Lepsius,

intends to bring glory to his country

by becoming the new hieroglyphs genius.

After France, Great Britain, and Italy,

a new European power

is now claiming its share

of Egypt's ancient riches.

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