Original subtitles

Egypt.

Land of legendary pharaohs and monuments,

whose majesty has never ceased to fascinate us.

And yet for more than a millennium,

this extraordinary civilisation was completely forgotten,

buried beneath the sands of the desert.

But in 1822, the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion...

...cracks the secret of the hieroglyphs

and gives a new voice to this long-lost Egypt.

Tragically, he dies before publishing all of his work.

This is a huge loss for Egyptology,

and the situation is urgent.

Across the country, the monuments of the pharaohs are disappearing

before they can even be studied.

And the magnificent antiquities of Egypt

have become prey for treasure hunters.

Howard Vyse, for example, is a colonel in the British army.

Hungry for glory, he won't hesitate to excavate the Pyramids,

using explosives.

We need another charge.

Richard Lepsius is a Prussian.

Since Champollion, no-one has understood Ancient Egypt

and hieroglyphs as well as he has. But how far

is this brilliant linguist willing to go to satisfy his king?

And finally, the Frenchman Emile Prisse d'Avennes

has sworn to preserve Egypt's heritage at all costs,

but will he go so far as to betray his own principles?

In February 1837,

Howard Vyse, a wealthy British colonel,

uses explosives

to excavate the entrails of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Bring me the ladder.

To reduce the risk of collapse

in this dangerous operation, Vyse has enlisted the services

of an engineer, John Shae Perring.

Bring me more gunpowder.

We need another charge.

We're standing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza,

built more than 4,000 years ago,

and the last one of the ancient wonders of the world still standing.

Here Howard Vyse was going to try and make a name for himself.

Unlike other treasure hunters, Vyse wasn't interested in money.

He was already rich enough. What he really wanted was glory.

He'd been a colonel in the British army,

but he'd never distinguished himself on the battlefield.

He hoped do that here.

Vyse, though, didn't have time to waste,

and after a year, without having made the grand discovery

that he was hoping for, Vyse decided that he needed to move things along

more quickly. So he decided

on a rather more dramatic course of action.

From this point on, he was going to use explosives.

This was Egyptology in a hurry.

Let's go.

Howard Vyse is certain there are hidden treasures

inside the Great Pyramid waiting just for him.

This is the burial chamber inside Khufu's Pyramid,

and over there is the sarcophagus

where the king would have been buried.

But no mummy was found here and no treasure.

And this gave Howard Vyse the idea that maybe this was,

in fact, a kind of decoy chamber.

So he set about trying to find the real burial chamber

somewhere else. Follow me.

Howard Vyse is convinced, if this chamber exists,

he can reach it through the Grand Gallery,

a long corridor running through the heart of the monument.

Right at the end of the grand gallery,

at the very top of the wall on this side, there's an opening

which leads to a chamber, otherwise completely inaccessible,

above the burial chamber that we've just been in.

Although it was discovered before the Howard's Vyse time.

he thought that if there was one chamber

above the burial chamber, perhaps there would be more.

The reed

There must be a cavity above.

I knew it!

We need more gunpowder. Hurry!

For a month, taking every risk,

Howard Vyse relentlessly attacks the massive ceiling.

More.

More.

And at last, on the 28h of March 1837...

It's empty.

There must be more...

He thought if there was one and then another chamber

above the burial chamber, maybe there would be more.

And he was right, and in fact he found a third, and then a fourth,

and then a fifth.

Pretty spectacular discoveries.

He still hadn't quite found the treasure he was looking for.

These are what we now call relieving chambers,

part of the architecture, the design of the Pyramids.

There was a huge mass of stone

pressing down on the cavity of the burial chamber,

and these relieving chambers are there

to help distribute that massive weight

rather than it all coming down on the top

and risking the whole chamber from collapsing.

Although it's empty,

the fifth chamber still holds a nice surprise for Howard Vyse.

Come! Look at this.

Hieroglyphs.

Unable to read the hieroglyphs,

the two men take careful copies of them.

I wonder what this means.

When he finally obtained a translation,

Vyse discovered that the hieroglyphs read something like...

It's probably written by the workmen

who were responsible for the construction

of that part of the Pyramid. That was probably

the name they gave themselves. Khufu is the name of the king

that the Greeks later called Cheops.

This was very important for our understanding

of the date of the Pyramid and the identity of the builder.

And yet there was some scepticism about this.

Vyse wasn't the most popular in the field at this time.

His techniques perhaps left something to be desired.

He'd used explosives.

He wasn't always the friendliest with his colleagues.

And there were people that even suspected

he might have put the hieroglyphs there himself.

We now know that that's not true. But at the time, for Vyse,

it was an encouragement, a motivation.

If people weren't gonna believe

that this really was a genuinely great discovery,

he was just going to have to make another one somewhere else.

For Howard Vyse, in his quest, his best chance was here.

It's another Pyramid, the smallest of the main three,

the tomb of Pharaoh Menkaure.

Until then, no-one had managed to enter this Pyramid.

And it wasn't for lack of trying.

In the 12th century, the Mamluk sultan Osman Bey

created a huge gash on the monument still visible today

in an attempt to find the entrance, without success.

Stung by his critics, Howard Vyse cannot imagine

returning to England empty-handed and disgraced.

So for two months he sets off explosives, digs tunnels

until finally, on the 1st of August, 1837,

he discovers an ancient passage.

Vyse had used explosives to smash his way in.

This would have brought him into this entrance passageway,

and from there into this chamber. And it's very distinctive, actually,

because it's decorated with these niches,

which are emulating the facade of an Egyptian palace.

It's the only bit of decoration we have in any Pyramid

here on the Giza Plateau, and yet Vyse doesn't mention this at all.

Maybe that's because the space wouldn't have been lit

as it is for us, but I suspect it's more to do with the fact

that Vyse was completely preoccupied with what else he might find beyond.

Howard Vyse was right to persevere:

there are treasures waiting for him.

In the first chamber, he discover s a partial mummy and a coffin

bearing the name of Menkaure, the man who built the Pyramid.

And this is only the beginning

Look at this beauty!

Vyse eventually made his way here to the burial chamber.

Down here he made another interesting,

sensational discovery: a magnificent sarcophagus

of polished basalt of a kind of blue-black colour.

It was found empty, but it perhaps didn't matter,

it was a magnificent object in its own right.

Howard Vyse has finally got his treasure.

But he was breaking the rules by this point.

He would have known that he was supposed

to declare any antiquities he discovered to the authorities.

He would also have known, just a couple of years beforehand,

Muhammad Ali had passed a rule

saying that any newly discovered antiquities had to remain in Egypt.

That was, of course, not what Vyse wanted.

He was hoping to take his treasure away,

so he simply didn't tell the authorities what he'd found.

His plan is simple: he will quietly leave for London

with the mummy and the coffin.

and Perring will send the sarcophagus

as soon as it has been removed from the Pyramid.

The sarcophagus was large and very heavy, and, in fact,

parts of the Pyramid had been constructed

only after the sarcophagus had been introduced.

So Perring had to dismantle some door supports

just to get it out. And it wasn't until a year later,

in September, 1838

that the sarcophagus started to make its way back to London.

But disaster struck.

The ship it was sailing on

sank off the coast of Spain

and the sarcophagus was completely lost.

Worse still for Vyse's reputation,

many, many years after his time,

the coffin and the mummy were radiocarbon-dated

and they shown to be far too late

to have been anything to do with Menkaura.

So in the end, Vyse's legacy

amounts to a partial mummy,

a badly preserved coffin that are, in fact,

nothing to do with the time of the Pyramid,

and a sarcophagus that he lost. All we have left of that

is Perring's drawing, a very fine drawing, but a poor consolation.

And in fact Vyse is better remembered now

for his reckless use of explosives

in blasting his way into this Pyramid.

This is not the legacy that he was hoping for.

In the 1830s,

the Egyptians allow these European explorers

to operate, despite their questionable methods,

and they too contribute to the destruction of their monuments,

using them as stone quarries.

The outer stone of this Pyramid, for example,

Aswan granite is removed at this time

and used to build the Alexandria arsenal.

But now people start to speak out against these practices,

including Emile Prisse d'Avennes. This Frenchman,

who's living in Egypt, can no longer bear to witness

such destruction. While the locals are dismantling temples

to build with the stones,

and the Europeans are taking the antiquities

to fill up their museums, Prisse is doing drawings.

When he draws, Prisse reproduces all he sees,

down to the smallest hieroglyph.

A perfectionist to the extreme,

he wants to leave the most accurate record possible.

Prisse d'Avennes is a truly outstanding draftsman,

equally capable of depicting people and monuments.

His drawings are so precise that they feel like

spontaneous photographs taken on the spot.

Prisse travels across Egypt with his paintbox,

which is now kept at the National Library of France.

It's particularly moving for me to have this paintbox next to me,

because it's the one Prisse d'Avennes used

to produce all of his drawings.

Prisse d'Avennes is a man who doesn't do anything by halves.

He sets himself strict codes of conduct,

and follows them scrupulously. But the imminent arrival in Egypt

of a man from Prussia , a kingdom

that included part of present-day Germany,

will force him to question everything.

Karl Richard Lepsius was born exactly 20 years to the day

after Jean-Francois Champollion. After the Frenchman's death,

no-one was able to take his work forward.

But 10 years later, Lepsius takes up the torch.

Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, and Lepsius can read them.

He masters them like a living language.

So well that in 1842,

the King of Prussia sends him on an expedition to Egypt.

And Lepsius doesn't arrive empty-handed

He brings ceremonial gifts, as is customary on such visits.

But above all, to put Muhammad Ali in the best possible frame of mind

with regard to Prussian ambitions, Lepsius hands him a letter

written especially for him by King Friedrich Willhelm IV.

Lepsius's expedition was the most ambitious

and the most expensive that there had been in Egypt

since the time of Napoleon.

The King of Prussia released a huge amount of money

to fund this. That was for two reasons:

firstly, he was very passionate about Egyptology himself,

but secondly, perhaps more importantly,

he wanted to build a collection of antiquities in Prussia

to rival the ones elsewhere in Europe.

So the idea was that Lepsius, the great Egyptologist,

could come to Egypt and copy as many hieroglyphic texts

and decorated scenes in tombs and temples as he wanted,

as long as he brought home as many remarkable antiquities as he could.

But here's the problem for Lepsius:

seven years ago Muhammad Ali issued a protection order

forbidding the removal of Egypt's antiquities from the country.

If the Pasha doesn't make an exception for him,

Lepsius's expedition will end before it has even begun.

Lepsius's strategy has worked.

Muhammad Ali grants his expedition the necessary excavation permits,

and authorises him to collect antiquities

for a museum planned for Berlin.

Lepsius chooses to begin his expedition

on the most emblematic site of all: the Giza Plateau.

We're standing here

in the middle of the Giza Necropolis,

which is the cemetery, not of the kings and the queens

who built the Pyramids, but of the royal court,

the people who surrounded the pharaoh

and carried out the daily activities of running the country.

Lepsius did not actually expect very much from Giza

and from the tomb surrounding it,

because Champollion and other earlier explorers

didn't give him much impression

that there was anything really to find out here.

But as Lepsius came here, he was stunned

by the abundance of information, in particular inscriptions

and carvings that told the story of these people's lives.

What we see here on this pillar is the kind of thing

that Lepsius was very excited by.

It mentions the job titles of this person,

that he was a keeper of secrets for the Pharaoh.

And it tells us his name, Seshamnopher.

And this was the kind of thing that Lepsius was really seeking,

the names of family members and how they connected to the King,

in effect creating a family tree

or genealogy of the royal court of the Old Kingdom.

Lepsius is excited.

"The many inscriptions list the family,

often very extensive, of the deceased,

as well as all his functions and titles,

so that I could almost compile a directory of the entire court

from the period of Kings Khufu or Khafre."

In Giza, Lepsius was able to map and identify 130 tombs,

and he started numbering all the tombs,

all the Pyramid, with numbers that we still use today

to identify these monuments.

Before Lepsius, many Egyptologists

did not document the provenance of the objects they removed.

Museums still hold countless pieces whose origins are unknown.

Lepsius's team includes draftsmen, painters,

sculptors, and they meticulously

record the dates and locations of their discoveries.

They are working with the future Berlin museum in mind

and that changes everything.

Lepsius expected to spend just two weeks in Giza,

but the Prussians stay for four months.

So at Christmas, 1842, they are still there.

A devout Catholic, he insists on celebrating Christmas.

But that isn't his only motive. He explains.

"It's useful that the arduous work should be rewarded

not only by a day off on Sunday, but also,

whenever the occasion presents itself,

by joyful festivities."

And even when it comes to leaving his mark at Giza,

Karl Richard Lepsius finds a way to have fun.

Climbing the huge blocks of the Pyramid of Khufu

is strictly forbidden... but exceptionally,

we were allowed to go up it, to see one of the site's best-kept secrets.

It's an immense privilege to be here.

We are quite a few courses of stone

up the north side of the Great Pyramid

at quite a height already.

This, though, is the original entranceway,

and it's off limits now. We're here to see a special inscription.

When we think of Egyptologists, I think we tend to think often

of quite serious, scholarly characters. But in fact,

quite a lot of the earliest discoverers

were quite some characters. They were intrepid adventurers

and not without a sense of humour and a sense a fun.

And Lepsius was absolutely one of these.

He was just 32 at the time. He was also bursting with energy and ideas.

In January, 1843, before the expedition left,

Lepsius couldn't resist carving a hieroglyphic inscription

onto the stone here. And he used an Egyptian formula

and the tone from a kind of Egyptian text

to create a text of his own, praising his expedition,

and above all, praising his king.

"So speak the servants of the King Friedrich Wilhelm IV,

among them Lepsius the scribe.

May the Highest god grant to the King and to his wife

a long and ever-changing life on Earth,

and a blessed dwelling in Heaven for all eternity."

Perhaps Lepsius was gonna fool people,

but anybody, of course, who could read the text

would understand that this is talking about the Lepsius expedition

and the King of Prussia.

So it's kind of an Egyptological in-joke, I think.

During this stay,

immortalised by his inscription on the Great Pyramid,

Lepsius discovers countless exceptional artefacts and papyruses.

Looking at the work of those who came before him,

Lepsius had already identified bas-reliefs

that would make a striking impact in the future Berlin museum

before he even arrived in Egypt.

At the Temple of Karnak, for example,

he sets his sights on a small chapel

that will undoubtedly become one of the highlights of his journey.

This is the Akhmenu. It was built by the Pharaoh Thutmose III

in around 1,400 BC

This was an important part of the temple of Karnak,

and later kings were coronated here.

But this is also the site of a very important text

for ancient Egyptian history, the Chapel of Ancestors.

This is a replica of Thutmose III's Chamber of Ancestors.

The original is now in the Louvre, and what we have here

is just an impression of what it would have looked like.

It's really quite remarkable. You have images of Thutmose III,

and then you have 61 seated kings

with their names above all around,

showing the history of Egypt.

Thutmose III decided to build this chamber

to celebrate a thousand years of history that came before him.

We have the earliest king here, Snefru, up at the top,

who reigned around 2,400, and then you have Thutmose III,

around 1,400BC. And so

he shows a straight lineage from the Pyramid builders to himself.

The Chamber of Ancestors is what's known as a Kings List.

It catalogues all the rulers in the order

in which they reigned. Even though Egyptologists can now read the names

of the pharaohs, they are still struggling

to reconstruct the full history of the country.

So for researchers,

this chapel is an essential source, all the more precious

because it's extremely rare.

There are only two known Kings Lists,

One was a highly fragmented papyrus sent to the Turin Museum

that we now call the Turin Canon. The other was a Kings List

from Ramses II's temple in Abydos that was sent to the British Museum.

So Britain and Italy had Kings Lists.

France and Prussia, or Germany now, did not.

So when Lepsius started his expedition,

he had a plan that he wanted to come here

to the Akhmenu and take the Kings List that was here

and bring it to Berlin.

Lepsius has made no secret of his intentions,

and some people in Egypt are annoyed by this.

The Frenchman Emile Prisse d'Avennes

in particular is outraged that the Pasha makes exceptions

to his Egyptian heritage protection order published in 1835.

A respected Egyptologist and artist,

Prisse d'Avennes expresses his annoyance in a letter

"In this Egypt already so depleted by tomb raiders and speculators,

a learned society has swooped down like a horde of barbarians,

to carry off what little remains of wonderful Egyptian monuments."

And in mid-April, 1843.,

while Lepsius and his men are still excavating

in the north of the country, Prisse d'Avennes heads to Luxor

to the Temple of Karnak.

He begins by drawing this Chamber of Ancestors

in meticulous detail.

Then, having had enough

and betraying some of his principles,

he decides to seize it before Lepsius can.

Prisse d'Avennes arrived here, and very much illegally,

he went in the middle of the night with his group of men,

when nobody would be around,

because most people were afraid of genies or spirits

or things like this...

...and he, under candlelight,

cut up this entire chamber into small pieces

and put them into wooden crates labelled natural history specimens.

He didn't tell anyone he was going to do this.

Prisse d'Avennes thinks he has been discreet,

working by night, but as he waits to ship his precious cargo,

some soldiers demand to inspect his camp.

Even caught red-handed,

e Frenchman is not the type to be pushed around.

The soldiers retreat, but they place Prisse d'Avennes,

his tent, and his boat under surveillance,

and the Frenchman is trapped.

It'll take a month and a lot of bribery

for the surveillance to slacken off just long enough for him

to load the crates and slip away from Luxor under the radar.

In autumn, 1844,

Prisse d'Avennes finally sets off for France.

He reaches Paris at the very moment when Richard Lepsius arrives

at Karnak to carry off the Chamber of Ancestors.

And when Lepsius arrived in Karnak, came to this spot,

and just saw the bottom base of the wall and nothing else,

he must've been quite enraged.

Prisse d'Avennes thought of himself as like a superhero,

saving ancient Egyptian antiquities. He sent it to the Louvre,

he gave it to them for free without taking any money,

because he very strongly believed in what he was doing.

To me as a modern observer, I find this quite bizarre,

because in the end, the chamber was taken out,

it isn't in the location, and what he did

was actually what Lepsius was going to do.

So he furthered the destruction of artefacts, but he was doing it

more against Lepsius' destruction.

Despite the disappointment

of arriving too late, Lepsius is enchanted by Luxor

and its treasures.

After Lepsius's arrival in Egypt,

it took him two years to actually come to Luxor.

But this was really the great playground,

because this place was filled with texts

as well as monuments and objects.

So really for Lepsius, this was the core of where he came

to understand ancient Egypt.

The tomb of Menna, a dignitary during the period

we call the New Kingdom, particularly captures his attention.

He lived nearly 1,400 years ago.

When Lepsius visited this tomb, one of the scenes

that really caught his attention was this one, because it was unique.

All the other tombs have scenes of daily life,

but this one actually shows an aspect of religion.

And here we have Menna coming into the Hall of Judgment of Osiris.

Osiris, the god of resurrection,

must decide whether Menna has earned a place in the afterlife.

And the crucial part is here,

where Menna's heart is being weighed against the goddess Maat

The goddess Maat embodies truth, justice,

and moral rectitude.

If these two weigh equally,

then Menna can be received by Osiris and make his way to the afterlife.

So this was something that for Lepsius was extraordinary,

because he'd also been looking at papyri

that showed these kinds of scenes,

but this was the first tomb he saw to actually show

the access of the deceased into the underworld.

In Berlin, Lepsius translated a long sacred text

about life after death.

So this depiction moves him deeply.

One of the most beautiful scenes in Menna's tomb is this scene

where Menna is shown fishing and fowling.

And on one level, it just looks like fishing and fowling,

but on another, this whole thing is really an encoded image

about rebirth, resurrection, fertility and order over chaos.

Lepsius is the first Egyptologist

able to work out the hidden meaning of the sublime images

this tomb is decorated with.

Here Mena is spearing, harpooning these fish, tilapia,

symbolic of rebirth and resurrection.

Because the tilapia's a mouth brooder,

it keeps the babies in its mouth and opens up and they go out.

So for the Egyptians, this was a miraculous way of being born.

And what is also lovely is the lotus.

The lotus is the quintessential symbol of rebirth

and resurrection. It comes out of the water,

depth of the water, opens up in the sunlight,

and then goes down at about two o'clock

to be born again the next day.

So really, over here, Lepsius can see this whole idea

of what the tomb is. It's a place where regeneration takes place,

and Menna can live for eternity.

The study of these images of resurrection,

of living a just and upright life,

fascinates Lepsius, who's a deeply religious man.

But the months and years pass and now it is time

to think about returning to Berlin.

Before leaving Egypt,

the scholar has to pay one last visit to the Pasha.

Your Highness. For one last time,

he needs his authorisation

to take away the antiquities and objects

he has collected for the future Berlin museum.

Lepsius's expedition lasted three years,

during which his achievements were immense.

And in actual fact, the quantity of antiquities

that he had gathered made Lepsius a little nervous.

He gathered together 2,000 drawings, 15,000 antiquities,

including two entire tombs. There were columns, sphinx,

stele, objects of all kinds.

But this was contrary to the recent law

that any newly discovered antiquities should remain in Egypt,

so Lepsius was a little bit nervous that maybe he'd gone too far

and taken too much.

After all, when he started out

he'd been given permission by Muhammad Ali

to take more or less what he liked.

Muhammad Ali was very smart, and he wanted

to get Prussian diplomatic relationships strong.

He wanted money, resources from the Prussian Empire,

and so for him, he thought it a good diplomatic measure

to let the Lepsius expedition take kind of whatever they wanted.

Unlike Champollion, who had returned more or less alone

and without any acclaim, Lepsius came back to Prussia

and was acclaimed as a hero. It took another 14 years

for him to publish the results of his expedition, but when he did,

his own publication was a monument of Egyptology...

...the Denkmaeler.

Numerous volumes of beautiful and extremely detailed drawings.

It set a new standard for Egyptology.

And in this sense,

Lepsius was another of the great founding figures

of the subjects. and yet somebody to whom there are maybe two sides:

a hero, for all the antiquities that he discovered,

all the great documentation that he did,

at the same time he was somebody

who shamelessly plundered the country

for its antiquities.

But at the end of the 1840s,

these repeated seizures of antiquities

carried out by certain Europeans in the name of science

become harder and harder to justify

in the eyes of a growing proportion of the scientific community,

as well as part of the Egyptian elite.

The game is almost over for adventurers and scholars

who destroy more than they preserve.

And there's one Frenchman who will epitomise this new era.

His name is Auguste Mariette.

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