Original subtitles

There has never been a discovery like it - not before, nor since.

ARCHIVE: We were to witness a spectacle, such as no other man in our time

had been privileged to see.

Everywhere the glint of gold.

On the 26th of November 1922, after five long years scouring

Egypt's legendary Valley of the Kings, British Egyptologist

Howard Carter and his aristocratic backer, Lord Carnarvon, broke

into the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The wonders they discovered captivated the world.

A coffin made of solid gold...

..and the famous gold mask...

..were just two of over 5,000 precious objects.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to know what it felt like

when the discovery was first made

for the archaeologists, the spectators

and for people around the world?

The discovery was captured using amateur films and early

newsreel for the cinema,

along with thousands of high-quality

black and white photographs.

But these images can seem to consign the story to history, and make

it difficult to capture the intensity

of this extraordinary event.

I want to relive the discovery, just as people did at the time.

And now using cutting-edge colourisation technology,

we can witness these events for the first time in a century,

almost as they were, in colour.

That's amazing, the fact that they're carrying the chair.

I hadn't even really made that out in the black and white

footage at all.

By transforming old images, I'm going to rediscover

these stunning objects, just as they were found

and in incredible detail.

33 centuries had passed

since human feet last trod the floor on which we stood.

This is Tutankhamun In Colour.

My name is Elizabeth Frood.

I'm Associate Professor of Egyptology

here at Oxford University.

I'm also Director of the Griffith Institute, a place dedicated

to the study of Egypt and the ancient Near East.

Back in 2015, my work was put on hold by a catastrophic illness.

Sepsis, often called blood poisoning.

I lost my legs below the knee,

part of my nose, and much of the function of my hands.

Thanks to incredible support, I've returned to work.

And now I'm ready to embark on the exciting journey to bring

the search for Tutankhamun's tomb back to life.

One of my institute's greatest treasures is the remarkable archive

of the man who discovered the tomb,

Howard Carter.

We have his personal diaries, maps, plans of the tomb

and hundreds of photographs, all carefully preserved by dedicated

archivists like Cat Warsi.

We've got copies of these two.

Our records start with Carter as a young man.

They're really striking photographs. I mean, here,

he just looks...

..he looks so young, but you still get that sense of kind

of intensity that you can see in this photograph here.

At just 17 when this picture was taken,

Howard Carter was preparing to follow his father into a career

as an artist.

Then through family friends, he landed an amazing job - in Egypt,

copying the paintings and reliefs of its ancient monuments.

Even his earliest work was exceptionally careful and accurate.

He was clearly entranced by his subject.

This one is probably one of Carter's most accomplished watercolours

that we have here in the archive.

It's absolutely stunning.

Carter's copies capture everything from the rich colours to the loss

of paint from the ancient surfaces.

Remarkable recording of colour.

You just get all the shading of the falcon's wings

and all the detail of the spread of the wing here.

The work of artists like Howard Carter in Egypt is often overlooked

nowadays, but at the time it was absolutely crucial

recording of details that are often lost to us now.

And it brings colour, and the richness of that colour, to a world

of archaeological recording that was very black and white

in terms of photography and sketches and plans.

So it really is an extraordinary record.

Carter's stunning artwork made the wonders of Egypt accessible,

preserving them in paint and paper.

And I want to do something similar - to transform the black and white

archive into colour, bringing the discovery of the tomb to life

and recapturing those scenes from 100 years ago.

Paris-based art director Samuel Francois-Steininger

and his international team are specialists in colourisation.

So how do you begin the process of converting old black and white

photographs into historically accurate coloured images?

When you work as an historian,

you are asking questions about the big picture,

whereas we are going to focus more on the history

of details, like objects, or

how people are dressed.

We are spending a lot of time to do extensive researches, to find

the answer to these questions,

that make us recreate the colours of such scenes.

As a test, we're going to start with the young Carter.

In order to recreate each image accurately, Sam's team

will have to decide on the authentic colours for every single object.

So I guess all I can say at this point is that I'm really,

really excited to see what you can do, and I'm really curious to see

how much it changes my feelings, and my knowledge

of these photographs.

So how did Howard Carter go from artist to the man who made

the world's most famous archaeological discovery?

His rapid ascent began in 1892, when he was given the opportunity

to work for this man,

leading British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie.

Petrie earned the nickname Father of Pots for the way he meticulously

recorded ancient objects,

no matter how ordinary.

He taught Carter to read the history

of an ancient site from the minute detail of its archaeology.

From his season with Petrie, Carter really learnt

how to record objects,

also, the need to draw and photograph things,

all of which really, although nowadays these are obvious things,

until Petrie came along,

they weren't the sort of thing, necessarily,

anybody would always have thought of.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Petrie also highly valued

his Egyptian workers, on whom he depended completely.

What we're seeing here, which we don't see in any other

museum that has ancient Egyptian collections, is the photograph

of the workmen who actually made the discovery -

so they are equally acknowledged.

Petrie was the only foreign archaeologist who would assign

the name of the Egyptian workmen who made the discovery on the tomb

plan that is discovered.

Carter was inspired, and wrote, "Petrie's training

"during those months transformed me.

"It became my great desire to be an excavator.

"To me, the calling had an extraordinary attraction."

Working here in the ruins of the ancient city of Amarna

on the Nile,

Petrie introduce Carter to the world of Tutankhamun.

Over 3,000 years ago, Amarna was home to an infamous

pharaoh, Akhenaten, his principal queen, Nefertiti,

and their six daughters.

They rejected most of Egypt's gods and embraced just one.

The Aten or Sun Disc.

Akhenaten also had a son.

This tomb relief shows him on the right.

The young Tutankhamun, with Maia, his nurse or tutor.

Soon after the death of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun became king

and a figurehead for Egypt's return to traditional religion.

Over three millennia later, Carter may have worked

where Tutankhamun once lived.

And here in the Ashmolean Museum, we have a fragment from a floor

from a building that they both might have walked through or near.

The scene of wild geese taking flight

was painted in the free style

so characteristic of the art of Akhenaten's time.

But the budding archaeologist had no idea that one day he would find

something of Tutankhamun's that was even more spectacular.

Back at Sam's studio in Paris, colourisation of the first

photograph is complete.

Oh, wow.

It really does look like he could stand up at any moment, and step

out of the frame, and shake my hand.

I did not imagine myself having such a strong kind of emotional

reaction to this, but it's really incredible.

Thank you so much. It really means something to me and to my team.

Colourising still images is one thing, but how about black

and white film?

How do you do the colourisation work with moving images?

Well, working on very damaged footage -

with grain, with scratches,

frame rate is not the right one, so we need to work on that as well.

And then we can only start putting colour.

Sam's first task is to convert all of the footage to the correct

speed, before cleaning up the scratches and dirt.

It's really remarkable to see

this photograph of Howard Carter in colour.

I can't wait to enter the extraordinary world he stepped

into, in brilliant colour, but now through the much more complicated

process of colourising moving images, of colourising film.

Carter built industriously on everything

he had learned from Petrie.

And by the early 1900s, he was one of the most accomplished

archaeologists working in Egypt.

This was a regular sight - riding his horse around the temples

and tombs of Luxor.

But Carter's problem was his prickly character,

and he often found it difficult to hold down a job.

Then in 1909, he met a man who would transform his life, paving

the way for the most famous

archaeological discovery of all time.

You might recognise this place.

It's Highclere Castle.

Also very well known from the hit television series Downton Abbey.

And it's the family seat of the Carnarvons.

In the early 1900s,

it was home to George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert,

5th Earl of Carnarvon.

Carnarvon was a fellow Egypt obsessive and a keen amateur

archaeologist and photographer.

He quite often put his camera on a timer and then ran

around and sat in it.

So sometimes his eyes are still closed.

So this was in the second...

In the basement of Highclere,

the current Earl and Countess of Carnarvon keep an exhibition

of some of his work.

Carnarvon had the wealth to fund his own excavations,

but he needed an expert.

So he hired Howard Carter.

Wow. Oh, man, I'm going to have to come back and have a look.

This is actually Howard Carter's

first Christmas present to Lord Carnarvon.

It's one of his paintings.

He did six watercolours and he gave them to Lord Carnarvon for

Christmas in 1909.

So I thought, "Frame them, and put them on the wall."

They're wonderful. Quite fun, isn't it?

He was not an easy man, Howard Carter, but he discovered

in Lord Carnarvon a man who was equally passionate

about Egyptian works of art, about the country,

about the wildlife.

The experience of being in Egypt.

So they found they had a lot in common, and they were

both very dedicated.

The two of them seem to have actually clicked.

They seem to have worked together extremely well.

And while Carnarvon was still around, I think he managed

to sort of moderate Carter.

The exhibition includes some of their early discoveries together,

but what the pair dreamt of finding was something never seen

before - an intact royal tomb.

And they knew exactly where they wanted to look for one.

Here in the Valley of the Kings, part of a dried-up

watercourse near Luxor.

Between 3,600 and 3,200 years ago,

this was the burial place

of the pharaohs.

Hidden in the rock are magnificent tombs.

This one, the tomb of Seti I, stretches nearly

the length of St Paul's Cathedral.

From the names of kings recorded, for example, on temple walls,

Egyptologists knew which tombs ought to be in the valley, but not

all of them had been found.

However, a few objects belonging to Tutankhamun

had been unearthed there.

And this convinced Carter that his tomb was somewhere

in the valley.

As he slowly brings Carter's Egypt to life, Sam has finished

colourising our first film sequence.

It shows some European tourists visiting Egypt in the 1920s.

The original film was cleaned and converted into digital files,

then sharpened up - film grain and damage removed from each shot.

Meanwhile, the colour of the clothes and buildings is researched.

Then each object is carefully coloured and the colours animated

to follow the objects.

Wow, that's amazing.

I mean, just looking at that, there's all these details

that popped out at me that I hadn't even seen in the black and white.

The texture of the temple wall, the light on people's clothing

and their faces.

I can almost feel the Egyptian heat just looking at it.

After our conversation about

the technical aspects of the process,

I expected myself to be looking for that, you know,

and kind of paying attention to,

"Oh, how did you do that?"

But I didn't. I was just...

You just get completely absorbed by all the details that you can see,

and all the new things that emerge from the footage.

In 1914, Carnarvon finally decided to back Carter's hunch and obtained

the permit, or concession, to excavate in the Valley of the Kings.

But almost as soon as Carnarvon won the concession, war broke out.

This put an immediate stop to most archaeology.

Egypt was forced to become a British protectorate and troops

from the far reaches of the Empire arrived to prepare for a fateful

attack on Gallipoli, in what is now Turkey.

These are Anzac forces, from Australia and New Zealand.

This has a really strong personal resonance for me,

as my great-great-uncle was among them.

He was roaming around the pyramids just like these guys.

I've even found a photo.

I think that's him.

Harry Northcroft squinting in the sun.

He and many of his comrades would soon be killed at Gallipoli.

The war changed everything.

Including the Egypt that Carter knew.

A third of Egyptian men were forced

to supply provisions for the British Army,

fuelling a seething resentment...

..a resentment that would eventually cause real trouble

for Carter and Carnarvon.

But for now, they remained focused on the Valley of the Kings,

and the search for Tutankhamun.

It was a task that required the rigorous archaeological approach

Carter had learned from Petrie.

This is Carter's actual map of the Valley of the Kings,

that he used to organise

his excavation work there, season by season.

It's laid out on a grid,

and the plan was to work through every square

and excavate down to bedrock.

Each sector is around 30 metres wide.

Removing all the stones and debris one sector at a time

was a massive undertaking.

But by 1917, there was a large archaeological workforce in Egypt.

This is really on an industrial scale.

I mean, these photographs show

dozens and dozens of workers, and some of them are children.

Loading rubble onto these railway carts, and then the carts were put

on this narrow railway to take the rubble away.

You can see the clouds of dust coming up.

I mean, it's just such an extraordinary operation,

so much labour involved.

Since the time of Petrie, Egyptian archaeological teams had become

increasingly well organised.

Each one of them knows exactly what they are meant to do.

There are some who would sieve, some who would take the sand

in the baskets, move away, others who would move the rocks away.

We would usually see the boys taking the sand away, and it's usually

the men digging.

And most of these workmen were actually farmers.

And that meant they were very qualified, not only of knowing,

of understanding the landscape and the soil and the land, but also

in their digging techniques.

The methods of archaeologists today are certainly more refined,

but they still use the systematic approach Carter deployed.

But systematic or not,

by 1922, after five backbreaking seasons, there was still little sign

of Tutankhamun's tomb.

And following the worst war in history, even Lord Carnarvon

was beginning to feel the pinch.

Income tax in England in 1914 was 6%.

In 1918 it was 60%.

In June 1922,

Lord Carnarvon was reviewing his overdraft, and he had said

to Howard Carter, "I can't continue to finance

"these concessions in Egypt."

It was the ultimate frustration for Carter.

There were just two of his sectors left to excavate and finish the job.

He pleaded for one last season.

I wonder what Howard Carter said to Lord Carnarvon. I mean, I think

he really did love Egypt.

He loved spending the winters out there.

And I think it was probably quite easy to persuade him to have one

more final season.

Their final season began on the 1st of November 1922.

Clearing the last two sectors of Carter's grid

would be a delicate job.

He would have to dig around a popular tourist attraction,

the tomb of Ramses VI.

And he had to excavate and clear the remains of ancient huts left

by the builders of Ramses' tomb.

But it was worth it.

A discovery came almost immediately, on the 4th of November.

Although it was Carter who was unquestionably the driving force

behind the operation,

it wasn't him who actually discovered the tomb. It was one

of his Egyptian team.

To keep the workforce going demanded a steady supply of water delivered

by boys on donkeys.

The clay water containers had round bottoms, so the waterboys

had to make small pits to stand them in.

As one boy, Hussein Abdel-Rasoul, did this, he hit

a hard surface below.

And reported his discovery immediately.

A team started carefully removing rocks to reveal a flight of steps

descending deep into the bedrock.

At the foot of the steps was a blocked entranceway.

Carter was convinced he had finally found what he'd been searching for.

He ordered his men to refill the hole and dispatched a telegram

to Lord Carnarvon.

And Lord Carnarvon opened it,

and it was a telegram from Howard Carter saying,

"At last have made a wonderful discovery in valley, a magnificent

"tomb with seals intact, recovered same for your arrival.

"Congratulations."

I mean, I'm not sure he knew exactly what it would lead to.

And they'd had so many false starts.

Once Carnarvon arrived with his daughter, Lady Evelyn,

the workers dug out all of the rubble to reveal

a blocked doorway.

Carter took a quick snap.

This is the photograph that Carter took of the doorway.

It's covered in seal impressions.

Now seen in colour, as Carter saw it, for the first time in a century.

On this photograph of the fragment here, you can actually

read the seals.

This was taken once Carter had broken down the doorway.

The oval shape tells us it's a royal name.

The scarab beetle in the middle reads "Kheper", the three strokes

make it plural, reading "Kheperu."

The basket reads "Neb" and the sun disc "Re",

giving the name Nebkheperure.

This is the throne name of Tutankhamun.

So it was reading this that Carter realised what he had discovered,

that he had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It was an incredibly exciting find, but there was also something

very worrying for Carter.

Looking again at this photograph, you can see that the left side looks

a little different, like it's been broken and replastered.

Carter knew what he was dealing with.

Somebody else had entered the tomb and then the tomb doorway

had been repaired and resealed. Who were they?

And what had they taken?

It's possible that the robbers were connected to those who built

the royal tombs,

and would have known its location and, perhaps, contents.

When Carter's team broke the wall down, they met only a passageway

packed with even more rubble.

Once the rubble had been cleared from this passageway, Carter reached

a door here, and took an iron rod and drilled through that door,

to create a small hole that he could look through.

Carter wrote...

.."With trembling hands, I inserted the candle and peered in.

"At first I could see nothing.

"The hot air escaping from the chamber, causing

"the candle to flicker."

It's really hard to imagine how Carter must have felt,

as he made the first break in the door, knowing

that there could well be absolutely nothing there.

It all might have been robbed out thousands of years ago.

Then Carter writes, "Presently, details of the room emerged slowly

"from the mist.

"Strange animals, statues and gold. Everywhere, the glint of gold.

"I was struck dumb with amazement.

"And when Lord Carnarvon inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?',

"it was all I could do to get out the words,

"'Yes, it is wonderful.'"

Thanks to colourisation, we can now get an extraordinarily clear

impression of what Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn

saw that day.

To the left were four dismantled gilded chariots inlaid

with brightly coloured glass.

They were in disarray caused by the tomb robbers.

On the wall in front of them, three gilded ritual beds.

One is in the form of the mother goddess, Taweret, with the head

of a hippopotamus.

Taweret protects the sleeper,

the dead king, and assists in his rebirth in the next world.

Another bears the head of a cow,

the goddess Mehet-Weret.

Underneath there is a pile of ancient wooden lunchboxes

containing offerings of meat and poultry, to sustain the king

in the afterlife.

Everywhere there were signs of the intruders.

And to the right, a pair of life-size wooden statues

with golden headdresses.

The black colour of the skin is associated with fertility,

after the black soil of the Nile.

It was extraordinary,

all of them to look through and see what they saw, these extraordinary,

strange animals, the gold glinting everywhere, and the sense

that somebody had last stepped inside there 3,000 years earlier.

If you've been working in Egyptian archaeology for your entire adult

life, and you've seen what you'd normally expect to find,

suddenly finding something which you never dreamt

would be possible to find

must've just blown his mind.

These stunning, now iconic, black and white images of the tomb's

treasures were captured by the renowned archaeological

photographer Harry Burton a few days after the tomb was first entered.

Over the course of the ten-year-long excavation, Burton took over 2,000

photographs on large glass negatives.

They may have been taken a century ago, but thanks to the size

of these plates, their clarity and resolution

is far beyond that of any camera available on the high street today.

By adding colour, we can dive deep into the context and detail

of every object.

I can almost feel the texture of these Egyptian

alabaster unguent vessels.

And colourisation highlights

easily overlooked items such as the bust of the king, peeking out

from behind a chariot.

But whilst these were incredible finds, there was still no sign

of Tutankhamun himself.

Even so, news of Carter's amazing discovery gripped the world.

The discovery of the tomb comes at the perfect moment.

The world has been involved in a massive global conflict.

And then hot on the heels of that conflict, we have a global

pandemic which kills more than 50 million people.

And then suddenly there is good news from the ancient world.

It's exciting, it's engaging, it's thrilling, and everyone can get

on board with it.

But Lord Carnarvon now faced a concerted assault by reporters

hungry for details.

How do you deal with it? You simply cannot manage,

you know, the press from America, from England, from

South Africa, from Australia, from Japan.

So he ended up choosing The Times, which he felt

was a sensible choice.

Carnarvon negotiated an exclusive and very lucrative deal

with The Times.

Which meant that all the rest of the press,

particularly the local press, felt they were being hard done by,

they were being short-changed.

Carter, though, was more concerned with figuring out how to tackle such

a massive task.

This exhibition, for instance, has just a fraction of the tomb's

treasures and is spread over five galleries.

The treasures are wonderful,

but instead of being presented

with care, as they are here, many of them were in a total jumble.

It wasn't what Carter had expected.

He'd found something really spectacular.

But what was it?

Because this isn't what you'd expect to find at this point

in a royal tomb.

You'd normally have expected a further corridor,

more chambers and things.

The objects here were designed for a tomb far, far larger.

So initially he was wondering, "Is this some kind of dumping

"ground for objects?"

Why wasn't Tutankhamun's tomb anything like this

later one of Seti's? And most importantly, where was the body?

Close inspection revealed a discoloured area

made from mud plaster, stamped with more seals.

Was there another chamber beyond?

Desperate as he was to break through,

Carter insisted that first each item in the antechamber

must be individually analysed.

Carter knew it would take a long time to clear the tomb.

There were literally thousands of objects and each one

had to be photographed, catalogued, conserved and carefully packed.

He gathered a team of experts to work with the objects, and one

by one, for the first time in over 3,000 years,

they emerged into the dazzling sunlight.

A few short clips of work around the tomb survive,

which really come to life when colourised.

This is the moment that a child's chair, made from ebony, inlaid

with ivory and gold, appears under armed escort.

That's amazing, the fact that they're carrying the chair.

I hadn't even really made that out

in the black and white footage, at all.

Then emerges a golden chariot.

Its wheels...

..and body.

The nearby tomb of Seti II was commandeered for use

as a laboratory.

Archaeologist Arthur Mace and chemist Alfred Lucas worked hard

to give the objects necessary intensive care.

The change in atmosphere from the hermetically sealed tomb

to the desert air led to some objects cracking and needing

to be stabilised using paraffin wax.

Once they were conserved,

the objects were carefully packed,

and loaded onto railway trucks.

It took 50 men to push the trucks by hand.

And because there were only a few pieces of track, they had to keep

hauling them in a relay to the front of the train.

A journey of five and a half miles took 15 hours in the baking sun,

until they reached the Nile.

The journey would take nearly two days.

But what was interesting is how the journey of all the crates

or the objects was followed by,

I would say, a procession on the sides.

Any of the Egyptians who would see, like, the barge in the Nile,

there were ladies who were mourning the death of the king

as if he had a second funeral.

There's no question that this was an amazing find, a unique

one for Egyptology.

But a century ago, it was to have a global impact, like no

discovery before or since.

There is an aura of glamour about Tutankhamun.

He is almost like a film star.

But one of the other important aspects of the tomb artefacts

is the fact that so many of them are personal, personal to the king himself...

..which allowed people to feel that they understood this ancient

king rather better than just a figure of might and majesty.

We have the idea that he is also a real human being.

He even became part of popular culture, and inspired

this fabulous jazz number, Old King Tut.

# 3,000 years ago In history we know

# King Tutankhamun ruled A mighty land... #

Egypt blossomed as a tourist destination for rich Europeans,

as their home movies, which Sam has now colourised, reveal.

After a pleasant trip across the Mediterranean,

they could stop off in Cairo and take in the sights...

# In old King Tut-Tut-Tut-ankhamun's day

# Beneath the tropic skies... #

..perhaps even clamber right to the top of the pyramid of Khufu...

# Now old King Tut-Tut-Tut was always gay

# Cleopatra, she sat upon his knee

# Pat! That's where she sat The girls would dance for him... #

..then sail up the Nile to Luxor...

# They'd move and move and move... #

..where they could visit the temples...

# A thousand girls would dance each day... #

..and other sites, such as the towering Colossi of Memnon.

# ..Tut, King Tutty's day... #

But the climax would be a bumpy ride to the Valley of the Kings.

And after, a picnic on the way to see

the newly discovered tomb of Tutankhamun.

# Peaches of that land They were never canned

# Pears most anywhere

# Why, Sam from Alabam' Would not run, one, two, three... #

And, if they were lucky, they'd get a glimpse of something emerging

from the tomb.

Perhaps the sight of Howard Carter himself.

# In old King Tut-Tut-Tut-Tut-Tut-Tut-Tut

# King Tutty's day! #

By 16th February 1923, the day had finally come.

Having cleared the antechamber of all its precious objects,

Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon broke through the sealed entrance

to reveal what lay beyond.

As the dust cleared, a dazzling screen of gold and blue emerged

on the other side.

Part of a shrine in a small room with vividly painted walls.

Just as they had dreamed, they had found

the king's burial chamber.

Carter made his way around the shrine, and discovered

a gilded doorway.

But its seal had already been broken.

Had the tomb robbers removed Tutankhamun's body?

With bated breath, he peered inside, to discover a second door.

But this one was still sealed.

Carter recounted the experience in an early BBC recording.

When we came to a golden shrine, the doors closed and sealed,

we realised that we were in the presence of the dead king.

Breaking the seal revealed yet another shrine, and another.

In all, there were four shrines,

each within the next.

With intense excitement, I went forward and unbolted the inner door.

There, filling the entire area within, stood an immense

yellow quartzite sarcophagus.

The four nested shrines almost entirely filled

the small burial chamber.

Removing them would be like taking a model ship out of a bottle.

And there was even more.

Peering out of a side room was the jackal deity, Anubis, a god

of mummification and the afterlife.

Anubis was wrapped in a linen shirt, inked with a name that

could be that of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father.

Carter called this room the Treasury.

Anubis guarded model boats, evoking travel in this world

and in the next,

and beautifully decorated boxes.

Opening a chest made from ebony and ivory,

they discovered an exquisite bejewelled pendant necklace.

In recognition of his contribution to the discovery, it was modelled

by one of Carter's team.

So you've got here Hussein Abdel-Rasoul,

the famous waterboy of the discovery

of King Tutankhamun's tomb,

wearing the pictorial pendant of the king

himself, and the pendant is quite heavy.

This can explain the way his face looks a bit strained and he looks

a bit tense. So maybe because of the heavy weight of the pendant.

It's a precious moment that we can

now witness in colour for the first

time in a century.

It's really remarkable, and just the way that the light is catching

the surface of some of the elements.

So you get a real sense of it as a kind of a living object.

It's just amazing how the scarab beetles, made of lapis lazuli,

pop out, along with the sheen of the solar discs in gold

and deep red carnelian.

It's remarkable, absolutely remarkable.

At every turn, new discoveries were being made

that amazed a waiting world,

and they hadn't even got to the mummy yet.

And then disaster struck.

The death of Carnarvon was a tragedy for the whole process.

He was bitten by a mosquito, on the face, and what he should

have done was simply not shaved for a few days while it healed.

I think the stress, and the pressure, he had no rest.

Everybody was criticising everything he did, or the reasons he did it.

In a sense, that definitely compromised his health,

which was not the strongest anyway.

He cut himself shaving. In a sense, he was so tired and forgetful,

he forgot to put some iodine on it,

and, you know, it did, in the end, lead to his death.

His cut became infected.

He developed sepsis, or blood poisoning, and died.

For a hungry press starved of information,

this was irresistible.

The curse almost certainly comes from the exclusive deal

with The Times of London, because we have journalists standing

about outside the tomb with nothing to report.

And two of those journalists would appear to have developed

this idea between them.

And the curse is, "Death will come on swift wings for he who disturbs

"the tomb of the King."

The curse of Tutankhamun was totally made up, partly to sell newspapers.

But for Carter, there may as well have been a curse.

Without Carnarvon, he was on his own,

and he lacked Carnarvon's social confidence.

How on Earth would he manage all the politics by himself?

Howard Carter, for a month more or less went into complete

mourning, unable to do anything, and he was not, and never

really had been, best suited to the role of a diplomat.

That was Lord Carnarvon!

Nor did he know all the Egyptians,

and the Ministers of State who Lord Carnarvon did know.

So that's where there was a bit of difference.

Carter tried to concentrate on the technically challenging job

of recovering the king's coffin.

First, he had to completely dismantle the entrance wall

to the burial chamber...

..then carefully remove the gilded roof of each shrine.

And finally, the surrounding gilded screens.

At last, the sarcophagus stood on its own in the burial chamber.

But what lay inside?

This, a decisive moment.

None of us but felt the solemnity of the occasion.

In a dead silence, the huge lid, weighing over a ton and a quarter,

was raised from its bed.

Light shone into the sarcophagus.

But how disappointing - the contents were completely covered by linen shrouds.

But as the last shroud was rolled back, a gasp of wonderment

escaped our lips. So gorgeous was the sight that met our eyes.

A golden effigy of the young king, of magnificent workmanship,

filled the whole of the interior.

This was but the lid of a series of three coffins, nested one

within the other,

enclosing the mortal remains of the young King Tutankhamun.

Laid on that golden outer lid was a tiny wreath of flowers,

as it pleased us to think,

the last farewell offering

of the widowed girl-queen to her husband.

Among all that regal splendour,

there was nothing so beautiful as those few withered flowers.

Carter now prepared for the climax of the excavation,

the opening of the coffin itself.

But he was finding himself under increasing pressure

from a surprising quarter.

Ever since the tomb's discovery, the great and the good

had been desperate to see it.

The head of the Egyptian Antiquities Department,

a Frenchman called Pierre Lacau,

here with the distinctive white beard,

frequently led tours

of the tomb for government officials.

So we've got here one of the official visits to the site

of the discovery, Tutankhamun.

It also takes the shape of a massive Egyptian party.

You would see like the tent that is built in it.

This is a very Egyptian way.

You would have it either for a funerary or for a wedding.

For this new nationalist government, Tutankhamun was a much-needed

symbol of independent Egyptian power.

But for the irascible Carter, this interference was intolerable.

Without the diplomatic skills of Carnarvon to back him,

he fell out with Lacau and the authorities.

And it was now that the story took an extraordinary turn.

In February 1924, on the verge of his greatest triumph, work

on the tomb was suspended.

Across the country, there was little sympathy

for this British archaeologist.

Political rallies were held in celebration of the tomb

being returned to Egyptians.

It took a year of diplomacy, and a change of government,

before Carter and his team were eventually invited back.

So at last in October 1925, they began

to open Tutankhamun's coffin.

As the lid was removed, another shroud was exposed.

Carter carefully peeled it back to reveal a second coffin.

This was hoisted out of the first.

It was even more magnificent, decorated with iridescent blue,

green and red glass inlay.

And inside that...

..a third coffin.

But it was covered with a thick, black, perfumed, resinous material.

Using a mixture of hammering, chemical solvents and heat, Carter's

team gradually cleaned it.

No-one could believe their eyes.

It was made of solid gold.

But there was still more.

Removing the lid took eight men, and revealed

the most incredible sight.

Tutankhamun's mummy covered in jewels and crowned

with an exquisite rendering of the king's face,

perfectly crafted in solid gold, glass and precious stones.

This is that golden mask.

But here in context, as Carter would have seen it,

what colourisation does is it brings out the detail

of the necklaces, all of the brilliant colours

of the jewellery start to pop out,

and we really get a full sense

of how Carter would have seen Tutankhamun for the first time.

The image shot around the world, but nowhere was its impact greater

than in Egypt itself.

This was a very highly emotional moment in Egypt.

The discovery was used as the

assertion of the Egyptian identity

and a proof of us being the descendants

of the ancient Egyptians,

which means that we're not supposed to be ruled by any foreigners.

This meant that Tutankhamun had to stay in Egypt,

and it was for the Egyptians.

But as Carter struggled to remove the mask from the mummy, its beard

became detached, seemingly highlighting his boyish looks.

And here we have an explanation of why his tomb was so small.

Tutankhamun's remains were not those of old King Tut at all,

but of a teenager.

He died age 19, before his official tomb had been finished.

The jumbled tomb that Carter discovered was a rush job

for the untimely death of a young man.

This was an especially poignant discovery for the time.

A lot of young men died in foreign countries during the war.

A lot of parents unable to fully grieve.

And the death of Tutankhamun millennia ago

allows them to make a strange connection there,

allows them to be able to heal, in some respects.

Tutankhamun's grave gives some measure of respect

for the many young men who had no graves.

A century later, the power of Tutankhamun seems undiminished.

What fuels our fascination?

What makes this the most famous

archaeological discovery of all time?

Of course, it is these incredible objects, but it's more than that.

It's the powerful stories of two men.

Howard Carter and Tutankhamun.

And restoring the astonishing images of the moments that connect them

has made me feel closer than ever to those extraordinary stories.