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00:05Egypt, land of legendary pharaohs and monuments, whose majesty has never ceased to fascinate us.
00:13And yet, for centuries, this extraordinary civilization was completely forgotten,
00:18buried beneath the sands of the desert.
00:27But in 1798, the French general Napoleon Bonaparte lands in Egypt with his army.
00:36This military conquest, accompanied by a scientific expedition on an unprecedented scale,
00:43ignites a powerful fascination for ancient Egypt across Europe.
00:49Soon, explorers from every corner of the Old Continent will be engaging in a crazy race to seek out hidden
00:55treasures.
00:56Come on, come on, come on.
00:57For Egypt has become the new battleground on which the mighty empires of Europe will come head to head.
01:03It's a race to see who will make the greatest discoveries
01:07and who will gain most influence in this new El Dorado.
01:12And the fiercest competition is between France and England.
01:18It's a time-honored tradition.
01:21First to set up camp along the Nile, the French discovered the Rosetta Stone.
01:26But the English took possession of it.
01:30The British, with no intention of stopping there, have commissioned a new agent,
01:36the flamboyant, smooth talker Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
01:41The Italian achieved an early success by getting a splendid bust all the way to London,
01:46right under the noses of the French.
01:50And now, he has his sights set on an unexplored temple in the far south of the country.
01:57The rivalry between the Europeans also plays out on a gentler battlefield,
02:02the race to decipher hieroglyphs.
02:05Working from the text on the Rosetta Stone, two contenders are leading the field,
02:10the brilliant British scientist Thomas Young and a young Frenchman,
02:14Jean-Francois Champollion.
02:17Let's travel together to Egypt to relive this incredible adventure.
02:53This is what we've been looking for, my friend.
02:56In early summer 1817, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, an Italian explorer working for the British,
03:03travels to Nubia, in the south of modern-day Egypt.
03:11Still a lot of work to do.
03:14Many days of work, I think.
03:17Belzoni has heard about an immense temple, which is still unexplored, near the village
03:22of Abu Simbel.
03:24But it's going to be a huge amount of work to clear the entrance.
03:36American Egyptologist Meredith Brand tells us about Belzoni's discovery of this unexpected
03:42site.
03:45Digging the sand was a monumental task.
03:49And Belzoni was the perfect person to do this.
03:52Belzoni was a great engineer.
03:53And he had already proved himself by moving the seven-ton young Mimnon statue, which was
03:59a feat of engineering that no one could have done.
04:01And from then on, Belzoni was hooked.
04:03He wanted to explore more, discover more.
04:08A few years earlier, Belzoni had fled his native Italy to avoid being drafted into Napoleon's
04:14army.
04:15Belzoni took refuge in England.
04:18And thanks to his extraordinary physique, he was two meters tall and weighed 130 kilos.
04:23He became a circus strongman.
04:29His signature act was to carry 11 people on his back or to bend iron bars.
04:48And so when he came here and he saw a mountain of sand, all he had with him were simple
04:54agricultural
04:54digging tools.
04:55There was nothing mechanized.
04:57It was just manual labor.
05:03I'm sure that the sand drew Belzoni to this temple because it hit it and it left questions.
05:10It protected it.
05:11And it made Belzoni think what could possibly be behind the sand.
05:15Belzoni has hired some Egyptian farmers to clear the sand from the temple.
05:20And you, after you finish, use the wood plank.
05:23But many of the men have already given up.
05:26And by day three, only a handful remain.
05:31They're working long hours in a sweltering heat with an authoritarian boss who doesn't give
05:37them a break.
05:38Faster on this side.
05:40Faster on this side.
05:41Come on.
05:41Come on.
05:53Faced with Belzoni's increasingly persistent demands, even the boldest men decide to throw
05:59in the towel.
06:01I tell everybody how you work.
06:05You never go to work.
06:06Listen to you.
06:07You're never going to work again.
06:09Never, ever someone is going to hire you.
06:19Belzoni has a rant, but he soon finds another solution.
06:23He replaces his Egyptian workforce with his own traveling companions.
06:29Can someone get this basket?
06:31Among the new workers are two former Royal Navy captains and the secretary to the British
06:36consul, Henry Salt, who is funding the work.
06:39With their sailors, they're 14 men in total, with no experience of this kind of work.
06:45The task is immense, but for Belzoni, adversity is a driving force.
06:50As he writes in his travel journal.
06:54We soon realized that each of us did as much work as five Egyptians.
07:00And this encouraged us.
07:02We got up at daybreak and continued working for two and a half hours after sunrise.
07:13The team is working for 10 hours a day in a stifling heat approaching 44 degrees Celsius in the shade.
07:22Because there is no time to lose their food and water supplies are running low.
07:37Belzoni wouldn't have had any access to food because nobody was allowed to give him food in the villages.
07:40The chief said no.
07:41He wasn't able to make a strong relationship with the local chiefs.
07:45He wasn't able to make strong relationships with the people in the villages.
07:47And that significantly hampered his work.
07:50It made it much more difficult for him to work at this site.
07:58Abu Simbel is a remote place.
08:00It is not somewhere where you would think there would be a whole beautiful temple like this.
08:06We're more than 250 kilometers south of Aswan.
08:09This is the border between Egypt and Nubia.
08:21And yet there's this amazing temple.
08:28There is the king, Rebs II, and he's here in Nubia looking out and saying this is my land.
08:36He's projecting power.
08:37And it's like a giant billboard saying that I'm the king of Egypt, I'm the pharaoh, I'm the most powerful
08:43person and this is my land and I'm a god.
08:48Belzoni would have come from this direction.
08:51He would have been sailing from north to south and he would have first seen this small temple.
09:00And then he would have seen a huge mountain of sand next to it.
09:05And this is where he heard rumors that there was some great discovery to be made.
09:11It would have looked so different than what I can see today.
09:15First of all, this is a lake.
09:17It wouldn't have been a lake in the time of Belzoni.
09:20It would have been a river.
09:22In the 1960s, the Aswan Dam was built and it flooded this area and made what we now called Lake
09:28Nasser.
09:34So when Belzoni would have seen this giant mountain, he would have seen the top of a crown and some
09:41hieroglyphs on the top of this mountain.
09:43And he looks at this area and says, okay, I know ancient Egyptian structures.
09:47I know that usually the temple has two big towers, an image of the god in the center and there's
09:53a doorway running through it.
09:54So he looks at this area and says it must be the same.
09:57Underneath the image of the god in the center of these two statues must be the doorway.
10:13After 22 days, the men's hard work finally pays off.
10:20After clearing a hole 50 feet deep, the equivalent of five stories, Belzoni finally spots an opening.
10:49Belzoni did an incredible feat.
10:52This entire area where I'm standing now was covered in sand.
10:56These statues are 20 meters tall and this facade goes up to 33 meters.
11:03This is really a big monument.
11:05This is a lot of space.
11:08Belzoni had to clear the sand from the god's sun disk all the way down to the open door.
11:15And he cleared enough just to get to this left top portion of the door to climb in.
11:20So he had this vast amount of sand to clear, but everything underneath it, he never got to see.
11:27And for many years after Belzoni, everybody who came here had to clear away sand to enter because the sand
11:34kept coming in from the valley next to it.
11:38So Belzoni starts to crawl through the sand on his belly and goes into the temple.
11:45And at that moment, I can't even imagine the shock for Belzoni.
12:00We had the pleasure of being the first to enter the most beautiful and vast subterranean space in Nubia.
12:06And to see a monument worthy of standing alongside the finest monuments of Egypt.
12:12At our first glance, we were astonished by the immensity of the space.
12:16But we were even more surprised when we found ourselves surrounded by paintings and colossal sculptures.
12:25On the walls were images of battles, assaults on fortresses, victories against Ethiopians, sacrifices.
12:38This text caught the attention of Belzoni. To Egyptologists now, we know this as the decree of Ptah.
12:48Importantly, it talks about Ramses II and his important powerful role and emphasizes his kingship.
12:59But to Belzoni, he had no idea what any of this said because he didn't know hieroglyphs.
13:03But he was interested in this text because he arrived at Abu Simbel in the height of the race to
13:09decipher hieroglyphs.
13:16In 1817, scholars on both sides of the channel are working relentlessly to discover the meaning of all these signs.
13:26In France, all hopes rest on a young linguistic genius, Jean-François Champollion.
13:33While in England, the doctor and physicist Thomas Young is the furthest ahead.
13:40The British consul, Henry Salt, who is funding Belzoni's expedition, has asked him to copy some inscriptions for Thomas Young,
13:48especially those which are called cartouches.
13:52Thomas Young asked Henry Salt to make sure all of his agents in Egypt copied cartouches
13:59because he thought they were the key to understanding hieroglyphs.
14:03And a cartouche is this right here.
14:11It's a circle, and inside of it is the name of the king.
14:15And if they could use what's in that circle and compare it to known Greek text,
14:20maybe they could figure out the sounds of hieroglyphs and their alphabetic value.
14:25So Belzoni came here, he saw these cartouches, and he copied this text and sent it to Thomas Young.
14:32Once he has copied these symbols, Belzoni presses on with his exploration of the temple he has just reopened.
14:54This is the inner sanctuary of the Abu Simbel Temple, and here there are four statues at the back.
15:01And there is Raharakti, Amun-Ra, a god named Bataa, and in the middle of them is Ramses II, over
15:09here.
15:14So when Belzoni entered, he would have seen these four gods.
15:17But he didn't know the actual kind of very creative design that had a bit of a trick to it.
15:24So the sun, twice a year, comes through the temple and it hits these statues on February 21st and October
15:3221st every year.
15:37But the most fascinating thing is when the sun comes in, it's focusing on Ra, Ramses II, and Amun.
15:45These are gods that are connected to the sun, they're connected to light, but the sun doesn't hit on this
15:52last god, the god Bataa.
15:54He's connected to earth and creation.
15:56So the ancient Egyptians had this sense of illuminating the sun gods and keeping the earth gods in the dark.
16:09This is so exciting.
16:11So this is an inscription that I have been looking for.
16:15I looked in the library, I looked in the books, and I couldn't find it, but I heard about it.
16:18And here it is. This is the name of Belzoni.
16:23He was the first person in thousands of years to enter this temple.
16:28He came here into the innermost sanctuary, and he carved his name.
16:33They were here August 1st, 1817.
16:42Belzoni doesn't just leave his name for posterity.
16:45He measures the different chambers and makes several sketches, despite difficult conditions, which he describes in his journal.
16:55The heat inside the temple was so intense that it was almost impossible to make sketches.
17:00The sweat from our hands quickly made the paper too wet.
17:09When Belzoni carved his name, he must have come into this chamber, explored the whole temple, and then he was
17:17pretty disappointed.
17:18He had great expectations of finding all kinds of treasures.
17:22But despite all the things he did and all the searching, he didn't find them.
17:26He found a few smaller statues and some metal parts of doors.
17:31Odds and ends, small pieces of antiquities, but he never found any of the treasures he sought.
17:40The actual treasure of Abu Simbel is the beauty of the art and the importance of the historical inscriptions.
17:47But to Belzoni, that wasn't something he could sell.
17:50So he was very disappointed with all of his efforts, laboring in the hot sun in the summer, clearing the
17:56sand for what he thought was little reward.
18:01So just three days after his discovery, disillusioned, he leaves Abu Simbel and rushes back towards Luxor.
18:10Luxor is built on the ruins of Thebes, the ancient capital of the pharaohs, and at the time, it's French
18:16territory.
18:18So Belzoni decides to stay a little distance away on the other side of the Nile, in the arid valley
18:24of Biban el-Muluk, better known as the Valley of the Kings.
18:33In the beginning of the 19th century, when Napoleon's savants were here in the Valley of the Kings,
18:40relatively few of the tombs that we now know are here were known about, not even as many as 20.
18:48But Belzoni would have known that writers like Herodotus had said that there were many more.
18:54Herodotus says there were 47, so it wasn't a great leap of the imagination for Belzoni to think there was
18:59more to find here.
19:13Determined to finally find some treasure worthy of the name, and motivated to beat the French to it, Belzoni gets
19:21to work immediately.
19:23Belzoni was confident. He had a kind of intuition that he would be able to find things, even if there
19:30was no visible trace of them on the surface.
19:33And in October 1817, he was here with his wife, Sarah, and they started finding things.
19:40They made a number of discoveries. They found a number of mummies.
19:43They even found royal tombs, spectacularly decorated royal tombs.
19:49And yet, somehow, Belzoni wasn't satisfied.
19:52He wanted to make an even greater discovery, a grander discovery, of a tomb that could be really his tomb.
20:01Belzoni's tomb.
20:07Belzoni has studied the topography of the valley carefully, and believes he's identified a place which is concealing the entrance
20:14to a new tomb.
20:17See, the first tomb is here.
20:20No one imagined the Egyptians would build the entrance to a great tomb in a riverbed.
20:24But there were strong clues which led me to believe that I would find what I was looking for.
20:32Can you come here, please?
20:39This area is, I think, we have the tomb.
20:43So...
20:48The Egyptians, despite their experience with excavations, were all convinced it would be a waste of effort.
20:54I persisted. And the next day, we realized the rock had been carved out to create an opening.
21:03Belzoni said it was entirely down to his intuition, his archaeological nose, that he was able to find the tomb
21:10in this place.
21:11Actually, recently, new evidence has come to light that suggests that perhaps the locals knew it was here.
21:18But even if that's true, the discovery of the full extent of what's inside is really Belzoni's.
21:25Belzoni's.
21:34The Italian explorer's efforts are soon rewarded.
21:40Just two months after opening up the Abu Simbel Temple, he manages to clear the entrance to a cavity.
21:50Belzoni immediately knows that he's made an exceptional discovery.
21:56Judging by the paintings on the ceiling, and the hieroglyphs visible through the rubble, I knew that we were at
22:02the entrance to a magnificent tomb.
22:32Belzoni was found with one of discovering the closest builders we changed on theysis.
22:33the tomb for the first time on the 18th of October 1817. Great moment and yet of course
22:40he doesn't know what he's going into at all. It's pitch dark in here. He's just got tiny little
22:46candles not really throwing much light onto what he's walking into. The corridors were
22:52full of debris of loose stones and chippings so they were kind of half climbing half scrambling
23:00proceeding with extreme caution not knowing what's ahead of them and they were right to
23:05because when they reached this point suddenly the floor just drops away.
23:13And Belzoni in his account tells us that he nearly fell and had he done so might well have been
23:20the
23:20end for him because the well that he had reached is something like eight to ten meters deep.
23:32So although he was stopped on that first day he came back the following day with a couple of beams
23:37to lay across the well shaft. It would still have been pretty dangerous but of course Belzoni
23:42had been in the circus so gymnastics of this kind were right up his street. In any case of course
23:49he turned out to be right so laying those beams across here allowed him to discover riches perhaps
23:56even beyond his wildest dreams.
24:02The day of this discovery was one of the luckiest in my life. I was gripped by an immense joy.
24:10I was the first person on the planet to enter a monument that had been lost to the world
24:16and so perfectly preserved that one might have thought it was finished shortly before our arrival.
24:35The further Belzoni went into the tomb the more fascinated he became.
24:46Finally he reached the burial chamber where Pharaoh was laid to rest. It's an extraordinary space
24:55place in two halves and we're about a hundred meters deep into the bedrock here.
25:07He wanted to find something spectacular and wow he did it. You can't imagine a more spectacular tomb.
25:16Indeed this is probably the largest most extensively decorated best preserved anywhere in the Valley of the Kings.
25:27The chamber here is six meters in height and above us we have the very first example of a vaulted
25:36ceiling
25:37with depictions of the heavens the way the Egyptians conceived the sky and the stars as deities.
25:53And here in this space where the king's body would have been laid to rest Belzoni found the sarcophagus.
26:07Fantastically beautiful Egyptian alabaster sarcophagus.
26:14The lid was also here but just off to one side not in position the tomb was empty.
26:21But to be the very first person in modern times to see this it's impossible to comprehend really.
26:33Belzoni's discovery was completely outstanding exceptional and the news spread quickly.
26:45But at this stage no one knows the identity of the occupant of this tomb.
26:51Belzoni hurriedly copies some cartouches and sends them to Thomas Young who believes
26:56he can read the name of a ruler called Samutis. It'll take several more years before it's established
27:03that this tomb belongs to Pharaoh Seti the First, father of Ramses the Great.
27:20Belzoni spent months and months here making records of everything that he found and he made something like 900
27:30drawings of various different sizes.
27:50He copied down thousands of hieroglyphs what he had in mind was that eventually those squeezes could
27:57be exhibited back home as a way of kind of recreating this tomb but in an exhibition in London.
28:09In the winter of 1817 it must have seemed as though everything Belzoni touched turned to gold
28:15and you can imagine that the French were maybe not too happy about the British boasting of all this success
28:23but little did they know that Belzoni had something else in store for them as well.
28:27Not here though in Thebes, modern Luxor but 650 kilometres off to the north on the Giza Plateau just outside
28:36the city of Cairo.
28:47In early 1818 Belzoni sets up camp at the foot of the pyramid of King Kafra at Giza.
28:55He studies, observes and methodically probes every stone of the structure.
29:01Comparing it with its neighbour, the pyramid of Khufu,
29:04he finally manages to clear a passage leading down into the monument.
29:20This is what Giovanni Belzoni found when he came inside the second pyramid of Kafra, the burial chamber,
29:26and in particular these granite blocks brought all the way from the south of the country surrounding the carved stone
29:33sarcophagus of the pharaoh.
29:34And Belzoni could have been very disappointed to not find the body of the king, a coffin or any jewellery
29:42or other treasures.
29:43But we have a sense in fact that he was probably delighted to be the first to enter inside the
29:50pyramid of Kafra.
29:53And to mark this momentous discovery, he wrote in Italian his name,
30:02Scoperta de G. Belzoni, discovered by Giovanni Belzoni, 2nd of March 1818.
30:11So there we have his great moment of pride, the first time anyone in modern times had ever been inside
30:18the second pyramid.
30:21As the French have taken over at Thebes, the British are now concentrating their research efforts around the pyramids of
30:27Giza.
30:29Henry Salt, the British consul, has recruited a new agent, another Italian, a former ship captain named Giovanni Battista Caviglia.
30:39Caviglia is interested in the Sphinx of Giza, but at this point, only the head can be seen sticking out
30:46of the sand.
30:52He's convinced the monument is concealing a secret entrance.
30:58So what is the Sphinx exactly?
31:00It's a massive portrait of the pharaoh in his Leonine aspect, his aspect as the lion, the most powerful animal
31:08in the animal kingdom.
31:11In most of our opinions, it represents the pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the second pyramid on the left, the
31:18one that still has some of its original casing at the top.
31:22The Sphinx stands at a height of 20 meters from its base to the top of the head, and it's
31:2973 meters long, enormously elongated body.
31:32And perhaps the most fascinating thing is it's carved mostly from one piece of stone.
31:42The appearance of the Sphinx when it was first created was different from now.
31:48It was colored and painted in bright colors, red paint for the face.
31:52And, of course, the Sphinx had more of its nose and beard.
31:59The headdress would have been in probably yellow and blue paint.
32:06But in 1817, when Caviglia came to this area, he would have seen mostly just sand with just the head
32:14of the Sphinx emerging.
32:15And people didn't even know at this point whether it was a woman or a man, what this image represented.
32:24And there were all sorts of myths and legends about structures underneath the Sphinx, which we know today to be
32:31inaccurate.
32:36But at that time, Caviglia was obsessed with looking inside the Sphinx and to see what it was, really.
32:48When Caviglia dug between the paws of the Sphinx, he didn't find a mysterious entrance to an underground cavern.
32:56But what he did find was this, this amazing 15-ton stone slab.
33:02And on it, he couldn't yet read the hieroglyphs.
33:05They weren't deciphered.
33:07What we know now, this was erected a thousand years after the Sphinx was carved out.
33:14And what the story is, is that the young Prince Thutmose, at that point, who wasn't even due to become
33:21pharaoh,
33:25young Prince Thutmose is out in the area of Giza in the desert, and he's hunting lions.
33:30He got tired, and he decided to take a nap in the shadow of this old monument.
33:37The Sphinx came to him in a dream, and he said,
33:39If you remove all the sand from my body, and you free me, I will make you king of Egypt.
33:46But Mose IV, as a prince, carries this out, becomes the king of Egypt.
33:54And then he takes a stone, and he carves it over in his own image, and the text tells the
34:03story.
34:09And what's fascinating is, right after Cavilia came here and found all of these things,
34:14he put the sand back to protect them, and also, perhaps, to keep the discovery a little secret from others.
34:23We don't know.
34:27In Egypt, the British have gained the upper hand over the French,
34:32having dug the Sphinx out of the sand, and discovered Seti I's tomb.
34:40But when it comes to deciphering the hieroglyphs, the game is not over yet.
34:46On both sides of the channel, scholars are working hard to decipher the texts of the Rosetta Stone,
34:52discovered by the French during Bonaparte's expedition in 1799.
34:58The wars between the French and the English were not just about land.
35:02They were also about intellectual property or ideas.
35:07Each wanted to outdo the other in everything, whether it was science or the arts or literature.
35:12And this included the decipherment for hieroglyphs.
35:16In 1819, the 49-year-old British scholar Thomas Young presents his first conclusions.
35:23Young has decent intuition, but he still hasn't grasped all the subtleties of hieroglyphs.
35:31Throughout the ages, people had been intrigued by hieroglyphs and had tried to understand them.
35:37But whether they had been Arabs or Europeans, no one had really come up with a satisfactory or accurate way
35:44of reading them.
35:45And so for a long time, people looked at them more as symbols rather than sounds or words.
35:51And unfortunately, this idea of it being symbolic is what sat in people's minds
35:56and was really a deterrent, an obstacle for people to truly understand
36:01that the hieroglyphs were letters as well as being symbolic.
36:17The Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion has also been studying the texts on the Rosetta Stone relentlessly for 10 years.
36:26They're written in three languages, ancient Greek, hieroglyphs, and demotic,
36:31which is a simplified form of hieroglyphs.
36:33Among the 15 or so languages Champollion has mastered by the age of 32 is Coptic,
36:40the language of Egypt's Christians, written with Greek characters.
36:46Champollion had a really detailed and thorough understanding of Coptic,
36:51which was the last form of the Egyptian language and script.
36:55And that is what allowed him a way into the earlier forms of the language and script.
37:01Until then, like his English rival, Champollion has been going round in circles.
37:09But his knowledge of Coptic finally gives him a decisive advantage.
37:15By analyzing the famous cartouches, the oval shapes that contain the names of kings,
37:21he understands that a hieroglyphic sign can also represent a sound.
37:28On the Rosetta Stone, he spots the name Ptolemy or Ptolemys in Greek,
37:33finds its equivalent in hieroglyphs, and thus deduces the first letters of an alphabet.
37:43He continues looking at other cartouches, including those copied at Abu Simbel.
37:56His stroke of genius is to realize that within a single word,
38:00a sign can represent either a letter or an idea.
38:07And on the 27th of September, 1822,
38:11Champollion finally reveals his discovery in the Great Hall of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Letres in Paris.
38:18The most eminent scholars are all there on that day, even his rival Thomas Young.
38:26This language, which has been lost for 1,400 years, is about to be revived.
38:32But Champollion still needs to study some other documents to refine his first alphabet.
38:38And he'll have a wonderful place to do that.
38:47The Turin Museum, which has just acquired a new collection, and Champollion is going to do the inventory.
38:56Among all the exceptional artifacts that Champollion finds in Turin, one in particular captures his attention.
39:03This is a papyrus more than 3,000 years old, which the Egyptologist will spend several months reassembling from the
39:11fragments.
39:14This document, which we now call the Royal Canon of Turin, is a chronological table that reveals the names of
39:2177 pharaohs.
39:23It's one of the most complete lists of royalty that we possess.
39:29Champollion catalogues the extraordinary collection in Turin.
39:32He knows that the British Museum in London is enjoying a huge success with the Rosetta Stone,
39:38and the young Memnon statue brought back by Beltoni.
39:41And it's clear that France is lagging behind.
39:45So when he learns that a new collection is up for sale,
39:48he loses no time in convincing the French government to buy nearly 6,000 objects,
39:54thus enriching the collection at the Louvre.
39:57He also lands the job he was dreaming of,
40:00curator of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities.
40:04We're in one of the famous original galleries,
40:07in which Champollion created our Egyptian Department and opened it to the public for the first time in 1827.
40:15Thanks to Champollion, the French public will be able to learn about Egyptian civilization for the first time.
40:29So here, typically this is one of the objects,
40:32and when I say an object, I mean an exceptional masterpiece,
40:36that visitors to Champollion's first Egyptian museum could see as early as 1827.
40:48This object depicts the pharaoh Akhenaten.
40:52You might think this is a statue where he appears alone, seated on his throne,
40:57but in fact, a statue of the queen who was at his side has disappeared.
41:01It was originally a royal couple, Akhenaten and the famous queen Nefertiti.
41:07And when you look at the object from the front, you can't tell.
41:11But if you walk around it,
41:13you'll see that the queen's arm and hand have survived, tenderly placed on the king's back.
41:23So that's how little by little the collection was created.
41:27From masterpieces like this,
41:29and from much more humble objects like toiletry items,
41:33mirrors, boxes, and jewelry too.
41:35So we ultimately have some very varied items to evoke this civilization.
41:50While the French will be able to admire all these new collections at the Louvre,
41:55the British are rushing to London, to the Egyptian hall in Piccadilly.
42:02Using the impressions he took in Setti I's tomb,
42:06Giovanni Battista Belzoni has reconstructed two life-size rooms.
42:14The exhibition opens in Paris a few months later.
42:18And on this occasion, Champollion and Belzoni,
42:21two of the greatest Egyptologists of the era, finally meet.
42:30Belzoni will never go back to Egypt.
42:33From now on, he wants to work independently.
42:36And in 1823, he decides to embark on the search for the sources of the Niger River in West Africa.
42:43But soon after, while on the road to Timbuktu, he falls ill with dysentery.
42:48He dies on the 3rd of December, 1823, at the age of 45.
42:57Belzoni barely spent six years in Egypt,
42:59yet his daring exploits, his tenacity, and his unwavering determination
43:03will serve as an inspiration for generations to come.
43:08As for Champollion, after years spent in libraries,
43:11gloomy museums, and smoke-filled lecture halls,
43:14he can finally breathe freely when he sets foot on Egyptian soil.
43:17His promised land lies before him, and it will completely captivate him.
43:28The End
43:28The End
43:29The End
43:29The End
43:30The End
43:34The End
43:42The End
43:46The End
43:48The End
43:50The End
43:50The End
43:52The End