The enigmatic ruins of Egypt have long been objects of fascination.
Two days stand out in the quest to understand this ancient civilisation.
The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.
Two days that shrank millennia to a heartbeat.
And unravelled the mysteries of life in Ancient Egypt.
This is a dramatisation of events as they happened on those days.
It's 1922.
Ghandi is jailed for questioning British rule in India.
Benito Mussolini is elected the first fascist dictator in Europe.
The USSR has become the world's first Communist state.
And in Egypt Howard Carter is about to make the most amazing
archaeological discovery of all time.
Valley of the Kings.
The ancient burial ground of Egypt's pharaohs.
Another day of work is about to start on the latest archaeological dig
in this sun-baked valley six miles outside of Luxor.
Three thousand years ago,
the kings of Ancient Egypt were mummified and laid to rest here,
in tombs furnished with all the wealth
and luxury they would need for the immortal afterlife.
Many have come here in search of the riches of the pharaohs.
So far not a single tomb has been found intact.
Still, everyday the Englishman called Carter comes here
to dig in the Valley of the Kings.
For Howard Carter this is his seventh year excavating in the Valley.
It is very likely to be his last.
With nothing more than a few broken jars to show for his investment,
Carter's financial backer has told him,
that this is the last season he will fund the dig in the Valley.
For the self-taught archaeologist,
this is the last chance to prove that
there are undiscovered tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Carter's sponsor is up early.
George Edward Stanna Herbert, the fifth earl of Carnarvon,
developed his interest in Egyptology after a near fatal motor racing accident.
Recuperating in Luxor,
he found hunting buried antiquities the ideal sport
and employed Carter as his archaeologist.
Now after spending 35,000 pounds, on the dig in the Valley,
he has had enough.
But three weeks ago, he received a telegram from Carter,
that over brimmed with excitement.
At last I've made a wonderful discovery in the Valley,
a magnificent tomb with seals intact.
Recovered same for your arrival.
Congratulations, Carter.
He arrived in Luxor two days ago,
keen to see the source of Carter's excitement
Today, Carter is only too aware that his telegram,
may have been premature.
He had started work on November the first.
Three days later his workers had found the top of a sunken staircase,
that bore all the hallmarks, of being a tomb entrance.
Carter had promptly telegrammed his patron.
But further work had revealed the entrance might not be all he had hoped for.
I was puzzled by the smallness of the opening in comparison
with other royal tombs in the Valley.
Its design was, certainly of the eighteenth dynasty.
Could it be a tomb of a noble, buried here by royal consent?
Or was it a royal cache?
There was nothing to tell me.
With the imminent arrival of his patron,
Carter is desperate to find out what,
if anything, lies at the end of the tunnel.
Carter arrives at the dig and checks on progress with Rase Ahmed.
Morning Rase
morning
How's it going?
Come on. Unh unh unh.
Things are not looking good.
Amidst the rubble in the tunnel,
his workers have found shards,
bearing the names of four different pharaohs.
These conflicting data led us to believe that we were about to open a royal cache.
But from the evidence have been probably opened and used more than once.
Not only is the intact tomb he promised Carnarvon looking less like a tomb,
it is far from intact.
Carnarvon's daughterjoins her father for breakfast.
So what's the plan for today?
Well I...
Lady Evelyn Herbert has no interest in archaeology.
But given her father's fragile health,
she's come along to keep him company.
It is a mixture of intrigue and sportsmanship
that has brought Carnarvon to Luxor.
Carter had cried wolf before.
He had found a tunnel in 1898 which he thought was the entrance of a tomb.
But after two years of excavation,
it led to just an empty room.
Could Carter have discovered an intact burial chamber this time?
Or will he be made a fool of again?
For the last seven years,
Carter has been digging for one tomb in particular.
That of a lesser eighteenth dynasty pharaoh called Tutankhamen.
Not that he had told anyone.
Current archaeological wisdom holds it has already been found.
Thirteen years ago,
in 1909, a ransacked burial chamber was identified,
as the final resting-place, of the mysterious boy pharaoh.
But for Carter, the evidence did not add up.
Based on the fragments of funeral paraphernalia
bearing the pharaoh's name he had found,
he is convinced, Tutankhamen's tomb remains undiscovered.
Might these sixteen stone steps, lead him to it?
Are things going well?
Moving along
Carter is worried.
The tunnel is smaller than all the other royal tomb entrances.
Far from an intact tomb,
he may be on the threshold of a major disappointment
Carter!
Carnarvon?
Carnarvon arrives at the dig in time for lunch.
Hello Howard.
How was yourjourney?
Carter updates his patron on the progress made clearing the tunnel.
He omits to tell him, of his private fear.
If it does turn out to be just, a ransacked cache,
Carter will not only be humiliated,
and embarrassed in front of Carnarvon...
it will be the end of his career.
As the temperature in the Valley soars,
the slow process of excavation continues.
For Carnarvon, it's an all too familiar game,
that requires little more than patience.
A quality that Howard Carter is running increasingly low on.
Then, just after two o'clock,
Rase Ahmed calls Carter to the tunnel.
Oh Mr Carter, Oh Mr Carter?
The workers have come upon a second sealed doorway.
But what lies behind it?
The entrance is so plain,
that Carter remains convinced that he has found not a royal tomb, but a cache.
He is also convinced that when they break through this door,
they will find it ransacked.
Carter prepares for the moment of truth.
Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn,
accompany Carter down to the sealed doorway.
After making a tiny breach,
in the top left hand corner,
Carter uses a candle to ensure that the air within, is not toxic.
Finally he peers in.
Lord Carnarvon,
unable to stand the suspense any longer,
enquired anxiously:
Can you see anything?
It was all I could do to get out the words,
"Yes, wonderful things."
These three words, will become the most famous in the history of archaeology.
Three words, that barely hint at the true wonder of what he has just discovered.
With the rest of the door cleared,
Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn finally enter the chamber.
What they see,
is beyond their wildest dreams.
Our sensations were bewildering,
and full of strange emotion.
Was it a tomb, or merely a cache?
Crammed from floor to ceiling,
an awesome array of funeral furniture and ritual objects.
Couches, thrones, chariots,
everything a king would need to live in splendour,
in the afterlife.
And enough evidence for Carter to believe,
he mightjust have found the tomb, of the boy pharaoh, Tutankhamen.
For Carnarvon, it is the Aladdin's cave he has waited so long for.
There's enough stuff here to fill a whole floor of the British Museum.
But Carter realises, if,
it is Tutankhamen's tomb it is missing one key item.
There is no coffin, no trace of any mummy.
The explanation gradually dawned upon us.
We were but on the threshold of our discovery.
What we saw was merely an antechamber.
In between the two lifelike figures on the far wall of the chamber,
Carter discovers another blocked doorway.
Behind the guarded door,
we should find the pharaoh lying.
A year later, in his published version of events,
Carter will write that they resisted the temptation,
to proceed further in their explorations,
that they exited the tomb, made it secure,
left the Valley, and returned to his house, strangely subdued.
Carter, pour us a drink.
Good idea.
But that's not the whole story.
To King Tutankhamen, To King Tut
Back at Castle Carter, they celebrate their discovery
Whiskey is one of Carter's few luxuries, and one that he always has at home.
It is what Carter will later describe as the 'day of days'.
But despite the wonderful things he has seen,
Carter is still perturbed.
If it is the pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb,
then why is the chamber so small?
And what if behind the next doorway,
they do not find the pharaoh lying in his coffin?
Carnarvon needs no encouragement.
Howard Carter makes one of the boldest decisions of his life.
One that contravenes the strict rules governing the dig
and runs counter to his years of good practice as an archaeologist.
It's a decision that must be kept secret.
But three months later,
on the very day of the official opening,
Lady Evelyn will tell the truth, about what she and her father did.
It is a thing that I would never give away
and it is one which I think ought not to be known,
or anyway, not at present.
Here is the secret.
We have both been into the second chamber!
Well after the discovery,
we had not been able to resist.
We made a small hole in the wall and climbed through.
Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn return to the Valley of the Kings.
Then, at the base of the wall between the two black sentinels,
they make a small opening.
Crawling through the hole,
Carter finally finds what he has been looking for.
A huge, golden sarcophagus, covered in the name of the mummified pharaoh within.
The final resting place of Tutankhamen, undisturbed for 3,245 years.
When they squeezed back into the antechamber,
they disguised the hole with a basket and some rushes.
Several items are taken during this secret visit.
An ointment box
and a small ritual figure is seen at Carter's house over the next few days.
Whether taken as souvenirs,
or to authenticate the tomb is not known.
Both items will later be dutifully catalogued.
The rest of the world will have to wait three months
for its first glimpse of Tutankhamen's sarcophagus
when Carter will perform the authorised opening of the burial chamber.
It will take Carter,
almost a decade to record and to remove the contents of the tomb.
Lord Carnarvon will not live to see his work through.
Within five months he will die of blood poisoning,
fuelling the belief in the curse of Tutankhamen.
Removed to Cairo where they remain to this day,
the amazing contents of Tutankhamen's tomb finally give immortality to a pharaoh
who had long been forgotten.
No one would've even known his name had it not been for an amazing
breakthrough one hundred years earlier.
It's 1822.
The Galunggung Volcano erupts, killing 4,000.
Brazil, has declared independence from portugal.
Mary Ann Mantell, has discovered the first dinosaur fossil.
And in paris, France,
one man is about to unlock the mystery of Egypt's ancient language.
28, Rue Mazarine, paris.
Jean Francois Champollion,
has spent the morning hard at work in his attic study.
He arrived in paris a year and a half ago, miserable and broke.
An ardent Republican,
he has lost his university post in Grenoble,
and had narrowly escaped trial for treason,
after supporting an anti-monarchist uprising.
Leaving his wife behind,
he has fled to paris where he has relentlessly pursued his obsession,
the successful translation of the language of Ancient Egypt.
It is not a particularly novel quest.
The hieroglyphics that adorn the pyramids
and temples of Egypt have mystified the greatest minds of the age.
Covered in a language of pictures no one can understand,
Egypt's ruins, are nothing more than piles of enigmatic stone.
Even the most basic information about this ancient world,
is unknown, kept secret, by a language no one can read.
A language, Jean Francois Champollion is on the brink of deciphering.
Je tiens la faire, jet tiens la faire, je tiens la faire!
Champollion has always believed
that the picture writing of Ancient Egypt could be read.
Now he has made the breakthrough he has spent two decades of his life working on.
He has notjust proved his theory,
he has found the key that will unlock the mysteries of Ancient Egypt.
There is only one person he can share his breakthrough with, his brother,
the assistant to the Secretary of the Institute of France.
Jean Jacques Champollion,
is just finishing off his morning's work,
in preparation for lunch.
His office, is just around the corner from Rue Mazarine.
Champollion covers the 403 metres in just under a minute.
Je tiens la faire!
Quoi?
Je tiens la faire!
Mon frere, mon frere,
mon frere!
The man who has just cracked the secret language of the pharaohs,
appears to be taking his amazing breakthrough to the grave.
The object that inspired Champollion to start
his quest was made two millennia before he was even born,
the Rosetta Stone.
A monumental tablet carved in the Egyptian city of Memphis,
a hundred and ninety-six years BC.
The text on the stone was carved in three scripts.
The top section is in hieroglyphics,
the language of pictures and symbols found on the ruins of Ancient Egypt.
The middle section was carved in hieratic,
a joined up written language from the same period.
While the lower section of the tablet was written in Greek,
the language of Egypt's rulers a hundred and ninety-six BC.
Within a few hundred years of its creation,
knowledge of the two Egyptian languages,
and the civilisation that used them, will have vanished.
Currently unconscious on the floor of his brother's office,
Jean Francois Champollion was just eight years old
when the Rosetta Stone dramatically came to light.
In 1798 a group of French soldiers,
unearth a mysterious stone monolith near the Egyptian town of Rosetta.
Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt, is in full swing.
With his army, come a hundred and fifty-one scholars and scientists,
their mission, to claim the cradle of civilisation for France.
The black basil tablet is clearly an object of significance.
It is 114 centimetres high, 72 centimetres wide,
27 centimetres thick and weighs 720 kilos.
But it is the writing on it, that really interests them.
The first two sections are indecipherable ancient Egyptian,
but the lower section is obviously Greek.
Translating it,
they learned the stone tablet is an expression
of homage to the ruler of Egypt, ptolemy
But it is the final sentence that excites them.
It orders that the decree be written in Greek and both,
of Egypt's ancient languages.
If the two other sections,
are translations of the Greek text,
then the stone found in Rosetta offers a prospect as simple as it is spectacular.
Using the Greek, it should be possible to decipher the two ancient Egyptian texts.
The soldiers despatch the tablet to the French Institute in Cairo.
It will soon become apparent,
that finding the stone, was the easy bit.
Twenty three years later,
and the man who has just unlocked the language of the Rosetta Stone,
lies unconscious in his brother's office.
Having called for a doctor,
Jean Jacques desperately tries to revive him.
He has encouraged and supported his brother throughout his life.
When the younger Champollion was just nine years old,
it was Jean Jacques who arranged for his private tuition in Latin.
It was 1799,
the same year the Rosetta Stone was due to arrive in paris from Egypt.
Already hailed as the gem of antiquity,
academics eagerly awaited the Stone in France.
It never arrived.
In Egypt, Nelson defeated the French at the battle of the Nile.
With British soldiers at the gates of Cairo,
the French petitioned, for an armistice,
that would allow them to keep the Rosetta Stone,
and other treasures they had acquired.
The British Commander,
Lieutenant General Sir John Healy Hutchinson,
would have none of it.
Since the fate of arms has decided against you,
I demand the execution, of the surrender, on this point.
I demand all these objects, and you may be sure that I shall not let,
a single part of them, leave for France.
The Rosetta Stone arrived in London, in 1802.
The race to translate it was on.
Twenty years later,
no one knows that Jean Francois Champollion,
has finally unlocked the lost language of Ancient Egypt.
Champollion's fascination with hieroglyphics,
started when he was just 14.
At the age ofjust 18,
he was made professor of ancient history in Grenoble,
and the following year,
in 1810, he had delivered his first paper on the Stone.
The inscription on the Rosetta Stone presents the Greek name of ptolemy.
It could not be expressed in the hieroglyphic part of this monument
if these hieroglyphs did not have the power to produce sounds.
Notjust a written but a spoken language.
Champollion believed that hieroglyphs could create sounds.
It was a radical proposition.
Today, and Champollion, has successfully read a hieroglyph.
Quite how, remains trapped in his unconscious mind.
From reading the Greek section of the stone, it was assumed,
that the lozenge like cartouche contained the name of ptolemy.
Champollion believed that the signs in the cartouche each
represented a different sound.
But he had no idea,
what each symbol sounded like.
To enable, and prove, the decipherment of a word,
Champollion realised,
that he needed to compare, a pair of names,
in which the same signs recur.
Champollion, had arrived in paris in 1821.
Broke, alone, and shunned by fellow academics,
he still clings to his theory.
I have analysed this language so much that I could teach it in a single day.
I shall prove that words are composed of a series of signs that represent sounds.
On December the 23rd,
he celebrates his thirty-first birthday alone.
A simple idea crosses his mind.
To count, the individual characters in the inscriptions.
He works out that 486 Greek words correspond to 1,419 hieroglyphs.
It seems to him now obvious,
hieroglyphs cannot represent a full word,
each one must represent a sound,
a part of the word.
But still he lacked the evidence to prove his theory.
The material Champollion so desperately needed arrived
earlier today on the morning of September the 14th 1822.
He receives a letter from his friend, Nicholas Huliot.
Huliot has recently returned from an expedition to Egypt,
travelling south of the Sudan to the recently excavated
ruins of Abbucymbal.
Champollion, has never been to Egypt.
His work has had to rely on other people's accounts.
Champollion, spots a cartouche, amidst the numerous hieroglyphics.
He knows from the cartouche of ptolemy, on the Rosetta Stone,
that these, lozenge shapes contain names.
Champollion is drawn to one of the individual hieroglyphs,
a circle within a circle.
If the circle were the sun, what sound, could it represent?
Of all the languages he has studied,
Champollion, has always believed,
Coptic, the language of early Christian Egypt,
to be closest, to Ancient Egyptian.
In Coptic, the word for the sun, is Rah.
Ra
Ra Ra Ra
Change the pronunciation of Rah, slightly,
and you have the name of one of Egypt's ancient deities.
Ra!!
He thinks he has found the symbol that represents the word for Egypt's sun god,
in a cartouche. He hazards a guess.
If the second sign, is an 'M',
and the last two signs, are both, 'S'
Ess
It means he has successfully deciphered one of the most famous
Ancient Egyptian royal names.
Rammm...
Rameses... Rameses!
Rameses.
Champollion, has notjust found the name of an Egyptian pharaoh,
he has done something no one else thought possible.
Rameses.
He has read a hieroglyph.
His mounting excitement is tempered by the dreadful fear,
that this flash of inspiration may be a fluke.
A lucky coincidence, to mock his 22 years of fruitless study.
Searching the rest of the drawings sent by Huliot,
his eye is caught by another cartouche.
Above the same signs,
that he has just assumed to be an 'M', and an 'S', is a picture of a bird.
What sound might that represent?
The bird of the Nile is the lbis, and in the ancient world,
the lbis, was used to represent Thoth, the god of scribes.
If the bird is an lbis,
then Champollion can read the name in the cartouche.
Thoth, Moses. Thoth Moses.
Another Royal Egyptian name.
At last he has confirmed, and proved his theory.
Hieroglyphs represent sounds,
which work together to make words,
which can be spoken.
Thoth. Moses.
Je tiens a faire!
Je tiens a faire! Je tiens a faire!
Champollion spent the next four days in bed.
But by September the 27th,
he will have recovered enough to announce his findings to the Institute of France,
and the rest of the world.
His breakthrough is the first step in the successful translation
of the hieroglyphic language of the Rosetta Stone,
and will provide the foundation
for the subsequent exploration and understanding,
of life in Ancient Egypt.