Egypt

Belzoni fails to please Pasha Ali of Egypt and his new career in 'water mechanics' fails. He is penniless and stranded in Cairo without work. Just 16 years after the invasion by Napoleon, the enthusiasm of Europeans for all things Egyptian is growing and there is intense rivalry between explorers and collectors - the rivalry is particularly intense between the French and the British.

Belzoni's new ambition is to be the greatest collector in history, but in the fashion of all good swashbuckling tales, he has a rival. Drovetti, the tenacious French collector, is waiting to thwart him at his every turn. Henry Salt asks Belzoni to go back to Thebes and Philae to find more artefacts for the British Museum. However, Belzoni doesn't realise that Salt is using him to furnish his own collection and sell artefacts to the highest bidder.

This is the story of Jean-François Champollion, the brilliant linguist, genius and one of the first true Egyptologists. The programme begins in Egypt in 1798, when the country had been virtually closed to Europeans for centuries and its ancient culture lost and forgotten for over a thousand years. Napoleon has with him scholars, including antiquarians and linguists, whose job it is to unravel the mysteries of ancient Egypt. But they were able to achieve little more than to paint its beautiful ruined monuments and wonder what it all meant, for Egypt's secrets were locked in the strange ancient writings, the hieroglyphs.

In the final episode of Egypt, Jean-François Champollion has unlocked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs but, in doing so, faces opposition from the Church and a challenge to his own beliefs.