Egypt

The first two episodes in this series focus on British archaeologist Howard Carter and his hunt for the tomb of Tutankhamun. In 1898 Carter stumbles upon a possible tomb, and that story is interwoven with the story of Tutankhamun himself, who became pharaoh when he was just nine years old.

As we conclude Howard Carter's story, the prize that he had sought all his life yielded more than anyone could imagine, including the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun himself. It was hailed as the greatest of all archaeological finds, but ,for Carter, the sudden loss of Lord Carnarvon overshadowed it all.

Episodes 3 and 4 of the series recount the story of Italian circus performer Giovanni Belzoni and how he became Egypt's greatest explorer. The story of Ramesses II is also told. Reigning for 67 years, Ramesses, father of over 100, plastered Egypt's temples with stories of his victorious campaigns.

In the second part of Belzoni's story, he struggles to clear centuries of sand from the buried temple at Abu Simbel. What he discovers there changes his life, and he sets out on a quest leading him to the Valley of the Kings, and the tomb of one of the greatest of all pharaohs - Ramesses the Great.

Part five of the six-part series is about the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Two brilliant men, Thomas Young, an English scientist, and a French linguist called Jean-Francois Champollion, race to unlock the hidden language of the pharaohs.

In the last episode of the series, Champollion realizes his dream to travel to Egypt. In 1824 Champollion was the only person in the world able to understand hieroglyphs and hoped to be the first person in over a thousand years to read the inscriptions on the walls of Egypt's great temples.