Quest for Ancient Egypt

In the first episode we meet Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, founder of the Museum of the Louvre and traveler, who came to Egypt with the army of Napoleon (1798) and first described scientifically the Giza Necropolis, Jean-Francois Champollion, who devoted his life to decipher the enigmatic hieroglyphs, Giovanni Battista Belzoni - master in smuggling Egyptian monuments to European museums, the German Karl Lepsius, who first created the systematic study of hundreds of monuments, located on the desert areas of Egypt.

In the second part we introduce Auguste Mariette and Gaston Maspero and their fight against establishing a law prohibiting wholesale of ancient Egyptian monuments and harboring them not only from greedy researchers, but also corrupt Egyptian government and the local thieves. The Egyptologist William Petrie introduced the first principle of order, a new method of chronology.

The third part begins with the incredible story of Carter and Carnarvon, who accidentally discovered the greatest tomb - Tutankhamun. Also presented are an American scholar George Reisner, co-founder of modern Egyptology and Pierre Montet, who spent over 32 years in Egypt, trying to prove the biblical legend of the captivity of the Hebrews in the land of Egypt. The series ends with a look at the last and most successful Egyptologists, the work of Dr. Zahi Hawass and Dr. Mohammed el-Saghir.