Original subtitles

Since Bonaparte's expedition in 1798,

Europeans have been pouring into Egypt.

For half a century now,

French, British, then Italian and German explorers

have sought to expand their influence in this new El Dorado,

full of archaeological sites waiting to be explored.

By the hundreds, ships leave the port of Alexandria

carrying cargoes of artefacts, statues, mummies

and sometimes even nearly whole temples

bound for the museums of Europe's great capitals.

What's left for the Egyptians?

Until then, that question did not concern the mercenary raiders

who came to help themselves to antiquities

like the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni,

the British explorer Howard Vyse,

or even the French consul Bernardino Drovetti,

one of the earliest collectors.

But in the middle of the 19th century,

Egyptology enters a new era.

Excavations will become more rigorous and more regulated,

no longer resembling the cynical, systematic plundering

of earlier times.

And this new policy will take shape under the leadership

of a Frenchman,

who will become one of the greatest Egyptologists in history.

In the autumn of 1850,

Auguste Mariette sets foot on Egyptian soil for the first time.

The 29-year-old Frenchman works in

the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre.

He has been given an assignment:

to acquire Coptic and Syriac manuscripts

to enhance the French collections.

Auguste Mariette had never intended to become an Egyptologist.

At twenty, the young graduate,

who earns his living teaching drawing and French,

dreamed of becoming a writer or journalist.

Then his father asked him to sort out the papers

of a distant cousin he has never met, who has recently died.

Auguste Mariette was a relative of Nestor L'Hote

who'd accompanied Champollion's expedition

and left behind a number of papers and very beautiful drawings,

watercolour drawings of sites and monuments in Egypt.

And this it seems led to him being bitten by the Egyptology bug.

Mariette roams the libraries

in order to make sense of Nestor L'Hote's many documents.

He comes across some copies of the Description of Egypt

and devours every book he can find about this country.

In a municipal museum,

he also comes across a sarcophagus

and a mummy brought back

from Egypt by the writer-diplomat Dominique Vivant Denon

during Bonaparte's expedition in 1798.

Fascinated,

the young Mariette spends hours studying the sarcophagus.

Teaching himself using Champollion's grammar book,

he begins translating the hieroglyphs on its lid.

A few years later,

he gets a job in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre.

Only weeks after arriving in Egypt,

Mariette realises that his mission is doomed to fail.

Mariette kind of made a bit of a false start when he was here.

His priority was to gather manuscripts,

including Coptic manuscripts,

and he found that by the time he got to the country,

there was a reluctance on the part of the people

who looked after such things to part with any more.

They probably already lost as much of these things

to European collectors as they could tolerate.

Returning to France empty-handed is not an option.

Mariette, it seems, almost found himself wondering what to do next.

But it didn't, in the grand scheme of things, take him very long

to realise that Saqqarah would be a very fertile territory

for somebody looking to gather antiquities.

So Auguste Mariette chooses to settle

on the plain of Saqqara,

about thirty kilometres south of Cairo.

The site where only a few ancient pyramids rise out

of the sand is completely barren.

For thousands of years,

it was home to the most important necropolis in northern Egypt:

that of the city of Memphis,

located just four kilometres away.

0 I'm at Saqqara, one of the famous burial grounds of ancient Egypt,

where many of the earliest pyramids were built.

It's a place that was known

as of the late 18th century by scholars like Champollion

and the Napoleonic expedition

because everywhere they would dig, they would find mummies,

bones, pottery, fragments of the ancient past.

So much so that it was called the Plain of Mummies.

Auguste Mariette came here in 1850.

And he had the idea that maybe he could find something

really special.

And he began working in this zone.

But he didn't have a permit yet for official excavation.

But that didn't stop Mariette.

He had a goal, and he had an idea,

and it was this area that drew his attention.

If we want to get an idea of what Mariette was seeing

when he came to Saqqara,

we actually can use pretty much any area of this wonderful site.

And we see on the ground all around us,

things out of place...

...that were brought here by people long ago.

Pot sherds, ancient pottery, stones,

and some of the stones speak volumes.

What's drawn my attention here is something unusual on the ground.

This is a piece of pink granite from Aswan,

from the southernmost border of Egypt.

Brought here very deliberately in ancient times.

But in the case of Mariette, what it was was not a piece pink granite.

It was a head of bright white limestone,

in the form of a king.

And as he cleared the sand, he revealed a long lion's body.

Human head, lion body, a sphinx.

All the hours Auguste Mariette has spent trawling through

libraries suddenly come back to him.

And one book in particular by the Greek geographer Strabo

from the first century AD.

Auguste has read it dozens of times.

Auguste Mariette would have had in mind Strabo's account

of Saqqara and the Serapeum,

which was approached via a processional route

lined with sphinxes.

And that's the kind of, maybe seems simple to us now,

but that's the kind leap of genius

that in this case led to the discovery of the Serapeum,

which is one of the most spectacular monuments to have survived

from ancient Egypt.

For now, Mariette has only discovered one sphinx,

during unauthorised and clandestine excavations

which must remain secret.

But if Mariette is indeed on the trail of the Serapeum,

he is about to rediscover one of the most important places

of worship of the ancient capital, Memphis,

of which Saqqara was the necropolis.

At Memphis and Saqqara, people worshipped the god Ptah,

god of creation and patron of craftsmen

whose incarnation on earth was a sacred bull: the Apis bull.

I'm here in Memphis.

This is where the pharaohs lived and had massive palaces,

and the Apis bull was one of the central elements

of the worship of ancient Memphis.

The priests of Ptah would go out throughout the country

and they'd be looking for specific markings

that identified one animal out of the entire animal world

as being the living emanation of the god Ptah.

And what were these markings?

The Apis Bull had to be black and white,

on the forehead, a triangle,

and on the back, a picture almost of a falcon.

Under the tongue, a shape that looked like a beetle,

the scarab beetle,

and the tail bifurcated into two strands.

Once all of these criteria had been met

and they found that one perfect bull,

they would bring it here, to the Apis House.

The Apis Bull was treated like a god, fed, bathed, washed.

And upon the natural death of the Apis bull,

the Egyptians did something extraordinary.

They mummified them,

just like they mummify their kings and high officials.

And these are the actual massive slabs of alabaster

upon which they conducted that surgery.

And once this was done,

it was carried in a grand procession out to Saqqara, to the Serapeum.

At Saqqara, is Mariette truly on the trail

of the Serapeum of Memphis,

the sanctuary devoted to the Apis bulls?

After the first sphinx, he found a second, then a third.

Soon he has uncovered an avenue of 141 sphinxes.

Mariette is now convinced the Serapeum,

whose entrance was lined with sphinxes, must be close.

And as he clears the sand around the sphinxes,

he uncovers a lot of extraordinary objects

including a statue now known throughout the world.

Here we have an icon,

an absolute masterpiece of Egyptian art,

it's the scribe.

Mariette, who found it at Saqqara,

described it as the crouching scribe,

and the name has stuck.

From the moment he discovers this statue, Mariette is captivated.

How can one not be fascinated by this strikingly, lively gaze?

Naturally, news of Mariette's successes

begins to spread.

Rumours circulate in Cairo

that the Frenchman has even uncovered statues made of gold.

Jealous and less successful treasure hunters

contact the authorities,

especially since everyone knows Mariette is excavating

without official authorisation.

Eight months after the start of his excavations,

Auguste Mariette receives a visit from two officials

sent by Egypt's new sovereign, Abbas Pasha.

He has unearthed an old protection order

issued by his grandfather, Muhammad Ali.

It states that excavations require an official permit

and that all export of antiquities is strictly forbidden.

Mariette isn't the type to let himself be intimidated.

His first reaction is to angrily dismiss the two officials.

Because he is not the only one excavating in Egypt

without a permit.

Why is he being called to account and not the others?

But once his anger subsides, he changes his mind.

He knows all too well that if he wants to continue

pursuing the trail of the Serapeum, he has to deal with the authorities.

He suspends his excavations

and does everything he can to sort out his situation.

The matter is taken to the highest diplomatic level

between France and Egypt, but eventually tensions ease.

Mariette even obtains official authorisation to send more than

five hundred objects to Paris,

enriching the collection at the Louvre.

Mariette resumes his work,

but he no longer enjoys complete freedom.

Two Egyptian army staff officers now remain permanently

on the site,

recording the results of his excavations each day

and ensuring, above all, that no new objects are exported.

Mariette finds a cunning way to get round this.

Mariette has not lost sight of his original objective:

finding the entrance to the Serapeum.

He waits until the guards leave,

then excavates at night with a small team.

At dawn, he covers up their work with sand.

And finally, on November the 12th, 1851...

...as they dig in the middle of the night, they uncover an opening.

After about 12 months of digging,

Mariette finally came here to the entrance to the Serapeum,

the underground burial vaults of the sacred Apis bulls.

In the course of this discovery,

Mariette kept going down and down and down,

as deep as 10 to 12 metres.

It was a massive excavation.

And as he started to go inside, he found unbelievable surprises.

When Mariette came into the Serapeum for the first time,

he was confronted by a terrible acrid smell.

And he says in his reports that a bluish vapor kind of rose up

in a column like something out of a volcano

and it took four hours for that to clear out until he could go further.

And what he saw as he penetrated deeper into the subterranean vaults

of the Serapeum was stunning.

Four to five metres high vaults,

some corridors as long as 240 metres,

just going on and on.

When Mariette finally got all the way into the Serapeum,

he found 28 of these immense rock-cut caverns

filled with some treasures.

And the treasures were spectacular, huge, hard-stone sarcophagi,

and each one of these over 50 tons in weight,

so extremely heavy.

They're covered with protective inscriptions

and cartouches naming the pharaoh under whose reign

the bull was buried.

But the mummified bulls were not found in sarcophagi.

So this was the main area that Mariette found,

but he found another area

that was fascinating in an upper zone

that was perpendicular to this one.

And Mariette discovered some extraordinary treasures,

in particular a golden mask, not of a bull, but of a human face.

This golden mask, now in the Louvre,

covered the face of a mummy

identified through its jewellery and amulets

as that of Prince Khaemouaset.

A son of Ramses II, he served as High Priest of Ptah

and during his father's reign, had the Serapeum enlarged.

The Serapeum is unquestionably one of the major discoveries

in the history of Egyptian archaeology.

But for Mariette, this success comes at a price.

These discoveries excited jealousy.

And it's said that even Mariette's life was threatened

at times by those who were jealous.

And a group of antiquities collectors and dealers

who were jealous of Mariette's discoveries

began to organise against him and even try to shut him down.

Unperturbed,

Mariette continues his excavations for two years.

But he continues to keep the true extent of his discoveries

hidden from the Egyptian authorities.

With the help of a few trusted men, working out of sight,

he packs hundreds of antiquities into crates

and secretly ships them to France,

far more than the five hundred objects

he is officially authorised to export.

Naturally, Mariette does not appreciate

people poking their noses into his excavation site.

He complains about visitors,

royalty and wealthy travellers alike,

who come to see his sanctuary.

Politically, he cannot refuse them entry,

but he gives them an icy welcome.

After four years working at Saqqara,

things got difficult for Mariette.

For one thing, he was running out of money,

but also there were political problems.

The ruler of the day, Abbas Pasha,

was assassinated by two of his mamluks.

And in his place came his uncle, Sa'id Pasha.

And this kind of political instability led Mariette

to think about returning to France.

Mariette had come to Egypt with express intention

to discover Coptic and Syriac manuscripts,

he didn't end up finding any.

Instead, he brought back nearly 7,000 objects

from the Serapeum excavations,

which led to great fame and acclaim for him.

And so Mariette was able to proudly say,

"Well, I have not brought back any Coptic or Syriac manuscripts.

I haven't inventoried any libraries,

but I have brought back to France a temple stone by stone."

Most of the objects Mariette removed

from Egypt, mostly illegally,

have now become part of the collection at the Louvre.

Five years earlier, he had entered the museum through the back door.

Now he holds the position of assistant curator.

He loves this recognition, but he's missing Egypt.

Very often I sat at my desk reading the description

of the burials of the Apis bulls.

After five minutes,

I was no longer at the Louvre, I was back in the Serapeum,

feeling the stifling, hot air of the galleries on my skin.

Then I'd send everything to the devil:

translation, philology, even the Louvre!

It got to the stage for Mariette where he didn't want to be

anywhere other than Egypt.

As hard as it must have been for him and for his family

and as hard as all of that fighting that he had to do

with the authorities in Egypt was, Egypt was his home.

And he couldn't function properly it seems without being here.

When Mariette returns to France, he has a real change of heart,

and he also has a change of approach.

And when he's sitting back in France,

he's really reflecting on some of what he's seen,

which is the disappearance of ancient monuments in Egypt.

I lived in Egypt for four years,

and in those four years I witnessed something almost unbelievable:

seven hundred tombs disappearing from the plains of Abusir

and from Saqqara.

A concern is growing within him that there needs to be

a national repository for antiquities in Egypt,

a dream that Champollion had imagined earlier and never realised.

Mariette had clearly fallen in love, I think,

with not just the idea of ancient Egypt,

as it was in his mind back home in France,

but he'd fallen in love with the place.

And obviously had at least the beginnings of an understanding

of how important it would be to ensure that sites

and monuments could retain their integrity here in Egypt

and not simply be broken up and taken away.

For more than fifty years,

Westerners have been plundering Egypt,

while the Egyptians don't yet appreciate

the value of their temples and monuments.

They continue to use them as diplomatic gifts

or to dismantle them for building materials.

But this situation is about to change.

And as a "reformed plunderer," Auguste Mariette will become

the principal architect of this.

First he approaches the French diplomat and entrepreneur

Ferdinand de Lesseps,

who is overseeing a huge project in Egypt:

the construction of the Suez Canal.

The canal will allow ships to travel between Europe and Asia

without sailing around Africa.

Under the leadership of Muhammad Ali and his successors,

Egypt continues to modernise and industrialise,

calling on foreign engineers

and conscripting tens of thousands of Egyptian labourers,

men who rarely appear in photographs from the period.

Thanks to Ferdinand de Lesseps,

Auguste Mariette returns to Egypt and obtains an audience

with its ruler, the Viceroy Sa'id Pasha.

Mariette had really annoyed him when,

through articles in the French press,

he realised the true extent of the objects diverted

to the Louvre.

But Sa'id Pasha listens and allows him to present his ideas.

Mariette explains that from now on he wishes to work for Egypt

and for the preservation of its heritage.

He also wants to resume excavations in a more rigorous

and scientific manner.

To convince the Pasha, he proposes creating a museum in Cairo.

Since all the great European capitals possess an Egyptian museum,

he explains, it is absurd that Egypt itself should not have one.

And his arguments hit the mark.

Sa'id Pasha, won over by both the project and Mariette's personality,

grants his request and appoints him

his Director of Egyptian Antiquities,

a post with staff to carry out his tasks.

One of the first tasks Mariette confronts

is the clearing of sand from the temples of Upper Egypt

in particular the Temple of Edfu,

which, thanks to Mariette's teams, will regain its former glory.

When Mariette began his work here,

the temple interior was completely occupied by dwelling places,

houses, and other buildings

that you'd expect in any kind of urban setting in Egypt at that time.

And the temple was full of those buildings and an accumulation

actually of centuries worth of building.

All of that meant that the level of the floor was much higher

than it is now.

Suddenly, you can imagine, once Mariette's work was finished,

you're confronted with this massively tall

and it is 32 metres high, fully decorated.

The temple was built in the last three centuries BC,

in the era we call the Ptolemaic, most of the kings at this time

were named Ptolemy, hence Ptolemaic.

This courtyard is the location

for one of the most important rituals performed in this temple.

This was the cult centre of the Egyptian's god, Horus.

And Horus' consort, his wife if you like, was Hathor.

Her cult was celebrated at Denderah.

Every year, an image of Hathor, a statue,

would be brought here to commune with the image of Horus.

These festivities performed here were among the most important

in the whole of the country.

There was a point in history when eventually all this came to an end.

There was probably a moment during the Roman period,

a few centuries after the temple had been built,

when Rome converted to Christianity,

slowly the population of Egypt,

which was a part of the Roman Empire,

converted to Christianity, and then later on,

they would use this as a simple dwelling place,

its religious significance was lost almost entirely.

And that brings us right up to the point at which

Mariette arrived here, took a great interest in the Ptolemaic temple,

wanted to see more of it.

In the 1860s,

Mariette was supervising work at up to 35 different sites.

And he would have maybe 100 men working at Giza,

something like 330 between Abu Sir and Saqqara.

He has about 70 at Memphis.

So he's working at sites all the way from Alexandria in the north,

all the down into Sudan.

And of course, he couldn't be there himself all the time.

This area is known as Draa Abu el Naga

and it's one of the parts of the wider cemeteries of Thebes,

it's like a little district within the necropolis.

So all around us the lumps and bumps here are pitted with shafts

and these are all tombs all around us.

In 1859, on the 5th of February,

somewhere here we're not exactly sure where,

but a shaft was discovered with a coffin in it.

At the time of this discovery, Mariette is in Cairo.

In such situations, his teams are instructed to inform him

and suspend excavation work until his arrival.

But this time, his site supervisor betrays him.

Instead of waiting for him, he informs the local governor.

The local governor came to the scene, the coffin was opened,

and it turned out to contain some fantastic material.

There was a mummy inside,

which was identified as belonging to a queen called Ahhotep.

And at this point the local governor is in charge

and of course he doesn't have the archaeological skill,

he's not really taking the care that we might want.

He discarded the bones, the mummy wrappings,

the body itself, but kept the jewels.

And he put these inside a special box, and his intention,

it seems, was that these would go directly to the viceroy.

You can imagine when Mariette found out about this,

this incredible discovery has been made.

Nobody told him. Somebody's gone ahead and opened the coffin.

He would have been furious.

Mariette learns that the governor not only

discarded the mummy,

but also sent the gold objects found in the coffin to the Viceroy.

To try to intercept the treasure,

he demands that all boats on the Nile be stopped

and their cargo seized.

Eight weeks later,

Mariette succeeds in recovering this precious treasure,

dating from the sixteenth century BC.

The material that was found inside this tomb,

belonging to Queen Ahhotep,

was fantastically valuable,

both in archaeological terms,

but also just in the material value as well.

It was an astonishing haul of treasure.

It contained weaponry.

There were nine axes, three of them in gold, three in silver.

There were daggers, amulets, armlets.

There was a lion's head in gold.

There was black sceptre.

Maybe the most fantastic piece was a necklace

with three flies in gold, beautifully crafted.

As for the mummy, Mariette secretly hopes to recover it.

He travels to the site of the discovery, and roams the necropolis

from one end to the other, exploring dozens upon dozens of tombs.

The mummy sadly, was lost to us forever in that moment,

agonizing moment.

I suppose the frustration though in that is that

we've got the material from Queen Ahhotep's tomb,

we don't have her mummy,

in that moment if only Mariette have been here at the time

maybe we'd have that mummy.

We don't know where Ahhotep's tomb was,

so it's exciting to be here,

but I'd love to know exactly where to look.

After this episode,

Mariette enhances the supervision of his excavation teams.

The treasure of Ahhotep becomes part of the collection in the museum

that Mariette finally inaugurates in October 1863

in the Boulaq district of Cairo.

The Egyptologist now divides his time between the museum

and his excavation sites.

In fact, he has returned to the place where everything began

for him in Egypt, Saqqara.

But his health is growing increasingly fragile.

He suffers from diabetes and eye problems,

irritated by the wind and sand.

He has also been hit by personal tragedy.

With the deaths of his wife Eleonore and three of his children.

After all this suffering,

Auguste buries himself in his work

and makes more remarkable discoveries.

We're here inside the courtyard of the Tomb of Ti,

a massive tomb of the Fifth Dynasty around 2500 BC

that was discovered by Auguste Mariette in 1865.

Ti was a very important man.

He was in charge of some of the royal pyramid complexes

and as a result he was powerful and wealthy enough

to construct a massive tomb like this one.

And in the centre of the court, we have stairs going down

to a burial chamber where his sarcophagus of stone

was located and within that his mummy

would have been placed,

although his body was not found in this case.

I'm here inside the innermost part of Ti's tomb,

and I'm speaking quietly because the high ceilings and stone walls

reverberate here so much that I want to respect the space.

Behind here is a two metre high statue of Ti,

a copy of the original one Mariette found in 1865.

And it's not so much for us to look in,

but for Ti to look out

and to receive the goods and the good wishes

that were being offered to him.

But I can resist taking a look myself.

There is another, lesser-known side

to Auguste Mariette's personality:

the rigorous Egyptologist, absorbed in his work,

was also an artist.

At the Pasha's request, Mariette works on the story,

the sets, and the costumes for an opera.

My dear brother, imagine this I've created an opera,

a grand opera for which Verdi is composing the music.

The Viceroy is spending a million.

Don't laugh it's very serious.

I have to go to Paris for the staging, the sets,

and the costumes.

This opera, now known all over the world,

is named Aida.

Its story is inspired by those of the pharaohs

and was commissioned for the inauguration

of the Suez Canal in 1869.

Mariette's objective for this opera

will be not only to create the storyline,

but also the sets and costumes.

The plot is inspired by an historical event,

the Egyptian conquest of Ethiopia

and he will add a love story:

two women in love with the same man, Radames,

and one of them is Aida.

Mariette's aim will be to use historical sources

and what he was able to see in the tombs

to create a truly archaeological opera.

The paradox of this opera is that Mariette wants to create

something authentic with regard to the archaeological reality,

but what works beautifully in stone or on a bas-relief

can look completely ridiculous on a living performer.

A king may look magnificent in granite

with an enormous crown on his head;

but once you have to dress him in the flesh and make him walk

and sing, it becomes awkward,

and you have to worry about making people laugh.

But these fears prove unfounded.

The opera whose story Mariette conceived

and whose sets and costumes he designed is an immense success.

Even though his work is praised unanimously,

Mariette's final years are particularly difficult.

As he continues his excavations,

he sees local inhabitants continue to plunder temples

and reuse the ancient stones to build their homes.

Even the ruler Isma'il Pasha

offers the second Alexandrian obelisk to the United States

to secure American support.

Mariette protests but to no avail.

And for the Frenchman, the run of bad luck is not over yet.

In October 1878, disaster struck.

The Nile experienced the biggest flood of the century,

and the museum and Mariette's residence were completely flooded.

All the notes, all the drawings, documents, books

that he had amassed over the decades were completely destroyed.

They might as well have been used as mops to clean the floor.

You cannot imagine how hard it is to see everything I struggled

so hard to build collapse.

As a consolation, Mariette was given the title pasha.

And he was really, really proud of this,

saying, this title alone is the triumph

of French archaeology in Egypt.

He had his museum rebuilt,

this time with the basement at a higher level

to protect it from further flooding in the future,

but he wasn't going to see much of that future.

On January the 18th, 1881,

Auguste Mariette dies in Cairo,

in this country he loved so deeply.

The Egyptians give him a state funeral

and PAY him the ultimate honour of building him a magnificent tomb

in the garden of his museum.

And if the country possesses one of the world's greatest collections

of Egyptian art today, it owes much of that to him.

Mariette's death does not mark the end of the world's passion

for the land of the pharaohs, quite the opposite.

Other archaeologists will soon take over and make new,

extraordinary discoveries.

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