Égypte

Superb and excellent docudrama series on the rediscovery of ancient Egypt. The B.B.C. make so many great documentaries on Egypt and other ancient civilizations ! However, I really think the B.B.C. should have used a French actor to play Jean Francois Champollion and a Italian actor to play Giovanni Belzoni. I mean I just couldn't get used to hearing Jean Francois Champollion speaking with an English accent !!!! Although Elliot Cowan and Matthew Kelly are both excellent actors. A great pity this series has now been deleted. Egypt would have made a great Christmas present. If there is anyone out there who has a spare copy of Egypt please let me know.

This BBC documentary on ancient Egypt is both educational & hugely interesting. Narrated by Andrew Sachs (Manuel in Fawlty Towers), it focuses on the achievements of three great Egyptologists Howard Carter, Giovanni Belzoni & Jean Francois Champollion. Most people know of Carter's discovery of the virtually intact tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. Nearly all of the Pharaohs tombs had been plundered in antiquity by grave-robbers, even those in the so-called Valley Of The Kings where Tut was discovered. Not so many know of the Frenchman Champollion's obsessive quest to crack the code of the Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone. His obsession to understand this ancient civilisation eventually caused to him to leave his wife and child & travel to Egypt. He read as much as he possibly could of the hieroglyphs on its tombs & monuments until his health failed him & he died there. Fewer people still know that the Italian adventurer Belzoni opened up Ramesses The Great's fantastic monument at Nubia in southern-most Egypt. Named Abu Simbel, the entrance had been blocked up by centuries of wind-blown sand. Hewn out of the sandstone rock & fronted by four 60 feet high statues of Ramesses it is, unquestionably, one of the greatest & most beautiful archaeological monuments anywhere in the world. Belzoni (very well acted by Matthew Kelly) also discovered the tomb of Ramesses The Great's father Seti 1st, the largest & most lavishly decorated tomb of any Egyptian Pharoah. Belzoni knew that most Pharaohs tombs had been robbed & asked himself where would be the best place for a Pharoah to be buried where his tomb & its treasure wouldn't be found & robbed. He decided, quite brilliantly, that the place in the desert now known as The Valley Of The Kings was it. Unfortunately for those ancient Egyptian Pharoahs, Tutankhamen aside, they all were. The acting by all of the participants in this documentary & its filming is great. Abu Simbel is a very impressive ruin & using computer graphics it is shown as it may have looked more than 3000 years ago. It would have been a jaw-droppingly magnificent sight!. You do not necessarily need to have any interest in ancient Egyptian history to enjoy this documentary & I would recommend it to anyone.

I am extremely delighted to be writing this commentary on a well researched and well presented drama on Egypt.

I am also happy to have had the opportunity to participate in the making of the documentary if on a small scale. I enjoyed meeting Ferdinand Fairfax, a colourful man, all the exceptional crew and diligent staff on the filming which I am happy to have been selected for in the summer of 2005.

Thank you to everyone. Please do contact me if there are any other projects. I enjoyed this very much. Regards to everyone who participated.

Taymour

I have come here before fisnishing the whole series. Just to say to the maker.. that i salute you..you have open a whole new world to me..i cant explaine the trip it is giving to me..

I was not expecting to enjoy "Egypt" as much as I did - Egyptian history was never my thing. But the series started out well, with the relatively well-known story of Howard Carter and the discovery of King Tutankhamun and then got even better as it went on. If you'd told me that I would have been entranced by two hours of drama on the race in the 1820s to translate hieroglyphs I would have laughed - but that's exactly what the concise and intelligent scripts by Jonathan Rich that ended the series managed to achieve. I don't think there's another broadcaster in the world who would attempt something this bold, a series in which the educational content matches the entertainment value and which doesn't talk down to its audience. This is the BBC at its very best and I was delighted to learn that a 2-DVD set of the series will be out in February 2006. This is a series I will want to watch again, and savour.