At Deir el-Medina he sees where the generations of builder, painters, sculptors and engineers who built the tombs lived with their families kept separate from the rest of the world.

From the wealth of archaeological evidence (scraps of cloth, fragments of wood, traces of paint) archaeologist have built up a detailed picture of the tomb builders' lives.

The builders were highly literate and thousands of examples of their writing on limestone and pottery have been uncovered giving detailed and intimate insights into ancient Egyptian life.

Arriving at the vibrantly decorated tombs at Beni Hasan he became disenchanted with the arid tracings he was instructed to produce and instead created beautiful watercolour renditions.

At 19, Carter was appointed site artist at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahri winning great acclaim with his newly acquired archaeological skill and was running the dig within 6 years.

Carter spent over a decade completing the excavation of the site before being gently pushed aside by the authorities and returning to a solitary existence in England where later he died leaving behind a magnificent archaeological legacy.

The Pharaoh Akhenaten is described as a revolutionary whose dangerous ideas would change politics, religion, art and language leading the nation to the brink of catastrophe.

Akhnaten left the ancient capital of Luxor to build a religious utopia in the desert to break from the past and honour his new monotheistic god.

Art works preserved at the site show unprecedented images of the royal family displaying humanistic emotions of affection and grief.

Ancient Egyptians also believed such rituals necessary for the annual flooding of the Nile and the rising of the sun and great temples such as the one at Dendera were built to facilitate this.

The temples were the engines of eternity built on massive scale to last forever as a route from the world of man to that of the gods with only the most privileged allowed access.

Ancient papyri bought on Cairo's black market in the 19th century however tell of an indecisive man unable even to choose between Tiye and Isis as his great queen.

The Romans marched into Egypt in 30 BC intent on turning it into an imperial province and bled the country dry to sustain the Empires extensive territories.

Ancient rituals were appropriated and transformed, including the Ptolomeic idea of monasticism, finally defeating the old gods by the mid-4th century when over half the Egyptian population had converted to Christianity and the rest were persecuted.

The last of believers in the old faith retreated to the Island of Philae, where the last Demotic hieroglyphs were carved in 394 AD, and when this bastion finally fell a 3000-year-old culture had been wiped out and its knowledge forgotten.