In the first part of the series, Joann explores how people lived during this time, from the tightly-packed houses and villages of the common people, to the clothes they wore and the food they ate. She discovers the ordinary Egyptians' love of poetry and their enthusiasm for interior design, as well as what it was like working in the most famous cemetery on Earth.

This episode reveals a strange and mysterious world - the ancient Egyptian afterlife. To them life was just a dress rehearsal for the perfect afterlife they were trying to reach. Joann clambers into rarely visited tombs, explores a treasure trove of long-buried objects and examines spectacular mummies to discover just why the Egyptians spent a fortune preparing for death - and what they hoped to find when they got there.

In 1822, Jean-François Champollion became the first person to decipher hieroglyphs in over a thousand years. Now, a new generation of Egyptologists is learning more about the people who wrote them.

Egyptologist Elizabeth Frood takes us back a century to experience the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb exactly as it happened, all thanks to the colourisation of the original photos and film.