An Egyptian Pharaoh in a London Townhouse

This May, I visited Sir John Soane's museum in central London. John Soane was one of the most eminent British architects of the early 19th century, best known for the Bank of England building. At his home on Lincoln's Inn Fields, he assembled an enormous collection of art, antiquities, and curiosities. Shortly before his death in 1837, he bequeathed his house to the It has remained so ever since. Of all the tens of thousands of artifacts in Soane's museum, the oldest, most valuable, and most famous is the sarcophagus of Seti I. I was fortunate enough to see the sarcophagus on a private tour with visitor assistant Jonty Stern. Let's take a look. If you'd like to follow me around the corner, this is the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, who was a member of the 19th dynasty in ancient Egypt. The 19th dynasty makes him new kingdom. He's about 3,000 years old. 3,000 years old doesn't sound very new to us, but in Egyptian terms, that's a new kingdom. In terms of how did that get to be here in a basement in the London Borough of Camden? Sir John Soane bought these three buildings, demolished them, and rebuilt them. This is an amazing collection. As you go around, you're looking at a building built by Sir John Soane with a collection collected by Sir John Soane in an order that Sir John Soane put them in with instructions for us not to move anything. It's quite an extraordinary place. This was his favourite piece. It was his most expensive piece. To put it in context, in Soane's time, the average housekeeper would earn £10 a year. Number 14, Lincolns-in-the-Fields, cost £1,400 before we demolished it and rebuilt it. This thing was £2,000, so really expensive, more expensive than a five-storey house in a very desirable bit of London. This was pretty much the centre of their London. Our London is 1,500 plus square miles. Their London was 18.5 square miles. It was a much smaller London, but this was pretty much the centre of theirs as it is of our London, so a very expensive area. This had been discovered by a gentleman called Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who was a very exciting character. He was nearly seven feet tall. Nowadays, he would stick out because that's taller than most of us are today. The mean average height then was a lot lower than it is today, so he really looked like a giant. He was incredibly strong. He started out life as the son of a barber, which would have appealed to Soane because in Soane's so-called social circles, most people had had that sort of background. Soane was the son of a bricklayer. There's a wonderful portrait of Sir John Soane by Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was the son of a publican. He was actually born in a pub. Missy Soane was born in a pub. J. M. W. Turner, a great painter, a friend of theirs, was the son of a barber himself. That's the kind of world they were in. Belzoni was the son of a barber. He got a taste for adventure at a very young age. His father took him and his brother on holiday. They absolutely loved being on holiday. They'd never been on holiday before. They thought what an exciting place it was, came back home, and he and his brother said, should we just escape and go back and have another holiday there? They tried to work out where this place had been. Of course, their parents were tearing their hair out. These two of them had just gone off, and they decided to take themselves on a second holiday. That was his first adventure, really. Then he came over to England. Because he was very strong, they got him to appear in lots of shows where he'd have a big metal harness strapped to him, and he'd carry seven men. He was very strong. He could do that. People would cheer. As soon as they knew Belzoni was going to be in a performance, oh, it's Belzoni. He's going to be carrying seven men. Absolutely wonderful. He got a bit fed up with that because he thought, actually, I do have a brain. I can do things other than just carrying seven men. He became a hydraulics engineer. He became absolutely brilliant at that. He put on a wonderful show once with fountains going and all sorts of things. I'm sure we'd all have loved it. I'm afraid people heard, Belzoni, excellent. He'll be carrying seven men. I'm really looking forward to that. They turned up, and they saw a lot of boring old water flying about, and they booed. He was very hurt. He realised, I can't stay in England. If I stay here, the only thing anybody will ever pay me to do is to carry seven men around and look at him. Isn't he tall? Isn't he strong? He thought, I actually need to go to another country where I'm not known. He went over to Egypt. Being a hydraulics engineer, he did a wonderful water wheel. Once he was there, he thought, actually, I'm quite interested in this country as a country. He became fascinated by ancient Egypt. He was a very good artist. He actually drew some pictures of various places which included hieroglyphic inscriptions. Those hadn't yet been translated. He actually managed to make them look absolutely accurate. You can actually read the hieroglyphs that he's put in his drawings, even though he couldn't himself read it because he's reproduced them so accurately. So a very interesting man. He managed to discover several tombs that nobody else had managed to discover. On one occasion, he was in the Valley of the Kings, and it was raining. It doesn't rain very often there, but it did on this occasion. The water came down the hill in a rather odd way. He looked at it, and he said, there's something under there. That's because of his training in hydraulics. There's something under there. The next day, he got the men to start digging because he said, that is the entrance to the tomb of Pharaoh Setu I. They said, you do realise that's only a few yards away from the tomb of Ramesses I? He said, yes, I know, but I'm telling you, that's where it is. So they started digging. Nothing happened. They said, we did tell you there's nothing there. He said, come back tomorrow and carry on digging. We haven't gone deep enough, and they did. Eventually, there was a little hole, and a small member of the party went in, came out, eyes ablaze. They had indeed discovered the tomb of Setu I. So that's how it came to be uncovered. He was right. When he got in there, water did play a role in it. The ancient Egyptians were trying to get one up on tomb robbers, which, let's face it, is what and the water went into a sump. So there was actually a little river inside the tomb, and the sarcophagus was on one side, and you had to cross it. I mean, they'd done everything to try to get one up on people in the future, but then he managed to get one up, and they were getting one up. He worked out how to remove this very heavy artefact. He had a whole team of men with him. Of course, he himself was very strong. He got taken out of there. The Egyptian government at the time were fine about it coming out of the country, and it got taken over to this country, and it was given to the British Museum, but on the understanding, well, I know you haven't paid for it yet, but obviously you will, so we'll give it to you now, and then you'll pay for it later. That was in 1817 when it came out of the ground. In 1824, it was still sitting in the British Museum. They still haven't paid for it, and the British Museum's trustees were split in two on the issue, and the reason is, in those days, if you wanted to see the British Museum, you had to write to them, may I see your museum, and what is your job title, and if they didn't like the answer, no, you're not getting in here, but everybody had to pay through their taxes for the British Museum, and there was a bit of disquiet because poorer people felt, well, I'm having to fund all these rich people going around the British Museum. I'm not allowed to go myself. They'd only just got the Elgin marbles, and half the trustees said, look, if we get what they call Belzoni Sarcophagus at the time, if we get the Belzoni Sarcophagus as well, there'll be riots in the streets of London. We can't do it. The other half said, bother all of that. This is the most important Egyptian artefact anywhere in the world outside Egypt. We must have it. Battle lines were drawn, and they were literally cutting off the trustees, and then there was a dispute between Henry Salt, the Englishman who'd sent Mr Belzoni out there, and Mr Belzoni himself, and then he died, and then Mrs Belzoni got involved in the dispute, and then who actually owns it, and in Belzoni's name is even written actually on the sarcophagus, we think probably by Mrs Belzoni, because the way that the letter N is written, we think that's probably Sarah Belzoni being proprietorial, saying actually this was my husband who discovered it. So there are all these disputes going on. Soane saw an opportunity, and he had a tenant called Mr Tyndall, who's at number 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and he said words to the effect of, Tyndall old chap, I understand you're one of the trustees of the British Museum. He said, oh yes I am actually. I know you've got the Belzoni Sarcophagus. I'm going to give you £2,000. Please don't come back and say to me, £2,300, let's haggle £2,000. Here's the date by which you've got to agree. If you don't agree, I'm taking the offer off the table. Good morning to you, and off he went. And he knew that they were just so sick of the whole thing that they were really pleased for it, you know, the idea of it disappearing and the problem going away with it. So it was taken away from there. A team of very strong young men had to carry it from there to here. They had to bash the north wall down. It had to be brought in. It had to be swung around. It had to be lowered. The north wall had to be re-erected. The pieces had to be put back together again. All of that was extra cost on top of the £2,000. So it's one of the most expensive things he owned in his life. Certainly in terms of the artefacts here, it's the most expensive artefact that he ever got. But he had to have it. He'd already laid this space out. The whole of this floor is supposed to be death-themed and dark and creepy, but punctuated by shafts of natural light. So you've got light coming all the way from the heavens right down into the underworld. That's the idea of it. He'd already decided that this should be the largest shaft of light, and there should be something very dramatic and very death-y here. And what he originally had was something called a crater, K-R-A-T-E-R. It was from Apulia, which is in Italy, but it used not to be. It was in effect in ancient Greece. And we still have that crater, and it's a lovely piece, but it's not very big. And I've seen a watercolour of what it looked like here, and it wasn't right when you had this very tall stick thing with it on top, and this huge space with really nothing going on around it. So when he heard about the sarcophagus, he had to have it. Thematically, what's more death-y than that? And it fits perfectly into a space that he'd already created, almost as if at the back of his mind he maybe guessed that something like this would come onto the market at some point. So that's how it came to be here, and that's why it's got Belzoni written across it. And it was interesting. At that point, they hadn't yet cracked, even though this is 1824 when he got it. It's two years after Lucius Champollion cracks the code of hieroglyphs. They hadn't yet translated all of this. Sem guessed which pharaoh it was, and he was only out by one pharaoh. There were 300 or so pharaohs in ancient Egypt. I mean, by tradition, I have to say, by tradition we call them pharaohs, just in case anyone's an Egyptologist. A pharaoh comes from Per-A-A. Per is house, A-A is great. It's one of those languages where the adjective comes after the noun sort of thing. And in the later period, they did just start to say, I'm not just the Nesu kin, I am the Per-A-A. I am the great house. And then Jewish people got that word pharaoh from Per-A-A, and then we got our word pharaoh from that. Most of them didn't call themselves that. Now I've got that out of the way, I'm going to go back to calling them all pharaohs, because traditionally we do. So of the 300 or so pharaohs, Sem was out by one, which is pretty darn good. He obviously had a feeling for Egyptology. And I saw one of my colleagues, Dusty, one of his books down once, and he was a book on hieroglyphs, so he was obviously very interested. So in a nutshell, that's how this actually comes to be here. We'll examine the sarcophagus in more detail after a brief word about this video's sponsor. Are you tired of mindlessly scrolling on your phone? If you'd rather spend your time online exploring quality content, check out Scribd. For just $11.99 a month, Scribd gives you access to a huge library of enriching content, everything from ebooks and magazines to audio books and podcasts. In fact, the audio version of my own book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants, can be found on Scribd, along with thousands of other books on history. Recently, I've been rereading David McCullough's Monumental Biography of Truman, and I keep adding new books recommended by Scribd to my reading list. You can get a two-month trial for only $0.99 at try.scribd.com slash toldenstone. That's two whole months to test drive the world's most fascinating library for less than $1. Just go to try.scribd.com slash toldenstone and start reading, listening, and learning today. So the language we see written all the way around the sarcophagus, both outside and in, and in fact you would see it on the lid as well if we still had the lid, which we don't, broken into bits, some bits would have disappeared, but anyway, the language is ancient Egyptian, which could be written in various ways. The oldest and most beautiful form of it is hieroglyphs, and that's what we have here. Now, for a long time hieroglyphs were a complete mystery, and then the Rosetta tablet was discovered in 1798. It was part of somebody's house, they didn't realise how important it was, and it was discovered, the French got it, the English then got it from the French, and it has the same lot of information written three ways. It's written in ancient Greek, and people in the late 18th century could read ancient Greek, so that was easy. Then the other two are actually the same language, ancient Egyptian, but written in two different ways. One is called Demotic, and that was the latest way of writing ancient Egyptian, and it's more the kind of writing we have. It doesn't look particularly pretty, but it's very functional, you can write quickly, and the other person can read what you've written. It's practical, but maybe not very beautiful to look at. And it was also in the same language, ancient Egyptian, but using this much prettier, but perhaps less practical, form of writing, hieroglyphs. So the fact that the same thing was written three times over was very helpful to linguists. And one might think, oh well, they must have cracked it that very year, and they didn't. It took until 1822 for it to be cracked by a brilliant Frenchman called Jean-François Champollion, who's particularly impressive because he hadn't been out of France for most of his life, but he had a knack for trying to work out what ancient people thought. Various ancient texts were brought to him, he'd look at them, he managed to work all sorts of things out. One would have to say he was standing on the shoulders of other people who had already done some work, both in England and in France, and also in Scandinavia. But one can't take away from him that it was he who finally cracked that. Now, why did it take such a long time from the late 18th century up until 1822? Well, in fact, there's a section here which helps to show why it's so difficult. You probably notice here, there is a kind of wriggly line, and here you've got three wriggly lines, and here you've got three wriggly lines. You think, oh well, that's the same symbol, so presumably once you've cracked that one symbol it's always going to be the same thing. These are perfect examples of the same thing being three entirely different things. So hieroglyphs are sometimes alphabetic, so that means you see a symbol and hear a sound, just like in our language you write the letter t, you hear t, you write the letter n, you hear t, sorry, you write the letter n, you hear n in your head. And what's happened here is that one of them is exactly that, and it's that one. So you write that and that's their letter n, so the sound you hear in your head is n. So then you'd think, well here presumably it's n, n, n, and it isn't, it's mu. That word means what it looks like, water. Mu is the word for water. So sometimes hieroglyphs can be symbolic, and on that occasion they are. How about the one in the middle? Is that n, n, n, or is it mu? It is neither. On this occasion it's something called a determinative, and a determinative is something that reinforces what you've just seen. It actually, funnily enough, makes more sense to us in the 21st century than perhaps it would have done in the 20th century when people were looking at this, because we have developed the emoji. So if I wrote to you and I said, it was lovely to see you today, and I put a smiley face, you would know that you read the first bit, you don't actually pronounce the smiley face, it just reinforces what I've just said. And in fact a determinative did exactly the same thing. So on that occasion the thing above is a pot, somebody's pouring something, what is pouring? It's a watery thing to do. So that determinative is to reinforce the liquidiness of liquid, as it were, liquidiness of pouring. So that same symbol is three different things. Now that, you can imagine trying to crack that, most languages don't do that, that's very complicated. There are some symbols which are purely alphabetic, some are purely determinative, some are purely symbolic, but you do get ones like that which are actually all three. Very, very complicated. So, and then another example of a determinative is something you can see just at the end here. You've got the god Kebesenef, and at the very end there's a seated figure. The seated figure is a determinative for a god, because what is Kebesenef? He's one of these. So you write it, but you don't pronounce it. Just like, lovely to see you, smiley face, you don't pronounce a smiley face. It's the same thing. So that's a determinative, so that makes it complicated. There are other things that made it very complicated. If you mention a god or a goddess it would be very rude to shut him in the middle of a sentence, him or her in the middle of a sentence, or at the end of a sentence. Much politer, much more honour if you put him or her at the beginning of the sentence. That meant sometimes breaking their own rules of grammar about where a noun should appear, because this isn't any noun. This is a holy noun. This is a god or a goddess. So that's called honorific transposition. You've actually moved things around because of the fact you're dealing with a deity. Now all of those sorts of things made it very complicated. There were blind alias that they went down as well. Some of the early people looking at hieroglyphs, they did realise that sometimes it's alphabetic, sometimes it isn't, and they felt that the alphabetic side of it was only used for foreign names like Cleopatra. They would never use it for their own names. And it was Champollion who worked out that yes, actually sometimes it was used for their own names, and in fact the name that he managed to work out was Ramesses. That's the first Egyptian name that he worked out that was actually written in an alphabetic way, and in fact that's happened to the pharaoh who is in here. And there is his name, Seti Merienpetah. It is actually alphabetic at this point, but even then it does it in a way that we wouldn't do it. So it starts in the middle of the word, and you can see a seated figure. This time it's a seated figure you do pronounce, and that's Set. To his right there are two feathers, that's E. To the right and above is something that looks like a pair of skis to me, that's Meri. The thing under it we've met before is a wriggly line, N, Seti Merien. Then you go back to the beginning of the cartouche, and at the top left there's a kind of box and that's Pe. At the bottom there's a half-bread roll thing and that's Te. And then there's a twisty bit of rope which is Pe, Seti Merienpetah, that's his name. So it is written alphabetically, but perhaps not quite the way we would write something alphabetically, but basically each symbol there gives a sound which is what an alphabet is. So this is why this is so complicated. So that's hieroglyphs as a means of writing in Egyptian language. Now as far as the religious side of this, I think a very good place to look at is here. The Book of the Gates exists for a to answer three questions they had. One of them is where is the Duat, the afterlife? Above us or below us or where is it? Another is we all know that the world is a flat disk, but the Nile doesn't rip off the edge of the world. Well if it's a flat disk it should, shouldn't it? So what's going on there? And the other is the sun goes down at night and he comes up a few hours later in a completely different place in the sky. Why is that? What's he been doing for 12 hours? The Book of the Gates answers all of those questions in their own inimitable way. So the idea, not that they would have had these words, but the world is a flat sort of thing, a bit like a pancake. There are mountains at the very edge of the world and the Duat, the afterlife, is like a doughnut. So obviously we wouldn't have had doughnuts then, but it's like a doughnut shape around the world. So you can't see your loved ones because they are here, they're not above, they're not below, they're here, but they're beyond the mountains. That's where the Duat is. The sun goes down behind the mountains into the Duat and gets taken along very slowly in a boat, which is what's actually happening just down there. And he gets turned into a sort of human figure but with an animal-like head and a disk above his head. The rays of the sun you can see curled all the way around him. They've turned into a snake. There are lots of snakes in the Book of the Gates. This particular one is called Mehen and that's specifically the rays of the sun when they get turned into a snake and it's called Mehen. And then a few hours later he and Mehen merge back together again and turn into that very bright object that we mustn't look at because it hurts our eyes. So that's what happens to the sun. And why doesn't the Nile drip off the edge of the world? Well obviously the water hits the mountains and can't go any further and that's why it doesn't drip off the edge of the world. So perfectly logical, it sort of answered all their questions. And as far as the Book of the Gates, can we see an example of actual gates here? Yes we can. Every time you see this upside down L-shape full of some really rather nasty looking spears, you wouldn't fancy trying to force your way through that gate. That is one of the gates. And in fact the first sarcophagus to have the whole of the Book of the Gates on, as far as we know, is this one. This is why this is one of the most important Egyptian artefacts anywhere in the world outside Egypt because it actually has the whole thing there. There was a pharaoh, two pharaohs before, set in first. He was called Horemheb and part of the Book of the Gates is there in his tomb. But to have the whole thing on one sarcophagus, this, as far as we know, was the first time that happened. And it's why the hieroglyphs are written fairly densely because you've actually got really a lot of text. I've got a copy of the Book of the Gates turned into a book. It is actually quite a thick book and you've got the whole thing. If we had the lid plus this, that would be the whole thing. And if you're wondering why we don't have the lid, interestingly it wasn't grave robbers, it was actually a high priest who broke it. A few hundred years after Seti died, Egypt was going through an economic sort of wobble. There was a lot of grave robbing going on and the mummies would be wrapped up and very often there was gold and silver actually on the bodies. Now the thing is, anybody caught in there is going to be executed so you're not going to hang about. You're going to try to get in, steal what you want to steal, get out as quickly as possible. So if there's a mummy wrapped up like that and there's some gold here, the easiest way to do it is chop the arm off. You just chop the arm off. Or there's some silver here and the easiest way of dealing with it is chop the head off. You just do that because you want to be in and out as quickly as you can. Now in their religion, if a body is desecrated like that, even if you've been out of your body for hundreds of years, you'll feel it in the afterlife. You'll feel it in the duos and it'll be uncomfortable. So it was very important for the bodies not to be attacked and there was a high priest who felt, well if they get the gold and the silver that's too bad. I really don't want them hurting any of those mummified pharaohs. So he got a team of people to break open the lids of 40 sarcophagi of which Seti was one and the mummies were taken out and they were taken to a cache halfway up a mountain. We still don't know how on earth they managed to get all these things to this place halfway up a mountain but that must be why he chose it. The very fact that you're not looking for it there, you're not going to assume they're going to be able to move them up there. I have to say Soane didn't know that. So we know something Soane didn't know. All he knew is Belzoni discovered it, it was empty when he discovered it and that's the story. But we now know because it was late in the 19th century after Soane died that that story was uncovered. So we're learning new things all the time so we now know why this was empty at the time, why there were a few fragments of the lid on the ground and the rest of it had disappeared. It wasn't grave robbers, it was actually that high priest who did it. So we're standing here above the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I with a very interesting glass case put around him that was put there by our second curator. We are on curator number 13 at the moment, Dr Bruce Boucher. Curator number two was Joseph Bonomi who was an Egyptologist and I have to say in Soane's time he didn't mind people touching the sarcophagus. In the time of curator number one George Bailey who got here in 1837 after Soane died, he didn't mind touching the sarcophagus or touching anything. Joseph Bonomi did mind. He realised that English thumbs were actually damaging the hieroglyphs and the wonderful blue colour they used to be in every hieroglyph had come away and he put that case around. So the case itself is now a bit of history. Joseph Bonomi's brother was Ignatius Bonomi, one of the first great railway architects in the country and you can almost see hints of the early railway period, kind of early 1866 period on the actual case. So it itself is historically interesting but of course nowhere near as as what's inside it, the actual Egyptian sarcophagus. So it's the sarcophagus of Seti I who was the second member of the 19th dynasty. What happened is Tutankhamun, the famous boy king, died very young. There were children but unfortunately they had previous dynasties too. So somebody called Ai took over as the pharaoh, didn't have any children. Somebody called Horemheb took over as the pharaoh. We don't think Horemheb was relating actually to the previous members of the 18th dynasty or to anybody in the 19th dynasty. He was a very brilliant man but he felt that there needed to be a new dynasty so he basically founded the 19th dynasty by getting somebody who was a brilliant military man, had done a lot of work protecting Egypt and more importantly had a son and a grandson already living. So you'd have a whole new dynasty and that man was Ramesses and he only lasted for about just over a year and then he died and his son was Seti I. So it's he really who solidified this new 19th dynasty and his son is Ramesses II who's probably the most famous of the 300 or so pharaohs in ancient Egypt. And because Ramesses is such a big name we often forget about Seti but he did some wonderful things himself. There was a whole area of Egypt which had been lost to the Egyptians in the time of Akhenaten who was Tutankhamun's father and that wasn't recovered by any of the next few pharaohs. Even people like Horemheb who were brilliant military strategists didn't manage to recover it, Seti did. There were a lot of huge buildings built in his time and there's some really very impressive things. Bearing in mind Seti had a much shorter reign than that of his much more famous son. Ramesses II ended up living to his 90s which is incredibly unusual. It's difficult to be precise about years in those days because of calendrical differences between them and now and various things like that. But he was pharaoh for roughly a decade-ish, maybe a tiny bit longer but not one of the biggest reigns in history. But he managed to achieve quite a bit and the main thing was just settling this new 19th dynasty in. So that's whose sarcophagus it is. It's just over nine feet long, it's made of calcite which isn't transparent but it is translucent. So if you shine the torch through it you get this wonderful red glow and you see the hieroglyphs almost dancing around in this angry red glow. It's absolutely amazing when people put a candle inside it or shine a torch through it or something like that. It's written inside and outside in hieroglyphs and this is the story of the Book of the Gates. One of the key figures in the Book of the Gates is the goddess Newt and you can see Newt lying down. You can actually see her better from up here than down there. The woman lying down at the bottom of the sarcophagus, she eats the earth every day and she gives birth to the earth every day. So the kind of person you want to have with you in the afternoon. So the coffee would have been above that, there would have been a lot more great goods above that. The reason they had to have so many great goods is like every religion, there are all sorts of regulations that you mustn't fall foul of and terrible things will happen if you do. And one of them was that in the afterlife the gods will make you work forever. Nobody wants that. You've had decades of work down on earth, you want to relax a bit when you're up there. So if you can get somebody to come up with a wooden image of you, it doesn't have to be your height, it can be quite small, but it's going to be well done, it's going to look like you. Put that in there, the gods will be fooled and they'll make that work forever and you can laze around in the afterlife. If your loved ones forget to put that, it's called a shabti, they forget to put the shabti in, you have just condemned yourself to everlasting work. So they're all sought for things like that, which is why it's so important to get the right things in there. So you'd have had the sarcophagus, then you had the coffin and you had layers around the coffin and you had various goods like the shabti and so on and then you had the lid on top. So however heavy it is now, it's about two and a half tons now, it would have been a darn sight heavier at the time. By the time Soane got it, no mummy, no shabti, no lid, it was literally as it is now and even so it was still very heavy. It took quite a large team of people to carry it from the British Museum round to here and in fact this wall here is the very wall that had to be smashed down in order to bring it in. Then it had to be swung around, it had to be lowered, this wall had to be re-erected, the pieces had to be put back on, it was a major operation and all of that was extra cost on top of the two thousand pounds that the actual piece itself had cost him. So a very, very expensive item indeed and his favourite item out of the 53,000 items there are in this incredible collection. So lots of images of death on the sarcophagus, the gods of the boiling lake that you can see just here, that thing that looks like a flag is the word Necher for god, three together is Necheru, gods, the cross is Imi, burning, the gods of the boiling lake, so like everything here it's death themed and in fact this sarcophagus isn't the only death themed thing down here, this whole floor is about death but from different cultures, different time periods, you've got Pluto, completely different time period looking after us because we're down here in the underworld and just around the corner we've got lots of wonderful pieces from the Roman era, lots of scenery urns and so on and here we have a capable which you might think has nothing to do with death whatsoever, well on the 30th of January 1649 when King Charles I stepped out of the balcony to be executed and he gave his famous speech, I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance may be, no disturbance in the world and so on, he would have stood very near this very thing unless he makes a hair stand up on the back of your neck thinking about it, so this whole floor, most of the items here have some link with death but there is nothing more deathy than the sarcophagus, that's sort of the king of all the wonderful artifacts there are down here in the crypt area of Sir John Soames Museum which we very much hope you'll come to visit if you're in London sometime, so thanks very much indeed for watching.