Plot Synopsis

MUSEUM SECRETS REVEALED explores celebrated and obscure objects, artifacts, and relics that are hidden in the backrooms, basements and restricted areas of the greatest museums in the world, revealing some of history's most fascinating mysteries and tales. Each 60-minute episode features a different museum, including these locations in Season 1: the museums of Vatican City, which contain Raphael masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel, and tens of thousands of underexplored historical documents are distributed among nine museums -- with the Vatican Secret Archives having over 25 miles of bookshelves; the Louvre, once a royal palace and now arguably the greatest museum in the world, where every painting, sculpture, and work of art contains a secret about the tales of a murdered king, a mad artist, a delusional emperor, a vanishing lady named Mona Lisa, and much more; the archives of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, for which the episode highlights a 2,000-year-old baby mummy, uncovers the explosive function of a peculiar piece of ancient Islamic pottery, and unearths a missing dinosaur lost for decades within the museum's walls; and the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, where the museum's deepest vaults allow just a few lucky visitors to gaze into the eyes of long dead pharaohs, examine coffins of silver and gold, and study mummified cats, falcons, baboons, and more. Smithsonian Channel aired the U.S. premiere of this series on Monday, November 5, 2012 at 8pm ET/PT.
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On Monday, January 13, 2014 at 9pm ET/PT, Smithsonian Channel aired the U.S. premiere of Season 2, with an episode that visited the Bardo Museum in Tunisia, which houses relics from the Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods. Subsequent episodes in the second season featured: the Chateau of Versailles, a museum on the outskirts of Paris, which houses artifacts representing revolutionaries and royalty; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which houses many objects, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are charged with spiritual meaning; and many more museums around the world.