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Lost Cities Of The Ancients (BBC Programme)

Mighty_Emperor

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New series on BBC2 running this week starting tonight:

9:00 pm

Lost Cities of the Ancients

The Vanished Capital of the Pharaoh: A journey to discover the lost city of Piramesse. This magnificent ancient capital was built 3000 years ago by the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great.

Hmmmmm Beeb site is messing up so more details in a mo but:

Tuesday:The Lambeyeque people in Egypt
Wednesday: Hattusha - the Hittite capital (where the photo of me on a green sotne as taken).
 
Good start with a genuinely interesting tale - no need to create some kind of false mystery to solve as a narrative device (although I thought the annoying bit at the start with the man writing words in his notepad was leading to that). Excellent detective work (if mad in its scale - I'll just plot all the ancient rivers flowing through the Nile and then use pottery to date them) to solve the mystery and provide an explanation for why the city moved.

Also little use for annoying tricks as it was so jam packed with information that the story didn't need padding (and it probably wouldn't work if you dumbed it down). The computer reconstrucitons, based on the sruveys, all slotted in really well and helped expand our understanding.
 
Wanted to see it, but was frittering away my time at the card tables... :(
 
minus points for use of "holy grail" within the first five minutes.

computer reconstructions were excellent. Helped get an impression of the scale of the settltement - too often one thinks of egyptian cities just in terms of temples and palaces, but it was good to have an idea of how vast the working class areas were - and the upper class in their riverside villas (plus ca change)

why did they have people dragging stones across the desert - the egyptians had wheeled transport (chariots and all that), couldn't they have used carts to carry some of the stones?

as for the mystery - well i had that sussed within 5 minutes - if the nile silts up on a regular basis and you've got all these pre-fab buildings then if the river moves, the city moves.

hope the next one is better, i doubt it - they seem to come off a TV production line.
 
Might have to check this out tonight. After watching Horizon from a very young age, I'm used to liberal use of the term "Holy Grail" and, 25 minutes in, the inevitable: "Just when they were about to give up, they made suprising discovery..."
 
I found tonights episode very interesting and I learnt a lot about something I hadn't heared of before.

One problem was that they appeared to construct an entire theory on scant evidence but then spend the rest of the episode with the narrator talking as if it were historical fact.

Very interesting though.
 
Very interesting program - a lot of conjecture, but the archealogical evidence on it's own was fascinating.
 
I suspect they can't really show the length and breadth of the evidence as you'd need to run the show over months.

It was another good one. I have seen a documentary on the coastal civilisations in Peru that were devastated by El Nino and it is interesting to see the problems it caused inland too.

I have to say my favourite bit was at the start and was one of those stirring adventurer moments - riding into a valley where few whitemen have been before and then realising the hills are actually pyramids.
 
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