Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Review: Lost Cities of the Ancients BBC 2 (UK Television)

A reveiw of Lost Cities of the Ancients, a TV programme on UK's BBC2: "The main mistake Pharaoh Ramesses the Great made was erecting his capital complete with hundreds of statues to himself in the Nile delta. The course of the river in any delta keeps changing, and today's prosperous capital becomes tomorrow's ghost town. The documentary evidence all pointed to this capital, Piramesse, being built on the westernmost branch of the Nile, but Montaigne, an Egyptologist working in the 1920s, found the architectural remains of the city well east of that point. The mystery of Piramesse being found in the wrong place was restated so often in Lost Cities Of The Ancients that I felt like I was attending a lecture on architecture for thickos."

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