Egypt, land of the pyramids, mighty monuments constructed in the early days of history. Monuments that endure to this day attracting visitors across the world. Many visitors come to Egypt to see one pyramid in particular, the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the most celebrated man-made constructions of all time.
Of the seven, only the Great Pyramid of Cheops survives, but history and archaeology are able to tell us the stories of all seven, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos of Alexandria.
For the first time in some 3,000 years, viewers see the Seven Wonders restored to their original glory.
This is the extraordinary story of how a small metal disc is rewriting the epic saga of how civilisation first came to Europe, 3600 years ago.
When grave robbers ransacked a Bronze Age tomb in Germany, they had no idea that they had unearthed the find of a lifetime. But they knew that it was worth selling. It was a small bronze disc of exquisite design. So they contacted the archaeologist Harald Meller, offering to sell it to him for £300,000.
Meller went deep into the criminal underworld and, after a police sting, he got his disc. It depicted the sun, the moon and the stars. This suggested an understanding of the heavens greater than that of the first great civilisations, like Egypt. Could it possibly be real?
After exhaustive tests, the disc was declared genuine. Then a team of crack scientists pieced together what it meant. What emerged is a true marvel.
This disc, it seems, is a Bronze Age Bible, combining an advanced understanding of the stars with some of the most sophisticated religious imagery of the age. In intellectual achievement and also age, it surpasses anything yet found in Egypt or Greece. It seems that civilisation had already dawned in Europe.
Excavations underneath the stones have revealed artifacts, like antler horns, carbon dated at 4000 years ago. Bodies found buried nearby are of the same age. This rules out the Druids, as well as the Romans who followed them. This even pre-dates immigrant settlers from Europe. That leaves a primative people known as Ancient Britons, who lived at the start of the bronze age. Great precision was used in assembling the 15,000 tons of rock into circles. Did they have the know-how?
Examining the stones, the large ones come from just 20 miles away and could have been dragged there by the Ancient Britons. But what of the smaller Bluestones? Investigation shows that they are found 200 miles away in S.W. Wales. Did they have the ability to carry these stones over water for that distance? The recent discovery of an ancient boat made from a log carrying quarried stones, points to the answer. Several of these boats lashed together and covered with a platform could transport the Bluestones. Investigators using manpower and simple wooden scaffolding have shown they had the technology at the time to erect Stonehenge.
The big remaining question is why did they build it? People who study architecture say it was probably a place of worship. Towering over the people as it did, it inspired a sense of something larger than themselves. The closing segment investigated a mass grave of skeletons found in the area. Using tests on the enamel of the teeth, scientists are able to determine where these people grew up. It was in Wales, the location of the Bluestones.
An archaeologist searching for a Roman road is amazed to instead discover an entire Roman town that had been lost and forgotten for thousands of years.
Hitler’s Hidden City is a subterranean adventure under the streets of Berlin, following the work of a team of German archaeologists and historians exposing and exploring the last remaining structures of the Third Reich.
In August 2005, a History Channel expedition team made a shocking discovery more than two miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean: large missing pieces of Titanic’s bottom, more than 1,500 feet from the rest of the ship, so well preserved that even the original red paint is still clearly visible.
These pieces were little known and never examined for their role in the sinking, and they tell a new and potentially more terrifying story of Titanic’s final moments, rewriting the script that had previously been taken as fact. Relive the disaster, the history, and the deep-sea search for new clues in high-definition in Titanic’s Final Moments: Missing Pieces.
The Mystery of Chaco Canyon examines the deep enigmas presented by the massive prehistoric remains found in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the summation of 20 years of research. The film reveals that between 850 and 1150 AD, the Chacoan people designed and constructed massive ceremonial buildings in a complex celestial pattern throughout a vast desert region. Aerial and time lapse footage, computer modeling, and interviews with scholars show how the Chacoan culture designed, oriented and located its major buildings in relationship to the sun and moon. Pueblo Indians, descendants of the Chacoan people, regard Chaco as a place where their ancestors lived in a sacred past. Pueblo leaders speak of the significance of Chaco to the Pueblo world today.
The film challenges the notion that Chaco Canyon was primarily a trade and redistribution center. Rather it argues that it was a center of astronomy and cosmology and that a primary purpose for the construction of the elaborate Chacoan buildings and certain roads was to express astronomical interests and to be integral parts of a celestial patterning.
While the Chacoans left no written text to help us to understand their culture, their thoughts are preserved in the language of their architecture, roads and light markings. Landscape, directions, sun and moon, and movement of shadow and light were the materials used by the Chacoan architects and builders to express their knowledge of an order in the universe.
Seven years ago, on his third trip to the Black Sea, Dr. Robert Ballard discovered a miraculously well-preserved Byzantine shipwreck, but his team could only take pictures. Now, Ballard returns with state-of-the-art technology and a revolutionary $1.5 million robot known as “Hercules” to excavate two shipwrecks for the first time ever, including one of the most pristine ancient vessels ever found. Ballard and his team have only two weeks, so they must work in perfect precision on their hunt for the Ghost Ships of the Black Sea.
The Pyramid Code is a documentary series of 5 parts that explores the pyramid fields and ancient temples in Egypt as well as ancient megalithic sites around the world looking for clues to matriarchal consciousness, ancient knowledge and sophisticated technology in a Golden Age. The series is based on the extensive research done in 23 trips to Egypt and 50 other countries around the world by Dr. Carmen Boulter in the Graduate Division of Educational Research at the University of Calgary.
The first episode titled “The Band of Peace” focuses on six different pyramid sites. They follow the Nile River and evidence points to the fact that the river itself was next to the pyramids at the time they were built than where it is today. Over time the Nile has migrated to the east, thus putting the river further from the pyramids than when they were built.
The Band of Peace is the area in which six different sites sit, among them the Great Pyramid at Giza. One scholar insists the pyramids were not built by slaves. So who actually built these structures? Although they are long gone, the three pyramids at Giza each had a top layer of smooth stones over the stones that we see today. One was red, one was black, and one was white.
The series changes the way the pyramids and the ancient past was taught in school. While a sarcophagus may be inside a pyramid, with no mummy ever discovered inside any pyramid the past conclusion that they were built to house the remains of pharaohs is discounted.
The pyramids might have been energy conductors that transmitted energy to affect human consciousness around the world. Sound like Science Fiction? Possibly. But the new scholars of today do not discount that theory. The five episodes bring up a new way of looking at the ancients, and completely discount our previous thoughts on the people of ancient times. It is a fascinating premise that today’s historians are checking into.
Martin Shaw takes a fresh look at one of the most famous war stories of them all. The actor, himself a pilot, takes to the skies to retrace the route of the 1943 raid by 617 Squadron which used bouncing bombs to destroy German dams. He sheds new light on the story as he separates the fact from the myth behind this tale of courage and ingenuity.
Using the 1955 movie The Dam Busters as a vehicle to deconstruct the raid, he tries to piece together a picture of perhaps the most daring attack in the history of aviation warfare.
Along the way, Shaw hears from the last RAF veteran of the raid, as well as a German survivor of the tsunami which resulted from the Moehne
From the moment that Allied forces established the first beachhead in Normandy on D-Day, the end of the war in Europe was in sight. But although many soldiers joked about being in ‘Berlin by Christmas’, tenacious German resistance soon brought home the realisation that there were to be no quick victories. It was a nearly a year before the defeat of Nazi Germany was complete and Hitler’s Third Reich lay in ruins – a year of murderous struggle in the hedgerows of the bocage, exhilaration at the liberation of Paris, tragedy in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden and panic as the Wehrmacht stunned the Allies with a full-blooded offensive in the Battle of the Bulge.
Discovery Channel documentary about Brian Boru and Ireland during the Viking Age.
During the chaos and destruction of WWII, ordinary men and women from all walks of life were thrown into fearsome, real-life situations worthy of any Hollywood movie — the only difference is that this series every story is true. Ordinary GIs and US Air Force and Navy personnel suddenly found themselves flying against the Japanese in China, jungle fighting in Burma and being dropped by submarine on enemy coasts at midnight. Each fifty-two minute story gives the viewer a clear view of the historical context, the strategic objective, and the tactical effort made by flyers, sailors and foot-soldiers — often in the most oppressive and life threatening situations — to win victory from the enemy.
In the last months of World War II, American troops discovered a top-secret facility in Germany with an advanced fighter aircraft in the form of bat wings. If Nazi engineers had had more time, would this jet have ultimately changed the outcome of the war? In this National Geographic documentary to rebuild an aircraft discovered in a secret German over the last months of the Second World War - the Horten 229.
World War I in Color is a documentary made with the cooperation of the Imperial War Museum, designed to make the Great War come alive for a 21st-century audience. The events of 1914-18 are authoritatively narrated by Kenneth Branagh, who presents the military and political overview, while interviews with historians add different perspectives. The human cost is conveyed by moving interviews with the now very elderly survivors, and by extracts from letters and memoirs.
