Civilisations Archives

Civilisations episode 4 – The Eye of Faith

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 3, 2020 / By HDclump

Civilisations episode 4 – The Eye of Faith: Professor Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Yet there are fundamental problems, which all religions share, in making god or gods visible in the human world. How, and at what cost, do you make the unseen, seen? Beneath all works of religious art there always lies conflict and risk. And the result is often iconoclasm – the destruction of works of art – which Mary believes can lead on to new forms of […]

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Immortal Egypt episode 4 – Invasion

History / 3 minutes of reading / January 30, 2020 / By HDclump

Immortal Egypt episode 4 – Invasion: In the final episode, Joann discovers how Egypt‘s enemies exploited a country weakened by internal strife, ultimately leading to its destruction. Joann leaves Egypt and journeys south to Sudan where she finds the remarkable story of the forgotten Nubian kings. For a century, they ruled Egypt from their southern homeland, even building their own pyramids to bury their kings. Back in upper Egypt, Joann finds the next group of invaders, the Saites, discovering how they had taken the Egyptian tradition of mummification to new extremes by preserving millions of animals. Finally in

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Immortal Egypt episode 3 – Zenith

History / 3 minutes of reading / January 29, 2020 / By HDclump

Immortal Egypt episode 3 – Zenith: In the third episode, Joann explores the magnificent Colossi of Memnon, built under Egypt’s greatest pharaoh – Amenhotep III. Joann explores the dizzying heights of Egypt’s civilisation and the lives of the workers and artisans caught up in Egypt’s most ambitious building project: the Valley of the Kings. But this golden age is threatened by the growing power of Karnak’s priests. When Amenhotep’s successors Akhenaten and Nefertiti strike back at the priests with a religious rebellion, it is their son Tutankhamen who tries to rectify it. By finding clues in Tutankhamen’s treasure,

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Immortal Egypt episode 2 – Chaos

History / 2 minutes of reading / January 28, 2020 / By HDclump

Immortal Egypt episode 2 – Chaos: In the second episode, Joann explores how the Pyramid Age ended in catastrophe. In one of Saqqara’s last pyramid complexes, Joann uncovers evidence of famine as the young Egyptian state suffered a worsening climate and political upheaval. With depleted coffers, Egypt was plunged into the dark ages and civil war. With the land fractured into many small states, Joann tells the story of small-town leaders rising through the ranks. In a little-known tomb in Thebes, Joann uncovers stories of warriors who fought in the bloody battle which eventually would mark the

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Immortal Egypt episode 1 – The Road to the Pyramids

History / 2 minutes of reading / January 27, 2020 / By HDclump

Immortal Egypt episode 1: In the first episode, Professor Joann Fletcher goes in search of the building blocks of Egyptian civilisation and finds out what made ancient Egypt the incredible civilisation that it was. Joann sees how people here changed, in just a few centuries, from primitive farmers to pyramid builders and finds the early evidence for Egypt’s amazing gods and obsession with death and the afterlife. On her search, Joann travels almost 20,000 years back in time to discover north Africa’s earliest rock art, she discovers how the first writing was used to calculate taxes and

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Civilisations episode 9 – The Vital Spark

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 14, 2018 / By HDclump

In Civilisations episode 9, Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art – the play of the creative imagination – that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday. Art, then, makes life worth living; it is the great window into human potential. And societies become civilised to the extent that they take culture as seriously as the prosecution of power, or the accumulation of wealth. But in the century of total war and industrial slaughter was (and is) that enough? The cause

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Civilisations episode 8 – The Cult of Progress

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 12, 2018 / By HDclump

If David Olusoga’s first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress – both intellectual and scientific – that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Advances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation’s superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists a deep fascinations with other

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Civilisations episode 7 – Radiance

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 11, 2018 / By HDclump

In Civilisations episode 7, Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th century Venice where masterpieces such as Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne contested the assumption that drawing would always be superior to colouring. As the Baroque took hold in enlightenment Europe another Venetian, Giambattista Tiepolo, created a ceiling fresco Apollo and the Four Continents at the Bishop’s palace in Würzburg. Civilisations episode 7 – Radiance In a glorious sequence Simon celebrates this grand opera of

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Civilisations episode 6 – First Contact

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 10, 2018 / By HDclump

In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. And, as historian of empire David Olusoga shows, art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange. By contrast we think Spain’s conquest of Central America in the 16th century as decimating the Aztecs and eviscerating their culture. Civilisations episode 6

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Civilisations episode 5 – The Triumph of Art

History, Art / 2 minutes of reading / March 8, 2018 / By HDclump

Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena did not unfold in separate artistic universes; they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways. The fifth film in Civilisations goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries, and examining how the role of artists from the different traditions of West and East developed

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Civilisations episode 2 – How Do We Look?

Art, History / 2 minutes of reading / March 5, 2018 / By HDclump

In Civilisations episode 2, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect us now? In raising these questions, Mary explores how the way we look can influence our ideas of what is civilised. The colossal prehistoric Olmec heads in Mexico set the scene. In a

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Civilisations episode 1 – The Second Moment of Creation

Art / 2 minutes of reading / March 4, 2018 / By HDclump

Civilisations episode 1 – The Second Moment of Creation: the first film by Simon Schama looks at the formative role art and the creative imagination have played in the forging of humanity itself. The Second Moment of Creation The film opens with Simon’s passionate endorsement of the creative spirit in humanity and the way in which art can help to forge the civilised life. Civilisation may be impossible to define, but its opposite – evidenced throughout history in the human urge to destroy – is all too evident whenever and wherever it erupts. Simon Schama explores the remote

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