1929 The Crash ep.1
In 1929 years of booming prosperity ended in catastrophe, it was the biggest stock market crash since record began.
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history
Genius of the Ancient World: Confucius ep.3
Bettany travels to China on the trail of Confucius, a great sage of Chinese history whose ideas have fundamentally shaped the country of his birth for around 2,500 years.
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Genius of the Ancient World: Socrates ep.2
Bettany Hughes’ series profiling the most celebrated thinkers of the Ancient world continues as she turns her attention to Socrates.
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Eight Days that Made Rome: Rome’s First Emperor
Presenter Bettany Hughes explores the day in 32BC when Octavian, Julius Caesar’s adopted son, stole the secret will of Mark Antony, his most dangerous political rival.
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Eight Days that Made Rome: Crossing the Rubicon
Presenter Bettany Hughes explores the day in 49BC when, defying the Senate, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the river Rubicon, plunging the Republic into civil war.
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Genius of the Ancient World: Buddha ep.1
Bettany Hughes’s three-part series profiles three very different thinkers – Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius – and assesses the major contribution they have made to different philosophical and religious traditions.  Content-wise, the programs are extremely good: Hughes interviews several experts in Buddhism, classical philosophy, and Confucianism; and visits several of the ancient sites associated with all three of them. Although the arguments are sometimes difficult to follow – especially in the Buddhist program – they are crisply advanced by a presenter who possesses an obvious enthusiasm for her subjects. And yet there is a strange feeling of similarity
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Eight Days that Made Rome: The Spartacus Revolt
The Spartacus Revolt: In 73 BC, Spartacus broke out of gladiator school and started the most terrifying slave revolt in Rome’s history. Visiting Pompeii, southern Italy and the British Museum, Bettany explores the importance and appalling reality of slavery in ancient Rome and how the revolt played a major role in shaping Rome’s political future. She also reveals that not all of Spartacus’s followers were slaves. Bettany Hughes looks at the day in 73BC that Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator fighting for the entertainment of the Romans, broke out of gladiator school and started a slave revolt. The Republic’s
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Eight Days that Made Rome: Hannibal’s Last Stand
Eight Days That Made Rome is a docu-drama that leaves behind the conventional chronologies of Rome’s thousand-year history and brings razor-sharp focus to eight days that created, tested and defined its greatness.
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East to West – The Asian Crucible ep.5
This spectacular episode explores the extraordinary powers and civilizations that have emerged from central Asia.
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East to West – The Renaissance and islam ep.4
In this episode we reveal how a golden age of invention and scholarship thrived in the Islamic World at a time when Europe lingered in the dark age. We see how Muslim scholars brought together for the first time the ideas of the Greeks and Romans with Persian and Indian mathematics and astronomy, and developed them into the beginnings of modern Science. We reveal the first contacts by which European scholars discovered this treasury of knowledge and how it was developed by generations of Arab-admirers (including Galileo & Copernicus) into modern science. This episode focuses on the House
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East to West – A Force from the Desert ep.3
We trace the origins of the Arabs and Islam, from nomadic Bedouins to the sophisticated Nabataean cultures at Petra and the magnificent city of Palmyra.
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East to West – The Triumph of Monotheism ep.2
Today one god is worshipped by two thirds of humanity. It is the culmination of an extraordinary story by which a single deity emerged from a pantheon of thousands in the crucible of religious ideas that was the ancient Middle East. In this episode we trace the birth, development and explosion of the religion of Abraham and Moses, from its very beginnings in Judaism to its triumph as Christianity within the Roman Empire. Also we look at the earliest form of monotheism, as devised by Akhenaten in ancient Egypt
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