Urartu: The Forgotten Kingdom

Entertaining and informative view of the age old history of the Armenian highlands and its political dispute over it by Urartu and Assyria.

The ancient world does not solely consist of Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks/Romans and Persians.

This "documentary" comes across more pseudo-documentary than like one presenting factual events. The narration sounds offhand in it's delivery, more like the telling of a story than a telling of history and statement of facts. It felt like it was more of an attempt to bolster ego, and to try to inflate importance.

Also, for a "newly discovered" epoch, there seems to be a wealth of written information with excessive detail. The physical artifacts found by archaeologists are also amazingly intact, better than any other 2800 + year civilization that I've ever seen in museums or on documentaries.

I would also feel much more inclined to believe the "facts and histories" presented here if it weren't the case that the whole "documentary" and almost all of the experts weren't almost exclusively Armenian. Surely this should be of worldwide interest? In the credits, it looks like a family affair with the same names appearing over and over in various places.

All in all, I would believe this much more if the claims of it being such an important and influential era hadn't been almost secret, undiscovered and formerly unmentioned until now.

Nope, sorry, I'm just not buying it.

I appreciate learning about this ancient culture. I can't comment on its accuracy but IMO the dramatizations lowered the overall quality with theatre-like sets and actors, and I think the narrator was a poor choice. The production, editing, audio are well done.

The film is decent but it has a lot of historical distortions, for example the word "Palestine" didn't exist at that time etc. Brief the documentary was fun to watch but shouldn't be taken seriously because of lack of accuracy in some parts.