Treasures of Ancient Egypt

I learned a little bit more about Egyptian culture... but good gracious Alistair wore his overly pretentious descriptions of the artifacts straight into the ground.

Presenter Alastair Sooke proclaims to examine ancient Egypt and thirty treasures "not through the eyes of an archeologist but through the eyes of an art lover". He's going through the history of ancient Egypt by its monuments and artworks. It's not actually that different than most other docs about Egypt. It would have been interesting for this to live up to that opening claim. It's a three parts with a total of about an hour. It's fine to see these objects but I learn very little from them. The little fish is cute.

The idea of these series - to show development of art in ancient Egypt is quite good but the implementation by Alastair Sooke was too shallow. We see Alastair traveling around to very beautiful places both in Egypt all along the Nile, the desert and in museums of Cairo, London and Berlin. This part is quite good, and scenery is picked well. However the commentary is too basic and the opinions expressed are sort of flat and simplistic. So the series benefit from Alastair's energy for climbing and entering dark tunnels but it would have been better to add expert in Egyptian history and art who would have provided more interesting and more thought provoking commentary. There are plenty of historical BBC series which have done it in the past without being boring or too academic (ex. those by Michael Wood or John Romer).

The second film from the series was probably the most watchable one, the golden age of Egypt is hard to spoil.

These documentary episodes show quite a bunch of interesting things, even some reliefs and statues that aren't that commonly featured in the average egyptian documentaries, but the presenter - and writer - of this mini-series, Alastair, is an opinionated little horny gremlin. Apologies for these harsh words, but this man has got massive issues with being unbiased and fair. And mature. Which he isn't.

What you hear here aren't necessarily historical facts, but his personal opinion about a great number of artifacts. And Alastair comes over as painfully opinionated and prejudiced, seemingly enticed by breasts and 'sexy' women depictions, offended by proportions he deems unsexy (he likes calling things ugly, nasty, fat, deformed), and he's trying to glaze it all over with a bunch of meaningless artsy hoo-ha talk that is entirely subjective, not backed by any facts or expert interviews, and leaves you wondering if this is a circus or a serious attempt at presenting the ancient egyptian culture.

His interpretations of facial features quickly paint the supposed original peoples of ancient times as pained, angry, grumpy, wholly unhappy and troubled individuals throughout, and all of Alastair's evidence for those claims are his personal dislikes for various features. Then on other occasions he will go onto lengthy rants filled with praise and his 'art expert' interpretations of what he believes arbitrarily chosen details to mean.

Take this documentary as a cautionary tale for what not to do. Namely don't let a fool rant away about things he has no knowledge about, and get more experts to present things instead. And fire Alastair.

Visually the footage shown here is quite nice though, so the production crew did its job well. Watch this only if you exhausted your supply of egypt documentaries.