Product Description

The BBC's unique style of dramatization brings ancient Egypt to life like never before! Take an action-packed trip back in time and re-live ancient Egypt through the eyes of three of it's greatest explorers. The ancient past and the recent past are skillfully interwoven, merging drama with documentary, as brave 19th and 20th century adventurers, explorers and code-breakers risk everything to unveil the world of ancient Egypt. As their discoveries unfold, the tales of Tutankhamun and Ramesses II are brought to life in this breathtaking production.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35946 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2006-05-23
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 360 minutes

Amazon.com
Part personal drama, part documentary, part history lesson, Egypt is a first class, six-part BBC production that manages to be at once edifying and entertaining. Whereas the History Channel, for example, might tell its tale with a mixture of reenactments, photos, interviews, and such, the makers of Egypt opt for complete dramatizations focusing on three men and their contributions to archaeology, with each story occupying two episodes. First up is Englishman Howard Carter (Stuart Graham), who spent over 20 years searching for the tomb of King Tutankhamun before finally locating it in the 1920s; his remarkable persistence and considerable accomplishments are undeniable, but Carter comes off as a humorless stiff who did little to endear himself to colleagues, patrons, and anyone else in his orbit. Much more likeable is Giovanni Belzoni (Matthew Kelly), a former circus strongman and most unlikely Egyptologist who, in 1817, entered Abu Simbel, perhaps the most impressive of the many monuments and temples dedicated to Ramesses (sic) II. Finally, there is Jean Francois Champollion (Elliot Cowan), a French linguistics expert who was the first Westerner to decipher hieroglyphs and who made his first and only trip to Egypt in 1822. In the process of detailing these men's various discoveries and accomplishments, the series also offers some detail about their personal relationships, as well as occasional insights (via reenactments) into the lives of their subjects (King Tut, for instance, assumed power at age 8 and soon was married to his own sister). There's a darker side as well. The explorers who blithely claim their discoveries for their respective nations are a chilling reminder of the arrogance of European imperialists; meanwhile, church authorities strictly proscribe Champollion from revealing any information that might challenge its doctrine that the human race began with Adam and Eve a mere few thousand years ago. DVD extras include "Nile: Crocodiles and Kings," a beautifully photographed documentary, along with a timeline and a catalogue of trivia. --Sam Graham

Customer Reviews

Highest Rating, Exciting, Fact Based Thrilling Adventures
If you are looking around for a DVD about Ancient Egypt I would recommend this one over all others. I have not seen all the DVDs covering Ancient Egypt but I have seen several and this one is at an entirely higher level. This DVD covers the stories of three of the most exciting life adventures really of all time; Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb, Giovanni Belzoni, discoverer of the hidden entrance to Ramesses temple at Abu Simbel and Pharaoh Seti I's tomb and Jean-Francois Champollion who solved the Ancient Egyptian language of the hieroglyphs that had been lost for almost two thousand years. These are extraordinary adventures, life consuming and life changing - and history changing as well as Champollion learned to read the hieroglyphs. This is the best DVD I have seen covering ancient Egypt, the best telling of Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankamun's tomb and the only stories I have seen telling the extraordinary discoveries of Giovanni Belzoni and Jean-Francois Champollion who is considered the founding father of Egyptology. During the telling of Giovanni Belzoni's story there is also a lot of flash back to the time of Ramesses as many of Belzoni's discoveries related to Ramesses. This is an extraordinary DVD with over six hours of fact based adventures and really value priced for what you get. Special feature included on the Nile River with total run time listed at 360 minutes. Highest rating.

Beware - 60 minutes cut from U.K. version
I have not seen this yet. It gets excellent reviews on Amazon.co.uk.

I will be buying it from Amazon.co.uk. The U.K. version is described there as lasting 360 minutes. The U.S. version is described here as lasting 300 minutes.

American studios do this kind of thing to DVDs quite often. See, e.g., "Vietnam, A Television History," in which two out of the thirteen original PBS episodes were quietly excluded from the DVD, and other episodes were edited down from the originals. The studios often fill up the saved time on the DVDs with advertisements. It tells us a lot about what the studios think about their U.S. viewers.

As you probably know, you will need a mutli-region DVD player to watch a DVD purchased from the U.K.

History never looked so good
This is a truly great DVD set.

"Don't know much about history", as the song goes, but a friend back in the UK said this was a cool way to find out more about the Egyptian variety. I've just finished watching and I've got to say that they're right. This is entertaining, involving and I learned a whole lot about a fascinating period. I never knew that Egypt was pretty well forgotten and unvisited by Europeans for hundreds of years. I never knew that even the Egyptians didn't know how to read hieroglyphs when the last priests of Ancient Egypt died and it took a Frenchman to show them how. I never knew that in the early 1800s the Egyptians themselves were dismantling the ancient monuments and using the stones for factories. The visiting Europeans (like Napoleon) were as bad - with a very thin line between preservation and outright theft. Most of the stuff in today's great Egyptian collections in Italy, Paris and the British Museum in London (including the famous Rosetta Stone) was plundered.

And it's not just the history that's so good - this is a well written, well acted and beautifully directed mixture of facts and drama. If you want to know more about Egypt and find out about three of the characters who helped rediscover the ancient civilisation and bring it back to life I can highly recommend this DVD set.