Ancient

This episode tells the story of the Jewish Revolt, which swept through Judea in AD 66 and threatened to destabilise the whole empire. Rome turned to the disgraced General Vespasian and his son Titus to put it down. Filled with spectacular sieges and huge set-piece action, the film pits the discipline and ingenuity of the Roman army against the passion and commitment of the rebels.

Rome was once a largely democratic society, with regular elections. This Republic lasted for 500 years, but then came Tiberius Gracchus. He believed in the ideals of the Republic - fairness, decency and justice for everyone -but was appalled by Rome's aristocrats' treatment of the poor. So he unleashed the power of the mob upon the streets of Rome, with devastating consequences.

In AD 410, the Goth hordes sacked the city. This event symbolised Rome's collapse. Within 70 years, the western empire - what we think of as Ancient Rome - was abandoned. But it should never have happened at all.

This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings - words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years. The text is the only record of work by one of the world's greatest minds - the ancient Greek, Archimedes - a mathematical genius centuries ahead of his time. Hidden for a millennium in a middle eastern library, it has been written over, broken up, painted on, cut up and re-glued. But in the nick of time scientists have saved the precious, fragile document, and for the first time it is revealing just how revolutionary Archimedes' ideas were. If it had been available to scholars during the Renaissance, we might have reached the Moon over a hundred years ago.

Athens, Alexandria, Tikal and Rome: these legendary cities are some of the world's most famous archaeological sites. And yet, they still have not revealed all their secrets. The ambition of this series is to resuscitate the first megalopolises of universal history.
In the first episode, the extraordinary city of Athens, the richest and most powerful in all of ancient Greece. The film leads us in the footprints of a nation of extraordinary builders, thinkers, and inventors of incredible machines.

The documentary is to tell the dramatic story of the greatest natural disaster to shake the ancient world, a disaster that triggered the downfall of a civilisation and spawned a legend. Around 1620 BC a gigantic volcano in the Aegean Sea stirred from its 19,000-year slumber. The eruption tore the island of Thera apart, producing massive tsunamis that flooded the nearby island of Crete, the centre of Europe's first great civilisation – the Minoans. This apocalyptic event, many experts now believe, provided the inspiration for the legend of Atlantis. Based on the work of leading scientists, archaeologists and historians, this drama immerses viewers in the exotic world of the Minoans.