Civilisations Episode 2

[Diante Scharsch]

Civilisationsis a 2018 British art history television documentary series produced by the BBC in association with PBS as a follow-up to the original 1969 landmark series Civilisation by Kenneth Clark. Individual episodes are presented by Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga,[1] with music composed by Tandis Jenhudson.[2] The PBS release differs in several respects, including series narration by Liev Schreiber.[3]

On 25 March 2014, Tony Hall, Director-General of the BBC, announced a commitment to a new version of Lord Clark's original Civilisation.[4] The new Civilisations series was officially announced by the BBC on 20 December 2015.[5]

While Clark's original Civilisation focused on the influence of western European art, Civilisations presents a global perspective on the role that art has played in shaping civilisations across the world, filming across 6 continents, and in 31 countries.

As a companion to the series, the BBC released Civilisations AR, an augmented reality smartphone app that enabled users to view and explore art and historical artefacts from around the world. It was developed internally by a BBC Research and Development team based in London, in collaboration with Nexus Studios.[7]

The Civilisations Festival was a season of events organised by the BBC in partnership with museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the UK, created to coincide with the airing of the Civilisations programme.[8] It runs from 2 to 11 March 2018 and the trailer for the festival was released on 8 February 2018.[9]

The series was launched at a preview event at the National Gallery in London on 6 February 2018.[10] Sir David Attenborough, who commissioned the original series with Kenneth Clark, made a special guest appearance, saying he "cannot wait to see the series". He also stated that the BBC could not simply have reproduced the approach of the original series, stating "Society has changed. We have an international society, a multi-ethnic society. You can't just do it in the way we did it."[11] The first trailer was released on 7 February 2018.[12]

The List gave the series 4 of out 5 stars, based on viewings of the first two episodes: "it's a visual feast as the cameras sweep across ruined cities and townships or focuses in for tight close-ups to emphasise the exquisite details of relics, pottery and sculpture. Even more inspiring is the breadth of knowledge, beautiful nuggets of information and insights into ancient worlds. Accessible and intelligent, Civilisations conveys a message of globalism, revelling in the variety of our species' ingenuity on an international scale."[15]

The Daily Telegraph in its review of the ninth and final episode concluded: "as nine discrete lectures, delivered by three of our most captivating cultural commentators, interrogating how we view art and what it means to us today, this has been a fascinating project that was undoubtedly worth the effort."[16]

Mark Lawson approved of the series but noted that the "format of TV as lecture theatre" had not changed since the 1969 original. He wrote: "the BBC has spectacularly and intelligently remade its 1969 hit in a way that reflects shifts in cultural and art historical thinking. Less apparent is any sense of fresh reflection about how and why art should be put on TV."[17]

BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz described the series as "patchwork programmes with rambling narratives that promise much but deliver little in way of fresh insight or surprising connections." He commented that although the scripts were "far from being literary masterpieces, the camerawork is of the highest quality throughout [with] plenty of delicious visual treats". He concluded: "a well-intentioned, well-funded series that has top TV talent in all departments but which ended up being less than the sum of its parts."[18]

Former BAFTA Breakthrough Brit Tandis Jenhudson[22] composed the original music for the series, as well as the main title theme (which features soprano Caroline Kennedy). A digital soundtrack will be released on 23 September 2018 and his score will also form the soundtrack of the BBC Civilisations AR augmented-reality app on both iOS and Android.[2]

Released as Civilizations by PBS in the United States, the individual programmes have distinct treatments and narrative arc, with Liev Schreiber as the series narrator.[3] While maintaining the principal contributions of Schama, Beard, and Olusoga, joining them are international artists and experts including religious studies scholar Jamal J. Elias, INAH anthropologist Rebecca Gonzalez-Lauck, art critic Jonathan Jones, Egyptology professor Salima Ikram, Asian Art Museum director Jay Xu, and history professor Maya Jasanoff.[23]

Based on the podcast with over 100 million downloads, the Fall of Civilizations book brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse.

Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztecs of Central America; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui. With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these ancient civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time to witness the end of their world.

In this episode, we look at one of the most dramatic stories to come down to us from the ancient world: the rise and fall of the empire of Carthage. Find out how this city rose out of the Phoenician states of the Eastern Mediterranean, and set out on voyages of discovery and settlement that put them at the centre of the ancient world. And hear how the city of Carthage was destroyed, and its memory nearly wiped from the earth.

In this episode, we tell one of the most colourful stories of civilizational survival: the story of the Bagan Empire of Myanmar. Find out how this kingdom rose up in the Irrawaddy river valley of central Myanmar, and built one of the most remarkable series of monuments to have survived from the medieval world. Discover what life was like for the people who lived there, and find out what happened to cause its sudden and complete collapse.

In this episode, we look at one of the most peculiar stories of civilizational survival to come down to us from the ancient world, the story of the Nabataeans. Find out how these once humble traders rose to become masters of the desert sands, and to defy empires. And discover what happened to finally bring down the empire of Nabataea.

In this episode, find out about one of the most remarkable ancient civilizations: the society known today as the neo-Assyrian Empire. Discover how the Assyrians built their empire out of the ashes of the Bronze Age, and built an empire of iron that lasted for centuries. Explore the extraordinary flourishing of art and technology that they fostered. And finally, discover what happened to cause their final, devastating collapse.

In this episode, we explore the mountains of the Andes, and tell the story of the Inca Empire. Find out how these mountain people built the largest empire in the Western Hemipshere, in one of the toughest terrains on earth. With Inca poetry, Quechuan hymns and authentic Andean instruments, discover the unique culture of the Inca. And find out what happened to bring their society crashing down around them.

In Civilisations episode 2, Professor Mary Beard explores images of the human body in ancient art, from Mexico and Greece to Egypt and China. Mary seeks answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect us now? In raising these questions, Mary explores how the way we look can influence our ideas of what is civilised.

Anders Sandberg: At that point, there is still a fair bit of fusion energy you could get, because there are a lot of brown dwarfs that are still hanging around. They just were too light to ever turn into a star. So in theory, you could mine them for hydrogen and burn that if you have a fusion reactor.

So what you probably want to do is that you burn the fusible elements, either in your fusion reactor or by dropping them on top of, for example, a white dwarf star or a neutron star. This has a bit of a limit, because once you add enough, the white dwarf star collapses gravitational and turns into a supernova. So there is that slight environmental problem.

But for many years now, he has been working on a more serious academic book called Grand Futures, in which he plans to address questions like: How good could the future be? How much might be achieved? And what do we need to do in order to get there?

Rob Wiblin: I hope to talk about how good the future could be and ask about possible impediments to complex life and machines spreading beyond our solar system. But first, tell us about the vision for this book, Grand Futures.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. On life, the universe, and everything. What are some of the questions that you hope to address in Grand Futures? And maybe what reaction do you hope it might inspire among people once they one day get to read it?

So the book is really about these big things. What does it take to achieve them? And that then allows us to focus on the things we really care about, what we need to start researching or constructing now. Quite a lot of it is going to be making the tools to make the tools to make the tools, or making the instrument to figure out some of the big questions so then we know what tools to make.

In the first one, the big future, what sort of stuff might people do in this very big future with all kinds of beings? Are there any maybe underrated or underappreciated options for what people could do with all of that time?

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