Customer Reviews

Egypt: Engineering an Empire - Signature Series

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(3)
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I absolutely loved it! Peter Weller tell the story of the rise and fall of the Egyptian empire in a fascinating and contemporary way. There is great insight on exactly how all those amazing pyramids were created and the story behind the leaders and commoners who made it happen. There is also the inside story on the creation of the first military fortresses which is absolutely amazing. The Egyptians were the first great empire and made their mark which will live on forever in history.

This DVD was a great example of entertainment meeting information. Dramatizations were well done, visually impressive footage. Very informative and worthwhile as a tool for education, yet also very entertaining. Well worth the purchase.

I love documentaries and I was looking for something to buy my father - an engineer - for Christmas but I had to stop watching this after a half hour since the music drives this otherwise interesting documentary like a horror movie. The music and narration maintain such a ridiculous level of tension that you're nerves are on edge while just trying to process simple facts. I'm all into good storytelling through a documentary but I warn you - this is like trying to read a good book while someone incessantly bangs a gong in your face.

As far as engineering or construction related documentaries go, this is by far the best one I have ever seen on Egypt.
It is not only the best graphically, but educationally too.
It starts at the beginning with the first grand construction project in Egyptian history, the dam of Menes.
It doesn't just mention the pyramids and other great structures that still stand today, but it mentions the great architectural feats that have long been lost and you rarely hear about, including Senusret's Nubian Superfortresses.
All in all, you cannot go wrong with this documentary.
I highly, highly recommend it.

This is definitely worth buying as it's a great documentary. However I have an issue. The History channel is still behind the times in that this is not anamorphic, it's wide screen letterbox. Also, the MPEG2 video encoding leaves something to be desired as well. In an age where people have 42" wide screen flat panels, and we're getting amazing Discovery channel/BBC documentaries like 'Planet Earth' which shoot in HD and get put out as proper 16:9 anamorphic DVDs. There can really be no excuse here.

This is one of those middle-of-the-road documentaries that tell you what a civilization did and how it performed on some levels. It's an anthropological look at the overall civilization per se, but explains only rudimentary mechanical concepts of how some of the world's greatest monuments were put together.

What is missing is details that are crucial to explaining how Egypt and other cultures roughly overlapping several thousand years ago created these architectural and engineering marvels. When you look at the pyramids and other similar structures around the world from that era, when you look at the surface, yes they are magnificent and some superficial explanations of their construction make sense.

However, beneath this story, and so many more, is the story of the real technology and purpose of these incredible works. If you look at the pyramids as massive piles of huge quarried stone, you find technologies past what we can create today.

Here and in othe disparate cultures of the time across the earth, there is overwhelming evidence of technological expertise that could not have existed then and does not exist now. If you look at the precision with which stones weighing hundreds of tons were cut, machined and their relationship to both the earth and the Universe, you see repeating patterns, images and precision for which programs like these offer no explanations.

Yes, I am speaking of extraterrestrial connections, guidance and possibly intermingling of genes. You see recurring images, paintings, sculptures and reliefs of figures which eerily resembly the astronauts of today. I'll leave the rest of this part of the discussion to the far more informative History Channel series, Ancient Aliens and The Pyramid Code. These series will literally explode an open mind to the possibilities of not only this period, but human ancestry in general.

The questions this particular piece doesn't address include how ancient civilization precisely milled and sculpted stone such as granite. Egypt, Engineering the Past just leaves us with rudimentary concepts of quarrying granite with hard round stones, building mud ramps to transport stones we would barely be able to budge today and various other concepts that leave us uninspired and by their hopes without the questions that would lead us to greater understanding of what was really going on during an amazing era in history.

This is not without value, but it is a superficial presentation at best. What merit it has is that it is a basic, although highly skewed presentation about an era, the real knowledge of which, if we knew it, could revolutionize life on this planet as we know it. Look further and be rewarded.

I will leave you with this thought. If you visit certain monuments in Egypt today, you will not be shown pannels which represent images such as spacecraft, helicopters and other forms of technology currently being developed in this age. You will no longer be able to take photographs in the Cairo Museum and several monuments. You will be guided only to those places and artifacts that fit a convenient construct. At this point there are almost no requests for archeological exploration being granted, and what few are, are strictly watched over by Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.