Historians, how accurate is the new show Ancient Impossible on the History Channel? It seems legit to me, what is your opinion?

by [deleted]
CommodoreCoCo

Skipping around the episode, I didn't find any information that I questioned. The way it was presented, however, was more "tabloid archaeology" than anything scholarly. It uses clever phrasing and catchy words to attract viewers to relatively shallow and pedestrian material. A few thoughts:

  • Impossible is always a bad word choice. "An ancient age where nothing is impossible!" and "Over 3000 years ago one of Egypt's greatest pharaohs created this impossibly vast monument..." are ridiculous statements to precede a segment telling you just how the admittedly cool thing was built. It's obviously not impossible so don't call it that.

  • There's a lot of calling things hard to do, but not enough showing why that's so. Take the copper chisel. Yeah, it's not iron, but you can't show a historian tapping a rock with a hammer for 3 seconds and say "look how difficult this is." That's like telling the person examining the Mona Lisa's paint chemistry to redo the work to show how impressive it is.

  • Like so many other History channel shows, it plays the question game. "Could the Egyptians have built this temple with nothing more than copper chisels?" suggests the possibility that they didn't, which was never on anyone's minds.

  • My personal least favorite quote: "It's from another time, and it doesn't make sense!" The entire "advanced for their time" concept is not well respected in archaeology. How can something be advanced for it's time if it itself is the technology of the time? It presumes some default primitive state; "impossibly advanced technology" is anything that approximates progress towards out modern tech. Using the same techniques as Mount Rushmore doesn't make the builders of Abu Simbel geniues who saw a technology 3000 in the future, but the first users of a technique to copy sculpture that's been in use for 3000 years because it works.

Roryrooster

It clearly tries to be accurate in the information it gives. The language and visuals are just designed to be dramatic ... sometimes a bit melodramatic.

But I know its makers want historic accuracy in what they presents and they look for expert opinion and take it seriously.

Disclaimer: I'm a contributor to the series.

Searocksandtrees

Since this program is mostly about archaeology, it might be worth x-posting this to /r/AskAnthropology; they have a few more archaeologists than here. Maybe also /r/Archaeology, although they're not an "Ask" subreddit.