Civilizations: Rise and Fall review – TV that will make you despair of our declining society | television

RAugust 24, 410 AD. The empire that dominated Europe for five centuries is on the verge of collapse, and its capital is at the mercy of a barbarian leader. What do people do? They do as they always have. The rich scramble to hide their wealth. The poor are running for their lives. Fateful decisions made by a few men obsessed with power bring the most powerful civilization on Earth to its knees. Sound familiar? And yet. No one saw it coming… well, except us, the bleary-eyed future doomsayers, watching the latest BBC adaptation of a historical series to be disturbed by the collapse of our civilization in real time.

The first Civilization Less Than Bone aired in 1969 AD. An equally unconscious era when it was perfectly fine for a man in a trilby and a tie (Kenneth Clarke) to depict the triumph of Western culture over barbarians. (Some might say: In addition to change.) Then, in 2018, came her well-meaning successors, led by Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga. who, like a weak emperor, was trying to be everything to everyone and thus, unlike Honorius in ancient Rome, suffered from mixed reviews and declining ratings. Now, this lavish trilogy steps onto the scene, encompassing all the fires, war, disease, disasters and great dramatic reenactments of the Netflix era. It also comes, to some extent, at a time when the BBC is experiencing a deep existential crisis within the BBC itself. Which in less ancient times was an instrument of another fallen empire…

In Civilizations: Rise and Fall, beautifully narrated by Sophie Okonedo, the focus is not on the rise of four ancient worlds, but on their fall: Rome, Egypt, the Aztecs, and the samurai of Japan. One by one they fall due to a set of circumstances that we current civilians are all too familiar with. Climate catastrophe, war, pandemic, mass migration, insatiable greed born of colonialism, gross inequality…need I go on? Valerie Amos, one of the series’ commentators, says it best: “The seeds of society’s destruction are sown in it.” Modern civilization, pay attention.

Each massive landing is brought to life by a cast of diverse experts – Antony Gormley on a 550-year-old turquoise Aztec skull! Alastair Campbell talks about the poisonous Ptolemaic dynasty! Along with that, there are reenactments featuring bejeweled and clad actors staring menacingly into the middle distance to make up for the lack of dialogue that was mostly blood-thirsty for rewatches of Game of Thrones, Shogun, and even Gladiator.

Capping off all the brutal history is a selection of cultural artefacts housed at the British Museum. How exactly we came to possess such ancient treasures as the 2,050-year-old Head of Augustus, the Rosetta Stone – whose Egyptian hieroglyphs are interpreted here to shed light on one of Cleopatra’s most important decisions – or one of the deadliest samurai swords ever created, is not part of the story. Which is a shame because it actually often is. Who knows, perhaps algebra will be the subject of civilizations: 4? In the meantime, I recommend watching Empire with David Olusoga as an excellent, if unintentional, companion piece.

Things are really unusual. Like the ornate silver casket Projecta (350-400 AD), which was used in the first episode to tell the ancient story of how the vast wealth of the super-rich 1% of Roman elites led to reduced entry into the empire’s coffers, and ultimately to the fall of the empire. “Wealth inequality is the most common and crucial element of societal collapse,” says Luke Kemp of the Orwellian Center for the Study of Existential Risk and one of the most intelligent commentators on civilizations. “It erodes the social fabric…it hollows out communities, leaving them just a fragile shell that can be cracked by many different shocks.”

Civilizations: Rise and Fall reminds us, again and again, that the past is the place we must go to find solutions to what goes wrong and disastrously in our present. A nice idea, if those in power were able to learn the lessons of history. Meanwhile, the artefacts reveal that nothing has changed. Humans are as terrible as they have ever been. Consider an 1875-year-old terracotta theatrical mask that expresses deep Roman prejudice toward northern peoples, which leads one commentator to explain the racist root of the word “barbarian.” It comes from ancient Greek Barbaros It was used to describe a “bar” of foreign languages ​​that the Greeks, and then the Romans, could not understand or accept.

It’s gripping, if desperate stuff. And it’s very stressful to watch, with a continuous countdown – 15 years until the fall… eight years… two years… the fall! – To show the terrifying and relentless march of history. Gone are the days of Mary Beard cavorting around Rome in her high-tops, singing fervently over some crumbling elegy. Documentaries about ancient history have become more urgent and frightening – and this is necessarily true. As Kemp says: “Every civilization throughout history has had an expiration date.” Given that we can’t know what we have, the apocalyptic nature of many of our viewing schedules these days is…interesting. We seem to want to spend our ever-shrinking downtime in a state of extreme anxiety. I think it must be the stage we are at in our demise.

Civilizations: Rise and Fall aired on BBC Two and is now available on iPlayer