John Romer's Ancient World

John Romer

Nowadays it’s a very popular pastime to binge watch TV box-sets. And in a sense, over the last few weeks while I’ve been stuck at home, that’s what I’ve been doing; although I’ve not been watching a box-set you’ll find on sale in any shop, sadly. This makeshift box-set of mine I’ve managed to cobble together by hunting around on YouTube – where I have collated the complete oeuvre of John Romer’s history documentaries.* I’ve re-watched them all in chronological order, and in doing so it’s fascinating to see how Romer’s ideas and interests have remained so consistent throughout. Something which always strikes me is his extreme lightness of touch, you get the sense that nothing is ever wholly definitive – Romer always stresses “what we know” and in some cases he highlights how this has changed from what we thought we knew, and in that sense it’s implied that new evidence, that which is yet to be discovered, could well rewrite the histories he’s illuminating. In that sense he’s rather unusual. I find a lot of other TV historians and documentary presenters a very forthright and didactic gang, dead certain that history is exactly how they say it is. And what they say nowadays is often accompanied by heavy-handed CGI re-enactments, highly subjective re-creations, all superimposed upon sweeping drone-mounted camera arcs, with melodramatic music rising to great crescendos over the top of it all. It’s the Hollywood-isation of TV history.

Romer’s first series of three films, Romer’s Egypt (1982), is a slight departure from what became his later style, and in many ways it stands out because of this. It is a curious mix of the calm and the frenetic. There are lots of his characteristic wide landscape shots in which we see him as a tiny figure wandering about, exploring. But here he’s often dashing about, scrambling over walls, etc., even breathlessly climbing up to the very top of the Great Pyramid at Giza. There are lots of lovely shots of contemporary Egyptian village life, used to illustrate the continuities of people’s lives nowadays with that of their ancient ancestors. This really is time capsule-like footage in itself now, as there is hardly a car or advertising billboard to be seen, there are no TV satellite dishes on the side of buildings, and nobody is wandering around with a mobile phone clamped to their ear or their eyes mesmerised by a tiny screen held in their palm. Unlike his other documentaries there is an odd and rather awkward soundtrack. The classical music accompanying these three films is bizarrely avant-garde, what I think of as ‘plinky-plonky’ atonal cacophonies – but here they are used to rather good effect, not like the rousing Russell Crowe Gladiator-style music which has since become the standard ersatz accompaniment to all modern history documentaries. In contrast the music on Romer’s later documentaries is much softer and perhaps more sympathetic, the opposite of this early bombastic underlining of the points he’s making. This softer music better compliments his style, he still darts about the ancient sites, climbing up onto parapets and fallen statues, but it is a lot less hurried – and that’s the real hallmark of Romer’s style, he takes his time but he isn’t slow in doing so. It’s as perfectly paced as his tone is perfectly pitched. He is always affable, he often begins with an anecdote or a joke. The story he begins Romer’s Egypt with, about ‘a bloke’ he knows who discovered an ancient grave in Jerusalem which was marked as being that of “Jesus, son of Joseph” is (for me at any rate) laugh out loud hilarious! 

The magic is all in the style of John’s delivery. He invites you to listen as much as to see. The words he speaks as he walks through these ancient sites manage to conjure up evocative pictures, which I think is far better than cartoonish CGI renderings which lock you down and channel you often through their endless and rather tedious repetitions. As Romer walks between the Colossi of Memnon and the camera pans back, opening up to the massive surrounding vista, he says, “You have to imagine me walking through the gates into a truly massive and monumental temple courtyard.” And given all the ruined temple footage you’ve already seen this is very easy to do, and far more impressive as the wide shot, with the two Colossi giving a guide to the scale, really reinforces the sense of how vast the now vacant space is – as the poet Shelley realised in his famous poem, Ozymandias, such long lost edifices must have been enormous! – You’d never get anything so simply or so deftly done on TV today.

His Ancient Lives (1984), is a masterwork. Over a series of four films Romer focusses on the lives of the ordinary villagers who lived near Thebes at a site now called Deir el-Medina, many of whom were employed over generations as tomb builders and tomb painters to the pharaohs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. It is brilliantly done, because here we are learning about the real, daily lives of literate individuals from the middle-lower social orders, ordinary everyday bread-and-butter ancient Egyptians, if you like. And because they were literate Romer is able to talk about some of them as real, living, breathing people; he can take you right into their houses, and he can even quote their words to you. Nothing could be that much more immediate than if the ancient Egyptians had left us cine film footage of themselves! – But none of this is done at the expense of all the paraphernalia of what people expect Ancient Egypt to be; we still get to see King Tut’s magnificent gold burial mask, we still get the tales of dynastic intrigue, and it’s wonderful to hear Romer regaling these tales, but they are the backdrop to what he’s really concentrating on. Effortlessly he is showing us how the interpretation of archaeology helps to recreate this world, and his acute sense of anthropological comparison helps to explain the contrasts between the world of the ancient Egyptians, their fundamentally different but oddly similar society and culture, and ours. Ancient Egypt can seem like a very alien culture when compared to that of Ancient Greece or Rome, or later early Muslim and Christian civilisation in Arabia, Africa and Europe. But Romer’s deep and intimate knowledge pervades his retelling with assurance and confidence.

I have always been a big fan of John Romer’s prose style. His eloquence belies a very ordinary touch. The affectionate familiarity with which he refers to and describes ‘chaps’ like the Pharaoh Tuthmoses III, or the scribes, Kenhirkhopeshef and Djutmose, the ‘blokes’ who deftly painted the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, is never over-played – you’re just listening to John chatting away very naturally. Romer’s histories are perhaps peculiarly British in terms of their style, indeed an early review of the first episode of Romer’s Egypt in the New York Times (in 1985) said his British accent “gets in the way” a bit, much as an overly American one would for a British audience, I expect. So maybe that’s one of the reasons his documentaries appeal so much to me – he’s not just talking about subjects which naturally fascinate me, he’s also doing so in a vernacular which is my own, hence it’s all so remarkably relatable. I watched and enjoyed these programmes around the time they first aired on TV, and it was the broadcasting of Romer’s truly excellent exploration of bible history in Testament (1988) which really lit a spark in my soul and in many respects has since shaped the subsequent course of my life and career (I’ve written about Testament previously on ‘Waymarks’ here). And I have often re-read the accompanying book as much for the beauty of its words as for the fascinating history it so deftly relates and interprets. In many ways, John Romer perfectly melds the three things which every good historian needs to possess: eyes, imagination, and intellect.

John Romer sees things as an art historian and as an archaeologist. He perceives and notes the tiniest details, he has an awareness of the skills and techniques required to create such works of art or everyday engineering. He has the imagination to ponder and interpret what he sees, how things might have worked, what might have happened, and why things might have been that way rather than another way instead. But very deftly he has the intellect to think things through seemingly as he is speaking, to focus and yet also to remain open, and thereby he manages not to over-egg the pudding! – Very few TV historians accomplish that balancing act with such grace or effortless aplomb. It’s Romer’s understatement which is his greatest strength.

In Testament it feels like he lifts these very admirable virtues to the next level. This series of seven films outline a careful and fastidious exposition of how the bible came to be. Not just how it was written, but how it was composed, the cultures and societies out of which it came, the world in which its stories, its laws, its tenets, its theology, were so deeply rooted. As such, he shakes the dust from the mythology, but not in order to say that this is all silly, superstitious nonsense – instead he sifts the history from the beliefs in a manner which conversely shows how deeply the two aspects are intertwined and interwoven, and how this has gone on to form the very fabric that underlies everything about our modern world. Testament demonstrates perfectly how the modern world has emerged from that of the ancient. In many ways it is so well done that this is the kind of intellectual and scholarly documentary which people rightly refer to as a ‘landmark’ series in broadcasting. Testament was made with a genuine human touch, such that it appeals and makes sense to both believers, non-believers, and also to agnostics alike. Which is an immensely difficult thing to do. I suppose the most fundamentalist of believers would be the only people to disagree with this sort of interpretation of history and belief, unable to synergise the sacred and the science in the way that Romer does so well, but then you’re not much likely to get any sort of a nuanced conversation going with that sort of person anyhow.

At the time it was first broadcast we only managed to videotape the very last episode of Testament. I then watched it so many times over that even today I know parts of that final episode almost by heart, so watching it again now is an enjoyable and rather nostalgic thing for me. As I say, it very much influenced me and helped inform what I wanted to do in life, as it was around this time that I began to work as a volunteer behind the scenes at the British Museum. There’s a lovely sequence where we see John Romer walking over the zebra-crossing on Great Russell Street, going through the big gates and then climbing up the steps of the BM. Inside he goes to the old British Library galleries, as they then were, to look at some bible texts from the time of the Emperor Constantine which used to be on display there. It wasn’t long after this that I went to several other locations which were key to the filming of Testament – for example, in 1992 I visited most of the sites John goes to in Egypt; in 1993 I visited Wittenberg, the home of Martin Luther, and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which houses the enormous glazed-tiled gatehouse of the city of Babylon; and in 2000 I wandered around the site of the old forum and the senate in Rome.  More recently I explored “Michelangelo’s magnificent library in Florence,” as well as Diocletian’s old palace at Split in Croatia, and I hope one day I will get the opportunity to visit Istanbul and Ephesus in Turkey too. When I do, as when I visited the other places before, I’m sure I will find myself unconsciously humming the beautiful and hauntingly plaintive theme tune to Testament as I wander about the place, recalling the text of Romer’s wonderful book and his evocative narration on the films as I go.

All the passion and the profundity of knowledge which Romer distilled into his first two documentary series on ancient Egypt, and the incisive and insightful eloquence which he honed to perfection in Testament, rather unexpectedly reach an impassioned boiling-point in The Rape of Tutankhamun (1993). This documentary aired only a year after I’d visited Egypt. It’s odd to think that parts of this were probably being filmed around the same time when I was wandering about many of the sites it visits. This film is a bit of a departure from the standard script of most historical documentaries. It isn’t the standard fodder for armchair antiquarians, instead it is a real and very genuine cri de coeur. I remember at the time it aired it was quite controversial, and looking back I think that’s because it did seem to arrive like quite a bolt out of the blue. I think many people weren’t ready then to hear this kind of thing, and I’m sure the way John goes about it was one of the reasons why it didn’t sit so well with those whom it was aimed at in academia. Effectively because it was a j’accuse-type tirade aimed very squarely at western Egyptologists, and the finger wagging tone he takes – although firmly grounded in fact and actually very precisely measured in its delivery – allows those he’s talking to very little room in which to wiggle. It’s perhaps little wonder that they took it very personally. And to many of these people I think it did rather seem as though John was biting the hand that fed him. He appeared to be ranting at his peers and colleagues in a rather undignified and un-collegial way. He places a lot of the blame for the degradation of Egypt’s ancient monuments on Western archaeologists. Notably he’s not so critical of the Egyptian authorities whom he speaks to, and who come across as oddly powerless, which seems strange given that presumably they ultimately have the authority over such expeditions.

But – be that as it may – in essence everything that John says, states, and argues for in The Rape of Tutankhamun has been borne out by the passage of time. This film is now almost 30 years old, and nowadays I think concerns regarding preservation and conservation are very much more to the fore in the field. It’s no longer enough to say that the “archaeological record” in terms of documenting and publishing equates to preservation, as some of the leading Egyptologists unabashedly state in their interviews with John. It is now recognised that by its very nature archaeology is at its core a destructive science, hence in recent years there have been major technological advances which allow for new non-invasive and non-destructive investigation techniques to be used at both newly discovered and well-known ancient sites alike. Geophysical analysis, using ground penetrating radar and the like, have added a new dimension to research. Such techniques have even discovered hitherto unknown cavities of enormous dimensions within the Great Pyramid of Giza itself quite recently. Conservation science has progressed too, and it’s now the norm for foreign-backed research teams to work in collaboration with and alongside local professionals and scholars. That said though, I fear the film rather dented John Romer’s prestige a little bit at the time it was originally broadcast, but I think time has only proved him right. He raised the alarm call early on, and, thankfully, it’s a call which many of today’s scholars have continued to heed. Implementing such new, non-invasive and more sophisticated conservation techniques, as well as engaging with knowledge exchange programmes, done in tandem with Egyptian scholars and archaeologists, as the film heralds with regard to a French archaeological expedition which John visits at the end of the film, very much paved the way for how such projects operate today. In that sense then, it may have been a bitter pill to swallow in 1993, making some viewers feel a little uncomfortable in their armchairs, but today I hope it seems apparent to anyone looking back on it, watching it now, that The Rape of Tutankhamun perhaps partly succeeded in achieving its aim.

Romer’s next series of films, The Seven Wonders of the World (1994), returns to the established format with John striding about ancient sites and talking directly to camera with his expressive hand gestures and his boundless enthusiasm, but this time with the addition of computer ‘virtual-reality’-like simulations superimposed to give an idea of the lost magnificence of the seven famous monuments, almost all of which have now vanished. Each episode is in effect a catalogue or gazetteer ranging through the legendary list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and, of course, the Pyramids at Giza. And by means of appropriate context and comparison, Romer manages to squeeze in a couple of other worthy contenders along the way, such as the Parthenon in Athens, inside which stood Phidias’s great statue of Athena – “a dress rehearsal” for his later statue of Zeus at Olympia, and the magnificent altar of Pergamon, built a little too late to have been counted by the ancient writers, but definitely an eighth wonder in its own right, as John says. He also brings in a few modern wonders of the world such as the Sydney Opera House, its interior and exterior lines almost mirroring those of the Egyptian Pyramids in some ways.

Once again Romer’s characteristically laid-back, yet effortlessly informed and deeply knowledgeable narration is lifted by his twin gifts of remarkable eloquence, counterpoised with a wry sort of humour which is all his own. For instance, whilst lying on a stone slab in a steam-filled Turkish bath having his shoulders pounded by a rather rotund masseur, he reflects on how the Turkish bath is a direct lineal descendent of the bathhouses invented by the ancient Romans; and yet, he wonders, “where are all the wonderfully sculpted torsos of Classical antiquity nowadays?” – concluding that they are probably no less common now than they were back then. Looking back though is also a way of looking forward. The idealised sense of hyper-realism which was the then revolutionary invention of Hellenistic art remains just as redolent today, he claims, as it is still with us, indeed it is readily apparent from the likes of “the paintings of Francis Bacon to dear old Robocop.” In this manner then, one of the main points of the series comes back to a theme which Romer first explored in Testament, that an essential continuity of ideas, philosophies, beliefs and the basic elements of religion which first met and melded in the alembic of the ancient world, joining the cultures of the mystic East with the magpie-like transmutations of the West, has founded the basic fundamentals upon which is built the modern world we know and recognise today.

Underlying the sense of wonder which comes through in each of these films in spades is Romer’s deep empathy for the ordinary lives of the ancients. At one point he enthuses about how he “absolutely loves looking round local museums”, and in such moments the viewer is gifted an intimate guided tour as John seemingly extemporises over the things he sees, apparently talking completely off the cuff, and yet it’s all part of a quite carefully crafted narrative aim. He’s not so much telling us as showing us. The idea of surveying the Seven Wonders is an interesting premise which quite literally covers a lot of ground, consequently it’s a bit of a geographical as well as an almost quantum leaping kind of guide to the ancient world; admirable in its attempt to show the viewer that much of the ancient world was just as old to the ancient Greeks as the ancient Greeks and Romans are to us today. Personally I would have preferred it without all the whizzy early efforts at CGI, which seem a little dated now; but then I’m not overly impressed by the current feats of CGI either – I suppose it’s become a necessary evil though, and one which logically is now unavoidable in the visual arts of documentary film-making.

Having said that though, there’s distinctly less CGI in evidence in Romer’s next series of films on Byzantium: The Lost Empire (1997) – “Byzantium, that magic, spicy word.” In many ways Romer’s Byzantium is a companion piece to Testament, as it focuses once again on the trials and tribulations of faith as the late Roman world is transformed into European Christendom. Faith and history again march shoulder to shoulder in Byzantium as Romer waxes lyrical once more on what the emperors, empresses and ordinary folk might have been thinking during these times of great change and cataclysm, as the ideology of the new faith wrestled with itself in order to shape a new world and a new sense of art in which to redefine itself. The history of Byzantium, and moreover the city of Istanbul, old Constantinople – the city where the East famously meets the West, and which still stands as a pivot between the past and the present, is clearly one of Romer’s most abiding passions. He talks in lush romantic tones of how he first visited the city in the 1960s after a three day train journey on the Orient Express, which was less Agatha Christie and more like “hell on wheels, with Communism passing by outside the window.” At the end of the line though, Istanbul hit him with all the exoticism of the East and clearly knocked him for six! He was overwhelmed by all the faded ancient remnants of a long gone imperial capital city which were still dotted about the place, waiting to be hunted down and re-imagined back into the ancient splendour and glory which they must have once possessed. The way John describes the empire of Byzantium is almost elegiac, and the last episode is possibly the best as that sense of loss, of reverence for the past, and insight into how it remains a part of the present reaches a profound sense of culmination and completeness. If Ancient Egypt is John Romer’s first love, one suspects that Byzantium could well be his not-so-secret ancient paramour!

It's perhaps excusable then that Byzantium soars to the heights of superlative excess at some points, whilst the evocative music is laid on a little too thickly at others, but Romer’s next series of films, Great Excavations (2000), which was released in the US under the title of Lost Worlds: The Story of Archaeology, brings the viewer, quite literally, back down to earth. This is a series of six films each of which focus on a different aspect of the history and development of archaeology. Looking at how the science of archaeology first arose out of the dilettante antiquarianism of the eighteenth century, how excavation techniques came to be systematised in the nineteenth century as archaeologists began to work out chronologies through examining the strata of sites, "reading the earth like pages from a book." Working out an initial sequence of epochs (stone age, bronze age, iron age) which were later refined (archaic, classic, Hellenistic, Roman, etc.) often using a system of typologies, until scientific advances such as Carbon-14 dating techniques managed to fix the accuracies of time-scaling beyond all doubts. Visiting a whole range of famous archaeological sites, including Pompeii, Hallstadt, Megiddo, Knossos, Jerusalem, Palenque, an ancient shipwreck site off the coast of Bodrum, Turkey, and, of course, King Tut’s tomb in Egypt. It tends towards being a catalogue of the heroic efforts of “great men”, proto-Indiana Joneses, such as Carter, Catherwood & Stephens, Champollion, Christie, Frankfort, Mariette, Petrie, Pitt-Rivers, and Schliemann – but, sadly, early archaeology is rather like that; so it’s to his credit that Romer includes several prominent women too, such as Dorothy Garrod and Mary Leakey – although there are quite a few more whom he could have included, Kathleen Kenyon, Gertrude Bell, and Edith Pretty, spring to mind. It’s such a vast and rich subject though that it would be impossible to cover all of it, but the overviews he does give are incisive and wonderfully detailed. He looks at the aims and approaches that have often defined archaeology, contrasting men such as Heinrich Schliemann, “a man who read books [i.e. – Homer’s Iliad] and dug,” and William Flinders Petrie, “a man who dug and wrote books [i.e. – proper archaeological reports].” He also takes to task present day crypto-archaeologists of the bible-lands who expressly use “archaeology to bait the hook of faith,” as well as the even more crackpot types, such as Thor Heyerdahl and Erich Von Daniken, who either push the boundaries of ‘diffusionism’ to its absolute limits, or espouse that distinct cultures can only be understood if their achievements are credited to the interventions of “little green men from Mars, or refugee magicians from Atlantis!” He also shows how archaeology is the one science which most frequently gets subverted for ideological aims, looking at how Hitler and Mussolini sponsored vast programmes of archaeological excavation, but all done to suit pre-determined, and frequently sinister, political ends. 

Great Excavations has all the classic elements of a John Romer documentary, we follow him clambering over rough terrain, jumping into old excavation trenches, getting his hands dirty in order to show us in situ pot sherds and stratigraphy. His hallmark low tech presentation-style, relying on the power of his own words and graphic descriptions with just the aid of simple maps, is nicely augmented by seeing him driving out to some of these far flung sites in vintage cars; the only minor distractions are the oddly over-used 'special effects' of people (and more strangely Romer himself) magically beaming in and out of frame, it's as if the film had been edited by Scottie from Star Trek; as well as the slightly twee and tedious background music, which also sometimes seemed a little incongruous (e.g. – gamelans accompanying a section about Minoan palaces on Crete). These though are really only very minor quibbles about a series of films which are fresh, informative, erudite, and certainly presented with a well-honed sense of panache. 

Watching his complete oeuvre in chronological sequence, to use a well-worn cliché, has been a remarkable journey. A globetrotting and epoch-jumping series of insights into human history, faith, art and culture. John Romer is firstly an archaeologist and an academic; secondly, he is an enthusiast and a storyteller; but more importantly than that, he is a poet with a unique gift for uniting all these elements in a captivating way. From superlative heights to dirt-and-earth fundamentals, Romer’s eye and his imagination seem to seek out enlightenment through empathy and understanding, whilst remaining grounded in facts and science. In that sense, his range is remarkable, and this is probably what makes his work so appealing. It would be really wonderful if all his documentaries could be released as a box-set.

Romer is still writing and publishing. His two volume History of Ancient Egypt came out only a few years ago**, and, he remains active in fieldwork in Egypt – where he still hopes to get permission from the Egyptian authorities to excavate in search of the potentially intact tombs of the last three remaining undiscovered pharaohs, located somewhere near the Valley of the Kings. He talked at length about this aspiration in a series of interviews for an Australian TV news channel in 2013. It’s a dream of his which he first mentioned in 1982’s Romer’s Egypt, and later elaborated upon at the end of 1984’s Ancient Lives; hence, if he gets the chance, it would be a wonderfully satisfying high-point on which to conclude and indeed crown his career as one of the world’s most exceptional archaeologists and the very best of our TV historians. I hope it happens, inshallah, and he manages, at long last, to find the fabled tomb of Herihor.

~

*NB - The playlist of John Romer's documentaries which I compiled on YouTube was complete when this blog post was originally posted in 2020. Unfortunately, some of the documentaries have since been removed.

**NB - A third and final volume of Romer's History of Ancient Egypt was published in 2023.

Also on 'Waymarks'

Testament - John Romer

From Surrey Heath to Ancient Alexandria