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| 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'
