Civilisations: Rise and Fall – A New Lens on Ancient Decline

Image: BBC Press

By Jon Donnis

What makes a great civilisation crumble? Is it war, ambition, climate, or the quiet erosion of power from within? Civilisations: Rise and Fall, a new four-part series from BBC Studios, sets out to explore those questions by looking at the stories behind some of the most powerful cultures the world has ever known. With exclusive access to the British Museum's vast collection and insight from historians, artists and academics, the series moves beyond textbook history to explore the moments when empires cracked and the artefacts that help explain why.

Each episode focuses on a different civilisation at its peak and on the brink: Ancient Rome, Cleopatra's Egypt, the samurai of feudal Japan, and the mighty Aztecs. The series doesn't just revisit what happened. It considers how the end unfolded from within, through the pressures of power, political missteps and seismic shifts in the world around them. In doing so, it draws a quiet but clear line to the present, asking what lessons we can draw from the past when our own systems feel increasingly under strain.

Objects rarely seen by the public offer a fresh way in. The Meroë Head of Augustus, a bronze Roman emperor pulled from beneath a Nubian temple; a near four-metre crocodile mummy, once worshipped as Sobek in Egypt; a newly acquired suit of samurai armour from Japan's Edo and Muromachi periods; and the Aztec double-headed serpent, both beautiful and unsettling. These are more than museum pieces. The series uses them to anchor its questions about power, decline and the role of culture in holding a society together.

With commentary from contributors including Dominic Sandbrook, Iszi Lawrence, Salima Ikram and Camilla Townsend, and dramatic reconstructions to bring key figures to life, the series is as vivid as it is reflective. Suzy Klein of BBC Arts calls it "particularly timely in our own uncertain age," and it's hard to disagree. The stories may be thousands of years old, but the themes of hubris, reform, resistance and collapse feel eerily familiar.

This is history told through objects and ideas. It doesn't claim to provide all the answers, but Civilisations: Rise and Fall offers a compelling window into what happens when great societies face their final tests, and how much of their fate was already written in the choices they made long before.

As this is the BBC, do expect some woke nonsense, and some obvious falsehoods.