The Making of Ancient Lives

by John Romer

Ancient Lives was one of the most unexpectedly happy things that ever happened to me. We shot the whole series in six weeks, working out of a Luxor hotel with a resident French chef and the best of company.

Five people shot the films. Along with two local drivers—old friends who had worked on my excavations—we walked miles every day, down into tombs and over the Theban hills, gossiping and stopping occasionally for me to do a camera piece. Usually, the eyes of TV presenters reveal hints of nervousness or agitation. There’s nothing but real pleasure, though, to be seen in Ancient Lives; series director Peter Spry-Leverton saw to that, and Luxor was a gem, a simple and uncomplicated place whose people were helpful and considerate. I knew Thebes like the back of my hand and had worked in the Valley of the Kings for years, so we moved through that wonderful landscape with considerable ease.

Though it was not yet published and had no name, I had already spent two years writing the book of Ancient Lives, and I carried the original typescript with me on the shoot. (One late exhausted evening, I left it in a temple courtyard and returned the next day to find it soaked in dew and lying on a block of stone, just as I had left it.)

When I first proposed the series to the head of documentaries at Central TV, I said that I wanted to present ancient Egypt like the U.K. television show Coronation Street. That’s apparent in the series as I take a long walk down the village’s narrow high street, chatting about the people who had lived behind the front doors that I passed. I wanted to turn the ancient Egyptians back into human beings, to show the audience that the royal tombs of Thebes were marvelous and that the artists who worked on them had been real people living with their families in a real village.

Our director had previously worked on news documentaries rather than archaeological films. He brought a love of wide landscapes to the series and, above all, an insistence on a strong story line. “I’m switching off,” he would say when he thought I was straying off topic, and we’d start again. We would talk through the day’s filming at breakfast in the beautiful misty light beside the Nile, and at the “magic hour” before sunset he and our cameraman would film the golden river and the flocks of birds flying in the evening breezes.

In those days, the Valley of the Kings was little known, even less appreciated, and threatened by flooding, both by water and by an onslaught of tourists. I had much to say, and Peter let me say it; he brought a deal of skill to the finished product, so that it appears quite effortless.

Peter Greenhalgh, our ace cameraman, flew in from Cuba and did the whole shoot with a roll of Castro’s bank notes in his pocket. He began his filming career tied to the mast of a schooner sailing around the Horn. He was very proud of his profession, which he learned directly from his father, who had filmed the D-Day landings.

The films were cut in a small suite in London’s Soho. Editing was dirty work, the loose film attracting all the dust in the air. Before digitization, even simple things like fades to black had to be made by physically reshooting a projected image—sometimes over and over again to get it right. After we finished the films—which we had always called “Deir el Medina” after the ancient village—a small committee of publishers and film commissioners tried to concoct a modern title. They could not agree until my wife, Beth, finally suggested “Ancient Lives.”

At the risk of sounding immodest, the series’ effect was notable. It was the first TV series to treat individual ancient Egyptians in any depth and to put the ancient people back into their landscapes. According to a counselor at the Egyptian embassy in London, tourism increased by 10 percent within a single season. Another bonus was the finding of the great Egyptian director Shadi Abdel Salem’s masterpiece, The Night of Counting the Years, from which we extracted clips for the last episode—and thus inadvertently prompted the use of actors in history documentaries. Shadi died young and most of his films were lost. Fortunately we found a good print at a London art cinema, where it had been shown on and off for many years.

Greatest of all, however, was the impact Ancient Lives had on Egyptology. When we made the series, no archaeologists were working in the Valley of the Kings nor at Deir el Medina, and only a tiny number of scholars were studying the huge quantities of texts that had been written by the ancient villagers. Since then these areas have swelled into an international academic industry that has produced whole shelves of books and maintains a number of specialist websites. Most gratifyingly, several of these scholars have told me that Ancient Lives first inspired their interest in the subject.

As a recent academic article observed, many of these new scholars have taken the series at face value and assumed that the ancient people really were “just like us.” For myself, I never really thought they were. But it seemed vital for the conservation of those most beauteous places—which were so fragile yet had been so miraculously preserved—that they should be turned back again, away from Hollywood and academia, into real places: that they should be rejoined to humanity. This, I hoped, would be the first stage in their continuing conservation.

© John Romer 2009