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Private Notes
The treasure trail 'is the murder of man's history and it's a tragedy.' History is murdered in the search for buried treasure, not just gold and silver, but fractured pots and broken statues, the highly saleable relics of past civilisations. Meet curators, smugglers, dealers and indignant archaeologists anxious to preserve intact the evidence of the past. Controversy continued with the announcement by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, of the million dollar purchase of the Euphronios Vase - the so-called 'hot pot'. The trail leads from New York to the Etruscan hills in Italy, to meet tomb robbers, policemen and a man who fakes pots for a living. Re-aired 15 December 1975, 3 September 1987
Cheops coming to reign over them plunged into every kind of wickedness. He ordered all the Egyptians to work for himself. And they worked to the number of a hundred thousand men at a time, each party during three months. Were the pyramids of Egypt built by slave labour, as Herodotus suggests? Is Von Daniken right in believing that the Ancient Egyptians could not have erected the 2,300,000 blocks of the Great Pyramid in less than 600 years? Some of the myths are destroyed and some of the mysteries still remain in this month's programme.
When two gleaming bronze guns, bearing the arms of England and Spain and the date 1556, emerged from the sea in February 1971, the City of Derry Sub-Aqua Club knew for certain that they had rediscovered La Trinidad Valencera after a silence of 400 years. This massive Venetian merchant ship, hi-jacked in Sicily and forced to join the ill-fated Spanish Armada, had limped, battered and sinking, into a remote bay in Donegal on 12 September 1588.
Magnus Magnusson tells the story of the club's trials, tribulations and triumphs over the last three years as a group of enthusiastic amateur divers came to terms with one of the most important wrecks in the British Isles and a momentous historical discovery. Re-aired 26 December 1975
In 1837 two Romanian peasants stumbled upon an ancient hoard of gold and jewels on a bleak hill-side near their village. Within three years the peasants were dead, the treasure smashed to pieces and several of the pieces had disappeared without trace. The damaged objects were reconstituted by experts and then stolen in a Rififi-type burglary. Recovered once more they were given to Russia for safekeeping a year or so before the October Revolution of 1917. They were returned to Romania only in 1956. This dramatised story of the treasure is based in exact detail on the files of 19th-century criminal trials of the principal characters involved, who are played by members of the ROMANIAN NATIONAL THEATRE COMPANY.
Who were the Celts? They grew rich in 'Salt-City,' the great rock-salt deposits near Salzburg in Austria. They were famous throughout the Roman world for their thirst for wine, their lust for human sacrifice and their astronomer druids. They rode moustachioed and naked into battle in chariots and their art was one of the great achievements of prehistoric Europe. David Parry-Jones describes the archaeologists' search for a culture which ranges across 28 centuries, and from Anatolia to Ireland, and is often as mysterious and ambiguous as its art.
For 50 years the strange, mysterious script discovered on baked clay tablets at Knossos in Crete remained undeciphered. Scholars and classicists were baffled. Then, in 1952, Michael Ventris, a young architect, cracked Linear B and electrified the archaeological world. René Cutforth tells the story of the decipherment and of its effect on a long-standing dispute between the grand old man of British archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans, and a young Englishman, Alan Wace, who claimed that Evans's theories about Greece 3,500 years ago were wrong - and who was made to suffer for his heresy. Re-aired 15 December 1977
