This beautiful documentary DVD arrives as a giveaway with our local Sunday newspaper. The focus is on the river Nile and its importance to the existence and development of the ancient Egyptian civilisation. It also examines the various old theories and concerning the reason why the Nile floods every year. The search proceeds up both the Blue and White Nile tributaries of the world's greatest river upstream from their confluence near modern Sudan's capital. The final episodes are docudramas that describe the adventures and endurance of the intrepid Victorian era explorers of both sexes in the quest for the Nile's elusive source. The cinematography is superb and the production gives equal balance to history, often enacted, geomorphology, anthropology, fauna and flora of the regions covered, all skilfully integrated.

Altogether an enthralling BBC-Discovery channel series of roughly 2 ½ hours on one DVD. (The DVD offered by the newspaper allows Greek or English subtitles and Greek or English sound commentary).

The "Nile" series is packaged with other related series by the sponsoring Athens newspaper as "The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt" in an attractive good quality box set container. DVD 2, which I haven't' seen yet contains two related BBC series, "Building the Great Pyramid" and "Egypt's Lost City", both BBC/Time Life/TLC productions.

Disk 3 , is the more readily available series "Egypt", the only one available currently from Amazon.

I shall comment on Disks 2 and 3 after I have watched them but aside from "Egypt" they may be hard to obtain commercially at present.

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