It was narrated by a lovely lady with probably a very English plum stuck up her bottom and a particularly fetching way of pronouncing 'Salisbury' so that even the resident american noticed it wasn't pronounced 'Salizzberry'. She was quite entertaining.
She told us that Stonehenge was constructed around the same time as the Pyramids. I'm sure those in the know would debate this, but as the resident american said it wasn't a very favourable comparison... I excused our ancenstors, suggesting that the colder weather probably retarded our development compared with the Egytians in their desert heat, and fortunately the programme then showed the the Uffington horse, which showed a more artistic side to our ancient relatives than Stonehenge:
But thanks to the plummy lady I can only now think of Stonehenge as a rather clumsy construction by some developmentally-challenged cave people who were probably so chuffed with themselves for getting three stones to stack together that they all went off to sample the best of the local scrumpy and forgot all about decorating their little construction... All while their distant relatives to the south were busy writing great long poems with hieroglyphics to explain their intricate buildings and painting friezes that would have made Laura Ashley proud.
5 comments:
Damn I wish I'd caught it too, those shows are always entertaining once you leave the 'mother ship'!
I never thought about that comparison but, yeah, now that you mention it, the pyramids do make Stonehenge look like it was built by some unimaginative underachievers.
Yes, but they had to do it in the rain, which must have made it harder.
In defence of my neolithic countrymen, the earthworks at Stonehenge pre-date the Egyptian pyramids by several hundred years. Admittedly, there is debate about precisely when the stones were erected.
Regarding the effort involved, the stones used in Stonehenge are larger than those used to make the Great Pyramid at Giza and the ancient Britons didn't have access to the 200,000 slaves that Cheops had to hand.
Both are fascinating relics from a millennium when little other architecture has survived.
Stonehenge was constructed by a bunch of juvenile delinquents doing Community Service. These days, they'd get an asbo.
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