The way to get a big budget documentary on the TV is to have it fronted by a celebrity historian. Channel Four commissioned Bettany Hughes to present a documentary about the Egypt of the pharaohs. On considered reflection it was reactionary eye candy.

All the usual tropes of TV history lite were employed. There must be several hundred Egyptian and Italian actors who make a living solely from historical documentaries. Twenty of them were used to recreate epic battles using the shaky camera technique to put you in the heart of the action. Computer graphics unconvincingly represented hordes of soldiers and peasants. Intrusive music supplemented the narrative. Various academics chipped in with thirty second sound bites. Nonetheless the viewer’s understanding of the society she describes was still only very partial after two hours.

If you were able to avoid being irritated by the visual style the ideological content was more than enough to make the blood boil. This was the “great man” view of history without apology or insight. Why did 25 000 workers spend decades building the pyramid at Giza for Khufu? In Bettany Hughes’ version it was because they were all happy to take part in a “great project of national importance”. Something of the same spirit is probably motivating the workers at the Olympic site.

Bizarrely a twenty first century historian was accepting the ideology of the pharaohs. If the rulers of ancient Egypt said that by building a pyramid to preserve the body of the dead ruler they would bring prosperity to the kingdom  that must be true. It was a shameless absence of critical thought.

Lucky old Khufu lived “at a time of great wealth”. This was illustrated by shots of peasants working in a field. That could have been the starting point for a much more interesting approach, one which looked more critically at how a small number of people were able to force a population to work on projects like the pyramids.

Even with a  low technological level societies like ancient Egypt were able to produce a surplus. This was expropriated, in particular that created by primary agricultural producers, by castes of nobles, priests and  soldiers. It was an intensely exploitative relationship. It amounted to extortion by groups which had contributed nothing to the surplus and, like all forms of extortion, it was done with the threat of force in the background.

The low level of productivity of ancient societies put severe limits on the uses to which stolen wealth could be put. Egypt lacked even the wheel barrow and while it’s true that the Romans had the water wheel there is little evidence of its use before the fourth and fifth centuries. Grand projects like the pyramids and temple building were one of the few ways available to ancient ruling classes to dispose of the massive amounts of wealth they took from the peasantry. Their claimed connection with the divine was the ideological justification.

As Hughes pointed out the workers on the pyramids died at an average age of 32 due to the prolonged and gruelling nature of the work. Yet they were not slaves. They were accommodated in workers’ villages and received rations of beer, grain, oil and fish adequate for a family of ten. She didn’t point out that in 1170 BC they went on strike when their rations did not arrive.

An examination of those relationships and some attempt to deconstruct the ideology of the period would have made for a much more interesting bit of television. That’s the sort of  TV that Honda would not be so keen to sponsor.