Ancient Apocalypse
2021
📺 3 Seasons
🎬 15 Episodes
📅 Returning Series
🌐 DE
⏱️ 50 min/episode
Documentary
Ancient Apocalypse investigates six catastrophic stories of how the world’s greatest civilisations collapsed.
Every continent has its ruins — places where only stones tell the tale of a fallen people. They might lay buried under the Earth, in the shade of jungle canopy or amidst the teeming industry of a modern city. However, they all raise the same questions: How could something so great all but vanish? Why do civilisations collapse?
In this 6-part series, we uncover the scientific reasons why some of history’s most fascinating peoples have disappeared in the face of the natural world’s might. We investigate the end of The Akkadian Empire, The Lost City of Helike, Sodom and Gomorrha, The mystery of the Sea Peoples, The Maya Civilisation and Doggerland. Some of the world’s greatest natural disasters reduced these societies to nothing.
Seasons
Season 1
The biblical story of Sodom. It’s stood for thousands of years as a powerful lesson of the perils of wickedness. According to the Bible, the men of Sodom were so wicked that God destroyed the city in a shower of fire and brimstone. But did the city of Sodom ever exist and could it be possible to locate? At Tall el-Hammam, in modern day Jordan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a once thriving bronze age city, destroyed by some cataclysmic event, that they believe is the city of Sodom.
Season 2
The Minoans, considered by many as the first European civilisation, flourished in the islands of the Aegean in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE before eventually disappearing around 1100 BC. A sophisticated people, both artistically and technologically, they are described as the first literate society in Europe, having left behind an unmatched legacy of unique art and architecture, incredible labyrinth-like palace complexes and fine artefacts. Their mercantile culture led to their presiding over a vast trade network and the grandeur of their civilisation is immortalised in the myth of King Minos and the Minotaur trapped beneath his palace at Knossos. But despite an extended period of cultural growth, Minoan civilisation is abruptly ended around 1550 BC as a result of a powerful explosive event.
Season 3
Production
ZDF Enterprises, ZDFinfo, World Media Rights