Educational Media Reviews Online

The Collection consists of six fifty-minute episodes. Each in the Ancient Inventions series is a generally light-hearted look at modern systems and conventions that evolved from inventions in ancient societies. On disc 2, The Surprising History of Sex & Love examines ancient sexual practices and morality with the aim of blaming Christianity for promoting masculinity and repressing female sexuality from the time of Saint Paul, carrying down to the present time. In this segment, the “facts” appear to have been selected to prove the theory that the Christian Church purposed to suppress all feminine expression in Western society. Both Hidden History segments attempt to reconstruct the daily lives in the non-privileged classes in Egypt and Rome.

These episodes were produced for the Discovery Channel from 1998 to 2002, likely from BBC programming. The quality of the video is excellent, filmed on locations in Europe, Africa and Asia. Since a film sequence from an episode can recur in another episode to illustrate a slightly different concept, some viewers will find the repetition irritating and may prefer to not view the Collection sequentially.

This video is recommended in support of high school and college curricula in history and social sciences to spark discussion. Some selectivity on the instructor’s part is essential, especially in the use of scenes from The Surprising History of Sex & Love which contains explicit sexual imagery in wall sculptures at a ruined temple in India. It also contains the most prominent phallic imagery although phallic symbols occur in several of the other episodes in the Collection. There are some nice historic and social connections made here, but use with care.