The legendary Silk route of oriental caravans from the Far East to the West passed trough the Outer Mongolian Gobi desert and the Central Asian Taklaman, in China's eccentric East Turkestan. Trade also brought a succession of cultural fertilization religious mission waves, leaving unique heritage in these arid deserts. The docudrama reconstructs the exploration by Sven Hedlin to dig in archaeologically to the remains of desert-reclaimed former commercial metropolises.

A historical portrait of Rome, now the capital of Italy and seat of the Catholic universal church. Most of all over a millennium it was the eponymous capital of the Roman empire and Antiquity's ultimate superpower. Rome, ruled nearly all of the known world west of China except for conquering Persia, until it succumbed to -mainly Germanic- invasions from the Barbaricum. Focus is when Rome reached its height in the 2nd century AD, as the first city to exceed a million residents.

A portrait of Alexandria, one of the Ancient patriarchates and main Mediterranean port of Egypt, hence the economical capital of the Pharaonic empire. Its main feature was the Pharos, Greek for lighthouse, but one of the seven Ancient world wonders on account of its unrivaled rich library. The library perished in flames when Rome's Julius Cesar reduced Cleopatra's realm to the emperor's private province. This realm a source of grain and wealth to provide Rome with bread, games and funds for the army.

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Farmers in Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Anatolia near Mesopotamia (Turkish-Syrian border), accidentally found circular stone constructions from the Neolithic, some as old as 11,000 years, 6,000 before Stonehenge. German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt unearths and studies them since 1994. They are the earliest known part (way before Jericho) of the rise of agricultural civilization in the fertile crescent, to be linked with town site digs in Palestine and Jordan such as Basta. Various elements prove older then known from finds elsewhere before, showing surprising ...