A Visual Guide to the Aegean Bronze Age in Doctor Who

Most people probably don’t associate Doctor Who with the Aegean Bronze Age. I mean, why would you? They’ve only done two stories set there and one is entirely missing from the archives. But when you delve a bit more closely, there’s a thread of Bronze Age stuff running through from the very first episode and lasting at least until the end of seventies.

Here’s the TARDIS in the very first episode of Doctor Who, in November 1963. Isn’t it lovely?

And that funny-looking chair is a replica of the stone one found in the ‘throne room’ at the Bronze Age palace of Knossos on Crete.

Imagining the Future in Bricks: The Designs of Lego Space (Part 1 – 70s and 80s)

Space Lego.

Have there ever been two words that go together quite so evocatively and conjure such boundless possibility? From 1978 to 1999 Lego released an unbroken sequence of original space sets, more than twenty years’ worth of spaceships, bases, rovers and robots. I was lucky enough to grow up right in the middle of this, a geeky kid as fascinated by space and science fiction as I was by knights and castles. Needless to say, I had a lot of space Lego.

I’ve written elsewhere about my own experience of a childhood lived through Lego bricks, about how those little plastic pieces lent physical reality and material texture to my imagination, how they continue to encode memories of my early life. What I’m interested in here is the world of Lego Space itself, and how it drew from outside inspiration. These ship designs and imagined spaces that mean so much to me – loosely defined but vividly depicted – where did they come from?  What were the influences on the small group of predominantly Danish designers who created them?

The Afterlife of Baʿal

(or, What This Ugaritian Storm-God Looks Like Now Will Astound You!)

Ba’al on a stele from Ugarit, now in the Louvre

 

Reconstruction of the Temple of Ba’al on the acropolis of Ugarit. From Callot 2011

 

Ever since excavations began at the Syrian city of Ugarit in 1929, the importance of the god Baʿal has been clear. Among the first Ugaritic texts discovered at the site were mythological tablets recounting the legends of this god; Baʿal’s temple was excavated in prime position on the city’s acropolis, close to that of his father Dagan. While the supreme god El occupied the pinnacle of the Ugaritian pantheon, as more and more ritual and religious documents have been recovered from Ugarit, it’s become unquestionable that the city’s people felt a particular fondness and affinity for Baʿal, the archetypal king who had his palace on Mount Saphon overlooking the city.

But Baʿal was not solely an Ugaritian god and knowledge of him was far from lost with the destruction of the city around 1176 BC. Through the distorting filters of hostile Judaeo-Christian writings and the medieval and later traditions of demonology and the occult which reinterpreted them, Baʿal has enjoyed quite an afterlife which has taken him from Canaanite king and storm-god to lurid demon in the court of Satan. In this incarnation he’s spread through popular culture. It’s a massive amount of cultural baggage to have built up even before those first Ugaritic texts were discovered.

What are the most Lovecraftian stories in Classic Doctor Who?

I’m going to level with you straight up – this post isn’t going to have a lot of archaeological or academic content (except inasmuch as Lovecraft’s stories themselves are intrinsically archaeological and scholarly in character), so if that’s what you come here for you might want to sit it out and wait for the next one.

The original run of Doctor Who last more than quarter of a century from 1963 to 1989 and in that time the good Doctor fought everything from the well-known Daleks and Cybermen to the more eccentric – robots made of sweets, gigantic prawn-viruses, rubber-clad men with aerials on their heads, and so on. More than once he’s come up against ancient, unknowable evils ‘Eeeevil, evilsincethedawnoftime!’ as Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor once put it (unfortunately the clip doesn’t seem to be up online anywhere), and especially in the 70s, he’s also seen his fair share of sinister cultists. These are, of course, staples of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and you’d expect a fair bit of overlap between the kinds of people who read his stories and those who watch and write for Doctor Who.

Sure enough, once the series was cancelled and the Doctor’s ongoing adventures moved to a series of monthly original novels for the 1990s, some of the fans writing these books tried to forge explicit connections between the cults and formless evils of the old days and the handily out-of-copyright Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos. There had been a universe before this one, a couple of stories said, and it had its own physical laws and its own equivalent of the Time Lords, the Doctor’s powerful race of time-travellers. When that universe ended, a few of them found ways to survive and emerge into our own, where they acquired previously undreamt-of powers. These became the Great Old Ones, and a number of the Doctor’s old foes were among their numbers. It’s a bit of a silly retcon, of course, an unnecessary link between two bodies of work almost diametrically opposed in their values, attitudes and approaches. But on the other hand, it is kind of fun, and part of Doctor Who’s raison d’etre is mashing itself up with things that don’t quite fit.

So with this in mind, let’s go for a whistle-stop tour through time and see just how Lovecraftian original-flavour Doctor Who could be.

Atlantis – Review

Res Gerendae’s been quiet for the summer. One of us was exiled to Dacia where, I’m reliably informed, it’s just horrible; one of us had to go down to the Underworld to consult the shade of a 19^th-century German philologist regarding a footnote; another unfortunate went to Turkey for a conference, got lost while hitch-hiking home and is now shacked up with a strange lady and her large collection of pigs. We expect them back some time in the next decade.

But with term about to start, the Fates decreed that Res Gerendae should return. And what better way than with a review of Atlantis, the BBC’s new sort-of-Classics-themed sword-and-sandals Saturday night effort.

Having followed the pre-launch buzz of this series with, if not interest, then at least moderate curiosity, the group of us that gathered a couple of nights ago to watch had a pretty good idea what we were in for. Atlantis is the latest in a line of shows aimed at filling the Doctor Who slot when that series isn’t on, but which never come close to equalling it. Most immediately, this is the pseudo-Minoan themed replacement for Merlin, a series I found so bad I didn’t make it to the end of the first episode but which I know a lot of other people quite liked. We already knew the main trio of characters was Jason, Pythagoras and Hercules, so we weren’t expecting the slightest bit of historical or mythological accuracy. That wasn’t what we were hoping for. Instead, we were holding out for a so-bad-it’s-good dose of cheesy Classical camp in the vein of the old B-movies by Harryhausen et al. which have been entertaining us for some time now.

Mehercle! Were we disappointed! Sorry everyone, I’m afraid I’m going to have to unleash the hunting-lions.

Via Memoriae Classicae IV – Time Team

For twenty years Time Team was a British institution. Despite being a low-budget, often rather dull programme tucked away in the less glamorous parts of Channel 4’s Sunday evening schedules, for a generation it shaped the way the general public saw archaeology. I long ago lost track of how often I’d been talking to someone outside the subject and the ‘what do you do?’ question would be immediately followed up with, ‘So are you going to end up on Time Team, then?’ I used to laugh politely, maybe say ‘I hope not!’, because, like many people in academic archaeology, I had very mixed feelings about the show.

Those interlocutors had the last laugh, though. Because this is where Classical Memory Lane’s media-reminiscences intersect most closely with my own career. You see, I really did end up on Time Team. Twice.

So this article is the story of the programme’s role in making me an archaeologist and shaping public attitudes to archaeology. It’s the story of a valuable piece of old-fashioned public-service television which for two decades delivered long hair, beards, woolly jumpers and Wiltshire accents to the Great British Public. It’s the story of how I learned to stop worrying and love Time Team.

And to add an extra frisson of excitement, I’ve got the arbitrary structural constraint of just three sub-headings to tell it!

Via Memoriae Classicae IIb – Classics and Doctor Who (The 1970s Onwards)

Last time we explored Doctor Who’s two gleeful, rambunctious 1960s forays into Classical antiquity. Now we re-enter the time vortex and complete our journey, in a great, colourful, careening sweep from the 70s to the present day. And if that looks like a lot to cram into a single blog-post, don’t worry. It’s bigger on the inside…

All together now:

Dum de-dum, dum de-dum, dum-de-dum wooo-eeee-ooooo……

The Time Monster (1972)

Jo and the Doctor

It’s the early 1970s, and the Doctor, now played by the ruffle-shirted and bouffant-haired Jon Pertwee, has been exiled to contemporary Earth, where he’s shacked up with UNIT – an endearingly homespun alien-fighting paramilitary organisation nominally attached to the UN but in practice as British as red double-decker buses and Home Counties quarries. There he’s got an assistant, in the shape of Ditziest Secret Agent Ever™ Jo Grant and a foil: Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the man whose picture is under ‘Unflappable’ in the dictionary, and who has a stick and a moustache. It’s all a bit camp, and half the fun of this period of the show is trying to figure out exactly which members of the cast are in on the joke.