Series · Prime Video · 2019
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
Useful. A record of work and of vanity. Watch it for the work.
A wonder is often a tomb or a boast that took a city's labor. The honest documentary says both: the skill was real, and the person who ordered it may have been spending lives to be remembered. Use this with an older child who can hold those two facts. Turn it off if it becomes a list of spectacles with no one sweating.
Good beside you. Ask who cut the stone, and whether their own house still stood.
The eight
Industry
8/10
Stone, labor, engineering. The series is about people who finished enormous jobs.
Household
3/10
Kings and tombs more than kitchens. A household is rarely the wonder.
Piety
5/10
Room for the scale of a thing made for a god or a dead man. The series does not have to share the worship.
Courage
4/10
The courage belongs to the unnamed hands. The credit usually belongs to the ruler.
Republic
6/10
A public work is a kind of republic, even when a tyrant ordered it.
Temperance
6/10
It can describe glory without drooling. It sometimes drools.
Truth
7/10
It prefers the account of how the thing stood to the legend on the plaque.
Stewardship
7/10
The question under it is what we bother to keep, and for whom.
Live historicallyWalk to the oldest building you can reach this week and say who was meant to use it.
