List Price: $59.95You Pay Only: $53.99 You Save: $5.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0733961775358
Format: Box set, Collector's Edition, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Label: A&E HOME VIDEO
Manufacturer: A&E HOME VIDEO
Number Of Items: 6
Publisher: A&E HOME VIDEO
Region Code: 1
Release Date: September 25, 2007
Running Time: 748 minutes
Sales Rank: 6175
Studio: A&E HOME VIDEO
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The Parthenon. Chichén Itzá. The Pyramids. Their scale, complexity, and sheer beauty stand as permanent reminders of the indomitable strength and ingenuity of the human spirit.
ENGINEERING AN EMPIRE: THE COLLECTOR S EDITION circles the globe to re-examine history s most magnificent civilizations by surveying the architectural and engineering triumphs they left behind. Beginning more than five-thousand years ago with the mind-boggling construction feats of the ancient Egyptians, the 14 documentaries--including two feature-length specials--in this collection revive the spectacular glory of the past, from the great temples of Greece to the majestic and mysterious Tenochtitlan. Cutting-edge CGI graphics and stunning location footage reanimate the ancient streets of such cities as Carthage and Rome, while expert interview trace the rise of each empire and the technological achievements that paved the way for their gravity-defying masterpieces.
Hosted by Peter Weller, ENGINEERING AN EMPIRE: THE COLLECTOR S EDITION unites each riveting moment of this critically-acclaimed and Emmy Award-winning series to reveal the innovation and infrastructure behind the world s most dazzling empires.
DVD Features: Season 1 Behind-the-Scenes Featurette; Egypt Featurettes Inside Look , From The Director s Chair , and Everything You Wanted To Know About Egypt ; Rome Behind-the-Scenes Featurette
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - The History Channel Presents, Engineering an Empire, The Complete Series
A very instructive series. Well researched, formulated and presented. The computer reconstructions are outstanding. For the most part, these documentaries are based on fact with little or no licence taken on purely speculative arguements. A well rounded, historically sound series of documentaries that should adorn every "History DVD" collection.
Rating:  - Excellent series!
This is one of the best series The History Channel did. I catch myself watching each episode over and over and learning something new each time.
I HIGHLY recommend it!
Rating: - Broad-reaching and interesting
The best thing about this series is that some of the episodes go beyond the typical fare for historical documentary subject matter. Rome, Egypt, and Europe have been done to death, but this series features episodes on Carthage, Persia, and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) empires--which all recieve MUCH less attention than the deserve. The series also covers Native American empires--the Aztecs and Maya--, so there's a fair amount of diversity. There's also some diversity in time period, with episodes on the rennesiance-era Italian city-states, pre-industrial Russia, colonial Britain, and Napoleonic France in addition to the ancient civilizations. There is also an episode on China, and 2 on Greece during both the Helenistic and classical periods.
I appreciate the breadth of subject matter in terms of geography and time period. This is the first documentary I think I've ever seen to focus exclusively on Persia or Carthage and not on the roles they played in Western contexts (the Greco-Persian and Punic Wars respectively). Never-the-less, these events come up and get significant attention and discussion. It would have been nice to focus on "fresh" (less-well known) facts. But this is only a small complaint. Another small complaint is that the series did not take this idea further. I could have done without France, Britain, and 2 whole episodes on Greece, and instead seen something on India or the forgotten empires of Africa (Nubia, Ethiopia, Tim Buktu, etc). The Khmer, the Celts, the Islamic ... Read More
Rating: - A Good Survey of World Engineering History
The History Channel's Engineering an Empire series, containing six DVDs, focuses on the engineering and architectural triumphs of great (and not so great) civilizations. Each of the programs attempts to feature a society's engineering accomplishments as a prism through which to view its history and culture. Because of the arbitrary selection of societies and engineering accomplishments and the limited length of each program, the series fails to achieve this grand goal, but it is still both entertaining and to a limited extent educational.
All too often, the engineering accomplishments of the civilizations covered are limited to aqueducts, the use of pilings to support buildings in marshes and over bodies of water, the discovery of the corbelled arch, and military inventions like the Greek triremes and the ubiquitous catapult in its various forms.
Although actors are used extensively, they look like you expect real people of the time would have looked, a major advantage that the History Channel has over PBS, where the actors are always English and good-looking. A History Channel Persian or Mayan looks like a Persian or Mayan.
One area in which the History Channel excels is that of Computer-Aided Design, which they use to "reconstruct" buildings that either lie in ruins or have disappeared. The results are remarkable.
On the negative side, while the experts who appear are clearly highly knowledgeable leaders in their field, that field is limited to history; ... Read More
Rating: - It's Pretty Good
I really enjoyed this set. I felt that it would have been a little more interesting if it got into a little more detail on certain topics. Over all though, I thought that it was worth watching.
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