Landscape Slayers

Hatshepsut was an Egyptian queen and pharaoh who reigned from 1504 - 1483 BCE and considered one of the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt, commissioning hundreds of construction projects throughout both Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, that were grander and more numerous than those of any of her Middle Kingdom predecessors. So who was she? How did she come to power in patriarchal Egypt? What were her built legacies and what happened after her death?

Episode 3

It was during this time that the first designed landscapes arose from the contemplation of the miraculous effects of irrigation on a dead world. The area of Mesopotamia known as Babylonia, after the capital Babylon, was threaded with canals used equally for transport and for trade. Uruk was the second city state to arise in the Tigris-Euphrates delta and is described in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh: "One third of the whole is city, one third is garden, and one third is field, with the precinct of the goddess of Ishtar”

"Paleolithic humans spread all across Africa and south-west Asia at the time and women could have played a significant part in determining this spread. Owen shows that the past was inhabited by diverse kinds of people, who responded to specific settings and problems in manifold ways. In these contexts women were at times hunters, fishers, craftspeople, collectors, killers, educators, sisters, mothers, grandmothers and shamans. In this more balanced view of hunting and gathering societies, men and children are also central actors, and we begin to see Paleolithic life in which the myths that generations of scholars have helped to create are no longer the only illuminated points."