Troy, Parthenon and Lost Cities | Lost Treasures of Ancient Greece | National Geographic UK

Hisalik hill lies a few miles inland. Its name means a place of fortresses. Today Hisalik is better known as the site of ancient Troy. Archaeologist Rustam Aslan leads one of the country's longest running excavations. This morning he's on his way to begin a new season of digging. I came to Troy in 88 as a student. It's been nearly 40 years and I work every season without interruption. I feel sometimes also myself as one part of the excavation history. In the 7th century BCE, Greek settlers founded a city here. They called it Ilium and believed it stood on the same spot as ancient Troy. Over the centuries Ilium's exact location was lost and the legend of its famous predecessor faded into myth. In the 19th century most of the research didn't believe that Troy is a real place. All that changed when a German archaeologist called Heinrich Schliemann visited this hill in the late 1800s. He began to dig, rediscovering the Greek city of Ilium and revealing how it stood on top of ruins more than 5,000 years old. Proof, he claimed, of ancient Troy. The Parthenon temple is Greece's most famous building but at more than 2,500 years old it's in urgent need of conservation. Earthquakes, war and previous well-intentioned but misguided interventions have taken their toll. Key sections are damaged or missing making it structurally unstable. The restoration of the Parthenon is a huge project. For the restorations needed that we have a deeper understanding of the ancient architecture and also the different damages the monument suffered. The restoration team doesn't want to rebuild the Parthenon so it looks brand new. Instead their aim is to restore what is necessary to maintain the building's stability. Today restorers work to slot new pieces of marble into existing ones creating a patchwork of old and new that will preserve the glory of the site for generations to come. Our civil engineers are working for the perfect matching between the ancient surface and the new surface so that there won't be any gap in between their zone. To create the new marble supplements the team begins by making a plaster mold around a broken original marble piece. This cast gives them the exact contours of the surface so the new marble can be cut and shaped exactly to fit. When finished the two will fit together like a jigsaw. Here we are down in the catacombs of Alexandria, the underworld, the place where the dead would be buried. He explores some intriguing carvings unlike anything in Egypt from before the Greeks arrived. Over here we can see at the very top you have a shield with a representation of a Gorgon or Medusa, a symbol of Macedonian power that you would often find on a warrior shield. You see the Agatha demon a symbol of good fortune of power but wearing the crowns of upper and lower Egypt sitting on top of a very Egyptian temple. The tomb displays a curious fusion of Egyptian and Greek religious images. It dates to the second century CE, more than 300 years after Alexander died. At this time a new people, the Romans, ruled Egypt. Here you have the god Anubis but he's dressed very much like a Roman warrior so with this leather skirt hanging down and that pose and spear he's a Romanized Anubis. Jay thinks the decorations reveal the background of the tomb's owners. We know it was a family from the representations that we see here. We know that it was probably from the Greek aristocracy. It's a wealthy family. There's a lot of Greek representations but there's also Roman representations and of course the strong Egyptian influence. The persistence of Greek culture in Egypt into Roman times reveals the success of the aristocracy that arrived with Alexander.