all sport voice-over: this is bbc news. we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. i m alice morrison, an adventurer and writer. i ve cycled across africa and run across the sahara. now i m on the trail of a mysterious and forgotten arabian civilisation the nabataeans. are we standing in the birthplace of written arabic? i think i would say that, yes. they were nomads who forged a rich civilisation here in the harsh desert conditions of western arabia from the fourth century bce. they ruled for around three centuries until they were swallowed up by the roman empire. now all that s left are the enigmatic remains of their great desert cities of petra and hegra in modern dayjordan and saudi arabia. and this is where i have come to explore, to find out how they survived and thrived here, who they were, and even what they looked like. i want to search for clues about their world. i ll investigate their ancient sites, delvin
How accurate do you think this could be? so they took the skull, and then they built up the layers for the soft tissue. and then the things like the skin pigmentation, the hair, the eye colours. it s as accurate as we can make it. and do we know anything about what she would have eaten, what her health was like? there are certain things we can tell from her health, particularly in the kind ofjawbone and the teeth. we can see a lot of grinding down of molars. molars missing. i mean, she s a beautiful woman. you can see an expression in her eyes and herface, and i think it gives you that connection with the nabataeans. it s quite hard to find because, you know, they didn t leave much to help us. and yet you ve managed to reconstruct this whole, what feels like, living woman with a soul and a story. so i find it very moving. hinat is as close as i can get to an actual nabataean. so for now, this is the end of myjourney.
Transcripts for BBCNEWS Arabian Adventures 20240608 01:51:30 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.