Event Merchandise are working with the producers of Ben Hur Live, the greatest spectacular of them all. Event will be creating an authentic range of merchandise to be sold around the globe. The premier is at the O2 arena in September and travels all over Europe and the rest of the World.

The show has a sea battle, an orgy and music by Stewart Copeland, the drummer from the Police.

Franz Abraham, the producer of Ben Hur Live, had dreamt of adapting Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ, for 15 years.

Ben-Hur is the story of a Jewish prince who becomes a galley slave and then a champion charioteer in the early 1st century AD. It was a hit play 100 years ago — the chariot race was depicted with live horses running on a treadmill device — and then an acclaimed silent film. For most people, however, it is indelibly associated with Charlton Heston in the 3½-hour epic released in 1959.

The nine-minute chariot race in William Wyler’s film is a Hollywood landmark and casts a giant shadow over any attempt to remake Ben-Hur. Other live chariot races have been staged over the years but none has evoked the same sense of danger and excitement.

“You have to feel the race. You have to smell it,” Abraham said. “The first rows will be only 3m from the race. You will get a drop of the horses’ sweat on your face and hear the sand and feel like you are under the horses.”

Two thousand years ago chariot racing was the Ancient World’s most popular spectator sport. The top teams were owned by wealthy patrons and followed by fanatical supporters who frequently fought street battles against each other after races. It delivered an addictive adrenalin rush to spectators and performers.

Estimates of the crowds at the Circus Maximus in Rome range from 150,000 to 250,000. According to the satirist Juvenal, who was in the last first century AD: “The people, who once conferred imperium, symbols of office, legions, everything, now hold themselves in check and anxiously desire only two things, the grain dole and chariot races in the Circus.”

Event merchandise will be creating Gladiator Swords, Helmets and other product from the times.