Secrets of Ancient Empires_1of5_The First Civilisations
Transcript
00:00The evolution of mankind from a wandering hunter to the sophisticated city dweller we
00:16see today is a mystery that is still being painstakingly unraveled.
00:23Our view of the past is being reshaped as archaeologists brush away the sands of time
00:29to reveal more secrets of ancient empires.
00:59Archaeology is often seen as a dry and dusty science, with fields of knowledge that are
01:29findings that appear to be as fixed as the stones from which they first emerged.
01:34In reality, our views of the past are being altered by new discoveries which are constantly
01:39generating new perspectives on ancient lives.
01:44This episode explores how the latest archaeological findings are reshaping our understanding of
01:49the very first civilisations.
01:54Traditionally, mankind's progression from hunter-gatherer to farmer was seen as a natural
02:00process of evolution.
02:02However, new archaeological findings have revealed evidence which challenges these assumptions.
02:10It may well be that mankind was transformed from the hunter-gatherer to farming societies
02:15not by the power of nature, but by the power of the sword.
02:24We also explore the latest theories on the origins of writing, which place the first
02:29writings much earlier than those in ancient China.
02:33We also discover the latest thinking on the origins of the first cities and civilisations.
02:41The Oxford English Dictionary defines civilisation as an advanced state of social organisation.
02:54This has become the accepted definition, yet it is a term with which we are becoming increasingly
02:59uncomfortable.
03:05Civilisation is a difficult term to use nowadays because we've very much inherited a lot of
03:09the meanings associated with the term from an earlier style of doing history and archaeology
03:14in which different societies were seen on a sort of ladder.
03:18Most archaeologists, most anthropologists are a bit uneasy with this term because there's
03:25a sort of checklist of practical things that a civilisation is supposed to have.
03:30The first thing you'd probably look for is writing. You'd look for palaces, you'd look
03:35for temples, you'd look for organised life, maybe indications of a centralised society.
03:41You wouldn't expect to find all of those things, but you'd expect to find some of them, or
03:45it wouldn't make the grade.
03:47And of course it was no coincidence that the people who were making these schemes, these
03:50evolutionary ladders, tended to be from the societies that considered themselves to be
03:54the most advanced, the Victorian European ones principally.
04:02The word civilisation comes from the Greek word for city.
04:08The ancient geographer Strabo claimed that to have a city was the only criteria you needed
04:14to be civilised.
04:17To the ancient Romans, the barbarian tribes of Europe were the perfect example of uncivilised
04:22peoples.
04:23Yet today, we know that even among these simple people, complex social and political structures
04:30existed.
04:36Civilisation is a term that has been used all too often to indicate a superior lifestyle.
04:42Superior that is, to the less structured, less progressive way of life that preceded
04:46it.
04:48Our views of the very first societies are being reshaped away from the widely accepted
04:53idea that mankind evolved from the hunter-gatherer as a result of an inevitable process.
05:01I think in this standard view of history, or the human story as a whole, is the idea
05:07that there were quite a few suddenlies.
05:09Suddenly these civilisations arose out of the background of Stone Age darkness, of ignorance
05:15and so on.
05:16But in fact these suddenlies, particularly the further you go back, give us a completely
05:21false impression of what was actually going on, because a lot of the change that was happening
05:25had been building up for thousands of years.
05:28And I don't think all the civilisations that history normally accepts as being the first
05:33either grew up overnight or grew up at the same time.
05:40Around 10,000 BC, near the end of the last great ice age, humans were found in virtually
06:02all inhabitable places on earth.
06:05By our standards they were unsophisticated.
06:09But they were already successful and accomplished hunters, whose skills and weapons showed a
06:14leap of imagination.
06:18They crafted tools, jewellery and detailed figurines.
06:24Recently evidence of textiles have been found dating as far back as 25,000 BC.
06:31The detailed cave paintings, such as those at Lascaux and Cosquer, are ample proof that
06:36they were also skilled artists.
06:41The secrets of early human lifestyle are still being uncovered today.
06:48People are not taught about what happened before the beginning of history, which is
06:52only 5,000 years ago, and human beings of the same intelligence and the same physical
06:59and biological make-up have been around for at least 100,000 years.
07:03So what was going on for 95,000 years?
07:05If you actually look at the archaeological evidence, you can see all kinds of advanced
07:11behaviour in all different spheres of life.
07:14For example, they made the most extraordinary stone tools, things that we can't replicate
07:21now.
07:2211-inch long stone blades made of flint less than half an inch wide.
07:28So they were very skilled at doing what they knew, very skilled at producing the sorts
07:35of tools and instruments they needed.
07:37If you look, say, at Stonehenge or some of the marvellous monuments of prehistoric Britain
07:42like Avebury or in the north, in Orkney, at the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stennis,
07:47these extraordinary monuments were produced 4,000 years ago by people who certainly didn't
07:53know writing and certainly didn't live in cities, yet they did produce these wonderful
07:57sophisticated monuments.
08:01Around the 10th millennium BC, a small number of humans began to adopt a new revolutionary
08:07way of life, and the world was introduced to farming.
08:13The setting for this change in lifestyle was the Fertile Crescent, a region of cultivatable
08:20land stretching up from the Persian Gulf into present-day Syria, down through Israel towards
08:26Egypt.
08:30The wild-growing wheat and barley of the area attracted tribes of hunter-gatherers to the
08:35region.
08:38Archaeologists have uncovered flint and wooden tools used to harvest the grain dating back
08:42to 1500 BC.
08:46And at Ein Gev, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, they have uncovered ancient grindstones
08:52that were used to turn the grain into flour.
08:59Around 11,000 BC, culture known as the Natufian started to live together in communities as
09:04large as 300 people.
09:08While these people were still hunter-gatherers, they wandered less, and were already tending
09:13the plants that the first farmers would be planting and harvesting at locations of their
09:17own choosing more than 1,000 years later.
09:25Soon, settlements of human farmers began to spring up across the Fertile Crescent.
09:31These people were on the cusp of an old form of life, the hunting life, and a new form
09:37of life which basically consisted of three factors which we can pick up from the archaeology,
09:44which is domesticating animals, domesticating plants, in other words growing crops, and
09:49basically living in one place the whole year round.
09:54The most famous of these early settlements was the one established at Jericho.
09:59By 8,000 BC, some 1,500 people lived in this oasis town in the Valley of the Dead Sea.
10:10Excavations at Jericho have revealed much about the ancient people who first lived there.
10:16They were farmers who grew figs in addition to wheat and barley.
10:21Settlements were domesticated with sheep and goats, pigs, cattle, and with dogs to
10:26defend flocks and humans.
10:30But was life any easier for these new farmers?
10:35I think most people see the situation that there was this vast period of the Stone Age
10:40where people were running around with clubs beating their wives and they were just rummaging
10:44around desperate for food and they were so stupid that by the time they'd caught something
10:50to eat and they'd managed to, you know, fumble to make a fire, that was all they could do
10:54for the day.
10:55And the result, if you like, was that eventually when somebody, some genius discovered agriculture,
11:02this freed up a lot of time. People could now live with more surplus, they had more
11:06spare time, they could think about things and develop more technologies. But this really
11:10isn't the case.
11:11In hunter-gatherer societies, they often only had to work a couple of hours a day to get
11:16their food. I won't say their daily bread because they didn't make bread, but to get
11:19their food and then they could sit back for the rest of the day, whereas we have to work
11:23an eight-hour day or something like that in order to get our daily bread.
11:29Not only did farming bring more work, it brought with it new dangers.
11:36More food brought more people. And more people meant a greater dependency on successful harvests.
11:44These fledgling communities were now far more vulnerable to the whims of nature.
11:54Storms and droughts could destroy crops, and precious domesticated plants were prey to
11:58the ravages of insects.
12:02The larger number of people living in a closer environment brought diseases that had been
12:06rare amongst the hunter-gatherer communities, who could simply move away to new areas not
12:13affected by such disasters.
12:18Recent excavations have revealed more signs of malnutrition in the bones of farmers than
12:23those of the hunter-gatherers.
12:27And the skeletons of these ancient peoples tells us that the average farmer was far shorter
12:31than his nomadic cousin.
12:34So if you compare the standard of living in the hunter-gatherer situation from the agricultural
12:42civilised situation, you might well find that the hunter-gatherers had much better standards
12:48of living, better diets, more leisure time and so on.
12:51The idea that the things that have happened are necessarily progressive doesn't really
12:55make sense, and one of the questions that really fascinates archaeologists is why did
13:00things change?
13:02If ancient man was better off in his hunter-gatherer days, why would he want to stay in these new
13:08unhealthy urban settlements?
13:13The evidence suggests that there was often no choice, for it appears that the first farmers
13:18may have been forced to work the land to feed the demands of other humans.
13:24It seems very likely that one of the key institutions that led to this was some sort of social stratification
13:33a separation between rulers and ruled, people who could require and get tribute and tax
13:41from agriculturalists.
13:43Soon as you get this kind of formation, where you have something like a class, where you
13:47have rulers and ruled, then you can begin to see the ways in which powerful polities,
13:53powerful centralised societies begin to emerge.
13:56And then you get quite rapidly the development of some very large communities, and Chattel
14:01Hoyuk is one of the earliest villages known, and is really quite a large site, you can
14:07certainly call it a prehistoric town.
14:11The ancient town of Chattel Hoyuk was utterly unknown to history until its discovery in
14:161961.
14:19A British archaeological team, led by James Melhart, began digging at the site on the
14:24Konya Plain in present-day Turkey.
14:27They found an archaeological treasure beyond their wildest hopes and dreams.
14:33The continuing excavation of the site suggests that as many as 5,000 people lived in the
14:38settlement as long ago as 7,200 BC.
14:44This is an area where there really isn't much stone, it's a flat plain and there's no stone,
14:50so the buildings were not made of stone, they were made of basically mud brick, clay.
14:56And they built their houses right next to each other, they didn't really have any roads,
15:01and you went home and you went in through the roof, that was where your front door was.
15:07And basically we know that this experiment worked because people built literally on the
15:12foundations of the old houses for a period of 1,500 years.
15:20For centuries archaeologists have struggled to identify the single source of the very
15:24first civilisations.
15:26Recent findings suggest that for all those years their search may well have been in vain.
15:31A variety of recent archaeological finds support the new theory that the first civilisations
15:37actually grew up in parallel, with no one dominant culture leading the process.
15:43As a result of this new thinking, the evolution of the first civilisations is now seen as
15:49a process of organic growth from many sources, rather than a linear process with its birth
15:55in a single society.
16:03The river Euphrates is one of the greatest rivers on earth.
16:20It rises as a small, insignificant stream on the high plateau near present day Turkey,
16:28then grows and broadens into a mighty waterway as it moves across the desert lowlands to
16:33join with another great river, the Tigris.
16:38These two rivers are the lifeblood of Mesopotamia, a Greek name for land between the rivers.
16:46Its Arabic name is Al Jazeera, the island.
16:52And it was here that civilisation as we know it really began.
17:07The rains in Mesopotamia came only occasionally, but the soil was potentially rich and fertile.
17:15The early farmers realised that they could divert river water, especially that of the
17:19Euphrates, and bring life to the soil.
17:26New discoveries have shown that the Mesopotamians became skilled in the techniques of irrigation.
17:33On the Euphrates they built dams and dikes to control the river flow, and canals to carry
17:39the life-giving water to their fields on the flood plain.
17:45The cultivation of Mesopotamia was a resounding success.
17:50Crop yields were impressive, human population grew rapidly and new settlements evolved to
17:56accommodate the expanding numbers.
18:00The first cities are thought to have appeared in 4000 BC in the far south of Mesopotamia
18:05close to the Persian Gulf, in the region known as Sumeria.
18:12These names resound through the earliest recorded history.
18:15Akkad, Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, Assyria, Nineveh, Eridu.
18:30Great developments in technology soon flowed from the people of the new cities.
18:35The wheel, the seed plough, the first medicines, textiles, and eventually the first sciences
18:43such as mathematics and astronomy.
18:48Civilisation was in full bloom.
18:54This first great civilisation was soon joined by another, a thousand miles to the west.
19:01It would be a civilisation whose spectacular buildings have endured to the present day.
19:09There could be few people on earth who are not fascinated by the monumental architecture
19:13of the people who lived on the banks of the great river Nile.
19:19The people of Egypt.
19:32The Nile is very special because, like the Tigris and the Euphrates, it provides the
19:41water for the cultivation. But because the Nile floods, you're not so much controlling
19:48the process, it's doing it for you. So that the Nile valley is hugely fertile if you just
19:55plant your things at the right place at the right time. The Nile floods, irrigation, thank
19:59you very much, and then you reap where you've sown. So it's enormously productive.
20:07With no need for complex irrigation schemes and the manpower required to maintain them,
20:12early Egyptian settlements did not reach the size of great cities like Uruk and Ur.
20:19Despite this, developments in Egyptian life had many parallels with those that took place
20:23in the Middle East. Skills in pottery and metalwork were well established by the fourth
20:30millennium BC. The end of that millennium also saw the beginnings of Egyptian political
20:37authority, with the establishment of a hereditary monarchy. The first of the kings who would
20:44become known as the pharaohs. These early Egyptian kings were considerably more powerful
20:51than those in Mesopotamia. By the time Egypt entered the age known as the Old Kingdom,
20:58around 2700 BC, it was a unified nation, and the pharaoh ruled over the whole state.
21:08Mesopotamia, by contrast, was a collection of individual city-states, with many kings,
21:16sharing a largely common culture. This difference in political power was dramatically demonstrated
21:24when Egyptian rulers began to commission a distinctive style of architecture for their
21:30tombs, geometrically designed monuments that will forever be associated with Egypt. These
21:37were the Great Pyramids. The first of these was the Step Pyramid, built
21:45for the third dynasty pharaoh, Zoser, at Saqqara. Not long afterwards, at Giza, the
21:53greatest of all the pyramids was constructed. This is the pyramid of the fourth dynasty
21:59pharaoh, Cheops. Originally 481 feet high, it was the biggest ever built. Completed in
22:07the 26th century BC, it remains the tallest building ever constructed in stone. The adjoining
22:16pyramids of Khefren and Menkaure are scarcely less impressive. Built from massive bricks
22:24of cut stone, a material pioneered in Egypt, they remain true wonders of the ancient world.
22:32It's interesting that in some early civilisations you see quite a lot of change, in others you
22:39see less. Ancient Egypt didn't really seem to change very much. You had the old kingdom
22:44of ancient Egypt already around 3000 BC, the pyramids just a couple of centuries later,
22:50and the Egypt that Caesar conquered wasn't so much different, and that was all of 2500
22:58years later. The wonders of Egypt touched many other civilisations, other than those
23:04in Mesopotamia and Rome. Amongst them was a culture that for thousands of years grew
23:12and flourished by itself in the Indus Valley. Farming didn't begin quite as early in India
23:20and Pakistan as it began in the Near East and in Egypt, but somehow the trajectory of
23:27development looks rather similar, in that you started off with small farming villages
23:32based on dry farming, and then the Indus Valley was more intensively exploited, and undoubtedly
23:40irrigation of some kind began, or at any rate the waters of the Indus were used, so that
23:46you got huge cities like Mohenjo-Daro forming around 2500 BC.
23:56Mohenjo-Daro, which means Mound of the Dead, was built on the Indus River almost 250 miles
24:02north of the Arabian Sea. Excavations reveal it to have had a population of around 40,000
24:10people. Like the city of Harappa to the north, the population cultivated rice and wheat alongside
24:26dates and mustard. They grew and spun cotton, which was woven into cloth. The people kept
24:34sheep, pigs and chickens, and harnessed the great power of water buffaloes and elephants.
24:42Granaries were built to store their surplus grain. Bustling shops and busy traders lined
24:48the streets of each of these great cities, which all boasted a central marketplace.
24:56The continuing excavation of Mohenjo-Daro has uncovered a public sewer system centuries
25:02older than any other found, and new discoveries are being made all the time.
25:15Recent findings have revealed compelling new evidence that Mesopotamian ideas and influence
25:20spread to Mohenjo-Daro. Inscriptions, trade documents and lists of goods have been uncovered
25:28by archaeologists, while weights from Mesopotamia have been found in the Indus Valley, and Indus
25:35seals have been unearthed in Mesopotamia. All indications of an ongoing trade that lasted
25:42for many centuries.
25:46There were other cultures, however, that developed in total isolation from any other civilization.
25:54It is amazing to see that in such places the growth of civilization was uncannily similar
26:00to that of Mesopotamia, Egypt or the Indus Valley.
26:06One of these civilizations was the Americas.
26:11In the Americas, it seems there are some very ancient urban dwellings of some sort, but
26:19they seem to be rather small scale. So even though several thousand BC some of the oldest
26:27remains can be found by archaeologists, it's not clear whether or not one would describe
26:33those as states, that is, big political centralised topologies.
26:39The early peoples of the Tehucan Valley, around what is now Mexico City, did not have sheep,
26:44goats or cattle to domesticate.
26:49They had no animals to yoke to the plough, and farmed using simple digging sticks.
26:57They grew beans, corn and chilli peppers, supplementing their diet by fishing and hunting.
27:06They lived most of the year out of doors, moving into caves during the rainy season.
27:13By 2500 BC their farming skills had developed greatly.
27:20But it was not until 1200 BC that signs of an emerging civilization were first seen.
27:30In southern Mexico, close to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, belonged a group of farmers
27:35known as the Olmecs, who had developed advanced farming techniques and lived in villages with
27:42a greater population than had been seen before.
27:48Between 1000 and 300 BC, like Mesopotamia, the population of Mesoamerica expanded
27:56and people began to live in small cities.
28:02These societies evolved to new levels, and while farming remained the basis of their economy,
28:08they expanded their territories through warfare and tribute with conquered tribes.
28:15One of these societies was the Maya.
28:20The Maya were never one single nation, but rather separate city-states,
28:25which, as in Mesopotamia, sometimes fought against each other.
28:31Larger cities conquered their weaker neighbours and made political alliances.
28:37The impressive remains of these Mayan cities certainly rival those of ancient Egypt,
28:43and the pyramids of Chichen Itza and Uxmal bear an eerie resemblance
28:48to those on the River Nile thousands of miles away.
29:07Another civilisation formed in complete isolation can lay claim to be the greatest civilisation of all.
29:15The culture and history of ancient China remains intact to this very day.
29:22I think one of the really fascinating things about Chinese civilisation is,
29:28first of all, it was probably happening independently from the Near Eastern world,
29:33probably happening independently from the Near Eastern civilisation of Mesopotamia,
29:39or from the Egyptian, or from the Indus Valley.
29:42It's a long way away, we don't really have much evidence for contact.
29:45So it's fascinating to see to what extent the development was similar,
29:49and to what extent it was completely different from those other civilisations.
29:53China, like the Two Rivers area, develops agriculture very early indeed.
29:586,000 BC they're cultivating rice on the Upper Yangtze area,
30:03they're growing millet and having pigs and so on in the Yellow River area, very early indeed.
30:10And the settlements of people who are doing this complex agriculture
30:14are elaborate and vast, very big by the standards of Mesopotamia.
30:21The first rulers of China were from the Shai dynasty,
30:24and their rule is now thought to have begun around 2,200 BC.
30:31Little is known about this first Chinese dynasty,
30:34and until recently most experts believed it to be a myth.
30:39But recently uncovered archaeological evidence suggests
30:42that the Shai descended from an earlier culture known as the Longshan.
30:48Settling mostly on the Huanghe or Yellow River,
30:51they lived in pit dwellings and huts covered with reed roofs.
30:56They crafted stone tools and developed pottery for storing food.
31:03The Shang dynasty followed, believed to have been founded by a rebel leader
31:07who overthrew the last Shai ruler around the year 1750 BC.
31:14Once again the Shang based their settlements on farming, hunting and the breeding of animals.
31:22Thousands of archaeological finds along the Yellow River
31:26provide us with evidence about the Shang dynasty
31:29that provide evidence of canals for irrigating crops
31:32and sewer systems that ran water out of town.
31:36The Shang built a highly developed social structure
31:39with kings, nobles, commoners and slaves and based their capital at Anyang.
31:44However architecture of this city could not have been more different to that of Egypt.
31:51China doesn't have our interest in stone masonry.
31:54The Mediterranean pool is into stone, stone buildings by the ton.
32:00Pyramids, stonehenge, Greek temples, you name it,
32:05great municipal halls in the 19th century.
32:09We admire and rate civilization by its stone buildings.
32:12Not so in China.
32:14China makes buildings out of wood
32:16and has sometimes stone-faced platforms on which the wooden buildings stand.
32:21And this whole sphere in the Far East is dominated by wooden buildings.
32:40Amongst the surviving relics of ancient China are a number of bronze vessels
32:45which prove that Chinese workmanship was far ahead of other civilisations at that time.
32:57Another of ancient China's greatest treasures was its literature and writing.
33:02The characters they wrote in are the characters such as
33:06The characters they wrote in are the characters still in use today.
33:11That is at least 3,500 years of continuity of a language system.
33:18Nowhere else in the world is that present now.
33:22Today most cultures take writing for granted.
33:26We are taught it at a young age and it is hard to imagine a world without it.
33:31But to the ancient peoples, the concept of a written language was nothing short of magical.
33:40Recorded human history begins with the written word
33:44and it is a skill that has influenced the development of mankind more than any other.
33:50I think probably the development of writing
33:54was one of the most significant steps in human civilisation
34:00to be set on a par almost with the development of settled life and farming
34:04that really is the basis, the foundation for all subsequent change.
34:12Like most other facets of the development of mankind,
34:15archaeologists are discovering that the roots of writing are far older than previously thought.
34:21People were recording information much earlier than they were writing.
34:27Even back in the Ice Age, people were making strange markings on bones
34:33that weren't just someone just seeing if their flint knife was sharp enough or something.
34:40And a microscopic study has suggested these notches haven't been just all done at once.
34:45They've recorded one and then another and another
34:48and it's been argued that these were to record the moon,
34:52the waxing and waning and the appearance of the moon.
34:56One of those at the forefront of pioneering work on the subject is Denise Schmandt-Besserer
35:02who recently made a breakthrough in the field of writing.
35:07She was a professor at the Institute of Medicine in London.
35:12She had just recently made a breakthrough discovery.
35:16An archaeological excavation at Eyn Ghazal in Jordan
35:20had uncovered a large amount of clay tokens.
35:24These tokens varied in shape from abstract cones and spheres
35:28to more defined shapes such as animals and tools.
35:32She was able, by working back from the earliest writings in Sumeria,
35:37the different shapes that were used for different things,
35:40she realised that these were ways of recording things
35:44like different kinds of animals,
35:46different amounts of grain, oil,
35:50and even more abstract things like one man's work for one day
35:54or one man's life for one day,
35:56or one man's life for one day.
35:58Or even more abstract things like one man's work for one day
36:02or one man's work for one week.
36:04So each one stood for something different.
36:07And then she found this sort of hollow egg-shaped clay envelope
36:14and inside there were a lot of these little different-shaped clay objects.
36:22These clay envelopes were a form of ancient accounts,
36:26probably records of trade or sacrifice.
36:31Then they thought, well, we really have to open it up
36:35every time we want to check what's inside.
36:37Why don't we make the markings on the outside?
36:40So if there were two, say, triangle, pyramid-shaped inside,
36:44they'd put two triangles on the outside
36:46so that you wouldn't have to go and look in every time.
36:49Then they realised, well, if we record it on the outside,
36:52we don't actually need ever to look inside.
36:54In fact, we don't even need an inside, so we'll make it flat.
36:57And that is basically how you get to the clay tablet,
37:00which is the earliest way things were written down.
37:04These signs, used by ancient accountants,
37:07evolved into a sophisticated script
37:10and later became simplified into wedge-like marks etched with a stylus.
37:16This first written script has become known as cuneiform,
37:21from the later Latin word for wedge, cuneus.
37:26Its translation is attributed to one Henry Rawlinson,
37:30who by 1850 had spent nearly 20 years
37:33copying and deciphering its codes
37:35from an inscription on an inaccessible cliff face
37:38in what is modern-day Iraq.
37:44This Sumerian writing is the oldest
37:46that archaeologists have so far discovered,
37:49although it is now known that in other civilisations
37:52writing evolved in a very different way.
38:00If you look in China, it's a completely different situation
38:03because the earliest writings have got nothing to do with economics at all.
38:07They're all to do with divination,
38:10basically a sophisticated form of fortune-telling.
38:15They took bones and drilled holes in them
38:18and applied hot brands, hot bits of metal,
38:21which made the bone crack,
38:23and then they would interpret the crack
38:25as meaning something about a problem they had
38:28with sickness or hunting or the weather.
38:31Then they inscribed the questions they posed to the oracle
38:35and the answers on those bones.
38:39The Chinese script is made up of over 3,000 characters,
38:44each symbol representing a different concept,
38:47which means that the same set of characters
38:50can be used throughout China
38:52even if the spoken language is different.
38:57Most early scripts were in this ideogrammatical form,
39:01and the language of ancient Egypt was no exception.
39:04The hieroglyphic script of Egypt
39:06is one of its most familiar hallmarks.
39:09But unlike China,
39:11all use of this script had died out thousands of years ago.
39:18It was not until the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone
39:22by a Napoleonic soldier in 1799
39:25that the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs were revealed.
39:29The Rosetta Stone,
39:31The Rosetta Stone contained the same passage of writing
39:34in both Greek and Egyptian.
39:37This gave the French archaeologist Jean-Francois Champollion
39:42the clue he needed to decipher the script
39:45and further our understanding of Egypt's illustrious history.
40:02The Mayan peoples of South America
40:05also wrote in a script consisting of glyphs,
40:08but no Mayan Rosetta Stone has ever been found.
40:12Their secrets remained a closed book...
40:16until recently.
40:19One of the great discoveries of recent years,
40:22often called the last great decipherment,
40:25has been the decipherment of Maya writing,
40:29one of the intellectual triumphs of the past 20 or 30 years.
40:32The Maya writing was glyphs,
40:35and each glyph was a little sign that had a meaning,
40:38but it also had a sound.
40:40There was one priest who'd written down some glyphs
40:43and what they would mean in terms of sounds,
40:46and it was a Russian scholar who began to take this seriously,
40:49and a number of ideas came together
40:52and realized that first of all, yes,
40:55these stele probably are talking about real events,
40:58and maybe they're talking about real places,
41:01so they began to look at place names and recognize the place names,
41:04which was a very important beginning of making realistic sense of them,
41:07and then the other line of thought was maybe some of them represent sounds in the language,
41:11not just all signs, but sounds, so you have to say them aloud,
41:14and then fortunately that related to some of the languages still spoken in the Maya area,
41:18so the whole thing began to come together and sort of exploded,
41:22so there's been this amazing intellectual triumph.
41:27Previously, experts looking at the American ancients
41:30had only the texts of invading Spanish historians to work with,
41:35but now have been able to decipher the many Mayan stele.
41:41The terrific amount of information learned from these translations
41:44has changed our view of the Mayan history.
41:48It gives us clearer insights into the Mayan religious beliefs,
41:52their view of the world,
41:54and, most importantly, the Mayan calendar.
41:59This allows archaeologists to date
42:02hundreds of recorded Mayan historical finds with greater accuracy.
42:07Such exciting developments confirm
42:10that we must always be prepared to change our view of the past.
42:18If you can be sure of anything in archaeology,
42:21apart from the fact that new things are going to be discovered,
42:24which is kind of obvious,
42:26is that normally when they're discovered,
42:28whatever you're talking about, whether you're talking about the origins of writing
42:31or the origins of urban living, the origins of agriculture,
42:35it's almost always being pushed back further in time.
42:39So what was once thought to be quite a short history of humankind
42:44is stretching out, and a lot of the achievements of mankind
42:47are continuing to be shown to have developed much earlier than we thought.
43:08Today, the arrival of new technology
43:10affords us undreamed-of possibilities in our search for the ancient past.
43:17But is there anything else left to find?
43:21I certainly think that a massive amount has been lost from the past
43:25and will never be discovered, but, of course, a lot is still there.
43:29It just hasn't been dug up or excavated.
43:32Archaeologists have found Troy,
43:34which was thought not to really exist,
43:38but just to be there in the epic poems of Greece,
43:42but, in fact, it turned out to be a real place.
43:45And, of course, there's hundreds of people running around
43:47trying to find the Garden of Eden.
43:49You know, I wonder where...
43:51And, of course, people are still looking for Atlantis.
43:57Indeed, the ancient civilisation business is booming.
44:01Countries spend millions funding excavations
44:05and have begun to invest heavily in huge research projects.
44:11It's like a club, you know.
44:13If you can prove you've got an ancient civilisation in your country,
44:17it gives you prestige, it gives you a great deal of tourism,
44:20because it's part of what people want to go and see.
44:22They don't want to just experience the beaches
44:25or the beautiful mountains of those countries.
44:27They want to go and look at that heritage.
44:29So it's a genuine interest people have,
44:32but it is also very much linked with political ideas.
44:37This may be because, after years of war, invasion and partition,
44:41ancient history now has a very potent political power.
44:47Dispossessed peoples in many parts of the world
44:49point to archaeological evidence of their ancient ancestry
44:53to support their claims to territory.
44:56And though it is nothing new,
44:58progressive dictators make ancient history
45:00a central part of their propaganda.
45:07I mean, there's certainly a lot of political propaganda in ancient Egypt.
45:12If you go to a lot of the temples,
45:14you can see, basically, political propaganda panels saying,
45:18you know, this pharaoh destroyed and crushed these people,
45:22and, you know, it's sort of showing off on a huge scale, literally.
45:26And this kind of thing is very common.
45:28And, of course, their views of history and recording their own events
45:32were very much orientated around their own interests.
45:35I mean, at that stage, I don't think that people were really trying
45:40to really think about what the history of the world was.
45:44They were interested in it from their point of view.
45:57The story of civilisation is the story of mankind itself.
46:02It is an ongoing and ever-changing tale of which we are the authors.
46:10The influence of our collective past permeates all aspects
46:14of our moral, cultural, artistic and scientific lives.
46:19I think that when you come to think about literature and art,
46:23or even cinema, which obviously draws a lot of inspiration out of the past,
46:30I mean, you've only got to look at Disney
46:33and see how many ancient legends there are.
46:35You know, they're systematically going round the world
46:38trying to find new ancient legends.
46:41And, you know, you've got to look at, you know,
46:46whether you just take Shakespeare or James Joyce or whoever,
46:49you can pick anyone, really, and their drawing on,
46:52whether it's Ulysses or earlier plays and inspiration,
46:56is definitely coming from the past.
47:01Modern man, with all his technological breakthroughs and advances,
47:05is in a unique position to treasure his own past.
47:09He's got to be able to look at his own past
47:13Perhaps that is the best reason of all
47:16for us to continue in our quest to uncover the secrets of ancient empires.
48:12www.mooji.org