Civilisations - S1.E1 ∙ The Second Moment of Creation
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00:00MUSIC
00:13I've always felt at home in the past.
00:17For, after all, what is the present
00:20except an endless chain of memories?
00:25Some of them are translated into stone.
00:30We are all the inheritors of those memories
00:34and we look after them as best we can.
00:43All this so we can pass on their revelation to the future.
00:49MUSIC
00:55But every so often, something comes along
00:58to shake them from our grip.
01:13In Mosul, in a matter of hours,
01:16the forces of ISIS destroyed the work of centuries.
01:20And when they took the ancient trading city of Palmyra,
01:24where the cultures of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Jews
01:28had mixed and merged,
01:30it was feared that exactly the same would happen.
01:46Here in Geneva, a few Palmyran artefacts have been saved,
01:50stolen before the violence began,
01:53arrested at customs as black marketeers tried to sell them.
02:00Like this bust of a priest.
02:05His eyes wide open, he seems not dead at all,
02:08just translated to a life elsewhere.
02:12These lovingly carved likenesses of the dead,
02:15looted from their tombs,
02:17ended up in exile, but safe for posterity.
02:23Saving the art that remained in Palmyra, however,
02:26could come at a terrible price.
02:29Khaled al-Assad, the chief curator of Palmyra,
02:33was 81 when ISIS took the town.
02:37And when their soldiers demanded he tell them
02:40where the city's artworks had been hidden, he refused.
02:47They beheaded him in the Roman theatre,
02:50suspended his mutilated body from a traffic light,
02:54placed his head between his feet...
02:59..and attached a placard identifying him as Director of Idolatry.
03:07Or we might say, protector of what needs to be saved,
03:12cherished, passed on as the work of civilisation.
03:19A lot of us spend our days talking about art.
03:23I doubt if very many of us are prepared to lay down our life for it.
03:27But for Khaled al-Assad, the stones and statues and columns of Palmyra
03:33were more than simply an ensemble of antiquity.
03:37He didn't need a UNESCO certificate
03:40to tell him that the significance of Palmyra
03:44was at once both local and universal.
03:48It's there for believers and unbelievers, for East and West,
03:52and somehow it had fallen to him to be the guardian of that inheritance.
03:59We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn't,
04:03but when its opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty
04:08and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilisation is.
04:14We know it from the shock of its imminent loss
04:18as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.
04:29The record of human history brims over with the rage to destroy.
04:37But it's also imprinted with the opposite instinct,
04:41to make things that go beyond the demands of food and shelter,
04:46things that make us see the world and our place in it in a different light.
04:52We are the art-making animal.
04:56And this is what we have made.
05:26THE CREATION
05:42When did it begin?
05:45That second moment of creation?
05:48The dawning of human creativity?
05:52Where did it begin?
05:57It must have started in Africa,
06:01where Homo sapiens first evolved about 200,000 years ago.
06:07On South Africa's Cape Coast,
06:10archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation
06:14stretching back around 100,000 years.
06:21In one of those caves, this was discovered.
06:2577,000 years old.
06:28A piece of red ochre, a mineral naturally rich in iron,
06:33etched in a diamond pattern.
06:36The oldest deliberately decorative marks ever discovered.
06:41The pattern may have been a kind of language
06:44or a kind of number scoring,
06:47but it's hard to see them as serving any functional need
06:50connected with shelter or sustenance.
06:55These are a design,
06:58and design announces the beginning of culture.
07:08Another 40,000 years pass,
07:11and in northern Spain, within a hill so uncannily conical
07:15it seems man-made,
07:18that mineral, that red ochre, has become paint.
07:25Deep inside a cave, rudimentary marks have bloomed and multiplied.
07:31Red circles.
07:33There are no brushes, no sticks to lay on this paint.
07:37They are all applied orally,
07:39colour swilled in the mouth with saliva
07:42and blown directly onto the rock.
07:46And then, these.
07:49An eruption of design,
07:52not blown onto the surface, but painted.
07:56Contours, outlines.
08:00Flowing streams of dots.
08:04There's a meaning here, but we don't know what it is.
08:08The signs of a biological compulsion to pattern?
08:12It's what we humans do.
08:15What we want to do.
08:17What we can't stop ourselves doing.
08:32And then, you come across this.
08:36And in an instant, vast millennia of time,
08:39just collapsing.
08:41You're in the midst of fellow humans,
08:43their hands doing what hands do.
08:46Signalling from a very long way off.
08:5037,000 years distant, in fact.
08:54But this long-distance greeting
08:57somehow makes us bond with the makers of this
09:01because they establish a presence
09:06that is palpably alive.
09:14Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves
09:18as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia.
09:22Wherever we went, it seems,
09:24the urge to signal a presence went with us.
09:30And undeniably, these hand stencils
09:33do what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to.
09:38First, they want to be seen by others,
09:41and then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker.
09:49Like the earliest photographs,
09:51the images here are faded, indistinct.
09:55But something tantalising is happening.
09:58The realization that we can, however crudely, represent.
10:07In another cave further west, in Asturias,
10:1020 minutes' walk away from any daylight
10:13are images that are anything but crude.
10:29This was a doubling of the world.
10:32A life copy.
10:34And executed with startling precision of drawing technique.
10:38They even understood modelling anatomical features
10:42following the rock wall surface of the cave.
10:45And there were many colours, not just the ubiquitous red ochre,
10:49but violets and blacks,
10:51and all those techniques seem to have been there from the beginning.
10:56Tens of thousands of years ago.
10:59When you think about this technique, your head just spins
11:03because it has to have been, above all, a memory exercise.
11:08They would have had to fix in their mind exact anatomical details
11:14and then transpose them here on the surface of the cave.
11:19And yet, when all that was done,
11:22they managed to preserve, miraculously, this animal vitality.
11:27This is truly one of the great marvels
11:31of the suddenly expanded human mind.
11:40It was in the later years of the 19th century
11:43that images like these began to be discovered.
11:47The first, and for many years the most famous,
11:50were in the caves of Altamira, also in northern Spain.
11:59Extraordinary paintings of bison.
12:02Herds of them.
12:04Sleeping, lying, standing.
12:15But as the number of painted caves discovered grew,
12:19it became clear that art and music came into the world together.
12:23For musical instruments were found.
12:28Animal horns.
12:32Flutes made from the bones of vultures.
12:36And even more hauntingly, bull-roarers.
12:40A piece of wood tied to a rope spun round the head
12:44that makes this strange whooping sound.
12:50Recent experiments with these instruments have suggested
12:54that the proximity of painting and music was not accidental,
12:59that they were connected elements in sacred rituals.
13:05I'm using software to test the acoustics in the space,
13:10so we generate this swept sine wave,
13:13and we use that to capture the acoustic of the cave.
13:19And we can look for relationships between sound and paintings.
13:32So the earliest paintings seem to be in these small little side areas
13:36where maybe one person might be there alone.
13:40And then the later paintings seem to be in sort of more grand places,
13:45a venue where a few people would have gathered,
13:48somewhere more dramatic, that sounds more dramatic.
13:57You can compare these spaces to a cathedral or a temple.
14:02They're places where people came for sacred moments,
14:07which were full of imagery and ritual and music.
14:19And it's like going into a place that's kind of underground,
14:24where you can stop time, where you can pause
14:29and have that special moment where you're out of time,
14:33where you're somewhere else.
14:36Painting is the sound.
14:38The sound-making, the music-making,
14:40whatever was happening in this sacred ritual, that is the painting.
14:45The painting is what's left of that activity.
15:05Anthropologists and archaeologists tell us
15:08that almost all of Ice Age painting
15:11had some sort of otherworldly ritual function,
15:15and that, therefore, it ought not to be seen as art,
15:19though, of course, religion has been a primary purpose of art
15:23for thousands of years.
15:34In Africa, the animals that dominate European cave paintings
15:39are accompanied by humans.
15:44They appear as stylised, elongated figures.
15:53Sometimes they're shown while becoming transformed into beasts.
15:58Men with the heads of antelopes,
16:01creatures that could never have been observed from life,
16:05but which arose from the trance-struck imagination of the shamans.
16:12In the rock art of Africa, these hybrids were painted.
16:16In Europe, where there were far fewer of them,
16:20they went three-dimensional.
16:25In 1939, the fragments of this lion man, carved from mammoth ivory,
16:31were found in a German cave.
16:35They remained an unsolved puzzle for 30 years
16:38before archaeologists realised that they formed a single figure,
16:43made between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago.
16:49This may be a shaman in the middle of a transformation.
16:53It may be the very first of the beast gods,
16:57around which pagan religions would build their mythologies.
17:02Perhaps the making of such things was itself a sacred calling.
17:08To see how much work was needed to make a lion man,
17:12archaeologists Wolfhein embarked on an experiment to carve a replica
17:17using authentic tools and materials.
17:20Without a mammoth tusk,
17:22he used a piece of legally sourced elephant ivory.
17:26I started working from the whole tusk,
17:30and then I took a big stone and hammered away this piece,
17:33and I was sweating like hell,
17:35because if I would have ruined it, it would be a disaster.
17:38And the most time-consuming part of the work was setting free the arms,
17:44because I had to take a very tiny tool
17:47and make grooves like this underneath into the ivory,
17:50and you scratch and scratch and days and days and working and working.
17:53I had blisters on my hands and every finger was aching,
17:56so it was very heavy work.
17:59I started in April,
18:02and I stopped working in the middle of July.
18:06I worked about four, five hours a day.
18:11In the end it was about 400 hours, then I stopped counting.
18:16I guess it was a real artist who made this,
18:20and he was set free by his community only to do this piece of artwork.
18:24If you do this a whole summer or a whole winter through,
18:27you can't go hunting, you can't go fishing, you can't do nothing,
18:30because you work all day on it.
18:33It must have had incredible meaning for the people who made it.
18:41And these must have been charged with meaning too.
18:45Small figurines embodying the primal life events of birth and procreation.
18:53Gravid Earth Mothers, weighty with fertility,
18:57enormous distended breasts and buttocks.
19:02So powerfully elemental they seemed to speak directly to modern artists
19:07when they first saw them.
19:10The most self-consciously modern of them all, Picasso,
19:13told a friend that no sculptor had ever bettered the Paleolithic carvers.
19:19He bought a copy of this one, the Venus of Les Bugues,
19:23and kept it in his studio all his life.
19:27Was he touched by its archaic spirituality?
19:32No.
19:34He was earthly and worldly,
19:38but he felt a deep communion with the makers of a physical art,
19:43and there were traces of that communion elsewhere in his work.
19:50Despite rumours, there's no direct evidence
19:53that Picasso ever visited the painted caves of Altamira,
19:57or saw in person the extraordinary painted bison that those caves contained.
20:05But he was obsessed with animals, one animal in particular.
20:09Not the bison, but its cousin, the bull,
20:12an animal to which he returned again and again.
20:19Do we think this is mere coincidence?
20:24He liked to call himself a modern primitive,
20:28and in those images, glimmering images in the caves,
20:31he found, he thought, a fountainhead of everything
20:35that was truly creative about the artistic instinct.
20:39So he paid Cave Art the ultimate compliment
20:43by doing something very similar.
20:46And then he produced this beautiful, dashing, impulsive picture of bull,
20:51so close to the original of the Altamira
20:54it could even have been the studio's copy.
21:00But then he produced another ten prints,
21:03bulls drawn from his own enormous range of styles,
21:07from meaty naturalism, through classical cubism,
21:12to a lightly delineated bull that's really just a pair of horns,
21:17and then that other thing that bulls always need.
21:23The entire sequence expresses his admiration
21:26for the genius of the cave painters,
21:29his belief that ancient or modern,
21:31the hand of the painter, the hand of the artist, never really changes.
21:37And I have to say, I agree with Picasso.
21:43GENTLE PIANO MUSIC
21:53We can walk into rooms like this one,
21:56which preserve the 19th-century style of museum presentation.
22:01Abundance.
22:06And as we wander through case after case,
22:09not just with minute fashioning tools,
22:12but ivory and bone,
22:14decorated with startling images of birds and horses,
22:18we can't avoid pushing back instinctively
22:21against the received wisdom of the scholars
22:24that none of these things should ever be thought of as art.
22:30For me, the last word in this entire debate
22:34belongs to one tiny ancient piece in particular.
22:40La Dame de Brassenspuis, the Lady of Brassenspuis,
22:45found in a cave in south-west France in 1892.
22:49She's between 22,000 and 25,000 years old.
22:58With this intensively carved female head we have for the first time,
23:05something immensely and movingly momentous.
23:09We have the revelation of the human face.
23:14It's a tiny thing, it can just go in the palm of your hand.
23:20This is exquisite.
23:22There are downward strokes and sideward strokes,
23:25there is carving and gouging and polishing and scraping.
23:29Every kind of extraordinary craft is applied to give this face
23:34what we have to say is its personality.
23:37One example, a dig is made below the forehead
23:43to suggest the presence of eyes.
23:47Those eyes are hauntingly vivid.
23:51They only become eyes when a shadow falls over that passage in the head,
23:57so that this little piece would have been turned into the light
24:00and as it was turned into the light, the shadow would have fallen
24:03and suddenly we have eyes as well as that beautiful nose
24:07and this extraordinary hair falling down the nape of the neck.
24:13Now we are not supposed to say, us amateurs in this field,
24:18we're not supposed to talk about art,
24:21we're not supposed to talk about things like
24:24the birth of a refined sensibility.
24:27I'm going to do that nonetheless, I don't care how anachronistic it is.
24:32With this tiny piece from Poissonbut,
24:36it seems to me that we have right in front of us
24:40the dawn of the idea of beauty.
24:47But beauty is hard to eat.
24:53The slow growth of civilisations depended at first on practicalities.
24:59The domestication of animals and cereal crops.
25:04The most ancient wheats were harvested on sites near the River Jordan
25:08about 10,000 years ago.
25:14Civilisation started small.
25:17It depended on the invention of needful things,
25:20pottery vessels for cooking, eating and storage.
25:25Excavations in Iraq in the 1920s and 30s
25:29began to reveal how intensive irrigation
25:32of the plains between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates
25:36had allowed the world's first true cities to arise.
25:41By about 5,000 years ago,
25:43cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants,
25:47such as Ur and Uruk,
25:49were producing art that reflected the self-image of the powerful.
25:55Here is the standard of Ur,
25:57where mosaic inlaid in bitumen showed the scenes that mattered most.
26:06Soldiers march, war wagons roll.
26:11And on the reverse, a court convenes,
26:14with the king depicted larger than his priests and courtiers,
26:18ranged below the catering classes, the toilers and hewers.
26:23It's a complete social world.
26:26And it came with writing.
26:29These scripts usually recorded administrative matters,
26:33but sometimes told the stories of heroes and deities.
26:38And animals continued to provide the models for gods and monsters.
26:44This gorgeous goat, also from Ur,
26:48drew materials from far and wide.
26:51White shells were from the Red Sea,
26:54the blue lapis lazuli from far Afghanistan,
26:58and the gold leaf was the work of local goldsmiths.
27:05Around 4,500 years ago,
27:08in the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean,
27:11migrants from Western Asia ceded Europe's first great civilisation,
27:17the culture of the Minoans.
27:23Its ruins are everywhere on Crete and on the islands of the Aegean.
27:31This must have been a fishing village.
27:33You can almost hear the bustle.
27:38Protected by the sea on two sides, but closely packed,
27:42so even here people will have had to learn the skills
27:45that any fixed settlement requires.
27:48How to be neighbourly.
27:54But there's more to civilisation than keeping neighbours happy.
28:02On Crete itself, we find the ruins of large towns,
28:07where the streets still thread their way,
28:10opening onto grandiose plazas, spaces for ceremony
28:15and pomp for ritual and for politics.
28:22Minoan cultural style spread across the Aegean Sea
28:27to islands like Santorini.
28:30A volcanic eruption destroyed the port city of Akrotiri
28:35in around 1627 BCE,
28:39but the ash preserved the murals found here
28:43in all their vivid realism.
28:47They raised the ghost of a seagoing civilisation,
28:51a clear ancestor of our own,
28:54with its clamour and glamour, its commercial pulse.
29:02These passengers aren't going to the afterlife,
29:05they're on ferries and festive excursions.
29:10And on the land behind them, there are streets with multi-storey houses,
29:14and in the richer of them,
29:16decorative paintings of the kind consumers would want forever after.
29:25This is the first truly social art the world had seen.
29:32Here are beautiful youths duking it out.
29:36Here are saffron gatherers.
29:40Here are swallows.
29:43A perpetual springtime brought into the living room.
29:47One contact sport dominated Minoan culture,
29:51bull leaping.
29:53Young men, possibly women too, backflipping over charging bulls.
30:00It's long been argued that this was too dangerous to have actually happened,
30:05that the art captures a myth, a fantasy.
30:10And yet, in the British Museum,
30:12there's a little bronze sculpture that's pulsing with a natural energy
30:16that feels absolutely true to life.
30:24What strikes me as being physically real
30:28is the fact that this is not a stylised piece of work at all.
30:32It has physical immediacy.
30:35Even though our jumper has lost his legs,
30:38his back is braced, his head is flung back,
30:41and the bull, the bull is indeed a bull in full charge,
30:46front and back legs tense.
30:49The eyes, and you can actually see the eyes, are blazing,
30:53and the muzzle is snorting with dangerous foam.
31:02Around the 15th century BCE,
31:05Minoan culture was producing myriad tiny masterpieces.
31:10Seal stones to be pressed into soft wax,
31:13or worn as micro art.
31:16Gold rings, sometimes decorated with goddesses,
31:20or their priestesses,
31:23bare-breasted, wasp-waisted, with flaring skirts.
31:27Minoan art was irresistibly attractive
31:31Minoan art was irresistibly attractive
31:34to a raw, rising power on the Greek mainland.
31:39Here was a culture that wanted to clothe its belligerents
31:43in sophistication,
31:45that would play a vital role in European history.
31:49The Mycenaeans.
31:52In 2015, American archaeologists were digging in western Greece,
31:58and here, far from Crete,
32:01they made the most significant discovery of Minoan artefacts
32:05for many, many years.
32:08They found the grave of a warrior,
32:11buried around the year 1450 BCE.
32:16Here we are in the grave, to look at our body today.
32:23It was the body of a Mycenaean.
32:29Pretty amazing.
32:32Yet almost all the objects found with the body were clearly Minoan.
32:37This is our third gold ring.
32:41Four solid gold rings were eventually found in the grave.
32:49They're just exquisite, actually.
32:52The craftsmanship on all of them is stunning,
32:55and they all have their own story to tell.
32:58They're very much like the iconography that you find in Minoan Crete.
33:02I think that's a really important lesson to learn.
33:05But civilisations are constantly borrowing
33:08and receiving inspirations from their predecessors
33:12and from those that surround them as they evolve.
33:17In total, the grave contained over 1,500 separate objects.
33:23There was a corroded bronze mirror.
33:26There was a bronze statue of a warrior.
33:29There was a bronze statue of a warrior.
33:32There was a corroded bronze mirror and ivory combs.
33:37Vanity was part of the warrior's job description.
33:40Hair was ritually combed before battle.
33:44And, of course, there were swords.
33:49The grave of the Gryphon Warrior has all of the artefacts
33:52that you would expect a warrior to have accumulated in his lifetime.
33:56And this is the first time that we can really understand
33:59what the complete warrior kit looked like.
34:02One of the objects found in the grave, tiny,
34:05not quite 1.5 inches long, was crusted in mud and minerals.
34:12Once cleaned, it forces us to rethink everything we thought we knew
34:17about this moment in history.
34:21High-resolution photographs show the extraordinary achievement.
34:30THUD
34:35We see the long hair flowing free that would have been combed before battle.
34:42We see a sword lying on the ground
34:45exactly like the swords discovered in the grave.
34:49But that is just the beginning.
34:53This is the first fight scene in all of European art,
34:59for all I know, in all of world art.
35:01Yes, there are occasional moments of combat and battle in other cultures,
35:05but they're flat, they're very stylised,
35:08they don't feel like the smash of bone and bronze and metal
35:14and the spout of blood.
35:16This does, this goes straight from 1450 BC to action movies.
35:23Look at those rippling biceps, look at those muscles,
35:27look at those tense bodies, this cross of locked-together fighters,
35:32a spear that's about to try and impale the body of its enemy
35:36before it's too late, the sword that's about to plunge down.
35:40It's 3D, folks, it's coming at you.
35:44And inevitably there is already a dead body perfectly modelled,
35:51an arm bent back.
35:53Homer speaks of such bodies with a hand or a face writhing in the dust.
36:01But, people, Homer is 700 years later.
36:09700 years later, the time between Chaucer and us.
36:14Somebody out there with incredible hawk-like eyesight
36:18is drawing on a body of combat literature
36:22that goes all the way down to those beautiful Homeric inventions.
36:27It sets something running in European culture,
36:31this Mycenaean love of guts and glory.
36:35And the Mycenaeans themselves, along with the Minoans,
36:38will pass into history.
36:40But this doesn't pass into history.
36:43It passes into poetry.
36:46It passes forever into the world.
36:54Sometimes there are discoveries
36:56that radically transform existing knowledge.
37:01But then there are other discoveries
37:04that reveal a culture so far outside the river of history
37:08that we may never truly understand them.
37:12As Mycenae rose about 3,000 years ago,
37:15an extraordinary culture grew in west-central China.
37:20Sanxingdui.
37:22Sanxingdui.
37:27Its remains were unearthed in 1986 on a building site.
37:36The revealed pits contained hundreds of elephant tusks,
37:40the remains of sacrificed animals,
37:43and in vast and startling abundance...
37:47masks.
37:53MUSIC PLAYS
38:03There were scores of masks.
38:05There were giant masks which probably stood in some sort of temple.
38:10There are little itty-bitty masks.
38:12There are masks that were user-friendly,
38:14that almost certainly could be worn on the face.
38:18They all have huge eyes.
38:22This one, you can still see a few traces of black paint.
38:26They were painted black.
38:28Dashing eyebrows, diamond-shaped eyes.
38:32Nothing in the rest of ancient China
38:35has ever been discovered remotely like these faces, like these heads.
38:40The bronze is the same.
38:42The figures and faces are not.
38:46Nothing that can tell us anything
38:48about the people who made these objects has survived.
38:52There are no writings, no other histories to tell us who they were.
38:57It's been suggested that some of the masks
39:00might have been used in rituals by impersonators of the dead.
39:05Those enormous eyes which see beyond the world,
39:09the ears which might hear what the departed have to say,
39:14but this is all pure speculation.
39:19The civilisation of Sanxingdui came,
39:22it flourished and then it disappeared off the face of the earth.
39:34But civilisation is always a balancing act.
39:38There may be enemies at the gates,
39:40there may be enemies within the walls,
39:43and sometimes the very landscape and climate
39:46in which a culture grows must be conquered.
39:53It may be too rocky, too arid,
39:57but here canyons and gullies became the streets and thoroughfares
40:03for one of the most spectacular civilizations of all time.
40:10One of the most beautiful civilizations in all of human history.
40:40This is Petra, where the sheer improbability of its location
40:45was also the secret of its spectacular flourishing.
40:51The reason why this tomb endured and survived armies and earthquakes
40:56is that the Napateans who built it
40:59cut it into the sandstone surface of the mountain
41:03rather than build some freestanding marble monument.
41:07The mountains shook with earthquakes,
41:10but these buildings stood intact.
41:15The Napateans have what you might call an instinct for cultural ecology.
41:19They worked with the rock of their desert home.
41:23The columns are graceful, the capitals are heavily decorated,
41:28it's all part of an international Hellenistic style,
41:31and yet it seems to me this place is very local,
41:36untransferable.
41:38This is Petra, and only Petra,
41:42these great palatial buildings seem to say.
41:55More amazing still, this place was built by people who were nomads
42:00when they first arrived here in the fourth century before Christ.
42:07The Napateans were goat herders, camel riders, dwellers in tents.
42:15But flocks and herds weren't going to produce...
42:19..this.
42:24Petra was built on trade, in incense.
42:292,000 years ago, aromatic frankincense and myrrh
42:33were essential for the ceremonism rituals which punctuated daily life.
42:41The nondescript little chunks and granules of dried tree resin
42:46produced these clouds of fragrant incense smoke,
42:50and they became the hottest trade between Africa and Persia.
42:55But here's the thing.
42:56The trees that produce the resin only grow in a particular part of Arabia,
43:00and who knew that desert, mile by stony mile, oasis by oasis,
43:05better than the Napateans?
43:07No-one.
43:08So the Napateans started as navigators and pilots, if you like,
43:13for this precious cargo,
43:15went on to be full-service providers,
43:17and then thought, well, why don't we trade it ourselves directly?
43:21Pretty soon, they were monopolists of the incense trade,
43:25the emperors of aromatics.
43:33But a civilisation here was inconceivable
43:36without the one thing more precious than frankincense...
43:40water.
43:42The Napateans engineered cisterns to trap the rains which came in winter,
43:48and their desert hydraulics made this place not so much rose-red
43:53as bright green.
43:55A garden city of fountains, swimming pools, groves and orchards.
44:06And the water which made all that possible
44:09also made it possible to feed a city of 30,000 people,
44:15many of whom were immigrants from all over the region.
44:18There were Egyptians and Syrians and Judeans and Greeks and Romans,
44:23and they were all coming to Petra
44:26to enjoy what the Persians called a paradesa, a pleasure resort,
44:31a little bit of heaven on earth.
44:34And they all brought a flourish of their own cultural styles with them.
44:40Most of the art discovered here has been taken to museums,
44:44but what survives tells the story of a cosmopolitan playground.
44:50There are curious, abstract representations of a Napatean goddess.
44:55Carved heads from the wine-soaked, Hellenistic cult of Dionysus.
45:04Recent excavations have brought to light
45:07ritzy villas carved into the living rock.
45:11Inside them, heels to happiness murals
45:15from that same Dionysian cult,
45:17which was the centerpiece of the city of Petra.
45:20Inside them, heels to happiness murals
45:23from that same Dionysian cult.
45:26Cherubs, vine leaves,
45:30the inevitable bunches of grapes.
45:35And from the later years of Petra's life,
45:38Byzantine mosaics found beneath the sand and rubble of a ruined church.
45:45PETRA
45:49Petra had its day, or rather its centuries,
45:52and then it ended.
45:55Not because of conquest,
45:57but because new trade routes simply made Petra commercially irrelevant.
46:03And without that commercial lifeblood,
46:05there was no longer any reason to struggle against the desert.
46:11The people left,
46:13the systems for capturing water fell into disrepair,
46:17and the desert reclaimed the city.
46:41On the other side of the world, in Central America,
46:44another culture would face a set of ecological conditions
46:48that seemed far more hospitable.
46:53The Mayans lived amidst tropical forest.
46:57It looks almost absurdly fertile.
47:01And these great ruins are proof
47:04that when the delicate balance between prospering habitat
47:08and vaulting ambition is maintained,
47:11civilisations can bind rulers and the ruled,
47:16and a culture can burst into riotously prolific bloom.
47:24If you take away all this magnificent vegetation
47:27that's sprung up naturally from this space,
47:30you realise this is an extraordinary plaza,
47:33or it's the centre of a city.
47:35And wherever you look, there are these huge stone staircases,
47:39some temples, some tombs.
47:41All the more amazing because there are no draft animals,
47:44there are no wheels,
47:46so human labour only is responsible for these great things.
47:51This is a spectacular space,
47:53the kind of space you would really expect to see in Rome or Greece.
47:58These great pyramids with platforms for performances,
48:02as much as anywhere in the Western world of antiquity,
48:06is essentially an urban theatre.
48:13It's a theatre of political and religious power.
48:18A structure like this looks down upon the citizens
48:22and forces them to look back up.
48:25And what they looked up to was often gruesomely violent,
48:29the mass sacrifice of captives.
48:32And one god in particular had a special thirst.
48:36The rain god, Chag.
48:45The power of the Mayan kings rested on the promise
48:48that every year they would persuade Chag
48:51to bring the rains on which all life depended.
48:55Mayan art and architecture was a prayer,
48:58an appeal to the weather.
49:00Let us live. Let every year be fruitful.
49:08Only the most damaged of the art that used to adorn Calakmul
49:12remains on site.
49:16In Mexico's Anthropology Museum,
49:18we can see some of that art and how Mayan society worked.
49:23There were kings made of flesh and blood
49:26and kings made of stone.
49:28And you had to obey both kinds.
49:35But Mayan art wasn't all enormous and formal, far from it.
49:40It was hugely varied,
49:42one of the most spectacular flourishings of creativity
49:46in human history.
49:49Every human type got his or her figurine,
49:52like action characters and heroes from a comic book or a play.
49:58There were ceramic vessels and there were murals, too.
50:05And out of the Mayan delight in making pictures,
50:08developed a fully-fledged script.
50:16Writing made up of glyphs, or word pictures.
50:21They were brushstrokes,
50:25They were brushed onto paper, made from wild fig tree bark,
50:30painted onto beautiful ceramic pottery,
50:33or, like this one, carved into limestone.
50:37They were everywhere in the Maya city-states.
50:39The Maya were the wordiest of all ancient cultures.
50:43So that this, which looks like something purely decorative,
50:47ornamental, a bestiary with all these animals,
50:50There's a monkey.
50:52There's a magnificently complacent frog.
50:55There, in the middle, is an extremely scary killer rabbit.
50:59In fact, all these are words which make a text.
51:03Each glyph is not a single word, but it's a syllable, in fact.
51:07And you put them together and you have a sentence, a paragraph.
51:12But in this case, it makes up a date.
51:15And we know exactly what that date was.
51:18This is the 11th of February, 526.
51:28In 526, Mayan civilisation was at its height.
51:33Its art and culture flourished.
51:35And many believe that the finest Mayan art of all
51:38is to be found in the city of Copan.
51:42The city was home to a dynasty that lasted from the 5th
51:47to the 9th centuries.
51:4916 successive kings ruled here.
51:55An archaeological team, led by Bill and Barbara Fash,
51:59have been studying Copan for over 30 years.
52:02And they've found that, for most of its life,
52:06the art of Copan is elegant, refined,
52:09astonishing.
52:12Single carved steles announce the accession of new kings.
52:20It's the work of a society where that balance
52:23between habitat and ambition is still in good order.
52:31It's certainly hard to imagine a more vivid realisation
52:36of the rain god Chak than this,
52:39complete with the bubbling streams of water
52:42that his blessings brought.
52:47In the 7th century, the 12th ruler of Copan
52:51commissioned a new, grand structure.
52:57This is the hieroglyphic stairway of Copan.
53:00It was built originally in honour of Rulon,
53:03originally in honour of Ruler XII, who is portrayed here,
53:07and then was finished by Ruler XV,
53:10who added on the uppermost section of it.
53:14And it has 64 steps in total,
53:17and they told the history of the dynasty
53:20and the succession of the different rulers.
53:25The stairway itself is a monumental statement.
53:28Certainly Ruler XV was trying to impress the population
53:33so he was really trying to cement in stone
53:36what the history of Copan was and what the dynasty was
53:40and to make sure that it stayed for the future.
53:46The hieroglyphic stairway sought to impress the people
53:50and persuade the gods to continue to bring rain.
53:54But by tunnelling beneath it,
53:57the archaeologists have discovered
54:00that this grand structure was, in fact, badly built.
54:06You can see all these gaps in the fill itself
54:09indicate that it was just loose rubble.
54:12This was a terrible way to build a pyramid.
54:15What this tells us is that at this point in time,
54:18people were no longer as enthusiastic as they were
54:21about supporting the rulers.
54:23Even though a gorgeous and very explicit hieroglyphic stairway
54:27was built here, it was built on poor fill.
54:30So it was a castle built on sand,
54:33and with time, eventually it did decay
54:36and the stairway itself collapsed in a heap
54:39at the bottom of the pyramid.
54:46The stairway we see today
54:49has been reconstructed,
54:51but around it, we can see the chaos of the collapse.
54:57The stairway was built as the Mayans were suffering a drought
55:01that would last decades,
55:03and the promise of rain had been a central plank of royal authority.
55:10Shortly afterwards, the kingdom of Copan itself collapsed completely.
55:18All across the Mayan territories,
55:20art and authority were out of step with reality.
55:25There was nothing grand or stately about starvation.
55:31And the ordinary people of the Maya
55:33saw that their civilisation had become a deathtrap
55:37and walked away, left kings and cities and art behind.
55:42They went back to simpler lives in the surrounding forest.
55:46And their descendants are still very much alive.
56:17Our culture is not dead.
56:19Our culture lives and survives in ourselves,
56:23because we are aware of it.
56:32The Maya and their language lived on,
56:34but far away from the stone monuments of their ancestors.
56:38All that remained to say that beneath the forest canopy
56:43was a civilization with the summits of the platform pyramids,
56:47but only the wheeling birds and the howler monkeys
56:51scrambling to the tops of trees would have seen that.
56:59All civilisations want what they can't have,
57:03the conquest of time.
57:06They build higher and grander to escape mortality.
57:10It never works.
57:12There's always an ending.
57:14Cities with their markets, temples, palaces and tombs
57:18are simply abandoned,
57:20and that great level of Mother Nature closes in,
57:24strangling the place with vegetation,
57:27covering it with desert sand.
57:33It might seem, then, that it's all for nothing,
57:37but that's entirely wrong.
57:40All these ruins, all these remains,
57:43are monuments to human creativity,
57:47human ambitions,
57:50human hopes.
57:54Monuments to shaping hands
57:57and shaping minds.
58:02Monuments to humanity itself.
58:11The Open University has produced a free poster
58:14that explores the history of different civilisations
58:17through artefacts.
58:19To order your free copy, please call 0300 303 3553
58:25or go to the address on screen
58:27and follow the links for The Open University.
58:34If you can't wait until next week,
58:36episode two presented by Professor Mary Beard,
58:38which explores the images of the human body in ancient art,
58:41is available on BBC iPlayer now.
58:43And you can also download the Accompanying Civilisations podcast
58:46from your preferred podcast provider.
58:48For more information, visit bbc.co.uk slash civilisations.