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00:002,500 years ago, the Greek scribe wrote out a dazzling list of wonders, sight seen in
00:21the mind's eye, he said, can never be destroyed. To this day, that magic list still haunts
00:37the modern world.
01:07This is the story of some of the West's most basic ideas, ideas of God and paradise and
01:28womanhood and how they crossed from the most ancient East into the modern world. The tale's
01:5110,000 years old and more, and you could start by telling it anywhere, really. We'll begin
01:58here, though, in Rome, on the 5th of May, 1527, with a frightened Pope fleeing from a German army,
02:05running like mad along the top of this fortified wall, the stretches between the Vatican and the
02:12ancient castle of St. Michael. There was a great siege. In the end, the Pope lost everything. His
02:22gold, his jewels, his very clothes were taken from him. Within ten years, though, another Pope
02:31is back in the same old castle, reasserting the holy power and grand authority of Rome.
02:38That text there tells the story. It tells of how the Pope found a ruin, an ancient tomb,
02:53made it into a great palace fit for a prince. There, right in the middle, on the end wall,
02:59St. Michael, the God of judgment, with a dripping sword. You've got to think that this was a Pope
03:06who knew that the people crowns had been melted down in this very fortress just a few years earlier.
03:11He was the Pope who started the Inquisition. But he also wanted to be known as a Christian
03:17knight, a gentleman, a man of action. So he cast around for an idea for his paintings, and he hit
03:25upon Alexander, Alexander the Great. He had the same name as the Pope. Here he is, fun of Alexander's
03:32greatest deeds, cutting the Gordian knot. There was a legend that said that in the East was a
03:38knot that was so entangled, the man who could undo it would become king of the world. Alexander took
03:43a look and cut it with his sword. The chivalrous knight as a man of action. And there, the chivalrous
03:51knight, Alexander, really as the patron of the arts. You see the book down the bottom? That's the
03:57complete works of Homer. Alexander is ordering that it be rebound. And over there, well, that is
04:04Alexander the chivalrous knight. That woman who's so beseeching him is the wife of the king of
04:10Persia. And Alexander's saying, no, I won't take you. I won't rape you as normal kings do. I'm a chivalrous man.
04:16He did, however, take the Persian gold back to the West. So Alexander here is operating as a bridge.
04:26Didn't just take gold. Think of all the things that came out of the mystic East. Silk, apricots, cherries,
04:32flowers, gardens, palaces that nobody had dreamt of, and gardens that were wonders. Alexander's
04:41empire was an empire of wonders. He conquered the city that had the ancient Eastern statue of the
04:47mother goddess in it. He died in Babylon, the city of the hanging gardens. This then is our story of
04:54these amazing wonders from the East and how this single man was the first bridge between the two.
04:59The legend of Alexander had started when he died in Babylon in 323 BC. At first it was a hero cult
05:08run by his generals who were ruling his enormous empire. Here's the legend of the chivalrous knight,
05:15but it's very beginning then. A painting of young Alexander fighting the Persians, opening up the
05:22ancient East. Actually, this is a Roman mosaic from Pompeii, a clever copy of an original probably
05:31made at the time of Alexander and painted by a woman. Some people think that it was commissioned
05:38by this man standing next to Alexander. Certainly it's a real portrait, as is the face of Alexander
05:46himself. The whole thing's pure propaganda, really. It's the usual mix of myth and incredibly accurate
05:55historical detail. It's also a very good picture of a battle. See those spears at the back? They're
06:01the Greek spears, these terrifying 17-foot spears, and they're about to be lowered, and the Greek
06:06army is going to advance on the Persian line. She's very long and thin. Meanwhile, Alexander is
06:13cutting down the inside of the line to arrive at the king of Persia in the middle of his army.
06:17Poor old Darius there. Look at Alexander. He's already speared one of Darius's bodyguards. They're
06:24called the Immortals, but his eye, his eye is fixed on the king of Persia. You could say it's this
06:32terrifying collision in time. It's happened again and again with the Spanish and South America. It's
06:37happening in our own time, when two societies, two cultures collide and one disintegrates. Look,
06:44there's Darius's charioteer. He's off, he's finished, they're done for. It's the new world
06:50destroying the old agrarian society of the ancient East. But look at the detail in the artist. Look
06:56at the harnesses of the Persians and the Greeks. Look at the spears and the helmets. All incredible
07:02detail. What this Greek artist is doing is inventing the idea of a barbarian, of an effete
07:08Eastern person, and in so doing, of course, he's inventing his own identity. That identity is still
07:16a part of the West's identity today, and it's a part in which the Seven Wonders has an important role.
07:22In Egypt, by the Nile, they called Alexander Pharaoh. By the waters of Babylon, he ruled from
07:34the great old palace of King Nebuchadnezzar, and here he died. The air was filled with mist, and a
07:44great star was seen descending from the sky, and Alexander fell into his eternal sleep. So runs
07:51the legend. He had died at the very heart of the ancient East. Babylon, built by the gods, the city
08:01of a thousand dreaming spires, the city of the Tower of Babel and the exile of the Jews.
08:12Babylon of Belshazzar and his wicked feast. The city, too, of the mysterious, elusive,
08:19hanging gardens, which, so the Greeks who wrote upon the Wonders Delas, were the gardens of
08:25Nebuchadnezzar's palace, with fields so high that ploughmen passed above your head, great high trees
08:32whose hanging roots were watered by the misty spray of plain fountains. Archaeologists dug into the
08:41gentle mounds of Babylon before the First World War. It was a large and well-conducted expedition,
08:47led by the respected Berlin professor Robert Kolduvey. They dug out the city's buried walls,
08:54once counted as a wonder of the world in their own right.
09:04They found the very gates through which the captive kings of Judah had passed with all
09:09their courtiers. They found 25,000 inscribed clay tablets, measured Nebuchadnezzar's ruined city,
09:18and brought old Babylon back to life again. And so, the ancient ruins of Babylon have been built again.
09:30The new bricks stamp not with the names of ancient kings, but with the name of Saddam Hussein, Babylon's most recent ruler.
09:44Kolduvey, then, found many treasures. He also thought that he had found the hanging gardens.
09:52They stood here, he wrote, amongst this dust, on these stone arches. And he made some clever drawings
09:59to show how they had looked. And yet, he had really found nothing of the sort.
10:07The tree roots of these hanging gardens would have forced the bricks and stones apart.
10:13Three centuries on, Alexander would have looked down upon a dreadful ruin.
10:20Translations of those ancient tablets, too, showed that Kolduvey's hanging gardens
10:25had really been offices of government. That the big arches hadn't held a hanging garden,
10:31but were humble storerooms underneath a road. The same Babylonian text also provided a mystery
10:39of their own. Not one of them so much as even mentioned hanging gardens.
10:47What on earth, then, was this wonder of the world? Well, most of the Greeks who wrote about the
10:53hanging gardens had never been to Babylon. They knew, though, of the wondrous gardens of the east.
11:00The gardens that the Persian kings called paradise. And so they simply seemed to have put the two
11:06together, and made for us a dream of gardens far away in distant Babylon.
11:12The grandest, most exotic things in all the Orient.
11:16What was it, though, that had inspired this special vision of a garden hanging in the air?
11:24The answer is the humble farms of ancient Greece, where hanging fields, or more properly translated
11:31terraced fields, strips of land on hillsides, was a usual way of growing crops.
11:38Olives and wheat and lovely wine and lots of good cheese from sheep and goats.
11:43It's the classic Mediterranean diet. And it was invented, or at least developed,
11:49in ancient Greece from about a thousand BC. And that protein-rich diet actually became the
11:54powerhouse that fuelled the great flowering of Greek culture. It's a completely new sort of diet.
12:01The older civilisations had been by rivers, with rich silt beside them, lots of lovely water,
12:06and a tremendous diversity of crops. There was none of that in Greece, of course.
12:10It was hard land, hard soil, and although the takings were good, it wasn't a very diverse existence.
12:17I don't think Greeks were tight, tough people. You think of Plato, the great thinker, in his
12:22home town of Athens, and you think, well, what's he going to do? What's he going to do with all this
12:27tough people? You think of Plato, the great thinker, in his academy surrounded by his students.
12:33That academy was a dry olive grove outside Athens, exactly like this one. So when these brave,
12:41tough guys went to the east, they were absolutely astonished by what they saw. They were astonished
12:46by the softness of the landscape and by the richness of the crops, by the apricots and
12:50cherries that were growing that you could just pick off the trees, and by the incredible riches
12:54of the people themselves, too. And when they returned to Greece, they carried this extraordinary
13:00dream of paradise, which, after all, is only the Persian word for garden, straight back
13:05into the west, and it's remained there ever since.
13:55Alexander the Great had read about the gardens of paradise in his beloved Homer even when he was a
14:00child. He probably read the accounts of mercenaries, too, working at the Persian court. These rough old
14:08soldiers had been amazed at the sophistication of King Cyrus, and King Cyrus had been delighted
14:14with them. He said, all this I planted out and measured with my own hands. Some of the trees I'd
14:20even planted myself. The Romans brought the idea of paradise from Greece, that great memory, into
14:28the heart of Rome, and this garden here is a Renaissance garden designed from a drawing of an
14:34ancient Roman garden made by the architect Piero Ligurio. And, of course, it still has the cross
14:41streams of paradise in it. The streams of paradise you'll find in the book of Genesis, in the great
14:47Mesopotamian myths. Gilgamesh, the hero, found the elixir of life in a paradise like this.
14:53In places like this, then, in the gardens of Cardinal Gangora in Bagnia, the north of Rome,
15:00you not only find beauty and peace, but you find shapes and scents that take you back
15:05right through history, back to your very beginnings.
15:17The Greeks said that the hanging gardens were built to please a homesick Persian concubine,
15:44an imitation of the mountains of her homeland on the flat plain of Iraq.
15:54It is filled with all sorts of trees and looks exactly like a mountain country.
16:00The several parts of it rise one on another and resemble a theatre.
16:05It is thickly planted and the trees' broad leaves nearly touch each other and make delightful shade.
16:13Waters gush forth from higher fountains, sink down into the ground and are forced
16:19up again in twists and spirals, rushing and swirling through the pipes.
16:26Bountiful moisture bathes the tree roots and the soil is perpetually moist.
16:33Such was the dream of paradise, the dream of Philo of Byzantium in the third century before Christ.
16:41Follow these ancient streams back to their beginnings.
16:44Go, as Alexander did, back to the font of our experience
16:49and you'll find not only paradise, but the most ancient gods as well.
16:56Just as they stand here in the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, close by Rome,
17:02so they stand deep in our minds, back at our beginnings.
17:11All along Alexander's route through Asia were the temples of the most ancient gods,
17:26gods whose Greek names Alexander knew and worshipped,
17:29the gods that when he saw them in other costumes and in other countries
17:33he recognised as part of a common well of sacredness.
17:40This marvellous rock shrine is called Yassilikaya in central Turkey.
17:47It is the most sacred sanctuary of the ancient Hittites and other races too who came here after
17:52them. Most of their gods, they brought with them from central Asia. These reliefs are now some
18:003,000 years old and they've never been attacked. They still hold their ancient names, their
18:08they still hold their ancient sacredness.
18:30We're right at the heart of the shrine and that god there,
18:35that's the god Teshub, the god who in Greece becomes Zeus who when he rolls his black curls
18:41causes thunder and thunderbolts to hit the ground. That one there, the small god with
18:46a double-headed axe, that becomes the Greek god Apollo. But it's the lady in the middle,
18:52that much-travelled lady, that's really our interest here. It's really a large part of
18:57the history of world religion too. 800 years after she's carved on this wall she's found in
19:05India as the god Varuna. See she's standing on a panther. She started standing on a panther
19:112,000 years before this scene was made in ancient Sumer and 7,000 years before that
19:18the villagers of Anatolia were painting her on the walls of their shrines. She is what is known as
19:23the great goddess, the mother goddess. In Alexander's day the people of Asia called her Kibbele.
19:30The Greeks called her Artemis and her template Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the world.
19:36Great is Diana of the Ephesians. The acoustics here are incredible aren't they?
19:58Can you imagine what it must have been like with 40,000 people roaring those words down through
20:04the city streets and out across the sea? That's what the book of Acts said happened here in 53 AD
20:12when Saint Paul brought Christianity to the great city of Ephesus. Diana is the bible's name for
20:19Artemis. This was the city of Artemis. She decorated every temple, every building. She was
20:26the richness of the city and she was the pride of its inhabitants and you can't be surprised that
20:3040,000 of them were roaring their defiance at Christianity. She of course had been in the city
20:37for a thousand years and it would take Saint Paul and his followers another 300 to dislodge her cult.
20:491,800 years later a single Englishman sat in this same theatre. He was looking out across
20:55the landscape looking for any trace he could see of the great temple of Artemis.
21:00The Englishman's name was John Turtle Wood. He was a wealthy amateur traveller, an archaeologist and
21:06in the way of those people in the 19th century he was quietly obsessed. He was obsessed with
21:13finding one of the seven wonders of the world, this great temple which had completely disappeared.
21:18Wood stayed in Ephesus for year after year digging for that temple. He went through a fortune,
21:23he caught malaria, he was threatened with kidnapping, he was shot at, he broke god knows
21:28how many bones in his body but he found the temple in the end and it was here in the theatre
21:34that he found the first clue.
21:41Wood's great clue was on this wall. Now when he was digging here all of this wall
21:51was covered with dirt which had swept down from the mountains over the theatre.
21:56When Wood cleared it away he found a whole lot of inscriptions on it. Now that's not surprising
22:02because there are lots of inscriptions, Ephesus is covered in them, but this one was rather
22:08interesting. It had been written about 50 years after St Paul's visit to Ephesus
22:18by a citizen of the place called Caius Vibius Salutarius and it stood here.
22:23It was such a remarkable inscription in fact that Wood got a British navy boat, the HMS Terrible,
22:31to come in, docked close by, 15 jolly jactars came along with ropes and hacksaws and removed
22:38the whole thing. In fact they got a pound of tobacco for getting it away unbroken. Now what
22:44this said was that this man, Caius Vibius Salutarius, who lived about 50 years after St Paul,
22:53donated a whole lot of golden statues of Artemis to the great temple. Now that was interesting in
22:58itself but what was crucial for Wood was that he described a procession that these statues took
23:04every year on Artemis's birthday. It said the statues were brought from the temple to the gate
23:10of the city, the Magnesian Gate, and there they were met by the young men in the city and carried
23:17down in procession. So what Wood had to do now was to find this Magnesian Gate and then he would
23:22have the road to the temple. Using the inscriptions as his guide, Wood dug down into the ancient city
23:32down along its streets back into Alexander's world. Ephesus had been one of the richest,
23:42most modern cities on the planet. As Wood dug along its marble streets, he dug back into ancient
23:49life. Here you might see sailors from India and Rome and Alexandria, Persians too with purple
23:58robes all sewn with golden beads, Corinthians in crimson, violet and sea green, and the busy
24:05priests of Artemis in lozenge pattern gowns with beads all drawn upon them.
24:15As he dug his way up the great marble street though,
24:19Wood missed the town statue of the goddess Artemis. Years later, Austrian archaeologists
24:25found her in the back of the town hall, cushioned in fine sand, buried by some early Christians who
24:32could not bear to see the goddess leave their city. For 17 centuries she had laid there in the
24:39dark, garlanded with sculpted necklaces and fine robes, hung about with those
24:45mysterious breast-like objects that had become her major symbol.
24:49Within a year of finding the inscription, Wood had found a city gate. He knew it was the gate to
25:06Magnesia because the city of Magnesia was just over there, and right in front of it the great
25:12broad pavement he knew would lead into the temple of Artemis. Once again John Turtle Wood
25:19had come down on an amazing piece of history. This was the gate that one of the pseudo-gospels
25:24said St John walked through to convert the Ephesians, and when he came there was a gilded
25:29statue of the goddess standing there with a veil over her face, a lamp at her feet. John says the
25:35city was dark from the smoke of the goddess's altars. He put paid to that. The gate by the
25:41second century had become Christian, the city converted by John. Anyway, Wood had more immediate
25:49problems. When he got to the outside of the gate he was on a pavement, sure, but which way did he go?
25:56He dug a fan 150 feet into the landscape, 12 feet deep looking for the road. He was lucky, he didn't
26:04find one road, he found two. Now he had a problem. Should he go left or should he go right across the
26:10landscape? Well, this is how he solved it. These deep channels here are the ruts from the carriages
26:19as they went through the city. One of these roads, the one leading to the right, had hardly
26:25any ruts. The road that took all the city traffic went left and so did Wood.
26:34Wood's walk looks much the same today. There's a little country track though where once there was
26:39an ancient highway. Imagine hundreds of men cutting the landscape, all digging away, Greek
26:48and Armenian workmen with bright-dressed Turkish soldiers looking on and bandits peering at them
26:55from the hills.
27:07Wood found hundreds of these on his way down the road. He wasn't looking for them much.
27:12They're sarcophagi and they're filled with whole families of people.
27:19Here's one of their epitaphs. Hiero's nurse who loved wine lies here.
27:25May her old body buried amid the vines feed in death the vats she loved in life.
27:39Five years into his work, Wood was in real trouble. He had malaria badly and he was running out of
27:45money. The only thing he had to go on was that an ancient guidebook said the road to the temple
27:50went slightly downhill and Wood felt that this track was going slightly downhill. It didn't seem
27:55to be going anywhere really so he took a big chance. The very last cash he had, he stopped digging,
28:03moved the men a third of a mile on where he thought the road might be and dug another hole.
28:0812 feet down he found these. They might not look much but to Wood they were manna from heaven.
28:15These he knew were the base of a great colonnade that a rich man had built so the statue of the
28:20goddess could come down her sacred way to the temple without getting rained on.
28:25Wood not only found the colonnade, he even found the roof tiles that kept the goddess dry.
28:33He must have longed for a sight of the temple though. The temple built so legend said by rich
28:39King Croesus, burnt down by a madman on the day that Alexander had been born and built again more
28:47grand and richer than before.
28:58Though Wood was still following those big square stones, he felt himself in real trouble once he'd
29:04left the hills behind him. You see all he could see was a little Turkish town. As he himself said,
29:11I felt the pangs of failure come across me as I looked across the broad uninterrupted plain
29:16without a trace of a mound that could hide the great temple. The farmers of course wouldn't dig
29:21in the fields at all so he had to try working in the corners on the roads and places like this
29:27and there as luck would have it he found more of his square stones. As a clever man he noticed that
29:34they still followed the lines of the fields and that line led straight to the old Turkish fort.
29:46In the last months of 1869, John Wood broke his foot. So for the work to continue his wife had to
29:58come with him. Previously she stayed home and cooked, now she was down the trench and he was
30:03stuck up top on a horse. It was said Wood, the most fortunate accident he'd ever had.
30:09From that moment on they always worked together.
30:11Mrs Wood took over the excavations, supervising holes 25 feet deep and finding altars, statues
30:20and mosaic pavements but never the temple of Artemis. Then on the very last day of the year
30:28at a depth of 25 feet the workmen hit huge blocks, a great marble pavement. By the 3rd of January
30:37the Woods knew that they had found the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world.
30:43Delirious from exhilaration and malaria, John Wood set down to write his journal.
30:49In his enthusiasm he wrote solidly for 15 hours and collapsed.
30:55So ended the most romantic archaeological search ever mounted.
31:00When today you walk through the site of Wood's great excavation, across the ruin field where
31:05once there stood a vast and holy temple, it's difficult to see what all the fuss had been about.
31:16What had fired John Wood for those seven long years in the search for these few blocks of stone
31:23was the temple's sheer fame. It's mentioned thousands and thousands of time in the ancient references.
31:29Gibbon, that greatest of historian, describes it as a combination of conspiracy, he says,
31:36of the arts of Greece and the wealth of Asia, enriched by successive kings and renowned for its piety.
31:44Here had stood one of the holiest shrines of Alexander's world,
31:49here had stood one of the holiest shrines of Alexander's world.
31:53Even the fish that ran in the river beside the temple were considered holy.
31:59Imitations of the building were built in other lands, silver models of the goddess were sold by
32:04the thousand. Like a great cathedral, the real wonder here was holiness itself.
32:12The Christians finally killed the goddess Artemis, the great statue at the centre of the town
32:18of that deceitful demon, they called her, was taken down and the victorious cross of Christ
32:23was erected in her place. By the fourth century,
32:26all mention of Artemis's name was scratched from the inscriptions of the town.
32:42So what had the great temple of Artemis actually looked like?
32:48Like this one, a Didyma, on the same coast of southern Turkey, where the surviving detail is superb.
32:56Some of the architects that worked here also worked on the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
33:20Its Greek architecture at its grandest, perfect for that stately lady, the oldest goddess in the world.
33:31Clean, clear and straight, sumptuous and majestic.
33:37And standing here still for our very great delight.
33:50Today, the stones of the great temple of Artemis are scattered through the little town that stands by ancient Ephesus.
34:20Every one of the stones in the temple of Artemis is made of stone.
34:25This is the stone that was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:29It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:31It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:33It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:35It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:37It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:39It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:41It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:43It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:45It was used to build the temple of Artemis.
34:48Every one of the stones in this aqueduct once came from somewhere else.
34:54So, a little bit of a Roman temple up there.
34:56You see that very pretty little bit of moulding once stood on the entablature above a column.
35:04But it's small and a little wibbly wobbly, so it certainly didn't come from the Artemisium.
35:10But this block, this block down here, is something very different.
35:17Of course, its sheer size gives it away.
35:20It's the same elements that the Romans used, but it's very much bigger here.
35:24It has a grandness about it that immediately catches your eye.
35:27These tatty fragments here, you see, are called astragals.
35:30They were once great egg shapes.
35:33And how well carved it is, too.
35:35Just look at that.
35:37It's made as finely as something would be on a machine,
35:41but with such delicacy, such style, such grandness.
35:46It truly is a tiny fraction of one of the seven wonders of the world.
35:50And there are other bits here, too.
35:59Now, this bit here, this is a real find.
36:03You see, when they built it into the aqueduct,
36:07the masons cut down the edge of the stone to get a nice crisp edge here.
36:11But they left this bit in the middle.
36:14This shows this lovely, clean, grand carving
36:18that's really so typical of the Temple of Artemis.
36:21In fact, it's a small piece of one of the 127 columns
36:25that the Roman plinies said that building had.
36:31See how it works?
36:33The flutes on the column, those grooves in the stone,
36:36can tell you just how high it was.
36:39With bits like that, then, you could almost reconstruct the temple.
36:43Three different styles of temple,
36:45the three orders of Greek architecture.
36:48Doric was the strongest.
36:50Corinthian, the most decorative.
36:54Wood discovered that the Artemis temple had been ionic
36:58with its gentle scrolls.
37:03When Pliny visited it,
37:05he said the temple was 225 feet wide and 425 feet long,
37:12with its great forest of 127 columns.
37:16The shrine of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world,
37:19would have looked like this.
37:33What does archaeology say, though, down at the excavations?
37:37Well, amazing stuff.
37:39Professor Bammer at the University of Vienna
37:42has been rewriting the history of the great goddess.
37:52All around these ancient temples, sealed in the river silt,
37:56were the jewels of the goddess
37:58from the innermost parts of her shrine.
38:01Her clothes and treasures
38:03and the presents that people brought to her.
38:07The ground was seeded with a residue of faith.
38:14A mixture of faith, too,
38:16from Asia, Africa and Europe,
38:19all here at the shrine of the mother goddess.
38:26She's quite heavy.
38:28Solid gold.
38:30One of around a dozen of goddesses
38:33found in the treasures around the temple.
38:37That face.
38:39That face was staring in temples
38:413,000 years before Christ in ancient Mesopotamia.
38:44And here she is again at Ephesus.
38:46The lady goddess.
38:48They weren't just these little statues.
38:51They were the actual clothing
38:53that Artemis herself wore in her temple.
38:56The great belts that you see on the statues.
38:59There were two of those and fragments of more.
39:02Exactly the same as you see in stone.
39:07And all the jewellery, too,
39:09lay stuck between the silks
39:11as it lay for thousands of years.
39:13Look, these are the goddess' necklaces.
39:15Crystal, amber from the Baltic,
39:17glass from Phoenicia.
39:19These hung around her necks in great swathes.
39:27Then there was the actual pieces of necklace itself
39:31with the beads of the goddess
39:33and the beautiful bull's head.
39:35These strung round in a circle.
39:37And then to go on that great shawl
39:39that you see on the statues, too.
39:41These beautiful lion-headed brooches
39:43and lots of rosettes, too.
39:45See the little holes for sewing onto the robes?
39:48One of the most interesting things
39:50seems to have been the solution
39:52to the great puzzle
39:54of what those breast objects were on the goddess.
39:58Now it seems,
40:00looking at these little amber beads here,
40:03that they're actually fruits.
40:05See this beautiful little piece of Baltic amber?
40:08That little top there,
40:10it's just like a baby pomegranate,
40:12like a little jewel in itself.
40:14And this, perhaps an aubergine.
40:16Perhaps the goddess was covered
40:18in an abundance of fruit.
40:20The goddess Artemis
40:22hadn't been able to find
40:24a single piece of fruit
40:26The goddess Artemis
40:28hadn't just left her jewellery behind
40:30in her temples,
40:32but thousands and thousands of examples
40:34of the gifts she'd been given
40:36from every country in the ancient East.
40:38Artemis had this magnetism
40:40which gave you presents from Egypt.
40:42That little chap has jumped here
40:44all the way from Egypt.
40:46It's best the god of childbirth
40:48who bangs a tambourine
40:50and makes everybody very happy.
40:52And from Egypt, two lucky scarabs
40:55The Phoenicians have left us
40:57the sanctuary of the great goddess
40:59some of their finest ivory carvings.
41:01The sort of thing you read about
41:03in the Bibles.
41:05The biblical kings lived in rooms
41:07decorated by these same artists.
41:09From Central Asia,
41:11those mysterious mobile cultures
41:13they're called the animal style
41:15but look at these,
41:17the beautiful griffin,
41:19the bronzes,
41:21all these strange markings
41:24And from Greece herself,
41:26Professor Bammer
41:28has excavated some of the very finest
41:30archaic ivories yet seen.
41:34This then
41:36is the Greek face of a much more
41:38ancient lady.
41:40Alexander called her Artemis
41:42the Anatolians
41:44Cybele
41:46The Romans knew her as Diana
41:48the virgin goddess of the hunt
41:50and she came into Europe
41:52with the ancient Babylonian zodiac
41:54the bats of hell
41:56and all the wisdom and compassion
41:58of a great all-knowing mother.
42:06Within a century
42:08the expulsion of the goddess Artemis
42:10from Ephesus
42:12Eastern gospels tell us that the city
42:14had been the final earthly refuge
42:16of the Virgin Mary
42:18and Ephesus
42:21the most important Christian city
42:23of the great province of Roman Asia
42:30And in 431,
42:32here in this very church
42:34it hosted
42:36a council, a supreme council
42:38of the Christian church
42:40and that really was to debate
42:42the most fundamental issue
42:44any religion ever has to decide
42:46the nature of Godhead itself
42:48Here it was
42:50that the Church adopted the notion of the Holy Trinity
42:52that is, God the Father
42:54God the Son
42:56and God the Holy Ghost
42:58So where in this extraordinary theological setup
43:00did Mary, the mother of Jesus, figure?
43:04Well, she was clearly the mother of God
43:06and so she was voted
43:08at this church council
43:10Theotokos, God-bearer
43:12That's a beautiful thing when you think about it
43:14Here in the city of Artemis
43:16with her temple that was one of the
43:18seven wonders of the world
43:20with ideas of female deity
43:22that stretched back for ten millennia
43:24before the Christian church ever existed
43:26Here in this same city
43:28the notion of female deity
43:30has gone full circle
43:32and swung back into modern faith
43:40That, then, is the story
43:42of a temple and a garden
43:44of the jewels of a virgin goddess
43:46and a dream of paradise
43:48and of Alexander, too
43:50that noble knight
43:52whose fabled journey through the distant East
43:54brought the West
43:56some of the seven wonders of the world
44:16.
44:18.
44:20.
44:22.
44:24.
44:26.
44:28.
44:30.
44:32.
44:34.
44:40.
44:42.
44:44.