1 00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:16,400 I've always felt at home in the past. 2 00:00:17,800 --> 00:00:23,040 For after all, what is the present except an endless chain of memories? 3 00:00:25,320 --> 00:00:28,520 Some of them are translated into stone. 4 00:00:30,800 --> 00:00:34,680 We are all the inheritors of those memories, 5 00:00:34,680 --> 00:00:37,680 and we look after them as best we can. 6 00:00:43,840 --> 00:00:49,120 All this so we can pass on their revelation to the future. 7 00:00:55,720 --> 00:00:58,880 But every so often something comes along 8 00:00:58,880 --> 00:01:01,520 to shake them from our grip. 9 00:01:13,800 --> 00:01:16,920 In Mosul, in a matter of hours, 10 00:01:16,920 --> 00:01:20,760 the forces of Isis destroyed the work of centuries. 11 00:01:20,760 --> 00:01:24,840 And when they took the ancient trading city of Palmyra 12 00:01:24,840 --> 00:01:28,680 where the cultures of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs and Jews 13 00:01:28,680 --> 00:01:30,520 have mixed and merged, 14 00:01:30,520 --> 00:01:33,680 it was feared that exactly the same would happen. 15 00:01:46,520 --> 00:01:51,200 Here in Geneva, a few Palmyrene artefacts have been saved - 16 00:01:51,200 --> 00:01:53,880 stolen before the violence began, 17 00:01:53,880 --> 00:01:58,280 arrested at customs as black marketeers tried to sell them. 18 00:02:00,120 --> 00:02:03,000 Like this bust of a priest. 19 00:02:05,560 --> 00:02:08,680 His eyes wide open, he seems not dead at all, 20 00:02:08,680 --> 00:02:12,000 just translated to a life elsewhere. 21 00:02:14,520 --> 00:02:19,480 These lovingly carved likenesses of the dead looted from their tombs 22 00:02:19,680 --> 00:02:23,520 ended up in exile, but safe for posterity. 23 00:02:25,160 --> 00:02:28,560 Saving the art that remained in Palmyra, however, 24 00:02:28,560 --> 00:02:32,040 could come at a terrible price. 25 00:02:32,040 --> 00:02:35,280 Khaled al-Asaad, the chief curator of Palmyra, 26 00:02:35,280 --> 00:02:38,120 was 81 when Isis took the town. 27 00:02:39,800 --> 00:02:41,960 And when their soldiers demanded he tell them 28 00:02:41,960 --> 00:02:46,480 where the city's artworks had been hidden, he refused. 29 00:02:49,640 --> 00:02:53,520 They beheaded him in the Roman theatre, 30 00:02:53,520 --> 00:02:56,600 suspended his mutilated body from a traffic light, 31 00:02:56,600 --> 00:02:59,440 placed his head between his feet... 32 00:03:01,520 --> 00:03:06,760 ..and attached a placard identifying him as director of idolatry. 33 00:03:08,640 --> 00:03:12,880 Or we might say protector of what needs to be saved, 34 00:03:12,880 --> 00:03:17,760 cherished, passed on as the work of civilisation. 35 00:03:20,200 --> 00:03:24,280 A lot of us spend our days talking about art. 36 00:03:24,280 --> 00:03:28,600 I doubt very many of us are prepared to lay down our lives for it, 37 00:03:28,600 --> 00:03:33,640 but for Khaled al-Asaad, the stones and statues and columns of Palmyra 38 00:03:33,640 --> 00:03:37,880 were more than simply an ensemble of antiquity. 39 00:03:37,880 --> 00:03:42,160 He didn't need a Unesco certificate to tell him 40 00:03:42,160 --> 00:03:47,360 that the significance of Palmyra was at once both local and universal. 41 00:03:48,640 --> 00:03:52,440 It's there for believers and unbelievers, for East and West, 42 00:03:52,440 --> 00:03:55,560 and somehow it had fallen to him 43 00:03:55,560 --> 00:03:59,640 to be the guardian of that inheritance. 44 00:03:59,640 --> 00:04:03,480 We can spend a lot of time debating what civilisation is or isn't, 45 00:04:03,480 --> 00:04:08,720 but when it's opposite shows up in all its brutality and cruelty 46 00:04:09,360 --> 00:04:12,280 and intolerance and lust for destruction, 47 00:04:12,280 --> 00:04:14,760 we know what civilisation is. 48 00:04:14,760 --> 00:04:18,880 We know it from the shock of its imminent loss 49 00:04:18,880 --> 00:04:23,160 as a mutilation on the body of our humanity. 50 00:04:30,600 --> 00:04:35,760 The record of human history brims over with the rage to destroy. 51 00:04:38,000 --> 00:04:42,080 But it's also imprinted with the opposite instinct - 52 00:04:42,080 --> 00:04:47,280 to make things that go beyond the demands of food and shelter, 53 00:04:47,440 --> 00:04:50,960 things that make us see the world and our place in it 54 00:04:50,960 --> 00:04:53,640 in a different light. 55 00:04:53,640 --> 00:04:57,000 We are the art-making animal, 56 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:00,120 and this is what we have made. 57 00:05:43,120 --> 00:05:45,760 When did it begin, 58 00:05:45,760 --> 00:05:48,640 that second moment of creation, 59 00:05:48,640 --> 00:05:51,360 the dawning of human creativity? 60 00:05:52,600 --> 00:05:54,520 Where did it begin? 61 00:05:58,840 --> 00:06:01,720 It must have started in Africa 62 00:06:01,720 --> 00:06:06,120 where Homo sapiens first evolved about 200,000 years ago. 63 00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:10,400 On South Africa's Cape Coast, 64 00:06:10,400 --> 00:06:14,040 archaeologists have found evidence of human habitation 65 00:06:14,040 --> 00:06:17,600 stretching back around 100,000 years. 66 00:06:21,760 --> 00:06:25,080 In one of those caves, this was discovered. 67 00:06:25,080 --> 00:06:28,080 77,000 years old, 68 00:06:28,080 --> 00:06:32,760 a piece of red ochre, a mineral naturally rich in iron, 69 00:06:32,760 --> 00:06:35,880 etched in a diamond pattern. 70 00:06:35,880 --> 00:06:40,080 The oldest deliberately decorative marks ever discovered. 71 00:06:41,800 --> 00:06:44,160 The pattern may have been a kind of language 72 00:06:44,160 --> 00:06:46,640 or a kind of number scoring, 73 00:06:46,640 --> 00:06:50,280 but it's hard to see them as serving any functional need 74 00:06:50,280 --> 00:06:53,000 connected with shelter or sustenance. 75 00:06:54,680 --> 00:06:57,480 They are a design, 76 00:06:57,480 --> 00:07:01,360 and design announces the beginning of culture. 77 00:07:07,600 --> 00:07:12,000 Another 40,000 years pass and in northern Spain 78 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:17,000 within a hill so uncannily conical it seems man-made 79 00:07:17,160 --> 00:07:21,080 that mineral, that red ochre, has become paint. 80 00:07:25,360 --> 00:07:27,720 Deep inside a cave, 81 00:07:27,720 --> 00:07:32,880 rudimentary marks have bloomed and multiplied, red circles. 82 00:07:33,720 --> 00:07:37,760 There are no brushes, no sticks to lay on this paint, 83 00:07:37,760 --> 00:07:40,040 they are all applied orally - 84 00:07:40,040 --> 00:07:42,800 colour swilled in the mouth with saliva 85 00:07:42,800 --> 00:07:45,560 and blown directly onto the rock. 86 00:07:50,640 --> 00:07:52,960 And then these, 87 00:07:52,960 --> 00:07:58,160 an eruption of design not blown onto the surface, but painted. 88 00:08:00,320 --> 00:08:05,560 Contours, outlines, flowing streams of dots. 89 00:08:07,720 --> 00:08:11,280 There's a meaning here, but we don't know what it is. 90 00:08:11,280 --> 00:08:15,520 The signs of a biological compulsion to pattern, 91 00:08:15,520 --> 00:08:18,440 it's what we humans do, 92 00:08:18,440 --> 00:08:20,160 what we want to do, 93 00:08:20,160 --> 00:08:22,720 what we can't stop ourselves doing. 94 00:08:34,600 --> 00:08:37,640 And then you come across this. 95 00:08:39,080 --> 00:08:43,400 And in an instant, vast millennia of time just collapse 96 00:08:43,400 --> 00:08:45,760 and you're in the midst of fellow humans. 97 00:08:45,760 --> 00:08:48,640 Their hands doing what hands do, 98 00:08:48,640 --> 00:08:52,040 signalling from a very long way off, 99 00:08:52,040 --> 00:08:56,360 37,000 years distant, in fact. 100 00:08:56,360 --> 00:09:01,280 But this long-distance greeting somehow makes us bond 101 00:09:01,280 --> 00:09:06,480 with the makers of this because they establish a presence 102 00:09:07,320 --> 00:09:10,160 that is palpably alive. 103 00:09:14,560 --> 00:09:18,800 Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves 104 00:09:18,800 --> 00:09:23,280 as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia. 105 00:09:23,280 --> 00:09:28,440 Wherever we went, it seems the urge to signal a presence went with us. 106 00:09:31,120 --> 00:09:34,000 And, undeniably, these hand stencils do 107 00:09:34,000 --> 00:09:38,640 what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to. 108 00:09:38,640 --> 00:09:42,080 First, they want to be seen by others, 109 00:09:42,080 --> 00:09:46,160 and then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker. 110 00:09:49,760 --> 00:09:51,840 Like the earliest photographs, 111 00:09:51,840 --> 00:09:55,480 the images here are faded, indistinct, 112 00:09:55,480 --> 00:09:58,920 but something tantalising is happening - 113 00:09:58,920 --> 00:10:04,000 the realisation that we can, however crudely, represent. 114 00:10:07,480 --> 00:10:10,920 In another cave further west in Asturias, 115 00:10:10,920 --> 00:10:13,720 20 minutes walk away from any daylight, 116 00:10:13,720 --> 00:10:17,440 are images that are anything but crude. 117 00:10:29,680 --> 00:10:34,280 This was a doubling of the world, a life copy, 118 00:10:34,280 --> 00:10:38,320 and executed with startling precision of drawing technique. 119 00:10:38,320 --> 00:10:41,000 They even understood modelling, 120 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:45,880 anatomical features following the rock wall surface of the cave. 121 00:10:45,880 --> 00:10:47,720 And there were many colours, 122 00:10:47,720 --> 00:10:51,360 not just the ubiquitous red ochre, but violets and blacks. 123 00:10:51,360 --> 00:10:56,040 And all those techniques seem to have been there from the beginning, 124 00:10:56,040 --> 00:10:59,880 tens of thousands of years ago. 125 00:10:59,880 --> 00:11:02,920 When you think about this technique, your head just spins 126 00:11:02,920 --> 00:11:08,000 because it has to have been, above all, a memory exercise. 127 00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:13,280 They would have had to fix in their mind exact anatomical details 128 00:11:14,120 --> 00:11:18,760 and then transpose them here on the surface of the cave. 129 00:11:18,760 --> 00:11:21,240 And, yet, when all that was done, 130 00:11:21,240 --> 00:11:26,480 they managed to preserve miraculously this animal vitality. 131 00:11:27,320 --> 00:11:31,040 This is truly one of the great marvels 132 00:11:31,040 --> 00:11:35,000 of the suddenly expanded human mind. 133 00:11:39,880 --> 00:11:43,040 It was in the later years of the 19th century 134 00:11:43,040 --> 00:11:47,000 that images like these began to be discovered. 135 00:11:47,000 --> 00:11:50,040 The first, and for many years the most famous, 136 00:11:50,040 --> 00:11:54,680 were in the caves of Altamira, also in northern Spain. 137 00:11:59,400 --> 00:12:04,240 Extraordinary paintings of bison, herds of them, 138 00:12:04,240 --> 00:12:09,120 sleeping, lying, standing. 139 00:12:15,640 --> 00:12:19,000 But as the number of painted caves discovered grew, 140 00:12:19,000 --> 00:12:23,440 it became clear that art and music came into the world together, 141 00:12:23,440 --> 00:12:26,200 for musical instruments were found. 142 00:12:26,200 --> 00:12:28,400 BLOWS HORN 143 00:12:28,400 --> 00:12:30,200 Animal horns... 144 00:12:30,200 --> 00:12:32,080 FLUTE WHISTLES 145 00:12:32,080 --> 00:12:36,240 ..flutes made from bones of vultures, 146 00:12:36,240 --> 00:12:40,800 and even more hauntingly, bullroarers, 147 00:12:40,800 --> 00:12:43,880 a piece of wood tied to a rope spun round the head 148 00:12:43,880 --> 00:12:48,120 that makes this strange whooping sound. 149 00:12:48,120 --> 00:12:50,720 BULLROARERS WHOOSHES 150 00:12:52,600 --> 00:12:56,080 Recent experiments with these instruments have suggested 151 00:12:56,080 --> 00:13:01,120 that the proximity of painting and music was not accidental, 152 00:13:01,280 --> 00:13:05,560 that they were connected elements in sacred rituals. 153 00:13:06,840 --> 00:13:11,600 I'm using software to test the acoustics in the space. 154 00:13:11,600 --> 00:13:14,560 So we generate this swept sine wave 155 00:13:14,560 --> 00:13:19,120 and we use that to capture the acoustic of the cave. 156 00:13:19,120 --> 00:13:24,360 And we can look for relationships between sound and paintings. 157 00:13:24,680 --> 00:13:27,600 WHISTLING 158 00:13:32,320 --> 00:13:36,480 So the earliest paintings seem to be in these small little side areas 159 00:13:36,480 --> 00:13:40,320 where maybe one person might be there alone. 160 00:13:40,320 --> 00:13:45,480 And then the later paintings seem to be in more grand places, 161 00:13:46,040 --> 00:13:48,400 a venue where a few people would have gathered, 162 00:13:48,400 --> 00:13:51,040 somewhere more dramatic that sounds more dramatic. 163 00:13:51,040 --> 00:13:53,120 BULLROARER WHIRS 164 00:13:57,360 --> 00:14:02,560 You can compare these spaces to a cathedral or a temple. 165 00:14:02,800 --> 00:14:07,080 They're places where people came for sacred moments 166 00:14:07,080 --> 00:14:12,240 which were full of imagery and ritual and music. 167 00:14:14,920 --> 00:14:17,480 FLUTE WHISTLES 168 00:14:19,800 --> 00:14:24,600 And it's like going into a place that's kind of underground, 169 00:14:24,600 --> 00:14:27,040 where you can stop time, 170 00:14:27,040 --> 00:14:32,120 where you can pause and have that special moment 171 00:14:32,320 --> 00:14:35,160 where you're out of time, where you're somewhere else. 172 00:14:36,800 --> 00:14:38,960 Painting is the sound. 173 00:14:38,960 --> 00:14:40,880 The sound making, the music-making, 174 00:14:40,880 --> 00:14:44,760 whatever was happening in this sacred ritual, 175 00:14:44,760 --> 00:14:46,440 that is the painting. 176 00:14:46,440 --> 00:14:49,760 The painting is what's left of that activity. 177 00:15:06,520 --> 00:15:09,840 Anthropologists and archaeologists tell us 178 00:15:09,840 --> 00:15:12,360 that almost all of ice-age painting 179 00:15:12,360 --> 00:15:16,320 had some sort of otherworldly ritual function, 180 00:15:16,320 --> 00:15:20,120 and that, therefore, it ought not to be seen as art. 181 00:15:20,120 --> 00:15:23,880 Though, of course, religion has been a primary purpose of art 182 00:15:23,880 --> 00:15:25,560 for thousands of years. 183 00:15:35,120 --> 00:15:39,760 In Africa, the animals that dominate European cave paintings 184 00:15:39,760 --> 00:15:42,160 are accompanied by humans. 185 00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:49,280 They appear as stylised, elongated figures. 186 00:15:53,520 --> 00:15:58,720 Sometimes they're shown while becoming transformed into beasts. 187 00:15:59,440 --> 00:16:02,520 Men with the heads of antelopes, 188 00:16:02,520 --> 00:16:06,000 creatures that could never have been observed from life, 189 00:16:06,000 --> 00:16:11,240 but which arose from the trance-struck imagination of the shamans. 190 00:16:13,120 --> 00:16:17,720 In the rock art of Africa, these hybrids were painted. 191 00:16:17,720 --> 00:16:20,480 In Europe, where there were far fewer of them, 192 00:16:20,480 --> 00:16:23,080 they went three-dimensional. 193 00:16:26,120 --> 00:16:30,160 In 1939, the fragments of this lion-man, 194 00:16:30,160 --> 00:16:35,400 carved from mammoth ivory, were found in a German cave. 195 00:16:35,640 --> 00:16:38,720 They remained an unsolved puzzle for 30 years 196 00:16:38,720 --> 00:16:43,760 before archaeologists realised that they formed a single figure 197 00:16:43,760 --> 00:16:48,200 made between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. 198 00:16:49,680 --> 00:16:53,960 This may be a shaman in the middle of a transformation. 199 00:16:53,960 --> 00:16:57,680 It may be the very first of the beast gods, 200 00:16:57,680 --> 00:17:02,440 around which Pagan religions would build their mythologies. 201 00:17:02,440 --> 00:17:07,520 Perhaps the making of such things was itself a sacred calling. 202 00:17:08,960 --> 00:17:11,720 To see how much work was needed to make a lion-man, 203 00:17:11,720 --> 00:17:16,960 archaeologist Wulf Hein embarked on an experiment to carve a replica 204 00:17:17,520 --> 00:17:20,880 using authentic tools and materials. 205 00:17:20,880 --> 00:17:22,800 Without a mammoth tusk, 206 00:17:22,800 --> 00:17:27,160 he used a piece of legally sourced elephant ivory. 207 00:17:27,160 --> 00:17:30,680 I started working from the whole tusk 208 00:17:30,680 --> 00:17:33,520 and then I took a big stone and hammered away this piece, 209 00:17:33,520 --> 00:17:35,360 and I was sweating like hell 210 00:17:35,360 --> 00:17:38,360 because if I would have ruined it, it would be a disaster. 211 00:17:38,360 --> 00:17:42,040 And the most time-consuming part of the work 212 00:17:42,040 --> 00:17:44,520 was setting free the arms 213 00:17:44,520 --> 00:17:47,320 because I had to take a very tiny tool 214 00:17:47,320 --> 00:17:50,400 and make grooves like this underneath, into the ivory, 215 00:17:50,400 --> 00:17:52,640 and just scratch and scratch and days and days 216 00:17:52,640 --> 00:17:53,880 and working and working. 217 00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:56,880 I had blisters on my hands, and every finger was aching. 218 00:17:56,880 --> 00:18:00,320 It was very heavy work. 219 00:18:00,320 --> 00:18:04,000 I started in April 220 00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:07,200 and I stopped working in the middle of July. 221 00:18:08,600 --> 00:18:12,960 I worked about four, five hours a day. 222 00:18:12,960 --> 00:18:17,160 In the end, it was about 400 hours, then I stopped counting. 223 00:18:17,160 --> 00:18:20,840 I guess it was a real artist who made this. 224 00:18:20,840 --> 00:18:24,920 And he was set free by his community only to do this piece of artwork. 225 00:18:24,920 --> 00:18:27,480 If you do this a whole summer or a whole winter through, 226 00:18:27,480 --> 00:18:30,200 you can't go hunting, you can't go fishing, you can't do nothing 227 00:18:30,200 --> 00:18:32,760 because you work all day on it. 228 00:18:32,760 --> 00:18:37,120 It must have had incredible meaning for the people who made it. 229 00:18:41,000 --> 00:18:44,960 And these must have been charged with meaning too. 230 00:18:44,960 --> 00:18:49,360 Small figurines embodying the primal life events 231 00:18:49,360 --> 00:18:52,560 of birth and procreation. 232 00:18:52,560 --> 00:18:56,840 Gravid earth mothers weighty with fertility, 233 00:18:56,840 --> 00:19:01,920 enormous distended breasts and buttocks. 234 00:19:01,920 --> 00:19:05,560 So powerfully elemental they seemed to speak directly 235 00:19:05,560 --> 00:19:09,440 to modern artists when they first saw them. 236 00:19:09,440 --> 00:19:13,200 The most self-consciously modern of them all, Picasso, 237 00:19:13,200 --> 00:19:16,840 told a friend that no sculptor had ever bettered 238 00:19:16,840 --> 00:19:19,080 the Palaeolithic carvers. 239 00:19:19,080 --> 00:19:23,200 He bought a copy of this one, Venus of Lespugue, 240 00:19:23,200 --> 00:19:27,320 and kept it in his studio all his life. 241 00:19:27,320 --> 00:19:32,320 Was he touched by its archaic spirituality? 242 00:19:32,320 --> 00:19:34,280 No. 243 00:19:34,280 --> 00:19:37,640 He was earthly and worldly, 244 00:19:37,640 --> 00:19:42,920 but he felt a deep communion with the makers of a physical art. 245 00:19:43,560 --> 00:19:47,800 And there were traces of that communion elsewhere in his work. 246 00:19:50,080 --> 00:19:53,240 Despite rumours, there's no direct evidence 247 00:19:53,240 --> 00:19:57,240 that Picasso ever visited the painted caves of Altamira 248 00:19:57,240 --> 00:20:01,360 or saw in person the extraordinary painted bison 249 00:20:01,360 --> 00:20:03,440 that those caves contained. 250 00:20:04,840 --> 00:20:07,360 But he was obsessed with animals, 251 00:20:07,360 --> 00:20:09,360 one animal in particular, 252 00:20:09,360 --> 00:20:12,280 not the bison, but it's cousin, the bull, 253 00:20:12,280 --> 00:20:15,800 an animal to which he returned again and again. 254 00:20:19,040 --> 00:20:22,360 Do we think this is mere coincidence? 255 00:20:23,960 --> 00:20:27,840 He liked to call himself a modern primitive, 256 00:20:27,840 --> 00:20:30,840 and in those images, glimmering images in the caves, 257 00:20:30,840 --> 00:20:33,520 he found, he thought, a fountainhead 258 00:20:33,520 --> 00:20:36,560 of everything that was truly creative 259 00:20:36,560 --> 00:20:38,840 about the artistic instinct. 260 00:20:38,840 --> 00:20:42,560 So he paid cave art the ultimate compliment 261 00:20:42,560 --> 00:20:45,240 by doing something very similar. 262 00:20:45,240 --> 00:20:46,920 He looked at a bull 263 00:20:46,920 --> 00:20:52,000 and then he produced this beautiful, dashing, impulsive picture of a bull 264 00:20:52,000 --> 00:20:55,560 so close to the original in Altamira, 265 00:20:55,560 --> 00:20:58,240 it could even have been a studious copy. 266 00:21:00,720 --> 00:21:03,560 But then he produced another ten prints, 267 00:21:03,560 --> 00:21:07,840 bulls drawn from his own enormous range of styles, 268 00:21:07,840 --> 00:21:10,600 from meaty naturalism 269 00:21:10,600 --> 00:21:13,120 through classical Cubism 270 00:21:13,120 --> 00:21:18,240 to a lightly delineated bull that's really just a pair of horns 271 00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:21,720 and then that other thing that bulls always need. 272 00:21:23,680 --> 00:21:27,000 The entire sequence expresses his admiration 273 00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:29,360 for the genius of the cave painters, 274 00:21:29,360 --> 00:21:31,840 his belief that ancient or modern, 275 00:21:31,840 --> 00:21:37,040 the hand of the painter, the hand of the artist, never really changes. 276 00:21:37,920 --> 00:21:41,600 And I have to say, I agree with Picasso. 277 00:21:53,120 --> 00:21:56,000 We can walk into rooms like this one 278 00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:00,800 which preserve the 19th century style of museum presentation - 279 00:22:00,800 --> 00:22:02,880 abundance. 280 00:22:06,120 --> 00:22:08,600 And as we wander through case after case, 281 00:22:08,600 --> 00:22:13,560 not just of minute fashioning tools, but ivory and bone, 282 00:22:13,560 --> 00:22:17,320 decorated with startling images of birds and horses, 283 00:22:17,320 --> 00:22:21,000 we can't avoid pushing back instinctively 284 00:22:21,000 --> 00:22:24,040 against the received wisdom of the scholars 285 00:22:24,040 --> 00:22:28,040 that none of these things should ever be thought of as art. 286 00:22:29,720 --> 00:22:33,560 For me, the last word in this entire debate 287 00:22:33,560 --> 00:22:37,680 belongs to one tiny ancient piece in particular... 288 00:22:40,920 --> 00:22:43,680 ..La Dame de Brassempouy. 289 00:22:43,680 --> 00:22:45,760 The lady of Brassempouy, 290 00:22:45,760 --> 00:22:49,800 found in a cave in south-west France in 1892. 291 00:22:49,800 --> 00:22:55,000 She's between 22,000 and 25,000 years old. 292 00:22:59,040 --> 00:23:03,800 With this intensively carved female head, 293 00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:05,520 we have, for the first time, 294 00:23:05,520 --> 00:23:10,040 something immensely and movingly momentous. 295 00:23:10,040 --> 00:23:14,400 We have the revelation of the human face. 296 00:23:14,400 --> 00:23:19,640 It's a tiny thing, it can just go in the palm of your hand. 297 00:23:20,640 --> 00:23:22,320 This is exquisite. 298 00:23:22,320 --> 00:23:25,240 There are downward strokes and sideward strokes 299 00:23:25,240 --> 00:23:29,400 there is carving and gouging and polishing and scraping. 300 00:23:29,400 --> 00:23:33,920 Every kind of extraordinary craft is applied 301 00:23:33,920 --> 00:23:37,840 to give this face what we have to say is its personality. 302 00:23:37,840 --> 00:23:43,040 One example, a dig is made below the forehead 303 00:23:43,720 --> 00:23:46,280 to suggest the presence of eyes. 304 00:23:47,640 --> 00:23:52,000 Those eyes are hauntingly vivid. 305 00:23:52,000 --> 00:23:55,240 They only become eyes when a shadow falls 306 00:23:55,240 --> 00:23:58,080 over that passage in the head. 307 00:23:58,080 --> 00:24:01,120 So this little piece would have been turned into the light 308 00:24:01,120 --> 00:24:03,880 and as it was turned into the light, the shadow would have fallen 309 00:24:03,880 --> 00:24:08,000 and suddenly we have eyes as well as that beautiful nose 310 00:24:08,000 --> 00:24:12,200 and this extraordinary hair falling down the nape of the neck. 311 00:24:13,920 --> 00:24:18,960 Now we are not supposed to say, us amateurs in this field, 312 00:24:19,200 --> 00:24:21,640 we're not supposed to talk about art, 313 00:24:21,640 --> 00:24:24,240 we're not supposed to talk about things like 314 00:24:24,240 --> 00:24:28,080 the birth of a refined sensibility. 315 00:24:28,080 --> 00:24:30,160 I'm going to do that nonetheless. 316 00:24:30,160 --> 00:24:32,720 I don't care how anachronistic it is. 317 00:24:32,720 --> 00:24:36,160 With this tiny piece from Brassempouy, 318 00:24:36,160 --> 00:24:40,480 it seems to me that we have, right in front of us, 319 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:43,600 the dawn of the idea of beauty. 320 00:24:47,640 --> 00:24:50,720 But beauty is hard to eat. 321 00:24:53,720 --> 00:24:57,360 The slow growth of civilisations depended, at first, 322 00:24:57,360 --> 00:24:59,400 on practicalities - 323 00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:03,040 the domestication of animals and cereal crops. 324 00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:06,840 The most ancient wheats were harvested 325 00:25:06,840 --> 00:25:11,360 on sites near the River Jordan about 10,000 years ago. 326 00:25:14,640 --> 00:25:17,680 Civilisations started small, 327 00:25:17,680 --> 00:25:20,440 it depended on the invention of needful things - 328 00:25:20,440 --> 00:25:24,800 pottery vessels for cooking, eating and storage. 329 00:25:26,360 --> 00:25:30,400 Excavations in Iraq in the 1920s and '30s 330 00:25:30,400 --> 00:25:34,440 began to reveal how intensive irrigation of the planes 331 00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:37,640 between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates had allowed 332 00:25:37,640 --> 00:25:40,720 the world's first true cities to arise. 333 00:25:41,800 --> 00:25:44,280 By about 5,000 years ago, 334 00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:49,320 cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants, such as Ur and Uruk, 335 00:25:49,480 --> 00:25:54,640 were producing art that reflected the self-image of the powerful. 336 00:25:55,320 --> 00:25:57,520 Here is the Standard of Ur 337 00:25:57,520 --> 00:26:00,320 where mosaic inlaid in bitumen 338 00:26:00,320 --> 00:26:03,240 showed the scenes that mattered most. 339 00:26:05,800 --> 00:26:07,840 Soldiers march, 340 00:26:07,840 --> 00:26:10,920 war wagons roll, 341 00:26:10,920 --> 00:26:13,960 and on the reverse, a court convenes 342 00:26:13,960 --> 00:26:18,240 with the king depicted larger than his priests and courtiers, 343 00:26:18,240 --> 00:26:22,760 ranged below the catering classes, the toilers and hewers. 344 00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:25,560 It's a complete social world, 345 00:26:25,560 --> 00:26:29,200 and it came with writing. 346 00:26:29,200 --> 00:26:33,040 These scripts usually recorded administrative matters, 347 00:26:33,040 --> 00:26:38,040 but sometimes told the stories of heroes and deities. 348 00:26:38,040 --> 00:26:43,200 And animals continue to provide the models for gods and monsters. 349 00:26:45,960 --> 00:26:51,120 This gorgeous goat, also from Ur, drew materials from far and wide. 350 00:26:51,680 --> 00:26:54,400 White shells were from the Red Sea, 351 00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:58,840 the blue lapis lazuli from far Afghanistan, 352 00:26:58,840 --> 00:27:02,760 and the gold leaf was the work of local goldsmiths. 353 00:27:06,080 --> 00:27:09,400 Around 4,500 years ago, 354 00:27:09,400 --> 00:27:12,040 in the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, 355 00:27:12,040 --> 00:27:17,280 migrants from Western Asia seeded Europe's first great civilisation, 356 00:27:18,600 --> 00:27:21,360 the culture of the Minoans. 357 00:27:23,640 --> 00:27:28,880 Its ruins are everywhere on Crete and on the islands of the Aegean. 358 00:27:31,240 --> 00:27:33,720 This must have been a fishing village. 359 00:27:33,720 --> 00:27:35,800 You can almost hear the bustle. 360 00:27:38,480 --> 00:27:42,520 Protected by the sea on two sides, but closely packed. 361 00:27:42,520 --> 00:27:45,560 So even here people will have had to learn the skills 362 00:27:45,560 --> 00:27:48,840 that any fixed settlement requires - 363 00:27:48,840 --> 00:27:51,240 how to be neighbourly. 364 00:27:54,280 --> 00:27:58,520 But there's more to civilisation than keeping neighbours happy. 365 00:28:02,240 --> 00:28:07,200 On Crete itself, we find the ruins of large towns 366 00:28:07,360 --> 00:28:10,240 where the streets still thread their way, 367 00:28:10,240 --> 00:28:12,560 opening onto grandiose plazas, 368 00:28:12,560 --> 00:28:16,440 spaces for ceremony and pomp, 369 00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:19,120 for ritual and for politics. 370 00:28:22,960 --> 00:28:27,440 Minoan cultural style spread across the Aegean Sea 371 00:28:27,440 --> 00:28:30,040 to islands like Santorini. 372 00:28:34,040 --> 00:28:38,600 A volcanic eruption destroyed the port city of Akrotiri 373 00:28:38,600 --> 00:28:42,440 in around 1627 BCE, 374 00:28:42,440 --> 00:28:45,680 but the ash preserved the murals found here 375 00:28:45,680 --> 00:28:48,520 in all their vivid realism. 376 00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:54,360 They raised the ghost of a seagoing civilisation, 377 00:28:54,360 --> 00:28:57,240 a clear ancestor of our own 378 00:28:57,240 --> 00:29:01,120 with its clamour and glamour, its commercial pulse. 379 00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:07,840 These passengers aren't going to the afterlife, 380 00:29:07,840 --> 00:29:11,240 they're on ferries and festive excursions. 381 00:29:12,600 --> 00:29:15,120 And on the land behind them, there are streets 382 00:29:15,120 --> 00:29:17,480 with multistorey houses, 383 00:29:17,480 --> 00:29:20,520 and in the richer of them, decorative paintings 384 00:29:20,520 --> 00:29:25,600 of the kind consumers would want for ever after. 385 00:29:25,600 --> 00:29:30,760 This is the first truly social art the world had seen. 386 00:29:32,360 --> 00:29:35,640 Here are beautiful youths duking it out. 387 00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:39,200 Here are saffron gatherers. 388 00:29:41,240 --> 00:29:43,400 Here are swallows. 389 00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:47,400 A perpetual springtime brought into the living room. 390 00:29:51,680 --> 00:29:56,760 One contact sport dominated Minoan culture - bull leaping. 391 00:29:57,520 --> 00:30:02,440 Young men, possibly women too, back flipping over charging bulls. 392 00:30:04,040 --> 00:30:07,120 It's long been argued that this was too dangerous 393 00:30:07,120 --> 00:30:08,960 to have actually happened, 394 00:30:08,960 --> 00:30:12,000 that the art captures a myth, a fantasy. 395 00:30:13,480 --> 00:30:16,040 And yet in the British Museum, 396 00:30:16,040 --> 00:30:18,000 there's a little bronze sculpture 397 00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:23,200 that's pulsing with a natural energy that feels absolutely true to life. 398 00:30:27,880 --> 00:30:32,360 What strikes me as being physically real 399 00:30:32,360 --> 00:30:35,400 is the fact that this is not a stylised piece of work at all. 400 00:30:35,400 --> 00:30:38,160 It has physical immediacy. 401 00:30:38,160 --> 00:30:41,040 Even though our jumper has lost his legs, 402 00:30:41,040 --> 00:30:44,720 his back is braced, his head is flung back. 403 00:30:44,720 --> 00:30:49,520 And the bull, the bull is indeed a bull in full charge - 404 00:30:49,520 --> 00:30:52,240 front and back legs tensed. 405 00:30:52,240 --> 00:30:56,520 The eyes, and you can actually see the eyes, are blazing, 406 00:30:56,520 --> 00:31:00,560 and the muzzle is snorting with dangerous foam. 407 00:31:05,080 --> 00:31:08,080 Around the 15th century BCE, 408 00:31:08,080 --> 00:31:13,120 Minoan culture was producing myriad tiny masterpieces. 409 00:31:13,360 --> 00:31:16,320 Seal stones to be pressed into soft wax 410 00:31:16,320 --> 00:31:20,080 or worn as micro art. 411 00:31:20,080 --> 00:31:25,240 Gold rings, sometimes decorated with goddesses or their priestesses, 412 00:31:25,960 --> 00:31:30,600 bare-breasted, wasp-waisted with flaring skirts. 413 00:31:31,760 --> 00:31:36,920 Minoan art was irresistibly attractive to a raw rising power 414 00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:38,720 on the Greek mainland. 415 00:31:40,080 --> 00:31:43,640 Here was a culture that wanted to clothe its belligerence 416 00:31:43,640 --> 00:31:48,920 in sophistication that would play a vital role in European history - 417 00:31:49,480 --> 00:31:51,480 the Mycenaeans. 418 00:31:55,520 --> 00:32:00,720 In 2015, American archaeologists were digging in western Greece, 419 00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:06,200 and here, far from Crete, they made the most significant discovery 420 00:32:06,200 --> 00:32:09,800 of Minoan artefacts for many, many years. 421 00:32:11,320 --> 00:32:16,520 They found the grave of a warrior buried around the year 1450 BCE. 422 00:32:20,480 --> 00:32:25,240 Here we are in the grave to look at our body today. 423 00:32:27,000 --> 00:32:29,760 It was the body of a Mycenaean. 424 00:32:33,400 --> 00:32:36,040 Pretty amazing. 425 00:32:36,040 --> 00:32:41,200 Yet almost all the objects found with the body were clearly Minoan. 426 00:32:41,560 --> 00:32:44,080 This is our third gold ring. 427 00:32:48,040 --> 00:32:52,480 Four solid gold rings were eventually found in the grave. 428 00:32:55,520 --> 00:32:58,080 They're just exquisite, actually. 429 00:32:58,080 --> 00:33:01,840 The craftsmanship on all of them is stunning. 430 00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:03,880 And they all have their own story to tell. 431 00:33:03,880 --> 00:33:06,200 They're very much like the iconography 432 00:33:06,200 --> 00:33:07,720 that you find in Minoan Crete. 433 00:33:07,720 --> 00:33:10,360 I think that's a really important lesson to learn 434 00:33:10,360 --> 00:33:14,040 about how civilisations evolve. Yeah. 435 00:33:14,040 --> 00:33:19,200 That civilisations are constantly borrowing and receiving inspirations 436 00:33:19,480 --> 00:33:21,320 from their predecessors 437 00:33:21,320 --> 00:33:26,200 and from those that surround them as they evolve. 438 00:33:26,200 --> 00:33:31,240 In total, the grave contained over 1,500 separate objects. 439 00:33:32,520 --> 00:33:37,200 There was a corroded bronze mirror and ivory combs. 440 00:33:37,200 --> 00:33:40,440 Vanity was part of the warrior's job description. 441 00:33:40,440 --> 00:33:43,600 Hair was ritually combed before battle. 442 00:33:44,640 --> 00:33:47,680 And, of course, there were swords. 443 00:33:49,360 --> 00:33:52,800 The grave of the Griffin Warrior has all of the artefacts 444 00:33:52,800 --> 00:33:56,480 that you would expect a warrior to have accumulated in his lifetime. 445 00:33:56,480 --> 00:33:59,520 And this is the first time that we can really understand 446 00:33:59,520 --> 00:34:02,920 what the complete warrior kit looked like. 447 00:34:02,920 --> 00:34:05,080 One of the objects found in the grave - 448 00:34:05,080 --> 00:34:08,400 tiny, not quite 1.5 inches long - 449 00:34:08,400 --> 00:34:10,680 was crusted in mud and minerals. 450 00:34:12,720 --> 00:34:16,600 Once cleaned, it forces us to rethink everything 451 00:34:16,600 --> 00:34:20,040 we thought we knew about this moment in history. 452 00:34:22,080 --> 00:34:26,920 High resolution photographs show the extraordinary achievement. 453 00:34:35,480 --> 00:34:38,120 We see the long hair flowing free 454 00:34:38,120 --> 00:34:40,320 that would have been combed before battle. 455 00:34:42,560 --> 00:34:45,320 We see a sword lying on the ground 456 00:34:45,320 --> 00:34:48,480 exactly like the swords discovered in the grave. 457 00:34:49,640 --> 00:34:52,120 But that is just the beginning. 458 00:34:54,560 --> 00:34:59,800 This is the first fight scene in all of European art, 459 00:35:00,640 --> 00:35:02,360 for all I know, in all of world art. 460 00:35:02,360 --> 00:35:06,560 Yes, there are occasional moments of combat and battle in other cultures, 461 00:35:06,560 --> 00:35:09,800 but they're flat, they're very stylised, 462 00:35:09,800 --> 00:35:14,280 they don't feel like the smash of bone and bronze 463 00:35:14,280 --> 00:35:18,120 and metal and the spout of blood, this does. 464 00:35:18,120 --> 00:35:23,400 This goes straight from 1450 BC to action movies. 465 00:35:24,720 --> 00:35:27,040 Look at those rippling biceps. 466 00:35:27,040 --> 00:35:28,640 Look at those muscles. 467 00:35:28,640 --> 00:35:30,280 Look at those tense bodies. 468 00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:33,480 This cross of locked-together fighters. 469 00:35:33,480 --> 00:35:37,000 A spear that's about to try and impale the body of his enemy 470 00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:38,640 before it's too late. 471 00:35:38,640 --> 00:35:41,480 The sword that's about to plunge down. 472 00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:44,960 It's 3-D, folks. It's coming at you. 473 00:35:44,960 --> 00:35:49,520 And, inevitably, there is already a dead body, 474 00:35:49,520 --> 00:35:53,640 perfectly modelled, an arm bent back. 475 00:35:53,640 --> 00:35:55,720 Homer speaks of such bodies 476 00:35:55,720 --> 00:36:00,560 with a hand or a face writhing in the dust. 477 00:36:01,640 --> 00:36:06,840 But, people, Homer is 700 years later. 478 00:36:09,720 --> 00:36:14,800 700 years later, the time between Chaucer and us. 479 00:36:14,800 --> 00:36:20,040 Somebody out there with incredible hawklike eyesight is drawing on 480 00:36:20,440 --> 00:36:23,280 a body of combat literature 481 00:36:23,280 --> 00:36:27,960 that goes all the way down to those beautiful Homeric inventions. 482 00:36:27,960 --> 00:36:31,880 It sets something running in European culture. 483 00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:35,920 This Mycenaean love of guts and glory 484 00:36:35,920 --> 00:36:39,040 and the Mycenaeans themselves, along with the Minoans, 485 00:36:39,040 --> 00:36:41,200 will pass into history. 486 00:36:41,200 --> 00:36:43,600 But this doesn't pass into history, 487 00:36:43,600 --> 00:36:46,640 it passes into poetry. 488 00:36:46,640 --> 00:36:50,000 It passes for ever into the world. 489 00:36:54,400 --> 00:36:59,160 Sometimes there are discoveries that radically transform 490 00:36:59,160 --> 00:37:01,480 existing knowledge. 491 00:37:01,480 --> 00:37:04,600 But then there are other discoveries 492 00:37:04,600 --> 00:37:09,040 that reveal a culture so far outside the river of history 493 00:37:09,040 --> 00:37:11,560 that we may never truly understand them. 494 00:37:12,800 --> 00:37:16,160 As Mycenae rose about 3,000 years ago, 495 00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:20,800 an extraordinary culture grew in west central China - 496 00:37:20,800 --> 00:37:22,800 Sanxingdui. 497 00:37:26,720 --> 00:37:31,360 Its remains were unearthed in 1986 on a building site. 498 00:37:35,840 --> 00:37:39,320 The revealed pits contained hundreds of elephant tusks, 499 00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:42,160 the remains of sacrificed animals, 500 00:37:42,160 --> 00:37:47,400 and a vast and startling abundance of masks. 501 00:38:03,480 --> 00:38:05,880 There were scores of masks, 502 00:38:05,880 --> 00:38:07,560 There were giant masks 503 00:38:07,560 --> 00:38:10,560 which probably stood in some sort of temple. 504 00:38:10,560 --> 00:38:12,640 There were little itty-bitty masks, 505 00:38:12,640 --> 00:38:15,000 There were masks that were user-friendly, 506 00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:18,720 that almost certainly could be worn on the face. 507 00:38:18,720 --> 00:38:22,200 They all have huge eyes. 508 00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:25,800 This one, you can still see a few traces of black paint. 509 00:38:25,800 --> 00:38:27,840 They were painted black. 510 00:38:27,840 --> 00:38:30,120 Dashing eyebrows. 511 00:38:30,120 --> 00:38:32,520 Diamond-shaped eyes. 512 00:38:32,520 --> 00:38:36,800 Nothing in the rest of ancient China has ever been discovered 513 00:38:36,800 --> 00:38:40,720 remotely like these faces, like these heads. 514 00:38:40,720 --> 00:38:45,480 The bronze is the same, the figures and faces are not. 515 00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:52,360 Nothing that can tell us anything about the people 516 00:38:52,360 --> 00:38:55,480 who made these objects has survived. 517 00:38:55,480 --> 00:38:59,120 There are no writings, no other histories to tell us who they were. 518 00:39:00,760 --> 00:39:03,600 It's been suggested that some of the masks 519 00:39:03,600 --> 00:39:08,760 might have been used in rituals by impersonators of the dead - 520 00:39:09,120 --> 00:39:12,960 those enormous eyes which see beyond the world, 521 00:39:12,960 --> 00:39:16,360 the ears which might hear what the departed say. 522 00:39:17,600 --> 00:39:19,960 But this is all pure speculation. 523 00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:26,560 The civilisation of Sanxingdui came, it flourished, 524 00:39:26,560 --> 00:39:29,400 and then it disappeared off the face of the earth. 525 00:39:37,720 --> 00:39:41,760 But civilisation is always a balancing act. 526 00:39:41,760 --> 00:39:44,160 There may be enemies at the gates, 527 00:39:44,160 --> 00:39:47,880 there may be enemies within the walls, 528 00:39:47,880 --> 00:39:50,800 and sometimes the very landscape and climate 529 00:39:50,800 --> 00:39:53,760 in which a culture grows must be conquered. 530 00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:01,720 It may be too rocky, too arid, 531 00:40:01,720 --> 00:40:06,960 but here canyons and gullies became the streets and thoroughfares 532 00:40:08,040 --> 00:40:11,000 for one of the most spectacular civilisations 533 00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:13,240 in all of human history. 534 00:40:40,080 --> 00:40:45,160 This is Petra where the sheer improbability of its location 535 00:40:45,160 --> 00:40:49,360 was also the secret of its spectacular flourishing. 536 00:40:51,280 --> 00:40:56,360 The reason why this tomb endured and survived armies and earthquakes 537 00:40:56,520 --> 00:40:59,000 is that the Nabateans who built it 538 00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:02,760 cut it into the sandstone surface of the mountain, 539 00:41:02,760 --> 00:41:07,320 rather than build some freestanding marble monument. 540 00:41:07,320 --> 00:41:10,840 The mountains shook with earthquakes, 541 00:41:10,840 --> 00:41:15,240 but these buildings stood intact. 542 00:41:15,240 --> 00:41:17,440 The Nabateans had what you might call 543 00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:19,560 an instinct for cultural ecology. 544 00:41:19,560 --> 00:41:23,680 They worked with the rock of their desert home. 545 00:41:23,680 --> 00:41:25,960 The columns are graceful. 546 00:41:25,960 --> 00:41:28,440 The capitals are heavily decorated. 547 00:41:28,440 --> 00:41:31,840 It's all part of an international Hellenistic style, 548 00:41:31,840 --> 00:41:36,080 and, yet, it seems to me this place is very local, 549 00:41:36,080 --> 00:41:38,760 untransferable. 550 00:41:38,760 --> 00:41:42,520 This is Petra and only Petra, 551 00:41:42,520 --> 00:41:45,920 these great palatial buildings seem to say. 552 00:41:55,280 --> 00:42:00,120 More amazing still, this place was built by people who were nomads 553 00:42:00,120 --> 00:42:04,360 when they first arrived here in the fourth century before Christ. 554 00:42:08,680 --> 00:42:13,840 The Nabataeans were goat herders, camel riders, dwellers in tents. 555 00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:20,760 But flocks and herds weren't going to produce this. 556 00:42:25,160 --> 00:42:29,240 Petra was built on trade in incense. 557 00:42:32,960 --> 00:42:34,440 2,000 years ago, 558 00:42:34,440 --> 00:42:38,320 aromatic frankincense and myrrh were essential 559 00:42:38,320 --> 00:42:41,920 for the ceremonies and rituals which punctuated daily life. 560 00:42:44,600 --> 00:42:49,200 The nondescript little chunks and granules of dried tree resin 561 00:42:49,200 --> 00:42:53,360 produced these clouds of fragrant incense smoke, 562 00:42:53,360 --> 00:42:58,120 and they became the hottest trade between Africa and Persia. 563 00:42:58,120 --> 00:43:01,440 And here's the thing, the trees that produce the resin 564 00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:03,680 only grow in a particular part of Arabia, 565 00:43:03,680 --> 00:43:07,400 and who knew that desert mile by stony mile, 566 00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:10,760 oasis by oasis, better than the Nabataeans? 567 00:43:10,760 --> 00:43:12,040 No-one. 568 00:43:12,040 --> 00:43:16,880 So the Nabataeans started as navigators and pilots, if you like, 569 00:43:16,880 --> 00:43:18,960 for this precious cargo, 570 00:43:18,960 --> 00:43:20,960 went on to be full-service providers, 571 00:43:20,960 --> 00:43:24,720 and then thought, "Well, why don't we trade it ourselves directly?" 572 00:43:24,720 --> 00:43:28,880 Pretty soon they were monopolists of the incense trade, 573 00:43:28,880 --> 00:43:31,480 the emperors of aromatics. 574 00:43:36,400 --> 00:43:39,720 But a civilisation here was inconceivable 575 00:43:39,720 --> 00:43:43,280 without the one thing more precious than frankincense - 576 00:43:43,280 --> 00:43:45,320 water. 577 00:43:45,320 --> 00:43:50,400 The Nabataeans engineered systems to trap the rains which came in winter 578 00:43:50,600 --> 00:43:55,160 and their desert hydraulics made this place not so much rose red, 579 00:43:55,160 --> 00:43:57,720 as bright green. 580 00:43:57,720 --> 00:44:01,160 A garden city of fountains, swimming pools, 581 00:44:01,160 --> 00:44:03,480 groves and orchards. 582 00:44:08,560 --> 00:44:11,240 And the water which made all that possible 583 00:44:11,240 --> 00:44:16,200 also made it possible to feed a city of 30,000 people, 584 00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:19,280 many of whom were immigrants from all over the region. 585 00:44:19,280 --> 00:44:23,800 There were Egyptians and Syrians and Judeans and Greeks and Romans, 586 00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:26,800 and they were all coming to Petra 587 00:44:26,800 --> 00:44:30,640 to enjoy what the Persians called a pairi daiza, 588 00:44:30,640 --> 00:44:34,600 a pleasure resort, a little bit of heaven on Earth. 589 00:44:40,200 --> 00:44:45,440 And they all brought a flourish of their own cultural styles with them. 590 00:44:46,080 --> 00:44:49,560 Most of the art discovered here has been taken to museums, 591 00:44:49,560 --> 00:44:54,160 but what survives tells the story of a cosmopolitan playground. 592 00:44:56,040 --> 00:44:58,720 There are curious abstract representations 593 00:44:58,720 --> 00:45:00,600 of a Nabataean goddess... 594 00:45:02,920 --> 00:45:08,200 ..carved heads from the wine soaked Hellenistic cult of Dionysus. 595 00:45:12,480 --> 00:45:16,200 Recent excavations have brought to light ritzy villas 596 00:45:16,200 --> 00:45:19,720 carved into the living rock. 597 00:45:19,720 --> 00:45:23,240 Inside them, "here's to happiness" murals 598 00:45:23,240 --> 00:45:26,080 from that same Dionysian cult, 599 00:45:26,080 --> 00:45:29,800 cherubs, vine leaves, 600 00:45:29,800 --> 00:45:33,240 the inevitable bunches of grapes. 601 00:45:35,480 --> 00:45:39,520 And from the later years of Petra's life, Byzantine mosaics 602 00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:43,960 found beneath the sand and rubble of a ruined church. 603 00:45:49,280 --> 00:45:54,480 Petra had its day, or rather its centuries, and then it ended. 604 00:45:55,520 --> 00:45:57,600 Not because of conquest, 605 00:45:57,600 --> 00:46:02,800 but because new trade routes simply made Petra commercially irrelevant. 606 00:46:03,160 --> 00:46:05,840 And without that commercial lifeblood, 607 00:46:05,840 --> 00:46:10,520 there was no longer any reason to struggle against the desert. 608 00:46:12,760 --> 00:46:14,560 The people left, 609 00:46:14,560 --> 00:46:18,720 the systems for capturing water fell into disrepair, 610 00:46:18,720 --> 00:46:22,480 and the desert reclaimed the city. 611 00:46:31,080 --> 00:46:33,520 BIRDS SING 612 00:46:40,880 --> 00:46:44,520 On the other side of the world in Central America, 613 00:46:44,520 --> 00:46:48,200 another culture would face a set of ecological conditions 614 00:46:48,200 --> 00:46:50,840 that seemed far more hospitable. 615 00:46:53,640 --> 00:46:57,560 The Mayans lived amidst tropical forests. 616 00:46:57,560 --> 00:47:00,960 It looks almost absurdly fertile. 617 00:47:00,960 --> 00:47:06,240 And these great ruins are proof that when the delicate balance 618 00:47:06,440 --> 00:47:11,320 between prospering habitat and vaulting ambition is maintained, 619 00:47:11,320 --> 00:47:15,880 civilisations can bind rulers and the ruled, 620 00:47:15,880 --> 00:47:21,120 and a culture can burst into riotously prolific bloom. 621 00:47:24,240 --> 00:47:27,560 If you take away all this magnificent vegetation 622 00:47:27,560 --> 00:47:30,000 that's sprung up naturally from the space, 623 00:47:30,000 --> 00:47:33,000 you realise this is an extraordinary plaza, 624 00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:35,280 it's the centre of a city. 625 00:47:35,280 --> 00:47:38,720 Wherever you look, there are these huge stone staircases, 626 00:47:38,720 --> 00:47:40,920 some temples, some tombs, 627 00:47:40,920 --> 00:47:44,000 all the more amazing because there are no draft animals, 628 00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:45,680 there are no wheels, 629 00:47:45,680 --> 00:47:50,280 so human labour only is responsible for these great things. 630 00:47:50,280 --> 00:47:52,920 This is a spectacular space. 631 00:47:52,920 --> 00:47:57,840 The kind of space you would really expect to see in Rome or Greece, 632 00:47:57,840 --> 00:48:01,720 these great pyramids with platforms for performances 633 00:48:01,720 --> 00:48:05,920 because this, as much as anywhere in the Western world of antiquity, 634 00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:08,760 is essentially an urban theatre. 635 00:48:13,400 --> 00:48:17,280 It's a theatre of political and religious power. 636 00:48:18,760 --> 00:48:22,120 A structure like this looks down upon the citizens 637 00:48:22,120 --> 00:48:25,440 and forces them to look back up. 638 00:48:25,440 --> 00:48:29,160 And what they looked up to was often gruesomely violent, 639 00:48:29,160 --> 00:48:32,360 the mass sacrifice of captives. 640 00:48:32,360 --> 00:48:35,360 And one God in particular had a special thirst... 641 00:48:36,560 --> 00:48:38,640 ..the rain god, Chaac. 642 00:48:45,080 --> 00:48:48,840 The power of the Mayan kings rested on the promise 643 00:48:48,840 --> 00:48:52,640 that every year they would persuade Chaac to bring the rains 644 00:48:52,640 --> 00:48:55,320 on which all life depended. 645 00:48:55,320 --> 00:48:58,480 Mayan art and architecture was a prayer 646 00:48:58,480 --> 00:49:01,000 and appealed to the weather - 647 00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:04,920 "Let us live, let every year be fruitful." 648 00:49:08,960 --> 00:49:11,240 Only the most damaged of the art 649 00:49:11,240 --> 00:49:14,800 that used to adorn Calakmul remains on-site. 650 00:49:16,640 --> 00:49:19,200 In Mexico's anthropology museum, 651 00:49:19,200 --> 00:49:23,760 we can see some of that art and how Mayan society worked. 652 00:49:23,760 --> 00:49:26,800 There were kings made of flesh and blood 653 00:49:26,800 --> 00:49:29,640 and kings made of stone, 654 00:49:29,640 --> 00:49:32,960 and you had to obey both kinds. 655 00:49:36,560 --> 00:49:41,480 But Mayan art wasn't all enormous and formal, far from it. 656 00:49:41,640 --> 00:49:43,680 It was hugely varied. 657 00:49:43,680 --> 00:49:47,080 One of the most spectacular flourishings of creativity 658 00:49:47,080 --> 00:49:48,520 in human history. 659 00:49:50,200 --> 00:49:53,640 Every human type got his or her figurine, 660 00:49:53,640 --> 00:49:58,280 like action characters and heroes from a comic book or a play. 661 00:50:03,880 --> 00:50:08,000 There were ceramic vessels and there were murals too. 662 00:50:09,680 --> 00:50:12,280 And out of the Mayan delight in making pictures 663 00:50:12,280 --> 00:50:14,920 developed a fully-fledged script. 664 00:50:20,440 --> 00:50:24,720 Writing made up of glyphs or word pictures. 665 00:50:25,920 --> 00:50:31,000 They were brushed onto paper made from wild fig tree bark, 666 00:50:31,000 --> 00:50:33,440 painted onto beautiful ceramic pottery 667 00:50:33,440 --> 00:50:37,600 or, like this one, carved into limestone. 668 00:50:37,600 --> 00:50:39,840 They were everywhere in Maya city states. 669 00:50:39,840 --> 00:50:43,640 The Maya were the wordiest of all ancient cultures. 670 00:50:43,640 --> 00:50:45,440 So that this, 671 00:50:45,440 --> 00:50:48,520 which looks like something purely decorative, ornamental, 672 00:50:48,520 --> 00:50:50,080 a bestiary with all these animals, 673 00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:52,240 there's a monkey, 674 00:50:52,240 --> 00:50:55,600 there's a magnificently complacent frog, 675 00:50:55,600 --> 00:50:59,440 there in the middle is an extremely scary killer rabbit, 676 00:50:59,440 --> 00:51:03,360 in fact, all these are words which make a text. 677 00:51:03,360 --> 00:51:07,760 Each glyph is not a single word, but it's a syllable, in fact, 678 00:51:07,760 --> 00:51:12,640 and you put them together and you have a sentence, a paragraph. 679 00:51:12,640 --> 00:51:16,040 But in this case, it makes up a date. 680 00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:18,320 We know exactly what that date was. 681 00:51:18,320 --> 00:51:22,840 This is the 11th of February, 526. 682 00:51:27,960 --> 00:51:32,760 In 526, Mayan civilisation was at its height. 683 00:51:32,760 --> 00:51:35,200 It's art and culture flourished 684 00:51:35,200 --> 00:51:39,240 and many believe that the finest Mayan art of all is to be found 685 00:51:39,240 --> 00:51:41,080 in the city of Copan. 686 00:51:47,200 --> 00:51:49,200 The city was home to a dynasty 687 00:51:49,200 --> 00:51:52,400 that lasted from the fifth to the ninth centuries, 688 00:51:52,400 --> 00:51:55,880 16 successive kings ruled here. 689 00:51:58,200 --> 00:52:01,800 An archaeological team, led by Bill and Barbara Fash, 690 00:52:01,800 --> 00:52:04,640 have been studying Copan for over 30 years. 691 00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:08,920 And they've found that for most of its life, 692 00:52:08,920 --> 00:52:13,200 the art of Copan is elegant, refined, astonishing. 693 00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:19,920 Single carved steles announce the accession of new kings. 694 00:52:23,360 --> 00:52:27,560 It's the work of a society where that balance between habitat 695 00:52:27,560 --> 00:52:30,360 and ambition is still in good order. 696 00:52:34,120 --> 00:52:37,920 It's certainly hard to imagine a more vivid realisation 697 00:52:37,920 --> 00:52:41,520 of the rain god Chaac than this. 698 00:52:41,520 --> 00:52:46,680 Complete with the bubbling streams of water that his blessings brought. 699 00:52:49,520 --> 00:52:53,160 In the seventh century, the 12th ruler of Copan 700 00:52:53,160 --> 00:52:56,400 commissioned a new grand structure. 701 00:52:59,200 --> 00:53:02,520 This is the hieroglyphic stairway of Copan. 702 00:53:02,520 --> 00:53:06,000 It was built, originally, in honour of ruler 12 703 00:53:06,000 --> 00:53:07,760 who is portrayed here, 704 00:53:07,760 --> 00:53:11,280 and then was finished by ruler 15 705 00:53:11,280 --> 00:53:14,640 who added on the uppermost section of it. 706 00:53:14,640 --> 00:53:18,360 And it has 64 steps in total 707 00:53:18,360 --> 00:53:21,120 and they told the history of the dynasty 708 00:53:21,120 --> 00:53:23,800 and the succession of the different rulers. 709 00:53:25,480 --> 00:53:28,760 The stairway itself is a monumental statement. 710 00:53:28,760 --> 00:53:33,600 Certainly ruler 15 was trying to impress the population 711 00:53:33,600 --> 00:53:37,480 so he was really trying to cement in stone 712 00:53:37,480 --> 00:53:40,960 what the history of Copan was and what the dynasty was 713 00:53:40,960 --> 00:53:44,320 and to make sure that it stayed for the future. 714 00:53:47,120 --> 00:53:51,080 The hieroglyphic stairway sought to impress the people 715 00:53:51,080 --> 00:53:54,160 and to persuade the gods to continue to bring rain. 716 00:53:58,560 --> 00:54:03,800 But by tunnelling beneath it, the archaeologists have discovered 717 00:54:04,160 --> 00:54:07,920 that this grand structure was, in fact, badly built. 718 00:54:10,480 --> 00:54:13,560 You can see all these gaps in the fill itself 719 00:54:13,560 --> 00:54:16,000 indicate that it was just loose rubble. 720 00:54:16,000 --> 00:54:18,480 This is a terrible way to build a pyramid. 721 00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:21,760 What this tells us is that, at this point in time, 722 00:54:21,760 --> 00:54:24,040 people were no longer as enthusiastic 723 00:54:24,040 --> 00:54:26,120 about supporting the rulers. 724 00:54:26,120 --> 00:54:31,320 Even though a gorgeous and very explicit hieroglyphic stairway was built here, 725 00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:33,520 it was built on poor fills, 726 00:54:33,520 --> 00:54:35,680 so it was a castle built on sand, 727 00:54:35,680 --> 00:54:38,440 and with time, eventually, it did decay 728 00:54:38,440 --> 00:54:43,440 and the stairway itself collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the pyramid. 729 00:54:49,200 --> 00:54:52,440 The stairway we see today has been reconstructed, 730 00:54:52,440 --> 00:54:56,960 but around it, we can see the chaos of the collapse. 731 00:54:58,720 --> 00:55:03,560 The stairway was built as the Mayans were suffering a drought 732 00:55:03,560 --> 00:55:05,240 that would last decades, 733 00:55:05,240 --> 00:55:09,320 and the promise of rain had been a central plank of royal authority. 734 00:55:11,880 --> 00:55:17,040 Shortly afterwards, the kingdom of Copan itself collapsed completely. 735 00:55:18,720 --> 00:55:21,040 All across the Mayan territories, 736 00:55:21,040 --> 00:55:25,520 art and authority were out of step with reality. 737 00:55:25,520 --> 00:55:29,760 There was nothing grand or stately about starvation. 738 00:55:31,440 --> 00:55:35,280 And the ordinary people of the Maya saw that their civilisation 739 00:55:35,280 --> 00:55:38,840 had become a death trap and walked away, 740 00:55:38,840 --> 00:55:41,960 left kings and cities and art behind. 741 00:55:41,960 --> 00:55:46,280 They went back to simpler lives in the surrounding forest. 742 00:55:47,680 --> 00:55:51,520 And their descendants are still very much alive. 743 00:55:53,000 --> 00:55:56,560 IN SPANISH: 744 00:56:31,320 --> 00:56:33,600 The Maya and their language lived on 745 00:56:33,600 --> 00:56:37,520 but far away from the stone monuments of their ancestors. 746 00:56:37,520 --> 00:56:42,480 All that remained to say that beneath the forest canopy 747 00:56:42,600 --> 00:56:44,720 there was the civilisation, 748 00:56:44,720 --> 00:56:47,320 were the summits of the platform pyramids, 749 00:56:47,320 --> 00:56:50,040 but only the wheeling birds 750 00:56:50,040 --> 00:56:53,640 and the howler monkeys scrambling to the tops of trees 751 00:56:53,640 --> 00:56:55,440 would have seen that. 752 00:56:58,760 --> 00:57:03,040 All civilisations want what they can't have - 753 00:57:03,040 --> 00:57:05,680 the conquest of time. 754 00:57:05,680 --> 00:57:10,120 They build higher and grander to escape mortality. 755 00:57:10,120 --> 00:57:11,960 It never works. 756 00:57:11,960 --> 00:57:14,600 There's always an ending. 757 00:57:14,600 --> 00:57:18,080 Cities with their markets, temples, palaces and tombs 758 00:57:18,080 --> 00:57:20,240 are simply abandoned 759 00:57:20,240 --> 00:57:24,160 and that great leveller, Mother Nature, closes in, 760 00:57:24,160 --> 00:57:27,600 strangling the place with vegetation, 761 00:57:27,600 --> 00:57:30,600 covering it with desert sand. 762 00:57:33,320 --> 00:57:36,720 It might seem, then, that it's all for nothing, 763 00:57:36,720 --> 00:57:40,320 but that's entirely wrong. 764 00:57:40,320 --> 00:57:44,400 All these ruins, all these remains are monuments 765 00:57:44,400 --> 00:57:47,880 to human creativity, 766 00:57:47,880 --> 00:57:50,400 human ambitions, 767 00:57:50,400 --> 00:57:51,960 human hopes. 768 00:57:54,400 --> 00:57:59,600 Monuments to shaping hands and shaping minds. 769 00:58:02,440 --> 00:58:06,600 Monuments to humanity itself. 770 00:58:12,320 --> 00:58:15,720 The Open University has produced a free poster 771 00:58:15,720 --> 00:58:18,560 that explores the history of different civilisations 772 00:58:18,560 --> 00:58:20,240 through artefacts. 773 00:58:20,240 --> 00:58:23,240 To order your free copy, please call... 774 00:58:26,160 --> 00:58:28,240 Or go to the address on-screen 775 00:58:28,240 --> 00:58:30,720 and follow the links for the Open University.