- 5/18/2025
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00:00INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
00:16Istanbul in Turkey, a city poised between East and West,
00:20and between the present and the past.
00:25It's a good place to think about where all this comes from.
00:28Not the physical structures of this particular city,
00:31but the invisible web that holds all cities together,
00:34and which we humans have been spinning since the time of the very first cities,
00:39some 6,000 years ago.
00:43Civilisation is the best word for it.
00:46One of the most profound innovations in our human story.
00:51Historians today become a little bit embarrassed by the word civilisation.
00:56We prefer less exalted terms, such as culture, community or society.
01:03But in telling the stories of the first great civilisations of the ancient world,
01:08I'm going to be making the case for civilisation itself.
01:17More than 4,000 years ago,
01:19an unknown poet listed the attributes of a successful city,
01:24the place where civilisation was first forged,
01:27and where the aspirations of a civilisation
01:30still find their most concrete expression.
01:34The details of the poem are so vivid, they could have been written yesterday.
01:40The warehouses are well provisioned,
01:43and the houses within the city are well built.
01:47Those who bathe before the holidays rejoice in the courtyards.
01:51Foreigners flock to and fro like exotic birds.
02:00The old women are full of good advice.
02:03The old men are full of good counsel.
02:06The young women are full of dancing spirit.
02:11The young men are full of fighting spirit.
02:15And the little ones are full of the spirit of joy.
02:22The people are happy.
02:31Of course, not everybody can be happy,
02:33but I believe that the aspirations expressed in that ancient poem
02:37make as much sense to us now as they did 4,000 years ago.
02:42It's like that when you look down into the well of history.
02:45It gets dark so quickly,
02:48but then just sometimes you catch a glimpse of something at the bottom,
02:52alive and moving.
02:54Then suddenly you realise that it's your own reflection,
02:57looking back at you.
02:59That's the story that I want to tell to you now.
03:02It's not the story of ancient worlds long past.
03:05It's a story of us then.
03:17MUSIC PLAYS
03:48When we talk about the ancient world,
03:50we tend to think of rare and exotic artefacts
03:53or the monumental remains of epic architecture.
03:56But these are just the empty shells that got left behind
04:00when the tide of history turned.
04:02The living creatures, the civilisations that once inhabited these shells,
04:07were rarely seen again.
04:09They were often forgotten.
04:11They were often forgotten.
04:13The living creatures, the civilisations that once inhabited these shells,
04:17were rarely, if ever, static or stately.
04:20They were dynamic, chaotic,
04:22and always threatening to spin out of control.
04:25Because civilisation is based on an improbable idea,
04:29that strangers can live together in dense urban settings,
04:34forging new allegiances that replace the ties of family, clan or tribe.
04:40It's an idea we're still coming to terms with today.
04:44But one of the best ways to understand the challenges
04:47is to look at how our ancestors tackled them the first time around.
04:54MUSIC PLAYS
05:10MUSIC CONTINUES
05:19In Baghdad, people know all too well
05:22just how precious civilisation is and how vulnerable.
05:30The ancient Greeks believed that the cornerstone
05:33for all successful societies was eunomia, good order.
05:38Lose that, and you're in danger of losing everything.
05:52Today, slowly and painfully,
05:55Iraqis are struggling to put back together the good order
05:59that dictatorship, regime change and civil war tore apart.
06:04And with the hope that things will be better one day.
06:09It's a tall order, but not an impossible one.
06:12In this part of the world,
06:14it's a story that's been played out again and again
06:17from the time of the very first cities,
06:20which appeared in this region some 6,000 years ago.
06:25MUSIC PLAYS
06:33We're in southern Iraq, just north of Basra,
06:36and I'm on my way to the place where this experiment
06:39in a new way of being human was first tried.
06:44The ancient Greeks called this region Mesopotamia,
06:48the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
06:52This is also the land between two seas,
06:55the upper sea and the lower sea,
06:58known to us as the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
07:02It is also the land between mountain and desert,
07:05lagoon and salt marsh,
07:07and all of these geographical features have to be borne in mind
07:11when considering the birthplace of the first civilisations.
07:17Geography versus history.
07:19It's impossible to know which takes precedence.
07:22There's no getting away from the brutal facts of nature.
07:26Rivers that flood or dry up, rainfall that's intermittent,
07:31mountains that are impassable, deserts that are hostile.
07:35Applying this kind of analysis to Mesopotamia,
07:38where the summers are hot, the winters are cold and rainfall is low,
07:43I'd sum it up like this.
07:45Difficult, but not impossible.
07:48No Garden of Eden, but no howling wilderness either.
07:59People had occupied this marginal land
08:02for 1,000 years before the cities came.
08:05They arrived as pastoralists with their herds,
08:08but they stayed on as farmers,
08:10clinging close to the riverbanks and scattered communities
08:14of one or 2,000 people at most.
08:17But then, just under 6,000 years ago, a remarkable thing happened.
08:23People left the security of their family compounds and tribal villages.
08:27They came together with other strangers
08:30to create something far more complex.
08:33A city, a society, a civilisation.
08:39The first place we know of where this radical experiment was tried
08:44is here, the ancient city of Uruk.
08:59So here it is, Uruk, the mother of all cities.
09:02Nowadays, as you can imagine, it's quite difficult to get to,
09:06but I'm glad I did.
09:08Athens, Rome, Constantinople,
09:11London, Paris, New York.
09:13If you trace the family trees of all these great cities,
09:16they'd all lead back here,
09:18to this dry and dusty corner of southern Iraq.
09:22Nowadays, there's not much to see,
09:24but 5,000 years ago, this was home to 40 or perhaps 50,000 people,
09:30a population density unprecedented in human history.
09:42In the mythology of Mesopotamia, Uruk was built by Gilgamesh,
09:48two-thirds god, one-third human.
09:51The great epic poem, The Legend of Gilgamesh,
09:54contains a proud description of his city.
10:00Go up, pace the walls of Uruk,
10:03study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork.
10:07Is not the masonry made of kiln-fired brick?
10:10And did not the seven sages lay its foundations?
10:15Three-and-a-half square miles is the measure of Uruk.
10:27In fact, if anything, the legend of Gilgamesh understates things.
10:31The walls that surrounded Uruk
10:33were nearly ten kilometres in length,
10:35enclosing an area of six square kilometres.
10:39Now, just to give you a point of comparison,
10:41classical Athens, at its height,
10:43was no more than five square kilometres,
10:46and even imperial Rome was little more than ten.
10:50So, by the measures of the ancient world,
10:52these first cities were neither small nor insignificant.
10:56Right from the very start, they were big players.
10:59Starting just under 6,000 years ago,
11:02the archaeological record at Uruk
11:04reveals a period of intensive building and rebuilding,
11:07which went on for four or five centuries.
11:12In that period, a dozen or more large public buildings were built.
11:16Temples, palaces, assembly halls.
11:19We don't know for sure what they were.
11:22But they weren't just buildings.
11:24But they were all of different shapes and sizes,
11:27and they used novel building techniques,
11:29like these cone mosaics, which once lined the walls here.
11:43You get the feeling that behind the restless building and rebuilding,
11:47the people of Uruk were searching for ways through architecture
11:51to express the new social structures
11:53that had come to be in their new city.
11:56The shape of things to come.
12:05But what kind of society was being built at Uruk,
12:08and why had it come about?
12:13The answer can be found in the need to satisfy
12:16the most basic of all human needs.
12:19Hunger.
12:23Civilisation might have had its head in the clouds,
12:26but it marches on its stomach.
12:44This is the Euphrates.
12:47This is the Euphrates, one of history's great rivers,
12:511,700 miles from source to delta.
12:55There's a lot of debate about where the name comes from,
12:58but some say it's derived from the Akkadian word frat,
13:02which means fruitful, and it's certainly that,
13:05provided its waters can be got to the farmers' fields.
13:10Agriculture, growing crops rather than raising livestock,
13:14predates the first cities by thousands of years.
13:18But at some point, and quite suddenly,
13:21agricultural activity in Mesopotamia became more intensive
13:25and on a larger scale than had ever been seen before.
13:31It may have been a response to an environmental crisis,
13:34a prolonged period of drought,
13:36or the sudden change in the course of the river
13:39following a cataclysmic flood.
13:41For the first time since people had started living in this marginal land,
13:45their survival would have depended on finding ways to manage the waters,
13:49forcing them to think beyond the narrow concerns of their clans
13:53and finding common cause with other clans,
13:56building dams and digging canals to bring the water to the crops
14:00on which all their lives now depended.
14:05The social consequences of this cooperation were profound.
14:09Those farmers weren't just digging ditches and sowing barley.
14:13They were planting the seed from which the tree of civilisation would grow.
14:20But what turns the farmer in his field into a citizen of a city?
14:34To answer that question, I travelled 600 miles north from Uruk,
14:38over the border into present-day Syria,
14:41to another ancient city, Tel Brak.
14:57Syrians call this area Al Jazeera, the island,
15:00because it's situated between the Euphrates to the south
15:03and the Tigris to the north.
15:05And the waters of both created an island of fertility
15:09in a sea of desert and mountain.
15:12And that is Tel Brak.
15:15It looks like a hill, but that impressive hump is actually man-made,
15:19the result of thousands and thousands of years of occupation,
15:23which has raised the level of the site 50 metres above the surrounding plain.
15:28Tel Brak stands as an impressive monument
15:31to the compulsive city-building activities of our ancestors.
15:38Excavations have been going on here since the 1930s,
15:42when the British archaeologist Max Malouin,
15:45accompanied by his new bride, the crime writer Agatha Christie,
15:49first started working on Tel Brak.
15:54Among Malouin's finds were these distinctive eye amulets,
15:58which had also been found in great numbers at Arouk.
16:01This suggests that people from Arouk may have travelled north,
16:05bringing their radical new ideas with them.
16:11Even today, Tel Brak is an incredibly rich site.
16:15As you walk around, you can't help but tread on a carpet of ceramic fragments,
16:20which could be anything from 3,000 to 6,000 years old.
16:29CLOCK TICKS
16:44This is area TW,
16:46and these structures date back to the 5th millennium BC,
16:50when the first city appeared here.
16:52These buildings are close to the city gate,
16:55and what you're looking at here is a type of light industrial unit,
16:59complete with a layer of ash from the ovens that were once here.
17:04But the reason why we're here
17:06is because of something which is stuck in the trench wall over there.
17:10It's a fragment of the past,
17:12which raises intriguing questions about the nature of the society
17:16that first emerged here 6,000 years ago.
17:20CLOCK TICKS
17:24Don't try this at home, not unless you're a trained archaeologist
17:28and you've got permission from the authorities who run the site.
17:37Now, I've got to be a bit careful here because it's very, very loose.
17:41I might break it.
17:43Now, we need a little bit of a trowel.
17:46I have to be very, very careful.
17:49This looks like it could be a complete one.
17:54Ease it out gently.
17:58When we talk about the ancient world,
18:00we tend to quite naturally think of the iconic or awe-inspiring
18:04Venus de Milo or the Egyptian Sphinx.
18:07Picture postcard stuff.
18:09But I don't suppose you'd find one of these in the postcard rack.
18:13Indeed, these are as significant as any armless Greek goddess
18:17or noseless mythical beast.
18:20Now, I'm just going to...
18:32And there you have a bowl from the fourth millennium BC,
18:37and it's complete.
18:39Amazing.
18:44For any archaeologist of this period,
18:47this would be instantly recognisable as a BRB,
18:51a bevel-rimmed bowl.
18:53And they were made by digging a bowl-shaped hole in the ground,
18:56pushing the clay in and then working it around the edges
19:00until it took on the shape of the mould.
19:02Then they were finished off by running a finger along the rim,
19:06creating a bevel just like this one,
19:09made by somebody's finger 6,000 years ago.
19:15But the extraordinary thing about the BRB
19:18is there are just so many of them.
19:20They've been found in their thousands at sites from Turkey to Syria,
19:24from Iran to Iraq.
19:26Here at Tel Brak, they've found so many
19:28that they've had to rebury most of them,
19:31just to free up space in their storage areas.
19:34So what does the ubiquity of the BRB tell us?
19:39One theory is that this is a ration bowl
19:42issued by some kind of central authority to its workers,
19:45holding a standard measure of grain.
19:48Think of it as being a bit like an ancient pay packet,
19:51a bowl of barley in return for a hard day's graft
19:54on the irrigation ditches,
19:56without which there wouldn't be any barley.
19:59The ration bowl theory is further strengthened by this.
20:04It's a stylised head with what looks suspiciously like a BRB.
20:09And this was a symbol for ration
20:11used in the account books of the first cities,
20:14because you can't have beans without bean counters.
20:17And what this shows is how, with the growth of civilisation,
20:21one thing led to another,
20:23from farming to irrigation to rations to account books to writing.
20:30That's how civilisation snowballed.
20:35The BRB is the next logical step on from the canals and the dams
20:40dug by that first generation of Mesopotamian farmers.
20:44But it's the product of a very different kind of society.
20:48Rather than the co-operation of autonomous clans,
20:51the BRB suggests a powerful political authority had emerged,
20:55which could be the BRB.
20:58which could persuade or force the general population
21:02to dig and delve for the common good.
21:05And just as the credit card is a symbol of our consumer economy,
21:09the BRB is a symbol of a redistributive economy,
21:13which is what the first cities operated under.
21:16A dominant central authority directing the workforce,
21:20collecting all the fruits of its hard labour
21:23and bringing them to the centre for redistribution
21:26through some kind of rationing system.
21:29A bit like North Korea without the cult of personality.
21:34Controlling the workforce made managerial sense,
21:38but as we'll see again and again in the story of civilisation,
21:41the law of unintended consequences also came into play.
21:46One thing led to another.
21:51Intensive farming is generally more productive than small-scale farming,
21:55and so it generates more than can be consumed.
21:58A surplus, in other words.
22:00In bumper years, the food surplus can be stored against the lean years,
22:05and that makes the centre that controls everything even more powerful.
22:13A food surplus also means that non-food products can be grown,
22:17providing raw materials for making or for trading with other centres,
22:22with their own surplus of raw materials.
22:27This allows the centre to invest in the specialists,
22:31the craftsmen and women with the skills to weave, throw pots or bash metal,
22:36as well as the merchants who run the import-export side.
22:40It's the beginnings of industry and trade.
22:53The surplus also supports other specialisations.
22:57Soldiers, builders, musicians, doctors, fortune-tellers, prostitutes.
23:03All of these can now be afforded
23:05thanks to the surplus generated by the toiling masses.
23:09It's the beginnings of the class system.
23:15At the top of the system, of course, are the executives who run things.
23:20In a rook, we know that they had titles,
23:23like Master of the Sheep or Master of the Grain.
23:26And you can bet that the masters got more than the daily bowl of grain
23:30doled out to the workers.
23:32The fat cats, it seems, have always been with us.
23:40And the place where all of these diverse constituents came together
23:44was, of course, the city.
23:47A new man-made feature in the landscape,
23:50dominant and impressive behind sturdy walls.
23:53The city directed the energies and controlled the fate of people
23:57who had traded the autonomy of their tribe
24:00for the good order and security of their civilisation.
24:05Religion, rather than politics,
24:08seems to have been the motivating ideology in the first cities.
24:12All of that hard labour, all of the great public works,
24:16the canals, the fields of barley, the city walls,
24:20were for the gods, rather than for the people.
24:23And the city was built for the gods,
24:26rather than for the people.
24:28All of the fields of barley, the city walls,
24:31were for the gods, rather than for the people.
24:34In fact, the people were there to serve the gods.
24:37That was why the gods had turned clay into flesh in the first place.
24:46Mesopotamian religion was suffused with an overwhelming sense
24:50of the fragility of civilisation.
24:53In this land of marshes and wandering rivers,
24:56the line separating the solid from the liquid was uncertain.
25:00And if it wasn't for the protection of the gods,
25:03all that hard work, all that had been achieved,
25:06could be swept away into watery chaos.
25:11SHOUTING
25:22We know a surprising amount about the way
25:24in which the first cities were organised,
25:27thanks to the development of an important new technology,
25:30one which would become one of the foundation stones
25:33on which all civilisations rested.
25:36Writing.
25:41Records were first inscribed in wet clay in Uruk and other cities.
25:47Lists of people and things, basic bookkeeping.
25:54But within a few hundred years,
25:56writing systems had become much more sophisticated,
25:59capable of recording concepts as well as things.
26:03Soon after that, there were even special schools
26:06where the art of writing was taught
26:08by an important new city specialist.
26:13The scribe.
26:24Now, you might think that clay would make a rather crude
26:27and cumbersome medium for writing,
26:30especially when compared with the delicate papyrus rolls
26:33of the ancient Egyptians.
26:35But clay is far tougher than papyrus.
26:38And the accidental fires which plagued these ancient cities
26:42turned durable clay into indestructible stone.
26:46And this is why we have many, many more historic documents
26:50in this period than later ones.
26:52This was history built to last.
26:58And history, along with love songs, peace treaties and lullabies,
27:03was among the things that the scribes started to write.
27:08Scribes began to look into the past and put things in the right order.
27:13Kings, their births, deaths, marriages were the obvious place to start.
27:22As we've seen, civilisation was built on hierarchies
27:26that were based on specialisations,
27:29from labourers to scribes, from craftsmen to temple priests.
27:35But what did the king do?
27:37What was his job description?
27:39Who needed him?
27:46In tribal societies, the power of leaders is rarely absolute.
27:52Restrained by a web of expectations, traditions and taboos,
27:56rulers are subject to the collective will of their communities.
28:00They can lead, but only as far as the people are prepared to follow.
28:07But in the first cities, the webs of tribal life dissolved.
28:11Schooled in the new system of hierarchies and specialisations,
28:15people quickly learnt how to be followers.
28:19The priests in the temple shepherded them in the direction of heaven.
28:23But there was also room for leaders who were more down-to-earth.
28:27In Sumeria, he was known as the lugal, literally, the big man.
28:32An important political counterweight to the power of the priests.
28:36A charismatic, flesh-and-blood individual in the palace,
28:40rather than a distant god in the temple.
28:45Kings set out to be different from the rest, in life and in death.
28:51This was made dramatically clear
28:53in the discoveries of pioneer archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley,
28:57who, in the 1920s and 30s,
28:59excavated the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
29:05Woolley and his team studied more than 1,800 burials,
29:09dating from around 4,500 years ago.
29:13Most of them were simple affairs, but 16 of them were very different.
29:21You can see from the drawings done at the time what the first difference was.
29:26These were mass burials, involving men, women and animals too.
29:30Their bodies laid out in ranks in the outer chamber,
29:33and in the inner chamber was the focus of all this carefully choreographed death.
29:38A single figure, surrounded by objects of astonishing beauty and rarity.
29:51Woolley called these burials the Death Pits,
29:55but now they're known rather more sedately as the Royal Tombs.
30:00Certainly with grave goods as stunning as these,
30:03you'd expect nothing less than royalty.
30:10But what about the other bodies,
30:12the ones that accompanied Meskalamdug the King and Pauline the Queen?
30:18In his classic work, Ur of the Chaldees,
30:21Woolley explained his findings with a compelling picture of a royal funeral.
30:26The body of the dead ruler laid out in the inner sanctum of the tomb,
30:31whilst the outer enclosure slowly filled with mourners,
30:35ladies-in-waiting, loyal soldiers and slaves,
30:38loudly bewailing their terrible loss.
30:42And then as solemn music played,
30:44the tomb is shut from the outside and the mourners take poison.
30:48Lit by the flames of guttering oil lamps, they then die one by one,
30:53presumably to be reborn on the other side of the grave
30:56and once again to serve their royal master.
31:02We simply don't know enough about the beliefs of the Sumerians.
31:07We simply don't know enough about the beliefs of the Sumerians
31:10to be sure whether Woolley's reconstruction is accurate or not.
31:14However, one thing is clear.
31:16The charisma of royalty, even in death, exerted a powerful pull.
31:21People followed kings in life, death and beyond.
31:27And, of course, they would also follow them into battle.
31:35From the start, war was civilisation's dark shadow,
31:39marching alongside it and separable from it.
31:47Boundary stones, bridges and bridges,
31:52boundary stones, placed by cities to claim a piece of territory,
31:57became trophies in the wars that they provoked
32:00and neighbouring cities marched into battle to challenge their claims.
32:09This is Naram-Sin, king of Akkad.
32:12He reigned for nearly 40 years and spent most of it fighting.
32:18His grandfather, Sargon of Akkad, was the first great Mesopotamian ruler
32:23to turn a kingdom into an empire, conquering his way city by city
32:28from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
32:33Empire was a new unit of currency in the civilisation's stakes,
32:38but Naram-Sin had to fight hard to hold on to what his grandfather had won.
32:44The logic of a territorial empire was simple.
32:48Conquer or lose everything.
33:08But when the city-states of Mesopotamia
33:11began to flex their regional muscles,
33:14they stepped up into the premier league.
33:17And that meant, sooner or later,
33:19that they'd come up against one of the top teams of the ancient world,
33:24Egypt, with its astounding monumental architecture,
33:28its divine god-kings
33:30and its all-pervasive preoccupation with death.
33:41MUSIC PLAYS
33:56But for all its magnificence and power,
33:59Egypt's contribution to the growth of civilisation
34:02is not as overwhelming as you might first imagine.
34:07There's so much to say about ancient Egypt,
34:10but the first thing that has to be said is that it was certainly different.
34:14For a start, the geographical hand that it had been dealt was a strong one,
34:19and the ace in the hole was this, the River Nile.
34:31Once a year, beginning in June and ending in September,
34:35the waters of the Nile rose, the river burst its banks
34:39and the fields for miles on either side were flooded.
34:42Instead of the labour-intensive canal systems
34:45that the Mesopotamians developed to control the Tigris and the Euphrates,
34:50the Egyptians simply banked up their fields
34:53to hold the floodwaters in place for a crucial 40 to 60 days
34:58at the start of each growing season.
35:03After which the banks were broken, the life-giving water drained off
35:07and a fertile layer of black mud was left to receive the seed.
35:16Of course, it wasn't quite as straightforward as that.
35:19Some years, there was too little water, some years, too much.
35:24But Bronze Age technology wasn't advanced enough
35:27to control these mighty waters.
35:29All the Egyptians could do was monitor the fluctuations carefully
35:34by a system of nilometers, like this one at Aswan.
35:44Cosseted by its miraculous river
35:46and separated from the rest of the ancient world by desert and sea,
35:50the Egyptians were like an island people,
35:53conservative, complacent, xenophobic,
35:57incurious about the rest of the world.
36:01Slow to adapt new technologies, from the potter's wheel to metallurgy,
36:06Egypt had a Stone Age heart in a Bronze Age body.
36:16Otherness was Egypt's great selling point, then and now.
36:21The things that fascinate us, pyramids, incestuous royal marriage,
36:26Islamification, and the whole elaborate, expensive cult of death
36:31were the very things that fascinated Egypt's neighbours.
36:35But like their famous hieroglyphs,
36:38they only really made sense in Egypt.
36:43Egypt's cultural reputation across the ancient world was enormous,
36:48but just as there was only one River Nile, there could only be one Egypt,
36:52and the lessons learned here about building a civilisation
36:55were definitely not for export.
36:58And so Egypt, despite its wealth and magnificence,
37:02was in historical terms a bit of a glittering dead end.
37:12The Egyptians were also terrible snobs.
37:15Political marriages between foreign courts
37:18became a common diplomatic tool in the Bronze Age world.
37:22While many a foreign princess came to Egypt
37:25to cement an alliance or seal a treaty,
37:28Egyptian kings refused to allow any of their daughters to be sent abroad.
37:33Who knew what nasty surprises awaited them there?
37:38The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
37:40that indispensable guide to the life hereafter,
37:43conceded that it was theoretically possible
37:46for non-Egyptians to win a place in the afterlife,
37:49but the gods would soon separate them out because of the way they smelt.
38:20In the tomb of the vizier, Raqmara,
38:23the smelly foreigners are doing what they're supposed to do,
38:27forming an orderly queue and paying tribute.
38:31The Syrians from the Levant with their horses,
38:34the Kushites from Africa with their ivory and giraffes,
38:37the Minoans from Crete with their distinctive conical jugs,
38:41all of them are there to bend the knee
38:44and buy the goodwill of mighty Egypt.
38:50The chauvinism of Raqmara's tomb disguises a broader,
38:54more profound truth about the ancient world.
38:57Outside of the narrow confines of Egypt,
39:00there was a big, wide world,
39:02full of lots of different kinds of people.
39:05They were known to each other,
39:07and each had things that the others wanted.
39:10So rather than seeing these images, as Raqmara would have done,
39:14as a sign of Egypt's political dominance,
39:17instead we should see them as a picture of an international market
39:21based upon the exchange of desirable goods.
39:26Trade rather than tribute was the heartbeat of Raqmara's world,
39:30and it began with the raw materials,
39:33which made up the substance that defined the age.
39:36Bronze.
39:38Bronze.
39:46Bronze-making was a transformative technology.
39:50It wasn't just that bronze could make tools and weapons
39:53that were sharp-edged and durable.
39:55It was also amazingly versatile.
39:58It could be cast in all shapes and sizes,
40:01from a clothespin to a two-man saw.
40:08It was made from ten parts copper to one part tin,
40:12but the distribution of these essential raw materials was not uniform.
40:17In fact, as a general rule, where you found copper, you did not find tin.
40:23So the only way for civilisations to get their hands
40:26on sufficient quantities of both was to trade.
40:32From this necessity came a Bronze Age world
40:35that was surprisingly joined up,
40:37and one of the best places to see the joins is in central Anatolia,
40:42in what is now Turkey.
40:47This is the ancient city of Kanesh,
40:49and behind me on that low hill there
40:51was its palace and administrative centre,
40:54which 4,000 years ago were ruled over by a dynasty of Anatolian kings.
40:59Now, we don't actually know very much about them,
41:01but we do know an awful lot about the people
41:04who lived down here in the lower city.
41:18Back then, if you were an Anatolian local strolling down this street,
41:22this would have seemed like a very alien place.
41:25Different clothes, food, customs, gods and language.
41:29Because all around me here are the ruins of the houses,
41:32warehouses and workshops of foreign merchants
41:35from the Assyrian city of Ashur.
41:38About 900 miles to the east were about 50 days' mule ride.
41:46This was the kerem, or port, of Kanesh,
41:49a permanent colony of Assyrian expats
41:52who'd come west to make their fortunes in the import-export business,
41:56bringing with them their distinctive drinking jugs,
42:00from which they honoured their now distant gods.
42:06These Assyrian merchants were an essential link in a trading network
42:10that stretched all the way from Afghanistan in the east
42:13to the Mediterranean coast in Egypt.
42:17An ancient precursor of our own global economy.
42:22The Assyrians could get things that people here in Anatolia wanted.
42:27Tin, essential for making bronze, which they bought in Iran.
42:32Textiles from Mesopotamia.
42:35And more exotic raw materials, like lapis lazuli,
42:39which came all the way from distant Afghanistan.
42:43In exchange for these goods, the Assyrians received silver and gold,
42:47which they sent home.
42:49Using it to finance the next consignment, or banking it for a rainy day.
42:54We know an enormous amount about these Assyrian merchants,
42:58because we have thousands and thousands of their letters.
43:02As you might expect from such canny businessmen,
43:05most of them are to do with money matters,
43:08contracts, bills of sale, receipts, legal wrangles.
43:12But not all of them.
43:15There are also personal letters, not just from the merchants themselves,
43:19but from the women in their lives.
43:22And these present a far more human face to our business story,
43:26and voices that still speak to us across the millennia.
43:34One of the best of these letters was written by a lady called Lamassie
43:38to her husband Pushu Ken, who was an Assyrian merchant at Cannabis.
43:44Now, Lamassie writes...
43:57When you left, you did not leave me any silver, not even one shekel.
44:02What is this extravagance about which you always write to me?
44:06There is nothing here to buy our food.
44:09But you think we are extravagant?
44:12I sent everything we have to you,
44:15and today I am living in an empty house.
44:18Send me the money you have received for my textiles,
44:22so that I can buy some necessities.
44:25And then there is this killer line.
44:31Since you left, Salim Ahum has already built a house double the size.
44:38When will we be able to do the same?
44:43Lamassie, I have to tell you that even 4,000 years on,
44:47you know how to make a man feel really bad.
44:58While the Lamassies of the world worried about keeping up with the Salim Ahums,
45:03at the top of the social pyramid, the rulers of the Bronze Age world
45:07engaged in their own games of one-upmanship.
45:11War, as ever, was the ultimate recourse.
45:14But by the middle of the second millennium BC,
45:17there was a new game to play.
45:19Diplomacy.
45:21The Hittite kings of Anatolia were the pioneers of this new form
45:26of war by other means.
45:29In Hattusha, the capital city of the Hittites,
45:32fragments of more than 70 peace treaties had been found.
45:38The Hittites seemed to have had an almost religious dread
45:41of breaking their word.
45:43When one of their kings did, by launching a sneak attack on Egypt,
45:47plague came to Hattusha and thousands died, including the king himself.
45:53The king's son considered this to be a divine judgement.
45:57He wrote a series of plague prayers, accusing his father of bad faith
46:02and seeking forgiveness from the storm gods,
46:05in whose name the original treaty had been signed.
46:09It took more than prayers to patch up relations with Egypt
46:13and the bad blood culminated in the greatest land battle of the Bronze Age,
46:18the Battle of Kadesh.
46:22It's commemorated here at the temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel.
46:27Proclaimed as a clear victory for the Egyptians,
46:30in fact, it was more of a score draw
46:33and it ended with a peace treaty,
46:36sworn in the name of the sun god of Egypt
46:39and the storm god of the Hittites.
46:44History teaches us that the fine words in documents like this
46:48are often as fragile as the materials that they're written upon.
46:52But history also teaches us that the fighting only stops
46:57when the wrangling over the fine print begins.
47:04If you wanted to find a typical king
47:07at the centre of this complex web of war, diplomacy, marriage,
47:11gift-giving and trade,
47:13there are a few more attractive figures than Zimri Lim,
47:17who, for 20 years, ruled as king of Mari,
47:20beginning sometime around 1770 BC.
47:24Mari occupied a strategic position
47:27between the cities of Mesopotamia,
47:29Mari occupied a strategic position
47:32between the cities of Mesopotamia to the south-east,
47:35the kingdoms of Anatolia to the north-west
47:38and the port cities of the Mediterranean to the west.
47:42The city was close to the river Euphrates
47:45and a canal connecting it to the river was dug through its centre,
47:49creating an inland port of great economic value.
47:54As a young man, Zimri Lim had to fight hard for his kingdom
47:59after a period of exile,
48:01and ultimately he would lose it, betrayed by his closest ally.
48:05But history has been more kind to Zimri Lim
48:08because in the traces that he left behind,
48:11we find, probably for the first time in human history,
48:14the outline of a recognisable personality.
48:18His urbanity and enthusiasms set him apart
48:22from the rather faceless kings
48:24who he competed against and cooperated with.
48:27From all that we know, Zimri Lim was obviously a rather civilised chap.
48:46He built himself a huge, imposing palace
48:49covering an area of 25,000 square metres.
48:54The throne room was designed like a temple,
48:57its walls covered with frescoes,
48:59painted by craftsmen imported from Minoan Crete.
49:06The palace even had its own ice house
49:09so that the king's honey-sweetened wine could be served cold.
49:14Zimri Lim was evidently a bit of a pleasure seeker,
49:18and he could get impatient
49:20when he felt that his needs were not being catered to.
49:23In a letter to one of his governors,
49:25he complained about the quality of the truffles that had been sent to him.
49:29And when his sister, Lictum, married a Syrian king,
49:33he wrote,
49:34''In the land where you dwell, there are many ostriches.
49:37''Why have you sent me no ostriches?''
49:44BELL TOLLS
49:49Midway through his reign,
49:51Zimri Lim made a journey from Mari to the coast of the Mediterranean,
49:55a round trip of more than 1,000 miles by river and land.
50:04He brought with him his family, his court officials,
50:08his cooks, physicians and musicians, and his army.
50:12Some 4,000 people put in motion by the whim of a great king.
50:17He visited fellow kings and royal in-laws,
50:20distributing and receiving gifts as he went.
50:23He even found time to arrange a divorce for one of his daughters,
50:27whose marriage to a neighbouring king hadn't worked out.
50:32But his final destination was here, Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast.
50:42The grand tour took five months to complete,
50:45and it must have been a hugely complex, disruptive and expensive exercise.
50:51And there was no reason for it either, except, I think, curiosity.
50:56I think that King Zimri Lim, of landlocked Mari,
51:00just wanted to see this, the sea.
51:04MARI, UGARIT
51:09Mari, as Zimri Lim knew, was only a small part of a much bigger world,
51:15a world connected by trade and diplomacy, marriage and war,
51:20but also connected by the sea.
51:23Merchant ships plied these coasts.
51:26Driven by the pursuit of profits and the quest for raw materials,
51:30they unwittingly carried with them the idea of civilisation
51:34to places far distant from Mari.
51:48An amazing discovery made about 25 years ago,
51:52just off the coast of south-west Turkey,
51:54reveals just how far the idea of civilisation had been carried
51:59in the thousands of years since it was first tried out.
52:03At Udalpurun, archaeologists discovered a shipwreck
52:07dated to the end of the 14th century BC,
52:10about 3,300 years ago, the high-water mark of the Bronze Age.
52:17In the quarter of a century since the shipwreck was discovered,
52:21archaeologists have recovered more than 17 tonnes of material from the seabed,
52:26around 15,000 objects in total, which, when pieced together,
52:31provide an extraordinarily detailed picture of Bronze Age civilisation
52:36and its surprising interconnections.
52:39What this nameless wreck tells us is that this was a joined-up world.
52:47They found raw materials and products from Syria, Greece, Cyprus,
52:52Egypt, Nubia, the Balkans, Iraq, Italy and Central Asia,
52:58glass, ivory, ostrich shells, pottery and jewellery,
53:03all the varied riches of the Bronze Age world.
53:07They've also recovered ten tonnes of copper from Cyprus
53:11in the form of oxide ingots, the standard shape and measure
53:15used throughout the eastern Mediterranean
53:18for trading this vital raw ingredient.
53:23But the cargo is just the start.
53:26Thanks to some brilliant detective work
53:29by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology,
53:32it's now possible to say, with a fair degree of certainty,
53:36where the ship came from, where it was going, who was on board and why.
53:42This sword and dagger probably belonged to the ship's captain and owner,
53:46a Canaanite.
53:48These animal-shaped weights, balance pan and wooden writing boards
53:53belonged to the merchants on board, who were from what is today Syria.
53:58Fish hooks and corn grinders belonged to the crew,
54:02giving us a good idea of the cuisine available on this Mediterranean cruise.
54:08Knuckle bones, used as dice,
54:10tell us something about the shipboard entertainments.
54:14All of this is stuff that you'd expect to find from a ship
54:18whose home port was on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean,
54:22in the vicinity of Ugarit.
54:26But, in fact, archaeologists have discovered items from further afield too.
54:31Foreign stuff.
54:33So it looks like this ship was carrying passengers.
54:37And judging by the style of their personal effects,
54:40they were Greeks from the kingdom of Mycenae.
54:47Mycenae was on the Greek mainland,
54:50a very long way from the ship's home port,
54:53but connected to it by the Bronze Age network of trade and diplomacy.
54:58What the Ulubur and Rex shows is that civilisation had come west at last.
55:11This is what civilisation looked like when it came west.
55:16A golden death mask of an unknown warrior king from Mycenae.
55:22Looking at these death masks,
55:24striking in the blunt assertion of power and status,
55:28you feel the distance that separated the millennia-old civilisations of the east
55:33from the civilisations that had gained a precarious toehold in the west.
55:40The Mycenaeans were originally nomadic warrior herdsmen
55:44who had conquered what is now Greece in the third millennium BC.
55:48It's thought they learnt the arts of civilisation from Minoan Crete,
55:53including the art of writing,
55:55but they never completely lost their rough edges.
56:00Mycenaean society was a vigorous hybrid of civilised east and tribal west.
56:07Their kings lived in heavily fortified fortresses.
56:11They hunted lions in the mountains,
56:14and they went into battle in helmets made from boar's tusks.
56:18Cimrilim's passion for truffles and ostriches
56:22would have seemed out of place in this warrior society.
56:32There were no cities in the Mycenaean world
56:35to compare to those in the east in terms of size,
56:38population density and social complexity.
56:42The wanex, or king, in his citadel held the monopoly of power,
56:46supported by a warrior caste of loyal retainers.
56:50The temple, a great institution in its own right in the east,
56:54was reduced to the role of cheerleader,
56:57and at the bottom of the heap was a class of agricultural serfs
57:01tightly controlled by the centre.
57:04All Bronze Age societies were hierarchical,
57:07but the Mycenaean class structure was particularly brutal,
57:11them and us, with very little in between.
57:16This all made for a civilisation with very shallow roots,
57:20and that was why, in the 13th century BC, it was all swept away.
57:25The reverberations of that cataclysm didn't stop at Mycenae.
57:30They were felt throughout the Bronze Age world,
57:33and once they had subsided, that world was in ruins.
57:37And civilisation, that hard-won and precious human achievement,
57:41would enter its first Dark Age.
57:58Stay right where you are.
57:59There's brand-new drama coming up next this evening
58:01with season four of Mad Men in just a few moments,
58:04and then at 10.45, the crime drama continues with part two of Luther.
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